As rents continue to skyrocket in the Bay Area, housing displacement is disproportionately affecting people of color. A “geography of racialized inequality” has long been set in the region -- but today’s segregation is taking a new configuration as new housing market preferences take root. 80 percent of neighborhoods in the East Bay experiencing gentrification were previously redlined, according to a finding from UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project is providing research and data tools to characterize the nature of this displacement in the Bay Area. In this episode, UC Berkeley public policy student Spencer Bowen and urban planning alumnus Philip Verma discuss some of the data analysis and what it reveals about the the Bay Area’s housing market today. Tune in here.

Are you interested in getting engaged with housing issues in the Bay Area? Here are three suggestions from Philip Verma:

1. Read Evicted by Matthew Desmond
2. Read more about California housing policy. You can start with SPUR and the Terner Center.
3. Every neighborhood has slightly different challenges. Find out what challenges your neighbors are facing by talking to your local council member.
4. Learn more about Urban Displacement Project’s data tool.

Speakers featured on this episode

Philip Verma is a Master of City Planning student interested in the intersection of housing and environmental health, especially for low-income renters. He has worked as a housing advocate in New York and Oakland, helping tenants fight evictions, harassment, illegal rent increases, and substandard conditions. He spent two years as outreach director for a sustainable transportation NGO in Bogotá. Philip graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in History.

Transcript
Spencer Bowen Welcome back to Talk Policy to Me. I'm Spencer Bowen, a first year Master of Public Policy student at the Goldman School. And today, we're talking housing policy. In September, Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project and the California Housing Partnership published a report about rising housing costs in the Bay Area, and a phenomenon they call resegregation. I sat down with Phillip Verma, the lead researcher on the project to learn more.

 All right. Thank you for coming by and chatting with me today.

Phillip Verma Thank you for having me.

Spencer So what would you say the general question your team set out to answer was?

Phillip Verma So the broad question was mostly a descriptive one which was just to ask where are low income communities of color growing and shrinking and try and get a more of a clear racial analysis within studies of displacement and neighborhood change, which had not been done as much up until that point. But then also in addition to that, understanding what relationship those changes have to the skyrocketing rents that we're seeing in the Bay Area. And then in terms of the significance, what implications did those changes that are potentially driven or in the question of the hypothetical, that were potentially driven by the rising rents, how did those potentially reproduce sort of patterns of racial inequality and segregation?

Spencer One sentence summary to someone who doesn't know anything about housing policy. What did you find?

Phillip Verma The most important...I think the biggest takeaway was that rising rents are correlated with losses of low income, low income people of color, low income households of color in the Bay Area. We didn't find any statistically significant relationship for low income white people. So it seems that low income people of color are particularly vulnerable to housing instability and rising rents.

Spencer Did the team find this surprising?

Phillip Verma No, I think this is something that most people experiencing it and organizing around it would tell you in a heartbeat, but it's it's very helpful to have data to back up what people are seeing on the ground.

Spencer Would you say that clear link between displacement and people of color was the most troubling thing?

Phillip Verma That was troubling. In some ways it confirmed what we suspected, so maybe not as much even though yes. I think for me one of the things that was most interesting and concerning was resegregation. And I want to be clear, that doesn't mean that old segregation is gone, right? So I think part of what we're seeing is racial segregation in the Bay Area is re-configuring. So people are getting moved around, people are moving out, people are moving to outer parts. Low income people of color, in particular, are getting pushed to the outer edges of the region. Some are leaving the Bay Area altogether. People who are moving farther out often are paying higher, actually have higher rent burdens. They're paying more of their income to rent than people who can stay in place. And so I think you're seeing both the persistence of old patterns of segregation. Which is to say, for example, even though San Francisco's lost 17 percent of its black low income black population over those 15 years, the people who remained were increasingly likely to live in segregated high-poverty neighborhoods. So on the one hand, that's remaining. On the other hand, people are getting pushed out more and more. So as both of those things are happening at the same time.

Spencer What does your team hypothesize is the driving factor here?

