Housing Anti-Displacement

What is displacement?

Displacement occurs when people need to relocate from their homes or neighborhoods due to a variety of factors that are often out of their control. These factors could include eviction, rising housing costs, deteriorating building conditions, neighborhood redevelopment or gentrification.

Per the approved 2023-2031 Housing Element and the approved 2024 Environmental Justice Element, the City of Menlo Park will develop an anti-displacement strategy, with a particular focus on the Belle Haven neighborhood. Anti-displacement is a plan of action to prevent people from leaving their homes and neighborhoods and ensure that those currently housed can stay in place. Anti-displacement strategies are laws, policies, or programs that intend to counteract the displacement pressures felt by some households.

How will the City of Menlo Park create its anti-displacement strategy?

The city, in collaboration with The Housing Endowment and Regional Trust (HEART) of San Mateo County, is preparing an anti-displacement strategy. The community suggested many helpful anti-displacement strategies and tools during creation of the recent Housing Element Update and Environmental Justice Element. The city has continued to engage with the community to help prioritize those suggested strategies, beginning with bilingual community meetings in fall 2024.

Community meetings

In 2024, the City adopted its Housing Element and first-ever Environmental Justice Element. Based on community feedback provided during the preparation of each element, it was clear that displacement was a top community concern. Therefore, within each element, a program to address anti-displacement was included. City staff has initiated program design, beginning with community engagement. City staff facilitated two (2) interactive community meetings at the Belle Haven Community Campus, the first in English on November 7, 2024 and the second in Spanish on November 14. The purpose of the community meetings was to capture the community’s feedback on prioritizing the twenty-plus community-suggested anti-displacement programs/policies shared in the City’s adopted Housing Element and Environmental Justice Element. Those in attendance were shown the pros, cons and definitions of policies and programs that were previously identified. Additional potential programs were also provided by staff and HEART who is collaborating with the City on the preparation of the anti-displacement strategy. The community feedback would be one source of data that would help formulate the City’s strategy.

Meeting format

A presentation was given at the start of the meetings with information including what displacement is, the types of displacement a community could experience and the potential policies and programs that could make up the City's anti-displacement strategy. The various strategies were presented as the Housing “P’s”: production, preservation and protection of housing. A 4^th “P” was added for prosperity. Please see Table A for the number of strategies that fell under each “P”. The meetings then continued by encouraging attendees to walk around the space to view the displayed boards which contained the pros, cons and definitions of each community-suggested program/policy. Each person was provided with three stickers to place next to their top three program/policy they believed would benefit themselves or the community the most. By providing the pros, cons and definitions of each program/policy, those in attendance could make an informed decision as to which ones they deemed the most important to implement.

The meetings were attended by 12 people. City staff compiled the feedback and responses to the exercise. The data from the two community meetings is summarized below. This data will help provide direction for the City's anti-displacement strategy

Summary of results

The program/policies that received the highest number of stickers (votes) were as follows:

1. Neighborhood tenant preference
2. Strengthening tenant anti-harassment ordinance*
3. Eviction monitoring/data collection*
4. Rental Inventory/registry* 

   _{*Received an equal number of votes}

^{Table A: Strategies per housing pillar}

Next steps

As next steps, the city released a citywide survey in English(PDF, 165KB) and Spanish(PDF, 164KB) and is establishing a focus group to receive additional feedback on how to prioritize the suggested strategies. The survey was released on April 26, 2025 and city staff is actively assembling community members for the focus group. The top-prioritized strategies will become the basis of the city’s anti-displacement strategy. The strategy will be presented to the City Council at a future study session in summer 2025.

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