On February 28, the Twin Cities’ Star Tribune reported that Metro Transit police officers dressed in plainclothes would begin boarding trains on both the Green and Blue light-rail lines to snuff out smokers. In 2018, Metro Transit fielded roughly 1,800 complaints of offenders smoking everything from marijuana to tobacco and e-cigarettes on transit platforms. The offence, a misdemeanor, can result in a fine of up to $300.

The Metro Transit’s interim police chief told the newspaper that the checks wouldn’t be carried out all day or every day. Rather, officers will be stationed on the days and times that tend to be most popular with smokers, chiefly the Green Line, which connects downtown St. Paul with downtown Minneapolis, during mid-afternoon.

While some might see this as a move to save commuters from clouds of smoke, there’s also an element of broken windows policing and an unfair targeting of already marginalized populations.

“We’re out there on the ground hearing from transit riders and [there are] plenty of communities of color that deal with the issue of being and feeling profiled,” says Jessica Treat, executive director of Move Minnesota.

While noting that Move Minnesota aims to partner with Metro Transit and other organizations rather than cultivating an adversarial relationship with them, Treat explains that Move Minnesota sees holding public agencies accountable and asking questions that check their policies as an important part of “centering equity” in its work.

“We’ve heard about the issue of using plainclothes police to address smoking and have called it into question. I’m not saying only people of color smoke, but I’m saying that a high percentage of people of color are riding public transportation. If they happen to be smokers, what does it mean to have plainclothes officers there? Why that approach?” Treat says.

Yet Minneapolis isn’t alone when it comes to a resurgence of the broken windows approach in monitoring public transportation.

Transit authorities in Charlotte, North Carolina, began cracking down on fare evasion earlier this year. New York City officials made a promise to do the same in December 2018 despite the fact that data show that people of color are disproportionately targeted by fare evasion crackdowns in the city.

According to a 2017 report compiled by the Community Service Society of New York, in just the first three months of 2017 the NYPD arrested 4,600 people for fare evasions, 90 percent of whom were black or Hispanic. In Brooklyn in particular, black men ages 16 to 36 constituted half of all fare evasion arrests despite representing only 13.1 percent of poor adults.

“This sort of ‘broken windows’ policing of low-level crimes of poverty has disproportionately targeted poor communities of color — criminalizing young black men in Brooklyn at alarmingly high rates,” the report states.

In New York City, captured fare evaders face a $100 summons or arrest. Harold Stolper, senior economist at Community Service Society and an author of the report, explains that if you’re a repeat offender in the city’s transit recidivism database or if you meet another condition for arrest in the process, the latter will be the likely consequence. A night or two in jail might mean missing work and pay, or losing a job.

“Both [fines and arrests] are a major disruption to … predominantly low-income people who are already living paycheck to paycheck,” Stolper says. “Plus, the potential trauma of being arrested for not having $2.75. Maybe you have $20 but it has to get used throughout the week and you had to make that hard choice.”

A desire to address these issues with transparency was part of the impetus for the 2017 report, and an NYC law that requires the NYPD to post and update data on turnstile jumping on its website each quarter along with demographic data including age, race and sex of offenders.

The police department blew past its January 30, 2018 deadline, and finally released a limited subset of their data for only some subway stations, rather than all of them as required by law, in October 2018.

The positive thing about the largely incomplete and extremely tardy NYPD data is that it does illustrate a decrease in fare evasion arrests to the tune of 70 percent less than the previous year’s final quarter. Stolper attributes this decrease, in part at least, to the city’s introduction of the Fair Fares program.

After campaigning for several years, the Community Service Society was successful in seeing money from the city’s budget allocated to the program that gives half-price fares to adults ages 16 to 64 with families at or below the federal poverty level — a $25,750 annual income for a family of four.

“For some of these families, a year’s worth of [public transit] passes are more than 10 percent of their family income and that’s just not tenable,” Stolper explains. “If you have policies like universal health insurance and universal summer jobs and people can’t access them, [the programs] will be limited in how many people they can reach.”

Move Minnesota’s Jessica Treat also sees potential alternatives to policing in addressing smoking on public transportation in the Twin Cities. While she has had positive experiences asking fellow riders to not smoke or to reduce swearing around her young daughter on public transportation, she recognizes that not everyone feels comfortable doing so. Treat sees solutions as simple as a looped announcement reminding riders that there’s no eating or smoking on the trains as a step in the right direction.

Treat also ponders the possibility of an ambassador program.

“I look at the Downtown Improvement District in Minneapolis [where] businesses are paying for ambassadors who walk on the street. They pick up garbage and are friendly and they provide directions … . Why couldn’t we have a similar approach on public transit? Why couldn’t we have trained people out there to help enforce decorum,” Treat wonders — rather than armed police officers who may make people of color feel uncomfortable based on a history of uneven law enforcement.

“Riding transit is a community activity,” she says. “I ride it all the time. I see people and recognize people. It’s a community and it should be treated that way rather than [as] a dangerous activity.”

As senior vice president for investments at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) one of his primary jobs is to shop around and negotiate where to invest the money that comes from donors until the foundation grants those dollars to various causes and organizations.

With $13.5 billion in assets, SVCF is the world’s largest community foundation. (It has taken some heat for being a place where tech billionaires go to avoid paying taxes.) So it’s no small thing that when Feuss went out looking to deposit that $8 million, he asked if the bank that took those dollars would sign on to the California Reinvestment Coalition’s Anti-Displacement Code of Conduct. The pledge would mean the financial institution would avoid making loans to developers whose business models rely on the eviction of existing residents and businesses.

Feuss first heard about the anti-displacement effort from the California Reinvestment Coalition’s executive director, Paulina Gonzalez. In partnership with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the coalition published research in 2018 using public data from the Oakland Rent Board to document the extent to which property owners were moving to terminate tenancies, increase rents or remove units from Oakland’s rent control program — and connect those property owners to the banks that finance their acquisition of single-family and multifamily housing in Oakland.

That research was funded in part by a grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, so it was a no-brainer for “the investment side of the house” to sign onto the code of conduct, Feuss says. About 85 organizations overall have signed on so far, but only one bank.

In taking the Anti-Displacement Code of Conduct to a bank, Feuss found a more-than-receptive audience in Mark Roach, chief banking officer at Community Bank of the Bay. It’s a small community bank with just three branches around the Bay Area and $390 million in assets — of which $248 million is in real estate loans.

Roach has been in the commercial real estate lending business for 25 years. He still vividly remembers when, while at a previous employer, a syndicated credit deal came across his desk — the kind of loan that’s so big, multiple banks team up to actually fulfill the request. The borrower was the Lembi family real estate empire, which was seeking to refinance debt on a number of properties in its portfolio that Roach describes as “fantastic locations,” in Russian Hill and other posh San Francisco neighborhoods. Everything seemed fairly run-of-the-mill, even for a loan of this size, until Roach and his colleagues dug a little deeper into the family’s business plan.

“There was buyout money,” Roach says. “There was money in the loan where they were going to go one by one to all the tenants and extract a move-out notice for money. That was the first time I’d seen a business plan where your moral compass just said ‘that doesn’t look right.’ We didn’t touch it, but that deal got done.”

Reports later surfaced about the Lembi family empire’s security guards breaking into apartments, shutting off utilities, changing locks and retaliating against those who refused to take buyouts. But by 2011, the empire was in default. Roach could see it coming.

“A lender, if you think it through, it’s not a farsighted business decision to finance someone like that,” he says. (Lehman Brothers, whose collapse signaled the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, served as the lead on that syndicated credit deal.)

It’s not that hard for banks to see if developers are displacing longtime, rent-controlled tenants. When a deal comes across Roach’s desk, one of the standard pieces of documentation is the building’s rent roll, with names, original lease dates and monthly rent amounts. Roach can see clearly if there’s some longtime tenants paying $1,200 a month while others in the same building are paying $4,000 for basically the same apartments. “If it has a bunch of people who have been there for 20 years, we can see that’s a law-abiding landlord and we don’t have any issue with that,” Roach says.

If they get a loan, landlords typically have to submit documentation on the financial status of the building to their lenders on a quarterly or annual basis — including updated rent rolls.

“If next year we saw that there was only Facebook people paying $4,000 a month and all the people who had been there forever had moved out, we would see that, and we would call the borrower to ask can you explain this,” Roach says.

If a bank finds that a borrower violated laws or regulations in evicting rent-controlled tenants, they have cause to “call the loan.” This might force the developer to sell the building (perhaps to a community land trust or to a local community-based organization) or refinance the loan with someone else and effectively divest the bank from the property. Roach says he hasn’t yet had to make such a call, but he would face that decision if a borrower was displacing tenants. Commercial real estate lending relies on approval of construction and renovation permits by cities, and you never know who is paying attention.

“It’s very, very bad for the market reputation of any bank, not just our bank. It’s not smart business at all,” he says. “One truism about commercial real estate lending is, the whole world can see who a lender is on a building. It’s a public record.”

After Feuss approached Roach about signing the Anti-Displacement Code of Conduct, it didn’t take long for Community Bank of the Bay to become the first, and so far only, bank to sign on. Roach even helped refine the pledge to more closely reflect how banks do commercial real estate lending.

With that squared away, SVCF took out an $8 million certificate of deposit with Community Bank of the Bay. The agreement between the bank and the community foundation stipulates that the bank will use the funds to support lending for individuals, affordable housing and small businesses in low- and moderate-income areas, and that the bank will report annually to the foundation on those activities as well as on its compliance with the Anti-Displacement Code of Conduct.

There’s precedent for the Anti-Displacement Code of Conduct effecting change. Grassroots groups in New York City used data to target Signature Bank and New York Community Bank for making loans that directly financed displacement of mostly low-income tenants. Both banks have since endorsed and made changes reflecting the demands of those grassroots groups. The state of New York’s financial regulator released guidance for avoiding financing serial evictors.

Federal regulators could adopt standards against financing serial evictors as part of banks’ regular examinations under the Community Reinvestment Act. There may even be implications for Opportunity Zones, since under that federal tax incentive, investors must make equity investments in projects in order to qualify, and real estate projects almost always combine equity with debt from somewhere else, often a bank.

Meanwhile, Feuss intends to talk to more banks about the pledge, as current certificates of deposit come up for renewal or SVCF decides to increase the amounts they hold in such investments. There are some that the community foundation works with that are clearly aligned already — Self Help Federal Credit Union, the union-affiliated Amalgamated Bank and Beneficial State Bank — but others may be a tougher nut to crack. He may have some awkward conversations ahead.

Javier Figueroa moved to Orlando in November 2017, not long after Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc on his hometown of Manatí, a small city on the north coast of Puerto Rico. After living on FEMA housing aid for about a month, he started looking for an apartment for himself, his wife, his mother and his 7-year-old son near his son’s school. He applied for a lease in a housing complex, paying $85 apiece for background checks for the three adults in the household. The rent was $1,197 per month, he says. According to the application, he was supposed to show that he earned at least three times that amount. That was basically impossible, Figueroa says. He has a disability and receives Social Security insurance income. It wasn’t until a Puerto Rican woman who worked in the leasing office helped him navigate the application process that he was able to secure the apartment.

After a year, Figueroa moved his family to a low-income housing development in nearby Apopka, Florida. He paid a $100 fee to have his family placed on the waiting list, he says. The deposit for the apartment was $1,294, and his family lived in a hotel for a week between leases. It’s been over a month since he left his last apartment and he still hasn’t gotten his security deposit back.

Until he moved to Florida, Figueroa, who is 42, had never been involved in community organizing. But he now works with Vamos4PR, which advocates for the Puerto Rican diaspora. Over the last few years, Figueroa has talked with lawmakers about the difficulty of finding and keeping an apartment for families like his in Florida.

In early March, two of those lawmakers, State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, who represents parts of Orlando, and State Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, who represents parts of Miami, introduced identical bills that would grant a sweeping set of new rights to tenants across the state. Among the provisions in the legislation are a “just cause” eviction clause, requirements that leases be provided in the preferred language of the tenant, a right of first refusal for tenants when their landlords are selling their buildings, and a rule that would require landlords to pay back three times the security deposit amount if they fail to return the deposit within 30 days of the end of a lease.

“We started talking at the beginning of this year about the need to protect renters in the state of Florida,” Smith says. “So many of Florida’s laws and protections are centered around landlords, and we think that’s wrong, because so many tenants and renters face problems when it comes to fair treatment in housing.”

The legislation was crafted in cooperation with a coalition of advocacy groups across the state, Smith says. They include Organize Florida, the Community Justice Project, Manufactured Housing Action, and Vamos4PR. (A Vamos4PR spokeswoman, Carolina Gonzalez, helped me and Javier Figueroa talk over the phone in English and Spanish last week.) The legislation is a push in the direction of more stability for renters, they say, if not the silver bullet to solve the state’s housing crisis.

“We all really care about increasing renter protections in the state, because there’s really not that many at all, and promoting a narrative around rent control and how it’s a simple solution to the crisis,” says Sheena Johnson, campaigns director for Organize Florida.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Florida has a shortage of more than 425,000 housing units for extremely low-income renters — families of four with less than $24,600 in yearly income. In Orlando, the affordable housing market is particularly tight, with just 17 rentals accessible to every 100 extremely low-income renters. And housing advocates say the state’s tenant protections are unusually weak; a RentCafe analysis concluded that Florida is one of the most landlord-friendly states in the U.S.

Johnson says Organize Florida works to empower low-income tenants in their conflicts with their landlords. Last fall, the group helped tenants in an Orlando apartment complex organize an effort to have city officials enforce rampant code violations, including caved-in roofs, broken lights and infestations. The effort resulted in the city imposing the maximum fine on the building’s owner: $1,500 a day until the violations were resolved, Johnson says. Laws like those introduced in the state legislature will help tip the scales back in tenants’ favor, she says.

