Editor's Note: The Bay Area Plan considers "Economic, environment and equity" . This article is a perspective on "social equity" in planning and regionalism and Smart Growth. Marin has its own Social Equity Advocates such as Urban Habitat, Public Advocates and Marin Grassroots (where our newest planning commissionor, Ericka Erickson works) and many more. These activists have embedded themselves on the planning commission and local politics and are considered "stakeholders" while the vast majority of us, ordinary Marin taxpayers and property owners are considered outsiders. This is why YOU need to get involved.
An interview on race and metropolitan development with john powell
In Northeast Ohio—one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the nation—race has been a powerful force shaping the region. To promote greater dialogue on this important subject, we reprint the following interview with john powell in which he takes the provocative stance that “bringing racial justice awareness to regionalism is the single most important civil rights task facing us today.” powell is one of the most innovative thinkers regarding race, civil rights, public policy, and the law in the country. He is the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University and Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the OSU Moritz College of Law. He was formerly national legal director of the ACLU and has published widely on race, civil rights, and the law. The interview was conducted by Bob Wing, editor of ColorLines magazine.
Q: What is regionalism?
A: Regionalism is the notion that you should think about, fight for, and administer resources at a regional and not just a city or federal level. The economy, the infrastructure (transportation, utilities, etc.), and the labor market all function on a regional level. In general a region can be thought of as a city and its suburbs, what the census calls a metropolitan statistical area. That is why regionalism is sometimes called "metropolitics" by people like Myron Orfield.
Q: Why is regionalism important for anti-racist work?
A: Today, metropolitan regions are divided racially and
spatially into largely white and affluent suburbs and largely non-white and poor
urban centers. These dynamics are at the heart of racial inequality today. If
this inequality is to be effectively fought, suburban sprawl and political
fragmentation must be combatted by movements for regional and metropolitan
equity.Regional inequity has seriously undermined the efforts of the civil rights movement. By the time the movement came to the north, this structure of suburban sprawl and urban poverty had been put in place and the movement could not effectively address it. A series of policy and Supreme Court decisions like Milliken in the mid-1970s outlawed desegregation and anti-discrimination efforts across school district and city lines. These decisions protected racial inequality between what were increasingly white suburbs and minority cities.
In fact, while the Supreme Court basically dismantled the
ability of whites to garner resources and protect themselves on a neighborhood
basis, it actually enhanced their ability to do the same on a regional basis.
Just as the doctrine of states' rights at the beginning of the century was a
code for allowing the states to frustrate the rights and economic hopes of
blacks, the doctrine of local autonomy and municipal rights have been used to
frustrate these hopes at the end of the century.
As a result, whites have been able to re-isolate minorities in
the declining urban core and older suburbs, away from jobs, growth centers, a
strong tax base, and other opportunities. This is aggravated by the fact that
today suburban voters outnumber urban voters: the political center of regions
throughout the country has shifted to the suburbs, again isolating the urban
core.
Q: But regionalism seems to be dominated by white
environmentalists and suburban interests that are not interested in racial
justice.
A: True. So far, regionalism, "smart growth," and anti-sprawl
movements have been mainly framed around the interests of white suburbanites and
environmentalists. Our challenge is to reframe these issues from the standpoint
and interests of people of color, who mainly live in the cities and older,
declining suburbs, but whose conditions are inextricably connected to the newer,
growing suburbs.
In most cases, the cities actually subsidize the suburbs,
which in turn suck resources out of the cities. Cities need to fight for equal
resources—housing, transportation, jobs, and education—with the suburbs. Cities
cannot raise the money they need to deal with issues of concentrated poverty
simply within the cities.
Q: How is concentrated poverty related to regionalism?
A: Although most politicians frame the issue of regionalism
mainly through an environmental lens, as a historical matter the central issue
driving sprawl is race.
Where there is sprawl—the expanding low-density use of
land—and political fragmentation in an area with a substantial minority
population, there will be racialized concentrated poverty at the core.
