Louisville KY Metro Council have voted unanimously for a new Anti-Displacement Tool

By Loretta Lees (Boston University), Kenton Card (University of Minnesota), and Andre Comandon (University of Southern California)

Led by the Initiative on Cities at Boston University, Loretta Lees (Boston University), Kenton Card (Boston University, now the University of Minnesota), and Andre Comandon (University of Southern California) developed a new Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool (ADA Tool) to be implemented by the Louisville Metro Government. The ADA Tool was developed in collaboration with government officials, Councilmember Jecorey Arthur, and in discussions with the Louisville Tenants Union. This first-of-its-kind planning tool to protect low-income and marginalized groups from displacement passed unanimously tonight – November 21, 2024 – at a full Metro Council meeting.

In December 2020, in the wake of the justice movement for Breonna Taylor, activist Jessica Bellamy and recently elected City Councilmember Jecorey Arthur collaborated on a campaign to protect Historically Black Neighborhoods in Louisville. The proposed legislation responded to systemic economic and racial marginalization in the city, as reflected in the 2019 Housing Needs Assessment, which identified majority Black neighborhoods as at greater risk of gentrification and found that the city had a shortfall of 50,397 units of affordable housing.

The team – Bellamy, later co-founding the Louisville Tenants Union with Josh Poe, and Councilmember Jecorey Arthur, serving as the youngest councilmember to take office in Louisville history at 28 years old – organized community meetings to advance the legislation over the following years. With a growing grassroots mobilization for racial and economic justice, the campaign led to the unanimous passage of a city-wide Anti-Displacement Ordinance in November 2023, which prohibited the use of city resources for housing developments that put residents at greater risk of displacement.

Once passed, the law required that the Louisville Office of Housing and Community Development partner with an external academic team to develop an analytical approach to identify displacement risk in Louisville. Academic researchers and cities have long struggled to accurately measure displacement risk, or the involuntary relocation of residents due to direct or indirect pressure from rising housing costs, landlord harassment, or changing neighborhood composition from gentrification. All residential developers who wish to receive city subsidies will, as part of their application, assess their project’s displacement risk through the Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool. The ADA Tool links the specific characteristics of the proposed project (e.g., size, affordability level) to the neighborhood where the project is to be located. The ADAT provides an overview of factors associated with greater risk of displacement, including changes in income, rent prices, racial composition, and education levels. These factors are then synthesized into market pressure, housing stress, and gentrification indicators that show the level of risk associated with each mechanism. The ADA Tool determines – based on the risk factors and the degree to which the project adds (or removes) housing affordable to existing residents of the neighborhood – whether projects are eligible or not for city subsidies.

The Anti-Displacement Ordinance which informed the ADA Tool was a tri-partisan piece of City Council legislation, written by Councilmember Jecorey Arthur (I) and co-sponsored by Councilmembers Shameka Parrish-Wright (D), Phillip Baker (D), Andrew Owen (D), Ben Reno-Weber (D), Jennifer Chappell (D) and Republican Khalil Batshon (R). It streamlines and makes the approval process for all new residential re/developments in Louisville publicly visible if public funds are involved. The academic team will release the code behind the ADA Tool open access to creative commons for other cities to reproduce.