Episode 12: Transit-Induced Displacement with Elizabeth Delmelle

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I am your host Shane Phillips. Our co-host today is Mike Lens. And our interview features Professor Elizabeth Delmelle from the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Our topic this time is transit investments and eviction. If you've spent any amount of time working on or talking about transit or housing, you've probably heard someone raised the concern that building transit infrastructure, especially major investments like rail lines could lead to the displacement of the people who currently call that place home. There is a perennial question of how we can invest in places in ways that benefit existing households, and ideally also welcome new ones rather than simply replacing the former with the latter. I think it's taken as a given that investments like this do lead to some amount of gentrification or displacement. But Dr. Delmelle's findings in this paper and in her earlier work really challenged that assumption. The reality is that there's just not much evidence that transit infrastructure and other improvements lead to evictions or other kinds of displacement. But as we discuss, research often looks at averages, or means and displacement is often experienced at the extremes. Just because we don't see much impact at a neighborhood level, it's still entirely possible that some individual households are negatively affected, even if the average household benefits. During the interview we dig into some of the very valid origins have concerns about displacement, what we might be missing in studies like these, and some possible explanations for why transit and other investments don't usually seem to lead to the displacement that many people fear. I also finally learn what a geographer is. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. And you can contact me with any questions or show ideas at Shanephillips@ucla.edu. Let's bring on Professor Delmelle.

All right, our guest this time is Dr. Elizabeth Delmelle, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences. We'll just jump right in and say welcome to the show. Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Delmelle 2:17
Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to do this.

Shane Phillips 2:20
Professor Delmelle earned her bachelor's degree at Madison James Madison University, Master's at SUNY Buffalo, and PhD at UNC Charlotte, and I think is our first geographer on the podcast. So let's just start off and let me ask, why geography and you know, what drew you to it? This is kind of my opportunity, I guess, because I've never fully understood what geography is as a field, and how do you distinguish it from things like urban planning? Because it seems like a lot of the research does overlap in different ways.

Elizabeth Delmelle 2:51
Sure, well, so how did I get to geography? It's a little bit of a story. So I went to James Madison University, which is in Virginia, and I came from New York State, so I didn't really know anybody and I was at my summer orientation. And at one point, they said, "Okay, now go to whatever major you want to study". And so I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. So half of the students went to psychology and half went to business. And then there was this girl with a little sign that said, geography just all by herself. And I said, "I wonder what that's all about". So I went over to her, and she was very excited. She said I was the first person all summer who had come. And she took me on a golf cart up to the department, and they were all excited to have me. And they handed me-

Shane Phillips 3:39
So you became a geographer out of pity, it sounds like...

Elizabeth Delmelle 3:45
Naturally drawn to kind of obscure things. Let's pop down things. So they gave me this VHS, which was about the new geography. And it talked about GIS and remote sensing and cartography, and I just thought that was the coolest thing. And I didn't know you could do that for a job. So I signed up, and I was, you know, the first student, the only freshmen. I think the rest of the majors eventually stumbled into geography haven't taken a course. But I stuck with it even now, today. But anyway, eventually, I settled in kind of merging this GIS GI Science with urban geography because I wanted to study cities, it reminded me of playing SimCity as a kid.

Shane Phillips 4:30
Us planners don't feel bad I think

Elizabeth Delmelle 4:32
Of course, first with Legos, then SimCity, and then GIS. So your question of what's the difference between urban planning and I guess, urban geography? I think, at a research level, there's a lot of overlap, especially at the academic sense, but maybe more practically, I would think that geographers kind of simply we don't make plans. We don't necessarily have to figure out how to implement something so we don't really study, you know, the zoning laws or the regulations or all of those mechanisms that go into making something happen. I would say that maybe we're a little bit more evaluative where we would say, "Okay, what are the implications across space as a result of the plans that a planner put into place?" So how does that impact residents and the environment and, and so on, but then we might come up with a recommendation, but we don't know how to actually implement that recommendation.

Shane Phillips 5:33
It's nice to just put that on someone else. Mike Lens is back as our co host today.

Michael Lens 5:40
I'm back

Shane Phillips 5:40
And is for the first time from London, where he will be on sabbatical for about a year. And actually, Elizabeth is sort of on sabbatical. She's in her sabbatical location, although still teaching and doing a real sabbatical, starting with the next year, but in The Hague, and I am in Los Angeles right now. So we've somehow managed to bring this all together. I guess we can ask both of you. How is Europe going so far?

Elizabeth Delmelle 6:09
For me, Europe is fantastic. It's everything I thought it would be of living in the Netherlands and biking around, and being in a city and not having a car. So I haven't reached the winter months of gloom. That's when I'm told maybe it won't be so great. But right now the sun is shining. And it's just after being you know, locked down for a year not going anywhere. Just being in another country just feel so great.

