Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Don Chen
Don Chen is executive director of Smart Growth America. He previously directed the Surface Transportation Policy Project.
Chen got his start as an environmental justice organizer in New Haven where he attended Yale University. When he took over as director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project his focus remained on equity and environmental justice issues and he played an important role in getting transportation on the radar screen among environmental justice groups. While currently networking smart growth groups around the nation, Chen remains involved in EJ issues and is on the board of West Harlem Environmental Action and is a member of the EJ Network in the Northeast.
In the past EJ groups focused almost exclusively the discriminatory nature of siting of highly toxic facilities in communities of color, Chen observes. However, increasingly, these groups are refocusing on community development and quality of life issues. The Sustainable South Bronx group, for example, has a greenways and an "active living" project which focuses on walking and cycling and all that. West Harlem Environmental Action is doing this Harlem on the River Project and is renovating an old building in their neighborhood to be their new headquarters. Alternatives for Community and the Environment in Roxbury in Boston organized a Transit Riders Union. And Dr. Robert Bullard [at the Environmental Justice Resource Center] in Atlanta is focusing on transportation and sprawl issues. All of this activity is broadening the scope of the EJ movement beyond the traditional toxics issues. "So the link is very clear to me. The evolution of EJ has been to focus on growth, development and traffic and all those things that we work on in the Smart Growth world."
Coming, as he does, from an Environmental Justice background, it is not hard for Chen to recognize that in order for "smart growth" to be smart it has to also be equitable. Smart growth means doing development in a thoughtful way and not just having haphazard growth that turns into sprawl, Chen continues. "And inequity is one of the drivers of sprawl; and, hopefully, equity is part of the solution to produce smart growth," he adds.
Chen sees an increase in residential economic segregation around the nation as exclusionary zoning rules shape new subdivisions that are built in such a way that all the houses are offered on the market at roughly the same price. Economically segregated sprawl is brought about by a mutually reinforcing system of policies, subsidies, industry standards and public attitudes. The DNA of sprawl is in the zoning regulations and is carried out by architects, highway engineers, and planning boards. Smart growth advocates must swim upstream against this force.
To succeed, what smart growth advocates propose is to offer people more choice in terms of the housing and transportation alternatives available to them. People should be able to choose housing that fits their needs. This will mean transforming exclusionary zoning practices that keep low-income Americans out of communities with good schools and jobs. But Chen does not propose that communities be forced to adopt inclusionary zoning that mandates the building of affordable homes in wealthy suburbs.
Instead, Chen sees four points of leverage that may help transform the current economically segregated housing market. First, members of the baby boom generation are aging and no longer need the big homes they own in the suburbs. Many want to sell their homes and move into a smaller place, perhaps a condo, but they don't want to leave their community. This will require that suburban communities build new town centered developments with clustered condo units for an aging population. Developers see a rising demand for this kind of construction.
Suburbs that have erected exclusionary zoning barriers that keep out the poor and prohibit the construction of multi-family housing are increasingly going to come under political pressure from middle class and wealthy families who want to be able to have grandparents and grandchildren live in the same community, Chen explains. This is currently difficult because the grandparents cannot afford to live in large homes and pay high property taxes in communities with good school where their children and grandchildren are choosing to live. The solution is to create town centers in suburbs that permit the construction of cheaper condos or allow families to build "granny flats" above their garage. In this fashion greater economic diversity may gradually creep into the suburbs, Chen suggests.
The second point of leverage is that traffic is getting a lot worse in suburbs and as a result a lot of people are moving back into the cities and it is creating a revival of urban life. As wealthier people move back into the city it has a gentrifying effect, Chen notes. The trick is to capture the positive aspect of middle and upper class people moving back into the city (rising tax base and improved municipal services) while avoiding the displacement of low-income urban residents. A third point of leverage is that when there is no affordable housing for workers in wealthy communities, the people who work in service jobs in these places must commute to work by car. This causes traffic to increase as it did in Aspen, where city officials found that the traffic was eroding the quality of life. Their solution was build affordable housing for some of their service workers. Similarly, the Silicon Valley Manufacturer's Group decided to push for the construction of affordable housing so that workers could live closer to their manufacturing jobs.
A fourth point of leverage appeals to conservatives who want to keep taxes low. It argues that channeling growth back into existing communities (instead of outwards as sprawl) will save us tax dollars by putting development in areas already served by infrastructure.
Chen sees a number of places around the country where metro-regional groups are forming to do better land use and transportation planning. Among them are the following: the Coalition for a Livable Future in Portland, the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, the inclusionary zoning efforts in Montgomery County. At the state level he points to the anti-snob zoning in Massachusetts, and the Mt Laurel court decision in New Jersey. In San Mateo County, California, the state now awards increased transportation funding allotments to counties that place affordable housing units near mass transit. And Vermont has created a trust fund that connects the need to build affordable homes in existing communities with the state effort to preserve open space in the countryside. Despite these encouraging examples, the places where smart growth practices are being tried out remain few and far between, Chen concedes and much work remains to be done.
