Race and Class in American Urban History

Note: This longer form was the basis for the Keynote Address at the Ohio Conference of Community Development's Spring Meeting, April 2017

First Things First: Who Am I and What Am I Doing Up Here?

Good morning everyone. My name is Bob Ernst. In terms of university education I’m what is known as an urban-social geographer. More importantly, I’m an urban planner who spent nearly 40 years as a planning consultant for large multi-disciplinary corporations here in the U.S. and overseas. My specialties include land use and comprehensive planning. In terms of Ohio experience, in the early 2000s I was project manager for the Hamilton, Ohio, comprehensive plan where I worked closely with the City’s Director of Planning, Jim Boerke, who many of you may know and is here today.

In September 2017, I wrote an essay that discussed viewing America’s national myths through the lens of history. After my friend and OCCD member Jack Riordan read that essay, he suggested it, at least in part, might be an appropriate topic for the Keynote Address for this Fair Housing themed conference.

Because the topic of my essay did not, at least at first, seem to me to dovetail exactly with what OCCD does or with the April Fair Housing theme, I turned to your website for suitable cues. And there I found several paragraphs titled Objective & Purpose. Allow me to quote directly from that document:

OCCD’s objective is to enhance the livability of the cities, towns and communities of the state of Ohio through:

·        the elimination and prevention of urban blight and physical, economic and social obsolescence;

·        and the development and preservation of well-planned, economically-sound urban areas with adequate community facilities, housing, and suitable industrial and commercial development.

Those objectives pointed me in the direction this address takes.

What Is this Keynote Address About?

The easy answer is it’s about leaning on American history to help us understand how the structure of our cities has been influenced by race and other social factors, including class. The more complex answer is it’s about who we are as a people and if we can expect to see changes in the future to that identity. But, more importantly, the best answer is we’re here to talk about all those topics together—history, race, class, and cities—because I believe they are inseparable when housing, discrimination, and segregation are discussed.

• Let’s talk for a brief moment about how this address is organized. It has six different parts.
• Introduction
• Who Did The New Nation of Americans Think They Were?
•  How Our Cities Came To Be What They Are Today
• Discussion
• Real World Solutions, But no Magic
• Concluding Thoughts

 My inspiration for this address was a quote from a famous American author, James Baldwin.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

I encourage you to keep those words in mind during this address. They will come up again later in this address.

Our cities are what they are today because we, as a nation, want it that way.

Let me explain that when I use the term “cities” I mean large metropolitan areas like Columbus and Cincinnati as well as smaller cities like Hamilton and Marysville and even much smaller places like Utica and Mechanicsburg.

In order to understand how and why our cities are the way they are today, we have to examine American history, laws, and the roots of what many like to think of as our way of life, meaning what makes America American. Obviously, that task is daunting in scope and beyond the capabilities of most people. Sad to say, I am not one of rare individuals who are capable of tying all those separate threads into a single understandable whole. Therefore, my address tonight will be limited to what I believe are the two most critical factors in the development of American cities and our urban social infrastructure, race and class. To keep things on the doable level, my focus is on political, legal, and social interrelations between white and black Americans over time without ignoring other aspects of race and class.

Part of our collective problem we are likely to face in an examination of this kind is that many Americans know little of their own country’s history and what little they do know is frequently wrong or misunderstood. So, our first challenge is to get the history right.

Who Did That New Nation of “Americans” Think They Were?

Let’s begin with the most famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence as a reminder of its role as a foundational element in what we are as a nation and who we think we are as a people:

•       all men are created equal

•       endowed with certain unalienable rights

•       life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

During this address, I’d like you to keep those famous words in mind as we talk about our history and think a little about the difference between inspirational and aspirational.

Putting aside for the moment the issues of slavery and legalized racial discrimination, we need to determine who the new nation of “Americans” thought they were, meaning their identity. Well, an identity besides being created equal and bestowed by God with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. One way to answer that question is by determining who the new Americans thought were eligible to be admitted to their club. And that takes us to the Naturalization Act of 1790 and other federal legislation that determined who was allowed to become a naturalized citizen.

An important point to keep in mind is that the U.S. only became formally acknowledged by the European powers as an independent country by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Thus, only seven years had passed between the formal end of the War of Independence and the signing of the Naturalization Act, which reads in part:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person . . . of good character . . .

My guess is many if not most Americans are unaware that the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to immigrants who were free white persons (male and female) of good character, thus intentionally excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, most New World Latinos, and Asians. That Act was superseded in 1795 by similar legislation with only minor changes. What that meant in the real world was that by law the U.S. officially declared itself a white man’s country.

In 1870, during the extensive debates in Congress over removing the word “white” from provisions establishing eligibility for naturalization, many Congressmen vociferously objected on the grounds that such a change would allow thousands of Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. West to become citizens. The measure was handily defeated. Those “white only” provisions remained law until the mid-20th Century.

But none of those laws stopped numerous determined resident Asians from pursuing their dream of becoming American citizens. In a famous case titled, In re Ah Yup (1878), four Chinese men went to court and filed naturalization petitions. Unsurprisingly, the court ruled against them as they were non-whites.

Anti-Chinese sentiment was so high that in 1882 Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, which sharply restricted Chinese immigration to the U.S., classified all resident Chinese as permanent aliens, and excluded them from U.S. citizenship. That law required a ten-year moratorium on the immigration of all Chinese labor, skilled and unskilled, and also established that no court of any jurisdiction, state or federal, could legally grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens. When the Exclusion Act expired in 1892, Congress extended it for an additional ten years, which, when made permanent in 1902, further required each Chinese resident in the U.S. to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without that legal document, Chinese residents were subject to deportation.

The first successful assault on America’s effective prohibition of citizenship for people of color (other than persons of African descent) was brought in the famous case of Wong Kim Ark (1898), who was born in the U. S. of Chinese citizens with permanent U.S. domicile and residence status. After a visit to China, when Ark attempted to re-enter the U.S. he was denied admission because Customs officials claimed he was neither a citizen nor had the requisite permanent resident status. After several trials, the case wound up in the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship language covered the specific circumstances of Ark’s birth and affirmed his citizenship (United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898).

The Japanese fared no better than the Chinese in taking their citizenship challenges to court. In Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), the Supreme Court ruled that under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which limited naturalization to “free white persons,” only persons of what was popularly known as the Caucasian race were eligible, not Asians, and, in that specific case, certainly not Japanese.

A similar, unfavorable Supreme Court ruling on Asian naturalization claims (United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923) concerned the petition for naturalization of a Sikh immigrant from India, who proudly identified himself in court documents as "a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood." The Court ruled that Hindus were not Caucasians as was commonly understood and thus were not "free white persons" and were racially ineligible for naturalization.

The Immigration Law of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, stated that aliens ineligible for U.S. citizenship were not permitted to enter the United States, which of course included Chinese and other Asians (with the exception of a very small number of Filipinos who were eligible to immigrate to the U.S. since the Philippines was a U.S. colony).

