Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Angela Glover Blackwell
Angela Glover Blackwell is president of PolicyLink, a think tank based in Oakland California that focuses on equitable development issues. For a number of years Blackwell has been the most visible spokeswoman for reshaping the way we subsidize and regulate development so that it is fair to low-income, heavily-minority communities. She also continues to interject equity issues into discussions about Smart Growth.
The Setting: The offices of PolicyLink are just across the street from Jack London Square, Oakland's storied port, where a stiff noon breeze is flapping a string of decorative nautical flags. This central gathering place in Oakland has seen remarkable development in the past few decades. Today, a TGIF restaurant, local seafood joints, and a recently-opened Barnes and Noble attract tourists from Berkeley and San Francisco. Once a gritty port, the area is being gentrified and condos are selling for big money. Mayor, Jerry Brown, is working to bring in 10,000 residents to occupy high-priced residential housing along the waterfront. While the area around Jack London Square has become a "favored quarter" that attracts both real estate and commercial investment, much of Oakland remains an economically distressed community that suffers from high unemployment. In fact, Jack London Square is a relatively small area of redevelopment at the edge of a large metropolitan area that contains vast expanses of dilapidated and abandoned housing. Where redevelopment is taking place there is a clash going on between the old and the new Oakland. Some of the local, long-term residents resent the yuppies and dot.comers who have invaded their community and displaced former neighbors. There is also the architectural clash between the industrial infrastructure of the Oakland port and the renovated area. One need look no farther than the railroad track that runs right by the trendy new restaurants carrying long freight trains burdened with Yaon Min and Hanjin double-decker containers from the Orient; or the towering maritime cranes unloading a mammoth freighter adjacent to a basin of yachts. But changes such as these are not new to Oakland. As tourists ignore the freight train rumbling past and gather around a statue of Jack London for a photo opportunity, one is reminded of an earlier day, a hundred and eighteen years ago, when 10 year-old Jack London moved to Oakland where he found menial jobs that supported him while he soaked in the tales of hard-drinking sailors and oystermen that would later people his novels and short stories. Horse drawn carts carrying goods from the port have been replaced by cargo containers hoisted by cranes. Different ethnic groups have come and gone. An Irish and Italian population gave way to an African American migration which is now making room for a newly arrived Southeast Asian contingent of immigrants. Looking out her window at this scene, Angela Glover Blackwell ponders how these changes in the human and built environment can be managed in a humane way; and how our system of policies, regulations and subsidies can be revised to help the lowest income and most vulnerable members of our community.
Interview
Steve Lerner (SDL): Is there evidence that the United States is being re-segregated both racially and by class by sprawl type development?
Angela Glover Blackwell (AB): Your question suggests that we were once integrated. We never were. We had an opportunity to become integrated in 1954 when we opened up the schools and later during the time of the civil rights legislation. That said I'm pretty sure that we are now more racially integrated than we have ever been although that is not a lot. The exception is in the South where there was a lot of integration in which poor black people and poor whites lived side by side. But even the South has become more racially segregated. Now you have more black and Latino people living in suburban areas, inner-ring suburbs, outside of traditional urban areas. It is true that we are becoming more economically segregated than we have ever been. We are becoming slightly more racially and ethnically integrated but a lot more economically segregated. The evidence for the economic segregation would be the suburban communities (and gated communities) where residents have to have a whole lot of money. As for the concentration of poverty, you will find people living below the poverty level are concentrated in urban areas. I'll bet that the data would bear out that we have become more economically segregated and slightly more racially and ethnically integrated.
SDL: What are the implications for a society that is more economically segregated? What will our society be like if we continue replicating these single income developments where over here you have low-income Americans renting in one area, people with the $250,000 houses in one suburb, and those who can afford a $500,000 house in another area? In one sense, this type of income segregation has been going on for centuries: people who have more power or money live in the more desirable places. Are you suggesting that we should end income segregation?
