The Root Cause Research Center and Actor's Theatre are bringing Ananya Roy to speak on "Housing Justice: Racial Banishment & a Right to the City."

First, the event. Then we'll define a few terms. The Root Cause Research Center is partnering with Actor's Theatre of Louisville to launch "Root Cause Radical Thinkers: A Movement Science Speaker Series."

On Saturday, March 7 at 10:45 a.m., Ananya Roy will be speaking about Housing Justice: Racial Banishment & a Right to the City. Roy's talk at Actor's Theatre is free of charge but you must reserve a place because seating is limited. Go here to do so.

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which promotes research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and and seeks to build power to make social change. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Master’s in City Planning (1994) and Ph.D. in Urban Planning (1999).

Ananya’s research and scholarship has a determined focus on poverty and inequality. Her work has focused on urban transformations and land grabs in the global South as well as on global capital and predatory financialization.

Going a bit deeper ...

Three research and policy priorities are central to Ananya’s current commitments. First, she leads a National Science Foundation funded research network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities. Building a shared terrain of scholarship across universities and movements, this network is concerned with advancing ideas, practices, programs, and policies of housing justice in Los Angeles as well as in other cities of the world. Second, Ananya’s research is concerned with “racial banishment,” the pushing out of working-class communities of color from urban cores to the far peripheries of metropolitan regions. In collaboration with housing justice lawyers and movements in Los Angeles, she studies the role of municipal ordinances in such processes of banishment. Third, since 2017, she has been actively involved in scholarship about sanctuary cities and cities of refuge. As evident in her recent article, The City in the Age of Trumpism: From Sanctuary to Abolition (Environment and Planning D), she seeks to expand practices of welcome and hospitality in order to take account of the long histories of settler-colonialism, imperialism, and slavery.

Here's a snippet about the Root Cause Research Center.

We believe that the people most impacted by an issue are best positioned to discover the root causes and solutions of that issue. They are the ones with the firsthand experience, social context, insights, and networks that are necessary to fully unearth the whole story behind a deep-rooted problem.

The Root Cause Research Center works alongside and trains community members to investigate and report community concerns. We bring together impacted community members and train them in community organizing, research, and design--all to help them tell their own data stories to the public, to policymakers, and to other connected stakeholders. We partner with local grassroots leaders to launch Community-Based Participatory Research projects. We also design inventive and interactive visuals that break down complex information for policy change.

The Root Cause Research Center is a policy-focused, grassroots-led institution grounded in Data Equity, Movement Science, and Abolitionist Planning (see Definitions below). We are actively building a new system in the American South that provides an alternative to the traditionally hierarchical and classist model of research. We lean into transformative justice by creating community-based alternatives to dehumanizing and inaccessible research institutions that use impacted community members as test subjects rather than co-investigators.

And a video.

New Albanians with memories of a time before taco walks will recall the Root Cause Research Center's co-investigator Joshua Poe, who lived here in New Albany a decade ago. Here's a forgotten piece he wrote in 2010 for the long dormant New Albany Bicycling Coalition blog. It actually was reprinted at Broken Sidewalk.

From contributor and New Albany resident Joshua Poe: "Observations about biking from New Albany to Louisville."

And, a few more links about Poe's work.

Joshua Poe explains how those "public input" meetings are kept meaningless to maintain pre-determined outcomes.

“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

Joshua Poe explains how those "public input" meetings are kept meaningless to maintain pre-determined outcomes.

We've spoken often about public input meetings that actually aren't, especially the ones pertaining to development and redevelopment projects, and the way city officials -- including our own Team Gahan, but by no means restricted to New Albany's ruling elite -- stage manage the process to give the illusion of meaningfulness.

Before allowing Joshua Poe to explain how this process of public input meeting deception really works, a bit from 2013 in which our Jeff Gillenwater discusses Poe and his work.

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Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

Friend and former neighbor Josh Poe is the sort of engaged and educated person who regularly challenges and improves upon my thinking; in short, the sort New Albany still tends to lose too often.

He continues the good work here, reminding that certain community outcomes are the direct result of careful planning rather than random market occurrences, often for the most egregious of reasons. If you don't think it still happens and happens here, I invite you to check out the school district mapping in western New Albany sometime.

