An Optimistic Comment

Equity planners should be of good cheer; their work has improved the quality of life of poor people and poor neighborhoods. Although mainstream planning may seem to be untouched by the examples of equity planners, social equity agendas have begun to be embedded in many plans, policies, and programs.

Early models of equity planning tried to provide more choices for those with few and to redistribute resources, political power, and participation toward the lower-income, disadvantaged residents of their cities. These precedents are now galvanizing practitioners and others across planning fields to address social and economic disparities.

While equity planners have accomplished much in moving toward a more just and democratic society, I believe the potential of equity planning will be more fully realized in the future. To show that this is not just wishful thinking, I briefly highlight the contributions of several important equity-oriented planning programs that emerged since the 1950s.

Montgomery County’s progressive mixed-income housing program. Since 1973, Montgomery County, Maryland, has required private developers building twenty units or more to build mixed-income housing everywhere, effectively challenging racial and economic segregation. The County mandates that 12 to 15 percent of this housing must be affordable and another five percent be available as rental housing for its poorest families. By 2010, the County’s Housing Opportunities Commission owned and operated forty-four thousand housing units, about 12 percent of the total housing supply.

Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary, the most effective and unique system of transportation and land use planning in the United States. The UGB, enabled by the state of Oregon’s Land Use Act of 1973, covered 342 square miles and protected the surrounding environment while forcing most private development back into the central city and older suburbs. As a result, the Portland region is characterized by minimal economic and racial segregation and balanced economic growth.

Tax sharing in the Twin Cities. Enacted by the Minnesota legislature in 1971, the Twin Cities Fiscal Disparities Plan narrows fiscal disparities between rich and poor communities. Poorer communities receive more back from the tax-sharing fund than they contribute; richer communities contribute more than they receive. In the process, fiscal zoning is minimized, municipal resources are brought into balance with municipal responsibilities, and poorer communities improve their ability to provide basic services.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. This Act helped infuse major amounts of capital into deprived neighborhoods. The Act, which came about largely as a result of grassroots mobilizations and the lobbying by neighborhood-based groups in Chicago, gave community organizations across the United States standing to challenge proposed bank mergers and closings in their neighborhoods. To avoid such blockages, and avoid unfavorable, possibly time-consuming reviews by their regulating agencies, banks entered into multimillion-dollar agreements to increase their lending into neighborhoods they had once red-lined.

The emergence of “linkage” and Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) that offer mitigation for destructive impacts on poor communities. These are facilitated by popular mobilization efforts by labor unions, liberal advocates, neighborhood groups, and faith-based coalitions that force the proponents of mega-projects to provide benefits to lower-income populations in their deals. The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) is one organization that demands concessions in return for public subsidy. Best known of these CBAs are the two agreements led by LAANE around the Staples Center and the LAX airport construction projects. The Staples agreement forced the developer to target job opportunities locally, pay living wages, and provide affordable housing. As of 2009, there were twenty-seven cities with CBA ordinances, and nine more were negotiating agreements. CBAs can leverage substantial benefits to neighborhoods and communities, especially in strong market cities, but much of their effectiveness depends on the skill of the planners and others who are negotiating the final deals. The last point is important; progressive planners cannot simply talk a good rhetorical game and expect that just outcomes will be self-achieving. Planners will have to be skilled in negotiations and coalition-building while arguing tenaciously for progressive outcomes in the service of justice.

There are examples of progressive advocacy, equity planning, and community empowerment that have occurred periodically in Austin, Boston, Burlington, Chicago, Cleveland, Jersey City, Santa Monica, Seattle, and many other cities. Often, these innovations have been incorporated into the public policy agenda at the local level. Also encouraging is the growth of neighborhood planning that addresses more of the needs of the poor if not poverty itself. Some cities have legitimized community-originated plans; others have expanded general planning to include neighborhood-based plans, including issues of environmental justice, food, and public health. Scores of cities adopted living wage ordinances, fought predatory lending, and championed first-source hiring. Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and their supporting intermediaries have produced tens of thousands of affordable housing units and commercial space in neighborhoods formerly shunned by the private market. CDCs and social service agencies have also helped mobilize low-income people and amplified their voices in the decision-making process.

