Advancing Equity Planning Now

Norman Krumholz, Kathryn Wertheim Hexter, Norman Krumholz, Kathryn Wertheim Hexter

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781501730382
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Social Sciences

What can planners do to restore equity to their craft? Drawing upon the perspectives of a diverse group of planning experts, Advancing Equity Planning Now places the concepts of fairness and equal access squarely in the center of planning research and practice. Editors Norman Krumholz and Kathryn Wertheim Hexter provide essential resources for city leaders and planners, as well as for students and others, interested in shaping the built environment for a more just world.

Advancing Equity Planning Now remind us that equity has always been an integral consideration in the planning profession. The historic roots of that ethical commitment go back more than a century. Yet a trend of growing inequality in America, as well as other recent socio-economic changes that divide the wealthiest from the middle and working classes, challenge the notion that a rising economic tide lifts all boats. When planning becomes mere place-making for elites, urban and regional planners need to return to the fundamentals of their profession. Although they have not always done so, planners are well-positioned to advocate for greater equity in public policies that address the multiple objectives of urban planning including housing, transportation, economic development, and the removal of noxious land uses in neighborhoods.

Thanks to generous funding from Cleveland State University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Section 1

LOCAL EQUITY PLANNING

1

GROWTH WITHOUT DISPLACEMENT

A Test for Equity Planning in Portland

Lisa K. Bates

Portland, Oregon, is considered a pioneer of regionalism, integrated land-use and transportation planning, and sustainability as a criterion for planning policy. After four decades of land-use planning, Portland has a national and international reputation for urban livability and climate change mitigation. While these successes are laudable, in the past decade Portland’s underrepresented and underserved communities have been raising a voice to demand that planners address issues of income and racial inequality. In response to and in collaboration with communities, over the past five years Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) has adopted an equity strategy with a racial justice focus.

This chapter traces the evolution of Portland’s planning from the Portland Plan—the 2009 citywide strategic plan that first articulated the equity framework—to the ongoing comprehensive land-use plan that addresses equitable development without displacement. These planner-community venues are spaces of both conflict and collaboration. The city’s planners and advocates alike recognize the value of this relationship, although it is sometimes challenging. Communities are building their capacity to speak the technical language of planning to demand more from city policymakers and to advocate for equity planning at the planning commission and city council. Planners are gaining the language and analytic approach to develop equity policies. Through relationships with community advocates, planners are more assured of political support for their equity work. The path from setting an equity goal to developing a comprehensive land-use plan and to beginning to implement anti-displacement policies has not been a straight or quick one. However, the learning and reflection that has happened along the way suggests that while it may not have been an optimal path, it may have been a necessary one.

The experience in Portland suggests roles and possibilities for city planners and community advocates seeking to move toward a more just city. Across the United States, cities are taking on the role of policy innovators, and increasingly, leaders recognize equity as one of the major challenges they must address. Many cities are declaring their intentions to address institutional racism and inequalities—from Seattle to Austin, Philadelphia, and Boston. This Portland case study provides lessons learned in the shift, from developing an understanding of the city government’s role in perpetuating and undoing inequity to incorporating equity into the everyday and technical decisions and policymaking of city plans.

Inside, Outside, in Between

Portland’s turn to address equitable development has involved inside equity planners in the mold of Krumholz (1982), work by Davidoff’s (1965) outside advocacy planners, and strategization from “inside activists” (Olsson and Hyssing 2012). Equity planners working for city government are people who are working with a defined goal to benefit those who are least advantaged. Their work, according to the Krumholz model advanced in Cleveland’s Policy Plan, includes conducting policy analysis and evaluation on the basis of achieving more choices for those who have few (Krumholz 1982, 172) and encourages the equity planner to be a political actor as well as a technocrat and to engage not only in the arena of the planning commission but also with elected officials. Davidoff’s (1965) advocacy planning model places the broader political arena front and center, suggesting that planners work with communities to develop alternative policies and plans that they can argue for, even if the plans are against status quo interests. Advocacy planners would be outside of government, pushing for change. Along this inside-outside continuum is the concept of the “inside activist” (Olsson and Hyssing 2012), the government staffer who openly maintains ties to community advocates. This model suggests that equity work can be advanced through inside activists’ brokering interactions with external groups and pushing agendas inside bureaucracies. In the Portland case, all of these models for urban planning’s equity work are recognizable.

