Integration and Regional and Urban Planning

Panelists:
Scott Bollens, UC-Irvine
George Galster, Urban Institute
john powell, Institute on Race and Poverty
Charles Smith, Metro Toronto
Ed Washington, Metro Portland

Moderator: Maya Wiley, Asst. U.S. Attorney, N.Y.

Maya Wiley

What do we mean by integration? Do we mean integration in terms of people, or in terms of resources? Is integration a goal in itself, or a strategy to achieve other goals? This conference gives us a rare opportunity to directly discuss the intersections of race and poverty, and to directly discuss integration. To the extent that integration is a goal or strategy to other goals, what barriers are there?

Scott Bollens

There are ways that the experiences of South Africa can be instructive to us in this discussion. The Group Areas Act in South Africa was the main way of maintaining apartheid. A study noted the Act "manufactured an inward group-oriented consciousness, which in turn is one basis for race-based political mobilization and inter-group conflict." The ANC, while its roots are very localized and its strength based on people-power, has adopted a metropolitanized form of governance to reconstruct the cities and redistribute resources. We need to look to regional governance, as opposed to regional government. Our governmental planning authorities tend to be insular, appointed, and powerful. Giving them regional authority is a mistake. Yet integrating economic, environmental, and social policies at a metro-wide scale is a practical necessity to make metropolitan areas more livable.

Regional (Multi-Jurisdictional) Planning Strategies Conducive to Integrated Communities

1. Channel HUD housing expenditures to lessen racial concentration (Gautreaux, Shannon).

2. Establish regional government campaign against residential segregation (multi-jurisdictional approach).

3. Increase densities and compact growth. Discourage income-segregating sprawl (Oregon law creates minimum rather than maximum densities).

4. Require "Fair Share" affordable housing obligations (as in MA, CA, and NJ, among other states).

5. Require localities to accommodate projected growth.

6. Encourage balanced distribution of jobs and housing.

7. Target regional transportation and redevelopment strategies (hook objectives to existing agencies).

8. Modify development review to advantage distressed areas.

9. Site "LULUS" based on equity criteria.

10. Develop guidelines for local integration maintenance programs.

ll. Attack root fiscal reasons behind municipal planning.

George Galster

Racial integration of residential areas should be a goal in and of itself because it is a powerful means of reducing racial stereotypes. Integration is also a strategy toward other goals, such as increasing access to the opportunity structure and increasing mobility. Racial segregation renders equal opportunity a sham.

We must take practical steps to achieve stable, integrated communities, using Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights in Ohio as examples. Important components of their pro-diversity program are:

1. Serious enforcement of the Fair Housing Act (hire testers and affirmatively tout real estate agents who promote integration/don't discriminate against people in the housing market). Active demand by all segments of the housing market on all segments is necessary to maintain housing values.

2. Affirmative marketing, especially to white suburbanites regarding central city neighborhoods, and to people of color living in the central city areas regarding suburban neighborhoods. The housing office does pro-integrative house tours: visits to neighborhoods in which one's "race" is the minority.

3. Major investment in public services concurrent with increases in the diversity of neighborhoods, to counter the notion that increased diversity means decreased services. This is an important stereotype to fight, especially in schools.

john powell

Integration is destabilizing white hierarchy and ending the subordination of people of color. It is an instrumental good and a terminal good. We recognize white hierarchy by how resources are distributed in the community. Roderick Mitchell's question in one of the earlier sessions "Integration into what?" is not a very difficult one. I would answer "Integration into an effective opportunity structure."

Segregation completely separates some people from the economic, social, political, and educational structures of society. Even the ability to elect a representative to the government may have no effect on the political process if the community's concerns are so separate from those of the broader society. Neo-Jim Crow is maintained by spatial segregation. Neo-segregationist approaches fail to transform white hierarchy and to increase access to resources (the opportunity structure). There is basic agreement that both of these must be done. The question is how?

Oliver and Shapiro, in their book Black Wealth/White Wealth, tell us that African Americans' net wealth measures as zero. Individual successes cannot overcome the community's overwhelming isolation from the opportunity structure. It is unrealistic, from this standpoint, for African Americans to "make it on their own." This idea flies in the face of all we know about the operation of capital in our economy.

Another aspect of the neo-segregationist agenda is the defense of "preference." Baldwin Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles where many middle-income African Americans live, is often cited as an example. African Americans' choice to live there was tainted by an element of coercion. Moreover, such accommodation leaves racism intact, rather than transforming it; and we know that racism, unaddressed, has a way of finding us.

Further, we know that capital flight is the most damaging force, but we can't stem it without ending white flight. Secretary Reich's book, The Work of Nations, warns that the rich are seceding from the Union. Resource isolation and segregation allow this. We need economic integration, which we won't get without racial integration.

