TRANSITIONING, GENTRIFICATION
Ex: typically urban areas transitioning from inclusionary and low opportunity to exclusionary and high opportunity.
Gentrifying communities typically become exclusionary as people looking for opportunity move into the community and drive up prices through demand. This is often combined with new and existing residents trying to preserve their access to the community’s resources by making it exclusive through stricter zoning, building codes, or deed restrictions. Though gentrifying communities may temporarily appear racially or economically diverse, this process almost always results in re-segregation that leaves wealthier and whiter communities with more resources.
In gentrifying communities, redress advocates should prioritize policies and programs that remove barriers to entry, create more affordability, and protect lower-income families from displacement and rising costs, such as:
True community land trusts (CLTs) are community-controlled, affordable housing developers that ensure all the housing they build is affordable forever. CLTs have a tripartite non-profit board structure with all board members elected by the membership: one-third from people who live in housing built by the CLT, one-third from people who live in the surrounding neighborhood, and one-third from the public. CLTs provide all types of housing, from rentals and coops, to condos and single-family for-sale units. Gentrifying areas are ideal for CLTs because CLT homeowners see significant appreciation in their home values, but are insulated from high or rising property taxes, because the land under their home is owned by the nonprofit CLT.
Grounded Solutions Network: Community Land Trusts
The rising cost of land in gentrifying communities is one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome when trying to develop affordable housing. Local governments can bypass this barrier by dedicating publicly owned land to affordable housing and pairing it with development subsidies. This can include surface parking lots, unused school buildings, tax-adjudicated property, or land owned by redevelopment or public housing authorities.
Local Housing Solutions: Use of publicly owned property for affordable housing
In some communities, white people who have accumulated generational wealth, through our historically racist real estate market, are committing to redistribute that wealth, often through home sales. In Portland, some members of the PDX Housing Solidarity Project have sold their homes below the market price to Black and/or Indigenous families. Others have provided direct cash gifts to Black and/or Indigenous families to aid in a home purchase. The sales don’t use realtors or advertise to avoid Fair Housing Act concerns and the group doesn’t handle any money, but acts as a network connecting buyers and sellers.
Short-term rentals (STRs), like those listed on Airbnb or VRBO, typically remove units from the market that would otherwise be available to renters and can drive up the cost to rent, purchase, or maintain a home, while also often contributing to quality of life concerns for neighbors. When STRs remove units from the market, they limit supply and can increase rents. STR investors often compete with first-time homebuyers and are willing to pay above the asking price for properties because of the high nightly rents they can demand. Those higher purchase prices can then raise assessments and taxes for long-time neighboring homeowners. Especially in communities where tourism is a significant sector of the local economy, eliminating or strictly-regulating STRs and the platforms that advertise them can prevent already high housing costs from reaching crisis levels.
Local Housing Solutions: Regulating Short-Term Rentals
San Francisco Office of Short-Term Rentals
America's criminal legal system has a disparate impact on Black and Brown people at every step in the process. The result is that criminal background screening in rental housing often operates as a proxy for racial discrimination. Fair chance in housing policies are designed to offer people with criminal records a fair chance at a place to call home while simultaneously reducing homelessness and recidivism.
Vera Institute of Justice: Opening Doors Initiative
National Housing Law Project: Fair Chance Ordinances, An Advocate’s Toolkit
Some of the most important ways to remove barriers to entry to communities where rents are increasing rapidly are HCV mobility programs. Typically, successful programs include at least three elements, in addition to a Source of Income anti-discrimination law, also described in this list. Those three elements are Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMR) or Exception Payment Standards, landlord incentives, and mobility counseling. Housing authorities, which administer the HCV program, can use SAFMR or Exception Payment Standards to set the amount a voucher will pay a landlord based on the average rents in the zip code, rather than the metro area. This ensures that in areas with higher rents, a voucher will have a better chance of being able to actually cover that rent. Research shows that landlord incentives, like lease-up bonuses paid by the housing authority to the landlord when a family with a voucher signs a lease in a high-opportunity neighborhood, prove very successful in ensuring voucher holders can access these areas. Mobility counseling programs, often run by the housing authority or a nonprofit contractor, provide case management to families with vouchers looking to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. They can include assistance with finding landlords who will accept vouchers, scouting new schools in different neighborhoods, planning out public transportation to jobs, and other similar help. Taken together, these programmatic and policy changes can significantly impact segregation in the voucher program.