Shane Phillips 6:35
Mike, how is uh, you're on like, week one?

Michael Lens 6:38
Yeah, so we're week two. Um, and, you know, I certainly have a lot of overlap and experiences with Elizabeth so far. It's an incredible opportunity for us to be able to kind of, you know, get away from some of the day-to-day responsibilities of UCLA, I'm sure, I'll miss aspects of teaching, but I won't miss the time that it takes to do so. And the opportunity to be able to, as Elizabeth put it, you know, get out of, you know, our various COVID bubbles in some ways and be in a city like London is really phenomenal. You know, we're we're very centrally located, you know, we sold our cars before we came here. The cars are gone, you know, we can walk around all over the place and pick things up and walk the kids to school. I mean, the amount of opportunities and privileges I have right now is really astounding. But also there's a ton of decisions to make, like, I haven't moved out of my house in 10 years, and the amount of cleaning it took to get out of that was crazy. The amount of stuff that we're buying right now to that we just jettisoned in Los Angeles is crazy. It feels very...

Shane Phillips 8:06
We're all talking to each other on zoom right now. And just yeah, empty bookshelves behind.

Michael Lens 8:13
These book shelves will never be filled. It's just....

What's the point?

....got all this, this empty space in here, which is great. But yeah, we would spend all year buying things if we wanted to fill this place out, which we won't do, because that would make no sense. But you know, we need towels, right? I mean, we just need random things. That's my one complaint. Shane, I need towels.

Shane Phillips 8:39
I think they have towels in London, I think you'll figure...

Michael Lens 8:41
They got them, they're expensive, but that's fine.

Shane Phillips 8:45
Okay, so the paper we're here to discuss today was published in housing policy debate. And it's titled, Investigating Transit-Induced Displacement Using Eviction data. Your co-authors, we should note are Isabel Nielsen and Alexandra Bryant. And to put it briefly your paper explores this question of whether investments in public transit and specifically rail stations in this case lead to more evictions in neighborhoods that might be at risk of gentrification. So this has been, you know, a very recurring question, certainly in planning that question of can you invest in communities without displacing the people who currently live there? The fear, of course, is that you can't, or that you can only do those kinds of investments after you've taken really strong precautionary measures with you know, anti-displacement, that kind of thing before you make the investments. You know, and that can be things like rail lines, that's a common one, but it can also be parks and it can even be simpler things like bike lanes, bus lanes, bus shelters, that kind of stuff. So you and your co-authors before we get to this paper, you all have a larger body of work on this and kind of similar questions around neighborhood change. So before we get to this paper, could you just share some of that work with us?

Elizabeth Delmelle 10:02
Yeah, sure. So we have looked at this question on the impact of transit stations on neighborhoods and gentrification and displacement from a lot of perspectives, both quantitatively, qualitatively from local case studies, and nationally. I feel like right now we're kind of wrapping up all of this research. And so if I look back and reflect on and say, what's the big conclusion that I would draw from this work, I would say that on its own, something like a transit station, or a park or bike lane, will not automatically radically transform a neighborhood. There needs to be certain preconditions in order for some transformation to happen, or some changes even to happen. So one of the important things that needs to be occurring in the city is that there needs to be a lot of population growth, and demand for housing, right? So if you take an example, like Buffalo, where I lived very briefly, and they have experienced rapid population decline, and they built a light rail line, I think, in the 1990s, and in order for that light rail line, to cause the city to suddenly revitalize or gentrify, because not a lot of people are moving in, it would mean that enough people already living in the city would have to decide that suddenly, they want to get up and move and live close to that light rail station.

Shane Phillips 11:33
Right, right.

Elizabeth Delmelle 11:34
And ignore all of the other reasons why they decided not to live in that location in the first place, which is probably because they don't have the right schools, they don't have the right housing, the crime rates, and so on right? So without the strong population growth, I don't think anything will happen. So in a city, though, like Charlotte, which does have a lot of population growth, lots of people moving in, from Buffalo, they're looking for housing, right? You could, in some cases, make the case that such an investment might make a neighborhood attractive enough that these people who are moving in decide to live there. But again, I think you need these same preconditions because when people make location choices, it's not on one variable. They're not saying, "Oh, this has got to train, that's it" right? They're looking at the schools, they're looking at the rest of the factors in the neighborhood. So if that investment is coupled with other desirable things that people consider when they choose a home, like these days, it's walkability, close to a city center, proximity to other amenities, then if you add a new investment, well, then that might put it over the edge and say, "okay, well, this is... even the city is investing in this, now it's even got this train", then for sure, then all of these people might move in, and then you might see something. But in that case, I would also say that it's not just that investment, like it had all of the ingredients. And with this big population growth, it may have happened anyway but maybe that just sped it up in a specific location.

