Housing Displacement Video Survey
Are you a resident of Olympia, Tumwater, Yelm, and Lacey?
We want to hear from YOU!
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Project Overview
Project Overview
The four unique cities of Olympia, Tumwater, Yelm, and Lacey are coming together to identify and study local policies and regulations that have resulted in racially disparate impacts, displacement, and exclusion in housing for their residents.
With a fundamental, data driven, and community informed understanding of harm done, the cities will take a restorative justice approach to serving their communities by developing and implementing policies to address historic and current racially disparate impacts caused by displacement and exclusion in housing.
Compensating Your Time
Compensating Your Time
Complete an interview and receive a $25 gift card! Limited funds available.
Who is Uncommon Bridges?
Who is Uncommon Bridges?
Uncommon Bridges is a nationally recognized organizational development, engagement, and policy consulting firm based in Seattle, WA.
Uncommon Bridges specializes in building consensus and unlikely coalitions, communicating complex information, demonstrating leading ideas, and shaping organizations.
What will we do with your input
What will we do with your input
Input from this process will be used by the Cities to develop goals and policies for the 2025 Comprehensive Plan update cycle.
Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory Compliance
With the passage of HB 1220 in 2021, jurisdictions are required to make adequate provisions for housing for all economic segments of the community. This includes identifying “local policies and regulations that result in racially disparate impacts, displacement, and exclusion in housing.”
As the jurisdictions update their Comprehensive Plans for the 2025 cycle, they will need to update their Goals and Policies to address the identified issues and to incorporate anti-displacement themes and strategies.
Understanding Housing Displacement
Understanding Housing Displacement
What is displacement?
Physical displacement: when households are forced to move for reasons like eviction, foreclosure, natural disasters or hazards, or deterioration in housing quality.
Economic displacement: when households are compelled to move due to rising rents or costs of home ownership like property taxes.
Cultural displacement: when households are compelled to move because the people, institutions, and services that make up their cultural community have left or been forced out.
What past housing policies resulted in resident displacement?
Policies to improve housing stability in the US most often exacerbate housing insecurity for renters. That is because US housing policy has a legacy of protecting, preferring, and subsidizing for homeownership and homeowners. Little is done for rent-burdened renters to alleviate displacement risk other than advocating for them to buy homes, a distant possibility for most (DeLuca, Stefanie, and Eva Rosen 2022, 345).
Quantitative efforts to measure displacement underrepresent the plight of disadvantaged populations by not considering lived experience. To counter this, displacement studies must include user generated, geographically tracked content to truly understand the state of gentrification risk in a community (Chapple and Zuk 2016, 115).
What types of current housing policies create the risk of resident displacement?
Code enforcement and condemnation can be a policy-driven displacement factor without a comprehensive plan to support displaced tenants. Low-income households may reside in substandard conditions, and in cases where a property owner is unable or refuses to make improvements, tenants may be forced to vacate (Lee and Evans 2020, 3).
Policies restricting housing development contribute to displacement risk. Increasing housing supply makes housing more affordable, and housing affordability is directly correlated to an individual's housing cost burden, an indicator of displacement risk (Been, Gould Ellen, and O’Regan 2019, 4).
To fight a growing trend of suburban corporate landlord conglomerates, governments should work to support, subsidize, and grow the amount of local small businesses that provide rental housing while incentivizing them to pass on savings to renters. Local property owners are more likely to provide support and relief to renters in financial distress, while corporate landlords are more likely to immediately resort to eviction.(Rutan et al. 2023, 166)
What groups and communities are at the greatest risk of housing displacement?
Older people, African Americans, and Latinos are overrepresented across most types of displacement (Lee and Evans 2020, 9).
Households in mobile homes are over twice as likely to live in poverty, a primary indicator of displacement risk. Half of all mobile homes in the US are in urban areas. There are 1.7 million mobile home renter households and 5.3 million mobile homeowners in the US (DeLuca, Stefanie, and Eva Rosen 2022, 348).
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