Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Carl Anthony
Carl Anthony is the director of the Sustainable Metropolitan Initiative program at the Ford Foundation, which has provided grants for the Commonweal's Fair Growth project. He is the former president of Earth Island Institute and founder and former executive director of the Urban Habitat program in Berkeley, California. And he played a leading role in assembling financial resources for equitable development in the Bay Area.
Interview
Steve Lerner (SDL): How does your work fit in with efforts to contain sprawl and de-concentrate poverty? What has Urban Habitat been doing in this area?
Carl Anthony (CA): The Urban Habitat program is 11 years old. The mission is to build multi-cultural urban environmental leadership for sustainable communities in the San Francisco metropolitan Bay Area.
We are an environmental justice organization in the sense that our roots are deeply in both the environmental movement as well as the activism that sprung up around environmental justice over the last decade.
For the first eight years of its existence, Urban Habitat was part of Earth Island Institute. I have worn several hats as being president of Earth Island Institute and founder and executive director of the Urban Habitat Program. Urban Habitat became independent in 1998. One of the reasons we did that was that over a period of time we have seen the connections between social justice and environmental issues and systematically followed it.
All the major environmental issues that people are concerned about are also social justice issues. To mention some obvious ones, if you look at practices that generate carbon dioxide emissions and who it is that is riding around in the SUVs, it is not the people in India who ride around on bicycles. So if you want to establish protocols that reduce or eliminate carbon dioxide emissions, you inevitably run up against questions of social justice.
In our view the environmental movement, at least a segment of it, has to be really re-framed, because when you look at issues of poverty, or population, or even endangered species, all these issues have been developed as if the natural world is really separate from the social, political and cultural world. The way we see it, communities of color in the United State, and in particular African-American communities, are right at the intersection of this challenge, because we don't benefit from the growth and we don't benefit from environmental protection. We lose everywhere. Our communities end up being the place where all the toxic waste dumps and the garbage are put.
People have been asking us to recycle bottles and cans and newspapers. But we are throwing away streets and roads, school houses, and fire houses. Do you realize that a thousand people a month are leaving Baltimore? There are 40,000 vacant houses in Cleveland and Chicago. This is a natural resource issue. All the resources that have been accumulated from mining and other industrial practices are now embodied in the inner-cities that have been developed over the last 100 to 200 years. And they are being abandoned and the populations that are living there are also being abandoned.
So, from our point of view, there is a strong nexus between traditional environmental issues just as conservation, protection, and restoration and the quest for social equity and social justice in a proactive way instead of just a reactive way.
SDL: Angela Blackwell at PolicyLink spoke about her experience with white flight in the 1950s. Do you see bigotry as a central moving force behind sprawl? There have been a lot of things said about what caused sprawl ranging from the investment in the national highway system to the GI Bill, to the mortgage deduction. What role did white flight play in driving sprawl and causing the tax base in the cities to shrink?
CA: john powell defines suburban sprawl as "what white folks do when they want to get away from black people." I think there is a lot to that. I think there is a certain element of bigotry [driving sprawl] but I also think there are other dimensions to it. There is a huge amount of support for teaching people that you can't have a good life if you are surrounded by black people.
SDL: Or is it if you are surrounded by poor people?
CA: Black people.
SDL: Who says this?
CA: The whole country [says it]... everywhere. It is the whole history of the country. If you separate the question of bigotry from people having the good life... People say: "Hey, I want to send my kids to a decent school. It is not that I am against black people, I just want to send my kids to a good school." So I think there is a mixture of self interest that is not based upon bigotry together with an emotional and psychological challenge. To me it is not really that difficult. When you have a country where you can convince people that their sex life will be better if they drink Pepsi Cola or buy a certain vehicle, then they ought to be able to convince people that social and cultural diversity is really good for them. I don't see the same kind of creativity going into this [kind of advertising message] that you see going into commercials for the Superbowl. I think some attention should be paid to what it would actually take to create a consciousness of social and racial diversity as a positive thing. And, as of yet, we have not as a society deemed that important enough to do.
SDL: Did you have white flight experiences similar to Angela's growing up?
CA: Yes.
SDL: So you think this is a widespread phenomenon?
CA: Yes. The caveat I would offer is that if there were no federal highway defense funds, if there were no mortgage assistance programs, if there were not an income tax write off on the mortgage interest, if there were not the fire service [extended to the suburbs], and trees chopped down to build new houses, if there were not all these public initiatives that made it economically viable for the private developer to build the sprawl in the first place, then there would have been no place for people to run [to the suburbs]. So you could argue that they were driven to build all these things to get away from black people but I think there is also a piece of federal policy that neatly fits into this.
SDL: Do you sense a re-segregation of America along race and class lines? A large percentage of low-income, minority Americans live in the inner city. There seems to have been an increase in the ghettoization of minorities. On the other hand there is evidence to the contrary. What does seem clear is that we are creating these economic ghettos at different levels with economically stratified subdivisions each housing a quite specific income group. Are we becoming more divided?
CA: I was hoping you would ask are we coming more divided or more together. The answer is yes... in other words both. There is no question in my mind that society is becoming more segregated racially.
SDL: What evidence do you have of that? Is it just what you see?
CA: It is what I see but it is also supported by books like American Apartheid.
SDL: That is a relatively old book.
CA: Then look at The New American Ghetto that came out last year. And just ask yourself who the hell would live in Camden, New Jersey if they had a choice or Detroit. What he did was take a photograph of a block in 1974 and then went back in 1979 and the back in 1985, same block, same position. If you look at any of these places...East Oakland is a paradise compared with these places. And I don't know who you think is living there. It is certainly not the American Dream. There is a spiral that is unmistakably bad.
SDL: Do you think we are becoming more economically divided?
CA: Well, I think there is the counter evidence. Look at Oprah Winfry or Michael Jordan or Collin Powell, for God's sake. In Time magazine they are saying that he is the next president. There is a lot of that kind of evidence.