Center for Budget and Policy Priorities: A Guide to Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs)
Poverty & Race Research Action Council: Housing Mobility Programs in the U.S. 2022
Local Housing Solutions: Increased voucher payment standards in high-cost areas
Local Housing Solutions: Landlord recruitment and retention
Local Housing Solutions: Mobility counseling for housing choice voucher holders
In gentrifying communities where long-time residents are facing displacement, local governments and affordable housing developers can create housing preferences for those displaced residents. The preference policy, which moves residents who can prove they previously lived in an area to the top of the list, can apply to multiple housing programs. In Portland, the policy applies to home repair loans, new affordable rental units, and forgivable down payment assistance loans.
Inclusionary zoning ordinances typically use a local jurisdiction’s zoning code to require that new construction of luxury rental or condo buildings in gentrifying or high-opportunity areas include a certain percentage of units as affordable. There are important decision points–such as the percentage of affordable units required, the affordability level, the term of affordability, and how “high-opportunity areas” are defined, that often require study and can determine whether an ordinance is successful in creating new affordable units. Additional resources can be found at:
In most states and local jurisdictions, landlords can evict a tenant who has done nothing wrong, without providing a reason, as long as the tenant is at the end of their lease term. The practice creates incredible uncertainty for renters and creates a huge power imbalance between renters and landlords when a renter household has to worry that they may lose their home at the end of every month. Just cause eviction legislation protects tenants from arbitrary or retaliatory evictions and establishes a limited set of reasons why landlords can move for evictions when the tenant is not at fault, such as when a landlord seeks to move a direct relative into the unit. Strong legislation should limit these exceptions, assist tenants who may still be displaced, and ensure robust enforcement.
Single-family zoning drives up the cost of housing in gentrifying areas, perpetuating displacement. Allowing builders and homeowners to add accessory dwelling units, often referred to as “mother-in-law units” on the same lot as a single-family home can create more rental options and help older people age-in-place. Especially in gentrifying areas, local governments should also pursue some sort of subsidy program as well to ensure these new units are actually affordable, because increasing supply without guaranteeing affordability may actually increase gentrification. Similarly, allowing duplexes, triplexes, and quadruplexes in areas that previously only allowed single-family zoning can also increase the diversity of housing types and open communities to people who were previously kept out. In these new or rehabbed small multi-family dwellings, local governments should also require one of the units to be affordable to truly make progress toward undoing segregation.
Local Housing Solutions: Accessory Dwelling Units
Local Housing Solutions: Zoning changes to allow for higher residential density
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: A State by State Guide to Zoning Reform
New Orleans allows “Small Multi-Family Affordable” developments in nearly all zoning districts.
In many cities where there is high demand for luxury condominiums, local governments have established fees or protections to discourage developers from displacing existing renters in order to convert buildings into high-end condos. The protections can range from long notice periods to relocation assistance, or the right for tenants to purchase the building.
Local Housing Solutions: Protections from Condo Conversions
Local Housing Solutions: Demolition Taxes and Condominium Conversion Fees
Real estate wholesaling is the practice of buying houses below their market value and then reselling, often through a purchase contract, to another investor without making improvements. Wholesalers are most easily identified by the signs they regularly post around lower-income neighborhoods, loudly proclaiming “We Buy Houses For Cash” or something similar. A ProPublica report found that some wholesalers use deception and aggressive tactics to bully vulnerable homeowners into selling for less than their house is worth. Elderly residents of gentrifying neighborhoods are often targets. Most states and local jurisdictions have few protections for homeowners in these scenarios. Examples of local protections include: requiring a cooling-off period of at least a week when a homeowner can cancel the contract, especially if the house was never publicly listed; requiring wholesalers to be licensed, creating a “do not call” list homeowners can add themselves to in order to avoid solicitations; and steep penalties for illegal solicitations or postings.
