In the wake of the justice movement for Breonna Taylor – who police shot and killed in March 2020 – an activist and a newly elected Louisville Metro Council member decided it was time to protect the city’s Historically Black Neighborhoods.
Four years later – on Nov. 21, 2024 — the Louisville Metro Council unanimously passed the Anti-Displacement Ordinance. The law enabled the creation of the Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool, the first grassroots-conceived, legislatively driven public dashboard to measure and limit the risk of displacement in areas where publicly funded residential developments are proposed.
Now, all residential developers who wish to receive city subsidies will, as part of their application, assess their project’s impact through the Assessment Tool.
The tool links the specific characteristics of each project (e.g., size, affordability level) to the neighborhood where the project is proposed. The tool provides an overview of factors associated with a 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) housing affordable to existing residents of the neighborhood – whether projects are eligible for city subsidies.
As a researcher for the METRANS Transportation Consortium based at the USC Price School of Public Policy, I was fortunate to be a member of a group that also included academics from Boston University’s Initiative on Cities and the University of Minnesota that developed the Assessment Tool.
The legislation that enabled the new tool responded to systemic economic and racial marginalization in the city, as reflected in the 2019 Housing Needs Assessment. The Housing Needs 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 housing units affordable to people within income half or less than half of the metropolitan area median income.
The new law was driven by a collaboration among a tenant union, government officials, and a Louisville Metro Council member. Councilmember Jecorey Arthur – the youngest councilmember to take office in Louisville history at age 28 – and activist Jessica Bellamy organized community meetings to advance the legislation. 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 law 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.
The result was the Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool. The academic team will release the code behind the tool under a Creative Commons license for anyone to reproduce, so that other cities can apply a similarly thoughtful and just approach to ensuring that residents in marginalized communities can live without the threat of being displaced by gentrification.
About the author
Andre Comandon is a research scientist at the METRANS Transportation Consortium. Based at the USC Price School of Public Policy, METRANS is a partnership between USC and California State University Long Beach. Comandon’s other research has included using individual tax records to trace how people moved within the Northern California Megaregion. The project documented the large-scale migration from the Bay Area to the neighboring Central Valley and Sacramento metro areas and the links to the housing crisis, lengthening commute times, and sprawling urban form.