SDL: That doesn't speak to where people live.
CA: I was talking to Chester Hartman about this, the author of Poverty and Race: Is Integration Possible? I think it is the wrong question. I think we have been integrated before the founding of the country. The whole country was built on the plantation system so there has always been this dynamic interplay. And some of the manifestations that are obvious to me are that if you go to some of these suburban communities and you see these [white] kids with their pants way down at the crotch and the baseball hat sideways and they have the same gait as the people who live in the inner city, these white kids come home and give each other the high five and say: "You my main nigger." So there is this other dynamic that has to do with social transference. You see white people with dreads.
SDL: So the cultural mixing is happening. But if we look at the types of communities that are being replicated around the country we seem to have settled on this model of economically segregated communities. And because of the wealth gap, if all the rich live over in the fast-growing suburbs, then number of African Americans living there is going to be small.
CA: I don't think it is accurate to try to reduce the racial issues to class. I think they are overlapping but they aren't the same.
SDL: What tools are available to generate investment in poor communities without causing dislocation of the poor? Have you seen effective initiatives that have figure out how to bring economic activity into these devastated neighborhoods without displacing the local population?
CA: One of the biggest issues we are facing in the Bay is the value of land is skyrocketing. We are in the preliminary stages of trying to get at a comprehensive approach to developing land trusts so that people can get ahold of the land.
SDL: In the paper today is a story that they are putting half a million dollars into this land trust. Fannie Mae is buying the properties and fixing them up and then leasing them.
CA: I worked on a project a number of years ago, just north of University Avenue, where the city of Berkley developed an equity sharing program. If a person of moderate income could accumulate 20 percent of the down payment for a house, then the city would enter into a partnership. Let's say the house was selling for $200,000, the down payment would be $40,000. So if the person could come up with $5,000 the city would come up with $35,000. Then as the property appreciated, say it went up by 50 percent, the family who came up with 20 percent of the down payment would get a proportionate share of the appreciated value and the city would keep the building for Berkeley housing.
We have also been working with the Bay Area Council on the Community Investment on raising capital for the 46 neighborhoods in the Bay Area that have concentrated poverty. We have been working with them to try to come up with mechanisms that will attract capital but will also have material benefits for the people who live in those communities without displacing them. So we have a set of criteria and we are trying to get those built into term sheets so that as the investments are made there are legally binding agreements about how the money is spent to make jobs available, to increase wealth, build in low-income neighborhoods, and promote social services such as child care. This is basically a double bottom line.
SDL: Do you have to build the affordable housing before you invite investors into the community?
CA: Not just affordable housing but also a strong community control of the process. That is what our struggle is about right now. We don't want to say: "Go Away." On the other hand we are mindful of the fact that if we don't have community control [over development] in place, then you are basically inviting disaster.
SDL: This is political dynamite. It is one thing to talk about trying to control investment in a poor community. There are those who would argue that if you buy a property you should be able to do whatever you want with it. But the other side of this is the question of fair share affordable housing and whether or not large developments should be required to include a small percentage of affordable as is the practice in Montgomery County, Maryland. Should inclusionary zoning be mandated? Should we be in the business of telling local communities they must build affordable housing?
CA: The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes. It will be a real fight but the question is: do these communities [suburbs that practice exclusionary zoning] get any federal resources? Do they get freeways, sewers, and schools? If they get money from the federal or state government, we believe that under equal protection of the law they cannot then turn around and say: "We don't want to deal with our fair share of responsibilities for the populations that are being effected by this." When you have a local jurisdiction making decisions about its land use it then can have a negative effect on a population that has no say in those decisions. You then have what I call a 21st century version of state's rights.
One dimension of this is the civil rights aspect of it. All of us who live in metropolitan regions are growing increasingly interdependent. You cannot build a boundary around a jurisdiction and say that it is sacrosanct. Air crosses the boundary as does traffic, jobs, and taxes. So, in effect, we have to own up to the fact that we are interdependent. That doesn't mean that local jurisdictions must give up their police powers or land use powers. But the state provides the framework in which the [housing] market must operate. From a planning perspective this is no different than demanding that people have inside toilets. You could argue that people should be able to drink any kind of water they want if it is not poisonous. So I don't buy the argument that somehow these mandates are compromising people's freedom.
SDL: Does this logically lead to banning certain exclusionary zoning techniques? As it is now, a lot of fast-growing, affluent suburbs are requiring large lot sizes and are prohibiting the construction of multi-family houses in order to ensure that no low-income people can afford to live in their community. Are you saying that these kinds of local decisions about zoning should not be permitted?
CA: These are the same kinds of arguments that were raised about whether people should be forced to serve [black] people in restaurants. They used to say: "This is a private establishment. I get to do what I want." And you can go in a restaurant anywhere and find a sign that says we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. I can go with that; people should have their freedom of choice in that way. But when the externalities are systematically and grossly burdening one population that has no political voice, then I think there is a case here for some kind of redress.
SDL: Is part of the redress disallowing certain exclusionary zoning practices.
CA: A thousand people a month are leaving Baltimore. There are 40,000 abandoned houses. Forget the social implications for a minute, just image the waste of resources. Should the federal government be chopping down trees and mining public lands to get the resources to build houses 40 to 60 miles from the town center? Should the public be subsidizing that?
I am saying that the cumulative effect of public policy at the moment is that poor people are in a sense like pawns in a chess game because they get to hold down the absurdity of us wasting our natural resources. S, should the public allow us to squander public resources in this way? And should we subsidize it?
If you look at Los Angeles, the fact is that the metropolitan land area is growing six times faster than the population because of all these individual decisions that are being made. Forget the poverty question. Is there any legitimate reason for the public to say we should be doing this?
SDL: My answer would be that we should eliminate subsidies for initiatives that are adverse to the public interest. Again, do you think we should disallow certain exclusionary zoning practices?