AB: I would question whether historically or globally the pattern is as you describe it. This is anecdotal, but when I travel in developing countries and the pattern I see (which is surprising because I am used to the pattern in the here) is that you may have a huge mansion surrounded y what I would call shacks. This reminds me of what the Plantation South must have been like because people who had slaves were comfortable having their slaves live with them on their land. And after slavery continued to have their servants live nearby. It looks like that same pattern exists in Africa in Indonesia where you go down a dirt road and see people living in shacks and then you turn a corner and there is a mansion. In St. Louis where I grew up there were whole blocks of huge houses but right around the corner were smaller houses where I assume the people lived who serviced the larger homes. So I am not sure we have ever been as economically segregated as we are now. The implications of what we are doing now [in terms of residential economic segregation] are pretty harmful because the biggest threat that we currently have is the growing space between the haves and have-nots. And we don't have a lot of hope for being able to bridge the gap. There is no question that the distance between the haves and have-nots has always been a problem. But I don't think that we previously had as many haves living as far away from the have-nots. And I don't think people are feeling real hopeful about being able to get much closer. Living together helps us humanizing each other. That is one good thing that happens when you live in close proximity to people who are different. Even if you think that some group of people is your enemy, the better you know them the more likely you are to be able to think about them as human beings. When you create a lot of distance, in terms of economic status, and people don't have much chance to interact with each other, then we get very bad results. I think some of the pathologies we have seen in places like Columbine really have to do with not having a lot of interaction with people who are different than they are. You can get some very bad results where people become isolated from each other. In isolation stereotypes and hatred are allowed to develop and people get a distorted view of the world.
SDL: Are you referring to the spatial mismatch theory about access to jobs and access to the places where the strongest economic activity is going on? There you get the situation where poor people are walled off in one area of the city and they don't have the transportation, money or contacts to get to the area where jobs are.
AB: I purposefully did not talk about it that way and I will tell you why. I talked about it that way for years when I started the Urban Strategy Council back in 1986. It was based on an analysis that the concentration of poverty had dire results for poor people and that we needed to really understand what it meant to be isolated from the mainstream access to good schools, good jobs, and the leadership that could help to improve your life. I have not felt that we have gotten very far with that approach because it has been 14 years of trying to talk that way and trying to develop policies that responded to real needs. I am now consciously trying to talk about it from the other end. I think it is bad for everybody to live in isolation from others. I mentioned Columbine because I think that is an example of the way in which isolation can hurt the wealthy as well as the poor. The flip side of the concentration of poverty is that middle-income, white families are growing up with a distorted view of the world. And that is not healthy. I think that we can make more progress building healthy, inclusive communities if we stop talking about the impact of the isolation of poor people and start talking about the impact of isolation on all people. We need to elevate the discussion to a societal concern because I am afraid what is going to happen with poor people, if we focus on them, is that they are just going to be moved to a different location isolated here rather than isolated there instead of thinking about how can we really build inclusive communities.
SDL: If you were addressing a largely white, middle-class audience in the outer suburbs where there is a lot of economic activity and where in order to buy into the community you have to be able to purchase a big lot with a lot of expensive land what would you tell them? What are the advantages to them of creating a more cooperative relationship with the inner-city where there are pockets of poverty? Why should they lower exclusionary zoning barriers and let the poor into their community by providing them with affordable housing?
AB: If I had that opportunity I would probably try to put together a speech about the future of disadvantaged children and I would talk about the crisis that some of children face because of the isolation they experience. I would talk about how they are going to schools that are not preparing them for the future world. I would talk about how we are creating environments that breed violence and ignorance. I would talk about their mental health of children who experience this type of isolation being in jeopardy. I would talk about their absence of contact with caring adults. And I would get people to agree with me that this is a crisis and we need to do something about it. And then I would tell them that the crisis we have been talking about is the crisis of white and affluent residents living in an isolated suburban community. They would have thought I was talking about poor children living in the inner city and actually I am talking about their children. So that they would begin to understand that the reason their children are not being prepared for the future is that the future world is of a world of color. The nation is going to be of color and the world is going to be of color. And if you are raising children in another reality they are ill equipped to be able to respond to what people are going to need when they are looking for good employers to lead in the nation. If we are concerned with the future of children, if we are concerned about the kind of nation or community that we are going to build, then we need to respond to this crisis of isolation. Then I would talk about mixed-income communities and opening up to people from outside.