I have been involved in this work as a member of advisory bodies to the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability; as a consultant researcher developing frameworks for addressing gentrification; as a member of the board of directors of an advocacy organization; as a leader in advocacy planning for the African American community; and generally as an active participant in the growing movement for housing justice in Portland. This chapter represents my own perspectives as well as reflections of colleagues from the equity and advocacy planning communities in Portland—public engagement specialists, neighborhood planners, community-based-organization policy staffers, and others who have been part of the work.

The Challenge of Gentrification as a Test for Equity Planning

In examining the evolution of Portland’s equity planning, I focus on the issue of gentrification and displacement as a key instance of the real challenges of implementing an equity focus. Portland was recently named the fastest gentrifying city in America by Governing magazine due to its rapidly changing neighborhood housing markets and dramatic racial turnover in the core of the city (Maciag 2015). The challenge of equitable revitalization highlights several critical tensions for equity planners, both inside and outside of government.

Gentrification—defined as rapidly changing housing markets that tend to push out long-time neighborhood residents who have a low income and are often people of color—is an issue that not all agree is a problem. In Portland, the influx of higher-income residents to inner city neighborhoods can be seen as a triumph of the reputation for livability and urban amenities, brought by a planning system that limits regional growth. Neighborhoods have been revitalized, and the city has invested heavily in infrastructure and economic development in what were poor and segregated areas. However, this public investment, occurring after a long history of redlining and exclusion, has disproportionately benefited newcomers to the neighborhoods and harmed long-time residents by failing to incorporate sufficient affordable housing and opportunity for inclusion in economic growth. Portland’s African American community has experienced the most severe displacement, with about one-third of the region’s Black population having been displaced from their historical homes in northeast Portland in ten years (as calculated by the author). Recent urban renewal efforts have compounded a history of harmful planning—once it was segregation; now it is displacement. Planners working on neighborhood development today face intense distrust and anger about past and current practices that spur gentrification, with recent controversies erupting over new bike lanes and a high-end chain grocery store (Lubitow and Miller 2013). As the region’s population grows and in-migrants display a clear preference for living in the city, communities observing the rapid changes in northeast Portland recognize that the wave of revitalization and displacement will continue to push eastward.

Attempts to address gentrification and housing displacement are faced with policy barriers and political challenges. Planners who do want to address equitable development are very limited in their tools. Oregon’s land-use planning system embeds goals that include equity considerations in housing and development, other policies, and laws that limit planning responses to inequality. State planning law prohibits unnecessary barriers to housing development, so explicitly exclusionary zoning is not a significant problem. However, planners are hampered by the state’s having preempted local governments from using inclusionary zoning tools to require affordable housing in new development—a restriction that was only removed in February 2017. Rent control, which is broadly defined, is prohibited, and that further limits the use of inclusionary housing regulations. These restrictions occurred at the behest of Oregon’s real estate industry lobby, which remains powerful in the state legislature. Further policy shortcomings related to housing stability are found in Oregon’s and Portland’s weak tenant protections. Landlords may evict tenants without cause and with just thirty days’ notice to vacate. Changing the context of growth to address development without displacement is also politically difficult. Real estate development interests are a strong political force in cities. Elected leaders who favor Portland’s makeover as a hip, sustainable urban mecca are favorable to neighborhood changes; in 2013 the mayor (a former real estate industry lobbyist) commented that he thought gentrification was a “problem of success” and was confronted by community groups over failing to identify any downside to the revitalization of inner Portland (Law 2013).

This legal and policy context explains how the growth pressures in Portland’s housing market are resulting in significant housing displacement for low- to moderate-income households, all renters, and communities of color. Planners and policymakers have been limited in what they could do and limited in their focus on the issue, until the work of the Portland Plan—a general plan that created a clear mandate to pursue equity goals, and racial equity in particular. The question of how planners will address gentrification and displacement has become a significant test for whether the equity goal can be made real for communities. The Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) recognized that its ongoing work needed to address the gentrification issue. BPS adopted several approaches, from trying to bring a technical approach to using an equity lens in development decisions, to a new advisory group system, to working with a community coalition that emerged to take the issue on. Embedding equitable development into planning frameworks has been a long process characterized by both collaboration and conflict between city planning staff and community-based equity planners.