CA: This is a hard question. In Hillsborough and Woodside, wealthy communities on the Peninsula in the Bay Area, houses cost typically a million or a million and a half dollars. They require maids to come in and out and travel two hours on the bus to get there. Should they be required to have some affordable housing so the maids can live there?
SDL: That would be an efficient use of resources. But should communities be able to say that they don't want to do that? As it is they pay wages that attract people to take the jobs cleaning the houses and travel out there by the Soweto express.
CA: I don't buy the free market argument here, because the free market could operate if it wasn't for the police, if it wasn't for state power, public investment. So the notion that if you can pay for it you ought to be able to do it doesn't really work for me. I mean, where is the money coming from? It is printed by the government? While I don't believe in total state planning, I think when people bring these arguments up you ought to say to them: [If you want to keep low income people out of your community by using exclusionary zoning practices, then] run your own utility system, sewer system, don't use the freeways or the streets, don't have police protecting you.
SDL: Should one of the rules be that communities be prohibited from putting up barriers to mixed-income developments?
CA: There should be barriers but they should not be absolute. There should be thresholds where there is some level of accountability. If we don't allow some flexibility we will be destroying people's humanity. I think people should have the right to choose the community they want to live in and associate with whomever they want to. If you said that you have to live next door to a Negro, it would be crazy. But I think there are boundaries where it gets totally out of hand and where the externalities are coming down on people who don't have any voice in the process and who are burdened by the process and have no recourse. So I would say there should be barriers but they should be permeable. If you meet these conditions, then there will be no intervention in you local process of setting zoning rules.
SDL: Do you mean that the state will not intervene if there is a certain amount of affordable housing.
CA: Yes and that if you get federal resources then you have to make a credible effort to make it available to the full range of the population. This is not an either or choice. Whatever we try to put forward is a surrogate for the complexity of full human communities. If I try to tell you who to have in your house and you tell me you want to decide who comes in your house and I call you a racist, I don't think either of us gets anywhere.
SDL: But what about the developers who are replicating large developments around the nation that are economically segregated?
CA: I think we have to rein in some of the prerogatives of some of the developers. Someone did a study in NJ where they looked at all the farmland that could be used for housing and they calculated that if these farmers sold their land for the highest and best use, the total value they could get was something like $350 million; but the cost to society as a whole would be $8 billion. So, is it their right to make a dollar and charge the public $24? The consequence of making decisions about purchasing land and developing it fall on other property owners in existing areas. Do people have a right to make a decision that devalues the property of others? It is not just property rights vs. non-property rights; it is also a question of what the rules are under which fair competition can be established.
We have a situation in East Oakland, Eastmont Mall, where the biggest tenant is the police station. There is no one else there. It's a black neighborhood. But the one in El Cerrito is also empty and it's right next to the BART station. This is a middle-income neighborhood with a shopping mall next to a BART station. And they can't attract anybody. Hilltop mall, which is out further is also in trouble. You have these developers who are playing one jurisdiction off against the other for tax breaks. Should developers be give free rein to do that?
I really agree with Myron Orfield about revenue sharing. If the jurisdiction would put up a share of the revenue then it would be fine. We have a huge problem in California around taxes because of Proposition 13 which creates a problem for jurisdictions which would like to have affordable housing but they can't because they need to raise the tax dollar to meet basic services. And that means they have a big incentive to bring in things that generate taxes and not costs [such as big box retail outlets]. So even if you intellectually agree that it would be better to have a more balanced community you can't do it. It goes back to the public factors that are driving this issue. And it goes back to bigotry.
We are in a situation where you have public policies that support outcomes that the people who are making those decisions do not even want. Most people do not want increased traffic. They want to breathe clean air. Most people in the Bay Area want a socially just community. It's different than it was 25 to 30 years ago when they first tried to integrate the schools at Berkeley. Most people in the Bay Area, if there were a reasonable way to do it, would rather have a socially and racially integrated community than a segregated one. That may not be true in Chicago, St. Louis and other places.
SDL: Is one of the levers here the issue of equity in infrastructure investments? As it stands now, a disproportionate amount of money federal and state money is going to provide infrastructure services for new communities and not enough is going into the maintenance and upgrade of infrastructure in existing communities. Could that be used to require metro-regional revenue sharing and fair share inclusionary zoning policies?
CA: I think this idea of fairness has a certain appeal. It may turn out that more people would support fair growth than smart growth. Some people would say, [the heck with] all that smart growth stuff. I don't care if it is smart I just want it to be fair. There is a certain cleverness about smart growth that appeals to entrepreneurs and people who pride themselves on being clever - the dot.com crowd. And, certainly, no one wants to be dumb. Whereas fair growth says that it is really not a question of how clever you are but rather about being real about what has to happen.
SDL: Smart growth advocates say: "Let's not do stupid growth that wastes resources and is a drag on the environment, we can grow in a smarter way and reuse infrastructure, we can make communities walkable. So smart growth was a reaction to what some people considered dumb growth that wasted resources and was hard on the environment and often lacked green space and public space.
CA: I think that is right and some people would say there was a movement for no growth. There were people like Herman Daley saying this pattern of growth is not producing anything of value so let's shut it down. What the smart growth people did was to hook the thing about being smart to the thing about growth so it was no longer debated about whether or not you should have growth. So I think it was very clever.
SDL: How has the smart growth movement performed in terms of equity issues?
CA: The smart growth movement hasn't dealt with the equity issue. I was there. It was more genuine than window dressing but it was not very deep.
SDL: But I have heard you say that you can't have a smart growth movement that is not also fair. In other words, unfair growth is not smart.
CA: That is my position. I think there are some people who don't believe that. I don't think Jerry Brown believes it. I think many of these people think it would be nice to have equity but they are more concerned with efficiency. If we can get equity in there, then fine.
SDL: But is it efficient to build lofts for the wealthy in downtown Oakland where there residents are poor? Is that efficient?
