Showing posts with label redlining. Show all posts
Showing posts with label redlining. Show all posts

Friday, September 25, 2020

Strong Towns: Redlining in Kansas City: What local reparations might look like.

The actual title of the article is "The Local Case for Reparations," which Lauren Fisher explains. It's about reparations for redlining, in case you're wondering.

 

On Monday, I was wringing my hands about how our morning article would go over. Within it, Chuck discusses a local strategy for investing in disinvested neighborhoods using opportunities and incentives that are often extended to large investors. Instead of wasting resources on big businesses that will take more than they give to a city, this approach would immediately, measurably uplift entire communities. Pretty much normal Strong Towns stuff. So why was I so nervous about it? The title is “The Local Case for Reparations.” I was worried about the reactions we’d receive. This piece is challenging to people with all kinds of views on reparations for slavery. It changed the way I think about the issue. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Previously:


“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.”

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Friday, July 24, 2020

Why 'destroying the suburbs' should be a Republican idea -- also, the Growth Ponzi Scheme revisited.


Exhibit 456-90-2020 in our series, "Nothing In America Makes Sense."

'Destroying the suburbs' should be a Republican idea, by Bonnie Kristian (The Week)

The Democrats, says President Trump, are going to destroy the suburbs ... so what, exactly, does destroying the suburbs entail?

Think: zoning.

Taken at face value, this is a bizarre policy choice for the Republican Party, both in its pre-2016 social conservatism and free-marketism and in its post-2016 Trumpian populism. Upzoning — allowing construction of buildings with more units or more nonresidential units than was previously permitted in a given area — seems like it should fit the GOP agenda.

It's a move toward greater economic freedom and stronger property rights. It can lower housing prices and make homeownership more accessible, especially for young couples who struggle to afford both home and kids. (A brief dig through the archives of the conservative Heritage Foundation turns up years of praise for Houston's unusual lack of zoning restrictions on exactly these grounds, and The American Conservative regularly publishes arguments for upzoning, including advocacy for doing away with single-family zoning altogether.) Also, having a granny flat means you might actually live with your granny, who can pass along familial traditions and help with childcare, a very attractive option amid pandemic. Surely this is the kind of pro-family, even pro-natalist policy Republicans ought to like. Why is Trump railing against it?

Because polls show the suburbs losing interest in Trump.

In those remarks and an even shorter comment on the subject three days prior, Trump singled out an Obama-era rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), which Biden supports and which Trump promised to repeal. That repeal arrived Thursday. The adfarm-near-me/">ministration characterizes it as a strike for freedom, federalism, and family. It is none of those things.

AFFH didn't "force" municipalities to do anything, as some conservatives have alleged. It mainly set conditions on some federal housing and transportation subsidies. (Suburbia is very subsidy-dependent.) It told local governments that to receive cash from Washington, they'd have to meet certain requirements, most notably ending single-family zoning. But single-family zoning isn't the creature of local self-governance Trump suggests. It originated significantly because of a previous set of conditions for different federal subsidies — subsidies, in fact, introduced by the archetypical Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministration: the New Deal-era White House of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We've been talking about suburban subsidies for as long as the NA Confidential blog has existed. Take it away, Charles Marohn.

"[S]ingle-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt adfarm-near-me/">ministration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance," explains Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, a new urbanism advocacy organization. "So, [AFFH said,] suburban governments, you won't get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then," he continues. "And we oppose this today because we are conservatives?"

It makes no sense.

Ah, but there's even more to it.

In addition to being heavily subsidized in both construction and ongoing maintenance, much of suburbia was shaped by 20th-century housing and highway policies that implicitly or, sometimes, explicitly functioned to segregate American homes. "White flight" was not merely an organic movement of private prejudice and social fashion. It was in no small part engineered by federal policies, as Richard Rothstein has meticulously documented in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

"To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford," Rothstein writes. Some of this was classism, he notes, but some of it was done with "open racial intent."

This, might we suggest, is the underlying reason for the suburb hubbub.

The Obama adfarm-near-me/">ministration's AFFH rule focused on the residue of that deliberate segregation, and Trump's critique of it hasn't untangled the issue of federal manipulation of local policies from the issue of racist zoning. That makes it plausible to see his talk of single-family zoning as the bastion of suburban integrity as implicitly part of an older tradition of state-enforced racism. It's not unreasonable to wonder if being "invaded by negroes" is what Trump means when he deplores watching a "beautiful suburb ... go to hell."

If you have not previously read Marohn's articles about the Growth Ponzi Scheme, as published at Strong Towns, then now is the ideal time.