SDL: So you are saying that the rich are deprived.
AB: I think one can make a case. I chose not to live in those communities because I think they are deprived communities. They are deprived of the richness and access that I think is important to be a functioning member of the society that we are moving toward. I live right here in Oakland. My neighborhood is inter-racial but not mixed income. I live in one of those communities where there are people of color who are of a certain income level. However, Oakland is a small place. So, while I live on a street of pretty expensive houses but when you walk around the corner, you have apartment buildings with people who I am sure are making very little money and some of the residents are not working at all. As a result, when I go to the grocery store it is an inner-city grocery store and the schools in my neighborhood are mixed-income schools. And I choose to live there. I could live anywhere I wanted to but I choose to live there because I find it richer and I find that it informs me about what the challenges are.
SDL: You were one of the first families of color to move onto a block in St. Louis back in the 1950s when you were a girl. What was your experience there? What did you learn about white flight and the role it played in creating urban sprawl?
AB: Unfortunately it didn't teach me anything until many years later because when I was going through it was just life. But I was able to analyze it later. The neighborhood that I grew up in was a beautiful neighborhood both physically and in terms of the interactions of the people who lived within it. It was in St. Louis, Missouri. It was the 4900 block of Kerry Street between Kings Highway and Euclid and it was part of a broader neighborhood that did not have a name. The houses were beautiful: brick with wood floors and stained-glass windows, and sloping front yards. There were many amenities in the neighborhood: drugstores, grocery stores, cleaners, and beauty salons. There were also two wonderful parks: one with a swimming pool and the other with a baseball diamond. Kings Highway had a grassy median that was always planted with flowers in the spring and summer. So it was just a beautiful neighborhood. But it deteriorated over time. What happened was that as all the white people began to leave the neighborhood. At first all the amenities stayed in place. As a result, what had been a beautiful white neighborhood became a beautiful black neighborhood. But, over time, as more black people began to move in, the businesses began to leave. I don't know why. And the city began to pay less attention to this area. Flowers weren't planted in the median any more and that became a dust bowl right down the middle of Kings Highway. We moved into that house in 1950 and I went to college in 1963. During those 13 years the neighborhood stayed pretty much the same. But by the time I started coming back from college I noticed differences. Then, I married and moved away. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I started coming back to visit, it was no longer the neighborhood that I had known. By the time my son was ten, in 1980, he would go to visit my parents without me in the summer and I was concerned about what he was going to be doing because of what was happening in the streets. My parents continued to live there until 1996. When they moved we were relieved that they got out safely. The white flight happened on our block within a two-year period. It probably took five to seven years before it became a black community and then it became a lower-income community. For example, the houses across the street from us were bigger and they started to be divided up into rooming houses. Poor people began moving in. By the 1960s people of the income level of my parents and above started moving out. And as they moved the larger houses would be bought and broken up and more poor people would move in.
SDL: Earlier you mentioned that a white girl lived across the street from you.