“The root of [the crisis] is gentrification and capitalism,” Johnson says. “But in terms of figuring out how to have a solution without dealing with the root causes of it, we need to have a state that has strong renter protections and a state that has some sort of landlord accountability.”

Also included in the legislation: housing protections for survivors of domestic abuse, language prohibiting discrimination against tenants based on gender identity and sexual orientation, a prohibition on evictions during states of emergency, and a requirement that landlords provide three months’ notice when they’re planning to raise rents by more than 5 percent. Other bills introduced recently in the legislature would undo a state law that limits local rent control policies and prevent the legislature from repeatedly raiding the state’s housing fund, known as the Sadowski Affordable Housing Trust Fund. According to a report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, lawmakers have diverted money from the fund every year since 2003 to balance the state budget.

Carlos Guillermo Smith says he wasn’t surprised that a group of landlords came out in opposition to the new bills as soon as they were introduced. (A landlord group in Florida did not respond to a request for an interview.) Passage of the bills is not a sure thing, Smith says, but if they are approved, they’ll enact a comprehensive set of tenant protections in a state that has fewer than most.

“The legislature is full of people who want to protect the rights of landlords, and that’s fine,” Smith says. “But there needs to be balance. We have a tough hill to climb, there’s no question. But what I’m really excited about is, this is really creating a conversation and highlighting the abuses that are happening.”

Ottawa Council Approves Stage 2 O-Train Extensions
Stage 1 of Ottawa’s Confederation Line, the upgrading of the city’s successful Transitway BRT to a light metro, is still having trouble making it to Opening Day, but that hasn’t deterred the Canadian national capital from doubling — make that tripling — down on rail transit.

Railway Age reports that Ottawa City Council voted 19-3 on March 18 to approve the Stage 2 expansion package for the O-Train light rail transit network. The C$4.7 billion (U.S. $3.53 billion) expansion plan will add a total of 43.5 km (26.72 miles) of new route and 24 stations to the nearly completed 12.5-km (7.77-mile) Confederation Line Stage 1 and the already-in-service 8-km (4.97-mile) Trillium Line. The O-Train Stage 2 project will be the largest single public works project undertaken in the National Capital Region’s history.

The Confederation Line will get extensions to the east and west of the Stage 1 segment. The five-station eastern extension will run 12.5 km (7.77 miles) from Stage 1’s Blair Road terminus to Trim Road. The western extension will have 11 stations and 15 km (9.32 miles) of route. The main line will run from the Stage 1 western terminus at Tunney’s Pasture to Moodie Drive and have nine stations; a two-stop branch will serve Algonquin College at Baseline Road.

The diesel-powered Trillium Line will be extended southward from its current terminus at Greensboro to two new termini, one at Riverside and the other at Macdonald-Cartier International Airport. A total of 16 km (9.94 miles) of route and six stations will be added to the existing line; in addition, two new stations will be added to the current Trillium Line segment and a new interchange station with Bayview on the Confederation Line built.

Work on Stage 2 is slated to begin later this year. The Trillium Line extensions should open in 2022, followed by the Confederation Line eastern extension in 2024 and the western extension the following year. Metro Report International states that the new extensions will have a design capacity of 24,000 passengers per hour in each direction at peak periods and put 77 percent of Ottawa’s population within 5 km (3.11 miles) of a station.

Meanwhile, Railway Age also reports that the consortium building Stage 1 will miss yet another deadline for handing over the completed line to the city. This time, it’s testing of the line that will cause the Rideau Transit Group to miss a March 30 deadline for completion. Not enough electric-powered LRVs have been certified as ready for service to provide the 15 two-car trains needed to simulate peak period operation on the line. The consortium has committed to turn over a finished, ready-to-run project no later than June 30. If it finishes its work early enough, the line could open on Canada Day, July 1, after a 30-day inspection period.

State, Federal Governments Sign Accord to Build Melbourne Airport Rail Link
The Australian federal government and the Victoria state government have reached an agreement that sets out how the long-planned rail line connecting the city and its suburbs with Melbourne Airport will be built, Railway Gazette reports.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in announcing the agreement jointly with Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews, said that “Melbourne is truly a global city that deserves world-class infrastructure” and that the people of Melbourne and Victoria “had been waiting far too long for the rail link to become a reality.”

The airport rail link will be designed to connect with several suburban services from a junction near Sunshine and head into the city using the new Metro Tunnel now under construction. The line will also connect with other suburban rail services via the planned Suburban Rail Loop belt line.

The federal government has already committed A$5 billion (U.S. $3.54 billion) to the project’s projected total cost of A$8 billion-$13 billion (U.S. $5.67 billion-$9.22 billion), and the Victoria government has pledged a similar amount toward construction. Actual construction should begin in 2022 and take nine years to complete.

Jakarta Metro Takes Passengers Along for Test Rides
Metro Report International reports that Jakarta’s new metro began carrying passengers on test runs March 12, a little more than two weeks ahead of a planned official opening on March 26.

During the trial period, the line will carry about 28,000 passengers a day on its 15.7-km (9.76-mile) run from Bundaran HI station in the city center to Lebak Bulus in the south.

Ridership once the line officially opens is projected to be 212,000 daily passengers at the outset, rising to 960,000 riders a day over time. The line has seven elevated and six underground stations, and fares are set at a flat 10,000 rupiah (70 U.S. cents).​

Know of a project that should be featured in this column? Send a Tweet with links to @MarketStEl using the hashtag #newstarts.

For many planners, a key goal is continuing professional education. APA Learn, the American Planning Association’s online education platform, offers planners an easy way to access ideas and insights on important topics, track Certification Maintenance credits, and advance their career goals.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” An investment in APA Learn education is a great value for APA members because they get a 50 percent discount on all courses. Plus, new content is continually added on topics that range from A to Z.

Find an alphabet’s worth of planning courses below as you browse through the ABCs of planning.

A IS FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Affordable Housing Series
Many communities support affordable housing production but want to balance it with preserving community character. In this course learn from combined National Planning Conference sessions on Affordable Housing. Explore tools that encourage affordable housing while affirmatively furthering fair housing.

B IS FOR BIKE LANE

Increasing Biking in Contentious Environments
The American automobile is far from dead, yet we are demanding more from our city streets. This session will take a comprehensive look at how bicycle infrastructure can be built in charged political environments.

D IS FOR DIVERSITY

Promoting Diversity and Inclusive Communities
Discover the barriers to the integration of diversity in planning education and practice through recent studies that explore perceptions and personal experiences of diversity in the workplace, practice and education. Learn strategies to foster diversity and promote culturally competent planning.

E IS FOR ECODISTRICT

EcoDistricts and Environmental Justice Academy Precepts
Explore a proven approach to community revitalization that combines EcoDistrict protocols and Environmental Justice Academy precepts. Discover how to integrate these protocols and precepts to promote equitable, resilient and sustainable communities.

F IS FOR FLOOD MITIGATION

Implementing Innovative Flood Protection/Mitigation
Hurricane Sandy underscored the region’s need to advance coastal resiliency planning, a need magnified by the potential threat of more frequent and intensive coastal storm events. Explore the six award-winning design approaches, created as a result of HUD’s Rebuild by Design competition.

G IS FOR GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE

Regional Green Infrastructure Strategies and Tools
Explore the processes and tools employed in the first stage of the Central Puget Sound Regional Open Space Strategy, and learn how these innovative, landscape-scale “green infrastructure” planning techniques can be applied to other regions.

H IS FOR HOUSING

Housing, Health Equity & Local Control
“Local control,” the newfound religion among progressive cities, has roots in strategies once used to combat reconstruction and civil rights. Is local control the antidote to state interference with laws aimed at achieving affordable housing and health equity? Find out.

J IS FOR JOINT DEVELOPMENT

All Aboard: Planning for Joint Development
Hear from transit agency development staff on how new policies are creating diverse communities, where agencies have successfully partnered with local cities — and learn where more collaboration and progress can be made.

K IS FOR KNOWLEDGE

Local Planning Agency Management and Skills
What you need to know to manage today’s local planning agency creatively and effectively. This course explores the perspectives, skills and knowledge sets planners need to succeed in managing traditional practice as well as emerging sustainability and resiliency work.

L IS FOR LAND USE

Can Land Use Decisions Prevent Violence?
Violence is preventable, yet it is pervasive in too many communities. Explore how planners and people working in violence prevention, public health and related fields can proactively collaborate to create safer neighborhoods for all.

N IS FOR NEW SUBURBANISM

Lessons in New Suburbanism
Washington, D.C., is transforming as aging, auto-dependent suburbs are being revitalized through new suburbanism. Presenting a data-driven approach to transforming sprawl into walkable, sustainable communities, this session offers insight into — and proven methods for — suburban design success.

O IS FOR ORDINANCE

Ordinances: Best Practices to Follow, Pitfalls to Avoid
Get a multistate perspective on good drafting techniques, common pitfalls that lead to unclear ordinances, and legal and judicial perspectives on the results. Learn why drafting individual ordinances, “simplifying” or “streamlining” them, or combining them into a unified code all need to be done with care.

P IS FOR PLACEMAKING

Creative Placemaking from the Community Up
Explore creative placemaking from the community up, grounded in values fostering belonging, equity, racial justice and inclusion. Examine local case studies from diverse urban and rural contexts, tools and resources, and creative participatory planning and community engagement practices.

Q IS FOR QUALITY OF LIFE

Austin Sidewalks: Planning, Assessment, and Execution
Sidewalk networks provide access to transit, increase transportation equity, help control air pollution and traffic congestion, and improve quality of life. Learn how Austin’s sidewalk and Safe Routes to School programs use GIS tools for analysis, planning and project management.

R IS FOR REGIONAL PLANNING

Complete Streets: Regional Planning, Local Implementation
The metro Orlando area of Florida consistently ranks at or near the top of the “Dangerous by Design” list for pedestrian safety. Learn how Central Florida is working to reverse dangerous trends by planning for and implementing complete streets.

S IS FOR SMART CITIES

Broadband Planning: Smart Cities and Superclusters
Learn comprehensive planning practices and the role of Wi-Fi SuperClusters in planning a resilient and sustainable smart city. Through case studies, experts share how high-speed broadband drives economic development and improves public safety, agricultural output, health care and educational services.

T IS FOR TAX INCREMENT FINANCING

Legal and Financial Strategies for Conservation
Explore conservation easements, historic tax credits, and programmatic strategies that engender stewardship and protection as strategies to balance the maintenance of character and heritage with limited financial resources.

U IS FOR URBAN DESIGN

Emerging Technologies to Transform Urban Design Series
Planners are playing an increasingly important role in the development of sustainable places and smart cities. This combined course featuring two NPC sessions explores automated vehicle technology, the use of ropeways and gondolas in an urban environment, and the proliferation of e-bikes worldwide.

V IS FOR VEGETATION

Bread & Butter: Planning for Farms
Planning for farms and food is a bread-and-butter issue. Forecast impacts of climate change and development, discover if your community is farm-friendly, and learn how an Iowa county preserved farmland and protected farms.

W IS FOR WALKABILITY

Saving Nature with Walkable Urbanism
Hear about the regulatory tools, capital investments, and partnerships that the riverfront city of Beaufort, South Carolina, and the college town of Davidson, North Carolina, employed to create more walkable communities while preserving their waterfronts and protecting their countryside.

X IS FOR XERISCAPING

Water Decision Support Tools for Planners
Planners increasingly rely on place-based information from decision-support tools to better understand impacts of water-related events on communities. Learn from experts in the federal, NGO and private sectors on using tools to address drought, coastal inundation and water quality.

Y IS FOR YOUTH

Captivating Youth Engagement
In this session, planners share their insights about programs that effectively engage young people in community planning. Learn about the institutional support for these projects and assess what resources you might need to undertake your own project.

Z IS FOR ZONING

Friends at Last: Preservation and Zoning
Communities today are seeking ways to align and synchronize historic preservation regulations and guidelines with zoning. Explore approaches used in Los Angeles, Fort Worth, Texas, and Roswell, Georgia, to see how they may work for your community.

]]>Wed, 20 Mar 2019 13:15:00 +0000Kimberley Jacques | American Planning AssociationMetro Boston to Get More Creative With City Planninghttps://nextcity.org/daily/entry/metro-boston-to-get-more-creative-with-city-planning
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/metro-boston-to-get-more-creative-with-city-planning

While serving as artist-in-residence in metro Boston's regional planning agency, Carolyn Lewenberg worked with an economic development planner to draw people to the launch of the Albion Arts Corridor in downtown Wakefield, Massachusetts. (Credit: Metropolitan Area Planning Council)

The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), the regional planning agency serving the 101 cities and towns of metropolitan Boston, made a unique hire in 2017: Carolyn Lewenberg, an arts organizer with a background in public art, became the agency’s first-ever artist-in-residence.

The goal was to bring arts, culture and creativity into the agency’s multidisciplinary planning work. Over 10 months, Lewenberg engaged with 10 different planners connected to land use, public health and the environment.

The work was fruitful enough that MAPC recently hired its second artist-in-residence, Hortense Gerardo, whose tenure will last until 2020. With experience as a playwright and interactive installation artist, Gerardo promises to bring her own creative perspective to the planning agency.

“I never quite understood why there wasn’t more space for arts, culture and creativity in the field of urban planning and community development,” says Jennifer Erickson, who leads MAPC’s arts and culture department. “The things that people love about places has so much to do with culture and people and creativity.”

Erickson was working in MAPC’s land use department when she started to question why planners weren’t engaging more with the arts. She saw it not only as a creative planning tool, but also as an invitation to citizens to become more engaged and excited about civic issues.

It was also important, she adds, to value “art for art’s sake.” While many countries have dedicated ministries of culture or arts councils, the United States does not. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that arts spending made up less than 0.02 percent of federal spending.

In 2015, Erickson floated the idea of developing a toolkit for tapping into arts and culture through the fields of urban planning and community development. In 2016, MAPC launched a website to showcase examples of arts and culture advancing urban planning and community development priorities. In April 2017, MAPC established an official arts and culture division with Erickson at the helm. The division was promoted to department status in February 2019.