A city divided: Louisville’s urban landscape rooted in segregation, by Joshua Poe, LEO

Author and journalist George R. Leighton visited Louisville during the mid 1930s, after which he opined in Harper’s Magazine that the River City was a place that paid great “attention to food and drink, but for the rest, let well enough alone.”

Eight decades later, the city’s dining scene continues to thrive while many of the same problems that long ago plagued Louisville’s urban landscape persist — namely, the physical barriers that isolate west Louisville, dividing this city by race and class.

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Yesterday on Twitter, Poe explained "How to control community input, manage optics & corral expectations in public meetings for redevelopment efforts."

1) Encourage participants to focus only on “positivity & solutions.” So important to prevent any accountability. Dismiss dissenters as “playing the blame game.”

2) Divide participants into groups & ask them to list the “problems in their community.”

3) Now ask them what developers can do about those problems.

4) Now ask them how the public sector can help.

5) Overuse the words “equitable” “responsible” “inclusive” and “empower.”

6) Invite local government & NGOs to watch over the meeting. Make sure people feel like they’re looking over they’re shoulders at all times, b/c they are.

7) Invite people from the community to help lead the discussion to establish trust.

8) Wrap up - Praise yourself for your efforts toward inclusion. You can now justify all public spending on your private projects as being “based on community input” & at the request of “the community.” No need for follow-up meeting but promise one anyway.

9) Draft “public/private partnership” proposal where developer receives land giveaways & $ incentives for revitalization along w/ increased police budget for project’s security force (public safety). Announce that proposal is response to what community asked for.

Chatting on Fb about the street grid in NA: "The push to start reclaiming some of our streets and spaces for users and uses other than cars isn't a radical change."

My friend and colleague Jeff Gillenwater posted the following to New Albany Indiana, a Facebook group that functions somewhat like the discussion groups of old. Italics are the omniscient narrator (that's Roger), with Jeff's comments in normal font. He begins by explaining a photo we use often at NAC.

This overhead view of Downtown New Albany was created several years ago by Josh Poe, then an urban planning graduate student and New Albany resident. Everything in red is off-street automobile parking. With the exception of the parking garage on the corner of State and Market, it's all surface parking (and, of course, doesn't include all the on-street parking that's readily available.) Given how much more densely developed the city used to be, commercial buildings and/or houses were torn down in most cases to create those parking lots. The next time someone tries to tell you New Albany hasn't done enough to accommodate cars, feel free to share. The push to start reclaiming some of our streets and spaces for users and uses other than cars isn't a radical change. It's a response to and corrective for the past few decades of radical change that has already happened.

Also worth noting, here's what was demolished to create the parking lot that eventually became Bicentennial Park.

And the bank and mostly parking next door.

For good measure, Jeff included parking documentation:

Here is a PDF showing a few hundred parking spots in downtown New Albany; publicly owned and free after 5 pm and on weekends.

Downtown New Albany Public Parking Guide

It seemed to one reader that such comments about auto-centrism were designed to discourage auto use downtown, thus defeating the purpose of revitalization by implementing a "European model" to serve the needs of the few, not the many.

People very invested in defending automobile centric culture are, whether they realize it or not or mean to or not, are speaking from a position of significant privilege. Though New Albany, like a lot of other older U.S. cities, was initially designed for multimodal street usage, most of our infrastructure spending has been aimed squarely at automobiles at the expense of other forms of travel for the past few decades. That's actually a short time in our overall history, but has been true for just long enough now that people don't remember it being any other way. Thus, they tend to see calls for more equity between various forms of transportation and any talk of curtailing automobile dominance as demonizing cars and car drivers. What the posts actually do is point out that it's not always been that way. If we could decide to change it fifty or sixty years ago, we can decide to change it now. Realizing what we've given up, what we've lost and are still losing in the process of converting to automobile dominance, is a first step in deciding to pursue change.

As for the "European model" in a pejorative sense ...