Give the difficulties ahead, Chen take heart from the fact that the message of smart growth is beginning to take root in the environmental movement. Members of the Sierra Club and historic preservation and land conservation groups are now pushing the affordable housing agenda because they see how it connects with preserving ecologically valuable open space and how it plays into the need to preserve our cities. He is also encouraged by a program run through former Maryland Governor Glendenning's Leadership Institute that will work with the EPA to help counties look at their zoning and see what needs to be updated in their codes to permit smart growth practices to flourish.
Looking forward, Chen hopes that the smart growth coalition he is working to build will address exclusionary zoning obstacles to smart growth and push for state wide trust funds for affordable housing. There should also be an organized push to refund the HOPE VI program under HUD which has done large scale affordable and mixed income projects around the nation. Overall, smart growth should help link people to opportunities and ensure that development serves community interests.
Interview
Don Chen (DC): Fannie Mae came up with "Fair Growth" as a different take on "Smart Growth" to place the emphasis on equity. Quite frankly, we in the Smart Growth camp are not doctrinaire about our name. In fact rather than saying smart growth, we are more in the business of saying that we need alternatives to sprawl and that it doesn't matter what you call it as long as we are doing the same stuff and following the same principles. Fair growth, just growth, equitable development, principled growth, quality growth, livable communities we regard them all as the same thing. We ally ourselves with groups that work on a whole range of niches and that is how we see our goal.
Steve Lerner (SDL): There are a number of people, Bruce Katz among them, who feel that calling it Fair Growth gets people's backs up. It makes it sound like what they are doing is unfair. And that it is subjective and judgmental.
DC: Our take is that growth can either be done in a thoughtful way or in a "growth at all costs" kind of way.
SDL: I started going to Smart Growth gathering more than five years ago and there were very few discussions devoted to equity issues involved with development. Over the years the number of seminars and workshops on this subject has grown. Katz described two ways of looking at Smarty Growth. One was Smart Growth Lite that did not include equity issues and that there were a lot of developers out there who were willing to adjust there way of doing development to make it greener and more efficient and accessible to mass transit, and mixed use and a number of other things. But as soon as you began to touch on the issue of the range in cots of housing options it was like the "third rail" for them. Will smart growth require an equitable development component in order to qualify as smart growth?
DC: I think the answer is one hundred percent yes. It requires it in the work we strive towards. But I agree with the assessment that a lot of places are dealing with Smart Growth Lite. And I will tell you why. Smart Growth has become a buzz word. Most people think that Smart Growth is a reaction to the bad stuff sprawl, traffic, and overdevelopment. So, in order to put a happy face on sprawl, traffic, and over-development they call it Smart Growth and they and they use a couple of other sub-buzz-words like "mixed-use development," walkable streets with sidewalks, denser development and they call it Smart Growth and it is just not the case.
Once an idea or phrase becomes possible it is hard to be the watchdog or disciplinary over it but we have tried to do that. But, at the same time if you try to do that too much you will run out of time and money. So what we try to do is proactively work on Smart Growth in the way we see Smart Growth properly conceived. We do not see Smart Growth as an issue per say like Transportation or Housing. Instead it is a different way of doing something or a paradigm shift. If you think about the way sprawl and development has occurred in the last seven years it is the product of a mutually reinforced system of policies, subsidies, industry standards, public attitudes, and the whole web of things that allow sprawl to occur. So, if you are a developer, the assumption from your lenders is that you are going to be building sprawl. The architect has plans for sprawl style developments. Your state and highway officials have your sprawling highway geometrics already in their guidebook. The people in the county planning board or the city planning office already have figured out what areas are going to be built in and at what density. It is all there to be streamlined.
SDL: It is the DNA of growth.
DC: Exactly. So if you want to do Smart Growth you have to swim upstream on everything. You have to get a special permit for that, you have to get special financing, and you might have to wait longer, which will cost you money. You have to bend the rules here and you might get sued. You are more vulnerable on all that. So it is a different way of doing things.
Cheryl Little, director of the Vacant Properties Initiative (CL): It also involves greater public participation in the process.
DC: That is our vision of it. We think that if you give people a choice, if you lay it out for them, if you show them that this is what it is going to look like as opposed to that, and these are the cost effects and the traffic and pollution impacts, then you will get a better product if we do it this different way. And then you build public support and hopefully the public support will cause the financiers to be less risk averse, the public agencies will approve it, and facilitate the development.
That is our idea for the social change model and at the same time we think that if you think about it as a different way of doing things, the equity piece falls in as an inherent piece. We think that inequitable patterns of development have caused a lot of the problems we have been talking about. In particular you have subsidies for outward expansion, the abandonment of inner cities, the segregation of populations, the defunding of inner city schools there is a whole range of things that fall along an axis of equity issues.
SDL: What are you saying caused this?
DC: This whole range of policies that were originally designed to stimulate suburban growth for a variety of reasons some of which were somewhat noble to ease urban crowding, to provide returning GIs with a decent place to live but they had the effect of disinvesting in inner cities and leaving those folks behind. Nowadays if you think about how difficult it is to do rehabilitation of older buildings, to maintain infrastructure in inner cities, to maintain facilities like schools in inner cities, those are the structural consequences of these subsidies that favor outward expansion. We think that inequity is one of the drivers of sprawl and equity, hopefully, is part of the solution to produce Smart Growth.