Concentrated poverty is where people with incomes below the poverty line
represent over 40 percent of a census tract: most of these are people of
color.
This pattern is caused by white middle class and upper middle
class people fleeing to the edge of the region, taking important resources and
opportunity with them and erecting barriers to low-income people of color.
Concentrated poverty should be understood as racial and economic segregation
combined. It is the segregation of poor people of color from opportunity and
resources.
Q: Can you give an example of how this dynamic of sprawl and
concentrated poverty actually works out?
A: Over the last twenty years, the population of Detroit has
fallen from just under two million to probably less than a million today. Most
of those remaining are low-income black people. At the same time, the population
of the Detroit metro area as a whole has increased by 3 percent—but the land it
occupies has multiplied times 12. Hundreds of separate municipalities have been
created, and they vie to capture resources and keep needy, low-income people
out. This is classic sprawl and fragmentation.
The first population that moved to the metropolitan edge was
white and upper middle class-the corporate executives of General Motors,
Chrysler, Ford, and their friends. When they moved, they brought their auto
plants and resources with them. I grew up in Detroit from 1960-1995, and during
that time there wasn't one auto plant built inside the city of Detroit. In 1960,
56 percent of the jobs in the Detroit metropolitan area were in Detroit proper;
today only 18 percent of the jobs are in Detroit.
When rich people move, they also suck resources out of the
urban core: businesses, jobs, property taxes, malls, money for highways,
transit, police, water, etc. Then other middle class strata in the population
follow them, reproducing the same phenomena. This flight was not just looking
for the right place to live, but looking for a white place to live.
This in turn left Detroit and dozen of other cities across the
country with masses of poor people of color who have much greater social needs
than middle class or rich people, but with a decimated tax base with which to
pay for those needs. Fewer resources, concentrated poverty. More needs, higher
taxes.
Q: But how is this sprawl related to race?
A: You know, half the people in the country living in
concentrated poverty are black. Another third are Latinos. Even though more than
half the impoverished people in the country are white, most poor white people
don't live in concentrated poverty. Moreover, during the long economic boom
we've had in the U.S., the number of people living in areas of concentrated
poverty has doubled. So it's not just economics; concentrated poverty is sorted
by race. And this racial sorting takes place not just on a neighborhood level
now, but on a regional level: cities versus suburbs, inner-ring suburbs versus
outer-ring suburbs, this side of the freeway versus that side of the freeway,
etc.
Q: Can you expand on the role of the government in this
racialized sprawl?
A: The government had a central role in the history of sprawl,
especially through its housing policy. When the government set up the homeowners
loan corporation and then the Federal Housing Authority in the 1930s, it wrote a
truly racist underwriting manual to guide them. To qualify for a loan, you had
to live in a "racially homogenous community," meaning an all-white community.
The federal government was the first to draw a red line around communities of
color, prohibiting loans. Newly constructed homes were preferred over existing
homes, thus encouraging the development of suburbs. And then the federal
government built highways so people could get from their new suburban homes to
their jobs in the cities.
Since the private lending industry wanted to do big business
with the federal government, they adopted the same racist policies for making
home loans.
These programs racially structured housing patterns just as
large numbers of blacks were leaving the south and moving to cities in the 1940s
and 1950s. Some economists have estimated that the federal government has spent
over two trillion dollars subsidizing the flight of white people out of the
central cities. Following the government's lead, private banks and the secondary
mortgage market made trillions of dollars available primarily for white
suburbs.
But there is even more racist inequity when one looks at our
transportation policy, our infrastructure policy, or our taxing policy. They
reflect nothing short of a national suburban policy and an anti-city policy. And
race is central to understanding any of these policies.
Q: What is the difference between regionalism and current
urban strategies?
A: I think in many ways urban strategies, so-called "in place
strategies," have been the wrong strategy. These strategies focus on specific
neighborhoods.
