Using demographic information to predict and track neighborhood gentrification urbandisplacement.org
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:All right. Good afternoon everybody. You're listening to method to the madness on k a l x Berkeley 90.7 FM, university of California and listener supported radio streaming on the World Wide Web, a k a lx.berkeley.edu. However you are listening to us this morning. Thanks for joining. My name is Eileen is r and this is method to the madness, a public affairs show that celebrates the innovative spirit of the bay area. And today [00:00:30] I am fortunate enough to be joined in studio by Dr Miriam Zuck. Hi Doctor. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm good. How are you? Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Uh, I'm great. Thanks for coming in. And um, today we're going to be talking about, um, a new project that had just been published, uh, of which Dr Zuck is the program project director called the urban displacement project. Tim, before we get to that a, we're in and we're going to talk a little bit about gentrification and some of the macro trends happening in the bay area right now. My first, I wanted to, [00:01:00] uh, start off by, we usually in this, uh, program talk about innovative ideas and projects that are bringing light, bringing to light, you know, um, issues that aren't necessarily fully understood. So I think what you're doing is a perfect example of that. Um, but we first kind of talk about what's the problem set, like, what led you to, uh, want to solve this problem? What are you trying to solve?
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:This particular pro problem. Well, [00:01:30] um, I actually came to this issue sort of in a roundabout way. I, um, became, I used to work in air quality, um, policy. I lived in Mexico City for a number of years and was starting to get interested in issues of transportation since that's one of the biggest, um, emitters of air pollution in, in Mexico City and in a lot of urban areas. So I became interested in issues of land use and transportation and how people get around in cities and how do we make them healthier for people. Um, and when I did my [00:02:00] doctoral degree here at UC Berkeley, it was really that intersection of health and place. So how do we make neighborhoods healthy for everyone? So not just healthy for, um, the wealthy, but healthy for low income households as well. Um, so I was doing research in Fresno, um, and looking at neighborhood revitalization and a lot of the efforts there, um, a lot of it going on around high speed rail and transit and access and how do we revitalize [00:02:30] neighborhoods. And as I was there, um, people were excited about revitalization but really anxious. They, they thought, who are you revitalizing our neighborhoods for? And is this going to lead to displacement? So that actually is what got me interested in the issue. And um, this project is kind of trying to answer those questions, um, of when we do invest in neighborhoods, when, especially when we invest in transit and access in neighborhoods, um, is that [00:03:00] leading to displacement and how do we help people stay in neighborhoods as they improve?
Speaker 1:Okay. So that's a, I think a really great, um, summary. I think of how you got to it. Now I want to ask about, uh, before we dive into the project itself and I want to hear kind of a little bit the, the history of how you went about achieving this really cool map, which everybody can check out@urbandisplacement.org. Um, I want to ask is this, uh, is this a unique problem? Like usually we can see problems and look back to history of [00:03:30] some kind of precedent, but it seems the macro trend of this flight kind of back to urban cores, um, is the reverse of the previous trend of people going out to the suburbs and leaving the cities. And so is this a new problem, this idea of gentrification? Is it a 21st century problem or has it always existed?
Speaker 2:I mean, there is the, the, the issues of, of people sort of homesteading, let's call it. Um, and moving into sort of low income neighborhoods and pushing out low income households is not [00:04:00] that new. I mean, I, in terms of the academic literature on it, um, could dates back to the 1960s in London when people started writing about it. And really coining this term gentrification. Um, but you know, we, if you search back even further, you can find all sorts of evidence. I'm a brown stoning and in, um, New York area, um, all sorts of issues like that. So I think the issue of place and, and whose neighborhood is it and you know, what are the amenities there [00:04:30] and who has the right to be there span history. Um, the, the current issue of gentrification and people trying to go back into city higher income households moving back into the cities, um, is a little bit more recent. But I think if you think about it more generally about displacement and, um, and right to break to the city, it's, um, it's not that now.