AB: We became friends. The family had three daughters and a son and they lived directly across the street from us. The girl's name was Mary. We were exactly the same age and we both liked dolls. They had a full attic and we used to go up there and play with the dolls. There was a dollhouse and stuff like that. We became very good friends. I remember, though, that they were a very religious family. They used to have Bible school for the black kids in the neighborhood. Since Mary was a friend and they served cookies at the Bible class, I wanted to go. My parents did not want me to go. I didn't understand it. This was in their house in the living room where they had all these black children sitting down on the floor reading the Bible and eating cookies. I thought this sounded great. I didn't understand it until I heard my mother and grandmother talking about how these folks had come to this neighborhood and thought they would do missionary work. And so my parents, who had been very open to me having a friend and going over to play, they had a different critique of what was going on and I think it was accurate. In 1954 when the schools integrated, Mary was going to a school on the corner that was all white, and because of segregation I was going to a school six blocks away that was all black even though we were in the same grade. I recall in 1954 running out into the street and doing that wonderful kids' dance that girls do. We were excited about the fact that we were now going to go to the same school. But come September Mary didn't go to that school. She was bussed to the suburbs. There was a scheme in St. Louis where they bussed kids to what they called private school (but were barely private) in suburban areas so that people who lived in mixed-race neighborhoods like Mary would not have to go to school with black children. As a result the school on the corner near where I lived became all black. That whole school building filled up with white children from around the corner, all of those children got bussed somewhere else. And that school became all black except for one boy name Virgil.
SDL: You also mentioned that some of the best black teachers were offered jobs elsewhere.
AB: The teachers at that time, who were black, were probably the best teachers in the school system. The reason they were so good was that in segregated America if you were black, educated, and talented the only thing that was open to you was to become a teacher. So I had wonderful teachers who were very well prepared and extraordinarily intelligent. For example, Mr. Thompson, who taught English, had a graduate degree from Columbia University. He had a Ph.D. and he forced us to understand literature in ways that I now understand was college level work. He would have been a college professor if that had been open to him. Our Spanish teacher, who lived two doors down from us, was devoted to Spanish. She had been a Spanish teacher in a private black school in the South and then she had been a Spanish teacher in high school for many years. She didn't marry until she was well in her 40's and she spent a lot of her younger years traveling to Spanish-speaking countries and she continued that every summer. She would go to a Spanish-speaking country and she would bring back things from those places whether it was Spain or Mexico. She was part of the Spanish Society and she was our Spanish teacher. I took Spanish beyond what was required. The last semester I was just one of two students she had. I had a journalism teacher who taught journalism. She helped put together they yearbook and she was an editor for the local black newspaper. So here was a person who was a practicing journalist. That was not uncommon. In the grammar school my mother, after my brother was in school full time, taught in the elementary school. My mother was extremely well-educated and well-read person. When later on I had a chance to come into contact with white teachers in the St. Louis public schools, I was always surprised at how unimpressive they were in comparison to the people who I knew who were my teachers. The white teachers were less sophisticated, they presented themselves in a less worldly fashion, and what they did during their summers did not compare -- it was an eye-opener for me. So after segregation, the teachers who had tenure could choose to go to whatever schools they wanted and they got recruited by other schools, so they moved to nicer areas.
SDL: Is one of the motivating factors behind low-density sprawl the race factor? Was a certain amount of the push for sprawl simple bigotry? Were white people moving out of cities away from minority populations to exclusive suburbs where they could put up a wall that protected them from the poor and minorities?
AB: I think that what you just said is an understatement. First there was sprawl within an urban area. We now have suburban sprawl. But in the beginning I think urban sprawl was largely driven by a desire to get away from black people who were starting to move into urban neighborhoods that they had not had access to before. Sprawl was fueled by public and private policy. The FHA actually provided the money that allowed people to be able to move to suburban areas in terms of the loans that were underwritten through the federal problem. Yes, there was a clause about racially harmonious neighborhoods. It meant that if you were white you could get a loan to move into a white neighborhood; if you were black and were trying to move into that neighborhood you would not get the loan because it would not be a loan that was perpetuating racially harmonious neighborhoods. You probably couldn't have gotten the loan if you were white trying to move into a black neighborhood but it didn't happen that much. So the federal law actually encouraged that pattern. The real estate agencies also had private policies that would cause their agents to lose his or her job if they sold houses outside the pattern they were fostering. So if you sold a house to a black person in a white suburban neighborhood you could lose your job. This is well documented. The article we wrote for the smart growth network is appropriately footnoted on this. A combination of factors motivated sprawl. White people wanted to be able to flee the neighborhood that was starting to attract black people. Moving out was also a sound financial decision. And the fact that whites were steered to houses in the new suburbs means that there is not much question that in the beginning sprawl was fueled by racism ... policy racism and private racism. I don't think that continues to be the reason that we have sprawl. I think it is a combination of the availability of automobiles, coming back from the war people really being in nesting mode, these suburban areas offered a little piece of land with the white picket fence. And once it started it created a momentum of its own. So I don't think that most people who live in the suburbs today identify with that history.
