Study finds housing costs create areas of segregation

Bay Area demographics changing dramatically

The Bay Area’s soaring housing costs are pushing out lowincome families of color at a greater rate than their white counterparts, according to a new study that highlights how the region’s chronic affordability crisis is exacerbating racial disparities and creating new pockets of segregation.

Thousands of low-income black families left Richmond, the Bayview in San Francisco and the flatlands of Oakland and Berkeley between 2000 and 2015, changing the demographics of those neighborhoods. Those families were more likely to be shunted into segregated neighborhoods with poorer environmental quality and less access to quality education and job opportunities.

At the same time, the population of low-income black households grew in areas with lower prices, such as Antioch, Pittsburg, San Leandro, parts of Hayward and unincorporated Ashland and Cherryland in Alameda County, according to data released Wednesday by UC

Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project and the California Housing Partnership, which focused on Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties.

“It’s just very striking,” said Dan Rinzler, senior policy analyst with the California Housing Partnership. “Race plays such an important factor in the housing market in terms of where people get to live.”

In the nine-county Bay Area, census tracts where rents rose by 30 percent between 2000 and 2015 had a mass exodus of low-income families of color as just more than 1 in 5 left.

But there was no change to the population of lowincome white households, according to the report. The researchers said the data offers no insight into why families of color are affected so differently from white families.

The report quantifies what local organizations have known for a long time, said Jahmese Myres, deputy director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy.

“It is in fact black and brown folks, people of color, typically low-income people of color, who are displaced from their communities,” she said, “and then experiencing the stress of finding new housing, housing instability, longer commutes, disconnection from their communities, and then all the stress that

goes along with that.”

In 2015, low-income white households in Alameda County were seven times more likely to live in higher resource areas than moderate and high-income black households, according to the report. And in San Francisco, low-income black households were more likely to live in segregated, high-poverty areas in 2015 than they were in 2000.

The disparities reflected in Wednesday’s report come after decades of redlining and other discriminatory practices, the UC Berkeley and California Housing Partnership researchers wrote.

“The legacy of that continues on and on even though we believe we’ve moved beyond that,” said

Miriam Zuk, UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project director.

North Oakland’s Longfellow neighborhood lost 400 of its low-income black households between 2000 and 2015, the largest loss in Alameda County, according to the report. Many of the North Oakland and Berkeley neighborhoods that lost low-income black families gained high-income white families.

For many low-income families, moving offered little improvement.

In East Oakland, three of the zip codes where the low-income Latino population grew led the county in child lead poisoning cases.

Throughout Alameda County, the report found that low-income residents

who moved in 2015 spent more of their income on rent, not less. Extremely low-income renters who didn’t move spent 68 percent of their income on rent. But that jumped to 85 percent if they left the county for another part of the Bay Area, and 80 percent if they moved out of the region.

That could mean those residents were moving from rent-controlled or otherwise affordable homes into market-rate homes, or it could reflect a loss of income that precipitated the move, the researchers said.

“That is probably one of the key things here; families are hurting when they’re moving,” Zuk said.

The findings challenge the notion that residents who are struggling to afford

Bay Area housing can easily pack up and move somewhere cheaper, she said. It also suggests Bay Area politicians and affordable housing advocates should be investing more resources in helping residents stay in place and avoid costly and harmful moves, Zuk said.

The California legislature has sent a bill to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk that Rinzler said would address many of the issues highlighted in Wednesday’s report. AB 686 would require public agencies to take proactive steps to further fair housing and combat segregation. The Trump administration suspended a similar federal mandate in January.