Income Inequality and Urban Displacement: The New Gentrification

New Labor Forum

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2017, Pages 84-93

  Chapple, Karen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

capitalism; inequality; Marxism; middle class; working class

Indexed keywords

EID: 85041180442     PISSN: 10957960     EISSN: 15572978     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1095796016682018     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly, Gentrification (New York: Routledge, 2008), xv.
2. Neil Smith, “Gentrification and Capital: Practice and Ideology in Society Hill,” Antipode 11, no. 3 (1979): 24-35.
3. The rent gap is defined as the difference between the potential ground rent of a piece of property and the actual rent. See Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association 45, no. 4 (1979): 538-48.
4. Damaris Rose, “Rethinking Gentrification: Beyond the Uneven Development of Marxist Urban Theory,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2, no. 1 (1984): 47-74.
5. Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple, Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships, Institute of Governmental Studies, Research Brief (Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, 2016).
6. For an explanation of the tech industry’s role in housing price appreciation, see Karen Chapple, John V. Thomas, Dena Belzer, and Gerald Autler, “Fueling the Fire: Information Technology and Housing Price Appreciation in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Twin Cities,” Housing Policy Debate 15, no. 2 (2004): 347-83.
7. For an expanded discussion of the debates sum-marized in this section, see Miriam Zuk, Ariel H. Bierbaum, Karen Chapple, Karolina Gorska, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Paul Ong, and Trevor Thomas, “Gentrification, Displacement and the Role of Public Investment: A Literature Review” (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper, Federal Reserve Bank, San Francisco, CA, 2015).
8. Zuk et al., Gentrification, Displacement and the Role of Public Investment.
9. Instead, primary data collection such as inter-views and ethnography provide a much more illuminating picture of housing pressures and insecurity, as shown so effectively in Matthew Desmond’s, Evicted (New York, Penguin Random House, 2016).
10. Rose, “Rethinking Gentrification,” 55.
11. Zuk et al., Gentrification, Displacement and the Role of Public Investment.
12. See the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s, “Housing Wage Calculator,” available at http://nlihc.org/library/wagecalc.
13. This project was a side product of a larger study funded by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (via the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Sustainable Communities Initiative) that involved extensive qualitative and quantitative regional analysis to better understand the nature of neighborhood change and displacement in the Bay Area and its relationship to transit.
14. Naturally occurring affordable housing units are affordable to those at 80 percent of area median income or less, paying 30 percent or less of their income for rent. On using the loss of low-income households between 2000 and 2013: as a proxy for displacement, on average, Bay Area census tracts’ low-income population grew by fifty-nine households between 2000 and 2013. Therefore, we assume that a tract that lost low-income households during this period underwent some process of displacement when combined with other indicators such as a loss of market-rate affordable units or a decline of the in-migration of low-income population into that tract beyond the regional median. Although the change in low-income households could be due to income mobility (e.g., low-income households moving into middle-or upper-income cat-egories, or vice versa), from our analysis of data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, we estimate that there would have been a net increase in low-income households in most places likely due to the Great Recession; there-fore, our estimates of displacement are likely an underestimate, if anything.
15. California Budget & Policy Center, Inequality and Economic Security in Silicon Valley (Sacramento, CA: California Budget & Policy Center, 2016).
16. Karen Chapple, “A Multi-dimensional Approach to Affordable Housing Policy: Learning from Climate Change Policy,” The Berkeley Blog, available at http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2016/02/11/a-multi-dimensional-approach-to-affordable-housing-policy-learning-from-cli mate-change-policy/.
17. Conor Dougherty, “In Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to ‘Build, Baby, Build’,” New York Times, April 16, 2016.
18. For SPUR’s point of view, see http://www.city-lab.com/housing/2015/07/whats-the-matter-with-san-francisco/399506/. For the Legislative Analyst Office reports, see http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/housing-costs.pdf and http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345. For information on the governor’s by-right bill, see http://www.hcd.ca.gov/housing4agrowingca.html.
19. Sources included urban research think tanks such as the Urban Institute, blogs on urban issues such as City Lab and Next City, blogs on planning such as Planetizen, environmental blogs such as National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) Switchboard, transportation blogs such as The Overheard Wire, Wonkblog from the Washington Post, and New York Times. The search included articles from January 2014 to the present.
20. Available at https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/em/summer13/highlight3.html.
21. “The State of the Nation’s Housing,” (Cambridge, MA: Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2016).
22. Rocio Sanchez-Moyano and Carol Galante, “Small Houses, Big Impact,” available at http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/blog/small-houses-big-impact-making-the-case-for-accessory-dwelling-units-in-und; Emily Badger, “The Great Senior Sell-Off Could Cause the Next Housing Crisis,” available at http://www.city-lab.com/housing/2013/03/aging-baby-boom-ers-and-next-housing-crisis/4863/.
23. Eric Fischer’s work illustrates this point quite elegantly: available at https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html.
24. In 2014, Mark Hogan estimated development cost at $469,800 for an eight hundred square foot unit, a minimum that does not include construction financing expenses, contingencies, developer’s profit, and other costs; costs today may be significantly higher. See http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2014-02-11/real-costs-building-housing. Re ultra-luxury apartments, see http://www.nytimes. com/2016/07/12/realestate/luxury/slow-times-on-billionaires-row-as-the-8-digit-boom-fiz-zles.html?ref=realestate’.
25. Zuk and Chapple, Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement. Moreover, the literature on filtering does not examine luxury apartments; conceivably, filtering may not even occur in this market segment.
26. Karen Chapple, “Industrial Land and Jobs Study for the San Francisco Bay Area” (prepared for the Association of Bay Area Governments, San Francisco, CA: ABAG, forthcoming in 2017).
27. Data for the first two columns come from Chapple, ibid., forthcoming. The last col-umn is calculated from data from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy, San Mateo County Union Community Alliance, and Working Partnerships USA, Economic Prosperity Strategy (San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, 2015), available at http://www.spur.org/publications/spur-report/2014-10-01/economic-prosperity-strategy.
28. See https://www.brookings.edu/research/city-and-metropolitan-inequality-on-the-rise-dri ven-by-declining-incomes/.
29. See, for instance, https://www.huduser.gov/por tal/periodicals/em/summer13/highlight3.html.