Charles Smith

One of the characters in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror says "We're guided by lousy language." Integration may make us think that what we need is something over there--that means the community of dominance. That may mean having to forget history as an African person. We need to re-examine the idea that everything we want is outside our communities. My dislike of the term integration is because it implies leaving, and leaving behind.

We must define access to resources in a transformative sense. We can redefine society from the point of view of the traditionally excluded--a transformative society based on critical dissent. Why cannot the resources be built into these communities? Why must the aspiring be forced to leave? Resources should be available in all areas. Toronto is an example of a place where neighborhoods having predominant racial compositions are succeeding. These neighborhoods are notable for their location and services. In drafting a plan for Metro Toronto, we want to build equality in a spatially different way. Our plan, which governs land-use planning infrastructure, builds in notions of equitable access to resources. The city has a concept of City Centers, which are business incubators. The successful Asian area is a block away from City Hall. It is also in a heavy transit area. What about putting City Centers and more transit in the new immigrant areas?

We are also working to have child care services available in the newer immigrant areas, and to have these services be reflective of the communities they serve, in terms of facilities, staff, and materials. We want to get the schools educated about different cultures, and to incorporate more of the cultural aspects of our diverse communities into the schools.

We know about stratification. What have we done about it? Why make people pull up roots?

Ed Washington

African Americans have been in Oregon from the beginning of European exploration of the area. They were barred, however, from settling there by early state law. I was born in Alabama, and left there in 1944 for Oregon. I remember life in segregation: the segregated buses and schools, black teachers, doctors, and dentists. In Oregon, there were few blacks until the shipyards needed their labor. I went to school with mostly whites. My life has been around white people, but I know who I am, and I am in my community.

How does this fit in with planning? When I look at what is happening in Portland, I know we have the same problems even though we have fewer people of color. Any two of us can get along, but when you get over five blacks and whites, you're going to have issues. A positive aspect of our system is that the planning board is non-partisan. We don't run on political parties, and we don't suffer the related gridlock. It's a disgrace to have this gridlock and these abandoned areas. Martin Luther King Boulevard in Portland was abandoned, but I am insisting that we rehabilitate this area. My presence on the planning board is crucial in confronting the attitude that only "they" live there. One goal I have is to make sure we have affordable housing that will accommodate everybody. We just have to take the challenge, fight like hell, and don't let anyone turn us around.

Question and Answer Session

Wiley: Do deconcentration efforts dilute political power?

powell: A simple majority can provide representation, so deconcentration could broaden the prospects for more diverse governmental representation. Change happens all the time: since the forties, millions of African Americans have left the South and migrated in search of opportunity. We don't need to glorify and hold onto everything from the past, some of which is a legacy of slavery and a received culture from the white hierarchy.

Jargowsky: When do we reach a point where we no longer need to push for integration, at which integrated neighborhoods will be stable on their own?

Galster: This question is difficult to answer if integration efforts are carried out in isolation; what needs to happen is there must be a continuous, aggressive effort by the government in every jurisdiction.

Gary Orfield: If an area is stable and has high quality housing and good schools, it does not require management; the areas that need direct management are most often those that are in the path of expanding ghettos. Other areas experience excessive gentrification, and have to be managed the other way.

Question: What was the tenor of the debate in Oregon about affordable housing? Here there have been attempts to shut down discussion about race, racism, and oppression, and to minimalize it.

Washington: Fair housing and employment acts have been on the books for decades. Oregon can be very liberal, then turn around and propose legislation against gays and lesbians. The environmental community is strong there. There's a nature ethos, and positivism. The anti-gays have been careful not to express racism. At the legislative level, you don't have much of the negatives.

Question: How do Galster and powell respond to Smith?

powell: One problem is that we're confused about race and assimilation. Charles Smith is talking about assimilation. I'm talking about having complete access. These segregated communities were not naturally constituted. We don't know how communities would be constituted without racism. The history of black migration shows that blacks have been fighting to get into middle-class communities. People's choices change when they are given information.

Galster: The enemy is racism, and we're trying to figure out ways to fight it. Spatial segregation supports racism. I don't view integration as a one-way mobility process. We need to get equal-status residential contact to erode racial stereotypes.

Question: Where is the representation of the Native, Asian, and Latino communities? Why did this happen? Why is there an assumption that these communities have the same aspirations as the black community?

Smith: I am speaking of communities that suffer discrimination, though there are particularities to communities of African descent.

powell: Racial politics in this country have been framed on a black/white axis. That is the dynamic from which the results are most clearly measurable. Those results are descriptive not of people, but of racism.

Question: How can planning academics address whiteness as a hierarchy in relation to integration in a way that does not reify that hierarchy?

Washington: As we plan for the future, we have to make sure that we have more people of color on the planning staff. We need people of color in these planning schools.

Bollens: Urban planning has been a highly technical, therefore conservative, field. How do I challenge that as a white planner? We need to change the profession to make it enabling rather than regulatory and restrictive. In South Africa, rather than town planning, they call it developmental planning.