Shane Phillips 13:07
Are you saying sort of that the investment sort of followed those changes in some cases or, you know, it's not the cause of them, and whether that investment came or not, those changes, were probably going to result in some kind of shift regardless.

Elizabeth Delmelle 13:23
Right, I mean, if you think about transit, you know, a city, especially one light rail line, cost billions of dollars, and the city wants some return on that investment, they're going to put it in a place that's most likely to see a return on investment in terms of economic development around the station, right? So they're going to put it in the places that are most likely to succeed. So I would say yes.

Michael Lens 13:50
Well, so I guess, you know, if I wanted to push back, you know, on kind of devil's advocate side, or people who are kind of most fervent lead of the belief that these investments make a very big difference and really produce generally gentrifying outcomes, like, isn't it usually the case that you're going to put these investments in places that have these kind of preconditions? And therefore like, can we then say that well, most of the time, it does end up this way where an investment goes somewhere with the preconditions, and then we get some kind of gentrifying outcome? Or would you also say that, like, even with the preconditions, that gentrifying outcomes are certainly not determined or not always that likely?

Elizabeth Delmelle 14:45
Yeah, I would say in those circumstances, given those preconditions, right, in the prime areas, if you put in this investment, it would probably speed up the process, right? Because it's telling developers and it's telling residents... it's kind of giving them a signal saying, okay, the city is investing in this area, if it's an area of TOD, putting in new sidewalks, they're making it nicer. And so all of those things will speed up this process. But if we were just the light rail, which is kind of what the narrative tends to be, then we would see uniform changes along the line, if it's one line, right? But in the case of a lot of cities, so I'm thinking of Charlotte, which is put in this new light rail line, those changes are most acute, close to the city center in walkable areas in neighborhoods that were next to neighborhoods that have already gentrified, but further out, and these areas that have less desirable characteristics, we don't really see many changes, because again, it doesn't override all of those other things, it's not going to say, "Oh, we've got to train" now, I'm just going to ignore all of the other reasons that make this place less desirable to somebody.

Michael Lens 15:57
And if I may go a little farther, and you don't necessarily have to sign on to this, if we're talking about neighborhoods that have these preconditions that have the high population growth and have high housing demand, etc. or growing housing demand, not putting the rail station there isn't going to stop justification. You know what I mean? I mean, like, the counterfactual is not necessarily like spaces in these neighborhoods that we're talking about.

Elizabeth Delmelle 16:29
Correct, because with all of that demand, right, developers are just looking, where am I going to put this next housing development or apartment complex to house all of these people who are moving in? And so they tend to follow investments but if the investment wasn't there, they would look at what are the other trends? I mean, it's just it would happen eventually, in my opinion.

Shane Phillips 16:50
Cool. Okay, so for your study, you looked at rail lines built or extended in four cities, Newark, San Diego, Seattle, and St. Louis. All of these were opened or extended between 2005 and 2009. And you found, kind of in line with this earlier work, that evictions did not increase in these places, with one exception that we will get to. This is discussed in the intro of your paper but you know, as as you mentioned, it sounds like the existing research on the subject seem to point in the same direction. Can you give us a little more detail just on what you found for this study in particular?

Elizabeth Delmelle 17:29
Yeah. So like you said, we looked at the rates of evictions and eviction filings, rates in these four different cities. And we took up what's called a quasi- experimental approach. So we looked at treatment neighborhoods, or neighborhoods that were near the transit station, and a set of control neighborhoods, so neighborhoods that were similar, and following similar trends that didn't receive the station. And so then we compared rates of evictions and eviction filing, and said, "okay, after this rail transit station opened, did the transit neighborhoods - the treatment neighborhoods, did their trajectory change in a way that was significantly different than the control neighborhoods. And so as you just mentioned, in basically all cases, we did not find a significant effect of the rail transit station opening on eviction filing rates, with this one little exception that for us is hard to explain. So in the case of St. Louis, there was a spike in eviction rates in transit neighborhoods just after it opened. But that also corresponded to, I think it was 2007 2008 which was the height of the foreclosure crisis. So we don't know if that was some artifact of that, why it just happened in the transit neighborhoods. But it immediately went back down and the rest of the time period followed the same trend as the control neighborhoods. So it's questionable whether or not that played any role, we probably should talk to somebody in St. Louis to figure out what happened in those areas. But other than that, we didn't find a significant impact.