In Toyota v. United States (1925), the Supreme Court affirmed that it was “the policy of Congress to limit the naturalization of aliens to white persons and to those of African nativity or descent” (Toyota v. United States 1925, p. 268, U.S. 412). With that decision, the Court acknowledged that overt white supremacy had been and remained the law of the land until the mid-20^th Century.

In case you might think that women were treated equally under federal law, in the Expatriation Act of 1907, Congress provided that female U.S. citizens who married citizens of any foreign country would have their citizenship held “in abeyance” while they remained wedded or until the husband became a naturalized citizen or died. In 1922, Congress passed the Cable Act, which amended the Expatriation Act, stipulating: “any woman citizen who marries an alien ineligible to citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of the United States.” That meant any American woman marrying a racially ineligible male would automatically lose her U.S. citizenship. Make no mistake, the U.S. was a white man’s world by law.

How Our Cities Come To Be What They Are Today.

Let’s start with early American history, with the early British colonists. A chilling chapter in that history that was almost totally ignored until the last several decades concerns the enslavement of Native Americans by European colonists. Today, most Americans have at least passing familiarity with the displacement of Native Americans across the continent by whites but little awareness of the specific ways in which displacement and enslavement overlapped in early North American history. What a number of contemporary historians have discovered is that the seeds of the African enslavement system were sown in early European efforts to exploit Native American labor. That early system of attempting to enslave Native Americans failed for many reasons, not the least of which was that Native Americans were, after all, natives, and thus knew the landscape well enough to beat feet at the first opportunity.

The main reason I focus on that failed effort to enslave Native Americans is that it was the forerunner of a much larger and far more successful slave regime and indicates a critical mindset on the part of a great many European colonists and their descendants.

When we turn to the first days of the new U.S.A., we begin by putting the Declaration's most famous and enduring sentence upfront for all to appreciate as a not so subtle reminder of its role as a foundational element of most of our national myths about what we are as a nation and who we are as a people:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Although the far greater majority of Americans know that our founders established a system of government based on individual freedom and equality, not nearly as many know, or have any desire to know, the historical details involved in our progress from newly formed nation to what we are today. As a result, many Americans tend to uncritically accept the idealism expressed in our founding documents as lived fact and fail to recognize the intense effort that has been required on the journey to make those aspirations real. My goal in this section is to use the historical record to determine how those ideals were grounded in the real world and whether they have achieved a status other than aspirational.

An excellent place to start is with our primary legal documents and with slavery, a condition certainly at direct odds with every “truth” quoted above in the Declaration of Independence. Upon examination, the U.S. Constitution reveals itself as trying desperately not to declare either for or against slavery, never once using the morally laden words “slave” or “slavery” while discussing human bondage in some detail. Four separate sections of the Constitution deal with the harsh realities of owning human property.

·         Article I, Section 2, codified and counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in terms of the apportionment of representation and taxation in a scheme that favored the Southern states

·         Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 specifically prohibited Congress from banning the importation of slaves before 1808, a concession to the Southern slave-owning states.

·         Article IV, Section Two, Clause Three, commonly known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, one of the most controversial sections in the Constitution, provided that escaped slaves would be returned to those who claimed ownership.

·         Article Five describes the process whereby the Constitution itself may be altered. Most significant to this essay is that Article shielded certain clauses in Article I from being amended until after 1808, specifically Article I, Section 9, Clause 1, which prohibited Congress from banning the importation of slaves before 1808, another concession to the Southern slave-owning states.

Those Articles tell us that the Framers were sharply divided in their views of slavery and knew the judgment of history would find them wanting. Why else would those “held to service or labour” be called persons in the Constitution and not slaves or chattel/property? Although the words slave or slavery never appear in the Constitution, their fingerprints and footprints are all over that document. However, as much as modern conservatives would have us believe that most of the Framers were rock solid against slavery and wanted desperately to eliminate it, the undeniable fact was that slavery was the law of the land and persisted from before our country was formed until December 1865.

Of the first five Presidents—George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—only John Adams never owned human beings. The other four owned slaves before, during, and after serving as President. Of those four, only Washington set his slaves free upon his death, or slightly thereafter in accordance with his will.

Historical documents demonstrate that many of the Founding “Fathers” personally regarded the peculiar institution of slavery as troubling for moral and political reasons. Although the Founders may have recognized the many conflicts generated by white ownership of blacks with respect to rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they consciously refused to address those conflicts. For the slave-owning Signers of the Declaration of Independence and ten of the first 13 Presidents of the United States, the unalienable rights of all to freedom and justice were trumped by the property rights, wealth, self-interest, and status of white Americans. Because the very existence of their world and personal fortunes depended on enslaving blacks, a great many white Americans elevated personal fortune over morality and demonstrated that the concepts of unalienable natural rights and liberty were reserved exclusively for people exactly like themselves.

A better understanding of the manner in which ordinary people in the Northern States, where the abolition movement was strongest and the desire to enslave humans weakest, regarded blacks and slavery is provided by state laws that regulated the ownership of human chattel. For those interested in what history tells us, it is critical to note that of the original Thirteen Colonies, only Massachusetts banned slavery as unconstitutional through combination of its State Constitution that was approved by voters in 1780 and a complex series of litigations collectively known as the Quock Walker cases. The other Northern States only issued partial and limited bans on slavery until the late 1840s or early 1850s. The legal prohibition of slavery in the Northern States was a very gradual process that took nearly 65 years to reach fulfillment rather than the abrupt transition many Americans who love their national myths want to believe.

A final critical point concerning exactly what the Framers thought about slavery was made in Scott v. Sandford (1857), when Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that the prevailing idea at the time of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution was that American blacks (slaves and freedmen) “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” I have quoted that decision as I believe Taney’s words are shocking because they indicate the existence of a universe parallel to the one we want to believe represents what our founders thought about freedom and the rights of man.

We think they [slaves] are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” Scott v. Sandford (1857), pp. 59-60 U.S. 405.

Chief Justice Taney also wrote these memorable words:

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. Scott v. Sandford (1857), p. 60 U.S. 407.

After Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson and many Congressmen, typically Democrats, fought passage of the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, arguing that it would lead to full citizenship for blacks. As Representative Chilton A. White (D-Ohio) put it bluntly before the U.S. House of Representatives:

What will be the effect of turning loose this mass of [enslaved black Americans]? Where will they go? What do you propose to do with them? Do you propose to enfranchise them and make them, “before the law”, as the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Stevens] says, the equal of the white man and give them the rights of suffrage, the right to hold office, the right to sit on juries? Do you intend, in other words, to make this a mongrel government instead of a white man’s government?” (Blair, J.C Rives, Bailey, and F. Rives 1865, p. 216; also see Colbert 1995, p. 11).