Look at transportation. The fact that we have overbuilt our highway system to stimulate land development has brought a lot of mobility within reach of people. On the other hand it has limited choice for people who don't drive. People who don't drive have a hard time getting to jobs in the suburbs. People who don't drive also are faced with either very long commutes to where transit does go. And there is also this attitude that mass transit is transportation for poor people. So there are a lot of these stigmas attached to the transportation system that are inequitable. In the Smart Growth field we talk about increasing transportation choices for people by providing public transit services whether it is for the old, young, the disabled, and everyone who doesn't drive. And we are not just talking about transit from the city to the suburbs. We are talking about transportation within cities, within suburban areas, and a shift of funding away from building new highways, which there are too much of right now, and more towards public transportation and maintenance of existing facilities for non-motorized transport and things like that.
SDL: Do you think there is an increase in residential economic segregation over the last 50 years. Do we have a development paradigm that is building developments that are all for the same income group.
DC: On a large scale I would say yes, absolutely, partly because when those areas were built there was an extensive practice of exclusionary housing and zoning very discriminatory practices. And that continues today. If you look at it from the economic standpoint it is economically discriminatory because in a lot of places there is a ban on multi-family housing.
SDL: Whole counties.
DC: Yes, whole counties. And then housing is tied to schools. We know there has been a tremendous balkanization of school districts since the civil rights days to the point where you have more and smaller school districts outside the suburbs where they can control their own little district. And avoid all the issues of bussing and those types of things. In the context of broad scale segregation I think absolutely there has been that transformation over time. When new subdivisions get built they are all the same [cost]. All the units are pretty much the same.
SDL: The $200,000 houses are here, the $500,000 houses are over there, the million dollar mansions are out here, and the $125,000 homes are here.
DC: Exactly.
SDL: So the vision of Smart Growth for this country does mix income groups. Is that a priority and if so how will that be achieved?
DC: From a message standpoint I would not present it that our goal is to mix incomes. The message is not: you must mix. Our message is that we want communities that can be real communities of all people. And if you look at, for example, just from a generational perspective, our communities are so non-diverse that you can't even have grandparents living in the same town as their grandchildren. It is unlikely.
SDL: Because they can't afford it?
DC: They can't afford the taxes because in places where the schools are good the property taxes are high and older people can't afford them. Also older people don't want to be stuck with a three bedroom house in the suburbs. They might want less maintenance and a smaller place. And generally you don't have that in places where there are good schools. So, purely from a generational standpoint, that "I want to live near grandma" that is a difficult thing to come by these days.
SDL: If the message is that we want communities where all kinds of people can live, and if you have said that in many parts of the country the paradigm we have now is to build economically segregated housing, that suggests that to get from the economically segregated housing to a model where there is a mixture will require that communities that currently exclude the poor change their ways. Doesn't it?
DC: Yes it does. absolutely. The message is that we want communities that are diverse because we think they work better. And we also think that communities do need to change their ways if they want to work well. So, for example, I used to live in Colorado near some tourist areas, where affordable housing was a real big issue. It was on the western slope near Aspen and Glenwood Springs. And day laborers and people who worked service jobs had to commute 40 miles to get to Aspen. I lived down the valley and commuted a little up valley and it was a nightmare. You had really rich people and people of more modest means. And people in Aspen came to the realization that this was destroying their quality of life because the roads are all clogged up with workers instead of tourists. And tourists were having a miserable time. So Aspen came up with a quite elaborate and generous affordable housing plan where they came up with owner occupied buildings that would only appreciate in value at a fixed rate of four percent a year. It involved limited equity. They did that.
In Portland, Oregon they did the Fair Share housing thing and they have had a greater economic integration within the Metro area compared to a lot of metro areas around there. And these are deliberate measures to increase opportunities and decrease reliance on driving all over the place, which I think would be a welcome solution for a lot of places. If you look at Silicon Valley The Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group and look at what they have done. They moved the workers closer. The same reason: quality of life, reduced traffic, increasing opportunity for lower income people to be in proximity of work.
SDL: So this is part of the vision of Sustainable America.
DC: Oh yes.
SDL: In many areas exclusionary zoning is very powerful and seemingly unbreakable, unless state governments were to come in and bust it apart. According to Prof. Gerald Frug at the Harvard Law School they have the power to do that. So there are many communities surrounding cities around the country that practice exclusionary zoning and no one seems to have any leverage to do anything about it. How do you see that changing?
DC: There are a couple of different types of exclusionary housing. Are you referring to bans on multi-family units or other things?
SDL: Let's start with that.
DC: In the places that have started to address that, like in New Jersey, and other places, that has not been an overwhelming success. How many years has it been since the Mt. Laurel decision? Twenty-three years? Let me first acknowledge that good examples are very few and far between. We can name them on two hands. They tend to be places that are wealthy and liberal.
SDL: Boulder, California, Massachusetts, Montgomery County in Maryland.