In hiring for MAPC’s first residency, Erickson stressed to applicants the experience would be far from typical. MAPC’s offices hold no studio space; the agency envisioned the artist embedded in its various planning departments.

Lewenberg says it was a “shift in mindset” for both her and the planners. “I learned a lot about making awesome spreadsheets,” she says. “I got to create a compelling foundation for why we’re doing this work.”

Lewenberg worked with an economic development planner to creatively draw people into the launch of the Albion Arts Corridor in downtown Wakefield. She worked with members of the government affairs department to develop an arts element at the Shannon Grant Basketball Tournament, which brings together youth and law enforcement in Somerville. She collaborated with a land use planner on integrating creative community engagement as part of the Revere Open Space and Recreation Plan.

“It was an opportunity to really learn how cities and towns function,” Lewenberg says of her integration into different planning departments. “I learned how to navigate these different entities to make a project happen.”

Toward the end of Lewenberg’s residency MAPC evaluated the program and ways to ease an artist into the structure and bureaucracy of a government agency. “To welcome an artist into this space, who hasn’t had experience with the field, it’s really starting from scratch,” Erickson says. “She’s an artist at a desk … . I think I underestimated how much time it would take for the person to feel really comfortable and welcomed.”

For the second artist-and-residence, MAPC carried out a more thorough orientation.

Gerardo went through a Planning 101 workshop and attended a workshop on creative community placemaking. She sat in on staff meetings of various departments to learn about their current projects, and attended numerous community forums to talk to residents about engagement and placemaking.

“I look forward to creating new work that directly reflects the needs and interests of the community,” Gerardo says in an email. “I am also interested in being part of a government agency that acknowledges the need for arts and culture to be an integral part of urban project planning.”

Erickson calls the artist-in-residence program “one part of a really ambitious program we have to infuse arts and culture into the practice, not only at MAPC but the overall Boston region.” The department is moving ahead on three kinds of work: capacity building (workshops and training on issues like creative placemaking); technical assistance (this includes the artist-in-residence’s services, an internship and a fellowship); and research, data and policy.

Erickson also helped start an Arts and Planning Interest Group with the American Planning Association about four years ago; it is now a network of over 300 planners and artists.

“How can we support the development of the arts and cultural sector through good planning and community development?” she asks. “There’s this growing awareness and visibility in the field.”

Henry, a commissioner in Adams County, which is adjacent to Denver, has been a local elected official for nearly 11 years. She says that during her campaigns, she has knocked on more than 19,000 doors. “Some of those doors just kind of stick out in your mind,” she says. “When I first ran, I remember knocking on this one door. They were a couple. It was 2007. They both worked. They both had really good jobs. When I went back four years later when I was running for re-election, one of them had lost their job. They were looking at losing their home.” When Henry was campaigning in 2016, she says she found the couple both had jobs — but they paid minimum wage.

“They couldn’t afford to put their kids into any sports activities,” Henry recalls. “They couldn’t go to parent-teacher conferences because they were just working to make ends meet.”

Between 2000 and 2015, housing costs increased and the number of high-poverty neighborhoods tripled in the Denver metro area. According to the same report on suburban poverty by Apartment List, there was a 500 percent increase in the number of suburban neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. As of January 1, Colorado state minimum wage is $11.10 an hour for non-tipped employees. That is up from 2016’s $8.31 and will go to $12 in 2020, thanks to a 2016 voter-approved increase. Henry believes an even higher minimum wage would be helpful, but state law prohibits local governments from setting their own minimum wage above the state level. However, a state bill could overturn this prohibition. In early March, the Colorado house passed the bill, moving it on to the senate, which has nixed previous versions of the proposal.

The bill represents a notable divergence from a national trend of state laws preempting local control and limiting the powers of local government. According to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), Colorado is one of 25 states with this kind of preemptive bar on minimum wage hikes. Blocking local decision-making in this way means the level of government closest to the people ends up gutted of power, according to Kim Haddow of the Local Solutions Support Center (LSSC).

“If you look at all three levels of government, there is … the most trust with local government,” Haddow says. Running into local elected officials at the grocery store, in church and at Little League games helps people feel “you understand where we live. You share our values. You get what we need here,” Haddow says.

Yet, a 2018 LSSC survey found that 59 percent of those polled supported state bills that overrode local legislation. In answer to another question, 43 percent felt that such overriding had a negative impact on them, and 38 percent said state-level preemption didn’t affect them at all.

LSSC’s position is that such preemption hinders working toward equality. The group’s primer on preemption says: “The increasing use of preemption threatens to perpetuate racial and economic inequality, limit local anti-discrimination efforts, and systematically strip local governments of their power to regulate and set health, safety and economic standards.”

Lori Riverstone-Newell, a professor at Illinois State University who has studied preemption, points out that when states take away local powers like this it’s often done by conservative legislators seeking to “limit local choices that deal with any kind of progressive social policy or any kind of progressive social actions that might affect the larger economy. And by that I mean preemptions that say you can’t use plastic shopping bags.”

“It’s extremely costly for us as a nation. We’ve used our localities to come up with all sorts of policy solutions in the past, some of which the states have adopted,” Riverstone-Newell says. “Anti-smoking provisions started at the local level. We can tell if [a policy is] going to be cost-effective on a local level, and we can see what the political backlash is going to be. So, that saves the state and state leaders tons of money and pain.”

Meanwhile, Laura Huizar of NELP believes wage increases benefit local economies: “When workers receive higher wages, they are very likely to spend those wages in the local community, so it has a multiplier effect of sorts where they’re spending money and pumping money into their local economy, which benefits everyone.”

Henry says she’ll continue to be a vocal supporter of the Colorado state bill. “I think the people who live here understand what our communities need,” she says. “We need to give the average blue-collar, middle-class people more of an advantage, as opposed to the large corporations.”

On March 4, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced a plan for the state to transition to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. “Climate change is an existential threat. We must take immediate action,” Walz said, as reported by Minnesota Public Radio. “If Washington is not going to lead, Minnesota will lead.”

Walz’s plan would raise efficiency standards for electric utilities owned by investors, assist low-income residents in creating more energy-efficient homes, and require utilities to prioritize clean energy over fossil fuels for new power generation. Moving forward, fossil fuel power would only be allowed if and when it’s required to ensure the delivery and reliability of other modes of electricity.

The state’s largest energy provider, Xcel Energy, already pledged to shift to nuclear energy by 2050, but there is opposition to the proposed changes.

“Renewable resources are not available all the time,” Missouri River Energy Services’ Joni Livingston, whose company provides electricity to 25 Minnesota communities, told the Star Tribune. “You know the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow 24/7.”

Those who think the change is daunting might want to look for inspiration in Rochester, home to the Mayo Clinic and its own public utilities system, Rochester Public Utilities (RPU). The city has been shifting to clean energy on its own for years.

“First of all, I’d say I support what the governor said, but it won’t affect Rochester in many ways. I believe we’ll achieve the same thing well ahead of [the state’s] schedule,” says Michael Wojcik, a member of both the city’s Energy Commission and the RPU board.

Kevin Bright, Rochester’s energy and sustainability director, sees the governor’s plan as having the potential to help the city “put the pedal to the metal a little bit.”

Rochester has a contract with the Southern Minnesota Municipal Power Association until 2030. While the city is beholden to coal-powered electricity until then, once the contract expires the city plans to be ready to hit the ground running when it comes to clean energy.

RPU will conduct an infrastructure study this year that is charged with laying out a plan for which energy sources the city will build or purchase as the 2030 transition point nears. “The board is expecting staff to come with a number of infrastructure alternatives, at least two of which will lead to 100 percent clean energy,” Wojcik explains.

Once the plan is complete, the public will have a chance to review the proposed alternatives before the board decides which one will be pursued.

Considering the cold temperatures that Minnesota deals with each winter (and this winter in particular thanks to the polar vortex), the foreseeable future in Rochester will include natural gas as a backup for when renewable sources go down. Wojcik says storage is key to clean energy success. “The ability to store energy is going to be critical. That’s what’s going to get us from 70-80 percent [clean energy], which is easier, to 100 percent, which is harder.”

Managing demand effectively across diverse sources of energy will help too. “It’s important that when the wind is blowing or the sun is out, that’s when we want to use energy that is available. And when it’s not, we’re using much less,” he explains.

Bright agrees, noting that having access to several energy sources that are capable of operating at different times will be key to the city’s ultimate energy success.

However, accounting for human behavior is tricky. Wojcik says the city knows that residents’ compliance is also necessary. “There’s nothing more effective than pricing structure,” Wojcik says, explaining that clean energy would be priced more cheaply when it’s abundant and would be more expensive when it’s not. “Nothing brings people together like a hit in the pocketbook,” he says. He clarifies that the goal is to reward clean energy behaviors rather than punish others.

Behavior isn’t the only human element Rochester has focused on in its clean energy plans. Both the future of jobs and equitable access to clean energy resources have been deeply considered.

Minnesota doesn’t produce any fossil fuels, but instead imports coal from Montana and Wyoming through Duluth’s Lake Superior port. Considering that a shift to clean energy would save money that could then be kept in state, Wojcik sees jobs growing as the state moves toward clean energy. Solar installer jobs were the fastest growing in eight states in 2018, including Minnesota.

When it comes to equity, the city is concerned with “making sure the [clean energy] plan works for everyone, not just the wealthy who can afford energy-efficient gadgets,” Wojcik says. “There’s a lot of focus on making sure the amenities offered extend to all areas [of the city],” adding that an emphasis has been placed on reusing underutilized infrastructure over new construction in order to increase housing affordability along with energy efficiency.

Wojcik credits Rochester’s clean energy trailblazing to two things: the community’s willingness to embrace science and their demand that actionable plans be put in place. He notes that the city’s voters have overwhelmingly stacked the City Council with clean energy proponents.

In addition to praising residents as being “smart enough to know that [climate change is] a real thing,” he says that unless a city can come up with an infrastructure plan designed to implement goals, actually getting there will be a challenge. “There’s a difference between saying you have a goal and taking the hard steps it takes to implement a goal,” he concludes.

This discount hotel in a Queens manufacturing zone was recently sold for $36.5 million. (Photo by Oscar Perry Abello)

When it comes to the tension between the global economy and New York City’s local economy, the battle of Amazon gets all the headlines, and community organizers are starting to score big victories — but not just against Amazon. While some bemoaned the loss of potential jobs and tax revenues as a result of the corporation’s decision to pull out from its plans to expand in New York, community organizers recently celebrated a win that could help clear the path for a different kind of economic development. After years of organizing campaigns calling for changes to protect land zoned for manufacturing, New York City Council approved a change to the zoning code in December 2018 that requires hotels to seek a special permit to develop in areas zoned for “light manufacturing.”

Of the 41,840 hotel rooms built in New York since 2007, about 10,000 are in such areas. Manufacturers that got their start in these neighborhoods have had to move elsewhere to grow, taking living wage jobs with them. They’ve moved farther and farther away from the affordable housing where some of their workers live — contributing to what researchers call “spatial mismatch.”

In the Greenpoint and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn, Leah Archibald has been fighting against the invasion of hotels in manufacturing areas for years. The city and state have provided funding for Evergreen, the nonprofit she leads, to serve as a one-stop shop to support manufacturers in these neighborhoods that need help finding or connecting with tax credits, incentives, loans and real estate. Around 200 manufacturers a year go to Evergreen for support. Ten to 15 of those are looking for help securing a new or larger space where they can grow and hire more employees — or simply keep the ones they have.

“For businesses that are expanding, that have a relationship with us, we very, very frequently cannot find them space in our community and we pass them off to our brother and sister organizations in other industrial neighborhoods,” Archibald says. “Heartbreaking though it is … . For a while, some of the employees will do the commute, but over time it just becomes too much.”

In Jamaica, Queens, Aron Kurlander sees a couple hundred manufacturers a year that need support from the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation. Many are from other parts of New York City, and they want to stay in the city, he says, but he’s recently had to place some in the Long Island suburbs.

“We had an elevator parts manufacturer who desperately wanted to buy a building in Queens,” says Kurlander. “They had grown from 10-15 jobs to 30-40 jobs, but the numbers just didn’t work. They couldn’t find anything they could afford to buy, so they moved out to Nassau County [on Long Island]. That was a great company, minority-owned company, they wanted to stay in the city. The owner lives in NYC.”

The part of the zoning ordinance that council amended in December hasn’t been updated since 1961 — when no one thought anyone would want to build a hotel in an industrial neighborhood. But hotels aren’t the only non-manufacturing uses competing for land zoned for manufacturing uses in New York. Self-storage providers, tech companies looking to set up in industrial loft space, as well as nightclubs, bars, and restaurants, are all after industrial real estate. However, unlike these other uses where the raw industrial structures can be part of the allure, hotel development generally involves demolition of industrial buildings to make way for new and generally out-of-context structures that would be costly later on to convert for industrial use.

“Things like hotels and self-storage, nightlife uses, are able to pop up [in manufacturing zones] as of right,” says Lee Wellington, executive director of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, a national coalition with 800 members in 200 cities dedicated to urban manufacturing. “So you have this competition … without ever having to go to the department of city planning to request a special permit or request a zoning change. This is all happening without any regulatory muscle from the city.”

City Council’s move last year requires that hotel special permit applications go through the city’s standard land use review process, known as ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure), which includes nonbinding input from the community as well as a binding vote by City Council. The council typically defers to the member whose district encompasses the land use application request.

Despite a steep decline in manufacturing since the 1950s, jobs in the sector remain some of the highest-paying for those without a bachelor’s degree. Many manufacturing zones are located close to affordable housing in New York, a city where 72 percent of people walk, bike or take public transit to work. Archibald says the neighborhoods she serves have walk-to-work rates twice the borough average for Brooklyn.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, manufacturing jobs also still have some of the highest jobs multipliers, a measure of how many other jobs each job in a given sector creates through the supply chain — much higher than accommodation and food services.