The Equity Turn: Portland Plan Sets New Goals

The adoption of an equity goal for the city of Portland emerged from a planning process that included a collaborative capacity-building effort by city planners and community advocates. Through a planning process, an advisory group worked together to learn and guide the development of the equity goal and work plan. The result of this collaboration was a powerful commitment to equity planning and to the end of racial disparities in particular, including an acknowledgment of the role that the city’s planning has played in creating inequitable development outcomes. In doing so, BPS revisited its own historical connections to Norm Krumholz’s equity planning model. Ernie Bonner, the first director of planning in Portland, was a protégé of Krumholz’s in Cleveland and a key player in the Cleveland Policy Plan.

As of the mid-2000s, despite its increasingly positive national and international reputation for urban planning, Portland’s deep inequities were becoming unavoidably obvious. The report, Communities of Color in Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile (Curry-Stevens, Cross-Hemmer, and Coalition of Communities of Color 2010), revealed deep disparities for racial and ethnic minorities in Portland, with gaps in income, education, and health outcomes that are greater than the national average. The city started a major planning process as the discussion about inequality in the region developed.. In 2009, Mayor Sam Adams launched a significant series of public events to begin work on a general plan for the city and its local, county, and regional governmental partners. The Portland Plan was led by the BPS, with planners developing the process and guiding the work of prioritizing and strategizing. The Portland Plan process was extensive—two years of participation by Technical Advisory Groups that represented a wide range of stakeholders in each topic area. The Portland Plan was not originally intended to be an equity plan. However, advocates for a new approach leveraged the opportunity of Portland’s culture of extensive public participation in planning activities. This plan would ultimately adopt, as its core lens for all goals and strategies, an equity goal that calls for an end to disparities for communities of color in particular.

The Portland Plan vision is stated below:

All Portlanders have access to a high-quality education, living wage jobs, safe neighborhoods, basic services, a healthy natural environment, efficient public transit, parks and green spaces, decent housing and healthy food.… The benefits of growth and change are equitably shared across our communities. No one community is overly burdened by the region’s growth.

Collaborative Learning and Strategy Building

The Technical Advisory Group on Equity, Civic Engagement, and Quality of Life—colloquially known as the Equity TAG—had a unique mix of members. The Equity TAG was a collaborative space with both government staff and community representatives as members (including this author). On the community side, selected representatives had both grounded knowledge of the concerns, experiences, and needs of underrepresented communities and expertise in policies and processes that could address those needs. The government’s representatives included those working in civil rights and civic engagement and were prepared to bring deep institutional knowledge of the city and its practices. Jointly, the committee conducted research on best practices, investigating most thoroughly the Seattle Race and Social Justice Initiative as the basis for the equity work in the Portland Plan. Through a group learning process, the committee was able to come to an important agreement on a definition for the concept of institutionalized inequities. The group adopted a local foundation’s statement of “systemic policies and practices that, even if they have the appearance of fairness, may, in effect, serve to marginalize some and perpetuate disparities” (NWHF n.d.).

Through this process, the TAG built a new expectation of who was responsible for equity work in the Portland Plan. Rather than the Equity TAG being siloed to address all aspects of disparities, separately from “mainstream” goals, each advisory group would be responsible for addressing critical inequities within its purview. For instance, the economic development group was directed to integrate issues of poverty and community development into its policies and strategies, and the environmental sustainability group, to incorporate environmental justice issues. Equity TAG members from the community side repeatedly exhorted city staff to “do the work”—in other words, to build relationships with experts from relevant communities and to learn about what an equity focus would mean in their policy arena. Planners were being called on to deepen their knowledge and skills to develop policies that would reach the least advan...

Table of contents

• Foreword by Ronn Richard
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1: Local Equity Planning
• Section 2: Regional Equity Planning
• Section 3: National Equity Planning
• Section 4: Looking to the Future
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index