Speaker 1:Okay. And, um, uh, looking from Dallas [00:05:00] from a historical perspective, that question, but thinking about like where we are in a moment in time, I can't think of a more timely project with the rising rents in the bay area, which is really priced so many people out of being able to live in the kind of core inner bay area. Um, and some of the statistics that you were seeing these ages staggering. I think I saw the average rent price in San Francisco is getting around $3,000 a month, which is, you know, I think I'm thinkable for a lot of people, yet there is this elite class of people [00:05:30] who can afford that and it's not a big deal. So having us really understanding what this trend, how it's happening and how to, how to handle it, I think is super, super important. So let's talk about the maps. So we'll actually, before we go there, I want to ask you a little bit about, so you're housed in a place, as I understood, it's called the community, the center for community innovation. And that's a cow, um, organization or department, the center. So tell us a little bit about
Speaker 2:that. Sure. It's a center started by a [00:06:00] professor, Karen Chapel and the department of city and regional planning. Um, and did generally a lot of, um, uh, professors and researchers here. We'll create centers to sort of how's their research and, um, have sort of an identity to their research. Um, and students that work with them. So this center was started by a professor chapel and really looking at housing community and economic development. It started with issues in the bay area, but we've gone regional [00:06:30] and international. Um, she's done work throughout Latin America. She's done work in Dubai. Um, so we're, we've expanded greatly, but especially in the last 10 years, a lot of our focus has been around transit oriented development just because that is sort of the dominant frame in city planning right now. Um, we want to get people out of their cars, we want them to use more transit, we want to be better for the environment.
Speaker 2:Um, and so this project really [00:07:00] comes out of that, comes out of a statewide interest in this, right? So because of, uh, AB 32 and the global warming app, global warming act, um, the state is trying to encourage regions to do a better job of linking housing and transportation and land use planning, um, and really trying to encourage transit oriented development. So we have a long history of doing research on this. Um, and, and as those programs have been coming out through [00:07:30] what's called the sustainable community strategies, um, communities are anxious, they're anxious that this is going to lead to displacement and, um, advance advancing gentrification, especially in places like the bay area and Los Angeles hot market cities. But we do see it in, in places that you might not expect as well, where we do see these kinds of pressures in communities throughout California.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When we're talking to Dr Mariam Zuck, the, she is the project director of the urban displacement project out of the [00:08:00] Center for community innovation here at cow. Uh, and this is a method to the madness here on k a l x Berkeley 90.7 FM. And you know, it was interesting, I was doing a little bit of research on your center and I saw that it was, um, reference Ab 32, which I didn't draw that connection when I first saw the map. But I guess the, the, um, targets that are put out by that, uh, Bill are, are very, very aggressive and there's, so there's a whole interdisciplinary focus on satisfying those targets. [00:08:30] And I guess it does make a lot of sense to have, um, a lot of urban planners involved because that's going to be the core of kind of figuring out the longterm effect you guys have. When you're looking at, um, the types of trendings that you're looking at. Do we have in your mind the population growth that we're going to have to solve for in places like the bay area?
Speaker 2:Um, so the bay area is currently going through an update of its community strategies which are mandated under SB three 75, which is sort of one of the implementing [00:09:00] mechanisms of Ab 32. Um, and it's called Plan Bay area and, and that's what they do. They do a lot of forecasting with that. So they know the future population. Um, or they, they, they forecast rather the future population and the future number of households with that. Um, I don't have the exact numbers on hand cause they are currently going through an update of it. Um, but they, they're required to, once they project out those households and project out what the transportation [00:09:30] is gonna um, the transportation infrastructure is going to be there trying to create plans that will meet the needs of those future households. So one of the goals, at least in the last plan bay area, um, was to house the entire population. Um, which is hard, um, the future population, right. Without, without having to displace people outside of the bay area region. Um,
Speaker 1:and which is technically the nine counties that touched the bay. Is that right? And that's [00:10:00] approximately what, six and half million people now [inaudible]
Speaker 2:oh, sure. Yeah. My numbers. I, I think it's something around there. Five to six, something like that. Yeah. So I don't know what the current projections are out out. Um, I think the plan bay area might project out to 2030. Um, so they're currently working through those forecasts right now.