DC: Yeah, so that is a challenge. I don't want to be Pollyannaish about this. I think there are three points of leverage and I don't know how strong they are going to prove to be, frankly. One is the aging boomers.
SDL: You are looking at one.
DC: You are the big bump on the demographic scale and as boomers get older they are going to be demanding more of the action on the housing markets. And a lot of boomers, if you look at AARP Surveys, have said they don't want to move from where they live. On the other hand a lot of them may have to for economic reasons. So, if you look at places across the country, like my hometown in New Jersey, they are increasingly building so called town centers with townhouses and condos where none existed in the past. This is purely out of enlightened self-interest because it is coming from the people. My mother lives in a three bedroom house in suburban New Jersey and she would love to move into a condo but Livingston, New Jersey doesn't have any. So now Livingston, NJ is considering and is making plans to level a parking lot near a strip mall and build a whole new neighborhood with sidewalks and pocket parks and townhouses and all that. And it was pre-sold out immediately. Now, that is not exactly your inclusionary housing approach although it is getting there. The homes are still quite expensive but they are smaller and they are for a wider range of people.
SDL: SO you start with the elderly.
DC: Yes, that is the wedge, theoretically and one would hope that it is not only elderly people who are buying these properties it is also people who don't have as much money as your regular resident. So in terms of overall inclusionary practice it is probably not as powerful because it is all market rate. On the other hand, it is fundamentally different from what has been happening in these suburban areas. This is happening all over the country. I was at a home builder conference last year where a well respected housing analyst said that if you are a developer your business is building town centers in places that have never had town centers before. You are going to be making money for the next generation. It was Prudential Real Estate Investment business. They were saying town centers, transit oriented development, and if we can develop that business we will be golden. The challenge for a lot of these developers is that they have lost the expertise to do this any more.
The second point of leverage is that concerns about traffic have gotten pretty extreme in a lot of cities. Especially in the late 1990s and the early part of this decade traffic got a lot worse. And you are seeing a lot more people moving back into the city and a lot of public officials thinking about how to reduce traffic because it is very detrimental in terms of the amount of time you waste in the car. The hassle and expense and the pollution involved in it. So that can have an impact. Economically what we have seen is the revitalization of or the resurgence of interest in living closer in. And that is not true everywhere it is true in high growth areas.
SDL: That can lead to a "favored quarter" of development.
DC: That is definitely occurring but I think that if we are talking about resegregation and diversity I think the opportunities for diversifying communities are greater when you have more people interested in getting back to the places that have been abandoned after white flight. That is not to say that this is having an overall beneficial effect on the very poor, unless they happen to be homeowners. But in terms of diversifying incomes, which is where we started, I think there is a lot more of that going on in Washington DC, LA, SF, there are a lot more people coming back into the city as a result of that and that is a powerful force.
The Brookings Institution came out with a study last summer on poverty concentration. For years they and we have been saying that poverty is concentrating and is getting worse and worse. Their analysis shows that poverty concentration decreased dramatically in the late 1990s partly because of this city rebound phenomenon. It is extremely complicated.
We are working on this effort to reclaim abandoned buildings through the Vacant Properties Initiative. It had a terrible impact on neighborhoods. At the same time it can have a gentrifying effect on neighborhoods. But in a lot of neighborhoods this is what residents want. They don't want to live next to a crack house or a building that may be burned down for insurance money. So it is a balance between community development and gentrification. How do you develop it without displacing people.
SDL: Development without displacement.
DC: That is the goal, isn't it?
The third point of leverage is more political and perhaps more wishful than the other two. I think increasingly with the Smart Growth movement, and not to toot our horn too much but I think there is an increasing awareness of the need to make these connections. Increasingly you have environmentalists who are advocating for affordable housing. We have affordable housing and community development groups that are advocating for urban parks and green infrastructure. And we are seeing more cooperation along those lines. Even though our political leaders are extremely lame and spineless on housing issues, for example Congress put together this Millennial Housing Commission to go forth and come up with recommendations and they did absolutely nothing. But I think there is an increasing amount of public interest and advocacy interest in affordable housing and creating more housing opportunities for people. I believe we are part of the community of people who want to make something happen.
Every time I go talk to Sierra Club people they know a lot about affordable housing. You can't say that was true ten years ago. When we talk to people who are interested in historic preservation they are more interested in affordable housing. That National Trust has a big initiative on affordable housing.
This is wishful because I recognize the political forces that are against us but given how effective these groups have been on their home issues historic preservation and environmental issues I can't help but think they are going to be able to create some change. For example our coalition is doing a strategic planning exercise this month. We are deciding what we, as a hundred plus network of organizations around the country are going to do. And it is almost certain that we are going to do something on affordable housing perhaps attacking exclusionary zoning or helping to establish more state-wide trust funds. Things like that. So that is another example of another place from which leverage may come.
SDL: Isn't the zoning the real challenge?
DC: OK, there are a lot of challenges.
SDL: What I hear from a lot of developers is: "We'd love to do this but we are not allowed to because of the zoning."