New York City has made attempts to support manufacturing in different ways over the past decade or so. It created industrial business zones, or IBZs, in 2006, areas where the city pledged not to re-zone land from manufacturing to other uses (after having done just that to many areas of Brooklyn and Queens). The IBZs also included incentives for manufacturers and funding for organizations like Evergreen and the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration committed to a 10-point Industrial Action Plan in 2015, which included the creation of the Industrial Developer Fund to help more nonprofit industrial developers like Evergreen acquire more real estate to preserve it for affordable industrial use. Evergreen acquired the first of its four buildings back in 2008, but hasn’t acquired any new buildings for about five years — and not for lack of trying, Archibald says.

“Looking to make sure industrial assets have nonprofit stewardship with an underlying mission to support the manufacturing sector can be really pivotal to help hundreds and hundreds of manufacturing companies in cities,” Wellington says.

But the continued competition from hotels, self-storage and other non-manufacturing uses has hampered all the above. There’s only been one acquisition made so far with the support of the Industrial Developer Fund. Evergreen received approval to make an acquisition with the fund’s support in Fall 2018, but hasn’t yet found an available property at a price that makes sense, Archibald says.

“Yes we need funding for new types of industrial development, yes we’re providing funding for the industrial business service providers, but we also need to be very intentional about the zoning, because the zoning is really what’s going to be the foundation for everything else,” says Armando Moritz-Chapelliquen, senior economic development organizer at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), a citywide network of community development organizations.

Inspired by a realization that no housing is affordable without a living wage job, nonprofit community development corporations in NYC and around the country have started taking a larger interest in organizing to protect land zoned for manufacturing. ANHD published a three-year progress report on the city’s Industrial Action Plan, and organized public statements and testimony at city council hearings and rallies. After years of work, momentum is growing.

“What’s most exciting to me are the growing network of community development corporations that are stepping into this space, and in the process of becoming industrial developers and stewards of manufacturing space, they’re also becoming the new advocates for rational manufacturing zoning,” says Wellington. “Several years ago, community development corporations were not even jumping into the conversation. This is very new.”

According to Moritz-Chapelliquen, getting City Council to change the code regarding new hotels required “continuous follow-up with the administration, working with the department of city planning, following up with the City Council members, focusing on the impact of what’s happening in the IBZs, highlighting problems that have continuously been here.”

With the hotel special permit requirement now in place, Archibald feels a bit of relief, though she’s worried it’s too late for it to help her neighborhoods.

“I don’t know what the long-term impact of the special [hotel] permit is going to be in north Brooklyn because we already had so many hotels … ,” she says. “I think it will be more beneficial for the other industrial neighborhoods where there hasn’t been quite the level of incursion we’ve seen.”

The next battle lines are already being drawn around land zoned for manufacturing in New York.

“There were good, important steps forward, but in some ways they were the low-hanging fruit, the most obvious,” says Adam Friedman, executive director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, which focuses on equitable and sustainable economic development. “The next wave of changes are more complicated, having to do with office development and retail development and how to limit uses … . The work of building more balanced planning, more balanced land use, is ongoing.”

The council released a report in early March, “Narrowing the Gap: Strategies to Alleviate and Prevent Poverty in Philadelphia.” It includes more than two dozen ideas on housing, jobs and education, and the social safety net. In a press release, Council President Darrell Clarke said the report includes “much of what we already know about generational poverty, and its perniciousness, and offers multiple blueprints for legislative and policy remedies.” Council members then introduced five bills mandating new affordable housing requirements for developments that use public land, preventing landlords from discriminating against tenants with criminal histories, and creating a legal defense fund for low-income tenants.

Andrea Batista Schlesinger, a partner at HR&A Advisors, the real estate and economic development consulting firm that council commissioned to do the report, says they examined other cities for policies that could help create economic opportunities and eliminate barriers for residents with the deepest challenges. They also spoke with housing advocates in Philadelphia and met with council members several times, Schlesinger says.

“They very much wanted actionable items, and our work is to bridge between ideas and implementation. They picked us for that reason,” she says.

There’s evidence to suggest that housing is a winning election-season issue. Since 2015, the last time Philadelphians elected a new mayor and City Council, cities around the United States have begun trying to address their housing crises with a variety of housing policies meant to make more homes accessible to more people. Minneapolis famously adopted a plan that calls for an end to single-family zoning in the city, after advocates pushed housing to the top of the electoral agenda in 2017. Austin voters approved the largest housing bond in the city’s history. A new cohort of cities and states has begun to look at implementing rent control, a policy that was widely considered passe just a few years ago. In Philadelphia, around 125,000 households spend more than half of their income on rent, and the first bills introduced alongside “Narrowing the Gap” were related to housing.

One bill, for example, would require that any public land that is sold for multifamily development set aside at least a third of the units for low-income tenants. The units would have to be leased at rates that people earning up to half the area median income can afford, maxing out at around $765 a month for an individual or $1,100 a month for a family of four.

The bill represents a new phase in conversations about inclusionary housing that have been going on in Philadelphia for years. Two summers ago, City Council Member Maria Quiñones-Sánchez floated a proposal that would have created the city’s first mandatory inclusionary zoning policy. That proposal was later altered, and last year, the council approved a voluntary version of the policy with density incentives for developers who build affordable units. The new bill essentially creates mandatory inclusionary zoning for projects on public land. Housing advocates in Philadelphia say they weren’t closely involved in crafting the new proposal, but they welcome the effort and tentatively support the goals.

“I do think that there is tremendous value in ensuring that public land is serving equitable development goals, and requiring some affordability for certain parcels is a really important step,” says Beth McConnell, policy director for the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations.

McConnell notes that many of the public properties sold to developers in Philadelphia are used for single-family housing, so it’s not clear how frequently the new policy would be triggered, if it ends up passing. But in the cases where it did come into play, such as a large-scale redevelopment proposal on a public lot in a gentrifying part of South Philadelphia, it could make a big difference, McConnell says. To make the bill as effective as it can be, it might make sense to pair it with an incentive, McConnell adds.

“I think it’s a worthwhile conversation about whether you would offer to discount the land in exchange for this requirement, or to compensate or offset for this requirement,” she says.

Another bill, which would create a Low-Income Tenant Legal Defense Fund, also carries on a policy conversation about tenant legal protections that has been active for years. In 2017, City Council Member Helen Gym’s office helped secure $500,000 to pilot a program, called the Philadelphia Eviction Prevention Project (PEPP), that helps tenants get access to legal aid in landlord-tenant court. In its first year, according to an annual report, PEPP provided more than 1,100 tenants with expert legal advice, distributed 8,000 tenant resource guides and assisted more than 2,500 tenants via a tenant help line. The city increased the allocation to $850,000 last summer.

Gym co-sponsored a bill in March that would appear to make the Low-Income Tenant Legal Defense Fund more permanent. The bill “brings our city another step closer to guaranteeing the right to counsel and expands on the city’s anti-eviction work, which has been a central priority of my office,” Gym said in a statement.

Another bill, similar to efforts in Washington, D.C., Seattle and Detroit, would prevent landlords from inquiring about a prospective tenant’s criminal background except “for the purposes of screening an applicant for sexual assault.” Two others would establish an affordable housing tax credit and require rental listing services to include city rental license numbers in their advertisements. (The Philadelphia Inquirer reported last year that nearly 40,000 rental properties are unlicensed, which creates code enforcement challenges.)

Other strategies in “Narrowing the Gap” could provide ready material for more legislation down the line. The first agenda item is creating a “linkage fee,” which would capture money from new development and allocate it to affordable housing programs. In effect, a linkage fee would be similar to another measure that the City Council has already debated. In 2018, the council narrowly approved a bill imposing a 1 percent tax on new construction and sending the proceeds to the city’s Housing Trust Fund, which helps pay for new construction and preservation of affordable housing and funds home repairs. Mayor Jim Kenney held off on signing the bill over concerns about its impact on development, before negotiating a compromise deal to let the tax proposal die in exchange for a commitment to put at least $53 million into the fund over five years with tax revenue from properties coming off the city’s controversial 10-year tax abatement.

Last month, the city announced that it had made good on that commitment with a $19 million deposit into the fund.

The last couple of weeks have truly gone to the dogs. In Massachusetts, a white woman, quickly dubbed Dog Park Debbie by the internet, called the police on a black man when his dog humped hers at the Attleboro Dog Park. CityLab posed the question “Are Dog Parks Exclusionary?” and chronicled the development of Chicago’s posh Lincoln Yards waterfront megadevelopment including the fancy dog park that’s slated to reside within it. Juxtaposing the Lincoln Yards amenity with other Chicago neighborhoods, a bleak picture began to emerge: Dog parks are scant in non-white and non-affluent areas while leash law citations flourish.

“While a dog park isn’t exclusionary per se, it sends a signal,” explains Vanessa Perry, chair of George Washington University’s department of marketing. Dog parks, bike lanes and other such public space amenities have come to be associated with gentrification in many U.S. cities. First come the dog parks, then the Starbucks, then sky-high property values that push out the longtime residents and small businesses that have called a neighborhood home for decades.

“Thy symbolism is also tied to the sociopolitical environment because public resources get allocated through the political process. To the extent that more long-standing residents don’t have the political wherewithal to be able to influence the flow of resources the way that newcomers do, then you have dog parks emerging as this symbol of the disenfranchisement of existing residents,” Perry says.

She adds that it’s not like there are hordes of people out there who are vehemently against dog parks — just that people want an opportunity to have their voices heard rather than have amenities dumped on them when their needs lie elsewhere.

One of the reasons a mismatch between a community’s wants and needs and what actually gets built can arise is through a default reliance on public officials. “It’s easier and in some cases legally supported to just defer to elected officials and zoning processes, but that’s not necessarily inclusive and doesn’t capture everyone,” Perry notes. Considering the fact that marginalized groups are often disenfranchised from voting, “what happens then is that people start to assume that there’s a conspiracy to run long-standing neighbors out of these neighborhoods and it’s hard to refute.”

As cities struggle with these public space equity issues, Raleigh, North Carolina, has taken a step in the right direction with broad outreach to ask residents about dog parks.

The city’s park system plan, adopted in 2014, called for a study of the need for dog parks. In 2018, a dog park needs assessment began and culminated with the city’s 2019 Dog Park Study, complete with a smiling dog on the cover and a collage of adorable faces on the third page.

The report found that an estimated one-third of all households in Raleigh have at least one dog, that the city’s pup population is projected to exceed 100,000 by 2023, and that over half of Raleigh’s human residents reside in multifamily or attached housing arrangements that often lack yards.

TJ McCourt, a planning supervisor in Raleigh’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department, was surprised that the study found, despite over 200 public parks and a network of greenway trails, many people only visit public parks to access a dog park. “For these people, this is one of their only outlets for getting outside, getting exercise and meeting neighbors,” he says.

In addition to looking at systems in other cities and defining holes in the city’s dog park coverage by creating something of a doggie census, Raleigh took community input seriously.

“When it comes to dog parks in particular, we were aware of the [equity] issue and wanted to make sure that we were getting as representative of a sample as we could,” McCourt explains.

His team used a variety of different methods, from collecting survey responses to interacting with people at pop-up dog parks, and stopped halfway through to look at the results they were getting.

“We were getting disproportionately high responses from downtown and north Raleigh, which is generally white and higher income,” McCourt says. “We saw that we were not getting high responses from southeast Raleigh where a high percentage of the population … identifies as black or African-American, so we did specific outreach there.”

The key, though, has been using the information from the report as a guideline that is secondary to individual communities’ priorities. As an example, the report showed gentrifying neighborhoods in east Raleigh, just outside of downtown, as prime locations for dog park development. Yet, because of previous engagements with residents of those neighborhoods regarding a different park issue, the city knows dog parks aren’t a high priority for that community.

“Even if there are flexible use spaces that are mostly empty, they’re often used for parties or barbecues or pickup sports or church events. Even though through some lenses they might be underutilized, we always look at the community use. We think it would be inappropriate to convert [spaces like these] into a dog park that would only serve one population,” McCourt says.

However, it’s not an all or nothing situation. The pop-up dog parks that were used in the study continue to be deployed across the city for days, weekends and sometimes entire weeks in order to meet the needs of dog park owners in other ways than permanent dog park construction.

By using fencing material that clocks in at a fraction of construction costs, the city has been able to save money and avoid the equity pitfalls that can surround long-term implementation.

“One of the things we tried to emphasize with the findings and throughout the process is that dog parks are for people too. They’re not just for dog exercise or places for dogs to go to the bathroom. We focus on the human side the same way we would for any other amenity,” McCourt says. “That approach and message go a long way to help people who don’t have dogs or don’t want to use [dog parks] to understand that we’re not building these places for dogs.”

Perry agrees, adding that small, simple and low-cost gestures that signal who a park serves can go a long way in addressing equity issues that surround not only dog parks but public spaces in general.

“There are no messages about who these spaces are open to. We assume that people know but we don’t say it,” she says, adding that there are inexpensive ways, like social media advertising, to send a message of inclusivity. “Something like ‘All dogs are welcome here’ sounds silly, but it’s true.”

The Obama Presidential Center (OPC) is the official name of the proposed complex to commemorate the nation’s 44th President, slated for location in Jackson Park, on Chicago’s South Side. None of the actual papers and documents from Barack Obama’s two terms will live there. Instead, existing facilities within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) system will store those documents, with digitized copies of nonclassified documents made available online. However, the Center is projected to include a branch of the Chicago Public Library, while the grounds will feature an incline suitable for sledding in winter, an outdoor track, indoor athletic facilities, community gardens and outdoor food trucks. The Barack Obama Presidential Library website, administered by NARA, is already live, housing whitehouse.gov archives from Obama’s presidency.

