Environmental Land-Use Planning

Panelists:
Ron Wirtz, Citizens' League
Luke Cole, California Rural Legal Assistance
Hazel Johnson, People for Community Recovery
Robert Liberty, 1000 Friends of Oregon
George Garnett, Green Institute

Moderator: Roy Taylor, Center for a Better Environment

Roy Taylor

How do local and regional approaches to land use planning differ, conflict, and work together? Can regional land-use planning empower and protect urban low-income communities of color when zoning boards are comprised of members of the larger metro community? Can local strategies ensure good planning, or do communities need regional assistance? How can land-use planning deconcentrate poverty? Finally, what is your top ten list for an agenda for sustainable land-use development?

Ron Wirtz

The Citizens' League is looking at sustainable growth for the Twin Cities. We look for win/win planning strategies. Social issues are interconnected with land use. Knowing there will be growth in an area, how do we address traditional growth through the government and how do we use social and economic capital to revitalize the urban center instead of continuing suburban stripping? To do this, we have to recognize what a sustainable community has (in terms of jobs, economy, etc.) and then we need to draw up a road map.

Land-use is critical to social issues. It's about vision, and we shouldn't disconnect regional vs. metropolitan strategies. Understanding communities from a macro and micro view, we can see the way these are integrated. Transportation, for example, is a land-use issue, but it is about access and community. Planning brings people together as communities.

Luke Cole

As an environmental poverty lawyer, I am usually working at the wrong end of the planning process: planning is done to my clients without their knowledge or consent. Suburbanization causes massive damage in many ways. There is a loss of open space and wild lands as people pave over land to create lower density housing. This housing also uses more energy. Suburbanization also affects cities in that it causes urban blight. Large parking lots are being created which take away a lot of space. Furthermore, the reverse commute by the poor to the suburbs along with the commute of the rich to the cities for jobs in finance, insurance, and real estate is an environmental disaster.

Regional planning has failed low-income communities and communities of color. We should think regionally but plan locally. Look at the distribution of environmental harm. Who bears the brunt? It affects the poor (for example, in the lead contamination in housing) because of their spatial location. With regional planning, because of the power differentials, low income and minority areas become dumping grounds. In California, 100 percent of the state's waste is dumped in low-income Latino farm workers' communities. This started in the 19th century, before land-use planning began, but has also continued recently, in terms of putting interstate highways in the ghettos and barrios. Toxic waste dumping in low income communities and communities of color is a pattern that began in the eighties and continues in the nineties.

We must act locally. The Tanner Act is a state law which set up local planning to create toxic waste facilities. A seven-member committee, the Local Assessment Committee, negotiates with people who want to build the facility and works to make conditions acceptable to the community. This is a good idea on paper; the problem is in the implementation. The Committee is selected by county decision-makers. Counties in California are extremely large, so they are making policies for vast amounts of land. The committees are either not choosing local community representatives, or are choosing representatives who will simply go along with them. So LAC is just rubber-stamping, or coming up with good recommendations which are ignored.

The long-term answer is local community empowerment through struggle. Grassroots groups have taken charge of the local planning process. These groups have elected people to the decision-making boards. Land-use planning is a technical field. We need to educate people so they can take an informed role in decision-making.

Hazel Johnson

We need to educate and motivate people to do something for themselves. There was a problem with contamination where I live, but people were afraid to complain and stand up for their rights because they thought they would be evicted. It's hard to get people to stand up for the environment in a housing complex with 2000 units. I go door to door with petitions from the EPA. I live in what I call the toxic doughnut, because I'm surrounded by a toxic dump for contaminants from all over the U.S. and an incinerator putting off PCB's during the night. Five hundred of us demonstrated to stop fifty-seven trucks bringing waste into the incinerator/dump. Seventeen of us were jailed as soon as the media left. Then they wanted to add a new dump, and kept offering the community twenty or thirty thousand dollars to take the dump. There were people in the community who just wanted to take the money, but our group was able to fight it off.

We've gotten young women to go back to school. We've trained sixty adults to remove lead from the apartments, and all sixty are now employed in that field. Two adults are now city lead inspectors and they remove lead from schools around the country. In addition to getting people education, we work to get trained people jobs with contractors. After meeting with contractors, we received a commitment from them to hire 36 students. We work with them in the interviewing process and in money management as well.