CA: Jerry Brown would say that Oakland has a bad image. West Oakland, five minutes by BART from the financial district in San Francisco, is under developed. He thinks you need a lot of market-rate housing at elegant densities next to the BART station. If there happens to be a poor black community that now lives there, let them live someplace else. I think he believes we need upper and middle-income people in downtown Oakland and if a few people get hurt it will work out better [for the majority] in the long run.
I disagree with the fundamental premise. Even from the point of view of efficiency, if you integrate a sense of social and racial justice, it will end up being a more efficient solution. People who say we will deal with that later...the later is prisons. My point is that it is better to do it all at once. If you are going to renovate the bathroom might as well do the kitchen at the same time.
SDL: People had some hope that Brown would be sensitive to these issues.
CA: I think Brown is trying to do his best. I think he is delivering on what he is claiming he is going to do. I think the way racism gets reproduced is in innovations. I think the environmental movement is a great example of this because when the people who do these innovations decide that it is O.K. not to think about race and poverty they end up reproducing a problem that nobody figures out later. So when the environmental movement took off it was framed as if we don't have to worry about social justice issues because we have a more important topic: save the air and water. What that did was give a running start to a new brand of racism. So when you find a manifestation of this in the work of Jerry Brown...all he is doing is following what has been going on for the last 20 years.
The idea of [The Earth Summit at] Rio was to integrate the challenge of protecting the environment with the concern for addressing poverty. When people said: "We will take half the story and forget the other half", they introduced a policy argument that overrode concerns for social and racial justice. What should have happened was that they should have taken to heart what the people from the South [developing nations] were saying. You would not be able to give good marks to ecology unless it was also giving attention to social justice. We have got the dotcoms [in the Bay Area -- a multiplication of millionaires. You build a million and a half dollar house out in the middle of no where and put a solar collector on the roof. And that is supposed to solve something/. I heard Ted Turner, bless his soul, say: "I think we should cut down on consumption. The coat that I wear, everything I wear is given to me. In fact the only thing that I own is my Lear jet."
I would make the reverse argument. To the extent that we are talking about economic development or social or racial justice, if we don't build in ecological concerns then we are implicated in creating environmental damage. So for us to go forward with a one-dimensional strategy would then have negative consequences.
A good example is the San Francisco airport expansion. I got a call from some folks in the mayor's office wanting an endorsement so I made a few phone calls. I was told by Bill Travis, who runs the Bay Conservation Development Commission, that it was a public works program. It is going to make a lot of jobs and that is why the mayor is for it. It is being driven by the airlines saying we need more runways and the construction unions saying let's go with this. But what about a regional solution that looks at San Jose airport, Oakland airport and looks at balancing an airport planning process that takes into concern local traffic. And the response is: San Francisco doesn't have any jurisdiction over San Jose.
I would argue that we can produce jobs for unions related to smart growth and not treat it as an isolated issue of jobs. There were also people who want to save the bay saying this is going to screw up the wetlands. Why not have a jobs program that actually reimburses ecological sanity. It would mean transit-oriented development, union jobs, and getting what we need to have built as opposed to what we don't need to have built.
We have this group called the Alliance for Jobs with the highway construction industry. They are the front lines of the politics of these things. They argue that we need highways because they produce jobs. So if we don't insist on integration of all these components, then we should not be surprised when we end up with a mess. Racial integration is one dimension of a larger issue. In the Bay Area we have to live together. So either we are going to have lemons or we can make lemonade.
Some people don't like the Benetton with their colors ads but I thought it was terrific. We ought to be out there showing how we can have culturally and racially diverse neighborhoods that work. We should be saying: "Hey, if you have a choice about where you want to live, then wouldn't you want to live in a place that was this cool. And we should have a similar ad for mixed income development? The arguments for doing this are very strong even for rich people there kids. After all, who is going to take care of their parents when they get old? Then there are people living in these gated communities. I met wealthy woman who lived in a big suburban house who said: "What I finally figured out was that I was basically a janitor." She was keeping his house clean.
SDL: But the number of gated communities around the country is going up and the construction of gated communities is one of the fastest growing parts of the real estate industry.
CA: If you live in the gated community, the original impulse was to keep all those people [unlike you] out. But one of the things that is happening now is that the animosity is being directed at other people within the gated community. So they are saying: "You want to paint your door fusia and we don't want you to. And we want you to have three potted plants outside and you want to put a Santa Claus out there." So a lot of the animosity that used to be directed towards other people is now being tuned inwards. It seems to me that the model has limitations.
SDL: Do you think the idea of fair growth is potentially a campaign that has legs?
CA: I think it has legs.
SDL: Why? Is it because people will find a mixed-income and mixed-race community more vital than the alternatives?
CA: I think it has legs for a number or reasons. Increasingly, a broad segment of the population is being hurt by unfairness. It is not just racial groups. It is spreading. The older, inner-ring suburbs are a classic example. They are not getting any benefit from this growth. One of the reasons this movement has legs is that unfair growth hurts the majority of the population. Basically, a few people, mostly developers, make away like bandits. They make huge profits and everyone else has to suffer with the consequences. Secondly, it is much broader than land use prices. To the extent that we are talking about an expanding economy the question is can we do it in ways that are fair?
In the Bay Area, which granted is an exception, if you look at a company like Cisco, that just expanded 2,200 new jobs, the question is: are the majority of people in the Bay Area benefiting from that or not. [The super-heated dot.com economy] is driving up housing prices; it is creating more traffic problems, and air pollution. So there is a question whether or not this growth is adding to the public welfare. The quick and dirty intuitive answer is that of course it is. Everybody needs jobs and this are 2,200 new jobs. But the experience we have had over the last decade is that growth is not necessarily an unmitigated good. So the question is: who benefits and who suffers the burdens. And that gets back to the fair growth question.
If you can show that the benefits and burdens are distributed fairly then it is more likely to be in the public interest to go forward. And the environmentalists in the Bay Area have been not as vocal in opposition to this growth as I would have thought they would be. I think it is because they are also compromised by this question of not having enough of an understanding of the social benefits. So the social arguments have all gone on the side of the developers.