In May 2015, the Obama Foundation chose Chicago, the former President’s adopted hometown and the actual hometown of the former First Lady, over Hawaii (where Obama was born) and New York City (where he attended Columbia University). In July 2016, the Foundation announced its decision to locate the Center in Jackson Park, a parcel near Lake Michigan on Chicago’s South Side, selecting the site over Washington Park, located further west across Midway Plaisance.

The buildings within the Center are projected to total up to 225,000 square feet and will occupy approximately 19 of Jackson Park’s 543 acres. With a projected height of 235 feet, the Center’s main building would tower over the park.

“This is an exciting model for the Obama Presidential Center, [to be located] in the community that gave them so much, to give back to that community,” says Michael Strautmanis, Vice President of Civic Engagement for the Obama Foundation. “Being in an urban neighborhood, being so connected and integrated into the community is a real opportunity.”

The consensus is that Chicago and Chicagoans are pleased they were chosen to house the presidential center of someone the city considers its own. But the project has generated considerable controversy on several fronts, including the location and design of the Center.

The Jackson Park location is the subject of a lawsuit by the nonprofit environmental watchdog organization Protect Our Parks that is under consideration in the courts. Odds are fairly well stacked in the Obama Center’s favor, but that the lawsuit has been allowed to proceed at all should translate at the very least into a construction delay.

A rendering of the proposed Obama Presidential Center, viewed from the South (Image by DBOX)

Plans for the Center also include closing a significant portion of Cornell Drive, a busy thoroughfare that bisects the park. The closure would allow for the creation of a “Museum Campus South” — an uninterrupted parcel of land with unimpeded pedestrian traffic from the western portion of Jackson Park to Lake Michigan. Opponents claim that the closure would create a traffic nightmare in an area already underserved by public transit, at least when compared with the city’s more affluent North Side.

Perhaps the most contentious dispute centers around the push by neighborhood stakeholders to institute a community benefits agreement (CBA). The Obama Foundation has flatly refused to agree to, negotiate, or sign such an agreement, insisting — with considerable evidence to back its claims — that it has taken significant and concrete steps to ensure that the Center brings maximum benefit to the community while minimizing the threat of displacement. But community constituents are equally resolute that — while they admire the former President and former First Lady Michelle Obama — a legally binding CBA is not only reasonable but should be instituted as a matter of standard practice.

The OPC is projected to support nearly 4,500 direct, indirect and induced jobs during construction, and an additional 2,500+ permanent direct, indirect and induced jobs once the Center is open and operating. The Center is expected to provide $675 million in economic benefits to Cook County during its construction and $246 million annually during its first decade of operation. State and local tax revenues are projected to total $16.5 million during construction and $5.9 million in state and local taxes annually once the Center is open. Projected attendance figures for the Center range between 625,000 and 760,000 visitors annually. These figures are cited in an Economic Impact Assessment statement, produced by Deloitte, that the Obama Foundation released in May 2017.

Weighing this sizeable economic impact against the environmental, traffic, and economic controversies swirling around the project, the question remains: How much will the community truly benefit from the Obama Presidential Center? Will the complex be a boon to residents, or hasten their displacement?

The Vision for the Buildings and Grounds

The design of the main building is meant to evoke an image of several hands with palms touching. However, the imagery is not immediately apparent. The initial design of the main tower resembled what architectural critic Blair Kamin described in an early critique of the Center as a heavy, pyramid-like “expanded version of a truncated obelisk.”

The design has undergone a number of refinements and revisions. For example, the original design included an above-ground parking facility on the Midway, which was roundly criticized by residents and ultimately scrapped. However, other elements of the design, including closing portions of Cornell Drive and merging Jackson Park and South Shore golf courses, have also been met with controversy, although they remain either under consideration or baked into the proposed plans.

The entire facility is designed to maximize open green space, says Strautmanis. “Most of the 19 acres of the site … is open and accessible beautiful park space that is designed to be used, enjoyed by the neighbors,” Strautmanis says. “People shouldn’t have to go downtown to Millennium Park to have a beautiful park to spend time with their families. That is an important part of what President and Mrs. Obama want to create.”

The site plan for the Cener (Credit: The Obama Foundation)

As of 2017, construction costs for the Center’s buildings were estimated to be as much as $300 million, and require an endowment of as much as $1.5 billion. That figure does not include taxpayer-funded infrastructure costs, including the projected closure of Cornell Drive, which has an estimated cost of at least $175 million. The proposed package, which includes a $10, 99-year lease to the Obama Foundation for the portion of Jackson Park slated for the Center, was approved unanimously by the Chicago City Council on Halloween 2018.

The Selection Process

The Obama Foundation initially announced an RFP in September 2014, inviting submissions by the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Hawaii, Columbia University and the University of Chicago, the ultimate winner. Proposals were not publicized, in the words of the Foundation “to encourage creativity and a range of suggestions from the applicants.”

As a response to what the Foundation named as a request from Protect Our Parks to see the winning design from the University of Chicago, downloadable links to all of the RFP and RFQ responses were posted on the website in October 2018.

The Foundation had previously chosen New York-based architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien as the lead designers for the Center. The husband-and-wife team was introduced along with Dina Griffin of the Chicago firm of Interactive Design Architects as an architectural team during a meet-and-greet at the DuSable Museum in March 2017.

In January 2017, also before the design’s unveiling, the Foundation had named New York-based Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates as the lead landscape architect for the project. The firm was selected to head a team of two Chicago-based firms: Living Habitats, with president Heidi Natura; and Site Design Group, directed by Ernie Wong.

Lakeside Alliance, a collection of five firms, was selected as construction manager for the Center in January 2018. Turner Construction Company, one of the country’s biggest construction managers, was awarded 49 percent of the construction business. The remaining 51 percent was divided between four Chicago-based, African-American owned firms: Powers & Sons Construction, UJAMAA Construction, Brown & Momen, and Safeway Construction.

How Does the Tiger Woods Golf Course Fit In?

Along with the Center itself, proposed plans call for a redesign and merging of Jackson Park and South Shore golf courses into a single PGA-level range designed by former golf world No. 1 Tiger Woods. Local residents are concerned that a PGA-level golf course would command PGA-level fees that they could not afford. However, revised plans for the golf course included reassurances that there would be no fees for children 17 and younger and that adult residents would be charged less than $50 to play 18 holes on the reconfigured course.

The loss of designated sanctuary space represents a second major focus of opposition to the proposed golf course. Under the proposed plan, four acres of the South Shore Nature Sanctuary would be sacrificed for the planned course. One particularly scenic lakeside location would provide what a 2018 WBBM Newsradio report labeled as “a money shot for televised tournaments.”

Cost is another issue associated with the golf course, which has been presented as a public/private project. Reconfiguration of the existing courses is estimated to cost $30 million, with an additional $30 million needed for infrastructure work including pedestrian underpasses. It is not entirely clear how closely the golf course and its costs are linked with the Obama Presidential Center, according to Jawanza Malone, Executive Director of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), a member of a coalition seeking a CBA for the Obama Center.

“I don’t know definitively where things stand. What I do know is that the city has conflated the two projects. They keep saying there’s no relation. [But] as part of their framework plan, which they got the city council to approve, they included elements to renovate the golf course along with all the other changes they want to do to make the Presidential Center possible. And so they’ve already laid the groundwork to move forward with that plan. Now, the question is going to be depending on who goes to the 5th floor [of City Hall, as the new mayor], what the next steps are,” says Malone.

Malone also claims that support for the golf course itself is limited. “When it comes to the golf course there are literally three people who told me they thought the golf course was a good idea,” he says. “Now the Presidential Center, OK, let’s argue about that. But the golf course is a non-starter.”

The “Nightmare” Closure of Cornell Drive

With its main structures situated nearly adjacent to the famed Museum of Science and Industry, the Center’s design creates a “Museum Campus South” reminiscent of the Museum Campus on the lakefront just south of the Loop comprised of the Adler Planetarium, Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium. This new Jackson Park configuration involves one of the most controversial aspects of the proposed center, other than the location within the park itself: closing Cornell Drive between 60th and 67th Streets, a plan praised by Kamin.

In Frederick Law Olmsted’s original design of Jackson Park, Cornell Drive was intended to be a bridle path. The proposed plan would allow pedestrians to walk unimpeded from the Presidential Center to the Museum of Science and Industry, on to Wooded Island and the proposed golf course. Former President Obama is also a major champion of the plan to replace a section of Cornell Drive with a grassy promenade, according to the Kamin review.

Transportation to and from the Center is a relevant issue. The Center’s site is not readily accessible by the Chicago Transit Authority “L” (elevated and subway train system). The closest train station is the 59th Street Metra (commuter rail) station — but a ride from downtown costs $4.25, versus $2.50 for the “L.” The site is accessible by CTA bus, which costs $2.25, but buses are susceptible to traffic slowdowns. A Green Line “L” station that would have been practically next door to the site was torn down along with a mile of track in 1997.

In its present configuration as a major multi-lane road, Cornell Drive slices through Jackson Park, with little resemblance to the originally envisioned bridle path. However, the proposed plan for closing a stretch of the road fails to acknowledge the differences between the present Museum Campus near the South Loop and the location for the proposed Center surrounded by much less affluent neighborhoods on the city’s South Side, according to Anton Seals, Lead Steward of Grow Greater Englewood and an active advocate for a CBA for the Obama Presidential Center.

“Museum Campus is downtown and not in the middle of three poor-ass neighborhoods. And that’s a big difference [from the proposed Obama Center]. What sprung up around that Museum Campus is the South Loop that didn’t even exist 20 years ago as a neighborhood,” says Seals.

Seals also states that insufficient consideration has been given to dealing with redirecting traffic from Cornell Drive. “As a community organizer and resident of South Shore, the issue around transportation is a big one because they’re trying to close Cornell Drive. They’re underestimating; ‘Oh, it won’t cost that much time.’ It will create a nightmare,” he says.

Closing Cornell Drive presents logistical and infrastructure challenges beyond traffic jams — and according to Malone, those challenges have not received nearly enough consideration.

“They are estimating as many as 800,000 [visitors] on an annual basis … That means increased cars, increased passenger vehicles, increased public transportation demands. What is that going to do to parking? What is that going to do to road conditions? The actual physical streets?” Malone says. “How is that going to impact people who just want to be able to get in and out of their homes? Where is the study that says they’ve paid any attention to this and they have a plan for it? There isn’t one.”

“Until we started yelling about the impact that this was going to have on the three schools that are right there on Stony Island as well as the YMCA, as well as the daycare facility … nobody took into account the fact that there were plans to turn Stony Island essentially into an expressway to make up for that fact that they were going to tear up Cornell Drive. Nobody was paying that any attention. And so then they went back and revised it and talked about traffic calming measures, etc. But that was in the third iteration of what they were proposing,” Malone says.

The Push for a Community Benefits Agreement

Clifford Helm, Equitable Development Initiative Staff Attorney for Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, defines a CBA as a private agreement between a community or community coalition and a developer that is legally enforceable. He says that while other documents, such as memorandums of understanding (MOUs) perform some of the functions of a CBA, negotiating an actual CBA is preferable whenever possible.

In Chicago, residents protest a May 2018 planning commission meeting at City Hall, to press for support for a Community Benefit Agreement with the Obama Presidential Center. (James Foster /Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

“In terms of a general CBA, of the important pieces, there are accountability, process and enforceability. Enforceability is most obvious,” Helm says.

Accountability falls to both community groups and developers. Community groups should represent the constituency for which the CBA is sought, which may or may not comprise the entire community. The developer should be sincere in the commitment to negotiate honestly, rather than engaging merely to appease the community group(s) seeking a CBA, according to Helm.

“Making sure that there is a process going forward … frequently falls on the developer and their willingness to actually engage in these conversations. What kinds of [processes] are we creating about transparency, about engagement, about the way in which things are done? So there is built into the CBA a process for creating some of the outcomes, then the community could be actively participating and supporting this thing that they’re asking for,” Helm says.

The Obama Foundation has so far adamantly refused to negotiate a CBA. According to a 2018 article in the Chicago Reader, a major objection raised by President Obama himself is that initiating a CBA negotiation will lead to an unmanageable situation where multiple organizations come out of the woodwork, each demanding a piece of the CBA pie.

“If we sign with one, two or five organizations, they’re not representing everybody on the South Side. Next thing you know, you’ve got 40 or 50 organizations — all wanting to be decision makers. We’re not going to do that,” the Reader quoted Obama as saying.

Strautmanis echoes the sentiment, stating that the Foundation’s desire was to work with the entire community surrounding the Center.

“We’re not going to pick and choose among community representatives. Because as I said, it’s a very diverse community. We’re going to impact the region and the South Side, the West Side and more. And so what we’ve done, we’re working with everyone to make sure that we’re listening to them and giving them the opportunity to partner with us and inform and build on the work that we’re doing,” Strautmanis says.

Amara Enyia, the director of the Austin Chamber of Commerce and 2019 Chicago mayoral candidate, has been an active member of the CBA coalition. She does not consider Obama’s argument a legitimate reason to refuse to negotiate a CBA.

“Identifying the parties that are bound by the CBA … is not something that should prevent it from being worked out. It’s certainly not anything that would prevent [the parties] from moving forward,” she says. “Those are details that can be worked out during the development process, during the process of negotiating the terms of the agreement,” says Enyia.

Distrust on the part of the city and the Foundation is also an impediment to negotiating a CBA, according to Malone. “There is a very real sentiment among decision makers that people who do what I do are just laying in wait to catch these people on something,” he says.

He cites his experience with negotiating the construction of a trauma center on the University of Chicago campus. “A lot of the people who were working in a coalition around the CBA were also working to get the trauma center built,” Malone says. “And part of [the hurdle] was this idea that we just wanted the university to look bad… [That] we didn’t really want a trauma center. It was ridiculous,” Malone says.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has not pushed the issue of a CBA. However, this scenario may change after the mayoral election runoff in April between former Chicago Police Board President Lori Lightfoot and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, each of whom has expressed support for a CBA.