design":"list","headerText":"Featured","textSize":"medium","pageSize":10,"imageAspectRatio":"1.7777777777777777","columnWidth":270,"gutter":60,"listImageSize":20,"listImageAlignment":"left","slidesPerRow":3,"textAlignment":"left","showTitle":true,"showThumbnail":true,"showExcerpt":true,"showReadMoreLink":false,"showPrice":true,"productQuickViewEnabled":false,"showPastOrUpcomingEvents":"Upcoming","metadataPosition":"below-content","primaryMetadata":"none","secondaryMetadata":"none","filter":{"tag":"Growth ponzi scheme series"},"autoCrop":true,"lightbox":false,"mixedContent":true,"blockId":"bf7f457bb189d1fb0cb1"}" data-block-type="55" id="block-yui_3_17_2_4_1449530555242_18381" style="background-color: white; box-shadow: rgba(128, 128, 128, 0) 0px 0px 0px 1px inset; clear: both; font-family: "Titillium Web"; font-size: 15px; height: auto; outline: none; padding: 17px; position: relative; transition: box-shadow 0.2s ease-in-out 0s;">
design-list summary-block-setting-design-list-thumbnail-left summary-block-setting-metadata-position-below-content summary-block-setting-primary-metadata-none summary-block-setting-secondary-metadata-none summary-block-setting-show-thumbnail summary-block-setting-show-title summary-block-setting-show-price summary-block-setting-show-excerpt sqs-gallery-design-list " style="box-sizing: border-box;">
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

"Russell: What is the Right to Remain?": Root Cause Research Center's series is about Louisville, but it might as well be addressing New Albany, too.


Because: Jeff Gahan didn't pull his public housing putsch idea from the passive ether. He copied it from the progressive-pretend playbook of his political idol, Greg Fischer (current backer of Mike Bloomberg, which pretty much says it all about Fischer's enduring cluelessness).

Sound familiar, nominal Democrats of New Albany?: "How hiding poverty and displacement is a violent strategy to become a competitive city."

Earlier tonight I read the first three installments in the Root Cause Research Center's series about Louisville's Russell neighborhood. I recommend you do the same -- and don't forget this coming event.

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."


I know, I know; a day at Recbar 812 is so much more fun. But these topics are reality, and it you're serious about getting to the heart of the matter, it might just require deeper understanding than comic book movies and Facebook memes.

---

Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 1
“African Americans experience homeownership in ways that rarely produce the financial benefits typically enjoyed by middle-class white Americans... The real estate market is so structured by race that Black families will never come out ahead." - Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor from Race For Profit

Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 2
Louisville wins at the expense of vulnerable black communities: How hiding poverty and displacement is a violent strategy to become a competitive city.

Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 3
Housing, neoliberalism, and financialization: What REALLY happens when the private sector controls public assets.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Thursday, February 13, 2020

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."

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Squalor-lining? After all, AT&T also doesn't landscape.


A reader asks: "Hmmm - why am I thinking about the central residential core of New Albany?"

AT&T hit with second complaint of discrimination against low-income neighborhoods, by Harper Neidig (The Hill)

A prominent civil rights attorney is accusing AT&T of discriminating against low-income minority communities within Detroit in a complaint filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Monday ...

... The Monday complaint alleges that AT&T is responsible for a “pattern of long-term, systematic failure to invest in the infrastructure required to provide equitable, mainstream Internet access to residents of the central city (compared to the suburbs) and to lower-income city neighborhoods.”

Asked for comment, an AT&T spokesman referred to a statement the company put out in response to the August complaint.

“We do not redline,” Joan Marsh, AT&T’s chief regulatory and external affairs officer, said in the statement. “Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is unparalleled. Our investment decisions are based on the cost of deployment and demand for our services and are of course fully compliant with the requirements of the Communications Act. We will vigorously defend the complaint filed today.”

We'll continue wondering why AT&T is such a slovenly big-biz presence downtown.
Why does City Hall tolerate AT&T's poorly landscaped corporate indifference opposite Breakwind at 510 E. Spring Street?

 ... I took a few snaps of the rubble in front of AT&T -- the scrawny bushes, tree stumps, exposed black plastic, rusty faded signs, random fence poles ... and in back, there are buckets of cigarette butts contributed by the women at St. Elizabeth fleeing their smoke-free campus, and in summer, lots of shimmering hot asphalt on all sides.

It's something to be proud of, AT&T. It makes the city look so much better. When I become dictator, remind me to nationalize the utility monopolies -- and can someone find me a nice wall for roll call?

Maybe ordinance enforcement doesn't apply to corporate monoliths?

(thanks B)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Monday, April 24, 2017

There goes the hood. Now I'm getting all nostalgic for redlining.

1117 E. Spring in red. 

How could the neighborhood association allow this to happen? Wait -- I forgot. City Hall owns the neighborhood association.

Look, just give me that cool million Doug promised, and we'll leave. It might be just enough to buy a house in Northampton MA -- or 25 slumlord properties in NA.
Posted by at 3 comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, February 25, 2017

“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.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Saturday, November 01, 2014

"Property values weren’t magically determined by some invisible hand of the market, but by a concerted effort of people and policy to enforce racial segregation."


It's gotten to the point that when I see Joe Dunman's name on the IL mailing, I just click through to read whatever he's written, irrespective of the topic.

Dunman's current piece is a must read.

Joe Dunman: During white flight, lack of racial diversity was by design (Insider Louisville)

... The Bon Air area was a hit. People, including my grandparents with my infant father in tow, flocked in droves. More than 2,000 affordable homes were filled with upwardly mobile young families almost overnight. Between 1953 and 1960, the population boomed to 12,000 residents packed into just over 2 square miles.

Almost every single one of those residents was white — 99.9 percent, in fact. This wasn’t some accident of demography, though. The complete lack of racial diversity was by design — an outcome guaranteed by official and private housing policies in force at the time.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)