High housing costs are driven by two factors: increasing demand from a booming economy and lack of new supply to keep up. Now we have data that show how the rising costs are affecting low-income people of color the most in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project and the California Housing Partnership document how rising housing costs between 2000 and 2015 have displaced these populations into new concentrations of poverty and racial segregation in the cheaper outskirts of the region, while prompting many to move out of the area altogether.

As an example from the study:

Between 2000 and 2015, as housing prices rose, the City of Richmond, the Bayview in San Francisco and flatlands areas of Oakland and Berkeley lost thousands of low-income black households. Meanwhile, increases in low-income black households during the same period were concentrated in cities and neighborhoods with lower housing prices—such as Antioch and Pittsburg in eastern Contra Costa County, as well parts of Hayward and the unincorporated communities of Ashland and Cherryland.

What can we do about these trends? Well, there’s little to do on the demand side, in terms of slowing the economy (which will happen during a business cycle downturn at some point anyway). Perhaps there are demand-suppressing options such as taxing vacant property or second homes at higher rates in the meantime. But there are no simple solutions.

So that leaves addressing the supply side, which means building more homes close to jobs (subsidies for affordable housing could help, too, but wouldn’t come close to meeting demand unless in the hundreds of billions dollars). And ironically the solution of building more infill homes is anathema to many advocates against displacement, who worry — sometimes rightly — that infill projects will displace existing low-income renters.

But by wholesale blocking solutions to more infill housing generally, such as SB 827 earlier this year, these same advocates are worsening the problem they care about, as the new data show. Unless we get a handle on high housing costs, the problem will only intensify.

It’s a conundrum that has to be addressed, if the state is ever to fix this economic, moral and environmental crisis brought on by the housing shortage.