The same thing happened with the growth boundary. The developers all argued that we need the housing and the environmentalists are putting their heads in the sand. Environmentalists say we need the farmland so we should have a growth boundary. It gives away the whole argument for social justice to the developers, which is really sad. So I think the idea of fair growth has legs, more legs than smart growth. Smart growth appeals to the people who are driving the decisions to build things; whereas fair growth is broader in terms of its appeal to the whole society.
SDL: People get to vote on these issues rarely. They have little input into development decisions. The zoning boards tend to be made up of people who have a direct interest in real estate such as the bankers, real estate developers, and builders. Of course, arguably the voters can change things every election cycle.
CA: We have come to the end of manifest destiny. Our whole development practice has been operating as if there were free land on which to build. As people moved across the country they just took land away from native people and developed however they wanted. Now we have come to the end of the frontier and we can't do it that way any more. Increasingly development decisions are going to have to be decided as a matter of public policy and they will have to be more democratic.
We have a legacy of developers who don't know how to do that. They are used to buying a farm and then giving someone the money to run to be supervisor and approve a highway expansion [so they can build their subdivision]. My view is that the only way you are going to rebuild the cities is by having a much higher level of public awareness about these decisions.
When Daniel Burnham laid out the plan for Chicago around the turn of the century, he created a text for all the eighth grade children. So what we really need is a broad public education about how do we recycle our lands in ways that have a closer fit with meeting our needs and with environmental questions. Currently, the public understanding of these issues is operating at a very crude level.
Jane Jacobs said that development should be smaller in scale and should be responsive to community needs. So the question is: what do communities need? That should be the driving question not what can developers make off it.
I put together a housing development over by 6th and Delaware, several acres, 60-70 housing units, and a whole green complex. I was a consultant to the city. There was a 15 year controversy over the land. What we did was put together a development plan for it in a fish bowl with everybody watching and providing input. Not only were they making input to the physical design but also the pro forma return on investment was all public. How much is a reasonable return on investment that a developer should be able to make. We came up with a figure, hired an architect, the architect did the schematic drawings and then we sent it out to bid. The winning developer got permits in less than a week and said this is the easiest job I have ever had. By that point there was no controversy.
I was chair of the siting commission in Berkeley, one of my most shining efforts. We did a plan for a 168 block area. There was a huge controversy that involved unions, people who were housing artists, people who moved into this area because they liked the mixed-use but who were getting really [very annoyed] at the fumes from the toxics. The environmental groups and the unions were at each others throats. The person on the city council and the planning commission told me: Make it come out right.
We developed a plan for 168 block area with a lot of public input at the end of the 19802 and early 1990s. Then a pharmaceutical company wanted a 30-year development agreement with the city. We had a development plan and everything was wrong with their plan. We had a 45 foot height limit; they wanted 85 feet. They wanted to do experiments with Bubonic plague. The chemical company was trading with South Africa. There were animal rights problems. And the parent company built Aushwitz.
My position was I don't give [gosh darn] if we do this development agreement or not. My concern is the community is sitting across the table from the 13th largest corporation in the world so it should speak with one voice. My view was: let's use this process to build community. At the first meeting I said that I know a lot of people don't like this idea of genetic engineering and feel it is really inappropriate. We are going to form a committee to shut the place down. And the people who want to do that should move into this corner. And we will also have to explain to the workers why they are going to lose these jobs. We will also have to explain what we will do about the [reduced] tax base. And we will have to explain to the rest of the business community that we are not anti-business, we just think this one is bad. So anyone who wants to join this committee it meets over here. No one moved to join it. So I called them on it. And then I said, O.K., so let's try to get the best deal we can get. I said: Anybody can stop this but you have to be responsible, you can't just posture.
We had 100 public meetings. Finally the planning commission and the city council voted unanimously in support of our plan and when it was up before the city council there were 50 people who came and said you should vote in favor of this. At the end of the process we all went down to Brenan's and had a beer together. I ran the meetings like a seminar. The idea was to make everybody smart. We hired a mechanical engineer to work for the public so that when people wanted to know about the production process we could have our own mechanical engineer explain to people whether it was possible to design a horizontal instead of a vertical process.
My position was: turn the whole thing on its head. Instead of trying to ram things through like castor oil, let's make people smart and get behind what has to happen. That was a massive education process. But what the hell: what are we going to do for the next 100 years. We had 100 public meetings. After I left people didn't want to stop. They kept going about other things. The manufacturers would come and explain their production process and people said: "Oh, I didn't know what they were doing." So it was a really exciting thing. We were able to see what the hell was going on in the community and that is better than watching television. It was not just: "Oh hell, another meeting." It was: "Hey, what is actually happening here?"
I was not able to do that when Dellums appointed me to help figure out what to do with the military bases. I was hoping to be able to do that. There was one group that wanted to build a science city at one of the military bases. Some of the folks in the Dellums group decided it was too hard. So they circumvented the process, which to me was bad. I thought: "Hell, to have a place where you can debate the future of technology. Why not?" We were able to do that with the peace activists at Livermore and the weapons designers working out what is the future of the laboratory and to what purpose it should serve. The notion of elevating the public discourse around critical issues is an end in itself. It is not just about getting to the right answer; it is also about building community.
To me this is what our cities need. It is not just about bigotry on behalf of white people it is also about responsibility on behalf of people of color. As Alice Rivlin said, "We have to be able to describe our vision of community." It is one thing to walk around calling people bigots it is something else to say: Here is the way we propose to live together.
Robert Bullard was making the point that if you have all black people in the neighborhood it is not necessarily bad. The corollary is that if you have all white people in the neighborhood it is not necessarily bad. We need a new language of how to talk about this. The only way I can see to get there is to have massive civic engagement, which has to be an end in itself as well as leading to something else. It has to be constructed like the town hall meetings so you feel that you are getting something out of this.
