Welcome to my research lab, the Urban Displacement Project!
The Urban Displacement Project (UDP) conducts community-centered, data-driven, applied research toward more equitable and inclusive futures for cities. Our research aims to understand and describe the nature of gentrification, displacement, and exclusion, and also to generate knowledge on how policy interventions and investment can support more equitable development. The goal of UDP is to produce rigorous research and create tools to empower advocates and policymakers, to reframe conversations, and to train and inspire the next generation of leaders in equitable development.
I founded UDP on an impulse in 2015, and it now attracts over 100,000 distinct users each year. I began working on displacement as an undergraduate in the 1980s, driven by a profound sense of injustice that families, mom-and-pop stores, cultural institutions, and manufacturers could be pushed out of their own communities. I have a deep and abiding interest in providing an evidence base that not only documents ongoing displacement and its causes across residential, commercial, civic, and industrial sectors, but also shows how wise policies, programs, and investments can mitigate displacement.
For UDP’s first four years, Dr. Miriam Zuk, now of Ground Works Consulting, served as executive director and developed the initial vision of a research and action initiative. Miriam built UDP’s community and funder connections, as well as our first website, and co-led and -authored our first studies on displacement. UDP’s credibility and reach are due in no small part to her brilliance and integrity. Dr. Tim Thomas worked at UDP from 2019 to 2025, contributing the Housing Precarity Risk and Estimated Displacement Risk Models on the site and forming his own Evictions Research Network. Other key staff contributors were Anna Cash, Julia Greenberg, Renee Roy Elias, and Eva Phillips, along with over 70 UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students. Along the way, we also partnered with UCLA (Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Paul Ong, Silvia González, and Chhandara Pech), Portland State (Lisa Bates), and University of Melbourne (Jennifer Day).
UDP is funded entirely by “soft money,” i.e., project-specific grants, and I exclusively hire UC Berkeley and University of Toronto students and postdocs for research assistance. We do not have any staff and unfortunately are thus unable to respond to many of the requests we get for pro bono advice, student interviews, or volunteering.
Karen Chapple