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the federal Reconstruction program immediately evolved into an extension of that conflict. It became a struggle between northern Radical Republicans and their allies who were committed to punishing both Southern states for traitorous acts and white supremacists whose culture racial dominance was the foundation of their Southern “way of life.”

President Andrew Johnson, a conservative Southern War Democrat from Tennessee, was an open advocate of white supremacy and an opponent of extending civil and human rights to newly freed blacks. Johnson’s Reconstruction policies granted amnesty to former Southern rebel soldiers and permitted only white men to vote or to participate in the framing of the new state governments. He appointed provisional governors from the white Southern power elite and outlined steps for the creation of new state governments that would allow the election of representatives to the U.S. Congress. Johnson strongly supported state sovereignty and the right of each state to decide how to treat blacks.

Many Radical Republicans became outraged that the recently defeated but unrepentant Southern rebels were determined to return their former Confederate leaders to national political power, that none of the Southern state conventions had granted freedmen the right to vote, and that every Southern state had immediately passed Jim Crow laws that tightly restricted the lives and freedoms of former slaves and their access to civil institutions to ensure the continued dominance of white culture. That Republican anger seemed more than justified when Benjamin F. Perry, South Carolina’s provisional governor, declared at the state’s constitutional convention:

. . . this is a white man’s government and intended for white men only.

After the 1866 election, angry Radical Republicans in Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from President Johnson, who had openly rejected the idea that blacks had the same rights of property and person as whites, passing the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. “White men alone must manage the South,” was one of President Johnson’s more temperate statements.

To expect Republicans who had just won the Civil War to surrender national power to a region that had been defeated on the battlefield and to a population they viewed as traitors was unrealistic. With Reconstruction and passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Radical Republicans in Congress focused their efforts on changing the balance of power in the South and on effecting a political revolution that they thought necessary to ensure black Americans would be able to achieve the full freedoms guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution (Smith 1982).

The stakes in controlling the political infrastructure of the South were extraordinarily high. In effect, passage of the Thirteenth Amendment increased representation from Southern states in the U.S. House of Representatives because it made the infamous three-fifths slavery Compromise in the Constitution meaningless since those who had been slaves would thereafter be counted as whole persons in apportioning seats in the House. If Congress seated unrepentant Southerners, national political power would immediately swing to the Democrats.

As a reminder:

·         The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.

·         The Fourteenth Amendment declares that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens, including African Americans.

·         The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits each government in the U.S. from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The judicial branch was far less open to accepting blacks as Americans with the full array of rights guaranteed to white citizens. In the Supreme Court set aside the convictions of three white men growing out of a massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, in which a white mob killed over 150 freed State militiamen who were defending a local courthouse. Many of those deaths occurred after the freedmen had surrendered and had been disarmed.

In its drive to eviscerate the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, the Supreme Court held that the federal government had no power to protect newly freed slaves from crimes, ever the murder of about 150 African Americans, since that was the province of the states, not the federal government. With United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the day-to-day federal enforcement of civil rights ended and the organized white terrorism of the KKK and other armed militias was unleashed on helpless black citizens who had no hope that any court at any level in the U.S. would protect them from white terrorism.

As painful memories of the Civil War faded, most Northerners lost interest in maintaining what turned out to be a difficult and prolonged struggle to ensure black Americans would be granted the freedoms, dignity, and equality guaranteed by the Constitution. The insurmountable problem was that the South that emerged after Reconstruction was almost exactly like the pre-war South in terms of its foundation on white bigotry and supremacy, with the exception that overt slavery of blacks was replaced by a system of debt peonage and social controls enforced through intimidation and violence sanctioned by every level of government and by every element of Southern white society.

The KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, Red Shirts, Knights of the White Camellia, Sabre and Rifle Clubs, and other well-armed white supremacist groups in the South and Border States led the way in a physical and mental reign of violence and terror against Black Americans, who they felt were responsible for their loss of political privilege and socioeconomic status, by lynching (nearly 4,750 murders by 1968), firebombing-burning, beatings, public humiliation, false arrests, and other acts of atavistic violence.

In 1890, Mississippi adopted a new constitution that disenfranchised nearly all black citizens through literacy tests (found to be legal by the U.S. Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi, 1898), poll taxes, multiple ballot box laws, white-only primaries, grandfather clauses, and residency requirements that cut black voter enrollment from approximately 147,000 to around 8,600 (Hench 1998; Karlan 1993). When those discriminatory provisions survived legal challenges to a U.S. Supreme Court that was blind, deaf, and dumb to civil rights violations against black Americans, nine of the other Southern states adopted similar constitutions, disenfranchising the far greater majority of their black American residents.

The Southern disfranchisement movement was so comprehensive that black people could not vote, serve on juries, or hold political offices, activities that were exclusively restricted to registered white voters. As a result, Black Americans were systematically excluded from any role in the socio-political system other than that of a lower, powerless caste.

As has been noted by numerous observers, the Confederacy may have lost the Civil War on the battlefield but the South won the struggle to maintain their white supremacist way of life by oppressing blacks through intimidation and violence. The result was a century-long campaign of savagery and terror waged against black citizens by armed Southern whites supported by local and state governments. An as illustration, Mississippi Governor James Vardaman famously stated:

There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter . . . Mississippi’s Constitutional Convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the “ignorant or the vicious,” as some of those apologists would have you believe, but the nigger . . . Let the world know it just as it is. See: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_williams.html

Many if not all Southern conservatives believed that black suffrage during Reconstruction had been an enormous political insult because blacks were inherently inferior, unqualified, and unprepared to assume the responsibilities of citizenship and, thus, the near total segregation of blacks from whites was a necessary precondition to eventual citizenship (Kousser 1974).

Although the Thirteenth Amendment freed blacks from the chains of slavery, they were uneducated and illiterate, asset-less, and typically unskilled except as agricultural laborers and faced a country that wanted as little to do with them as possible other than to ensure their subservience to and separation from whites.

As an example, in Blyew v. United States (1871), the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled that in Kentucky, and nearly all Southern and Border States, whites could kill, rob, or cheat Black Americans as long as the only witnesses were black because those states had laws prohibiting blacks from testifying in court against whites, thus no prosecution could result.

From 1882 to 1968, approximately 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress. Seven presidents and many dozen politicians fought for anti-lynching federal legislation, but no law that would have made lynching a violation of federal law was ever passed because through filibusters Democratic Senators who controlled the Southern and Border States effectively killed all such legislation.

Most Americans do not know that prior to the turn of the 20th Century racial ghettos did not exist, not in the South or in the North. U.S. Bureau of the Census data for 1890 show that on average, urban black Americans lived in districts that were only 27 percent black (Cutler, Glaeser, and Vigdor 1999). In Columbus, Ohio, none of the City’s 15 wards had a black population of more than 25 percent and the ward with the largest black population was only 16 percent black (Hayward 2013).

