Last time, before the coronavirus pandemic interrupted work on this series, I explored an outside-the-box approach to winning abundant housing called “hyperlocalism.” This time, I back up to review the displacement dimension of housing and housing politics.
In 1970, the year I turned six, my family moved to a drafty, old house on the mostly white perimeter of Seattle’s Central District, then the heart of Cascadia’s African-American community. The Central District was 73 percent Black, and I was among the handful of white kids in my class who walked to school. Most of my white classmates rode buses from the city’s north end as part of Seattle’s successful but too-soon-abandoned school integration program.
Today, no one in my family could imagine still affording that home, an Art Deco behemoth with peekaboo views of Lake Washington. My parents lucked into it during the Boeing Bust, snapping it up for $38,500 and housing in its seven bedrooms three kids, two pets, plus sometimes a campaign office. They sold it a few years later when they moved us East. By the time we returned to Seattle, prices in the neighborhood had escalated out of our reach. Microsoft was happening. Later, Amazon happened. Seattle home prices multiplied and multiplied again. As of this writing, Zillow estimates my childhood home’s value at $3.3 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s 13 times its value 50 years ago.
I’m not complaining! My family has lived on the privileged side of North America’s racial divide. We have done well. We bought homes in other parts of the metro area, and they too appreciated, though not as much. Most of my African-American classmates—indeed, most of the Black population of the Central District—were not so fortunate. Rising prices pushed them away, mostly to the south, to be replaced by whites with bigger paychecks. Today, the Central District is only 13 percent African-American, and it drops another percentage point each year. Black home ownership in the city, never very common, has fallen by half, to just one-fifth of Black households. Already in 2016, Seattle Times reporter Tyrone Beason would write, “When I asked African Americans young and old about Seattle’s ‘black community,’ almost to a person the response was, ‘There is no ‘black community’ in Seattle—not anymore.’”
Abundant housing and community stability: making common cause?
The rising tide of real-estate values has swept over the Central District, pushing out African-Americans and carrying in whites, who now make up 60 percent of the neighborhood’s residents. Other tides of displacement—varied in their details but alike in their inexorability—have rolled over the city’s Chinatown/International District and other once-minority zones. They have done the same to the old majority-Black sections of Portland and other Cascadian cities. Beyond Cascadia, the displacement trend has been, if anything, even more pronounced.
In the Central District and other places once consigned to people of color by racist laws and general bigotry, this trend—integration by gentrification, if you will—is galling. People oppressed by a Jim Crow housing regime, and their descendants deprived of the intergenerational wealth that accrued to people like me, deserve better than to have their hard-built communities replaced by well-heeled newcomers with advanced degrees and six-figure salaries. Such neighborhoods deserve help to stabilize their residents and to have a say in how their futures unfold. Moreover, many of their residents are owed damages—reparations for the centuries of exclusion that have stunted their life chances, impoverished them, and left them disproportionately vulnerable to everything from pandemic diseases to a racist system of policing and criminal justice, no less in the progressive-minded Northwest than elsewhere. Operationalizing the moral imperative that Black lives matter in the domain of housing policy is complicated by tangled layers of historic patterns, legal precedents, and economic forces. But complexity is no excuse for inaction. In the end, all that’s needed is political will and money—a lot of both.
How might housing abundance help repair the generations of racial injustices that this spring fueled an international uprising of protest sparked by the death of George Floyd?
This article is part of a series about the politics of abundant housing. How might we gather the power to turn low-slung places like Seattle and Portland into walkable, low-carbon wonderlands like Paris and Vienna? How might housing abundance help repair the generations of racial injustices that this spring fueled an international uprising of protest sparked by the death of George Floyd? Proponents of abundant housing in low-carbon neighborhoods, including Sightline, need proposals that aim not only to solve housing shortages and make low-carbon living possible but also to right historical wrongs that continue to poison North America.
More practically, to build affordable, low-carbon, high-opportunity cities, abundant-housing advocates need allies, just as anti-displacement movements need partners. Heretofore, both camps have mostly been losing. Indeed, one reason for these losses has been the tendency of the two groups to fight each other. An example is the work of California anti-displacement advocates, some of them representing communities of color, to help block the United States’ most celebrated housing-abundance campaign: the effort to upzone near public transit lines across the Golden State. The same conflict was at work in 2017, when many abundant-housing advocates joined the opposition to anti-displacement advocates’ campaign for Proposition 10, which would have ended California’s statewide limits on local rent control laws.
For my purposes, therefore, the question is neither which movement gets the solutions right nor which is morally righteous. The question is: what anti-displacement strategies can abundant-housing proponents get behind? Is there an intersection in the Venn diagram of the two agendas? I think there is.
One place to start may be the parts of most cities where US authorities canonized race-based ghettos with redlining maps drawn during the New Deal of the 1930s. These areas are surprisingly small in the Northwest, so restorative programs within them may well be achievable. Policies for community stabilization against racial displacement can be natural complements to policies that welcome an abundance of housing in walkable neighborhoods. One key is to take market pressure off neighborhoods of color by allowing rapid housing growth in other parts of town. Another is to award extra allowances for home construction to affordable-housing builders rooted in the community. Below, I will lay out these and other joint priorities, but first, I review the case for preventing displacement.
