It’s been over a year since I collaborated with the Greenville News to write about about racial displacement in the city of Greenville, SC. I tried to tell a story about gentrification occurring in historically Black neighborhoods that relied on data rather than anecdotes.
The time has come for an update.
Working with a data visualization team housed in the Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities at Furman University, I’ve compiled some new graphs and charts to explain how racial displacement isn’t a random occurrence, it’s a policy outcome. The notion that thousands of Black residents in a city as small as Greenville could simultaneously decide to leave in such a short amount of time due to unique or personal preferences is statistically improbable.
The research on gentrification and displacement has been consistent for years: without safeguards, intensive public investments in physical improvement projects meant to help poor and predominately renter occupied neighborhoods can produce unintended consequences. Namely, without proper planning, these types of “place-based” investments can inadvertently fuel an increase in private property values and ultimately price out the people who live in them. Although well intentioned, disproportionate amounts of “placed-based” investments drive displacement.
So what can cities do to prevent this? They can choose to invest in people as much as the places in which they live. By balancing investment in infrastructural and recreational projects alongside funding for things that can actually raise incomes (job training, transportation, childcare, affordable housing), cities can help people increase their earnings enough to keep up with the rising rents around them.
The mistake that many cities make is that they spend lots of money on physical improvements in neighborhoods long before they budget similar amounts to help people get and keep better jobs. When municipalities prioritize places over people, rents rise faster than renters can keep up. The outcome? Displacement. And when those cities have high rates of racial economic inequality to begin with, they get racial displacement. Once this cycle begins, the scope and extent of racial inequality makes the entire area less attractive to wealthier Black households who could afford to live there.
Here are the facts about what is happening in the city of Greenville, SC:
Between 2021 and 2022, the city saw the biggest one-year percentage drop of the Black population on record.
The racial income gap is more extreme in the city limits than nearly every other small city in the Southeast.
Compared to neighboring municipalities, Black professional and upper middle class households comprise a drastically smaller fraction of the city’s overall Black population.
Adding more affordable housing will not slow displacement on its own: In a city of over 30,000 households, only 1,600 current Black households fit within the targeted income brackets.
Before I begin my analysis of them, let me be clear about why I’m doing this.
I want the city of Greenville to be a better place. I’m interested in using data to help cities develop innovative strategies to revitalize communities while also keeping them intact. I want kids to be able to come back from college and live in the neighborhood where they grew up. I want local businesses to be able to pick and choose from a widely diverse array of talented job applicants. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s what I want to happen.
But we aren’t there yet. And sadly, I fear the city is heading in the opposite direction.
At the end of this piece, I’ll go over the risks of unchecked place-based investment one more time and make a renewed pitch for how to mitigate them by prioritizing people over places when it comes to public funding. Reversing these trends I’m about to show will not happen overnight. It will get worse before it gets better. But there is a path.
For now, let’s break down each statistic, one by one, and assess what they mean and why they matter.
Stat #1: Between 2021 and 2022, the city saw the biggest one-year percentage drop of the Black population on record.1
What does this mean?
In 2021, Black residents comprised 22.5% of the city of Greenville. In 2022, that figure dropped to 18.8%. The percentage of Black residents in the city has declined for two reasons. One, white households are moving into the city at a rapid rate and this dilutes the Black population as the overall population grows. Two, Black residents are leaving. Between 2021 and 2022 both these factors were at play, the city gained roughly 3,000 white residents and lost roughly 3,000 Black residents.
Why does this matter?
In the 1960s, the city of Greenville was the site of some of the most influential Civil Rights protests in the nation. At the time, Black residents comprised more than 35% of the city population. However, over the past 30 years, those numbers have consistently dwindled. And that makes the recent losses between 2021 and 2022 a cause for alarm. Racial displacement within the city limits is not slowing. It is accelerating.
Stat #2: The racial income gap is more extreme in the city of Greenville, SC than nearly every other small city in the Southeast.2
What does this mean?
The median white household within the city of Greenville earns 2.7 times more than the median Black household ($80,735 to $29,897). Other small cities in the southeast do not have such extreme inequality. Compared to peer cities, the city of Greenville’s white households are nearly the wealthiest and our Black households earn the least. Even Richmond, VA, with the wealthiest white households, has less relative inequality because its median Black household earns 30% more than the median Black household in Greenville.