Shane Phillips 19:09
We can get to maybe why, possible reasons that St. Louis had different results. But I guess we can first just talk a little bit more about displacement and eviction and sort of what this all means and how it's measured, because there's many different ways to do it. Obviously, displacement is extremely disruptive in people's lives. And linking this back to our discussion a few weeks or months ago with Kristen Perkins. We know that the impacts of moving for whatever reason aren't always felt equally. Her work shows that the well being of black and Latino children, for example, on average, seems to be more negatively impacted than that of white children when they move again, on average, people obviously have good reason to be concerned about displacement. But there doesn't seem to be much evidence really that these public investments are the thing causing it. So why do you think that this concern persists?

Elizabeth Delmelle 20:06
Well, I have a couple of thoughts. Well, so one, in the gentrification and displacement literature, there is sort of a divide between quantitative studies and qualitative studies where quantitative studies have tried very, very hard using all kinds of imperfect data to capture this effect that qualitative researchers insist exists. So what next....

Michael Lens 20:29
Wow, that's well said

Elizabeth Delmelle 20:34
Um, so one reason for this might be, and I'm going to credit my co-author Isabel Nelson, for coming up with the term, it's the "means versus the extremes". So quantifiers, like myself, we study mean, we study averages, we study trends, and if there's some high value, it kind of gets, you know, leveled off in our analysis, and we're not concerned with that. Whereas if you're a qualitative researcher, you're going to go to that observation that just gets, you know, averaged out. And you're going to report on what's going on in that area. So what we might call an extreme or even an outright, it doesn't even have to be an outlier, just be a high value. And you're going to talk about that. So that's one big difference between this why we can't capture it, because perhaps it's not widespread everywhere, like which for all the reasons we just talked about. And when we try to model things, we're not going to get that one or two observations in those neighborhoods. Another reason is something that's hard to measure is displacement. So what does it mean that somebody is displaced, it means that they've left involuntarily. So we have residential movement data sets, where we can try to quantify this, but those don't tell us the reasons why somebody has moved, right? And then qualitative researchers have also tried to interview people and talk to them about why they've moved out of a neighborhood, is it because there was a train that came in, is it because your property values went up because of gentrification, but by definition, somebody who's displaced is no longer there. So those people are really, really hard to find, and interview and talk to and figure out these reasons. So it's a bit (of a ) difficult population to study, and we've got this kind of disconnect.

Shane Phillips 22:18
And it does seem that even if you were able to ask them what caused them to leave or what caused them to be evicted, or why their rent went up, they might say, "well, it was the train, but they don't know that that's true". And it could be I don't mean to say that it's not, I just mean to say that, it's probably impossible for an individual person to be certain of why, you know, their rent went up, or their landlord decided, you know, I'm just gonna file an eviction, rather than putting up with this, you know, late payment or whatever which I was fine with in the past.

Elizabeth Delmelle 22:51
Right, and some of this also comes from this distrust between planning, and communities of color, right? So in this instance, this has come up a bit in our qualitative research in Charlotte, where we talked to residents who said, "you know, we didn't ask for this train. If you had given us a billion dollars to spend on something, why didn't you fix crime or this, like, dilapidated hotel that's on the corner?" Or if you were truly concerned about transportation, they didn't say this but I'm thinking for them, why don't you give everybody a car and an auto-centric city, right? A single rail line that goes one place is really not going to improve mobility and access to jobs, right? If it was truly about that. So there's this trust in a lot of communities that says, "well, this investment is clearly not for us, this isn't catering to our needs. Nobody asked us if we wanted it, they must be doing it because they've got bigger plans. And the bigger plan could be that we leave and this neighborhood is replaced by a different population".

Shane Phillips 23:56
Yeah, yeah. And I do think it's important to acknowledge, you know, in particular, the legacy of urban renewal and highway construction in the US where these were things that were done for the benefit of primarily white communities; they went through communities of color, primary lead black communities, but they weren't for them. And so even though I don't think rail has exactly that same character, if you're sort of primed to see it that way, or you just don't find it to be something you personally care about using, I think it's easy to see why people might reach that conclusion.

Michael Lens 24:33
Right. And yeah, I guess the clear similarity there is that some form of the government has promised you some benefit or promised your community some benefit in the past, that has turned out to be anything but in the case of urban renewal, of course, and freeway construction. And so that, you know, that I think is the through line, there. That there was this promise, these were broken promises, and now you're coming in again to say, "well, we're gonna do it differently this time", how do I know I can trust you about that? Or, you know, as Elizabeth pointed out, like in Charlotte, people might not see a use of even a rail line coming through their neighborhood, even if they don't have a car so...