DC: That's true. There are a lot of challenges. The zoning is a huge challenge. And that is why our town has gone through this big public process to evaluate planning and zoning to reevaluate it. It took awhile and a public ruckus. Our Leadership Institute, Glendening's shop, they are doing a technical assistance program with the EPA that goes into different communities and helps them evaluate whether or not their codes and zoning are conducive to smart growth. And these are communities that say they want to do smart growth but they haven't actually had someone come in and say: "Well, given your DNA you are either well positioned to pursue this smart growth idea or not. So that is one point of leverage.
SDL: I saw a report on the health costs of sprawl and it made me think about the total costs of "stupid development" or "unfair development." I have never seen a cogent argument made about why it makes sense to do all the things you want to do. And to invest in the inner city where there has been disinvestment. If you look at it from a sociological standpoint and see that there are large areas in cities where there has been white flight, disinvestment, abandoned homes, vacant lots, bad schools, high crime and people cut off from jobs in the suburbs it is clear that the people in these areas end up needing a lot of social services from health care to policing to prisons to mental health facilities etc. Then if you approach this from a conservative point of view about why we should invest in center cities and build affordable housing near mass transit and improve the schools and mix income groups if you did the financial argument for that and pointed out that people who live in more economically integrated communities where there is better access to good schools and jobs will likely need fewer government services and will end up paying more in taxes Has anyone done that?
DC: In terms of human services like prisons and so on not that much. There is a little work on prisons and smart growth but it is more about the destructive way that prisons chew up the landscape and the local labor force. But it is not about how improvement of our policies and practices can lead to reduced caseload.
SDL: It seems to me if land use policy was done in a smarter way it could reduce taxes.
DC: In the Brookings report and in our literature we talk about reducing taxes for infrastructure. And there is a well established literature on that. On vacant properties we are exploring how reclaiming these properties can reduce municipal service costs for emergency response, arson, crime, maintenance. Another thing is the health connection: the link between sprawl and rising Medicare and Medicaid costs, which the state ultimately bears. Those costs are skyrocketing now but wait until the obesity epidemic catches up with those figures and we are in big trouble. And how even a modest contribution from the built environment more walkable communities if we can increase the amount people walk it will have an impact on the end of the pipeline.
I think part of the problem is people's taxes are cut up in different ways so people in the suburbs don't see themselves as taxpayers for the cities even though at the state and federal level they might be. But at the city level they aren't and the state and federal level are cutting social services drastically so people don't perceive that as much of a problem as they used to. So I think the sense of urgency is not there as much as with these other issues like infrastructure and health costs and traffic that are more directly borne in their personal life or their household budget or their own taxes.
SDL: We can talk about equity issues as being a critical component of smart growth but I did notice that ULI did not sponsor the last Partners for Smart Growth gathering in Portland where equity was high up on the agenda. As a result there wasn't the same level of participation from the developer community that we have had at other Smart Growth gatherings in the past that ULI helped sponsor. Does this suggest a split?
DC: I didn't think of that. I did not hear of any problems with ULI not sponsoring. I think they are not sponsoring it mostly from a budget standpoint. These things are expensive to put on. This is not the first one they have passed on. The decision to make this one have an emphasis on equity I think was independent of whether or not ULI would be involved. So I don't know that there was a connection there.
SDL: I heard from some ULI people that they did not enjoy getting beaten up on equity issues at the smart growth gathering in Atlanta a couple of years ago. It seems obvious that as equity has become a bigger issue there were fewer developers in the room. Yet you have mentioned a number of reasons why developers, for their own pocketbooks, should be interested in town-center development and even in affordable housing. If you look at who needs housing now a lot of it are folks with a bunch of kids who don't have much money but can afford something. So logically developers should be gravitating towards that market but they can't seem to get through the zoning obstacles. What are you going to do in terms of the money side of this? If we are going to deal with affordable housing on a significant scale around the country and do it in a way that begins to have more mixed-income aspects to it even if it is not mixed-income in the same building but rather in the neighborhood it seems to me that there will have to be the money for it and a political coalition to lobby for the public funds necessary to do this. Do you buy the notion that there could be a coalition between the residents of the inner-city and the inner-ring suburbs, and even some in the suburbs who see that their area will be ruined if too many people move out. Do you see a potential political coalition that can change the public financing of affordable housing?
DC: I think we have already seen it. A lot of the regional coalitions built around these issues have started to address this set of things. For example, in the Portland region it is the Coalition for a Livable Future they are focused on affordable housing, land use, and transportation. But they mainly have a housing and equity focus. [ See the Citizen Planning and Housing Association.] They have a focus on these issues also. The Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago does this. There are quite a few regional coalitions that are conceived in this way. Some are more powerful than others but the bones for this type of collaboration are there in a number of cities.
SDL: And Myron Orfield's work in Minneapolis.
DC: Yes. So I do believe that can be a successful model. It is hard, however, because the forces that we are up against are well funded. In Loudon County here in Virginia they pumped a ton of money into the local races and beat a lot of the smart growth candidates but you are always going to run up against that.