SDL: Dave Crockett, city council person in Chattanooga, said that people who moved to the suburbs were moving to a cleaner, greener, safer place. One can see that if you have policies and subsidies that reward the flight of the more affluent urban residents to the suburbs then the result is going to be a decrease in the tax base and a concentration of poor people in the city where the likelihood of crime going up is going to be almost axiomatic.
AB: It's true. Tom Brocaw (NBC) did a piece a few months back on sprawl and he did interviews that were very telling. He was interviewing a woman in an inner-ring shopping mall who was moving from an inner-ring suburb to an outer-ring suburb. He asked her why she was moving and she said because the outer-ring suburb was safer and the schools were better. Brocaw confronted her with data that proved that the schools were actually better in the inner-ring suburbs and crime rates were actually lower. He said: "what would you say to that?" She said: "I don't know, but I still don't want to live there."
SDL: Suggesting there was another factor.
AB: Yes. It told the whole story.
SDL: Tell me more about your personal experience of white flight.
AB: When we first moved into that house there was a white family living right next door to us. The woman had two children. There was a husband but we never saw him; I guess he worked a lot. They had two children, a boy and a girl, and whenever my brother and I would go out they would run to the fence because they would want to play with us. The mother would come screaming out at them, snatching them, hitting them, and doing scary things. And she screamed at us and calling us names and told her children to stay away from us. It was very traumatic for us not because we felt bad about ourselves but because we felt terrible for those children. We got to the point when whenever we were out and those children came out we ran in the house to save those children from getting a beating. They moved away and that was a good thing. A nice family moved in and that was great. There was another family that lived in back of us, across the ally, and they were older and their children were grown. One day there was a truck coming down the ally and my brother and I were playing out there and we jumped up on their wall to get away from the truck and the woman came out calling us horrible names and shaking a broom at us. So partially I was happy to see these people move away because they made our lives miserable. They were witches as far as I was concerned. I was a little girl seeing these adults completely out of control. It reminded me of the witch in Hansel and Gretel. So mostly I was happy when they moved away. But I'm sure I was curious about why all the white people left. The response that my mother always gave to me about race was that those people were ignorant. And they were.
SDL: But you speak of this period as a lost opportunity. You seem to suggest that when the schools became integrated there was an opportunity for the community to become integrated as well.
AB: That's right.
SDL: And there were these policies and subsidies and bigotry that created white flight instead.
AB: The one white family that we were friendly with was an Italian family that lived two doors over. My father and their father liked to do things in the woodshop. When they moved away I went to visit them in their suburban home. But I didn't like it and it didn't compare positively with our neighborhood. I think that made an impression on me because they had been friendly and I thought they were different. Then, when I went to their home in the suburbs, it was obvious they had moved away from us because they had not moved anyplace better.
SDL: Did this have an impact on the pocketbook of your family. When there was white flight and poorer people moved into your neighborhood did the real estate values go down?