Shane Phillips 25:22
So let's talk a little bit about evictions and displacement and how we measure these things. So eviction judgments in the court and eviction filings are one way to measure it. And even though the data can be hard to collect, and you know, it isn't always comprehensive, one strength of using these is that they're pretty unambiguous. You know, an eviction is an eviction, and it can't really be mixed up with something where someone like leaves voluntarily, but informal evictions are very common to where landlords just tell a tenant, they have to leave or they cut off their power. And some tenants, you know, know their rights and don't leave, but some do without much fuss. And that doesn't show up in eviction records, or, you know, we don't have a way of tracking that as a form of displacement. People also leave their homes because their rents rise to a price they can no longer afford, or they just don't feel is worth it anymore. And even if that doesn't show up as an eviction, I think a lot of people would still consider that a form of displacement. And on top of all that, even if displacement does occur in some form, you can't always prove what caused it with the data available, as we kind of talked about earlier. So I know there's more to it even than this. But could you tell us and maybe Mike, you can chime in because I know you're also an expert on eviction, in particular, what the different approaches are to measuring this and the challenges with measuring displacement?

Elizabeth Delmelle 26:48
Yeah, so some of it we talked about before, right is getting... there is no data set. So we use these proxies so one data set that we looked at, in the past with respect to transit and trying to get at this idea of displacement that's been used a lot in gentrification studies, is the panel study of income dynamics, which is a sample of the population that's captured longitudinally, and you can look at residential movements. But again, it's not involuntary, we don't know why the person moved. So that's a significant limitation. Other people have looked at tax records. But again, these are just getting at this movement from one place to another. So the bottom line is, there is no perfect or even very good, I would say data set to capture displacement. We've tried to study these other ways, we're unable to come up with this impact. It's still very much the narrative, why don't we try something else? So that's where there was this eviction data set, and we said, well, it's worth at least testing this hypothesis. We still couldn't find anything. But for all of the reasons you stated, it's still an imperfect measure of displacement.

Michael Lens 28:02
Yeah. So you know, in a couple of recent papers in Southern California, my co-authors, Kyle Nelson, Ashley Grommerson and Xavier Qy have looked at eviction, generally trying to see what kind of neighborhood characteristics are associated with eviction. And, you know, I think there's a lot of overlap between our approach, and our findings with yours - with some of your work with your co-authors where, you know, I mean, for us, well, there's two things I want to talk about one is kind of the data issue or like, what eviction is conceptually compared to displacement? Because as we talked about a little bit, like it's not the same thing. The other thing is like, where do we see more evictions? And, you know, at least as far as we can, you know, kind of torture the data, it doesn't seem to be the case where you see more formal, you know, court-based evictions in neighborhoods that are increasing in housing value, increasing in rent pressures and, you know, declining vacancy rates, you know, some of the indicators that you would think are showing a hot housing market or a rising housing market that you would think are pricing out the local population, existing population and/or making landlords think, "oh, I could get something better here I could get somebody and pay more. I've got this tenant that's not particularly timely with the rent I can you know, squeeze them out of here, you know, by suing them". So, you know, where we find you know, the most evictions are places where people of color, particularly African Americans live, even kind of rising levels of those people of color, where poverty is concentrated, and almost zero evidence that like some kind of housing market, heat is correlated to that. So yeah, so that's kind of the finance side of it. And then like conceptually, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, you know, first we know that landlords evict people and through a few different means, right? There's ways you can just kind of threaten people that don't know their rights, you know, with an eviction, and they might leave. But what we're ultimately holding on to, and what I believe Elizabeth and her colleagues are holding on to are like, court petitions, right, and court judgments, you know, and you need some kind of case, you need, you need a tenant to have exercised in some kind of wrongdoing, you know, or not lived up to the contract of the lease, right? And so as a measure of displacement, I think it has a lot of power but an obvious drawback that you need a tenant to, what you're often picking up is that tenants are not paying or tenants are not living up to the lease in various ways. And you're also capturing that particular landlord who isn't going to be randomly distributed across the city, a particular type of landlord is more or less litigious, right, more likely to have a lawyer, more likely to seek court redress for various things, including my tenant didn't do a thing that, you know, they said they would.

Shane Phillips 31:26
Just to clarify, you know, the point you're making, it sounds like, if your lease expires, and the landlord just says, I'm not going to renew this lease, the tenant, I think, again, would probably as many tenants at least would consider that displacement, but by this metric that would not qualify, right?

Michael Lens 31:45
Yeah. That's not an eviction.