New Albany was built by European immigrants on a European model. That's how it was designed to properly function (and functioned well, for 150 or more years. Over and over again for years people have provided links to research, case studies, and successful approaches that have pointed directly to greater overall public good via what you call a European model. That some folks simply choose to not acknowledge that doesn't make the people sharing that information a narrow interest group. If you can show how automobile centric models have proven to be better for us in terms of fiscal responsibility, public health, and environmental wellbeing, I'm all ears (or eyes, as relevant).

Another reader asked whether it is possible to have a vibrant urban area without "cheap" parking on abundant surface lots. Parking garages like the one we used in Chicago last week weren't mentioned.

One of the more interesting aspects of the "hard to park" scenario has to do with perception. People often walk farther from their parking spots and back to their cars at WalMart than they do downtown, but will still insist that WalMart has close-in parking and downtown doesn't. Try to suggest that the environment in which people are asked to walk has something to do with it, though, and ...

Jeff elaborated.

It really is a trip how quickly downtown parking perceptions changed. When my mom got married, she moved from the west end of New Albany... all the way to Sellersburg. LOL. When I was a kid, we still came to downtown New Albany all the time. In the 70s and early 80s, a lot of the older stores were still here. We never expected, even at that late date, being able to park directly in front of a place most of the time. I mean, you might get lucky and something would open up along the way, but we mostly just went straight to the parking garage (formerly located next to what's now Big Four Burgers) and assumed we'd have to walk a few blocks to the places we were going. Now, to hear some folks talk about it, parking on Bank Street to go to a place on Pearl is some sort of inordinate hardship. Oddly enough, a lot of those same people don't think twice about parking in the middle of the Meijer parking lot and walking quite a bit farther to the department they actually need, to the checkout counter, and then back to the car. It might have something to do with the environment in which the walk is occurring.

I mentioned out having just returned from Chicago, where people regularly pay outlandish prices to park downtown. For the record, we parked the car in a garage for four days ($122) and bought two three-day CTA transit passes for $20 each. One reader rightfully pointed to the absence of these transit options in New Albany.

At one point in their respective histories, the Southern Indiana/Louisville metro area rivaled Chicago in transit development. It's one of the things that gives me a chuckle when some folks refer to New Albany's automobile-centered heritage. It just ain't so.

Jeff posted these three explanatory links.

Passenger Rail The Way It Used To Be

Louisville’s Incredible Elevated Rapid Transit Trains

JEFFERSONVILLE/NEW ALBANY TRANSIT HISTORY

The point in sharing examples from other places and comparative histories isn't to say that those places are the same or should be. More than anything, the idea is that places can change themselves and what they emphasize or value and have many times over, New Albany included. Per the original Chicago reference about parking, people pay a lot to park in Chicago because (Rahm's privatization scheme aside for a moment) they think it's worth it to be there. That's a very scalable concept. Funny aside: I deal with Chicagoans pretty regularly now at work, including getting them parked sometimes. When I tell them all-day parking is $6, they laugh at me like I told them a really good joke.

In advocating two-way streets and other components of urban street grid reform, we've always referenced research and experience. We've pointed to successful reforms in other cities, and not just in Europe. I've come to expect a specific rebuttal, which constitutes a form of exceptionalism: "But New Albany is different. Biology and gravity might work the same here, but not street grids."

For a lot of Americans, merely pointing out that a concept came from elsewhere is the equivalent of saying it's obviously wrong. Beyond that, it's often a matter of insisting that WE have always been one way and THEY have always been another. Like "scalable", that applies to a lot more than parking and cars, too. In all seriousness, privilege and the language and power dynamics of privilege are always a big part of conversations around cars and other street users. You can swap out the "we" and " they" parts and a lot the arguments are so similar to other social issues that involve a majority addressing a minority that they're nearly interchangeable on a linguistic level.

Too much information? 

Unfortunately, no one ever said learning was easy. Ten years ago, I understood very little of this. Now I understand more, and if a slow learner like me can do it -- so can anyone. 

“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

The City of Louisville press release of February 14 includes a link to the redlining map.

City begins community conversation to combat redlining

 ... Local urban planner Joshua Poe has developed the interactive story map entitled “Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate.” This tool illustrates the ways that redlining has affected housing development, disinvestment and lending patterns in Louisville since the 1930s. By layering data sets such as vacant properties, building permits and property values, the map shows how the intentional redlining that was devised in the 1930s has had consequences that are evident still today.