The Specter of Displacement

In many ways, displacement and gentrification represent the elephants in the room for the Obama Presidential Center. The disparity in income and amenities is significant between much of the south and west sides of the city and the more affluent North Side. Residents of neighborhoods adjacent to the proposed Obama Center fear that they will be priced out of their homes, especially if they are renters, says Malone.

“There’s a study that came from the Network of Woodlawn that essentially argues a 15 percent increase in rent could result in the displacement of half the renters in Woodlawn because of the income levels that are there,” says Malone. “That’s a problem.”

This fear of displacement is one of the major motivating factors behind the push to obtain a CBA. Helm and the Chicago Lawyers Committee are working with the local CBA coalition to obtain a legally binding agreement with the Foundation and the city of Chicago about the Obama Center. Despite their failure (to date), it appears the coalition’s concerns are being taken into account.

”The Obama Foundation has created some very clear processes. Not a CBA, but there is a very clear, transparent process from them around their contractors and construction,” Helm says. “Maybe it was their plan all along, but they’ve included something that at least approaches [community demands for a CBA] in their plans.”

Malone agrees that the Foundation has shown receptiveness to the community’s concerns. For instance, the Foundation has posted its commitments to the community online, along with steps they have taken to carry out those commitments. And in July 2018, the Foundation hired Chicago firm Ernest R. Sawyer Enterprises Inc. as a diversity consultant, to oversee the employment and contracting process. Founder Ernest R. Sawyer is the brother of former Mayor Eugene Sawyer and an uncle to 6th Ward Alderman Roderick Sawyer.

“Chicago is now releasing an RFP for housing on city-owned lots as well as a separate RFP for small business development for commercial corridors again on city-owned lots. That’s in direct response to what’s in our CBA. The fact that a majority/minority firm was contracted as well as an oversight officer … The oversight officer is something that we have been emphatically pushing for. That got done. There have been a series of things — traffic studies, the parking lot being moved. There’s a ton of different things that have happened along the way to indicate that they take us seriously,” Malone says.

These good intentions aside, Malone insists negotiating a legally binding agreement is essential.

“One of the cornerstones of business in this country is the idea of a contractual agreement. Attorneys make billions of dollars every year negotiating agreements for small and large corporations,” Malone says. “[And to] make sure that all the people who need to make sure that this thing gets built, do so in a way that legally binds them into doing whatever…they said they were going to do. [Yet] time and time again when it comes to the community people want to say, ‘Just trust us.’ But there is no evidence, none, that business should be transacted based on trust.”

Malone also remains unconvinced by the argument that jobs and training programs generated by the Center will largely negate the displacement issue.

“[The implication is] that because some people will be able to get jobs, that’s going to address the increase in rent. As if everybody who’s going to [suffer] a rent increase is going to work on this project. What about a senior citizen who is renting, who is not going to get a construction job building the Presidential Center?” Malone says. “What about the ex-offender who’s coming home to their family? What job can they count on in that community that’s going to prevent their family from being displaced?”

Strautmanis insists the Foundation remains committed to minimizing displacement in the community as a result of the Obama Presidential Center.

“President and Mrs. Obama talk about the fact that they want to create this project to give back to the community and create a project that people in this community can experience and enjoy. That is not a figurative statement. They are talking about these people who live here today. And so the purpose of the project is to create something for our current neighbors and friends who live here to enjoy and experience,” says Strautmanis.

The Dispute over Jackson Park

The choice of Jackson Park for the Obama Center necessitated a federal review of the planned complex, to evaluate the center’s impact from an environmental and historic-preservation standpoint. (The park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) The Foundation expects a 2019 groundbreaking but does not plan to release a more specific timeline before the completion of the federal review, according to Strautmanis.

Another hurdle is the lawsuit filed in May 2018 by Protect Our Parks. This lawsuit contends that because the Obama Center will be a private entity and not an official presidential library, that the planned 99-year lease transfer of public lands constitutes an “illegal land grab.” (In 2017, in a similar vein, local environmental watchdog organization Friends of the Parks fought successfully against the George Lucas’ Museum of Narrative Art, planned for Chicago’s lakefront. That facility will open in Los Angeles in 2021.)

An aerial view of Jackson Park, looking north from East 67th Street (Photo by Eric Allix Rogers via Flickr)

In February, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey granted a petition to permanently dismiss the claims of one plaintiff who lived outside the city for lack of standing. The judge also dismissed the suit’s First Amendment claims because, in his view, they were not yet relevant, but stated that they could be re-introduced if circumstances changed. However, the judge found that two plaintiffs who live in the city of Chicago, along with Protect Our Parks, did have standing to make a claim against the lease transfer, and allowed the lawsuit to proceed on those grounds. He scheduled a late-February conference for both parties to meet, along with 45 days of discovery and then a “firm, six-week schedule” to determine the ultimate outcome.

Former alderman and 2019 mayoral candidate Bob Fioretti is acting as an attorney for Protect Our Parks in its legal action against the Center. At a mayoral forum held shortly before the February election, he stated that neither he nor Protect Our Parks was against the Obama Center in principle — they just don’t want parkland to be taken to build it.

However, others don’t find it problematic to build the Center on parkland, according to Seals, who sits on the Board of Friends of the Parks.

“Friends of the Parks is not anti-Obama Center. Our whole thing is around protecting park space. We’re not opposed to this [Center] going into a public space, but you have to be able to provide more space. I’ve heard from some residents, ‘What’s the big deal about it being in a public park? Most of the museums are in public parks. Aren’t these kinds of things in public spaces?’ They’re kind of right,” says Seals.

The Jackson Park dispute also exposes fault lines of race and class among residents of Washington Park, Woodlawn, South Shore and the more affluent Hyde Park. According to a February 2018 story in The Chicago Tribune, many working-class black residents felt put off by the Foundation’s willingness to relocate a parking garage underground after Hyde Park residents protested, all the while categorically refusing to negotiate a CBA.

In a related vein, a current of sentiment also exists among some black residents that opponents of the Center were primarily white people from other parts of the city who appeared concerned about migratory birds, yet indifferent at best to the prospect of economic development in black and brown neighborhoods, according to the article. Seals understands that sentiment.

“I think this is like us [organizations like Friends of the Parks] being seen as folks who are trying to stop this from happening. [The perception is] it’s a bunch of older white hippies. It becomes problematic that people will see us that way. People will see us as detractors based on race,” Seals says.

At present, it seems likely that the challenges associated with the Center will be resolved and that the complex will be built in Chicago as scheduled, avoiding the debacle of the ill-fated Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Unlike Lucas, the Obamas have deep roots in Chicago.

“We’re very aware as the Obama Foundation of the intense need for economic opportunity in this community,” Strautmanis says. “President and Mrs. Obama are excited to do their part by choosing to bring the Obama Center here as opposed to any other place in the world. And that is in part because they know this neighborhood. They know this community.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Two quotes have been clarified for meaning: the quote from Amara Enyia about how identifying parties should not preclude negotiating a CBA; and the final quote from Anton Seals, about community groups like his being perceived as wanting to stop the Center from happening.

Gwinnett County residents will vote March 19 on a deal to have MARTA take control of the county’s transit system. (Photo by James/Flickr)

Most days of the work week, Amber Moon drives the almost 30 miles from her home in Snellville to her job in Alpharetta, two Atlanta suburbs in two different counties. It’s often an hour or more commute each way.

A referendum on March 19 in Gwinnett County, home to almost one million people and 16 cities including Snellville, could someday change that.

Right now, Gwinnett — the second most populated county in Georgia — has limited local and express bus service that is separate from MARTA, metro Atlanta’s public transit authority. But the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners approved an agreement with MARTA that would allow the agency to take control of the county’s transit system and expand it, linking it to public transit in the rest of Atlanta.

The upcoming referendum asks county voters to approve the MARTA agreement and a new 1 percent sales tax until 2057 that will help cover the cost of transit projects.

“While it’s going to increase the sales tax in Gwinnett, I think there’s going to be a lot of benefits with property taxes and property values,” says Moon, who is voting yes to MARTA. “It’s going to lift the community by giving people more options and making the suburbs a little more accessible.”

The agreement with MARTA calls for a rail extension to the Gwinnett city of Norcross, as well as bus rapid transit and expanded local bus service.

Expanding MARTA has long been a contentious proposition in suburban Atlanta. The last time it was up for a vote in Gwinnett in 1990, the county turned it down.

“Hence, we are going at it again, hopefully with a different approach and with a different attitude toward transit in the county,” says Charlotte Nash, chairman of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners.

In 1990, Gwinnett had about 350,000 people. Today, the population is 2.5 times that. It has also become one of the most racially diverse counties in the Southeast, and 25 percent of residents were born outside the United States.

“That alone will make you have second thoughts about how are we going to deal with the traffic that will be generated by that number of additional people,” Nash says, adding that the transit plan, known as Connect Gwinnett, was developed through public conversations over the past three years. “The plan is designed to match different types of transit with the density and requirements of different parts of the county. Twenty years from now, the face of transportation in Gwinnett County will look very different if the referendum passes.”

The March referendum has wide-ranging support, including bipartisan endorsements from former Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce and many local Democrats. But there is also a small opposition effort that is starting to overtake proponents. A recent poll found that 51.4 percent are against the referendum, while only 39 percent support it. But the demographics of the poll don’t match the county: More than 90 percent of those surveyed were over 40 years old and about two-thirds were white.

It also doesn’t match a 2018 poll conducted by the Atlanta Regional Commission planning agency, which found that half of respondents in Gwinnett would be willing to pay more in taxes to fund expanded regional public transit.

Both sides have been rallying to get as many Gwinnett residents as possible to vote come Tuesday.

The county commissioners have held open houses about the referendum and appeared at forums and events sponsored by other groups to provide information, Nash says.

“As always, the idea that there would be a sales tax associated with it generates concern,” she says. “[People] don’t automatically want to increase taxes without feeling like it’s a good investment. I try to think about it from that perspective myself. However, I see the decision on transit as being the next big decision for Gwinnett County. It’s very much akin to the big decisions that were made in the past to build a good water-sewer system, for example. It’s a long-term investment, and it’s going to be foundational to the future of the county.”

If the referendum doesn’t pass, Nash says the county will look at other ways to move forward.

“We have to have transit options,” she says. “I don’t see another alternative to that, so that means if one try is not successful, then we have to look for another way to approach it.”

Having a system connected to metro Atlanta will allow for more seamless transit connections, greater access to job centers in and outside of Gwinnett, and reduced traffic congestion, says John Orr, manager of the Atlanta Regional Commission’s transportation access and mobility division.

“Connecting our largest suburban county to the rest of the MARTA network is very critical,” says Orr, who lives in Gwinnett. “It’ll allow us to provide different ways for citizens in Gwinnett County to access our major employment centers other than driving, and also it’ll provide access to Gwinnett County from the rest of the region. In many ways, Gwinnett County is a critical job center on its own.”

Gwinnett knows that companies look for transit access when locating offices. The county still remembers the sting from technology company NCR moving its Gwinnett headquarters to Atlanta’s core. Nash says the company cited lack of good transit as one reason for relocating. Packaging company WestRock followed, moving 800 employees from Gwinnett to a suburb with MARTA access.

But connecting to MARTA isn’t just about jobs. It holds the potential to make Atlanta less car-dependent.

Snellville resident Moon is excited about a proposed MARTA bus route next to her house. It would make getting around easier and cheaper for people like her legally blind wife, who often pays $35 to take a Lyft to Atlanta.

“When you have the ability to move people, it opens up a new world of possibilities — to move people to your jobs, to your stores, to your retail spaces, to your homes, to the market. You’re moving a demographic into your community, and I think any access points that communities can have for that sort of access, especially being a suburb of a metropolitan city, I think it’s a good thing. I can’t see anything bad with it,” Moon says. “We’re a commuter city and [the vote] can change that.”

]]>Fri, 15 Mar 2019 11:00:00 +0000Adina SolomonIntroducing the Community Fridge, a New Way to Tackle Food Insecurityhttps://nextcity.org/daily/entry/introducing-the-community-fridge-a-new-way-to-tackle-food-insecurity
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/introducing-the-community-fridge-a-new-way-to-tackle-food-insecurity

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the environmental charity Hubbub has installed 50 community refrigerators — in community centers, churches, and other public places — and aims to install another 50 across Britain by the end of 2020.

Restaurants, home cooks and supermarkets can donate excess food with the confidence of knowing it will remain fresh longer, and community members can pick up the food, free of charge.

The fridge network is redistributing 25 tons of food a month, a small but impressive bite out of the £13 billion worth of food wasted every year in the U.K. Hubbub estimates the donated food is equivalent to 50,000 meals a month.

The donated food tends to be healthy, as well, says Manaza Nasa, a volunteer at Food Academy in East London, where one of the fridges is located.

People “are getting to try new fruit and veg that they’ve not tried before because fruit and veg [are] more expensive than junk food,” she told WEF.

The fridges are modeled on projects in Germany and Spain. In the latter case, in at least one town, the mayor had to grant the fridge “special independent legal status” so that the city can’t be sued if someone gets sick, NPR reported. The legal hurdles are important, as three UC Davis graduate students found out in 2014. As the Sacramento Bee reported, the “free.go” fridge, in their front lawn, “quickly ran afoul of state health and safety codes and was unplugged.”

A similar project in the U.S., the Little Free Pantry, encourages neighbors to operate “Little Free Library”-size pantries for non-perishable goods across the country. As for legality, on its site, the LFP suggests pantry managers “consult The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act of 1996. Determine if it applies to you and manage your project in accord with its tenets.” (CityLab notes that perhaps because of this law, which protects people who donate food with good intentions from lawsuits, no one has ever been sued for “food donation-related liability.”)