For example, there are hundreds of community development
corporations (CDCs) that fight for more low-income housing in their
neighborhoods. I say we really don't need it. If you look at Minneapolis for
example, 85 percent of low-income houses are in a few neighborhoods, often at
the behest of community advocates. The problem is that concentrating low-income
public housing also concentrates poor people away from opportunity and
resources. It adds to concentrated poverty.
By contrast, Montgomery County, outside Washington, DC,
adopted a mixed-income housing plan. Their plan requires that 15 percent of new
housing has to be below market rate and half of those need to be public housing.
They thus distribute public housing throughout the community rather than
concentrating it in a few neighborhoods. And the public housing is not some
cheaply built high rise, but normal commercial units that have been taken off
the market. It's a very popular plan that deserves consideration elsewhere.
By regionalism I'm not suggesting a dispersal strategy, but I
am suggesting a comprehensive strategy. We need a strategy that looks at what's
going on in the region and that links people of color with opportunities. This
can be done through new transportation lines. It can be done by bringing some
jobs and businesses to the community itself. But we also have to have the option
of having people move to where those opportunities currently exist outside of
the inner cities.
I know there is real concern about maintaining strong
communities of color, but can we do this if they are communities of concentrated
poverty?
Q: Why do you think many activists are reluctant to take on
regional issues?
A: Many urban social activists are legitimately concerned that
regionalism will weaken the political and cultural ties of minority communities
that are centered in the cities.
Certainly this is a real issue. But the answer is not to avoid
participation in regional discussions, but to participate in such a way that we
protect those concerns. With or without us, regional development is occurring
and undermining our communities. The corporations, developers, and suburban
whites who drive this regional development are not likely to put racial issues
on the table. If we don't come to the table, wealthy and middle class whites
will simply continue to set the regional agenda according to their own
interests, and we will simply suffer the consequences.
Q: What organizing opportunities does regionalism present?
A: The core issues are really jobs, housing, and education.
But they are also the hardest issues to get political unity on, given the class
and racial differentiation of the metropolitan populations. So, unless you
already have significant political clout, I suggest you start with easier issues
like tax base revenue sharing, transportation, and infrastructure sharing.
These issues appear to be relatively race neutral, but can
nonetheless be quite beneficial to people of color. For example, some years ago
in Portland, concerns about slowing growth, saving the spotted owl, and
maintaining farmland led to an agreement to create an urban growth boundary.
Consequently, the resources that would have sprawled out started going back in.
Land and housing values in Portland started soaring, including those of the
black and Latino communities. In fact, Portland's black community is
accumulating wealth at a faster rate than any other black community in the
country. A non-racial regional decision to create an urban boundary line had
positive impact on racial minorities. There are still issues but the
environmental community in Portland has started to focus on racial justice
issues.
In Detroit, there is a growing coalition between those who
want to save farms and those that want to save the cities. And throughout the
country, faith-based organizations are successfully taking up this issue.
Unfortunately, the civil rights community is not present.
Q: Where do you think regionalism fits in a racial justice
agenda? How important is it?
A: I believe that fighting for regional resources and
participating in regional planning are crucial to a successful racial justice
agenda. Currently, regionalism is aggravating racial inequality and injustice.
People from Al Gore to big corporations to your county boards of supervisor to
your regional transit boards make regional decisions every day, and people of
color are basically absent from these decisions.
I think that bringing issues of race into regionalism is crucial to a progressive agenda that can cut away at racialized concentrated poverty and inequities in education. In fact, I believe bringing racial justice awareness to regionalism is the single most important civil rights task facing us today.
This article is reprinted from the Fall, 1999 issue of ColorLines, a national magazine of race, culture and action. Subscriptions are $16 per year. Visit their website at www.colorlines.com. john powell (he doesn’t capitalize his name) can be contacted at the Institute on Race and Poverty, 415 Law Center, 229 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (612-625-8071).
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