Speaker 1:But I do know that the macro trend in, in terms of the United States and the world in general is just way more people and not having too much more space [00:10:30] in terms of lease in like a densely populated urban core, like the bay area. Yeah.
Speaker 2:People want to live in cities. Yeah. So, so that's certainly one of the issues that that plane barrier is trying to solve. Right. We don't necessarily want our workers to have to move out to Tracey and Stockton, um, and commute those really long commute. So that's actually shooting ourselves in the foot in terms of trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we're, if all of our low wage workers are living outside of the region having to commute [00:11:00] in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the answer isn't to build bigger freeways, it's to build more densely populated urban cores that have access to public transit. Yeah. And is there anything being thought of besides bart in terms of public transit options in the bay? I know we're getting a little bit off of what you're doing, but do you know anything about that?
Speaker 2:Well, there are, I think, 75 new stations or train stations and train routes planned throughout the bay area. Um, so there's the Bart going out to eastern [00:11:30] Contra Costa County, if I remember correctly, the smart, um, which goes up through, um, north Bay. Um, there's extensions of Bart, right? So right now we're seeing the extension down to San Jose going on. So there's a lot of upgrading our existing transit, but there's also trying to, um, I know you've probably heard about the bus rapid transit, um, efforts going on in Oakland. Um, Berkeley unfortunately didn't want it. Um, and I'm sure there's other [00:12:00] areas around the bay area that are trying to use buses similar to the way that we use to trains to get people to places faster and at lower cost.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. So that we, we went, veered off a little bit there, but I'm so interested in this topic, but let's get back to, okay. So you, um, are at the center for community innovation and you see this problem of, um, gentrification and wanting to do some research on it. And we see the product to the end result, [00:12:30] which is this incredible map. And I encourage everybody to go check it out@urbandisplacement.org. Uh, but tell me a little bit about how you came to even wanting to build something like that, or how did that idea come about?
Speaker 2:So I would actually say this is an intermediate product where actually, well the product project is ending officially, um, next year. Um, at least the state funded piece of it. Um, but the, we were also funded by the regional planning agencies to do this work. And [00:13:00] the idea behind it, especially from the regional agencies was help us figure out where we can both Papas understand where we're experiencing these things right now, these, these pressures, um, and where we expect to see them into the future in part so that we can do a better job of enacting policies and investments, um, in the right places. So that's where it came about. Um, we were fortunate to, to participate in the regional prosperity plan, which was part, [00:13:30] um, it was run by the regional agents, the planning agencies. Um, and it was a project funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, um, the, the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Speaker 2:Um, so as part of that project, um, right there was this, the, the, they called it the regional early warning system for displacement. So what can we learn from what the information we have now about where these processes are [00:14:00] going to continue or advanced in the future? Um, so it was both sort of a, a data exploration, um, endeavor as well as, um, we did nine community-based case studies as part of that project. So working with community based organizations to better understand what are the pressures that they're experiencing, what are the policies that they think that they have seen work and the on the ground. And then how do we compare the experience on the ground to what the data is saying. [00:14:30] Um, so that sort of where it came about.
Speaker 1:So there's a quantitative and qualitative component.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And we're also working for the state law, um, piece of this project. We're working with UCLA. So there is a la component to the research, um, where the idea is what can we provide for, um, regional plan planning around the state to help them better understand these issues. So we're continuing to work with them, um, and figure out sort of how can we generalize [00:15:00] this information to other communities around the state.
Speaker 1:So, and the quantitative side really kind of has this visual component of this map, um, and, and playing around with the map, you have a lot of different data sets in there. So how did you go about deciding which data sets to visualize that really would it got, I'm a very big, um, I have a huge interest in data visualization. I think it's one of the new, I think I've, I view as an art form, you know, trying to figure out ways to unlock the secrets of this [00:15:30] data. There's lots of different ways to look at it. So you have looked at lots of different data sets. How did you decide which data sets to visualize in your map?