Community fridges (or pantries) can’t fight hunger by themselves. The Trussel Trust, which runs food banks in Scotland, told the BBC that “food banks… offer signposting, a listening ear, and increasingly, other services which can help tackle the underlying causes of poverty. … Community fridges cannot always offer the food which would sustain people through a crisis, as they rely on people donating what they do not need.” And food recovery — the means of getting the food from where it’s not needed to the fridge — is still a logistical issue. Chefs, caterers, or shops must, instead of tossing food directly into a dumpster, load up a car and drive to the fridge location.

The nonprofit ReFed sums up the challenges: “The cost of short-distance, small-load transportation is expensive per pound compared to long-haul transportation of larger loads. … Perishables need to be distributed quickly and efficiently to maintain freshness. … Transportation costs are typically covered by food recovery organizations, which often operate with small budgets.” But better communication between food banks (and/or community fridges), through technology or other means, could result in 183 million meals saved a year, the group said.

Back in London, the Food Academy’s community fridge has become, volunteer Nasa says, a community gathering spot.

“It brings (people) together. They come here to meet other people and it gets that spirit going, that sharing spirit,” she told WEF. “We exchange recipes with each other, how to cook healthy — it’s a lovely atmosphere.”

Following a year of teacher strikes where educators in West Virginia, Los Angeles, Denver and beyond called for wage increases and reduced class sizes, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) has introduced a new bill to incentivize smaller class sizes in kindergarten and first, second and third grades. The legislation, which would allocate $2 billion for competitive grant funding, primarily to high-poverty school districts in the United States, is co-sponsored by Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris (CA), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Elizabeth Warren (MA), Cory Booker (NJ) and Michael Bennet (CO). The bill is also endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, the National Parent Teacher Association, and First Focus Campaign for Children.

Merkley says his bill is not a direct response to the teacher uprisings, but rather a reaction after discovering his son’s surprisingly large first-grade class. “My memory of my first-grade class was there was about 20 kids in it,” he says. “When I saw my son’s class I thought, how is the teacher ever going to be able to do this with 34 5- and 6-year-olds? We are the wealthiest nation on earth and can afford to do better.”

Class size reduction has long been a popular policy among parents and educators, but in state and federal government, interest in the issue has waxed and waned over the last two decades.

To fund smaller class sizes, states and school districts have been able to use Title II-A money, which is an annual pot of federal funds available for teacher quality initiatives. In the early 2000s, 57 percent of all Title II-A funds indeed went for this purpose. But by 2015, just 25 percent of those dollars were going to class size reduction, with far more dollars now spent on things like professional development.

One reason cities and states began to turn away from class size reduction was basic purse-string tightening. Nineteen states began eliminating or loosening their class size limits following the 2008 recession to save money. But class size reduction also began to fall out of favor with policymakers and education wonks, as interest in alternative reform policies, like evaluating teachers based on student standardized test scores, ticked up.

Advocates for class size reduction as an evidenced-based reform point to studies showing a link between higher academic achievement and fewer students per class. The most reputable study, known as Project STAR, is from the mid-1980s, when researchers randomly assigned students and teachers in Tennessee elementary schools to classes with an average of 15 students or 23 students. The study found students in the smaller classes tested better, with the improvements particularly significant among disadvantaged children. Later research found that the smaller class sizes also increased the probability of attending college, with the effects more than twice as large among black students.

Other influential research has suggested that setting the class size cap below 20 students will yield the greatest benefits, and Merkley’s bill caps class size at 18.

Some experts object to class size reduction — arguing it’s a cover for district bloat, and less effective than other reforms for similar or even lesser costs. Prominent critics include journalist Malcolm Gladwell and former Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Others point to implementation challenges: In California, when the state legislature passed a $1.6 billion measure in 1996 to incentivize reduced class sizes in grades K-3, it was universally adopted very quickly. Researchers later found that the rapid statewide reduction in class size led to an influx of new, inexperienced teachers, and many teachers working in poorer schools in Los Angeles and Oakland left to fill the new vacancies in wealthier districts. While the researchers found that smaller classes boosted student achievement when all else was held equal, the rollout of the policy was tumultuous, and appeared to negatively impact some students and schools it was aimed to help.

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit that advocates for smaller classes, says Merkley’s bill is “very important” and targets a major problem in public education. “As the teacher strikes reveal, and data shows, class sizes have increased across the country since the recession, and even though we’re a decade past that point, school budgets and class sizes still haven’t recovered,” she says. “Increases in class size have severely damaged the quality of education for all children in affected schools, but especially disadvantaged students and students of color, who see twice the benefit from smaller classes than the average student.”

Haimson praises Merkley’s bill for its requirement that districts report how smaller class size affects teacher retention and turnover rates, as well as student discipline and chronic absenteeism. Haimson says the bill could be improved by more explicitly defining how grant recipients should report the number of new teachers hired, how many new classes are added and by how much class sizes went down. “In the past, state and city audits have shown that at least half of the districtwide class size reduction that the New York City Department of Education claimed was a result of a state grant class size reduction program was due instead to falling enrollment,” she explains.

Regarding policy criticisms around class size reduction, Merkley says he agrees “other things need to be done” to improve schools, but he emphasizes his conversations with child experts lead him to believe that investments in smaller class size for the early grades can “make such a profound difference for everything that goes forward.”

Would he want smaller class sizes for middle and high school, too? While most studies have focused on K-3, conceivably fewer students per class would have an impact in more advanced courses as well.

“The studies we’ve looked at say K-3 is where it matters the most, but if we start here, we can evaluate the impact and decide,” he says. “If we do this right, evaluate it, and find out it doesn’t have an impact, then that will be information worth having and can change how we allocate our resources.”

O’Connor v. Uber, filed in August 2013, argued that thousands of drivers were wrongly classified as independent contractors instead of employees. Uber, like other “gig economy” companies like Lyft, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and so on do not pay health insurance, retirement, or other benefits that employees traditionally receive.

Lawyers for Uber said Tuesday they had agreed to a settlement with drivers and plan to pay out $20 million, or about 37 cents per mile driven by the drivers involved. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen will decide whether the settlement can go forward after hearing both sides on March 21.

Uber is attempting to clean up its image in preparation for an IPO, the New York Times reported. Uber’s chief legal officer Tony West has conducted a review of how many passengers had been sexually assaulted during Uber rides to create a transparency report and worked to settle some of the company’s largest lawsuits.

The recent settlement with drivers, if it is approved, will be “mostly a win for Uber,” labor law professor Michael LeRoy told NBC. $20 million for a company worth around $120 billion is a small price to pay, and Uber will continue to classify its drivers as contractors.

The settlement is lower than the $100 million Uber offered in 2016, Engadget reports, but since then, the number of drivers in the class-action suit has shrunk. The original suit involved 385,000 drivers, and the previous offer would have seen some drivers get a total reimbursement of $12. Since then, Uber won an appeals court ruling that knocked most of the drivers out of the class-action suit. Now that the suit now covers only 13,600 drivers, $20 million will give individual drivers more than they would have received under the previous offer.

Separately, last week Uber settled charges in the Netherlands related to violating local taxi laws from July 2014 to November 2015, TechCrunch reports. Uber was operating UberPOP (one of the brand names it used for non-licensed taxi ride-hail services) in a country that required transport services to have a taxi license.

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service announced that Uber will pay a €2 million fine and €309,409 in “criminally earned capital,” aka the 20 percent commission Uber collected on rides. Also, “the person responsible for the rollout of UberPOP in the Netherlands has performed a 90-hour [community service] penalty,” the DPPS said in a statement, according to TechCrunch.

The P.U.R.E. Cannabis Coalition led a discussion about centering racial equity in cannabis policy at the 14th Annual Chicago Food Policy Summit on February 15, 2019. (Photo by Audrey Henderson)

A collection of Chicagoland activists wants to ensure that, if and when marijuana is legalized in Illinois, mainstreaming the sale of cannabis includes an equitable distribution of related monetary benefits to communities hit hard by disinvestment and uneven drug enforcement policies.

The state has already decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, and in a 2017 poll of 1,000 randomly selected Illinois residents conducted by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, 74 percent of respondents either supported or strongly supported decriminalization of marijuana possession.

Demand for legal marijuana would far outstrip the capacity of licensed growers, according to a study conducted by Colorado consulting firm Freedman & Koski and commissioned by state legislators. According to the report, demand would average between 350,000 and 500,000 pounds annually, but growers would only be able to satisfy between 35 percent and 54 percent of the market. The shortfall would be at least partially responsible for keeping prices for legal marijuana higher than illicit street prices.

The Coalition is also pushing for correction of inequitable enforcement of drug-related laws in black and brown communities. Correcting this disparity is especially urgent for Anton Seals (a 2018 Next City Vanguard), chief steward of Grow Greater Englewood, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable food economies and green businesses.

“How many people will really get their records expunged? What will be the real impact of what they’re proposing as opposed to like, it sounds great but it may only impact 250 people. And then also out of those people re-enter into society, how do you pair them with what the economic opportunities are?” Seals says.

Anton Seals (Photo by Audrey Henderson)

Seals has been involved with the legal marijuana industry for the past several years, performing consulting work for a medical marijuana dispensary located near Midway Airport on the southwest side of Chicago. He has also traveled to Colorado where he met with the mayor of Denver to learn more about legalization in the state.

The law in Illinois is still catching up with public sentiment. In 2016, former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed legislation decriminalizing the possession of 10 grams or less of cannabis or related drug paraphernalia. Under the revised law, punishment for possession carries fines ranging from $100 to $200, rather than jail time. However, operating a motor vehicle under the influence of cannabis remains a criminal offense.

In August 2018, Illinois expanded its medical marijuana program when Rauner signed the Alternatives to Opioids Act. This landmark legislation allows individuals suffering from a list of “debilitating medical conditions” to obtain prescriptions for marijuana as an alternative to opioids such as oxycodone.

J.B. Pritzker, who became Illinois governor this year, has gone even further. Legalizing the manufacture and sale of marijuana had a prominent place on his campaign platform. Pritzker outlined a number of policy ideas aimed at not only legalizing marijuana, but also commuting sentences for individuals convicted under strict drug laws and ensuring that black and brown communities receive equitable consideration in the distribution of marijuana dispensary licenses. Pritzker mentioned potential revenue from the manufacture and sale of cannabis in his first budget proposal presented to the Illinois Legislature in February. There are two state bills under consideration to legalize marijuana.

The P.U.R.E. Cannabis Coalition has “come together to advocate around equity, not just the growing aspects, but the economic opportunities and influencing and advocating for what that looks like,” Seals says. “In particular when they say they want to give back, what does the give back look like? All the way down to the kind of nitty-gritty around the bill of where the revenues will go? Does it go back to general ops? And what percentages and what departments, how is all that going to be negotiated? Because if that’s the case, then black people won’t see any of that money. It will go right back to the coffers of, you know, a bureaucrat or controlling the outputs.”

The Chicagoland activists join a growing movement in cities across the U.S. that advocates for economic inclusiveness in the legal marijuana industry. Bodega owners in New York pressed to be included in talks about potentially legalized marijuana sales. District attorneys have announced plans to dismiss marijuana possession misdemeanors in response to findings that black and brown people experience higher rates of marijuana arrests than white people, even though marijuana use is consistent across races. After marijuana legalization in Massachusetts, a state agency launched a job training program aimed at helping marginalized residents start or work in marijuana-related businesses. Oakland has an Equity Permit Program aimed at making sure those who have been systematically targeted by past drug enforcement policies can now benefit from California’s legal marijuana industry. After critics charged that the program wasn’t doing enough to break down barriers to access — starting a business takes capital — the city of Oakland planned to apply for state funding to support more entrepreneurs in the Equity Permit Program.

“What we’re advocating for from our point of view is to make sure that those words meet actions, meet implementation, meets real equity benchmarks. In 10 years we’re not going to look behind and say ‘Oh, well, if we had only.’ And that seems like how we do a lot of public policy is ‘oh if we had only.’ I think that a big part of our work is trying to advocate what people want to see from the ground up,” says Seals.

Chicago, above, is one of many U.S. cities elevating the importance of the middle class and their communities into the national conversation. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)

There is a movement in many American cities to stabilize the property tax base, as the revenues it produces are critical to adequate city services. As Chicagoans head to the polls to pick their next mayor, there is heightened attention on the pressing need to shore up the city’s tax base and its property values. Meanwhile Baltimore is taking purposeful steps to fight property vacancies by preventing them from happening in the first place. In both cities, local decision-makers are focused on neighborhoods that have received little attention: middle neighborhoods. Chicago and Baltimore are just two examples of cities around the United States that are elevating the importance of the middle class and their communities into the national conversation. In a country increasingly defined by the extreme divergence between the most wealthy individuals and everyone else, the devastating effects of the disappearing middle are threatening the livelihoods of all.

In many ways, the publication of “On the Edge: America’s Middle Neighborhoods” in 2016 provided a starting point for understanding what’s happening to middle neighborhoods throughout the country and importantly, what steps can be taken to ensure that these places remain home to the vital “center” of so many cities across America.

Following publication of “On the Edge,” a series of convenings, most recently in Cleveland, is bringing together city officials, community development practitioners and researchers into a community of practice in support of middle neighborhoods dedicated to finding portable solutions to ensure the stability of middle neighborhoods in the years and generations to come. Key themes emerging from the convening in Cleveland reaffirm many of the observations Reinvestment Fund has made through our work in cities throughout the country.

Focusing on middle neighborhoods is not wholly new. Reinvestment Fund’s efforts in these neighborhoods date back over 15 years when former Philadelphia Mayor John Street launched his $295 million Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI). Street dubbed middle neighborhoods the city’s “key battleground” areas; lose them and Philadelphia’s long-term prospects decline. Although many observers and commenters focused on NTI’s emphasis on demolition of vacant housing units, the very first principle in Street’s rollout of NTI was “Preserve Healthy Neighborhoods.” These were central to NTI’s “build from strength” approach to neighborhood stabilization and revitalization.

