Robert's case was moot when he came to the Indianapolis eviction court where my students and I represented the tenant. His landlord was seeking to evict Robert for failing to pay his rent. But Robert had receipts to show otherwise. Lots of receipts. Robert, now in his 80s, had lived in the apartment for more than 20 years.
When we questioned the landlord's attorney about this, he shrugged. “Okay, I'll dismiss this,” he said. “But anyway, his lease expires in three months and the new property owner has no intention of renewing it.”
The attempt to evict Robert turned out to be one in a series of lawsuits filed by an investor-owned real estate company that had recently purchased his building. The plan was to clear out the current tenants, most of whom, like Robert, were black and had lived in the area for many years. The next step was to make some cosmetic changes to the building, change the name, and begin selling condos to the wealthy, mostly white, people who began moving into Robert's neighborhood.
Robert's story is not new. Black households in our community have been displaced for generations. When Robert was young, entire blocks of black communities near downtown were bulldozed to make way for interstates, urban college campuses, and medical complexes. Both the campus where I teach and the Loop Expressway I take to get to court are built on the land of displaced Black families.
The same pattern was repeated in urban America. Starting with the Housing Act of 1949, the federal government spent more than $13 billion on a series of programs known informally as urban renewal. However, in black neighborhoods, the program was more commonly known as “Negro Removal.” There's a good reason for that. Even though they made up less than 15 percent of America's population at the time, black Americans made up the majority of her 250,000 households displaced by urban renewal.
A new wave of forced displacement of black and working-class people is now occurring in surviving areas near urban centers. Displaced people today are too often portrayed as less relevant to government policy than they were during the urban renewal era of the mid-twentieth century. But today's gentrification is no accident, nor is it simply the result of changing tastes for urban life or the so-called invisible hand of capitalism. The displacement of Robert and hundreds of thousands of others is the result of choices made by government policymakers, from zoning decisions to infrastructure investments to the handing over of federal land managed by local governments and federal development funds to private capital. This is an intentional and predictable outcome.
“Gentrification isn't about a Starbucks suddenly appearing in a community,” says John Washington, organizing co-director of PUSH Buffalo and organizer of the national housing guarantee campaign. “Migration and homelessness are indeed the goals of the architects of our country's housing market, supported by government budgets and policies.” The driving force behind governments handing over land, cash and large tax subsidies to private developers is It's so undeniable that even the centrist Center for American Progress admits that “today's evictions are the result of policy choices.”
But not everywhere.
For decades, residents of historically black neighborhoods in downtown Louisville have watched black residents disappear from their communities through foreclosures and evictions. As long-time residents were forced to leave, developers purchased homes to sell to primarily white buyers. “They were eating away at the bones of my community,” said Jessica Bellamy, an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union. Her family had lived in the Smoketown area for generations.
The bone pickers were supported by the Louisville Metro government. For years, local governments have diverted U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funds to projects that would drive up housing costs for everyone in the area, even though their own assessments showed the city was in short supply. has diverted millions of dollars to distribute to developers. More than 30,000 units of housing affordable to even the lowest income residents. (Nationwide, there is a shortage of 7.3 million housing units for very low-income households.)
So Mr. Bellamy and other residents drafted legislation to prevent local governments from giving funding, land and staff support to projects that would result in housing costs unaffordable for the neighborhood's current residents. They called it an anti-eviction ordinance and hired Metro Councilman Jecory Arthur to introduce it. Arthur also grew up in a historically black neighborhood in Louisville, and the musician and teacher, who has battled eviction for years, recorded a song called “Gentrification” in 2019. But he made it clear that the ordinance was community-driven from the beginning.
“It's important for other cities trying to deal with displacement to understand that relief doesn't just come from electoral politics,” Arthur says. “We need to organize around grassroots movements. That's what gets reforms passed.”
When Arthur first introduced this bill, he had little official support. A majority of Congress refused to support it. Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, himself a former developer, vigorously opposed it. But the Louisville Tenants Union and others went door-to-door in support of the ordinance, holding phone calls, text banks and public events in councilmembers' districts. They gathered 1,500 signatures on a petition and recruited 50 organizations to support the ordinance.
“No one can express a struggle better than people who have been through it,” Arthur says. There, residents spoke at community events and met one-on-one with councilors. On the day of the November vote, the mayor called on all council members to lobby against the ordinance. But it was already too late. Despite the mayor's refusal to sign the ordinance, the ordinance banning forced relocation passed 25-0 and became law.
“The end result is that using our tax dollars to displace people is no longer acceptable to the people of Louisville,” Arthur said. Jacobins.
Louisville joins Boston, which in 2020 adopted a similar requirement that developers seeking zoning approval first meet anti-eviction guidelines. Other reforms are also needed to stop forced evictions. Black tenants are often the targets of unjust evictions, so they need protections such as requiring just cause for eviction or lease renewal (so our client, Robert, can have access to his home. will remain in place).
The same goes for rent controls to stop price gouging and ensuring tenants have a right of first refusal to buy a home or building if the owner intends to sell. Aggressive reparations, such as transferring government-owned properties to community land trusts rather than profiteering developers and funding more public housing, would help address the problems caused by decades of forced displacement. The damage could be reversed.
But cutting off the funnel of government money that funds gentrification is an important step. Housing researchers at the RVA Eviction Institute say Louisville's ordinance changes the narrative and deters government complicity in displacing Black people, and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights says Louisville's example is one that other communities should follow. He said he would encourage others to follow suit.
John Washington said the Home Guarantee Campaign is looking to build on its victory in Louisville. “This ordinance is very valuable because for too long the government has avoided responsibility for gentrification,” he says. “People living in these areas are condemning the government and calling on it to stop displacing entire communities.”
Jessica Bellamy agrees. And she has advice for other communities suffering from her evictions. “We need to stop waiting for someone else to do something for us,” she says. “Anyone can do this, should Let's do this nationwide. ”