Speaker 2:Sure. So first we started with, I mean, we had a long list of all the data we wanted to look at. Um, some of that got thrown out because we couldn't get data that covered the entire region. The goal was to cover the entire region and to be able to go back at least 10, 20 years. So that, because we know that these are long processes. Um, so [00:16:00] some of the things that we wanted, we had to throw out, um, like we thought we could get information on, um, housing discrimination complaints, um, and we could get it at the city level, but we wanted it at a smaller grain, right? We want to understand what's happening at the neighborhood level, so, and, and we couldn't go back very far for that. So, so that was one narrowing step. Um, I think we start off with like a hundred variables that we wanted to look at. Um, so we narrowed it down based on that. Then we collected [00:16:30] all sorts of data a lot from the census, which has its limitations, right? The, our data ends at 2013 and you don't have to be rocket scientist and the bay area to know that things have really skyrocketed since 2013 so we know that what our estimates are conservative right now because we don't have more recent data, at least on demographic data.
Speaker 1:And is it, isn't it, um, the census data doesn't get down to the neighborhood level, does it?
Speaker 2:It does. We looked at the census track level, which is, you know, three to 5,000 [00:17:00] people. Um, you could get block group level data, um, but the quality of the data, there's a lot of uncertainty at those levels. So yes,
Speaker 1:that's your, is that your most granular unit is the center
Speaker 2:and distract? Right now we're trying to do a little bit more granular analysis in San Francisco. Um, but yeah, the census tracks is how we decided to summarize the data. Um, so once we had a clean data, so we, most, a lot of it was from census. Um, we purchased assessor data, um, tax assessor [00:17:30] data to get information on housing units, um, transaction data to see sales prices. We have, um, vacancy data from the postal service. There's all sorts of different data sets that we collected and we cleaned them and we started running, um, statistical models to see, you know, what are the variables that really look like they're important in terms of predicting neighborhood change. Um, so we would all dumb down. [00:18:00] In addition to that, we did a bunch of, uh, uh, we did a bunch of academic literature review to see what if other people found and how are they defining gentrification specifically? Um, displacement. We separated it out, um, in part because we didn't want to enter into the current debates about does gentrification necessarily involve displacement or not? So we've separated them. Gentrification we're looking at is mostly demographic change in, in neighborhood. Um, and
Speaker 1:is it a demographic, like is it ethnic, is it, [00:18:30] but as, as a more just, um, economic,
Speaker 2:it's mostly economic, um, because there's an income, right? So we looked at growth in median income as well as educational attainment, which tends to be a better, um, uh, tracker of, of class, um, than income just because there's issues about the way people report their income. Um, sure.
Speaker 1:It just as a matter of understanding this, the gentrification, the definition, gentrification one is the changing mix of kind of undergraduate [00:19:00] degrees or something in a certain census tract.
