Is the new anti-gentrification legislation in Louisville a model for global cities?

 

“A number of folks including myself got really engaged, because here’s all this money and resource coming into the neighbourhood, so why can’t it be used to match the vision the community has for itself and support folks who have been here for years?” says Bellamy. “It’s great that there’s investment, but let’s invest it into the people.” 

 

The redevelopment combined with evictions, or homes which descended into poor condition because contractors were unwilling to do the work to repair them at a reasonable price. These homes were often done up and resold for much higher sums to more affluent buyers once the original resident had left.  

 

Bellamy and other campaigners began organising a community fightback. “For over a decade now, I’ve been organising in Smoketown - talking to people on couches, on their doorstep, conversations about what their problems are and what their vision of the future is,” she says. Bellamy began to build connections with other similar neighbourhoods, ultimately forming the ‘Historically Black Neighbourhood Assembly’, which began to meet regularly. 

 

“In those meetings we found that there were so many problems that were the same,” she says. “We realised that we needed a collective and proactive solution, and writing policy is what we landed on.” 

 

 

What is now a major and groundbreaking piece of city policy began life as a grassroots Google Document and Zoom calls during the pre-vaccine stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

 

A vision began to take shape: if developers were going to use city resources – whether land, grants, letters of support or tax benefits – then they should build for the benefit of the community. The project was – as Arthur puts it – “anti-displacement, not anti-development”. 

 

“We just believe that public resources, limited as they are, should be reserved for projects which help people who need them the most, not simply for the greed and profit of developers whose only motivation is to make money,” he says. 

 

The idea was simple. In order to access city support, development projects would be required – by law – to be assessed for their risk of displacement. If the risk was too high, the project could not qualify for city support, unless it was revised and reassessed. The campaigners drafted city policy (known as an ‘ordinance’ in the American system) and sought political support to drive it through. 

 

This was not work which the city - keen to attract the economic growth which they believe results from development - welcomed. The Democrat mayor, Craig Greenberg, refused to sign off on the campaigners’ ordinance. But Arthur, Bellamy and the rest of the campaigners were up for a fight.

 

 

“Bellamy’s organising and leadership really helped us win this, because we out-organised the developer lobby,” says Arthur. “They didn’t have our biggest weapon, which is an army of working class people who wanted to see this happen.”

 

Pressure from developers against it was mainly pushed “behind the scenes”, according to Arthur, although there was an opinion article published in the city newspaper, authored by, among others, a developer focused on renovating abandoned properties for resale, which said the proposed reforms were “racist, unconstitutional and designed to create class conflict”. 

 

“Gentrification hysteria is simply not real,” the piece said. “ We shouldn’t let government pick and choose who is going to live in neighborhoods. It’s a free market.”

 

But the proposed ordinance was now in committee stage and progressing to a full vote, with campaigners pushing their representatives to support it. 

 

“You had Councilman Arthur in conversation with the various legislators, giving feedback on concerns and dispelling any myths,” says Bellamy. “And then our community organising pushed constituents to contact their councillors en masse saying, ‘I need you to vote for this legislation’. We wanted our representatives to stand with us and be champions, and they knew that if they didn’t they were going to look like the villains. That perfect balance of in and out working allowed us to get those votes.”

 

 

As the vote on the proposed ordinance approached, the mayor called on councillors to veto it. But by now, the call for reform had momentum and councillors defied the mayor - voting the ordinance into law last November.

 

The passage of the legislation allowed six months to develop the tool which would measure anti-displacement and regulate access to city funds. 

 

Here the campaigners linked up with Professor Loretta Lees, Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University and Dr. Kenton Card, then a post-doc at the Initiative on Cities (now at the University of Minnesota) who researches tenants unions, who in turn brought in Dr. Andre Comandon, a research scientist at the METRANS Transportation Consortium at the University of Southern California, and the academic team won a contract from the City of Louisville to develop the tool.

 

 

“One of the key aspects of this tool is its flexibility,” Comandon says. “What’s different about the tool from other means of assessing the impact of a new housing development is that it is responsive to the specifics of what the developer is proposing, and the neighbourhood where it is proposing it. 

 

“So a project that offers relatively low levels of affordable housing may not be appropriate somewhere that is undergoing rapid gentrification. But in a neighbourhood that is mixed income already and there is a shortage of housing, it might fit and actually open up some opportunities for lower income people to move in.” 

 

On 21 November, the Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool (ADAT) was voted into law - and will now be used to assess forthcoming developments in Louisville. Displacement is measured based on changes to rental prices as a close indicator of housing stress, “as research finds that rising rents lead to voluntary residential displacement.” The tool allows developers to input basic characteristics of the proposed development and links the levels of affordability to local rental prices. Spatialised demographic data from the census is used to model the impact on residents such as income level, racial composition and education. The Displacement Mitigation Matrix then recommends how to manage a sustainable growth plan for affordable housing that protects local residents. The academic team has said it will release the code behind the tool for other cities to reproduce.

 

“People assume that if you’re against displacement, you’re against any kind of development,” adds Lees. “But that is not what this is about. In a city like Louisville, which is looking towards its socio-economic future, that is something it is really important to be clear about.”

 

“We didn’t want to be in a situation where people who are against building affordable housing co-opt what we are trying to do,” adds Arthur. “We want people to have affordable housing. Our unhoused population has really risen over the years. The problem is that historically, the city has been investing in unaffordable housing.”

 

 

The legislation also sets up a commission of people directly impacted by gentrification to become involved in the drafting of its five-yearly housing needs assessments.

 

“Usually, the people who work on that are government officials, developers and not-for-profits,” says Arthur. “But now we’re going to have people who are struggling with the crisis and closest to the solution part of updating that document every five years, forever.” 

 

Arthur views gentrification as the latest manifestation of the long struggle of black communities in this part of America. “We know segregation forced us to live in certain places, and gentrification is really the descendant of that, in forcing us out again,” he says. “So we wanted to protect historically black neighbourhoods.” 

 

Already, campaigners from other US cities are contacting him to talk about how to bring the same sort of rules into place where they are. “This is something that Louisville is going to be famous for, but it goes way beyond Louisville,” he says. “Somebody in DC has contacted me, somebody in Mississippi, somebody in New York, Los Angeles. A lot of people are interested in the work that we did here. Maybe even internationally as well.”

 

This may well be true. While Louisville has its own particular manifestations of the housing crisis, it is not hard to see the parallels with campaigns being played out on the streets of London and Manchester. 

 

With 1.5m homes set to be built over the next five years in the UK, a debate looms about the extent to which these new developments are really helping address housing need.  

 

To help find the answer perhaps we should look to Louisville. 

 

 

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Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and author of Show Me the Bodies: How we let Grenfell happen. The book was awarded the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2023. Apps is a contributing editor of Inside Housing