We are fighting for a health clinic to serve those with illnesses resulting from the toxic waste. People are dying from asthma, cancer, and kidney problems, and suffering miscarriages from living in such a highly contaminated area. The EPA recorded 17,000 PCBs per million across the street from a Head Start school.

I began doing this work as a volunteer when I couldn't get a job. Racism is a terrible obstacle to employment. People in our complex want to work. I have been hired over the phone, then rejected when I arrived for work. Also, I began this work many years ago, before there were so many people concerned about the environment. Now that there are more white environmental groups, I see the funders turning to them instead of us. People for Community Recovery is an effort to address our environmental concerns and also increase our participation in society. In PCR, we make the decisions together. We are also forming a midwest coalition of organizations, because even without money, there's power in unity.

Robert Liberty

There hasn't been regional planning, so you cannot say whether it has worked or failed. There hasn't really been local planning either, just zoning. The term planning means something that's mandatory and enforced for an entire metropolitan area. There isn't one anywhere in the U.S. One is emerging in Portland. Some things can only be done at the regional level, such as: exclusionary zoning, transportation structures, and green spaces acquisition (greenfrastructure). Techniques should be local, but allowing white flight hurts community involvement.

Can regional planning be used to protect low-income communities of color? Yes, but not necessarily. Whites are the majority all over. We need a regional framework, so we have to work to involve the minority, but that's not a reason to avoid regionalism.

We've had fifty years of urbanization and it stinks. The local approach has failed; we're a metro area country. Over half the U.S. population lives in metro areas of one million or more people. Tax-base sharing can get reinvestment into the urban core. We're building too many roads, which are very expensive. We should take some money away from roads and put it into transit, and reinvestment and employment in core areas. We should grow in and up, not out.

Our regional government is directly elected and has authority to carry out state mandates and a home rule charter. In the next twenty years, Portland is projected to "grow" 500,000 people. We will not expand the city boundary, rather we will change the housing density. Money will be spent on green spaces and redoing the existing city centers, including neighborhood centers. No money will be spent on freeways; we will keep congested freeways to deter overuse. A bond issue on this, to direct the money to transit instead, passed in the suburbs 2 to 1. The new neighborhoods will average 6,000 sq.ft./house. The Twin Cities is averaging 15-20,000 sq.ft./house, an environmental disaster.

The moral foundations of this kind of planning are: (1) Frugality. Don't waste land that is full of natural resources on housing; reuse land in the city centers. We have strong pro-planning Republican farmers who want the city to reuse its land the way they do. (2) Reverence for nature. People want nature near, and should have common back yards. (3) Community. The metro/regional life is the neighborhood. These small suburban jurisdictions are not real. (4) Democracy. Americans are an optimistic "can do" people, but when it comes to metropolitan areas, they're hopeless and fatalistic. They think the sprawl is inevitable, and there is nothing they can do about it. In a democracy, people need to make choices about housing, transportation, etc., collectively. Americans aren't given a choice. When people say all Americans want the suburbs, it's bunk. We can have better choices if we maintain the crucial elements: (a) directly elected regional councils (b) boundaries to urban growth (c) rebuilding on existing foundations, using the land within them wisely (d) respect for the people in these communities, refusal to abandon them.

George Garnett

What works in one part of the country in terms of local vs. regional approaches might not work in another. There are cultural differences. Minnesota, for example, is very local. It has been built up around the concept of the devolution of the government, and individualism. We've done some of the best things, like tax-base sharing, but at the same time, fostering urban sprawl.

The Phillips neighborhood has been hollowed out. Much of the middle class is gone and the polluted land and problems are left behind. Twelve years ago, regional authorities decided to build an incinerator in the neighborhood. After twelve years, and much displacement, the neighborhood was able to stop them. This suggests that "people power" is the better answer. The question of what to do afterwards, with this already cleared land, sprouted the Green Institute. Our goal is to develop models of sustainable economic development. An example is the Re-Use Center, which takes construction materials out of the waste stream. We are working on a zero waste, zero pollution industrial park, which is integrated into the community.