SDL: One of the ideas floated about exclusionary zoning is that there are a lot of good things than can be done to bring up economically depressed areas. The Vacant Properties Initiative is clearly one of them. I have been with the architect Mike Pyatok who does design workshops in inner-city neighborhoods with local residents who come up with their own plans for affordable housing. So this is a very participatory process. So there is some of that going on. But when you begin to look at the question of how you can arrange to have a greater variety of housing types in more affluent communities where you run up against exclusionary zoning rules there are very few tools to get around that. One idea that was suggested to be is that we pass legislation that penalizes communities that do not provide a spectrum of housing choices. So if it is an affluent community with exclusionary zoning in place that keeps out the poor, then that community is lower on the list of priorities when it comes to state and local spending for roads, schools, and infrastructure improvements. That is a slightly more punitive approach.
DC: I have heard it before. Robert Liberty was the one who brought that up. He is the former head of One Thousand Friends of Oregon. He is a kick ass guy. I like that idea. That type of punitive approach has to be presented in the right way otherwise politically you get beat. You have to present it in such a way that you are not the big, bad, federal government or state government bringing it down onto the counties and municipalities. You should talk about it in terms of everyone pulling their fair share. For example, in NJ, after the Mt Laurel decision, some communities pay each other to take all the affordable housing. Instead this could go deeper. You have exclusionary practices on the books then you are not eligible for state and federal funds. That is a more robust way of doing it.
SDL: So sell it as fair share policies but with teeth.
DC: Yes, fair share, with teeth, but also in the context of a broader set of issues. This involves housing affordability and opportunities, transportation. People who work in affluent areas are also poor. So how do you reduce traffic overall.
SDL: Robert Bullard addresses that in his book on "Just Transportation."
DC: Right. My own thoughts about exclusionary zoning, I think that the whole issue of exclusionary housing practices needs to be opened up to a much wider array of approaches. For example, yes, we need to think about punitive approaches such as those you are describing. We also need to think about fair share approaches such as those in Oregon, Montgomery County, and other place. We also need to be thinking about creative market-based approaches. For example, we could encourage the development of condos; and allow accessory units to be put in and other things that would take place if it were not for government regulation.
SDL: Who is this telling us we cannot build a granny-flat above our garage? This is our property we should be able to renovate it in a way so that our children or parents can live near us. Or so we can rent out an apartment to pay the rising property taxes so we don't have to move out of our community.
DC: Exactly. It is almost like an anti-government thing. Give people more flexibility to use their homes flexibly so they can generate income for themselves and generate housing for their in-laws, college kids, workers, or whomever. That ought to be someone's right. This would make it legal. People don't want to break the law; they would rather do it legally. May they would pay a little bit to do it legally.
Packaging a range of strategies together to make it less punitive is the way to do it. The other strategies would include affordable housing trust funds. Vermont has this one that is tied to land conservation as well so it funds both activities. A lot of states have affordable housing trust funds.
SDL: I don't hear the incentive side of this.
DC: The incentive side is the programs like the Housing Incentive Program in California HIP). San Mateo County decided that they would incentivize the building of housing units near transit by offering a certain amount of transportation dollars to municipalities that allow bedroom units to be built near transit stations. The state gives the money to the metropolitan planning association, and the county gives the money to the jurisdictions. So San Mateo County did this and it was the Housing Incentive Program. For every bedroom built within a certain radius of the transit station the jurisdiction gets more transportation dollars. And you can spend those transportation dollars doing anything you want: fill potholes, build a road, put in transit. The idea was that if you put more bedrooms closer to transit fewer people will be driving and more people will use transit.. That was not tied to affordable housing but all the units were multi-family housing. And there was a statewide legislative proposal that would have done it state wide. It failed in the legislature but maybe it will come back. It is something they will try to do again. So it would give $1,00 per bedroom and even more if they are affordable units. That is for new construction. But California is adding so many people that we are talking about millions of units that need to be built so there is going to be home construction in the state and the idea is to incentivize as much of that as possible along transit lines.
The fair share stuff like in Montgomery County and Portland it is not an incentive but it is not an onerous thing.
SDL: That is a policy. My understanding is that it worked better when there were more large lots that were developable and so you had developments of more than fifty units. Then you got a lot of 49 unit applications and now there are not a lot of places where you can fit 50 units.
DC: It has been in practice for twenty years. You can't tell the difference between the market rate and the affordable units. I also think that Hope VI, despite a few flaws, it is the right model for affordable housing production. It is mixed-income, good design standards, integration, a range of housing types, and the New Urbanist model. I think that is the right model.
SDL: Except it seemed to have a tragic flaw.
DC: I think it had two flaws. First, they didn't have one-to-one replacement, which is the biggest problem.
SDL: That's a pretty big flaw. We are talking about the loss of tens of thousands of units for poor people.
DC: Yes, but I think there should be more housing production along that model and we should provide more units and that is the way we should do it. I do agree with the assertion that if you look at the style of housing that was done before Hope VI they were barracks in a lot of places and in many places the housing quality was not good and was dehumanizing. If you look at what Hope VI has done is that they have really built quality neighborhoods. The Ellen Wilson Homes in DC is a great neighborhood and people seem to like it. But the big problem is that there aren't enough of them. The funding has been zeroed out by the Bush Administration. But I think the model is the right one but there needs to be more of it.
