
Led by the Initiative on Cities at Boston University, Loretta Lees (Boston University), Kenton Card (University of Minnesota and Boston University) and Andre Comandon (University of Southern California) developed a new tool to be implemented by the Louisville Metro Government to guide decisions about residential investments. The tool is the result of a collaboration with a tenant union, government officials, and Councilmember Jecorey Arthur to implement the policy.
In an era of political polarization and economic insecurity, grassroots advocates and a bipartisan political coalition in Louisville, KY, have advanced a first-of-its-kind planning tool to protect tenants at risk of displacement due to increasing housing costs. The Anti-Displacement Ordinance is the first grassroots-conceived and legislatively-driven public dashboard to measure and limit the risk of displacement in areas where publicly-funded residential development is proposed.
In December 2020, in the wake of the justice movement for Breonna Taylor—murdered in March 2020 by police—activist Jessica Bellamy and recently elected City Councilmember Jecorey Arthur collaborated on a campaign to protect historically Black neighborhoods in Louisville. The proposed legislation responded to systemic economic and racial marginalization in the city, reflected in the 2019 Housing Needs Assessment. The Housing Need Assessment, updated in 2024, identified majority Black neighborhoods as at greater risk of gentrification and found that the city had a shortfall of 50,397 units of affordable housing.
The team—Bellamy, later co-founding the Louisville Tenants Union with Josh Poe, and Councilmember Jecorey Arthur, serving as the youngest councilmember to take office in Louisville history at 28 years old—organized community meetings to advance the legislation over the following years. With a growing grassroots mobilization for racial and economic justice, the campaign led to the unanimous passage of a city-wide Anti-Displacement Ordinance in November 2023, which prohibited the use of city resources for housing developments that put residents at greater risk of displacement.
Once passed, the ordinance required that the Louisville Office of Housing and Community Development partner with an external academic team to develop an analytical approach to identify displacement risk and a framework to allocate funds without exacerbating future displacement. Academic researchers and cities have long struggled to accurately measure displacement risk, or the involuntary relocation of residents due to direct or indirect pressure from rising housing costs, landlord harassment, or changing neighborhood composition from gentrification. All residential developers who wish to receive city subsidies will, as part of their application, assess their project’s impact through the Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool. It links the specific characteristics of the project (e.g., size, affordability level) to the neighborhood where the project is proposed. The tool provides an overview of factors associated with greater risk of displacement, including changes in income, rent prices, racial composition, and education levels. These factors are then synthesized into market pressure, housing stress, and gentrification, indicators that show the level of risk associated with each mechanism. The tool determines—based on the risk factors and the degree to which the project adds (or removes) affordable housing to existing residents of the neighborhood—whether projects are eligible for city subsidies.
A tripartisan resolution around the tool continues to advance, written by Councilmember Jecorey Arthur (I) and co-sponsored by Councilmembers Shameka Parrish-Wright (D), Phillip Baker (D), Andrew Owen (D), Ben Reno-Weber (D), Jennifer Chappell (D) and Republican Khalil Batshon (R). It streamlines and makes publicly visible the approval and funding recommendations when residential developers request public subsidies. The academic team will release the code behind the tool open access to the creative commons for cities to reproduce.