Examples of conventional redlining that still exists today include refusal to provide delivery in certain areas, business loan denials regardless of credit-worthiness and refusal to write property insurance policies or dropping property owners from insurance coverage altogether.

Other forms of redlining, referred to as reverse redlining, also exist. Examples of reverse redlining include offering services low-income residents at higher prices, higher interest rates and excessive service fees or inferior products. This example may come in forms such as payday loans, cash advances, and expedited tax returns.

This story made it all the way to CityLab, but let it be duly noted that former New Albanian resident Poe's work on this topic goes back many years, as Jeff Gillenwater noted in this space in 2013.

Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

Friend and former neighbor Josh Poe is the sort of engaged and educated person who regularly challenges and improves upon my thinking; in short, the sort New Albany still tends to lose too often. He continues the good work here, reminding that certain community outcomes are the direct result of careful planning rather than random market occurrences, often for the most egregious of reasons. If you don't think it still happens and happens here, I invite you to check out the school district mapping in western New Albany sometime.

It's wonderful to see Josh's efforts bearing fruit. Will Greg Fischer's hyperbole translate into action? That's always the biggest question.

Louisville Confronts Its Redlining Past and Present, by Brentin Mock (CityLab)

A new online mapping project is aimed at dismantling the Kentucky city’s grim legacy of racial segregation.

 ... “When I started the research, I hoped that it would be used at the grassroots level, and I also hoped it would be used by planners,” says Joshua Poe, the urban planner who developed the project. “It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

On the website, users interact with a city map from 1937 that shows how the city was carved up for real estate investment purposes. Poe discovered a trove of documents in D.C.’s National Archives that show how lenders used race, class, and the number of immigrant families residing in an area to determine its value. Users can view these documents from the maps and also compare the city’s racial and class population distribution between 1937 and 2010.

After Poe: More about "Little White Houses."

Readers may have missed an important comment by the Bookseller on Bluegill's posting last week: Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

For those interested in this topic, and for Josh, look for this upcoming book: Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, by Dianne Harris, University Of Minnesota Press, releasing Feb. 1.

Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

Friend and former neighbor Josh Poe is the sort of engaged and educated person who regularly challenges and improves upon my thinking; in short, the sort New Albany still tends to lose too often.

He continues the good work here, reminding that certain community outcomes are the direct result of careful planning rather than random market occurrences, often for the most egregious of reasons. If you don't think it still happens and happens here, I invite you to check out the school district mapping in western New Albany sometime.

A city divided: Louisville’s urban landscape rooted in segregation, by Joshua Poe, LEO

Author and journalist George R. Leighton visited Louisville during the mid 1930s, after which he opined in Harper’s Magazine that the River City was a place that paid great “attention to food and drink, but for the rest, let well enough alone.”

Eight decades later, the city’s dining scene continues to thrive while many of the same problems that long ago plagued Louisville’s urban landscape persist — namely, the physical barriers that isolate west Louisville, dividing this city by race and class.

Lunch & Learn at the Carnegie Center, 10/19/10: "Why Stormwater Matters & What Can We Do."

From the Carnegie Center for Art & History.

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Join us Tues. October 19, from 12-1 pm for our next Lunch & Learn program, "Why Stormwater Matters & What Can We Do" with Joshua Poe, The Center for Environmental Policy and Management.

Joshua Poe, from the Center for Environmental Policy and Management, will discuss the effects of stormwater and what we each can do to help calm the floods. He will also share alternative strategies for stormwater management and discuss how sustainable stormwater management could be used as a redevelopment effort through beautification, traffic calming, creating greenspace, encouraging walkability and cycling, and fostering economic development.

This event is free but registration is required. You may call 812-944-7336 to register or click HERE to email your registration to Public Relations Associate Delesha Thomas (please include your name, telephone number, and the names of any additional people you are registering). You are welcome to bring a brown bag lunch; drinks are provided. Sponsored by the Carnegie Center, Inc.

Thank you and we hope to see you Tuesday!