A century of segregation and its slow decay
The arrival of richer whites in poorer, central city neighborhoods of color is a rare and troubling case of a much larger and otherwise benign trend: desegregation of housing in North America. In most places, trickles of people of color have been moving into previously all-white areas—a fulfillment, if overly slow, delayed, and uneven, of one of the civil rights movement’s signature goals. In 1980, more than one-third of white Americans lived in census tracts that were at least 97 percent white. They lived, that is, in segregated white bubbles, most of which were suburban. By 2017, that figure had fallen to just 5 percent. The remaining white bubbles, what’s more, were almost all rural. The United States is a long way from being thoroughly integrated by race and ethnicity, but the trend is a slow, meandering walk in that direction.
The demographically smaller story—indeed a story that is statistically rare, though it is vastly more consequential for housing politics—is exemplified by what happened to the CD in Seattle: white people moving into some neighborhoods of color. A New York Times analysis found that just 1.5 percent of Americans live in formerly minority neighborhoods into which whites have been moving since 2000. Unlike the people of color moving into white neighborhoods, who match the incomes of the neighborhoods they move to, though, the whites moving into minority neighborhoods typically have much higher incomes and more education.
Emily Badger and her coauthors summarized US trends in the New York Times:
In city after city, a map of racial change shows predominantly minority neighborhoods near downtown growing whiter, while suburban neighborhoods that were once largely white are experiencing an increased share of Black, Hispanic and Asian-American residents.
Indeed, in impressive online mapping projects by the New York Times (for 2000 to 2017) and the Washington Post (for 1990 to 2016), you can zoom in on any US location and see unfolding the consistent pattern of slow but unmistakable racial and ethnic diversification.
Explicitly race-based exclusionary laws are consigned to the past, but their legacy endures.
Cascadia is no exception. University of Washington (UW) historian James Gregory and UW students have assembled a detailed and comprehensive suite of maps that starkly portray the confinement to defined quarters that Seattle imposed on people of African, Chinese, Hispanic, Japanese, Filipino, Native American, and Jewish descent in the early and mid-20th century. The maps are case studies of how racism and other forms of exclusion have shaped cities. After all, the history of North American cities is pockmarked with unjust laws and practices: redlining, block busting, restrictive zoning and covenants, government-funded relocation of poor people called “urban renewal,” racist rental and sales practices such as steering, the disproportionate funneling of new construction into neighborhoods of color, and predatory subprime lending and foreclosure practices.
Explicitly race-based exclusionary laws are consigned to the past, but their legacy endures. The pattern drawn on maps last century by redlining—a system of directing mortgage funds away from neighborhoods of color that was banned half a century ago—is still readily apparent in property values today. Later maps in Professor Gregory’s set show the displacement and ultimate diffusion of people of color in Seattle, especially southward: the old Central District and Chinatown neighborhoods turn whiter, and the rest of the metro area diversifies. (I recommend clicking through them!)
Since 2010, Gene Balk, data journalist at the Seattle Times, has also detailed and mapped the growing racial and ethnic diversity of almost all of the Seattle area. Seattle’s suburbs are dramatically more diverse than they used to be. Indeed, they now far surpass the city in measures of diversity. Bellevue and Redmond, once overwhelmingly white, no longer have a majority racial group; nor do Federal Way, Renton, or Kent. Once-white redoubts such as Auburn and Everett are more diverse than Seattle, though Seattle has grown slowly more diverse as well, even in its whitest districts. The few remaining areas of almost-pure white population near Seattle are rural zones mostly home to the oldest cohorts. As Cascadia ages, the diversity of its young people almost guarantees that the integration trend will continue. Sociologist Timothy Thomas of the Urban Displacement Project at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, portrays the contours of this process in the animated map above, which shows the share of residents in different census tracts who were people of color from 1980 to 2010. The southward displacement of Seattle’s people of color—first out of the Central District and subsequently out of the Rainier Valley and the rest of South Seattle—has continued since 2010. The Seattle Times’ Balk has documented that South Seattle’s largest racial category is now white, outnumbering Asian-Americans. Many Asian- and African-American residents have moved to Renton or points farther south.
The story in Portland, as in Cascadia’s other cities, has been similar, although the populations of all races have been smaller. African-Americans, Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, indigenous peoples, and other residents of color endured decades of discrimination and exclusion—notwithstanding the modern reputations of Northwest cities as liberal—yet forged strong communities of their own.
And then, white people with more money began outbidding them for real estate in the same areas. Erin Goodling, Jamaal Green, and Nathan McClintock of Portland State University (PSU) show in the animated map below the resulting displacement of African-Americans from Albina and the surrounding North Portland area into which they were shunted in the middle years of the last century. Displacement has continued apace since 2010, pushing African-Americans out of Albina and neighboring areas toward the periphery of the city and, especially, into East Portland, according to the UC Berkeley Urban Displacement Project. PSU Professor Lisa Bates, perhaps Cascadia’s leading scholar of race and housing, says that more than a third of Portland’s roughly 38,000 African-Americans have relocated to the city’s periphery in recent years. As everywhere, Black areas have grown whiter, and vice versa.
The gnawing injustice of racial displacement from areas into which white society pushed people of color over the past century is perhaps best understood as a category contest. Urban land is two irreconcilable things at once. It is money, and it is meaning.