Recent Comprehensive General Plans have emerged from both declining and growing cities that emphasize social equity as a central concern. For example, “Connecting Cleveland,” the city’s 2020 General Plan, pays special attention to the production of affordable housing (working with the city’s CDCs), regional inequities (promoting reverse commuting programs with RTA), and income (assuring that all eligible families apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit). Newark’s 2010 master plan equates planning for social equity with safe and healthy neighborhoods. Milwaukee’s Citywide Policy Plan, adopted in 2010, places social equity as one of the city’s four core planning principles and states that “a high quality of life depends on the equitable distribution of resources and opportunities for residents.” Austin, Texas, one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, states in the city’s 2012 “Imagine Austin” plan that “Austin can harness its strong economy to extend opportunity and social equity for all residents.” In 2012, Portland’s city planners produced, and city council adopted, The Portland Plan, which places equity at its center in efforts to reduce health disparities. These recent comprehensive plans suggest that social equity issues are becoming a more and more significant part of current comprehensive planning.

A social-equity agenda has also begun to emerge as part of the transportation planning process, long the province of highway engineers and imperious state departments of transportation. State transportation departments working on mega-projects are now anxious to encourage a maximum of citizen and community-participation. In the 1990s, experimental programs emerged in reverse commuting, linking low-income city residents to suburban jobs and testing low-income car-ownership and loan programs. In Portland, the transit agency set transit service levels higher for corridors serving low-income areas and communities of color. King County (WA) created an Equity Impact Review tool and has been applying it to their budget and general plan. If the nation’s other 3,006 counties followed King County’s lead, it would revolutionize planning.

At the same time, in California’s Alameda Corridor project, which cuts through many of the poorest neighborhoods in the region, community groups organized on a regional level to negotiate local hiring agreements and other mitigation from the transportation project. Regional lobbying around the I-64 highway project in St. Louis by a coalition of mostly religious groups also took place to target well-paid construction jobs to disadvantaged communities in the path of the highway. The final agreement will place more than one hundred fifty minority, low-income, and female workers in construction jobs. The Alameda Corridor and I-64 examples demonstrate that coalitions of community-based organizations can negotiate successful workforce hiring agreements and offer hope for more of such arrangements in the future.

Planners, working with CDCs and their intermediaries, have been successful in attracting capital into weak inner-city and first-ring suburban neighborhoods by exploiting the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). A product of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, LIHTC draws investments of private capital into neighborhoods where developers have not seen opportunities for profit. Briefly stated, LIHTC offers profitable corporations an opportunity to invest in affordable housing, while receiving a reasonable rate of return on their investment. The direct tax write-offs on corporate tax liability made possible by LIHTC now make up from 50 to 60 percent of the equity capital in most affordable housing developments in the United States. By 2003, more than 1.2 million housing units built by nonprofit groups and private developers had been constructed under the LIHTC program, and life had returned to some formerly shunned neighborhoods.

Also promising is the Obama Administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative, which promotes equity and inclusiveness in regional planning and across planning fields. In addition to land use control, such subjects as health equity, climate justice, and food access are becoming a regular part of planning agency work programs. In 2012, the cities of Portland and Minneapolis added equity departments to their regular government affairs. In Minneapolis, the new office is charged with employment equity while in Portland the focus is on equity and human rights. Seattle has a Race and Social Justice Initiative, which is a citywide effort to train and recruit staff with an eye to diversity, inequality, civic engagement, and community building. All three initiatives offer a broadening of equity planning practice. These innovations begin the process of institutionalizing social equity as a way of judging municipal performance on a regular basis, just as cities look at their municipal bond rating and police response time.

Additional examples of equity-oriented planning have been offered by academics who were asked to review drafts of this Commentary. Professor Joe Grengs of the University of Michigan wrote the following:

When the Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles filed a lawsuit in federal court in 1994 to challenge public transportation policy that harmed poor people of color, they demonstrated the power of protection that is offered by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (see the Labor/Community Strategy Center v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority). Besides the tangible benefits that the resulting consent decree provided for transit-dependent, minority bus riders, the case is notable for substantially raising awareness among transportation policy makers and public officials about the need to continuously monitor progress toward achieving social equity in transportation. Federal agencies must now continuously monitor progress toward achieving social equity in transportation. Federal agencies now must routinely act to detect discrimination in their programs. Backed by strong guidelines—such as Executive Order 12898 of 1994 and the Federal Transit Administration’s Title VI Circular of 2007—recipients of federal transportation funding must actively substantiate their compliance with civil rights legislation through regular certification of regional planning agencies, collecting and reporting demographic data, carrying out alternative analyses with respect to communities of color, and ensuring appropriate public involvement. Through these and other recent advances, advocacy organizations, community activists, and planners in public agencies have a foundation on which to continue building policies and procedures that address the longstanding injustices in the transportation field.

