Housing Production, or the Lack Thereof, and Displacement
In this month’s DC Office of Planning newsletter they had a piece on measuring displacement. It included a link to a map created by the Montgomery County Planning Department looking at neighborhood change over the 2000-2019 period.
I have been interested in better understanding the displacement of Black residents in DC. In the last decade, from 2010 to 2020, DC lost a net 20,000 Black residents. I wanted to get beyond the rhetoric and hashtags that permeate this issue and look at the facts. It is something I have asked the Office of Planning to do as it relates to DC’s historic districts, which my analysis has shown to protect white enclaves and have a catalyzing effect on neighborhood that had recently been majority Black.
My thanks to Ben Kraft of the Montgomery County Planning Department for sharing this “Neighborhood Change” dataset with me. From it I have been able to look at the last 20 years and see not only where Black residents were leaving, but where we see a net increase in housing units.
There are those who view the lack of new housing construction as a major cause of displacement. Displacement is, afterall, largely a function of housing demand and housing costs. High demand which is not offset by greater supply will drive up the cost of housing. Incumbent low income residents, especially renters, are squeezed out. I tend to put myself in this camp, but like many issues, I’m driven by the data rather than a narrative.
There are others how see the creation of new housing - the term most preferred in these debates is “luxury condos” - as the cause of displacement. Build a cluster of high end mixed use buildings in a low income neighborhood, and that will drive the rents up for everyone.
There has been a good deal of research on this topic, and generally the studies say that building “luxury condos” makes the nearby non-luxury housing more affordable.
What I found in the “Neighborhood Change” dataset is that displacement of Black residents in DC is happening in a wide range of locations. Some of those locations, like Navy Yard, East End, 14th Street and Shaw, we see the combination of high levels of displacement coinciding with significant increases in housing. But many of the locations where we the most acute levels of displacement are happening in areas where housing production has been low or non-existent, such as Capitol Hill, H St NE, Kingman Park, Petworth, Crestwood, Brightwood Park, Fort Totten. and places in Upper Northwest that had few Black residents to begin with, like Cleveland Park and Woodley Park. And there were other places where strong housing growth coincided with far lower Black displacement or even growth.
To illustrate these differing points of view or scenarios, I created three distinct categories of census tracts in the map below.
The red areas are place where the net displacement of Black residents (% drop in Black residents between 2000-2019) was 20% of more, and the growth in housing units over the same period was 20% or more.
The orange areas are places where the net displacement of Black residents was high (20% or more) but the production of new housing units was lower or non-existent (10% or less).
The blue areas are places where the net displacement of Black residents was low or non-existent (10% or less, including growth), and the production of housing units was high (20%+).
The labels on these tracts are the net change in Black population between 2000-2019. Note that most of the big losses are in areas with limited to no housing growth. Only two tracts that lost more than a net 1,000 Black residents during this time are in areas of high housing production: the East End and the area around Meridian Hill Park. High housing production places like Navy Yard and The Wharf encountered net displacement, but no where near the levels in many of the places where there was little housing production. The tract where Union Market is home gained net population of Black residents (+62%) while also significantly increasing housing (+63%).
The issue of displacement is complicated, and this is an admittedly simple analysis. But the data is also fairly compelling that NOT building housing in response to high demand is not a solution to the problem of displacement. When moderate and higher income home shoppers are looking for a place in DC, lower rent and real estate neighborhoods have been paying the price.
Building more housing in high opportunity areas such as Upper Northwest where the threat of displacement is low, can offset the pressure to buy existing housing stock in neighborhoods with a large share of Black residents.
The data can be found here