Speaker 2:Yes. Right. Well, it's, the definition of gentrification where you using or to to for the modeling purposes are, um, it starts off as a vulnerable tract. So it starts off with a higher proportion of low income households. Um, higher proportion of rentals. Um, there's two more, which of course are escaping me right now. I know hot in the studio right now just so, um, [00:19:30] there's, um, a higher proportion of people of color. Um, and there's one more, which of course it probably is a higher proportion of people with less than a bachelor's degree. Yeah. Um, so, so it starts off as a vulnerable place. Um, we see demographic changes we just discussed and we also see investment in real estate. So we see growth in sales prices, new development, um, because it's all cash purchases. We do not. Yeah. That's something that you probably could get from the [00:20:00] assessor's office.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, we do because there's a, there's mortgage information on there too, so, yeah, that's a good point. So, um, so that, so that was kind of how we define gentrification and we looked at displacement simply as the loss of low income households. Um, we've toyed with a bunch of different things. Um, people, a lot of people have been asking, well, but couldn't it just be that people are moving up and the income scale, which is true. Um, and we did a little bit of analysis. [00:20:30] Unfortunately you don't have that kind of data available, um, at the household level. But what we did analysis that we did right ends in 2013. So this is the period of the great recession. And, um, when we looked at national level data, we found the opposite to true. Right? You have many more people who are going down in the income ladder rather than up. So for at least for this period, we feel like it's a decent enough proxy for displacement.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So we're talking to Dr Miriam Zuck, she's the project director [00:21:00] for the urban displacement project coming out of the Center for Community Innovation here at Cau. You can check out the map that she built and published a, it was last week was when it came out as, or is it this Monday? This Monday came out of the urban@urbandisplacement.org and she's been doing the rounds and different radio stations here in the bay area. So we're very lucky to have her here. Thanks for coming in again. Um, so I wanted to ask about, um, you were just talking about the data collection and the visualization is really cool. Um, but I think one of the intents here [00:21:30] is to not only visualize what's going on and identify places that are at risk for displacement, but provide some kind of actionable intel to organizations. And that's really, I think where the rubber meets the road is we know this is happening and you know, anybody who's been to, like I used to live, uh, in the western edition in San Francisco 15 years ago, and if you go to Divisadero street now, it is like Disneyland compared to what it used to be.
Speaker 1:So this is something that's happened happening and everybody knows it. But the question is, what do you do about it? Because [00:22:00] these are market forces and market forces we all know are very powerful. So supply and demand, if someone wants to live there and they're willing to pay more, it's hard to stop that from happening. So what do you think is the, the, the actions that can be taken out and whether they be on an individual level, government level, um, what do you think is the real way to combat displacement? Or can we, or is it just inevitable?
Speaker 2:I don't think it's inevitable. And so part of the thing that we're trying to emphasize with these maps are that somebody had called them on the continuum [00:22:30] of gentrification the other day. And I said, no, no, no, it's not a continuum that, that, that implies some sort of inevitability. Um, there are things that we can do and we're currently working on a policy tool that will really help community organizations and cities and people interested figure out what's, what are the right tools for my place. So originally we thought that we were going to be able to say, okay, you're a place at risk. Here are the things that you need to do. But there's so much diversity in neighborhoods and cities that it didn't make sense and [00:23:00] we didn't want, you know, to give out some generic lists that then people can just be like, man, this doesn't apply to me and, and move on. So we're currently in the process of developing a tool that will really try to match what the conditions are in the place with what are the appropriate policies and investment in types. Um, but there's a lot that cities can do. Um, there's a lot that land on or you know, property owners can do being good, being good, uh, uh, landlords, um, mean not raising the rents, not or, [00:23:30] or just, uh, raising the rents a moderate amount instead of doubling them, tripling them, um, just because they can right now. Yeah. Because
Speaker 1:who was the first city in 30 years for somebody to enact [inaudible]
Speaker 2:yeah. So, yeah, which is, it is a step can do that and still struggle. You know, there's, there's petitions out right now to try to repeal it. Um, of course. Uh, and so, but it's shows the leadership over there, um, that hopefully other cities will follow in suit in. Other cities [00:24:00] are actually saying like cities that you wouldn't expect. Um, um, places in San Mateo County or talking about rent control, which I think a lot of us thought that there was no hope for anybody in acting, rent control anymore. Um, yeah, but, but we see that it's happening and people see it as a solution. So, you know, there are things that cities can do in terms of helping people stay in place as the, as the neighborhood is changing. Um, things like tenant protections are in control, just cause evictions, ordinances, um, [00:24:30] preserving affordable housing. So a lot of affordable housing stock is at risk.
Speaker 2:The, the subsidized housing stock is at risk. So, um, you know, people are no longer accepting section eight vouchers because they don't have to, they can get more money if they don't. Um, so enacting policies, anti-discrimination policies could be helpful and then there's making more affordable housing. Um, and w kind of similar into the preservation. Um, you know, historically most low income households [00:25:00] have lived in non subsidized housing, but it was affordable to them. That doesn't really exist in the bay area anymore. And so trying to convert some market rate housing into subsidized housing is what some cities are looking into. Um, and just generating no new resources or being open to citing affordable housing in your communities, which is a big hurdle in a lot of communities. Um, is another thing that we're looking at.