SDL: Berkeley is well known for this kind of participation. I'm not sure how easy it would be to replicate this elsewhere. It does seem we have something of a phobia about planning in this country and we see planning as control over us as opposed to an opportunity to come to a consensus about what the community wants. Developers are able to do what they want to do almost by default because we have the free market system and private property rights held as more important than other values. But we don't have an agreement that planning is good.
CA: But in fact planning is going on. It is just going on in private rooms not in the public. The Bank of America and Nation's Bank have people who sit around and plan [developments]. They plan what they are going to invest in and where they are going to invest and how that is going to fit within their national and international strategy. They plan but it is not public.
SDL: How do you require that it be public?
CA: I take a long view of this. I think the reason the United States is so inadequate in this way goes back to the Thirty Year War where there was so much racial and religious strife and where people were killing each other because they were Protestant or Catholic. So when they got here they said: let's not do that. You do your thing I do mine. You give me the right to protect my individual stuff [and I will do the same for you]. There are a lot of battle scars. The ways in which these things were resolved was just to take more lands from the native peoples.
But I think that planning is intuitive and natural and that it is unnatural not to plan. I recently saw a film about some rice growers in Vietnam. They were concerned about weather patterns and how it is going to affect the harvest. They got together to decide if they should plant earlier. That is common sense. If it is a big problem you get everybody together and figure out what to do about it.
SDL: That is at the village level where it is easier to do that. We are now in a mass society where it is harder to figure out what are the appropriate boundaries within which to seek a consensus.
CA: I think it is a pattern of discourse. I have a colleague who teaches at Santa Cruz. He thinks that instead of giving people a master thesis to write they should write an article for Atlantic Monthly. Their target should be: how do you communicate what you deeply believe to the larger public in a way that is compelling.
The opportunities to talk about how you get civic engagement around these larger issues are atrophying. Your father, [Max Lerner], when he wrote the book America as a Civilization, lived at a time when there was a whole different kind of discourse going on. Now everyone is trying to get tenure. You don't write for the public; you write for your colleagues who review your tenure application. So for the past 15 years the public discourse has radically shifted. I think a lot of people would love to have the kind of conversation we are having now. But where can you have it? There is no institution...you have environmentalists who talk with each other about global warming; and then you have prison people who talk to each other about prisons.
You would think the question of what is going to happen when we die should be everywhere. It ought to be of interest to people. I'm an optimist. I think when people get their fill of the pabulum that comes over the media they will return to their sense and realize that their quality of life could really improve if we create more context for these conversations.
SDL: In order to master a field we have become very specialized. You have to invest a lot of time into a very specialized subject to know it well. Connecting the specialists and getting a shared a vision and cooperating to work toward it is a rare event.
Peter Calthorpe, the architect/ New Urbanist planner, holds meetings with the public where he flashes up images of five different styles of development and then gets the people to vote on which most closely approximates what they want for their community to look. Then they look at a map give people chips and ask them to place the next million people. That's helpful but it doesn't bring all the issues to the table; it simply circumvents the NIMBY reflex. It only indirectly deals with equity issues.
CA: To some extent it is on the people of color to take some leadership on this issue. The old paradigm is that the white people are guilty of [messing] up and the people of color are victims. I don't see that as being a way forward. I'm not sure organizing people around guilt is useful for anything. I think it is a good thing to put race at the center of this debate. It is also important for people of color who are articulating this to take responsibility for the outcome. When Martin Luther King in the late 1950s and early 1960s was putting forward the vision of the Beloved Community, I didn't really get it but I liked it.
When they had the bicycle coalition in San Francisco [who held bike rallies to demand bike lanes by jamming the roads at rush hour with bicycles] I thought they would benefit from going to a place like the Highlander Center. They were giving the finger to the bus drivers. I'm not saying everyone was doing that but they should have been helping old ladies across the street. They should have been waving to bus drivers and saying we are for public transportation. There should have been an aura around their project that they were taking the streets back for the people.
Unless people of color step up to the plate I don't see anything coming of this conversation.
SDL: Do you see signs that will happen?
CA: I see some signs, if we don't go back into the same dynamics we have had for the past 30-40 years. No amount of that is going to make up for the kind of pro-active activity on behalf of people of color to say: "OK, here is an opportunity to really look at these things. And there is an opportunity here because this whole model of the suburbs vs. the inner city was invented by these right wing people in 1970. The created this myth that the people in the suburbs were monolithic and of the white working class as being resentful of African Americans in particular on social issues. So for 30 years we have been treating that as if it were the weather. That it was a fact. But in reality people of color have been moving into these suburban communities. The suburban communities are not all the same. Some are poor and some are rich. Now we have Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Latinos moving into suburbs. So it is not the same picture as in the 1970s.
SDL: Now there is this metro-regional approach with policy analysts saying that our salvation lies in greater cooperation at the metro-regional level. Is that going to improve equity problems?
CA: I love this. I totally love this. I don't know that I would say it will ultimately bring our salvation. I don't know if I would go that far. But what we are seeing is a shift in the way we measure positive outcomes. We are seeing shifts in public consciousness. People in the Bay Area are saying we have 100 jurisdiction and six and a half million people. We are engaged in the global economy. We have 17 rivers and the Bay is part of the watershed. Thirty eight percent of the population is comprised of people of color. We have so many suburbs and we have the dot.com folks over here. If we could actually produce a body of integrated knowledge on this scale we could create a society that had some kind of coherence. And that would be like an evolutionary step.
I've been invited to give a talk at the College of Natural Resources and the dean gave out 40 Ph.D.s. He could not pronounce the names of the dissertations. The knowledge has become so specialized. The guy who asked me to teach a course is a wonderful man who is the world expert on fruit bugs. And he said this has something to do with cities can you work out a course for me. And it does have to do with cities and forestry and disease in trees. But the fact is that he could only talk to his peers in other countries about these bugs. He can't talk to someone in another department about the relationship between that and something else.