Shane Phillips 31:49
Yeah. Yes. Which, you know, as you say, like the strength of evictions is they're very clear on what they are. It's just a subset. I think, pairing that with your own research, though, on how evictions seem to be much more associated with, you know, communities of color and black people in particular, and poverty rates. And actually maybe useful to clarify if that includes Los Angeles, where, where landlords don't have the freedom to just end the lease.

Right

Basically, you can only be evicted legally through an eviction filing and judgment.

Michael Lens 32:27
Or the Oregon Ellis Act.

Shane Phillips 32:28
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I do want to actually just really quickly go back to what you were saying earlier, Elizabeth, about the extremes versus the means and how it seems like one possibility here is some people went a rail line, or what have you gets built, some people who wouldn't have been evicted, or otherwise displaced are, maybe just because of who their landlord is or whatever. And others maybe they care more about staying, and so they're better about paying the rent, maybe they really value this thing, and maybe there's a balancing that's happening, where it's not the same people who would have been evicted or displaced in lieu of the investment. But the total maybe doesn't change all that much. Because just people's priorities are different. And you've changed the neighborhood such that it's more valuable for some people and you know, not more for others, or even if rents go up less so because your rents have gone up, but you don't actually care about the rail. So why would I pay this extra expense? Does that sound like a possibility to you?

Elizabeth Delmelle 33:35
it's a plausible explanation. We use the PSID data to look at residential mobility, just more simply in Rail Transit neighborhoods, we just looked at whether or not somebody moved out a few years after it opened in that, we varied that year. And we found that, like all other studies, lower income residents are more mobile, from one time period to the next, they just tend to move around a lot. But the significance, again, of this rail variable was not significant. So living in a rail... or neighborhood that opened up a new rail transit neighborhood, played no role in somebody's likelihood of moving. Again, on average, and that was across the whole country right? So that could have easily smoothed out a case here or there where this definitely happened. And somebody could point to it and say, No, she's totally wrong. I saw it happen in this particular neighborhood at this particular point in time, but...

Michael Lens 34:39
Because you just brought up that hypothetical person pushing back in Charlotte, like do you encounter, I don't know anywhere from advocates to students to you know, people that you might present to locally that say, "oh, let me tell you about my neighborhood or let me tell you about this person", and like, they feel pretty strongly that this is a big driver?

Elizabeth Delmelle 35:06
Well, I can tell you that I've had two interviews with the Charlotte Observer this past two weeks since the new census came out. And both times the headline that they ended up with after talking to me was, you know, diversity increases everywhere except along the light rail line. And the share of white residents increased, I think it was 5,000% in these neighborhoods, specific neighborhoods close to the light rail line. So they run this headline, but if you dig deep into it, deeper into it, right, some of the things that were happening in those neighborhoods were that they're in previously in light industrial areas, right? It's cheaper to put a rail line when you don't have to knock down houses. So it was underdeveloped land, there was hardly anybody living there to begin with. So it's an artifact of small numbers, right, you can get really high percentage when the share of residents increases by that much. But the story that they want to sell in the newspaper was that it's because of this light rail, right? So part of it comes from, I think, how this is depicted. And there have been a lot of changes along the rail line. But again, if you disentangle that, from all of the other things and, you say, okay, but let's look specifically where the changes are happening among the light rail line. Again, it's not everywhere, it's in the neighborhoods that are close to uptown. But this is something that's contentious, and it's expensive, not everybody wants it so it's easy to criticize. With residents, though that we've talked to, especially lower-income residents in neighborhoods that are further away from the center city and older, suburban neighborhoods, they didn't really want to talk about the light rail when we had focus groups. I mean, they might have this initial concern like, "Oh, yeah, nobody asked us if we wanted that", but then would easily get sidetracked into all other topics of conversation. So I don't think that it really had a huge impact or hadn't at this point.

Michael Lens 37:03
Interesting.

Shane Phillips 37:04
It does feel like I guess, something that I often point out with these kinds of debates, a lot of this comes down to the fact that this austerity mindset or approach of government over the past several decades, where part of the problem is we are only building a rail line in one neighborhood every decade. And so there's, of course, going to be a lot of attention there, whether it manifests as higher rents, or evictions or whatever, it's going to be very noticeable. And arguably, it's just not enough, we should be investing more broadly, in more neighborhoods kind of all at the same time. And it's just kind of the focused nature of these things, and how rare these kinds of investments actually are. That is maybe part of the problem here. And if you had a rail line open to many places at once, or in the same five-year period, it would be hard to say like, "well, you've just totally changed this one place" when you've really, you know, benefited a lot of places all at the same time.