Why does this matter?
Economic inequality warps the housing market in a self-perpetuating cycle. Rents and property values rise as wealthier households arrive and compete with existing residents for available units. As this wealthier demographic grows, the supply of luxury housing increases to meet their expensive new tastes. High end retail follows suit. Affordable housing, goods, and services eventually get replaced with more expensive options to cater to these new residents. When you add racial inequality to this formula, you not only price out poorer residents, you price out your remaining Black households. Remember, the city of Greenville priced out poor white households, too. What makes the city of Greenville different than its peer cities is that has easily replaced its poor white households with much wealthier white households. However, as I’ll show with the next statistic, when it comes to adding wealthy Black households, the city of Greenville has had no such luck.
Stat# 3: Compared to neighboring municipalities, Black professional and upper middle class households comprise a drastically smaller fraction of the city’s overall Black population.3
What does this mean?
Of all Black households in the city of Greenville, only 13.6% earn over $75,000. This is a much smaller proportion of the Black population compared to those in neighboring areas and municipalities. For example, in Boiling Springs, despite its smaller Black population, two-thirds of Black households are solidly middle or upper middle class. The same goes for Simpsonville, where nearly half (44.6%) of Black households earn more than that city’s median income. Greer comes the closest to the city of Greenville, but even its relative proportion of Black households earning over $75,000 is double that of the city of Greenville’s.
Why does this matter?
Businesses and commercial enterprises want to be able to pick from a diverse pool of strong job candidates. The bigger the pool, the more options they have from which to choose. No city can provide those options if it lacks a strong base of Black professionals. Recruiting wealthy households is never a given. They have options. They are looking not only at housing costs, but at potential networking circles, mentoring opportunities, and for singles, dating options. As I’ll show in the next statistic, there are roughly 50 Black households in the entire city of Greenville that earn over $200,000 a year. At that rate, why would a Black couple with two professional incomes choose the city of Greenville?
Stat # 4: Adding more affordable housing will not slow displacement on its own: In a city of over 30,000 households, only 1,600 current Black households fit within the targeted income brackets.4
What does this mean?
To keep poorer households from being priced out, cities across the country are working hard to provide affordable options. In the city of Greenville, that means buying, developing, subsidizing units so that households earning between $25,000 and $45,000 a year can afford to live within the city limits. However, when you break the city population down by income brackets and race, you see that are actually very few Black households who would be economically eligible for such opportunities. The economic and demographic composition of the city is heavily skewed towards very wealthy white households on one end of the spectrum and very poor Black households on the other.
Why does this matter?
For affordable housing initiatives to be effective, you need a pool of waiting candidates willing and able to take advantage of new opportunities. The most likely candidates would be people already living in the immediate area. Recruiting from outside the city would require asking people to move farther away from their church, their kid’s school, their current job, etc. Even if the city of Greenville were able to triple or quadruple the number of available units at 30% to 50% AMI, there just aren’t that many Black households in the city to take advantage of them. Racial displacement will not be solved by affordable housing alone.
If you’d like to see how the city of Greenville compares to other municipalities when it comes to race and income brackets, you can do so yourself with this interactive data tool. Also for an update on my methodology, see the footnotes of this piece5
So how did we get here and what can we do about it?
Like many cities across the country, the city of Greenville’s approach to revitalization began with intense investment in amenities and infrastructural improvements. This has made the city a wonderful place to live, work, and play. People who owned property before these improvements have benefited tremendously as the value of their assets has appreciated tremendously.
Unfortunately, however, renters do not benefit from place-based investment. And for a variety of historical reasons and policies, when revitalization efforts began, the neighborhoods in the city of Greenville with the highest proportion of renters were predominately Black.
Improved streetscapes and widened sidewalks in these neighborhoods has put landlords in the enviable position of being able to charge what the market will bear. Renters on existing leases will get to enjoy their newly installed street lighting and recreation spaces until it comes time to renew their rental contract. That is when the reality of revitalization will set in. They’ll be priced out.
So what should we do?
Cities need to quickly close the gap between the amount they spend on improving physical places and the amount they invest in the people who live in them. Place based investment is an effective way to attract people to areas by making them more livable, walkable, and otherwise enjoyable. However, upon arrival, those newcomers also become the competition for existing housing. Building more housing helps, but increasing the housing supply takes time and current renters need help now.