In all Southern and Border States, voter registration laws, poll tax laws, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical violence prevented black Americans from voting. State laws throughout the U.S. required schools to be racially separate; schools for black Americans were very inadequately funded and staffed and were overwhelmingly located in high-poverty areas. Unbeknownst to most Americans, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court upheld the legality of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination on the grounds that segregation in itself did not constitute unlawful discrimination. The 7-1 majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown noted that "in the nature of things it [14th Amendment] could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races unsatisfactory to either." That ruling stood for the next 70 years.

When the Great Migration of black Americans started around the turn of the 20th Century, 90 percent of all blacks lived in the South. By the 1970s, nearly half of the country’s 22.5 million African Americans called other states home. Those migrants sought jobs in booming cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Los Angeles. When that first wave of migrants arrived in northern cities they found already in place a system of legally and socially enforced segregation and mostly low-wage, low-skill jobs. During the World War I years, about five million white young men joined the military. Those suddenly available job opportunities in the major cities constituted a siren song hundreds of thousands of job-hungry blacks could not resist.

In response to the increased flow of black migrants, municipalities enacted racially restrictive ordinances and property covenants that required segregation. As an example, Louisville, Kentucky, passed an ordinance that prohibited blacks from living on a block where the majority of residents were white. When that law was challenged, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that and similar laws as unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley (1917) because they violated the Due Process/Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

After that ruling, real estate agents quickly wrote "codes of ethics" that included bans on selling homes to African Americans outside of black areas. In most large cities, white residents responded to the arrival of black families with private racial covenants—legal language in private deeds that barred any subsequent purchaser from selling to African Americans. The legality of racial restrictive covenants was affirmed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) that such covenants constituted private and not municipal actions and therefore were not subject to the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here’s a real world example: A 1946 Goshen, Indiana, housing development read: “No person of any other race but the white race shall occupy any building or any lot.” However, one major flaw of private racial housing covenants was that they were voluntary and private homeowners often refused to include those restrictions in their property deeds. Thus, covenants were not a perfect solution to the continuing problem of black infiltration into previously all-white neighborhoods.

But covenants weren’t the only racial bans. By law or overt threats of violence, hundreds of “sundown” towns throughout the U.S. prohibited blacks from being within the city limits when the sun set. Utica, Ohio; La Crosse, Wisconsin; and Goshen, Indiana, are examples of “Sundown” towns (Shuler 2017). In addition, in 1924 the National Association of Real Estate Boards changed its official Code of Ethics by adding Article 34, making it a violation for realtors to try to sell houses in white neighborhoods to a member of “any race or nationality” that would “clearly be detrimental to property values.” (Metzger 2000) Those "codes of ethics" included bans on selling property to African Americans outside of black areas.

That first major wave of black migrants was greeted in northern and western cities by threats and physical violence, such as firebombing residential and office buildings owned by black Americans to force them from white neighborhoods. That violence was commonplace and culminated in widespread race riots that killed hundreds of blacks and dispossessed many thousands more of their homes.

State and local laws restricted black American’s right to own and lease property, conduct business, and move freely through public spaces in cities. Banks, savings and loan companies, mortgage firms, realtors, insurance companies, and federal housing agencies engaged in a process that came to be known as redlining. In redlining, no loans or policies were provided for individuals living within undesirable areas outlined in red. The effect was to ensure Black Americans lived separate lives from whites in areas characterized by dilapidated and deteriorated housing that frequently was without indoor plumbing and with minimal urban services, such as police, fire, street lighting, street repair, and trash pick-up.

Federal programs like those run by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), the U.S.-sponsored Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), and Veterans Administration systematically fostered racial segregation by refusing, via federal regulations, to lend money to black people for home purchase or improvements or to whites who lived in racially integrated areas, and also promoted racially restrictive housing covenants (Jackson 1980). As early as 1934 and 1935 the FHA underwriting manuals instructed banks to steer clear of areas with "inharmonious racial groups", and recommended that municipalities enact racially restrictive zoning ordinances (Light 2011; Schill and Wachter 2001; see The Special Collections Department - Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore for additional materials).

By the time the second and much larger wave of approximately five million black Americans migrated in 1940 to 1970 from the South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, West Coast, and Southwest, white America had fine-tuned its de jure and de facto systems of racial discrimination and segregation. In cities throughout the U.S., racially restrictive covenants had become private and were thus legal according to the Supreme Court. Redlining by banks, savings and loans, mortgage firms, realtors represented by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and insurance companies was the rule. Violence and threats of violence served to maintain all-white residential neighborhoods through the 1970s (Abrams 1955; Brown Jr. 1972). Federal programs like those run by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the U.S.-sponsored Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), Federal Housing Authority (FHA), and Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) systematically promoted racial segregation by refusing, via federal regulations, to lend money to black people for home purchase or improvements unless they lived in all-black neighborhoods, or to whites who lived in racially integrated areas, and also promoted racially restrictive housing covenants (Brown Jr. 1972; Hayden 2004; Glaeser and Gyorko 2002; Glaeser, Kahn, and Rappaport 2000; Jackson 1985; Massey and Denton 1989 and 1998). In the post-war suburban expansion period, the HOLC, FHA, FNMA, and private banks required new suburbs to be uniformly white before investments would be made or insured (Mahoney 1995, pp. 1671-1672) and used redlining to exclude homeowners in black neighborhoods from securing federally-backed mortgages and home improvement loans (Seitles 1998).

Effectively that meant until the Supreme Court’s 1968 Jones v. Mayer decision, FHA and HOLC regulations stipulated that if housing developers sold to blacks, they would not be able to sell houses in the same neighborhood to whites who needed home loans. Home loan programs administered by the U.S. Veterans Administration had similar if not completely identical racially discriminatory regulations. In many thousands of cases, black families unable to obtain a standard conventional or U.S. Government-insured bank mortgage had no other option but to buy houses in black-only neighborhoods using a financially punitive housing “contract” system that preyed on poor, option-less black buyers (Hirsch 1983; Satter 2010).

Under the “contract system”, the title to and equity in a property would not be transferred to the buyer until all contract payments had been made over the 20 or 30 year contract. Contract buyers were charged exorbitant fees for repairs to correct building code violations, which speculators frequently concealed from them. Contract buyers who missed or were late on a single payment would be evicted with no right to recoup prior payments. The property would then be sold to another black household under the same terms. In Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps as many as 85 percent of all homes bought by blacks were under the contract system. Those homes were frequently repossessed and re-sold dozens of times by real estate speculators over short periods, generating huge profits. It was a vicious underworld where blacks desperate to own their own homes were preyed upon by greedy white real estate speculators (Satter 2010).

As a result, those practices created a system in which buyers, sellers, realtors, bankers, insurers, and housing developers worked in concert with the federal Government to maintain existing all-white neighborhoods and all-black ghettos and to build all-white suburbs that were largely financed through FHA and VA programs (Jackson 1985; Mahoney 1995). In the context of VA loans, I must mention that the one million Black Americans who served in the U.S. military during WWII were as racially segregated as they were in the Deep South (until July 26, 1948, when President Harry Truman issued an Executive Order that integrated the armed forces). They could fight and die for democracy against totalitarian enemies overseas but were nearly powerless against the overt racism and bigotry that typified white America. Here’s an example that is both telling and chilling: in 1942 the American Red Cross refused to accept the blood of black American volunteer donors for use in hospitals (Gates 2013).