Speaker 1:Are you talking about Nimbyism? Like people want it, but they don't want it for a housing in their [00:25:30] neighborhood. Is that what you mean?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean it's a huge struggle. Um, you know, they'll say, oh, we don't want the density or we don't want the traffic, but really they don't want, um, people that are different from them and their neighborhoods. Um, and certainly asset building, you know, we're seeing a lot of movement, especially in minimum wage, but even the new minimum wages that's going to be enacted, what over a three year period in some of these cities, um, it's still not going to [00:26:00] meet the demand that the need for housing. I mean, I think you need to be making over $25 an hour to be able to afford housing. Um, so,
Speaker 1:so highly controversial. And some of the owners like restaurants I've been noticing is they're just getting rid of their best stuff. Yeah. Cause they just saying they can't afford it too though. They just need to, waitresses and the waiters have to do more work basically. Yeah. Um, so I mean it's a complicated Web, but, uh, and you know, you've, you've been, you've done great work in helping us to understand a little bit more. [00:26:30] I want to ask them the last questions here in Burleson. We're talking to Dr Miriam Zuck here on methods to the madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. I'm your host Ali Nasar. Um, when you're doing research, I, one of the most illustrative, um, tasks in the research process is the quantitative or qualitative side. So we were talking about the quantitative. Can you share with us a story during the qualitative part of looking at this that really crystallized this problem for you, that really made you really understand it and like redouble [00:27:00] your efforts to try to solve it?
Speaker 2:Sure. Um, so our case studies, um, were selected for a variety of different reasons. Some of them were places that have already undergone gentrification, like the mission. Some of them were places where the anxious about it, like marine city. Um, and some places were places where, you know, we see pockets of low income and um, households that we feel like neighborhoods are changing. But there wasn't quite enough information there. So for [00:27:30] instance, um, the monument corridor in Concord, nobody really thinks of Concord as a gentrifying area. Um, and we started working with a monument impact, a community based organization out there that's been heavily involved with the downtown revitalization efforts and trying to really protect tenants. Um, and we started doing interviews, uh, with all sorts of different kinds of stakeholders. And in one of our interviews with a landlord, we heard him say, um, or he responded [00:28:00] when we asked him his opinion about the bart stations, cause it is near a Bart station.
Speaker 2:There's all sorts of reasons why you might want to see it. You might see investment there. He said, you know, I don't really care about the Bart station, but, um, I know the laptop crowd does. So I, uh, I'm planning on evicting all of my low income Latino households. Um, eventually I want to convert to condos and I want to make room for the laptop crowd to move in and more like, where are we? We're [00:28:30] out in Concord, you know, and there's that speculation happening all over the place. Um, so property owners see that the demand is regional and they know that eventually we're gonna run out of space, um, in more of the hot market parts of the bay area and they're prepping for this. And so we're starting to see change in areas that we wouldn't expect. Um, and when we heard that story, we were like, this is a really, this is a huge issue and we're only scratching the surface at this point.
Speaker 1:Great. Well that's [00:29:00] a really powerful story and I think helps to crystallize, you know, the issue here of, like I said earlier of the supply and demand problem, you're always gonna have capitalists trying to take advantage of it and that's one of the basis of this country's built on. But yeah, to be able to mitigate that somewhat and make it have a fair playing field, I think is the trick that we've got to find the bay area being a progressive leader in the country. Hopefully we can lead the way for others to really understand this. So thanks for all your work, Dr Zack. Absolutely. And I, like I said before, I really encourage everybody to go to the urban displacement.org that's the map where you can [00:29:30] go and play around with all the data that she's visualized for us. And a, you can check us out@calixdotberkeley.edu if you want to learn more about the program, this is method to the madness. Thanks for joining. Have a great Friday.
Speaker 4:[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:30:00] [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:30:30] [inaudible].
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