Also I know that Hope VI because of the quality standards and the way they were administered they tended to be expensive per unit. But that is trade off between quality and quantity.
SDL: They also had to pay for the demolition of the high-rise poverty towers they replaced. It was not as if they were starting from scratch.
DC: I think we ought to be investing a lot of money in affordable housing. We shouldn't be scrimping on this.
SDL: Will you be pushing for increased federal funding for affordable housing?
DC: We have been trying to see if we can restore funding for Hope VI for awhile working with the National Low Income Housing Coalition, LISC, the Enterprise Foundation and other groups.
SDL: What about a sue-the-bastards approach; and do you see a potential civil rights approach. Economic residential segregation also has a racial aspect in that a disproportionate percentage of minority groups are poor. So the end result of exclusionary zoning is that you often get these lily white suburbs right next to the city where there are large minority populations. Looked at from afar this doesn't look right. This looks un-American. There is a kind of segregation going on here where rich people take an area and say this is ours and you can't come in. Is there a possible legal challenge to this?
DC: I would think that there is merit to cases like that because you can point to a disparate impact. You can say that the effect of these policies has been discriminatory. However, I am not a lawyer familiar with precedent and case law and all that so I don't know. Some of the original case law upholding zoning, Euclid vs. the State of Ohio, found in favor of a municipality's right to self-determination. So I don't know if precedent is in our favor.
SDL: But it does seem to be a civil rights issue as well. Is there a potential coalition there with civil rights groups?
DC: There is. You know john powell? For years we have been talking about how to motivate the civil rights crowd on these issues. Frankly it has been a tough sell because traditionally their issues are job discrimination, education discrimination, housing discrimination not in the way we are talking about it in terms of access to housing opportunities. On the other hand john has said and written that he thinks this kind of regionalism is the number one civil rights issue of today because of the geographic implications. In particular he is talking about schools. If you look at the balkanization of jurisdictions and school districts and how that was the response of the majority white population coming out of the civil rights rulings of the 1950s and 1960s, that is how a lot of these communities have shirked their responsibilities in terms of racial integration.
SDL: So we used to have segregation rules, those were shot down, now they have zoning rules.
DC: Yeah. They have the same effect. If you look at mainstream America in order for us to succeed we have to sound reasonable. If we go and start from a civil rights premise and say: civil rights believes this then it won't go anywhere in our America today. You might go somewhere in a few places. There are groups like the Gamieliel Foundation and all their affiliated groups that have prioritized "metropolitan equity" as their number one issue. So there are groups that care about sprawl and see the ways it harms their communities.
But from a tactical point of view we are working with john to try to bring this up in a way that is He is more willing to be direct and outspoken with civil rights leaders because that is his role and he has credibility. We are a mainstream kind of left of center coalition of a lot of different people. And for us to be effective on these issues we have to come up with more sneaky ways to do it.
Getting back to the exclusionary zoning issue, coming up with a range of policies that appeal to self-interest and be politically savvy, some market-based, some punitive, some coalition building, some incentive-based approaches down the barriers is more our style.
SDL: Do I understand you want someone working here on the environmental justice side of this? What is the tie-in there?
DC: I come from the Environmental Justice world. That is my background. My first job was as a community organizer in New Haven, CT. I went to Yale and worked in New Haven and got plugged into EJ through advocacy and organizing. When I worked at Surface Transportation Policy Project most of my focus was on equity and environmental justice. I played an important role in getting transportation on the radar screen among environmental justice groups to the point where Bob Bullard is mostly focused on transportation and sprawl now. And lost of other people are doing that. I am on the board of West Harlem Environmental Action, I am a member of the EJ Network in the Northeast. So that is how I self-identify.
The link is that over the years, EJ groups that have for many years been NIMBYs frankly and have talked about the discriminatory nature of siting and pollution and toxics and all that. Increasingly those groups are shifting from exposures to hazards and NIMBYism and fighting stuff; and they are moving more to community development and quality of life issues. So you have groups like Sustainable South Bronx that want greenway and an "active living" project, which focuses on walking and cycling and all that. West Harlem Environmental Action is doing this Harlem on the River Project and they are renovating an old building in their neighborhood to be their new headquarters, you have Alternatives for Community and the Environment that is in Roxbury in Boston that is doing this Transit Riders Union. You have Bob Bullard focusing on these transportation and sprawl issues so he is broadening his scope beyond the traditional toxics issues. So the link is very clear to me. The evolution of EJ has been to focus on growth, development and traffic and all those things that we work on in the Smart Growth world.
SDL: I've just spent a few years looking at the Norco/Diamond community in Louisiana where a refinery and chemical plant were built on top of an historically black community. This is an example of the human cost incurred when land use is done badly. This is what happens when the interest of poor people are not considered important when big development decisions are made. The cover of my book is a kid dunking a basketball on the fenceline with a huge refinery and chemical plant with plumes of smoke coming out. And if people can look at that and say: yeah, that was really stupid that was criminal to do that. The next step is how to get more sustainable land use decisions.