The reality is that even after redlining and racial covenants were outlawed, real estate and mortgage firms used the practice of racial steering to ensure prospective black homeowners were directed toward homes only in predominantly black neighborhoods and to loans whose terms were predatory when compared to loans available to whites.

Perhaps you should think about this real-world situation. Black Americans seeking to buy homes could only get mortgages if they lived in all-black neighborhoods, but since all-black neighborhoods were redlined by the HOLC, FHA, VA, FNMA, and private banks as undesirable areas no federally-insured or conventional mortgages could be obtained. Local laws/ordinances also prevented low and moderate income housing from being built for minorities (Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel).

State laws also prohibited inter-racial marriage and co-habitation and required segregation in education, housing, hospitals, commercial transactions, employment, transportation, hotels and restaurants, and public places like parks, swimming pools, and beaches. Publicly funded universities across the country rejected black American applicants solely because of their race. As examples of racial discrimination in higher public education despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, on October 1, 1962, after Army troops took control of the university, James Meredith became the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. And in 1963, the first black students were admitted to the Universities of South Carolina and Alabama.

It’s Not Only Race

But race isn’t the only factor that has affected the structure and character of American cities. As an urban planner I would be remiss if I failed to tell you that economic discrimination and segregation in American cities would not have risen to today’s level without the direct intervention of state enabling legislation and municipal regulations governing zoning. And that’s exactly what brings us to the consideration of social class as a formative factor in the evolution of American cities.

The concept of class is more than somewhat like that of race since neither has a great deal of scientific weight behind them. Class is more undefined than race in that no two sociologists will have the same definition. Although no matter how class is defined, that definition will include a varying blend of social, economic, educational, lifestyle, and status/attitudinal factors. In the past several decades, mostly under the influence of economists, income is typically used as a surrogate for class owing to the ease in tracking that statistic.

Here’s a fairly brief summary of how class has become a critical formative force in cities.

Although the first comprehensive zoning ordinance was enacted in New York City in 1916, the first big legal test of zoning came in 1924, the Ambler Realty Company contested a newly adopted Euclid, Ohio, zoning ordinance, claiming it violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by depriving them of liberty and property without due process of law, denying them the equal protection of the laws, and violating the Ohio Constitution. The complaint sought an injunction restraining enforcement of the zoning ordinance. In 1924 the lower federal court held in Ambler Realty Co. v. Village of Euclid that the ordinance was unconstitutional and thus void. That federal judge specifically found that the ordinance was written “to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life.” In effect, the judge ruled that the ordinance excluded poor people from upper class neighborhoods, which it undeniably did, a situation he found violated the U.S. Constitution.

In 1926, the Supreme Court considered the Village of Euclid’s appeal in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926). Their ruling endorsed the right of local municipal authority to designate zones for certain types of buildings and dictate restrictions on lot and building sizes. By upholding local zoning power, the Supreme Court endorsed what has become known as “Euclidian Zoning” even though that specific zoning code unashamedly promoted economic and social (class and racial) segregation. With little change, that form of zoning remains in effect in municipalities throughout the U.S. and continues to create and perpetuate segregated housing because it is based on discrimination of wealth and race/ethnicity.

The Supreme Court’s 1926 ruling held that apartments were often nothing but “parasites” and near nuisances that degraded detached single-family residences by cutting off light and air, totally ignoring that those single-family zones segregated people by race/ethnicity and class, even though neither the poor or a lower class was mentioned in the ruling. Thus, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, Euclidian zoning became a legal tool designed to keep people in their proper place in society, meaning well-to-do whites with their fellow whites, blacks with blacks, and ethnics/immigrants with their fellow unwashed masses.

I have no doubt that much of urban social order embodied in in today’s zoning ordinances was and is based on explicit and implicit white desirability/superiority and black undesirability/inferiority that is inherent in zoning ordinances since the Euclid decision.

In 1977, the Supreme Court’s decision in Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. institutionalized that loophole by asserting that exclusionary zoning is not unconstitutional. Why is this American history of racial discrimination and segregation important today? Because that history in creating majority black areas in central cities has led to lower land values, less money for public education, reductions in school quality, constrained local employment opportunities, and fewer commercial amenities located in and around segregated black neighborhoods. Which means that all black Americans have been and are adversely affected by highly-deleterious racial segregation and racial prejudice.

The discriminatory combination of government policy and individual actions by white homeowners, realtors, appraisers, banks/mortgage firms, and insurance companies and was aided and reinforced by economically and racially segregative zoning regulations. The resulting rate of racial segregation in the United States has been quite high and racially integrated neighborhoods continue to be an anomaly. Racial segregation indices have improved slightly, though primarily in areas with military installations, which tend to be more integrated.

The existence of overt racial bigotry and bias in relations between dominant whites and sub-dominate people of color in the U.S. is well-documented in our history and our daily lives. Here’s how I think it worked.

·        Because white rights took precedence, in 1790 the U.S. Government was able to restrict citizenship only to whites of good character, a legal restriction that lasted until the mid-1900s.

·        Because white rights took precedence, white Americans could deny citizenship to blacks and Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians and not recognize the astounding divergence of those actions with ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

·        Because white rights took precedence, the U.S. Government was able to break its sworn word (statutory obligations) to indigenous peoples and take land promised in Senate ratified treaties would be tribal property in perpetuity and give it to white Americans and not feel dishonorable or treacherous.

·         Because white rights took precedence, white Americans could enslave and torture blacks and not feel legal or moral obligations to treat them as human rather than as chattel.

·        Because white rights took precedence, white Americans felt no guilt in amassing the collective power of federal, state, and local governments to oppress black Americans freed from the chains of slavery and force them by law into a racially separate and inferior world.

·        Because white rights took precedence, in the 1930s between 500,000 and two million Mexican-American citizens and legal residents were deprived of due process and forcibly and illegally deported to Mexico by the U.S. and state governments in a policy/program policy, authorized by President Herbert Hoover.

·        Because white Americans—whether Supreme Court justices, Congressmen, land-hungry settlers, or men and women in the streets—were confirmed in their superior station over subordinate persons of color, they knew their actions regarding them were right and just.

The U.S. has never adequately faced its history of institutional racism or inequality. The very real problem is that millions of white Americans most likely never will address that history because they deny the existence of institutional racism and inequality and are comfortable with the present situation.

The fault, many Americans claim, lies with the millions of Native and black Americans who have willfully chosen not to participate in the quintessential American Dream and thus are personally responsible for such shortcomings as laziness/no work ethic/lack of initiative, dependence on government hand-outs, poverty, poor education, unemployment, etc. Those Americans hold tight to their glorification of our country as having been made Exceptional through our unique democratic spirit and therefore worthy of uncritical love, devotion, and patriotism and completely reject historical and structural causes of inequity.