Elizabeth Delmelle 38:04
Yeah, I think that just kind of boils down to the bigger problem of the world, cities today, which we can't solve. Not about the train. I mean, it's inequality, right, it's equality in space, and in incomes, and in education. And if the landscape were more equal, none of this would be a big deal, because it wouldn't just be a few places that have everything, and then a few places that seem to have nothing, which is the way a lot of our American cities are today, right? So if we can improve this inequality, that's the heart of the matter, forget about the light rail again, figure out a way.

Shane Phillips 38:45
But I do think it's important to acknowledge that, you know, people have what powers they have. And as an advocate, if you really do believe that the light rail is causing some kind of... if it's causing gentrification or whatever, you might have a way to influence that in a way that you probably can't fix or even, you know, move the needle on income or wealth inequality in your own city, much less than the country which is really where it has to happen. So I want to give people their due that like they're not necessarily acting irrationally, at least if they think this is the problem, you know, part of the problem, even if they understand it's a symptom of the problem, there's I think, a correct recognition that you probably as an individual, or even as a group of individuals in a city can't really solve the root cause.

Elizabeth Delmelle 39:35
Sure, and I think another fair criticism of something like rail, which is very expensive. I mean, I like trains... can be wrong, but in a lot of these cities, it's not going to do much for solving transportation problems, right? They're designed around the automobile. So is that the best use of a billion dollars for addressing transportation problems, right or with something else with straightening out culs-de-sac somehow, again, I don't know how because I'm not a planner. But evening out, you know, these disconnected roads and older suburban neighborhoods in a way that made access between low-income individuals were increasingly out in the suburbs and low-wage jobs. Like, if you could spend a billion dollars on that. Yeah, that'd be cool

Shane Phillips 40:27
Bus lanes, you could get so many bus lanes with a billion dollars.

Michael Lens 40:30
Yes.

Elizabeth Delmelle 40:31
Right. But again, the infrastructure isn't really there especially in Charlotte. So if you're in...

Shane Phillips 40:38
Here in LA, we got the grid. But we got that going for us.

Elizabeth Delmelle 40:42
So grid the street, we put in bus lanes,

Michael Lens 40:45
Big roads going in straight lines, we could send many buses down, we have plenty of those.

Shane Phillips 40:53
Do we know anything in your study about the demographics of these evictions. Part of why I'm curious about this, because I don't want to just dismiss the fact that you know, St. Louis did see an uptick in evictions in these transit neighborhoods relative to the controls, it was like the significance was at the 10% level, it was, you know, not a super, super strong connection, but it's there. And I'm wondering if demographics, as Mike talked about, might have something to do with this, in part because, you know, St. Louis just has a larger black population. And black households tend to experience eviction at higher rates. Is there maybe something going on there? I know that Newark has a similar black population, share of the population, so you know, if that was the sole answer, we might expect to see a similar result there. And we didn't but what are your thoughts on that?

Elizabeth Delmelle 41:47
Well, first, we don't have data on the race of the evictions. But I don't think that's it. The reason being because when we did this selection of our cases, in our control neighborhood, our treatment and control neighborhoods, we use this propensity score matching technique, which tries to find neighborhoods that are matched very similarly across income. So we kind of control for that, and the onset and say, "these two neighborhoods are very similar, they have the same share of black residents". And for some reason, two very similar neighborhoods, the transit one saw that immediate spike, and then drop that back then/

Shane Phillips 42:25
Got it. And just to do a call back to another one of our earlier interviews with Evan Mast, another possibility I was thinking about here about why we don't see the eviction that a lot of people fear might be, you know, on the one hand, you're building this rail line, and maybe there is some gentrification pressure that we're not catching in these studies. But on the other hand, a lot of times new housing development also accompanies these. And what we've seen with past studies, is that rents tend to stabilize in nearby buildings when these buildings are built. And even, it seems like displacement might fall a little bit, too. I think Kate Pennington's work showed that for San Francisco, so don't really have a question for that. But just to think about, like, how many different things are going on here at the same time, where it's not just that a rail line is being built? And then that's, that's the end of the story?

Elizabeth Delmelle 43:25
Yeah, absolutely. That's kind of one of our running hypotheses of why we see these no effects everywhere, is because there is housing into your day neighborhoods built right around those stations that captures a lot of that demand. And it's housing that's directly tailored to the type of person who wants to live in this type of TOD neighborhoods in the US, I guess. So and in Charlotte, at least, the impacts are really concentrated around the rail transit station, when you go further away from the neighborhood, it's hard to tell that there was any impact of transit line, I would say. So new developments..

Shane Phillips 44:03
In terms of ridership or in terms of development, or...

Elizabeth Delmelle 44:06
in terms of development or changes. Yeah, got it.