The tension between local and regional authority is healthy. There are issues in declining neighborhoods that have to be addressed on a regional level, but we have not seen the political will to do that yet. We allocate land and resources based on the political process, and so it may come down to the question: How empowered are poor communities of color to participate? In regionalism, we have to think of protecting the rights of the minorities from the tyranny of the majority. This is a moral imperative with profound political elements and consequences.





Wrap-up john powell

David Rusk set out a very strong need for a regional effort, which he called the inside/outside game. He argued that people who just focus on the inside game have not been effective in reducing poverty. Although a number of people challenged some of his assumptions, and some people said they shouldn't be asked to reduce an area's poverty level, no one took issue with that fact. That suggests the importance of looking at the inside/outside game. Sandra Newman asked, "What's the cause of racial segregation?" She looked at three possibilities: economics, discrimination, and preference. She dismissed the first, saying that all the data show it's not economics, and suggested that it might be a combination of the latter two; but that preference might play an important role in the segregation patterns in terms of housing. Later we heard from Tara Jackson, one of the authors of the preference study Dr. Newman had referred to, who suggested that her study was being misquoted: That in fact, the data seem to suggest that blacks still have a high interest in integration and certainly will go to almost any neighborhood where opportunities are. If that's the case, segregation cannot be substantially explained in terms of preference. It's not that preferences are irrelevant, but they can't explain the degree of segregation that exists in this country. This leaves us with discrimination.

We also had a discussion about wealth. There was broad agreement that it is important to increase access to the opportunity structure for people living in impacted communities. One way to do that is through mobility strategies, another is through in-place strategies. A third is through a combination, and regional strategies, which keep regional growth under control, so that there's some impetus to invest back into the central city. Rusk suggested that one of the most deadly things for trying to maintain a vibrant inner city, which is critical at this time for low-income people and people of color, is urban sprawl. Some of us may not have traditionally looked at the issue of urban sprawl, but that may be an important area to look at in the future.

Ellen Burzynski stressed the importance of investing back into these communities. She identified as problems, not only white flight from a community perceived to be going down, or off the cliff, as Galster described it; but also the flight of capital. This is seen in the loss of the economic infrastructure: jobs, banks, and grocery stores. Shorebank tries to change market perception and invest in those critical structures to rebuild the capital in those communities. They see themselves as a catalyst, to reconnect the community to the larger economic market. One reason this is so important, is that we have a seven trillion dollar economy. If these low-income communities don't participate and can't leverage in that economy in some way, then most of our efforts are going to be, at best, flying against the wind. James Head underscored a similar approach, but reminded us that in terms of investing back into the community, it can't be heavily in terms of debt; it needs to be equity. Debt financing is too expensive a way of getting money to revitalize these communities. He also reminded us that as we address these issues, there is going to be conflict, and that we should expect it. We need to be creative about the conflict, and accept that there are going to be multiple strategies. John Calmore, in his session, expressed concern about focusing too much on mobility strategies, partially because he's skeptical about their scale, which he described as tokenistic. Regardless of what strategy we adopt, many people will be living in poor communities, so we have to pay attention to revitalizing those communities.

Finally, on the last panel that I participated on, we talked a lot about integration and segregation. I challenged the group with the suggestion that while we may look for integration strategies to have a modicum of success, we can find almost no segregation strategies that have had any success. Responding to the question that Roderick Mitchell asked earlier, "Integration into what?" if we think in terms of integration into the economic or opportunity structure, not just in terms of skin color, it changes the way we think about this. We need to also be clear that when we talk about integration, we're not talking about assimilation, or abandoning our community. Choice came up again in our last session. We have to think about how choices come about, and be aware that they change. It was pointed out that at one point, only 15 percent of whites supported Brown v. Board of Education, but now the number is well over 80 percent. So choices can shift over time. The other thing about choice that came up in Curt Johnson and Myron Orfield's discussion, and again Rusk touched on it, is that in metropolitan planning, if we want a region's municipalities to participate, there's some indication that doing it on a voluntary basis simply does not work; that we need something more comprehensive, and with much more bite in it to make it work.