The long term solution is to invest in people. They need training and education to be competitive for good paying jobs. They need adequate public transportation to get to and from those jobs. They need childcare options so they can keep those jobs when friends or family can no longer watch their kids for free. These are the basic and timeworn tools in the community development arsenal.
Investing in people’s futures isn’t as flashy as a ribbon cutting ceremony at a new park or a luxury brand hotel, but it is an investment that allows current residents to grow their income so that they can one day compete with newcomers for housing at market rates.
Invest in the people who live here first and the businesses will come after them: employers want good job candidates to choose from. More people with growing incomes will increase the tax base. And with those proceeds, we can build all the amenities we want to reward ourselves for a job well done.
The US Census Bureau tracks population in two ways: the decennial census and the American Community Survey. The decennial census is the most reliable data we have but only comes every 10 years. The American Community survey comes in two forms: 5 year estimates and 1 year estimates. For a deeper dive, the Census describes the differences here. But the general idea is that 5 year estimates are rolling averages and 1 year estimates are a snapshot in time. 5 year estimates have a smaller margin of error but are slower to pick up on new trends because they include older data. The 2022 5 year estimate has Black residents in the city of Greenville at 22.7%. The 1 year estimates have Black residents at 18.8%. Which should you trust more? 1 year estimates have a larger margin of error but can help identify when trends begin. For the city of Greenville, 1 year estimates have also proven accurate every year since 2018 when it comes to predicting population trends. See also footnote #2.
To calculate the income gap in these cities, I rely on 5 year estimates, which are more conservative. Recency is less important because these rates of relative inequality do not vary quickly over time, even though they vary a lot by location.
While the margin of error (MoE) can help us interpret the range of possible outcomes on a single variable, like I show in stat #1, we cannot use MoE when estimating a wide range of variables drawing from different samples (e.g. 5 year estimates from different geographies). For this, each year the census calculates, a “coefficient of variation” for each geographic place. In any given year, there may be a wider range of possible outcomes.
Taking note of the coefficient of variation is especially important when trying to measure smaller populations. Because as populations shrink, like the Black population in the city of Greenville, they get increasingly more difficult to measure. Thus, even though it is possible the one year estimates reported in stat #1 may be an outlier, the 1 year estimates in 2022 for the city of Greenville still had a coefficient of variation of 16, which is one point higher than their threshold for “good reliability” but falls well below their 30 point threshold for “fair reliability.”
[Many thanks to Dr. Claire Gilliland for helping me explain coefficient of variation here].
The cutoffs for “middle class” or “professional class” are a subject of political debate. The Pew Foundation defines middle class as between 2/3rds and two times that of the median income. The median income in the city of Greenville is roughly $65,000, making “middle income” anywhere between $42,000 and $130,000. I use the terms “upper middle class” and “professional” to any household earning over $75,000. This cutoff is also the point at which people no longer become eligible for affordable housing because they approach the “area median income” (AMI) as defined by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) (see footnote below). Additionally, determinations of whether one is “middle class” or “upper middle class” also vary by household size. The average household size in the city of Greenville is roughly 2 people, and HUD defines its base figure for AMI for a household of 4 people. In short, if your household in the city of Greenville is of average size and earning $75,000 or over, you most likely have options and can find a place to live in the city if you prefer.
In theory, for housing to be affordable, it should not cost more than 1/3rd of a person or household’s gross income. This includes rents, utilities, insurance, etc. In practice, “affordable housing” is based on an area’s median income (AMI) and household size.
Area Median Income (AMI) varies across the US. Policy makers use median incomes, instead of mean (or average) incomes, in order to reduce in the influence of outliers (e.g. a few really, really wealthy residents) that skew the numbers. Affordability benchmarks for metro areas are set by Housing and Urban Development (HUD). According to HUD, 2024 AMI for a family of four in Greenville is $88,600. For context, AMI for same size household in New York City region is $155,000
One reader of the piece questioned whether an analysis of population trends of American Community Survey respondents who identified as both Black *and* as an additional race (e.g. multiracial) would change the results of this report. It would not. Actually, when you include survey respondents who identify as either Black or white “alone or in combination with one or more races” the trends of displacement become more pronounced. Thus, the loss of the Black population within the city limits is *not* due to Black city residents deciding to change their racial identity to “more than one race.”
Thank you for this. May I share on Southernside FB page?