AB: We suffered for it only when my parents sold the house in 1996. They bought the house for $12,000 in 1950; and in 1996 they sold it for $40,000. That is nothing for having lived in a house for 46 years. They only were able to sell it for $40,000 because at that time young black professionals started to recognize that these were lovely houses. A few years before they would only have gotten about $30-32,000. I'm sure that when we went to college it would have been a lot easier on my father if he had been able to pull that money out of the house. He did take out a second mortgage on the house but he didn't get nearly the help that people living in the suburbs did.
SDL: So the property value issue is a significant factor because generally speaking the largest investment of most families is in their house. And their biggest opportunity to make money is in their house appreciating over time. I gather that this was a widespread phenomenon.
AB: Yes, widespread. Certainly, when we were going to college my father could have used more help from the house. And when they moved out here, while we were all happy to do it, we had to all chip in to get them settled in a place out here. I'm sure that most white families who have had a home that many years and the folks decide to sell the house and move somewhere else, they can get enough out of that house to do it [because the property values have risen in their neighborhood].
SDL: So when we look at the difference in wealth between African-American families and white families, a lot of it has to do with this.
AB: That's right.
SDL: Similarly, low-income, minority residents in economically segregated areas, who have not been able to generate wealth through an appreciation in the value of their homes, do not have the resources to move into the new, affluent, largely white suburbs..
AB: Yes. And they don't have the resources to start businesses or finance a college education for their children and they don't have access to the best schools for their children.
SDL: You talk about redevelopment without displacement. The New York Times Magazine just published an article about the Lower East Side in New York. Suddenly the area started to gentrify and now places are selling for huge amounts of money and all the old inhabitants are gone. What tools would make it possible for an area to improve economically without displacing the people who live there who don't have a lot of money.
AB: Angie Wei is working on a "Managing Gentrification Tool Kit" for us. We are trying to manage gentrification so we can promote equitable development. Some of the tools people are using are housing trust funds, inclusionary zoning, and a tool that communities and governments can use to build or fund affordable housing. Most zoning ordinances are exclusionary -- that is they forbid certain types of housing or land use in neighborhoods. Inclusionary zoning, on the other hand, is a tool that can foster mixed-income development by mandating that all new residential developments set aside a specific percentage of housing for low-income families. Inclusionary zoning also provides developers incentives to build affordable housing. There are a number of cities and counties that are already doing that. They do it in Montgomery County, Maryland; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Boulder, Colorado. Another tool is housing trust funds. They are created through legislation as vehicles to aggregate funding for the creation of affordable housing. They create and maintain housing targeted for low- and moderate-income members of the community. They often are funded by taxes and other revenues. For example in Tallahassee, Florida and the Illinois legislature has created the Illinois Affordable Trust Fund in 1989 that has made over $20 million in grants. In Santa Clara County, California is working hard to create a $20 million trust fund for affordable housing. There are also community land trusts and assisted housing programs that we are highlighting in the tool kit.
SDL: Is it essential to secure land for affordable housing in a low-income area before gentrification starts so that you can buy the properties at a low enough price to make the units you build on it affordable?
AB: We feel that this tool kit can be useful along a continuum. Here in the Bay Area we are very concerned about gentrification. But if you go to Baltimore they will say, please give us the problem of gentrification. So we have quite a continuum from places trying to attract development to those trying to manage it. There is a big rally here on Saturday at the Mission. They expect a thousand people to come out in the mission protecting the displacement that is happening because of development. We are hoping that this tool kit will be attractive across the spectrum. It must work in places like Baltimore so people will be able to figure out how to attract investment in a way that does not lead to displacement; and in places like the Mission where gentrification is pretty far along. It must also work for people in West Oakland to figure out what they ought to be advocates for.
SDL: This is political dynamite is it not?
AB: I think we should recognize that gentrification is an outcome of inequitable development and that inequitable development is driven by policy. If we want to have equitable development we need to develop policies that will lead towards that outcome. When we subsidize the revitalization of low-income communities with public dollars, if we get gentrification as a result of those subsidies and policies, we need to rethink the policy agenda and develop ones that lead to a different outcome. Gentrification is not the natural course of the market; it is the natural course of the policies that move the market in certain ways.
