Development Stories Rely on Formulaic Fears of Displacement

It’s as formulaic as a rom-com. Any story about developers revitalizing a downtrodden area will include a paragraph like this one from the Chicago Tribune:

“But the city’s latest reinvention still worries some residents. It’s tough now to afford housing and food, they said. And although the development blueprints look great, hundreds of new, expensive apartments and amenities could remake downtown into a place for the tourists and the affluent, pricing out struggling Kenoshans.”

I know what you’re thinking: Where the heck is Kenosha?

It’s in Wisconsin, by Lake Michigan. For six months of the year it is brutally cold and dark. It has a few attractions, but I’ll go out on a limb and predict that it will never be a hotbed of tourism. However, that is not what this column is about.

It’s about how revitalization stories always include fears of people being “priced out.”

I’ll let you in on a secret: Good journalists have tension in every story. Otherwise, the result is a puff piece that doesn’t show a true picture, because nothing is without tension.

But reporting fears of displacement has become a trite way to add tension to development stories. And giving ink to unfounded fears can give them credibility they don’t deserve.

Remember the fears that cell towers would cause cancer? Totally baseless. But some towns denied their residents cell service for years as a result. Publicizing fears that vaccines are dangerous has reduced vaccination rates, which actually is dangerous.

A more realistic tension point for redevelopment stories is the risk that projects will lose money. The Atlantic Yards project generated a ton of coverage about how it would “destroy” Brooklyn, which it did not, but very little about the chance that its debt would go bad, which it did.

Mainstream publications don’t understand project finance so they default to covering protest signs and pitchforks — and if there aren’t any, they hunt for unhappy people.

Cue the “struggling Kenoshans.” I’m sure some fear change, but if they are struggling, the status quo is not working for them. New investment might.

“Downtown Kenosha was nearly dead 20 yrs ago, now there’s everything you could want, except a grocery store,” one resident commented on Reddit.

The New York Times just ran a story about Jersey City’s revitalization. For tension, it quoted a retired basketball coach saying the infrastructure was not keeping up with development and a random, 30-year-old lifelong resident saying her high school classmates “had scattered across the state and country after graduation, driven away by the cost of living.”

The basketball coach is not an expert on infrastructure, and the 30-year-old offered no evidence that her classmates left because of high costs. More likely they left because before the development boom turned things around, they saw no future in Jersey City.

Low-income people move a lot. This goes unnoticed unless there’s gentrification going on, in which case their moves are deemed “displacement.” In fact, research has shown that poor people are less likely to leave their neighborhood if it is improving.

The Times mentioned neither of these things. Instead, it wrote:

“The decline in available affordable housing has notably affected Black residents, who on average have less wealth than white families. Between 2013 and 2023, the city’s Black population fell by about 3,000, while its white population grew by about 15,000.”

What decline in affordable housing? The story said the median rent has risen, but that’s because new projects added so many units above the old median. The number of affordable units is actually increasing, and older buildings are rent-controlled.

Jersey City’s development boom does not explain why Black people moved. They have also moved from places where development did not boom.

Indeed, northern cities have experienced a broad decline in Black residents. Some decamped to the suburbs, and as racism in the South receded and opportunity grew for people of color, many moved there — a reversal of the Great Migration.

At least the Times included rebuttals of its conjecture, noting that Mayor Steve Fulop “said Jersey City remains one of America’s most ethnically diverse cities, and that the drop in Black residents mirrors a dynamic that is playing out across the New York City region.”

“Jersey City residents spend less of their income on housing than the state average,” the story added. “Housing experts say that the building boom, whatever its flaws, has made Jersey City much cheaper than it otherwise would be.”