So to me the Metropolitan Idea is wonderful. Bruce Katz [at the Brookings Institute] says it presents an opportunity to look at land use and change in governance, and the creation of opportunities. I see it also as a new way of organizing knowledge that could really be helpful. What is the relationship between fresh water, sea water and the return of fish [to our rivers and streams]? How does that relates to school curriculum and global trade and the relationship between the rich and the poor? We have the capacity to cut some of these issues down to size in ways that are not air tight. No one is making the argument that a region should be totally self contained. But I do think that you could make an argument that a certain percentage of the food should be grown in the region. The voters would go for that. And you could make a case for certain things being made in the region, people would go for that. We have companies that are arguing that cheese will be really important regionally. We can cut [some of these issues] down to scale so people can feel some greater connection [with the place where they live].
SDL: I do see the potential for approaching the business community and saying that in the future the competing economic units will be metropolitan areas and that if you want to be in one that works efficiently you need a certain amount of coordination and that there is a penalty associated with creating a Balkanized structure where people and goods and jobs don't flow in an integrated way. There is also a way to approach people who care about keeping their taxes low and tell them that if we keep extending and replicating our infrastructure out into the countryside they will have to pay for it and their taxes will go up. So there are ways to bring people together around the Metro-Regional approach.
But then you look at the other side of the ledger and you see that in communities of color even if you create a situation where people have more choice about moving out of poverty areas because affordable housing has been made available in other areas where there are more jobs and more transit, will that dilute the political base and will local politicians resist it. On the other side of the fence, officials running for office in the white outer suburbs are elected on the basis of how vigilant they have been in protecting property values for people who live in $250,000 to a million dollar house. Those trends seem dramatically at odds with the success of a Fair Growth movement.
CA: It is in the nature of life to have contradictions. I don't think that makes it unusual. I'm not sure I would say that Fair Growth is inconsistent with protecting property values. For some of those communities promoting more affordable housing would actually increase property values. If we think not necessarily in terms of the number of units of housing but rather in terms of healthy communities, we would then have a wider palette of ways to go.
I have been arguing that in the Bay Area that if we improve the efficiency of existing housing stock by 1 percent a year for 5 years that would be the equivalent of 100,000 new housing units. So when you have a single woman living in a 2,500 square foot house because her husband ran off with the secretary that is crazy. And you have older people whose kids have gone off to college who don't need all the space they needed when their kids were young. So we must find a way of making existing housing more efficient. Yes, it would probably require changes in the zoning laws; and recognizing the importance of non- traditional family structures when doing architectural design. And, when we are working with communities, we must ask the question: What does this community really need? And then design around a proactive agenda for healthy communities.
Even though I happen to agree that some element of coercion may be necessary, there are other approaches. If you say, "Look, if you are going to attract jobs you have to be sure that there is the full range of people who will be employed can be accommodated living here. That is not such a big leap [in thinking].
And I agree with Myron [Orfield] that on the tax base we really have to come to terms with that in California. Here it is a mess because the state has played such a problematic role.
I believe in the agency and continuity of the experience of people of color and African Americans. We are not just passive consumers and victims. We have a history. African American people have been in America for 18 generations. The initial patterns of squandering of the land started with the plantation system when people were forced as slaves to turn land into monocrops. There is a long history here of the relationship of black people to the land that we have been missing. When black people, between the first and second World Wars, began migrating to the cities and the civil rights movement unfurled, there was a very strong rural base to the civil rights movement that then moved to the urban neighborhoods. Then we had a wave of black people being elected as mayors of these inner cities when this [white flight] abandonment happened. Now that wave is gone. So we have Giuliani back in New York and Daley back in Chicago. There is a history here that asks: what are we going to do now?
My view is that this Metropolitan Region agenda is really the next logical step looking at it from the internal dynamic of the African American experience. We really can't address the problems of St. Louis without talking about the suburbs and the whole Metropolitan region.
SDL: Is that not going to scare African American elected officials. Will they think that a greater metro approach, which allows more choice about where people of color live, might dilute their power base? Do you see that as an obstacle?
CA: I see that as an obstacle but I also don't think we have any choice. And this is not new. This argument came up when black people were asking should they leave the South. Some people were saying let's get the [Hell] out of here; others were saying let's stay and work it out here. Some people up and left and now the majority are in cities.
The assumption is that white people will never vote for a black politician. I think that is nuts. Look at Collin Powell. I think it is contraindicated by everything I see. If you look at Oakland, the black leadership of Oakland has been evicted en masse despite the fact that 44 percent of the population is black. So what are we going to do? Are we going to try to get back in the ghetto. For the Jewish population it was the same issue; they had to decide if they were going to get everybody back into a little ghetto.
SDL: Most chose assimilation.
CA: Assimilation into what. It was a transformation. The culture is different. If you are talking about the intellectual contribution [of the Jews], the culture itself was transformed.
SDL: A lot of the Jews were trying to hide.
CA: Hey, I try to hide too. I'm not going to convince anybody that I'm not black. I'm saying from a realistic point of view and even a nationalistic point of view, the nationalism that grew up in the 60s grew on the heels of the civil rights movement. If it hadn't been for the civil rights movement no one would have been nationalist. So if you want a black power base you really have to go towards this more open thing. These things are dynamically related to each other. People will say: "Hey, I'm not going there and I'll stay here." And the more challenged they are the more people will take a firm stance. In addition, the other side of the equation is that we have to develop a regional voice. The Bay Area is different. There are 17 jurisdictions in the Bay Area that have people of color in the majority but we have all these issues around the new comers and Latinos.
SDL: There is a demonstration today in the Mission of local people who are feeling displaced by the dot. comers.
CA: It is happening every day. We have large Latino populations. Immigrant populations across the country are filtering into the older inner-cities. So the concept of abandonment makes less sense because of the open immigration policy. A lot of these places are places that immigrants move into; although not all of the immigrants move into them. You go out to Point Reyes [in Marin County] and there is a big Latino community out there: at least 20 percent of the population. They don't even bother with the Mission or the Oakland area they just go directly out there and get into the dairy industry.