SDL: Give me an example.
AB: California's Proposition 13 is a policy that has penalized communities building housing as opposed to attracting retail, because when you build housing you don't get much property tax from it but if you build retail you get the sales tax. So you force communities to use their dollars to go out and subsidize retail because it brings in a tax base. This policy discourages the construction of housing, particularly low-income housing, because it creates no tax base. So this is a policy that discourages the building of low-income housing. The City of Oakland is subsidizing the housing that is going up down here [near Jack London Square]. They are subsidizing it. The developers that are building all that expensive housing got a deal on the land because all of this is owned by the Port of Oakland. And they are building high-rent housing because Jerry Brown wants to bring 10,000 high-income, big spenders into this area to develop it economically. I think it is a mistake. There was no housing here but there are a lot of Southeast Asians who live in this community. There is a really vibrant East Asian Community and these are low-income people --- Hmongs and Laotians. We ought to be encouraging a model of development that works for them rather than pushing them out. We could build some housing around the cultural vitality they are bringing to this area rather than something that is at war with it. Mayor Brown is not doing both the high-end and low-end housing.
SDL: What about the exclusionary zoning in the outer suburbs. Should be prohibited?
AB: I want to be careful about that. I don't want to start making a big deal about something that is peripheral to the problem. I've been to Danville. Ho-hum. It is a community out past Walnut Creek that is very expensive and exclusive that they sell as an executive community. It is full of million, two million, three million, four million dollar homes. I don't know if permitting that that is our problem. I'm not sure it isn't a red herring. Those people have big money, big influence and if you start threatening their interest and I don't think the fight is about people living in $2 million houses. There are only so many people who can afford to live there. I see it as their problem and their loss that they chose to isolate themselves in that way. But I am a little more concerned about Walnut Creek because it is a bigger community that is more diverse economically but not racially. Economically you have some people who are probably school teachers or postal workers who live there. Now if Walnut Creek does not allow some low-income housing -- and this is a place where businesses are opening up and you have a lot of fast food joints and these are entry level jobs. So if Walnut Creek doesn't allow the building of low-income housing, then we have a problem because people are certainly going to be commute from Oakland to Walnut Creek because there are jobs there. So it would make sense if they could live there. But if Walnut Creek says, yeah, we are diverse, but we have all the low-income housing we want, that could be a problem
SDL: But the principle should apply universally, should it not? In Montgomery County, Maryland, when a developer wants to put in 150 houses he is told that he has to provide a certain amount (10 percent) of affordable housing units in the new development. Is that what you want?
AB: Yes.
SDL: Let's think about the implications of that. Some are going to say that zoning decisions should be made at the local level. Now we have people coming in who are saying that it should be made at the federal or state level. That is dictating policy to the local people. Some people have a problem with larger political entities trying to dictate to them how they have to run things at the local level. Particularly on land use issues they will fight tooth and nail to prevent that.
AB: I think we ought to fight that.
SDL: A private developer buys private land. Should the government be able to tell people what they can do on their land?
AB: We do it all the time. There is nothing unusual about that as a concept. We have been in a battle in our neighborhood over some trees we feel should be cut down. The trees are rotten and we are still in a battle. There is nothing un-American about it. At PolicyLink, we have been talking about how what we do on our land impacts the people around us for a long time. We need to figure out a way to decide where to take a stand that will benefit the people we want to benefit. That is all what I'm saying about places like Danville. If we are going to have a state-wide solution, then that's fine. But if we are going to pick the local places where we are going to fight it out, then let's be intelligent about it. One question is whether there are other things going on in that community that provide a good reason why low-income people should have access to it. When you think about fairness, if you are going to attract businesses to your area, because of the tax base that retail businesses provide, then you are getting that benefit and other places are not so you ought to provide affordable housing there as well. I think we can make a case that if you take this [economic benefit] you ought to provide that [social asset, such as affordable housing].