Professor Ken Reardon of the University of Memphis offered this example of equity planning involving community building and food:

When residents of Foote Homes, a public housing project located just south of historic Beale Street in downtown Memphis, were asked to identify the major challenge confronting their community, few planners expected to hear, “The struggle for bread”! However, more than 70% of the families living in this neighborhood live below the poverty line; four out of five households lack access to private automobiles; city bus services have been drastically cut, and the nearest full-service grocery store is nearly three miles away. With the help of University of Memphis planning students and faculty, residents prepared a proposal to transform a retired city bus into a mobile market, making stops at 19 public housing complexes, community centers, and health clinics in neighborhoods lacking full-service groceries. In its first three months of operation, the Green Machine Mobile Market attracted approximately 4,000 customers who purchased $15,000 worth of fruits, vegetables, and dried goods. Success of this resident-led food security campaign have led to plans to establish a consumer-owned and operated grocery which the Vance Ave. collaborative and the University of Memphis Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning are currently working together to realize.

Writing about food issues, Katherine Lieberknecht of the University of Texas at Austin’s Community and Regional Planning Program, contributed the following:

Communities, NGOs, and municipalities across the U.S. have brought focus and creativity to the task of rebuilding and expanding community food system infrastructure. In many cases, planners, especially those with an equity focus, have contributed to these grassroots efforts with capacity, leadership and resources. Although much work remains to be done to ensure community food security, positive examples of equity planning now exist in every aspect of the food system. For instance, the Food Trust’s efforts to secure a public grant and loan fund leveraged with private contributions (the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative) has established 88 new grocery stores in areas with low food access in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Growing Power, Inc.’s efforts to rebuild food systems in neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, now employ over 150 people working on almost every aspect of the food system: growing vegetables, fruits, fish, and poultry: operating farm stands, community supported agriculture programs, and other distribution options for low-income households; composting 400,000 pounds of food waste a week; and providing education and small business incubation. And the Madison Area Community Land Trust’s Troy Gardens development of mixed-income housing combined with community gardens and a commercial farm serves an example for planners struggling to balance housing affordability for all and secure access to land for peri-urban farmers.

Although these programs and others like them have helped low-income people and low-income neighborhoods, they are often difficult to implement and require confident, risk-embracing leadership supported by mobilized grassroots constituents that must not let up on their advocacy for fairness and justice. Strong mayors with equity objectives are most effective in mobilizing resources and civic constituencies, but there are many variants in which city councils or neighborhood-based leaders play transformative roles. However, in the future, other pressures and opportunities may encourage cities and regions to pursue more explicit equity planning opportunities.

Most significant to a more equity-oriented planning practice in the future is the change in our national demographics. The United States is fast becoming a minority-majority nation, and, in fact, many cities already have that distinction. I believe this increased diversity will produce political conditions making a more liberal response possible not only in planning but in all the institutions of American society.

This new, more liberal movement will not be led by the American Planning Association. No professional organization can redefine itself in sweeping terms, because it represents a wide range of different practitioners, and because it tends to be dominated by its senior, more conservative members.

The change toward a more liberal society of which planning is a small part will be led by the people elected by a political coalition of the tens of millions of poor and near-poor people in America, their liberal advocates, union members, the many members of the middle class now concerned about the collapse of American industry and the loss of jobs this entails, and the environmentally sensitive and other, similar groups. The elected leaders of this coalition will not all govern in the same way, but they will all want to hold the coalition together and do more for their political base. They will demand more management by government of the affairs of the market, and will reject policies that demand unreasonable sacrifices by the poor, minorities, and women. In effect, this coalition will demand a more humane and equitable society. If I am right, public planning will be revived and will thrive, and planners will rediscover the concepts of advocacy, pluralism, and justice in America’s cities and regions.