Do comprehensive plans plan to prevent displacement? An analysis of four regions experiencing gentrification in the United States

ABSTRACT

This study assesses whether jurisdictions’ comprehensive or general plans mention gentrification, given that gentrification impacts vulnerable communities’ long-term economic outlook, health, and quality of life. We focus on plans in four regions – Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Portland, Oregon. In our content analysis, only 23 of 308 jurisdictions that adopted plans between 1990 and 2020 mention gentrification, describe the problem of gentrification, and/or provide recommendations in their plans. The findings suggest that most planning blueprints do not acknowledge gentrification despite the equity impacts on vulnerable communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Comprehensive plans
• gentrification
• displacement
• equity planning

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Rebecca LaVictoire, Daisy Munoz, Mumuchhu Gurung, Madison Hughes, Miriam Torres Sanche, and Ariana Hernandez for their research support in collecting plans and coding for analysis; Amalia Merino, planning practitioner, for helpful comments and suggestions; and Abigail Jimenez and Misael Galdamez for copy-editing support. The authors also thank Dr. Paul M. Ong from the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, Dr. Vinit Mukhija from UCLA Urban Planning, and Cesar Montoya from UCLA LPPI for their encouraging and insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We acknowledge that there are a growing number of studies and projects that propose different methodologies to measure and map gentrification and displacement risk. For instance, Governing Magazine, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and Enterprise Community Partners map and analyze gentrification patterns across U.S. cities. Finio’s (2022) systematic review of 179 quantitative studies found significant variation in how researchers define gentrification, with an inconsistent combination of 37 variables used across studies. Preis et al. (2020) found similar results when applying four distinct gentrification and displacement risk models to Boston, Massachusetts, and identified striking differences in both inputs and outputs.

2. New York’s counties are coextensive with New York City’s five boroughs: New York County (Manhattan), Kings County (Brooklyn), Bronx County (The Bronx), Queens County (Queens), and Richmond County (Staten Island).

3. The State of California passed AB 686, which requires all housing elements associated with general plans to include data analysis around displacement risk and strategies and actions to protect existing residents from displacement (California Department of Housing & Community Development, 2020). This change was implemented for housing elements due on or after January 1, 2021 and thus are not included in this analysis. Consequently, our study focuses on whether or not comprehensive plans include language on gentrification before it became a state mandate.

4. Some comprehensive or general plans had overlapping geographic boundaries. For example, the City of Los Angeles has 35 separate community plans to achieve the broad objectives laid out in the city’s general plan (Los Angeles City Planning, 2022). Thus, some community plans within the city of Los Angeles were included in addition to the city-side plan for Los Angeles.

5. Public comments were excluded from the analysis unless they were included in the comprehensive or general plan.

6. Excerpts related to displacement from environmental causes (natural disasters, earthquakes, fires, people having their homes destroyed, and nonhuman displacement like soils) were excluded from our analysis.

7. However, as Bates (2020) noted, the City of Portland’s comprehensive plan did not include detailed steps of this racial equity analysis and how developers or public investments would respond to this equity analysis (p. 158).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the University of Oklahoma Gibbs College of Architecture Program for Research Enhancement and the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute’s state appropriation made possible by the California Latino Legislative Caucus.