Nor has the federal government ever addressed the results of callously throwing five million newly freed, illiterate, asset-less, and basically unskilled blacks into the cauldron of American society and then ignoring its responsibility to incorporate them into that society and to protect them from the very people and states that had been their enslavers and oppressors. Moreover, the federal Government has never addressed the multitude of adverse effects of federal, state, and local laws and majority white culture that intentionally discriminated against and oppressed black Americans for well more than 100 years.

Although the consequences of being forced to live in marginal urban areas are numerous, severe, and long-lasting, I’ll only briefly demonstrate one of those critical outcomes: financial. But before we look at that outcome, I ask you to keep in mind two critical considerations.

First, homeownership typically helps to build individual and familial wealth. When generations of black American were denied that asset-creating tool, adverse consequences were passed down to generation after generation. And second, homes in communities of color are valued less initially and appreciate less in value over time.

Okay, keeping those two major factors in mind, let’s look at some additional real world facts. In 2013, the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances analyzed family net worth in the U.S.

Median net worth for white families                $141,900

Median net worth for black families                  $11,000

Median white family assets were 13 times greater than those of black families.

Net assets for families whose head of household was a college graduate:

Median net worth for white families                $180,500

Median net worth for black families                  $23,400

For families whose head of household was a college graduate, median white family assets were 11 times greater than those of black families.

Net assets of families whose head of household had earned a graduate or professional degree:

Median net worth for white families                $293,100

Median net worth for black families                  $84,000

For families whose head of household had earned a graduate or professional degree, median white family assets were nearly 3.5 times those of black families (see Boshara, Emmons, and Noeth 2015; Emmons and Ricketts 2017; Meschede, Taylor, Mann, and Shapiro 2017; and Jones 2017).

The inequity resulting from that discrimination is also highlighted in research by sociologists and economists at numerous universities (Shapiro, Meschede, and Osoro 2013) and more recently by Kochhar and Fry (2014) of the Pew Research Center who reported the median household net worth for whites in 2013 was $141,900 and $11,000 for blacks, a wealth gap of nearly 1,300 percent. Their research found that from 2010 to 2013 “the median wealth of non-Hispanic white households increased from $138,600 to $141,900, or by 2.4 percent” while during the same period the median wealth of non-Hispanic black households fell 33.7 percent, from $16,600 to $11,000.

Unless broad public policy and institutional changes are initiated at the federal level to address racial disparities in homeownership, education, employment, income, wealth, and inheritance, closing the black-white inequity gap will be an unfulfilled dream (Shapiro 2004 and 2006; also see Johnson 2014; Jargowsky 2015; Rigsby 2016).

The socioeconomic playing field was not designed from the birth of this country to be level for people of color. That discrimination resulted in inequities that are present today and has denied them opportunities other Americans enjoy. Because federal and state laws and regulations produced this situation, it is obvious those governments have the ability to undo the results of that creation. But, absent political will, that change seems well-nigh impossible.

All Americans are aware of the horrific struggle of blacks to be treated equally under the law, to be treated as full-fledged American citizens. Today, when we justly say that things have certainly changed for the better in terms of race relations, most of us mean in terms of that struggle. After all, lynching and overt physical violence as an accepted way for whites to control blacks is illegal. Overt racism is frowned on though it is alive and well in some circles. The black vote is no longer as constrained as it once was though several states are trying very hard to return to those times.

We, as a nation, have changed for the better in the sense that racial discrimination and segregation are no longer matters of law or government regulation, even though in many ways they are still part of American culture. But, at the same time that civil rights for blacks were improving, other changes that were not nearly so beneficial have come to dominate our urban landscapes.

Those changes are matters of law in all states and nearly all municipal jurisdictions. Under President Lyndon Johnson, three pieces of important legislation were passed by Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. All three were widely heralded as presaging a new day for people of color in terms of reducing racial discrimination. In terms of enforcement, the first succeeded moderately well, the second hit the ball out of the park until the Supreme Court eviscerated it in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and the last failed miserably. The question we should ask is why the Civil Rights and Voting Acts came to be enforced at least fairly vigorously and the Fair Housing Act never has been.

My take is that unlike voting or job discrimination, residential locational decisions are based intensely personal factors, including cost, availability, nearness to work/transit, desirability, etc. It’s about where you and your family live. It’s about where you relax with friends and neighbors, people you identify with. It’s about you huddling in the nest with people exactly like you against the Dangerous Others.

If you look at research into the persistence of urban segregation you’ll see that American cities that were segregated in the 1960s were just as segregated or even more so in the 2010s. Why? The answer is obvious: most whites do not want to live with or even in close proximity to people of color, especially blacks.

In a detailed investigation, ProPublica (an independent non-profit news organization that produces investigative journalism) discovered only two occasions since George Romney's tenure at HUD in which the Department withheld money from communities for violating the Fair Housing Act. Records even show HUD has given housing grants to communities after they've been found guilty by courts of promoting segregated housing or have been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. New Orleans, for example, has continued to receive HUD housing grants after the Justice Department sued it for violating that Fair Housing Act by blocking a low-income housing project in a wealthy historic neighborhood.

In case some of you may have only partly understood the real world effects of redlining and racial discrimination, in 1968, the year Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, the city of Dearborn, Michigan, had zero black homeowners. The city of Livonia had one. And Warren, Michigan, a city whose population hit nearly 180,000 in 1970, had a grand total of four black homeowners.

Real World Solutions, But No Magic

Although I am certain that solutions are out there in terms of how we as a nation can constructively address racial discrimination and urban residential segregation, I am still up in the air about how to access those solutions, especially at this point in our history.

Perhaps the questions we should be asking are whether America has the capacity to be honest about the adverse effects our history of racial prejudice and discrimination have had on cities and on the lives of poor people and people of color. Perhaps we should be asking whether we have the political will to finally address those problems. Even with the gift of 20/20 foresight, predicting the future political will of the American people is much like predicting the price of oil 15 or 20 years from the present.

The problem is many of us are desperate for certainty, for the confidence of experts who know exactly what to do that will bring the best results and will lead us out of the darkness we now inhabit. But you of all people know the real difficulties of any community development that is associated with the often dreaded words, Fair Housing.

Often you hear that all politics are local and therefore you should start by focusing on local solutions to your problems. In this case I believe that is bad advice because from where I stand this problem has a geographic dimension that extends beyond local or regional or even state government.

Let me ask you this: how was the terrorism and brutality of Jim Crow defeated? Did the citizens of Birmingham or Montgomery or Selma suddenly see the light of morality and justice and open their arms to black people? We don’t have to pick on Southern cities when we have nearly equally bad examples closer to home. Do any of you remember the rallies in Cincinnati, Ohio, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace who ran for President in 1968 on a platform supporting racial segregation? Do you remember Wallace’s campaign slogan at those rallies? "Stand Up for America!" Or his infamous pledge at those rallies: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

In Boston, the struggle to desegregate city schools started in the 1950s and lasted through the 1980s and resulted in widespread violence by white groups that regularly made national news headlines and horrified millions.