Phillip Verma Our hypothesis was that rising rent rising rents were kind of behind some of this. Being in policy school, we can't say like exactly what the cause is. We can say what we saw and what kind of associations we saw. And honestly, the study was largely descriptive. I will say, if we think about not as much quantitatively about the cause, but think about history, the longstanding patterns of segregation that were put into place over the past century, maybe a little less through public policy decisions. And the sort of repercussions those had on private lending practices of redlining for example you know certain neighborhoods. If you lived in certain neighborhoods you couldn't get investments or loans to buy, or refurbish your home, choices about what neighborhoods to demolish, where to put public housing. You know we have a sort of geography of racialized inequality that has been set in to this region and now people's preferences. Their market is changing in terms of what may be people where the demand is. But that is behind it, it's maybe not causal but it's it's sort of the framework that all of this is building off of.

Spencer Someone could ask you, "Hey you know I know about all this discriminatory housing policy in the past. We don't do that anymore. Why is rising rent kind of seemingly only affected people of color in a displacement way? You know, what's your best way of getting at that kind of disbelief? Because it does feel like, you know, we've certainly improved.

Phillip Verma Yeah some of that housing policy it's a good question and it's a complicated one I think. Yes. Officially we've gotten rid of a lot of of the sort of de jure segregation. Some of that still persists in more subtle ways. For example. s landlord doesn't want to take Section 8. That's a form of discrimination that isn't explicitly racial, but if you look at who the vast majority of Section 8, who receive Section 8 subsidies, that is going to be a form of discrimination. So that's like a workaround that exists on one level. On another level, in terms of just the way that the residential segregation patterns set up even once they're in place, they kind of get locked in to some degree. I think that's part of what we found, was that even moderate and high income people of color, and particularly moderate and high income black households, were far less likely to live in so-called high opportunity neighborhoods. Meaning, generally more affluent neighborhoods with more jobs, better schools, better health outcomes, stuff like that than low-income white people. So you know in terms of thinking about, I don't know all the causal mechanisms that are that are leading to that. But certainly, we're seeing that even if you have more money being a person of color, it seemed like being black to a lesser degree being Latin meant you're more likely to live in a lower resource area.

Spencer Does your team have any ideas or do you personally have any ideas on policy solutions to this problem?

Phillip Verma The conclusions that we reached in terms of what, one, the importance of thinking about race when we're thinking about solutions. The important thing about history and the importance of thinking about place. And all those things kind of relate to each other, right? Places have neighborhoods have racialized histories and they have particular meaning and significance for different communities based on those histories. And so, for example, historically black neighborhoods, historically Latino neighborhoods, strictly Asian neighborhoods, in San Francisco, for example, have all lost some of those core communities. Chinatown, the Mission, the Bayview, Fillmore...Those are all neighborhoods that have lost a lot of their low income people of color over the past 15, 20, 30 years. So what kind of supports can we come up with that keep people in place, given the history of disinvestment, selective reinvestment, those kind of things. So that's one piece. And then on the other hand, when we're thinking about these sort of disparities in terms of access to resources and who can live in different types of neighborhoods, thinking about how to expand affordable housing in those kind of places too, places that have largely resisted through zoning or other types of policy and planning tools, have managed to exclude lower income people from accessing the amenities that they've been able to access for the same sort of the inverse of the segregation process. At the same time you're creating poor segregated neighborhoods, you're creating rich and exclusive neighborhoods. And those we've actually shown through some of the other research that Urban Displacement Project has done. Some of those are becoming more exclusive over time. So they're losing what few low income people they have, and they're not being replaced. So I think for me, the big takeaway isn't "here's this one policy solution," but different places need different solutions. We need to come up with tools that are powerful enough to compel action, but that are flexible enough to avoid some of the potential, unintended impacts, particularly on low income people of color that have felt the need to borne and brunt of policy decisions, particularly urban policy decisions for the past century at least.

Spencer I'd love for you to tease out a little more what you said. I'm so interested in kind of this equal and opposite effect that you mentioned. That as we're creating low income, disadvantaged communities that kind of, in turn, creates affluent well-off communities.

