Public Comment
How fake is the housing debate? Pretty fake.
You hear a lot of political talk about housing these days and what kinds of policies we need to fix the housing crisis. Nevermind that there's no widely agreed upon definition of what the crisis is, our politicians see a chance to fix something and fix they shall. That's why we call them fixers. And boy, the fix is in.
In situations like this, everyone in politics has a chance to advance their pet agendas, reward friends, and punish enemies. The only catch is that they need the public to not pay too close attention to what they're saying. Fortunately for those politicians, a compliant press stands ready to help.
The headline on East Bay Express' daily news blog crows:
"UC Berkeley Report: Affordable Housing is Best Way to Combat Gentrification" (Darwin BondGraham, 5/27)
The article discusses a recent report from UC Berkeley researchers Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple who have previously been called upon to lend City Council proceedings an air of academic respectability.
It's a compelling story. BondGraham leads off
"According to a new report by UC Berkeley researchers, the best way to prevent gentrification and displacement is to build affordable housing in cities and neighborhoods where rents and home prices are rising fastest." (Darwin BondGraham, 5/27)
Amazing! In fact, that's exactly what the nine pro-development members of the council want to hear! It's also perfect for the goals of the pro-development Rent Board progressives!
For some on council, the story means we should build more market rate housing to get in-lieu fees to build affordable housing. For the rent board and some on council, the article means we should regressively tax rents in order to get more money to give to developers in hopes they'll build affordable housing.
Sounds great, right?
One small problem. Zuk and Chappel, those UC academics who wrote the research briefing, proved nearly the opposite.
The headline is false. The article's lead is false. It's just plain wrong. Building more affordable housing is a lousy strategy for preventing gentrification.
Let's take a look:
Living people, real communities, gentrification, and displacement
I claim -- hopefully uncontroversially -- that if you talk with people who identify themselves as suffering the ill effects of gentrification, they will speak about a range of issues such as:
* The loss of businesses that were traditionally community-serving such as a neighborhood-favorite used bike shop being replaced by a pricey restaurant.
* Rapid inflation such as $3 dollar breakfast being replaced by $4 coffee.
* The diminishment of amenities such as the disruption of a multi-generational tradition of pick-up soccer at a play area at Delores Park.
* Neighbors moving out.
* In-migration of people who are stand-offish.
* Kids saying goodbye to friends.
* Seniors becoming more isolated as people in their network leave.
And of course people recognize displacement as losing one's home under economic pressure; being compelled to abandon one's community.
What is significant about this for most people is a kind of catastrophic disruption of a broad range of social relations, including but not only economic relations.
The individual experiences of displacement and gentrification are of a social fabric being shredded.
Every analysis, policy proposal, or scientific study that purports to be about displacement and/or gentrification ought, ultimately, to be examined in terms of those individual and community meanings.
The academic study of displacement and gentrification
When academics like Zuk and Chappel want to study displacement and gentrification they face a real problem. There aren't really any statistics that measure the destruction of community. The condition of the social fabric doesn't appear in census tables.
When academics study these issues, for the most part, they have to rely on very indirect clues.
I wish to highlight two constructions used in Zuk and Chappel's IGS Research Brief, (a) the measurement used as a proxy for "displacement"; (b) the distinction made between neighborhood displacement and regional displacement.
To an individual human, displacement within one's community is a significant loss of continuity in the evolving social fabric of a community. In a stable community, people may come and go, and the character of the community may change over time, but there is a kind of continuity. In-migrations more often result in integration into the community. Out-migrations are largely isolated events, often purely voluntary. In a stable community, kids grow up knowing one another. Adults form networks of mutual trust and support. In a community experiencing displacement, that dynamic withers.
To measure "displacement", Zuk and Chappel rely on a proxy. They study the absolute and relative numbers of low income households in an geographic of study. To see if there has been displacement, in other words, they count poor people.
That is a suspect proxy, of course. It is insensitive to the effects of gentrification. It also doesn't measure community stability, only a general character of the incomes of whatever households happen to be there. If there's a lot of churn, and communities break up, but there's still plenty of the poor, it appears as no displacement.
This proxy measurement problem is worsened by Zuk and Chappel's introduction of the concept of "regional displacement" as contrasted with "neighborhood (or block-level) displacement".
When people complain of gentrification and displacement, they very nearly always refer to neighborhood-level displacement. Even if someone says, for example, "Black people are being driven out of San Franciso [or Oakland, or Berkeley or the East Bay]," OK, they are talking about a large area but if you look closer, they are talking mostly about very specific, very local neighborhoods.
In contrast, the concept of "regional displacement" (or its absence) is not really an individual concern. It is a concern of capital: a concern about the regional supply of low-wage labor and the regional need for various forms of welfare. Frankly, when people are watching their communities being torn up, and when they are being forced away from their neighbors, friends, and established life, the regional supply of cheap labor is the least of their concerns.
What the report really says
To its credit, the IGS Research Brief clearly states what I will paraphrase here:
(a) Market rate development does not help and may worsen displacement at the neighborhood level. There are good reasons to think it makes things worse.
(b) Subsidized development has little or no impact on neighborhood-level displacement.
(c) Other means -- not development of any kind -- are likely necessary to protect local communities.
Zuk and Chappel do cheerlead for development, mostly on the basis of its regional effects on the supply of workers. Nevertheless, they are unequivocal that if government is not to become the enemy of community, then government must look far beyond development to address displacement and gentrification.
The Big Lies
Darwin BondGraham:
"According to a new report by UC Berkeley researchers, the best way to prevent gentrification and displacement is to build affordable housing in cities and neighborhoods where rents and home prices are rising fastest. "
As you can see from the above,the IGS Research Brief very nearly says the exact opposite. In fact consider this quote from the Brief's conclusion:
"In overheated markets like San Francisco, addressing the displacement crisis will require aggressive preservation strategies in addition to the development of subsidized and market-rate housing, as building alone won’t protect specific vulnerable neighborhoods and households. This does not mean that we should not continue and even accelerate building. However, to help stabilize existing communities we need to look beyond housing development alone to strategies that protect tenants and help them stay in their homes."
Consider the headline: "UC Berkeley Report: Affordable Housing is Best Way to Combat Gentrification"
First, the report says only that development is associated with preserving low income households at regional scale, not in communities.
Second, the report compares the effects of only two development strategies, examining their relative merits, and noting that neither is adequate to the problem. It says nothing about "best" strategies.
Even though the article states a blatant falsehood, it must be understood as, nevertheless, a potent political weapon. For example, it is not hard to imagine a councilmember like Droste, Capitelli, Arreguin, or Anderson -- any of them really -- citing the East Bay Express article as a source of authority. That is, false reporting like this helps to advance bad policy.
Nor can the IGS Research Brief be entirely excused. It encourages precisely the misreading BondGraham came up with. Several times, without argumentation, simply by unsupported assertion, the Brief's authors cite the criticality of new development. They repeatedly endorse it for unstated reasons.
I wish I could say that this kind of thing was exceptional. The underlying science, having gone through various filters, is described as saying nearly the opposite of what is said. At multiple levels of presentation, a narrow political agenda in favor of aggressive housing development is advanced, in spite of the underlying findings. By all appearances, the individual concern about the loss of community continuity is deliberately suppressed, and the workforce demographic concerns of capital are disguised as an answer to those individual worries.
This is typical. For whatever reason, our policy-formation institutions are completely immunized against any critical examination of objective facts.
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