Displacement risk

Displacement risk is a modeled estimate of how likely a neighborhood, block, or household is to experience displacement, residents being forced or priced out of their homes, driven by rising housing costs, redevelopment, or neighborhood change. It is typically produced as an index or risk score at the neighborhood level rather than measured directly, since displacement itself is hard to observe until it has already happened.

Models combine indicators such as rent burden, recent home-price appreciation from the house price index, falling vacancy rates, demographic turnover, and proximity to new investment or transit, weighting them to flag areas where conditions resemble places that have previously seen displacement. This differs from the housing affordability index, which describes whether housing is affordable right now; displacement risk is forward-looking and neighborhood-specific, aiming to flag where existing residents are at risk of being priced out next, not just where prices are already high.

Cities, planners, and community organizations use displacement risk scores to prioritize tenant protections, affordable housing investment, or anti-displacement policy before a neighborhood turns over. A key pitfall is that these models are built from historical patterns, so they can reflect and reinforce whatever biases shaped displacement in the past, and a high score is a probability estimate rather than a certainty — it identifies elevated risk, not a guaranteed outcome, for any specific household.