But what characteristics define a healthy neighborhood? Where are they located and what threatens their future?

Over the past five years, Reinvestment Fund has conducted comprehensive real estate market studies in a diverse range of cities — from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, to Jacksonville, New Orleans, and Houston, to Dallas, Kansas City, and St. Louis — using an analytic approach developed for NTI. In all these places, the emergent challenges facing middle neighborhoods tend to be associated with restricted access to conventional mortgage lending, increasing investor activity, fraying commercial corridors, and displacement pressure from “above” in instances where the middle neighborhoods are located near a re-emergent inner core, but more frequently from the “push” of neighborhood decline and softening demand. These factors collectively threaten the ongoing stability of these communities.

In the mortgage market, middle neighborhoods face two related phenomena that portend uncertain times ahead for many of these places. On the one hand, conventional mortgage lending has become increasingly tight in middle neighborhoods in the decade since the mortgage market collapse of 2008. In cities throughout the country, Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured mortgages are becoming the de facto mortgage product of choice for many middle-income borrowers in middle neighborhoods. The chart below presents FHA/Veterans Affairs market share in Philadelphia from 2005 to 2017 across neighborhoods at different income levels.

Percent of Philadelphia home purchase mortgages with FHA/VA insurance, 2005-2017 by census tract ratio of income to area median (Source: HMDA)

On the other hand, cash transactions and home sales to investors have begun to assume an increasing share of middle neighborhood real estate activity. Through this process, historically owner-occupied neighborhoods may be transitioning into majority rental neighborhoods in cities throughout the country. What this means for the long-term health and vitality of these places remains to be seen, but the potential loss in owner equity cannot be ignored. The maps below show the location of investor purchases from owners (blue dots) and investor to investor purchases (red dots) in Kansas City, Missouri, from 2014 to 2016.

Another ongoing flashpoint for city officials and practitioners working in middle neighborhoods is the displacement risk faced by individuals and families in these communities. In many middle neighborhoods, residents face displacement pressure associated with neighborhood decline. Many middle neighborhood residents in areas with aging housing stock, and where people may have not fully recovered from the mortgage market collapse, are increasingly faced with a decision to hang on to their homes where deferred maintenance is slipping into blight, distressed sales remaining vacant, owners selling to investors who are renting their properties, and public safety becoming a major concern (when it was previously an afterthought). Many of the residents in these communities do not qualify for programs funded with public resources, yet they lack the financial wherewithal (or incentive) to maintain their homes or remain in their communities.

On the other hand, in a few (but highly publicized) places, this pressure is felt from above. In rapidly appreciating markets, longtime residents, particularly those on fixed incomes, can find it difficult to keep up with rising rents and property taxes to enjoy the increased amenities that come with robust development in these areas. In addition, there are increasing reports of strategic displacement, i.e. eviction of long-term renters by developers seeking to extract higher rents in new or redeveloped properties in these communities.

Finally, some middle neighborhoods face challenges associated with fraying commercial corridors that, in the past, were not only centers of neighborhood commerce, but also supported social life. In city after city, it’s clear to see the interdependence of the health and vitality of commercial corridors with the surrounding neighborhoods that represent their primary patron base. Many of the small business owners who occupy these corridors (oftentimes small retail and service businesses) face a set of complex macroeconomic forces (i.e., historic and emerging competition from big-box stores, chains, online shopping, home delivery services, and so on) that exert considerable commercial pressure on their sustainability. The map below shows the turnover of businesses along the Ogontz Ave. commercial corridor in a middle neighborhood in Philadelphia, where the number of establishments declined from 173 in 2008 to 157 in 2013 (pink circles are business closures; blue squares are business openings).

When local residents are no longer able, or willing, to patronize their neighborhood establishments, the ability of these operators to carry on erodes. In these situations, there is a very real risk that a neighborhood falls into a vicious cycle. As neighborhoods fail to thrive, that adversely impacts the corridors. And as those decline, they damage the appeal of the community as well as the social networks the businesses help foster.

That’s because these commercial corridors are not just economic engines in middle neighborhoods. They are also where people see their neighbors, share their experiences over a meal and discuss solutions to life’s everyday challenges. In short, they are a unifying element of their neighborhoods that meets both material and social needs of local residents. In many middle neighborhoods throughout the country, the fate of the residential housing market is, and will continue to be, ineluctably tied to the fate of the commercial strips that bring, and keep, these places together.

In the face of these mutually reinforcing challenges, the public and private sectors are innovating approaches to support their middle neighborhoods. Persistent demand for affordable housing has led to private developers and financiers (predominantly community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, and other nontraditional lenders) to begin building out approaches to market affordable housing development in the single and multifamily sectors. Market affordable housing looks different in different markets, but is generally characterized as housing created with no, or very little, subsidy that remains affordable for residents and profitable for developers and financiers. In addition, a number of cities have created, or expanded, home rehab programs with income limits sufficiently above the median income in the region so residents of middle neighborhoods can access these programs for resources to support home improvement and maintenance. And an increasing number of cities have adopted new policies to provide renters with additional protections from forced displacement from their homes.

Understanding how these countervailing forces will shape the landscape of American cities over the middle half of the 21st century is critically important — and not just for those who work in community and economic development, but urgently for the individuals, families and small businesses who call middle neighborhoods home. Recent attention in Detroit and Chicago has centered on the disproportionate impacts middle neighborhood displacement has had on African-American households and intergenerational wealth. Those working on middle neighborhoods will meet in Chicago in November for their third national working group meeting. Among other topics, this convening will address a prevailing challenge of this young middle neighborhood movement: How do cities prioritize anything other than the poorest places at a time when community development resources remain scarce and are increasingly under threat? Policymakers and practitioners seeking to be strategic and purposeful in their efforts to support their communities would do well to keep Ben Franklin’s axiom close at hand: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

This op-ed is part of Next City’s Middle Neighborhoods series, supported by a grant from The American Assembly. Follow our coverage as we dig into the solutions and success stories that animate the conversation today.

The Dream Beyond Bars Fellows program invited formerly incarcerated youth to be part of a participatory action research project. (Photo by Robert Brown)

One year ago, 19-year-old Xochtil Larios was incarcerated at Alameda County Juvenile Hall, a sprawling facility located atop a winding drive in San Leandro, California, about 10 miles south of Oakland. Larios had been in government systems, whether foster care or juvenile detention, since the age of 12, but this time would be different — thanks to Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (or CURYJ, pronounced like “courage”).

She was invited to join a participatory action research project led by formerly incarcerated young leaders. CURYJ, along with Oakland-based Urban Peace Movement, wanted them to find solutions to youth incarceration and build their leadership skills. The research project was grounded in the belief that formerly incarcerated young people should draw on their lived experiences with incarceration, and acknowledged they aren’t “subjects to be researched by others” but instead are experts on their own lives. (CURYJ, based in East Oakland, was co-founded by George Galvis, who was incarcerated as a teen.)

The youth leaders, who became known as the Dream Beyond Bars Fellows, received training in politics, community organizing, policy advocacy, power mapping, public speaking, technology, research methodologies and more. Daniel Mendoza, a 23-year-old community organizer with CURYJ, says the youth began the process with strong leadership skills.

“We just had to direct their passions to the right area and the right tables,” he says. “Young people just didn’t know there was a table for them to sit at, speak their minds and speak their truth.”

The fellows carried out a three-pronged research process. First, they reviewed public information like budget reports, incarceration rates, and local and statewide criminal justice reports. Then they held focus groups with formerly incarcerated young people, as well as family and friends impacted by youth incarceration. Finally, they gathered data through a town hall survey.

In February, after 18 months conducting outreach and research, Larios helped organize a summit to present their report, which includes policy suggestions. They found that on the busiest days, Alameda County Juvenile Hall stands at 21 percent capacity. Most inhabitants are young people of color: Within the county, according to the report, Latino youth are 2.3 times more likely to be arrested for a felony than white youth; that figure is 10.6 for black youth.

The report (which will be released to the public later this month) outlines major themes that emerged from the focus groups and survey. One finding stresses that once youth enter the system it becomes difficult for them to find a way out, because government institutions aren’t reaching root problems.

Marginalized youth need money, guidance and support, the report says, while youth also revealed that alternatives to incarceration — particularly ankle monitors and group homes — can be as traumatizing as incarceration itself.

One important theme the fellow’s research revealed: Youth impacted by the system had experienced significant trauma at a young age, prior to incarceration. Some focus group participants described using marijuana and other substances to cope with traumatic experiences. Eventually, some experienced so much trauma that it became normalized and learned behavior.

“It goes to show we’re not addressing this with a solutions-based approach,” Mendoza says. “Hurt people hurt people.”

A finding that “healing community-based alternatives are more popular than incarceration” informs the solutions-based element of the report. “We know if you send a young person to a [community-based] organization, they’re better off than being in the system,” says Mendoza, who was incarcerated prior to joining CURYJ.

In the report, the youth define community-based solutions as “solutions that address the harm caused to and by youth so that healing can take place outside of confinement, as well as address and create solutions to the circumstances that caused the individual to get arrested or detained.”

The report compares the cost of incarcerating a youth in Alameda County, at $240 a day, to community programming, which average $75 a day. It highlighted organizations throughout California, like Youth Justice Coalition and Young Women Freedom Center, for their community work.

The release of the report is a first step. Mendoza says the fellows will next apply their new skills in meetings with community leaders and elected officials where they will present their findings and make policy recommendations to address youth incarceration in Alameda County. These include eliminating probation, ankle monitors, group homes and juvenile detention for minor offenses, as well as investing in community-based solutions and organizations.

“The nature of this work is that you never take a break,” Mendoza says. “Now, with the findings out, the real work begins.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cut the ribbon to formally open the entire 77-km (47.8-mile) Marmaray rail line, which runs from Gebze in Asia to Halkali in Europe via an already-in-service 13.6-km (8.5-mile) subway tunnel that crosses under the Bosporus. Both the International Railway Journal and Railway Gazette International reported on the opening, which brings to a conclusion a project 15 years in the making.

Work on the project, which also links Asian and European long-distance rail networks, began in 2004 with the construction of the immersed-tube Bosporus tunnel. The first trains carried passengers through it in 2013, four years after it was supposed to have opened. That same year, service on the regional rail lines that would feed it from the Asian and European sides was suspended so that upgrading and reconstruction could take place. Work on that project was delayed once and suspended once due to problems with contractors, resulting in another four-year delay in opening.

The reconstruction project added a third track to the two-track surface routes; this track will carry long-distance passenger and freight trains. It also rebuilt 27 stations on the Asian side of Istanbul and 11 on the European side.

The Marmaray line will become the central thread linking all of Istanbul’s rail transit services together. Interchange with 16 different metro and tram lines will be provided at 13 of the line’s 43 stations. The Hyundai Rotem EMU trains that will provide metropolitan service can run as fast as 100 km/hour (62.1 mph) and will operate at an average speed of 45 km/hour (28 mph) on their 1-hour, 55-minute trip across the Istanbul region. Trains will operate at headways of 2 to 10 minutes.

The completion of the Marmaray route also makes it possible for high-speed intercity trains to run between Europe and Asia for the first time. Turkish State Railway’s high-speed trains from Ankara, which have up until now terminated at Pendik, east of the city center, will now operate all the way to Halkali via central Istanbul using the tunnel, making stops at seven stations along the Marmaray corridor.

The Turkish government has high hopes for this project. When the tunnel opened in 2013, The Guardian reported that the government had dubbed it “the iron silk road.”

In Denver, Lyft App Will Help You Find the Next Bus or Train
The ride-service app industry is taking one more small step toward becoming part of a multimodal mobility solution aimed at reducing overall car use in Denver where, Mass Transit reports, Lyft users will soon be able to find the bus or train stop nearest their location using the Lyft app.

Lyft's Nearby Transit app in Santa Monica (Credit: Lyft)

This functionality, dubbed “Nearby Transit,” is being provided through a partnership between Lyft and the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD). The feature will display the closest bus and rail stops as well as the location of Lyft Scooters and ride service drivers.

The aim, Lyft officials say, is to make their service more universally useful by offering riders information on the lowest-cost as well as the most efficient options for getting from where they are to where they want to go.

Lyft’s data show that 46 percent of Lyft users nationwide take public transit at least once a week. In Denver, according to Lyft, 23 percent of users take the ride service as a last-mile connector between their origin or destination and the nearest public transit route. In addition, 53 percent of Colorado car owners Lyft surveyed report using their cars less because of Lyft, and both Lyft and the RTD have reduction of single-occupancy vehicle use as a shared goal.

Lyft offers Nearby Transit functionality in six other cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Seattle and Washington. In Denver, the rollout comes on the heels of a similar RTD partnership with Uber that lets users view transit options from within the Uber app and will eventually allow them to purchase RTD tickets.

Getting to Manhattan May Soon Cost Only $4 — for Central Kansans
Wait until Greyhound, Bolt and Megabus hear about this: Soon, you will be able to get to Manhattan for only $4. Actually, the discount intercity bus operators have nothing to worry about. The “Manhattan” in question is the small city that’s home to Kansas State University. KSN in Wichita reports that North Central Kansas Coordinated Transit and the Kansas Department of Transportation are working on launching a new service that will connect Salina, Abilene and Junction City with Manhattan. The aim is to offer a lower-cost, lower-hassle alternative for central Kansans who now drive on I-70 between the four cities.

The one-way fare from Salina to Manhattan will be just $4 if the proposal becomes reality. With intermediate stops in Abilene, Chapman and Junction City, the fare works out to $1 per stop, North Central Kansas Coordinated Transit’s Claire Mullen told KSN.

Launching the service, which would make four round trips daily on weekdays, is contingent on funding however. The route will cost $300,000 a year to operate, and the transit agency and KDOT are looking for partnerships and stakeholders to help cover its cost.

KSU itself would make a logical one: It has a branch campus in Salina, Kansas State Polytechnic, also known as K-State Salina.

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