In addition to creating more opportunities for renters through inclusionary zoning or eliminating single-family zoning, renter equity programs can also help disproportionately Black and Brown renters in gentrifying communities build wealth. Renter equity programs were first developed as a way to help renters in affordable housing developments build wealth in exchange for contributing to the upkeep and governance of the property. Renters received equity credits for paying rent on time, attending tenant meetings, or helping to clean common areas. Larger organizations and at least one state are bringing the model to scale by funding the construction or rehab of affordable rental developments and then requiring that any profit the building makes above a certain threshold needed to pay back debt and investors is shared with the tenants of the building. The equity is typically dispersed to tenants through monthly cash rebates.
Building wealth and community for renters in Cincinnati, OH
Enterprise Renter Wealth Creation Fund
Colorado Affordable Housing Finance Fund and enabling legislation
Local nuisance or “crime free” ordinances often have a disparate impact on survivors of domestic violence and have the potential to be weaponized against apartment complexes by disapproving neighbors. The policies often penalize tenants or property owners for 911 calls, placing survivors of violence in the unacceptable position of choosing to call for help or facing eviction. Repealing these ordinances and focusing on functional health and safety regulations for rental housing can protect renters at risk of displacement.
National Housing Law Project: Nuisance and Crime-Free Ordinances Initiative
Unlike criminal court, defendants in eviction court are not entitled to an attorney and nationwide only 3% of renters facing eviction have a lawyer compared to 81% of landlords. Evictions disproportionately impact Black and Brown families, and women-headed households with children, in particular, and they have cascading negative health, employment, and educational impacts on those families. However, in the past decade, a growing number of cities and counties, as well as some states have implemented Right to Counsel programs designed to ensure renters can access an attorney. The extensively evaluated programs show that when jurisdictions pay for attorneys, they reduce evictions and homelessness, and save money on other expenses like incarceration, healthcare, and foster care.
National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel: Tenant Right to Counsel
In many areas with a significant portion of low-income renters, the tremendous imbalance of power between landlords and renters means that most renters don’t expect to receive their security deposit back when they leave a unit. The result is regular theft from low-income renters that makes it all the more difficult for them when trying to secure their next apartment. State and local governments can take a number of steps to better regulate security deposits and ensure their return, including: requiring deposits to be held in a separate, interest bearing account; capping the amount of deposits at one month’s rent; clarifying in the law what counts as regular wear and tear; setting a significant penalty for failure to return the deposit of at least three times the monthly rent; funding legal aid attorneys to assist low-income tenants in filing small claims cases when their deposits are wrongly withheld; and conducting educational campaigns to inform renters about their rights regarding security deposits.
Source of income (SOI) anti-discrimination ordinances are local or state-wide legislation that bars landlords from discriminating against prospective renters who have a Housing Choice Voucher (“Sec. 8”). Most ordinances also bar discrimination against people accessing other government programs, such as food stamps, disability, or veterans benefits. Ordinances should specifically name housing vouchers as a covered form of income, as some state courts have ruled that unless specifically named, they do not count as a protected source of income. SOI ordinances should also prohibit landlords from setting a minimum income requirement based on the entire rent–instead, any minimum income requirement should be based only on the tenant’s portion of the rent. Enforcement and oversight are also key to the success of these laws.
Special Purpose Credit Programs include race-conscious loan programs specifically authorized under the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA). They allow a lender to offer assistance to specific groups that would otherwise be denied credit or receive it on less favorable terms. Most SPCPs offer loans or grants to Black and/or Brown first-time homebuyers. SPCPs may be especially well suited to gentrifying areas because they can help stem displacement and help buyers of color access areas where their home will appreciate significantly.
National Fair Housing Alliance: Special Purpose Credit Programs Toolkit
In gentrifying areas, high or rising property taxes can make it especially difficult for long-time, lower-income homeowners to stay in their homes. Rising property taxes can also push up rents and displace renters as well. Property taxes are also essential to local governments ability to provide basic services so property tax relief should be narrowly targeted to the people who need it most. One of the best policies are caps on the amount of property tax a homeowner pays based on a share of their income. As an example, seniors in Massachusetts have their property taxes capped at 10% of their annual income. Those caps can also be graduated so they protect the lowest income homeowners the most. Jurisdictions should also offer similar relief to low-income renters by offering an income tax credit to offset the part of their rent that is likely paying for property taxes.
Local Housing Solutions: Property tax relief for income-qualified homeowners
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: The Property Tax Circuit Breaker
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