When after World War II black Americans in Chicago began a public struggle to end racial discrimination in the city, white people fought back with hostile demonstrations but eventually demonstrated with their feet, abandoning the city for the all-white suburbs. Similar stories abound throughout the U.S.

The reality is with barely 50 years of practically non-existent enforcement of fair housing laws this country has not been able to achieve significant racial and economic integration. After all has been said and done, we as a nation have not been able to wish away the persistent effects of 300 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow violence, and over 80 years in which local, state, and federal regulations resulted in forced racial segregation in urban housing and education.

Here’s just one example of the mountain of ideological resistance ahead. As Stella Morabito, senior contributor to The Federalist (see: http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/30/american-exceptionalism-human-exceptionalism/), put it succinctly in August 2016:

America is exceptional because it is the first nation to codify and embrace the understanding that every human being—no matter one’s nationality—is endowed with something unique to offer and is therefore exceptional. No exceptions.

If you take Morabito seriously, you have one very substantial problem: the country that Morabito (and millions of like-minded conservatives) is fantasizing about never existed. Here’s a brief outline of the country she apparently does not know exists:

·       From the get-go, America’s Constitution permitted the enslavement of blacks by the millions.

·       From 1790, American law excluded all but whites (and blacks since 1870) as citizens until the mid-1900s.

·         The federal government systematically coerced Native Americans into selling their land at bargain basement prices, only allowing them as a people to become citizens in the mid-20th Century.

·         Federal government and federal courts permitted Southern and Border States to terrorize millions of black Americans through Jim Crow laws, thousands of lynchings, and other forms of atavistic violence and overt racial bigotry for well over 100 years.

·         Federal and state governments, agencies, and courts at all levels permitted blacks to be segregated in central city slums by means of laws/regulations that denied their property and civil rights.

Now, go back and re-read what Morabito wrote and see if her idealized conception of America corresponds with our history as lived.

How is change to be achieved when all Democratic Presidents since LBJ have moved so far to the center they are little more than what were formerly known as moderate Republicans?

I do not apologize for believing Republican Presidents would never, at least in my lifetime, lead the charge to enforce the Fair Housing Act since that view is based on political reality, not partisanship.

For many who have assembled in this conference, a primary goal is to overcome our historical racial economic, education, and housing discrimination and the resulting disparities that we have experienced with our lives and craft a solution that embodies progress in reducing racial discrimination.

Here’s a picture of American urban reality. Our large cities are characterized by segregation, poverty, disinvestment, depopulation, and crime. We haven’t tried to change that picture because we are either too entrenched in ideological worldviews to address means of effective change or we simply don’t care. The sad truth is the political and moral will to change that picture is largely absent in the general public.

But despite our historical lack of the national political will to ground in action the aspirational message contained in the Declaration of Independence, in the last 60 plus years things have changed for the better, at least in part. The KKK and the Jim Crow South are gone, at least in terms of effective social movements. Overt racism is no longer tolerated in public discourse, although it is alive and well in many circles. It’s no longer a cultural imperative that black Americans are treated like second- or third-class citizens.

What prompted those changes? The simple answer is belief in the words enshrined in the Declaration of Independence forced President Lyndon Johnson to commit political suicide (and for the foreseeable future to change America’s political landscape) when he forced passage of laws protecting black Americans from white racism.

And change America he did. Here’s one measure of that racial change. If Dylan Roof, the unrepentant white supremacist who murdered nine innocents at the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, had acted in the 1930s, he would have been celebrated as a hero by his fellow white South Carolinians. That’s real change.

Let’s not be romantic about our history. It wasn’t John or Robert Kennedy who changed America with transformative civil rights legislation. The truth is that both brothers were very reluctant to push for the civil rights of black Americans because they saw the looming white backlash and correctly estimated the political cost they would have to pay for supporting the movement. It was Lyndon Baines Johnson who sacrificed the future of his Party by forcing the civil rights platform into legislation. He did that while being pushed and shoved in the right direction by Martin Luther King Jr. and his associates by using the televised white-inflicted violence in Southern cities to show America what it had become. To their credit, most white Americans outside the South were repulsed by that hatred.

What was it that changed America? The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It may surprise the seasoned community and economic development specialists in the audience that I included the Fair Housing Act in that list. People certainly can argue that although the Civil and Voting Rights Acts have been effective means of change in America, the Fair Housing Act cannot by any measure be included in that group. But consider this point: passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts did not immediately work wonders in our political landscape. Effective enforcement took many years and later amendments to the Acts, particularly after the early 1970s. Those Acts ultimately succeeded because of the nationally televised brutality and terrorism of the Jim Crow South was morally and legally indefensible and turned our collective stomachs.

Lest we forget, the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not repeal anti-miscegenation laws found in 16 states that prohibited blacks and whites from co-habiting or marrying, including every Southern state plus Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Delaware. In 1967, those laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Loving v. Virginia. Years prior to that ruling, 41 of the then 48 states had passed anti-miscegenation laws. Alabama continued to enforce their prohibition of inter-racial marriages until 1970. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to officially remove their anti-miscegenation provision from its Constitution. Although 60 percent of those voting approved that ballot measure, nearly 526,000 Alabamans, the remaining 40 percent, voted to continue the prohibition of racial inter-marriages.

Lesson: White supremacy dies hard.

Or as Martin Luther King Jr. said on that topic: “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily” (MLK, Letters from a Birmingham Jail).

However, the Fair Housing Act was never enforced effectively in terms of barring housing discrimination and "affirmatively" advancing residential integration. The Act was no more than six months old when LBJ was succeeded by Richard Nixon and he adamantly refused to allow his HUD Secretaries to enforce the Act, even firing his first HUD Secretary, George Romney, because he insisted on real enforcement of the Act. No President since then has actively supported enforcement of the Act, not even Barack Obama, who most of us hoped would have been its champion. But he was too busy playing Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte to care about something as prosaic as the Fair Housing Act.

In terms of the historical obstacles to racial integration and equality, it seems that four possible real world solutions should be considered.

·         First, we’ll always have to live with something like or similar to our existing urban racial discrimination and segregation.

·         Second, overcoming racial discrimination and segregation on a voluntary, city by city basis over many decades may eventually be partially successful.

·         Third, prepare the best legal case for Fair Housing enforcement and bring suit in federal court to establish precedent nationally.

·         Fourth, overcoming the many obstacles to fair housing will require real world enforcement of the federal Fair Housing Act over the next several generations.