Phillip Verma Some people maybe already know this history but starting in I think the 1930's, if I'm remembering my history correctly, the government started this process of...You know, there was an increased interest in home ownership in the U.S. they were shifting from a predominantly renter to predominately homeowner society and the Home Owner Loan Corporation, the HOLC, started creating these maps to sort of guide investment decisions by banks and they marched different neighborhoods based on various factors. Most notably, whether it was considered a risky investment, a lot of that had to do with whether there were a lot of people of color or immigrants living there. A lot of immigrants that today we would consider white, we're also considered. They were not considered white and they weren't kin, they were considered risky as well, those kind of neighborhoods. So, neighborhoods on one side of that dividing line, the red line, you know. So if there were marked as red or whatever, they were denied investments than if they're on the other side. So that was just the beginning. And so if you were on the right side of that line, you could get loans to buy property to invest in property and so you have this cycle. That in turn helps people accumulate wealth and pass that on to their kids and so it becomes this under General intergenerational process of wealth accumulation that measured the income doesn't even get at. So that's a big piece of it, and this wasn't part of this project, but urban displacement project in some of the other research found that I think it's something like 80 percent of neighborhoods in the East Bay that are currently experiencing gentrification were we're redlined, essentially, as almost a century ag. Then at the same time, the neighborhoods that are exclusionary today, something like 70 something percent were marked as desirable for investment. So you know we're seeing it's persisting over time, and potentially consolidating. Even as you're seeing gentrification in these in these neighborhoods that were once disinvested from, you also still have a kind of a consolidation of wealth and exclusion in parts of the hills.

Spencer Right. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I I think at least in the Bay Area we're seeing somewhat of a shift back to a renters market, especially among young people, away from owning homes. I would imagine that it's going to just further solidify some of that carried wealth that owning a home...Because a lot of people owning a home is the biggest thing they have, right? Their biggest source of wealth. If less and less people are owning homes, than the same people who were owning homes are still the same people owning homes. So that's just another weight on this scale. That's very interesting. Where do you hope research on this topic goes from here?

Phillip Verma We're doing a little more work. We're trying to build out the analysis we did for the region. So we did the three counties, Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco, but we have data for the nine-county Bay Area. So extending out our analysis a little more to the rest of the region and to dig in a little more in understanding the sort of the racial disparity, what's potentially driving it, and some of the implications that might have for segregation. So that's, on our end, that's like a little more in just in the next couple of months. I think we're hoping to finish that by the end of the year, maybe early next year. You know, so that's that's where we're going with it. I hope that it's a useful tool for people that are working around displacement and sort of neighborhood stabilization efforts. And yeah, that people continue to use this kind of research and to build on it and, you know, update it as new data becomes available. Try and tie it to other types of trends. You know, there's so much data out there and the problem is so pressing. I think it's really important to try and draw connections as much as we can, and try and tie them to real solutions that help people on the ground.

Spencer Why are you so passionate about housing, why are you involved in this work?

Phillip Verma So I worked for a while and a couple of years as a tenant advocate in housing court in Queens, New York. I think it's hard to work in that kind of environment and not get angry. It's hard to see the scale of the problem, to see the scale of evictions day after day and not feel like there's something really just totally wrong with that. And to recognize that...So I was working in the legal services side of things,  very important, you know it's really needed, overburdened and underfunded, but also insufficient. It's just one piece and you really need to think about some of the policies that are driving that. And so, that's kind of what pushed me into thinking about these things and what pushed me to go to grad school and to continue working on this kind of stuff.

Spencer that's a good podcast, good book, something media-wise on housing or tenant rights or something that you would recommend to a listener who wants to learn more.

Phillip Verma I think for like understanding the human dimensions, I think Matthew Desmond's book Evicted gets at, at least for me, what I saw a lot in terms of court, in terms of the exploitative nature of the housing system and makes the case that it's not just about gentrification that we need to talk about, but there's a bigger picture that's about housing and poverty as exploitation. And I think that is a powerful point that that doesn't get talked about enough.

Spencer You know what's one thing someone could go out and do tomorrow, if they're moved by this problem, to to help it?

Phillip Verma So there's a lot of big housing initiatives on the ballot, both in at the state level. I think there's Props 1 and 2 which are both affordable housing and homelessness bonds. There's Prop 10, which is the repeal of the state limit on rent control, so it would allow cities to implement more in terms of rent control and renter protections if they wanted to. So those are the three big ones. And then there's a number of ones--in think Berkeley has some, Oakland, lot of cities are have stuff on the ballot. So I think doing your research, understanding and particularly the conclusions of this report, understanding what implications they have for the broader community and for racial equity. So I think that's an important first step and then beyond, find who's organizing, who's standing up for people in the community and find ways to plug in, they know what they're doing.

Spencer Talk Policy to Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans. For show notes, visit us at talkpolicytome.org. Music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck. Michael Quiroz is our producer and engineer. I'm Spencer Bowen. See you next time.