SDL: You can also argue that it is more efficient to do it that way because you don't have people with these long commutes creating traffic congestion and creating environmental problems.
AB: If we got creative we probably could make a case around the public schools. We could ask: "Why is it that if I don't make $200,000 I can't have access to these schools?" One approach is to fight for equitable funding for schools in low-income neighborhoods. Another approach is to demand that children from low-income neighborhoods be allowed to live in areas that have schools that meet their needs. California is not one of those states where the local property tax funds education. Local property taxes go to the state, and the state then gives it back.
SDL: Are infrastructure investments being made in an equitable fashion?
AB: They are not.
SDL: As a result can suits be brought under the Civil Rights law?
AB: That is what Bob Bullard [director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University] is saying he is doing. There is no question that public transportation dollars are disproportionately benefiting suburban commuters who get to work by using the highways; and that by contrast those who use public transportation do not get as much. Atlanta is the most outrageous example of that. You know that MARTA only serves the city of Atlanta and does not connect to the suburban community at all. So if I live in Atlanta and I don't own a car and I want to work out there in the suburbs I am so disadvantaged it is unbelievable. And to have public dollars create that kind of inequity is outrageous. There is no question that there are multiple examples of that. We also put public dollars into building a sewer system that allows people to live out here in an exclusionary community and go to the best schools the state has to offer and make it easy for them to live there. It is not fair.
SDL: Some say the poor are subsidizing the building of sewers to new rich communities in what used to be farms or forests.
AB: And putting wonderful schools out there to which none of the low-income people have access. They are creating jobs that low income people can't have access to. And they are creating suburban parks and playing fields and so much more. There are beautiful public parks in these suburban areas. And no one from the inner-city can get to them.
SDL: One response is that these communities are open to anyone with the money to buy into them.
AB: I would say that it is not open to anyone if you don't have public transportation. You have to add that it is open to anybodyanybody with the money. So it is not open to anybody if you have to addwith the money.
SDL: Does that mean that any place in America has to be open to anybody regardless of how poor they are?
AB: I won't go there. But I would say that when you are using public dollars to develop a region we need to pay attention to making the regional resources as accessible as possible. That is a much less ambitious goal.
SDL: Do you feel that the Smart Growth Movement has adequately addressed the issue of equity and if not what is it that they should be doing.
AB: It has not. They [smart growth advocates] have not addressed the equity issue nearly as much as the environmental issues and the economic efficiency issue. I think this is an emerging issue and I think the environmentalists would tell you they have a long way to go. I am sure the people who are trying to be most efficient in terms of economic growth are frustrated in what they have gotten done. But I think both of those issues have gotten a bigger and better airing than the equity one has. Part of the reason is that the movement has not attracted a lot of people who lead with equity issues. I would not be so crass as to say that the environmentalists and the business people don't care about equity; they just do not lead with it. Equity issues in Smart Growth have attracted a lot of people of color, although it hasn't attracted a lot of community activists. From the policy end we have been pulling in the civil rights groups and the economic development groups and the CDC people. One reason that the equity agenda has not been more developed is that people who lead with the equity issue have not been a part of the Smart Growth Movement. I also think that it is because the people who are leading the Smart Growth movement don't really care about equity that much. They have put it in because it clearly is a part of it but they really care about other issues. And we haven't defined Equity very well in America. I think the equity movement is a new movement. It is an outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement and an outgrowth of the Equality movement. But it is still defining itself. So we haven't really gotten Equity out there. When you are talking about regional growth the discussion should include equity issues. I think the regional discussion is the right place to develop the equity issue. And if we keep talking about it enough we are going to get it on the [negotiating] table. But it is not on the table yet, it does not have its advocate in every room, and we are coming up against the same kind of opposition we always come up against when we have these kinds of discussions about race and equality.