SDL: One of the big migrations is the minority population that can move is moving to the inner ring suburb or near suburb. So you have a re-concentration of certain minorities in inner ring suburbs. Is that what you see happening?
CA: I have been at this so long that the whole concept of minority doesn't make any sense to me any more. In California the people of European heritage are actually in a minority. And the people of European heritage are not of one group. They are [made up of] many groups.
SDL: But if you are going to speak about the race issue you have to use some designation.
CA: I find myself in a problematic situation because I do think racism is real [in one sense]. If you say racism is a figment of the imagination I say, "Yeah, but my taxi cab driver doesn't know that when he doesn't stop [for me because I am black]. I have Scottish, Huguenot, Cherokee and Seminole ancestors as well as African ancestors. This makes me ask myself what the [Hell] this minority thing is. All of my ancestors were here before the end of the 18th century. There is this notion that all these white people, who don't even agree with each other, are a majority. But they don't come from the same place. So, although objectively speaking there are manifestations of people being concentrated in various areas, simultaneously there is a set of forces that will break up this notion of white people being a viable identity. In fifty years people will be saying: What were they even talking about [when you referred to race]? That's what I think.
My son is European-American, part Irish and [African American] and the crowd he goes around with is all mixed up [racially]. I am hoping that the sense of racial identity will not disappear. What I would rather see a stronger more positive sense of identity. I spend a lot of time thinking about what this journey 400 to 500 years meant [for African Americans]. I see that, as incredibly painful as it has been, that it is also extremely valuable. I feel the experience we have as African Americans enriches the public discourse. And the notion of this disappearing seems like incredible squandering to me not just for black people but for everybody. I also feel that way about Jewish people. A woman, 94 year-old living at a nursing home in Florida, is looking at the wall with nobody to talk to. And this woman was in Russia in 1918 and all the stuff she went through is not part of the public discourse. It's crazy. You don't see this on TV the assets of what our human experience has been. When you turn on the TV you almost never see anyone who struggled to learn English and yet that experience is pretty widespread.
SDL: My father learned it going to movies.
CA: But you don't see any depiction of this in the public consciousness. The idea of having a character who learns English by going to the movies and then ends up, as your father did, getting a scholarship to Yale, that is a very important story.
What makes me hopeful, but what also makes it difficult, is the fact that people don't get the fact that the only way the black story is going to be told is if the Jewish story gets told. You can't refuse to tell the story of Polish people and then have Black Power floating into the picture. That doesn't work. If you are going to say Black Power then you also have to be able to say Polish Power. As a matter of public policy you can't have it both ways. I think that people should be able to be proud of the fact that they are Irish or Norwegian or whatever mongrel mixture you are which is totally consistent with being part of a cosmopolitan community and not requiring that you have walls around your experience. Any more than being a member of a family means that you can't be a good neighbor. But it will require a shift in consciousness of a scale that most Europeans have not even thought about. One of the things that will be necessary is that people of European heritage find new grounding for their identity.
SDL: If you were to do a table of contents of fair growth, what would it include? I approach it as what are the key issues that define this area. We have discussed a number of them: (1) The impetus for sprawl was partially racial and how it played out in concentrating poverty; (2) The potential ways of solving this problem include fair share affordable housing; tax base sharing, and metro regionalism. (3) Or one could tell it through the lives and works of different people. That is what I am doing here. What do you think would be an appealing way to make a useful addition to this field as a book or series of articles?
CA: There is a lot of academic stuff, although I think the general level of discourse is still very low. I would want to know what is fairness and what is growth. I would want an expansion of what those things mean because there is a lot taken for granted about those words. I have been making this argument about the environmental justice movement. People have thought about Environmental Justice in terms of the disproportionate siting of toxic waste facilities in communities of color. I think that is too narrow a definition of the environment and too narrow a definition of justice. I would want to deal with some of the issues that have to deal with fairness, although that might be something more of an intellectual exercise than you might want to get into.
I think it could be organized a little bit like Neal Pierce's book. Here is the big picture about what has to happen. Here are some case studies. Here is what is happening in Chicago, in the Bay Area. Another focus would be on healthy neighborhoods. These are not contradictory. What is it like growing up in a neighborhood that was economically diverse? That can get you into a discussion about what is a healthy neighborhood. You could have a racially segregated neighborhood that was in many ways segregated; and one that was racially integrated that doesn't have relationships. You could have an economically integrated neighborhood and have them be that happen to be racially integrated that could be highlighted and what that means. Some case studies would be interesting.
We have the religion of the three E's: the economy, the environment, equity. Another dimension would be to show what happens when two or three of these come together. We have cases where environmental issues and social equity issues can come together to do a good thing for example in transportation or housing. Look at where you have senior housing and day care for children in Fruitvale.
One of the things we are working on in the Bay Area is that we want to create a permanent regional institution, like the Bay Area Council, that represents the poor people and the working people and the people of color. We want it to have a region-wide capacity to weigh in on these issues. We also have a leadership institute where we pay individuals and organizations to send people to this institute. And the idea is to have people have the opportunity to conceptualize a different set of possibilities.
When Alice Rivlin was talking about how she invited people from the suburbs to come into Washington and see what it was like; there also needs to be the other part. Who is helping the people in Washington see the suburbs? We have to do that.
SDL: I remember your describing efforts to bring a bunch of inner city folks in full regalia into some suburban meetings where issues that will affect them are being discussed.
CA: That is the shock value version. But at another level, at a less threatening level, there has to be something that allows young people to think: "Oh yeah Walnut creek is part of my community." And in Los Angeles the Mothers of East LA, all the stuff they did around water issues means that they now think of Mono Lake as part of the 'hood. And that sense of enlargement of the context is a really important part of this.
I think we have a whole generation of policy that is screwed up because people think of the inner city as being unconnected to the larger dynamics. I think you could look at that. I also think you could look at improbably people such as a retired business executive who has gotten religion about helping inner city kids and helps them learn to read. You could describe people who have jumped barriers.