Shane Phillips 44:10
Yeah. And I should acknowledge that some people think that the development itself is also exacerbating gentrification and displacement even more, but the evidence we have mostly points in the opposite direction.

Michael Lens 44:23
You know, at the outset, Elizabeth, you, I think, covered kind of the bigger picture of all of the work that you and your co-authors have done, on not just this specific question of transit, in potential transit-induced gentrification as measured by eviction, you know, but if there's anything we missed about kind of this bigger picture. Because, you know, our format for this podcast is to talk very specifically about one paper, but you know, if there's something else on on this very important body of research that you've engaged in, you know, then that would be good to hear.

Elizabeth Delmelle 45:09
Yeah, I mean, one of the other kind of stories and other papers that we've been working on that comes to mind is I was giving a presentation at a conference, I think it was with planners, and somebody stood up and said, "No, no, you're totally wrong; transit does cause displacement, and I can tell you... or (rather) gentrification. And I can tell you that in Durham, North Carolina, there's plans to build this light rail". So this was maybe five years ago, "there's plans to build the light rail, and already there's new construction going in, gentrification, and it's all because of this", and then they canceled the light rail. So one of the things that we've looked at is, if it was just the train, right, what we would expect is maybe property values kept going up as they announced it, and then if they cancel the train, property value should crash, right?

Michael Lens 46:03
That's a wild natural experiment.

Elizabeth Delmelle 46:06
Yeah. Right. So we cancelled our trade quickly. We don't obviously find that effect. But if the announcement effect was strong enough to signal to the developers, again, which kind of circles back to those points up, this development is coming to come. And the developers just need a signal on where to go next. And a train or any other infrastructure is just telling them this is the next place to go. But it would probably come anyway. You don't even need the trains, just have to pretend that you're going to have a train.

Michael Lens 46:42
Right, if developers did not go out of business in Durham, after that announcement, or move to Chapel Hill or something, then I think that's a pretty strong finding.

Shane Phillips 46:59
Well, I think we can close this out, Professor Delmelle, anything else you want to share or any anywhere we should direct our listeners to your work?

Elizabeth Delmelle 47:07
Well, they could just I guess, do a google scholar and find the work there. I will also give another shout out to my partner in crime, Isabel Nilsen, who the two of us have worked together on all of these projects. So I tend to do all of the speaking and she does all the work.

Michael Lens 47:26
Oh, that's...

Shane Phillips 47:27
... that's a good deal.

Michael Lens 47:28
She's a good person to have around then definitely. Well, I'll ask one one other question in that vein, what is next? You know, is there a focal point of your sabbatical research wise?

Elizabeth Delmelle 47:44
Yeah, so we're pretty tired of studying the train honestly, and we've been...

Michael Lens 47:51
You told us all we need to know, now we know the answer.

Elizabeth Delmelle 47:55
So I got this new obsession. That actually was as a result of studying the train when we were walking through neighborhoods and trying to figure out what was going on what was going to happen in this neighborhood, right near the light rail station, but there were these small houses, nothing seemed to be going on. And so I pulled out my phone and I got out Zillow. And I started to read the property advertisement and it said, you know, this is the next up and coming neighborhood; "this is right next to the light rail line, you know, builders dream". And so I became obsessed with scraping Zillow advertisements and analyzing the text of property advertisements. So that's been our project now. So we've been looking at property text analysis, I have a PhD student who's been doing some work on discriminatory language in rental housing or restrictive language, kind of building off of this eviction things like where are all of these restrictive languages most present in the housing market? And so, over here, we're trying to do something similar with the Dutch housing market and kind of compare what amenities are marketed and targeted towards certain homebuyers between different Dutch cities.

Michael Lens 49:11
That sounds very fantastic and interesting, I would have no... so a dirty secret about my London sabbatical that I'm now telling our vast listenership is that I'm not here to study anything about London. So I would find trying trying to study Zillow, the Hague or Zillow, London to be a very daunting and intimidating challenge. And I'm glad I'm still studying United States from here. That seems...

Elizabeth Delmelle 49:45
I found some colleagues and research partners who can at least translate the Dutch for me.

Michael Lens 49:52
Fantastic.

Shane Phillips 49:53
Okay. Professor Delmelle, thank you for joining us.

Elizabeth Delmelle 49:56
Thank you very much for having me.

Shane Phillips 50:01
You can learn more about Professor Delmelle's research and find our show notes and a transcript of the interview at our website. Lewis.ucla.edu. The UCLA Lewis center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter @ShaneDPhillips, and you can find Mike @MC_lens. Thanks for listening to the UCLA housing voice podcast, and for telling your friends and colleagues about the show. That really helps the next time

Transcribed by https://otter.ai