Governments Fund Gentrification. But We Can Stop It.
Today’s gentrification is not an accident, nor is it simply the effects of shifting preferences for urban living or the so-called invisible hand of capitalism. It’s the intentional, predictable result of policy choices. And we can halt it in its tracks.
"Gentrification in Progress" tape in front of Brooklyn Museum. (Andy Katz / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images)
When he came to the Indianapolis eviction court where my students and I represent tenants, Robert’s case made no sense. His landlord had filed for eviction against Robert, alleging he had paid his rent late. But Robert had receipts to show differently. Lots of receipts. Robert, now in his eighties, had been living in his apartment for more than two decades.
When we confronted the landlord’s attorney with this, he shrugged. “OK, we’ll dismiss this case,” he said. “But his lease is up in three months anyway, and the new property owner is not going to renew.”
Turns out the attempt to evict Robert was one of a stack of cases filed by the investor-owned real estate company that recently purchased his building. The plan was to clear out the current tenants, most of whom were, like Robert, black and longtime residents of the neighborhood. The next steps were to make a few cosmetic changes in the building, rename it, and start selling condos to the wealthier, predominately white people who had begun moving into Robert’s neighborhood.
Robert’s story is not a new one. Black households in our community have been displaced for generations. When Robert was younger, entire blocks of black communities near downtown were bulldozed to make way for interstate highways, an urban university campus, and a medical complex. The campus where I teach and the urban highway loop I travel to get to court are both built on the land of displaced black families.
The same pattern was repeated across urban America. Starting with the 1949 Housing Act, the federal government spent over $13 billion on a series of programs informally known as urban renewal. But in black neighborhoods, the programs were more commonly known as “Negro removal.” For good reason: black Americans made up the majority of the quarter-million families displaced by urban renewal, even though they were less than 15 percent of the nation’s population at the time.
A new wave of black and working-class displacement is now occurring in the surviving neighborhoods close to urban cores. Too often, the current displacement is portrayed as less connected to government policies than the urban renewal era of the mid-twentieth century. But today’s gentrification is not an accident, nor is it simply the effects of shifting preferences for urban living or the so-called invisible hand of capitalism. From zoning decisions to infrastructure investment to handing over government land and federal development funds controlled by local governments to private capital, the displacement of Robert and hundreds of thousands of others is the intentional, predictable result of choices made by government policymakers.
“Gentrification is not about a Starbucks suddenly appearing in a community,” John Washington, an organizer with the nationwide Homes Guarantee campaign, says. “Displacement and homelessness are actually the goals of the architects of our housing market, and they are backed by government dollars and policy.” The driving force of government handing over land, cash, and enormous tax subsidies to private developers is so undeniable that even the centrist Center for American Progress admits that “displacement today is the result of policy choices.”
But not everywhere.
“Using Our Tax Dollars To Displace People Is No Longer Acceptable”
For the past several decades, residents of historically black neighborhoods in Louisville’s urban center watched while their communities lost black residents to foreclosures and evictions. As the longtime residents were forced out, developers purchased their homes to sell to mostly white buyers. “They were picking the bones of my community,” says Jessica Bellamy, an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union whose family had lived in the Smoketown area for generations.
The bone pickers were backed by the Louisville Metro Government. For years, the local government had been repurposing US Department of Housing and Urban Development funds to distribute millions of dollars to developers for projects that spiked the cost of housing for everyone in the community, even as the local government’s own assessment showed the city was short over thirty thousand units that are affordable to the lowest-income residents. (Nationally, there is a shortage of 7.3 million housing units for very low-income households.)
So Bellamy and other residents worked with incoming Metro Council member Jecory Arthur to draft a law to block the local government from giving money, land, or staff support for projects that would result in housing costs that were unaffordable for a neighborhood’s current residents. They called it an antidisplacement ordinance. Arthur also grew up in Louisville’s historically black neighborhoods and had long fought against displacement — a musician and teacher, he recorded the song “Gentrification” in 2019. But he makes it clear that the ordinance was resident driven from day one.
“It is important for other cities that are trying to address displacement to realize that a remedy is not going to come just from electoral politics,” Arthur says. “You need to have grassroots organizing at the center of the effort. That is what gets reform passed.”
When Arthur first introduced the legislation, he had little official support. The majority of the council refused to endorse it. Louisville mayor Craig Greenberg, a former developer himself, aggressively opposed it. But the Louisville Tenant Union and others canvassed door to door in support of the ordinance and held phone and text banks and public events in councilors’ districts. They collected 1500 signatures on a petition and recruited fifty organizations to endorse the ordinance.
“No one can articulate the struggle better than the people going through the struggle,” Arthur says. So the residents spoke at community events and held one-on-one meetings with councilors. On the day of the November vote, the mayor reached out to every councilor to lobby against the ordinance. But it was too late. The antidisplacement ordinance passed 25–0 and went into law, even though the mayor refused to sign it.
“The end result is that using our tax dollars to displace people is no longer acceptable to the people of Louisville,” Arthur told Jacobin.
Pointing the Finger at Government
Louisville joins Boston, which in 2020 adopted a similar requirement that developers seeking zoning approvals first meet antidisplacement guidelines. Other reforms are also necessary to stop displacement. Black tenants are disproportionately the targets of unjust evictions, so protections like good-cause requirements for evictions or lease renewals (which would have kept our client Robert in his home) are necessary.
So is rent control to stop price gouging, and ensuring tenants have the right of first refusal to purchase their homes or buildings if the owner intends to sell. Positive reparations like transferring government-owned property not to profiteering developers but to community land trusts, and funding more public housing, can start reversing the damage caused by decades of displacement.
But shutting off the spigot of government dollars that is funding gentrification is an important step. Housing researchers at the RVA Eviction Lab say the Louisville ordinance is changing the narrative and stopping government complicity in black displacement, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights says the Louisville example will inspire other communities to follow suit.
John Washington says that the Homes Guarantee campaign is looking to build on the Louisville victory. “This ordinance is so valuable because governments have for too long been deflecting their responsibility for gentrification” he says. “People living in these neighborhoods have pointed the finger right back at government, demanding it stop displacing entire communities.”
Jessica Bellamy agrees. And she has advice for other communities struggling with displacement. “You got to be all the way done with waiting for someone else to do something,” she says. “Anyone can do this — and should do this, all over the damn country.”