Is there a place in Smart Growth America for looking at the toxic fenceline story? Who in America is suffering the most from bad land use policy? These people are sucking up the fumes on the fenceline because no one has a rule about how close human beings can be to these giant, polluting facilities. Is that part of your agenda here?
DC: It is to some degree. In terms of exposure to toxics, I probably was more focused on those issues when I was at STTP because of the transportation and pollution issues. Here, at Smart Growth America I'm more focused on linking people to opportunities and making sure that development decisions serve communities. So most of the land use decisions we are talking about are not about building a waste treatment center or something like that. It is more about residential and commercial retail type stuff going into places; or the provision of public transportation where you are dealing with highways and transit.
So it is less of the toxics stuff. I would say there are probably only two ways we intersect with the more traditional EJ issues. One is with regard to my work with WHEAC. They have been fighting the city of NY for years locating so many bus depots in northern Manhattan. That has been a major issue from the Smart Growth standpoint. The provision of transit services is important but it is kind of like a fair share thing. We want a fair share of housing and of buses. These are important services but they do have some consequences. I would argue that housing is less of a consequence than idling diesel busses. That is something I have been active in as a board member.
The other way is less direct but it is working with EJ groups on clean water issues. And trying to enact state wide reforms and also local reforms so that communities the typical way of dealing with stormwater is building retention ponds and then buffers and traditional techniques of holding stormwater and then letting it filter through the land. Instead our research shows and this is borne out by EPA's research and other studies is that it is important not only to have the water filtrate through natural areas but also to reduce the footprint of the built environment. Smart growth techniques such as rehab and reinvestment create less impervious surfaces. So techniques that revitalize central cities, reclaim abandoned buildings, reclaim vacant lots and turn them into gardens, all of those are techniques that will improve stormwater and river quality. This is a huge issue here in DC. We were active in California two years ago when they were doing Proposition 40 that was a bond measure of $6.2 billion, the largest natural resource bond in American history. And the measure provided for open space, urban parks, clean water and clean air measures. And the people who voted for it most were the people of lowest income, lowest education attainment, and the most disadvantaged minority populations. Hispanics supported it at the highest level at 80 percent. African Americans supported it at extremely high levels, 70 percent. Asian Americans supported it at 60 percent. Whites supported it at 53 percent. It passed.
SDL: The same was true of the big affordable housing bond in California.
DC: Yes, so those are things that people see value in.
SDL: I want to leave you with the suggestion that you consider including fenceline populations in your coalition. In Europe they are working on a land use system where facilities can be sited based on how close they are to residential areas where people spend a lot of time. So it is a graded system about the siting of toxic industries. You don't put them near places where people sleep or where there are schools or daycare programs. You put them in places where people spend less time. That makes sense to me. If we are going to talk about Sustainable America it seems to me that should be part of the discussion about how we deal with land use. We have to deal with the dirty part of the industrial cycle and the fact that poor people are now disproportionately exposed to toxics. The question remains where we should put the refineries and where we should move the people who are near existing ones. And what should the policies be about how close new construction can be to polluting facilities. That seems to be a key question hanging out there. When I wrote "Diamond" it became clear to me that many new Diamond-like communities continue to be built today. You get cheap land next to a highly polluting facility and poor people will go live there because it is the only place that they can afford to live. So we are building these places every day and we will end up paying for it because people will have to be moved.
DC: I have been working on land monitoring, which is a technique that was perfected in Communist China. Basically the idea is that you have a much better hands-on inventory of what land is available or what vacant parcels are ready to go on the market and what are the regulatory restraints that are attached to this land. SO basically it is monitoring and inventory and information. The homebuilders have really latched onto this because they like the idea of more sophisticated understanding of what land is available and what you need to get it ready. It is more land developers than builders who are interested because they are the ones who play the role of getting land ready for development. The corollary of this is that not only do we need to think about what land is ready for development we need to think about what land is bad for development. What land is contaminated, what land is floodplain, what land is fire prone. Carl Anthony's unit funded a study out of the Ford Foundation about the impact that wildfires have and the study found that poor people bear a disproportionately large amount of the burden from wildfire damage.
SDL: It is certainly true that poor people live in the floodplain.
DC: The wildfire thing is a little different because wealthy people also live near the woods. But they have insurance. But the poor don't have insurance. They are living out there not because the have a giant castle on the ridgeline but because the land out there is cheap. They live in the foothills or scrubland.
So land monitoring means know where the good and bad places to build are. If we can get developers to agree to good places to build, let's get them to agree on bad places to build and point out the huge liability attached to the bad places.
SDL: There is also the environmental services side of land use. Some land should not be built upon because of the environmental services that the land provides will be incredibly costly to reproduce mechanically. So it is not just the liability and danger reason not to build somewhere. It is also protecting those lands that provide important environmental services.
Good land use decision making would have to take into account a lot of factors. Building should be relatively compact and dense, close to mass transit, not near polluting sites, not on lands that provide important environmental services, and offering a variety of building types so that people of different incomes can live in proximity. It should also be within walking distance of services and a bike ride from schools, post offices, and town or neighborhood centers.
DC: The environmental services thing is like what Gov. George Pataki did in New York. Instead of putting in giant water treatment facilities they preserved the land around the water supply.