As a person whose optimism has always been grounded in the real world, I have to reject the first two options. The first is morally repugnant and must be rejected by those who value justice and believe the promises in the Declaration of Independence. The second is exactly the solution to Jim Crow racial segregation and discrimination proposed by prominent conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s and should be rejected now as it was then as offensive to the American Constitution. The third option has a certain amount of merit but would require nearly a perfect storm of causes to be effective. In addition, the Supreme Court is notoriously unfriendly to such cases.

Please note that none of the above potential solutions involve judicial action. I’d like to remind you that the U.S. Supreme Court as an institution cannot be relied upon to acknowledge fair housing as a value protected by the Constitution. After all, the Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott and his brothers and sisters were doomed to a life of enslavement by superior whites. In Blyew v. United States (1871), the Supreme Court ruled that in Southern and Border States whites could kill or injure blacks as long as no whites were around to testify to the crime.

In United States v. Cruikshank (1875) the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had no power under the Constitution to protect newly freed slaves from being murdered by whites since that was the province of states. In Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court that ruled that Jim Crow bigotry was perfectly legal. In Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racially restrictive covenants constituted private actions and therefore were not subject to the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926) the Supreme Court ruled that residential zoning excluding poor people was perfectly legal, going so far as to imply the people living in apartments were parasitic nuisances that degraded detached single-family residences, totally ignoring that single-family zones effectively segregated people by race/ethnicity and class. In Korematsu v. United States (1944) the Supreme Court closed its eyes when Japanese-American citizens were denied access to due process when they were forced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt into concentration camps at the beginning of World War II. And in countless decisions courts across the country have ruled that exclusionary residential zoning is perfectly legal as long as the reason for excluding people is based on class rather than race, which means that excluding lower class people has simply become a legal way to keep blacks out.

The lesson we must learn is that expecting judicial relief from racial segregation and discrimination is at best a faint hope and at worst a dangerous delusion.

However, economic discrimination and segregation supposedly based on class is not only the darling of the Supreme Court it is the law of the land in zoning ordinances found across the country that are cleverly crafted to keep poor folks as far away as possible from middle-to upper-class people (Lens and Monkkonen 2016; for a popular but well-researched and well-written summary, see Florida 2016; see also Resseger 2013).

It’s not simply that people innocently choose to live among those who have similar incomes, education, and occupations. It’s that they are choosing to live where excluding people who do not meet those criteria is legal. That’s a type of discrimination the courts have allowed to flourish to the point that most people accept it as a normal and even natural part of the urban-suburban landscape.

Since the courts have consistently come down favoring class discrimination, the only real tool that can address the issue is federal and state law (see Ikeda and Hamilton 2015; Mangin 2014). That leaves us with the failed legacy of the Fair Housing Act. I’m sure I do not have to go into the pitiful litany of low life expectancy, child poverty, educational, and employment issues that characterize the many failures of that legislation (Jargowsky 2015; Reece et al. 2009; Rigsby 2016).

Other interesting potential solutions include regulatory budgets, zoning budgets, the use of Tax Increment Local Transfers (TILTs), and moving land use decisions from the local to the state level, where lawmakers are less affected by NIMBY pressures and more likely to favor economic growth factors. Part of the reason I’m not a big fan of those measures is the practical difficulty of persuading homeowners and the politicians they control to make decisions that are not in their interests, at least in their short-term interests (Schleicher 2013). For example, RTAAs and TILTs that literally pay nearby homeowners to support affordable housing development that they would otherwise likely have opposed, may seem to be a great idea but it almost certainly will conflict with other deeply held homeowner attitudes and values, such as class and racial animus, in-group loyalty/identity, etc.

The big challenge is how today’s class discriminatory housing system can be changed in an ideological climate where conservatives claim that the numerous social ills affecting blacks and Latinos are self-inflicted and that the efforts of the federal government to address that situation are ill-considered social engineering and intrusion into a free market most whites believe is functioning well.

Complex problems seldom have simple solutions may not be what you want to hear. But it is reality.

That does not mean we should abandon the effort to create solutions to American housing problems but that we should respect the inherent difficulty of that task. Right now, in a conservative-transcendent America, the search for genuine solutions does not look promising. My best guess is Donald Trump will not be a force for Fair Housing progress, nor will Ben Carson, the newly nominated HUD Secretary, who was by all accounts a brilliant neurosurgeon but hasn’t shown much consideration for poor black folks.

My point is racial discrimination and segregation are not local issues to be solely addressed at the local level. They are national in scope and can be best addressed at the national level, which means by federal law. But, you say, we already have Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. That’s the problem and perhaps a potential solution.

For me, the only viable solution to racial discrimination and segregation is one that occurs at the national level, which means we have to elect a President and a Congress that cares enough about justice to insist on enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. And how probable is that? After all, no Democratic President since LBJ cared enough to be its champion because the political risks of alienating white voters were simply too great.

But voting seems to be the best alternative we have. Talk of a social justice revolution is mental masturbation. If we want real change we’ll have to get out and work hard for the right candidate.

Now, at this point you might be feeling a little down, especially since we have a President who may be intent on getting the Fair Housing Act repealed. But in a bitter way I’m a little okay with Trump being in office. Because my hope is a nationwide backlash will in 2020 sweep in a candidate who will be a Fair Housing champion.

My great hope is that Trump’s election encourages citizens to get off their duffs and smell the coffee that has been brewing for years. National leaders starting with Ronald Reagan and continuing through Bill Clinton, the two Bushes, Obama, and Hilary crawled in bed with Wall Street and the Big Banks and turned their backs not only on Main Street America but also on poor people everywhere and blacks specifically. It’s not enough to elect a President who talks the talk and claims to share your worldview while blowing smoke up our collective skirts with campaign promises that turn to dust the day after the election. What’s critical is to elect a President who pushes for real-world actions focused on justice and equal treatment under the law in the housing arena. What we need is a President and a Congress that will put in place institutional measures that will result in long-term enforcement of the Fair Housing Law. Period.

I’m not proposing a feel-good, romantic, Hollywood solution to our centuries old racial problem but one that requires old fashioned hard work. It’s called campaigning and voting for a candidate who believes in justice for all Americans, in recognizing how our history of racial discrimination affects people today and is determined to change it.

To demonstrate that conservatives and liberals believe in the same America, I quote Harry Jaffa, a conservative political philosopher who in 1964 was a speechwriter in Barry Goldwater’s Presidential campaign and was passionate about the principles of the Declaration of Independence; he believed its main contention that "all men are created equal" should be held dear by every American:

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue."

Now is when I ask you to recall the proposition we started with:

Our cities are what they are today because, as a nation, we want them that way.

I believe that statement is true because if we wanted our cities to be different than they are, we would have taken specific steps to ensure the necessary changes were made. But we didn’t take those steps, thus we are, as a collective, either okay with today’s situation, or we are indifferent to the condition of our cities. I am convinced that many Americans are okay with the structure/condition of our cities because that structure/condition benefits them in many ways.

We made sure our cities developed as we wanted through ordinances that intentionally segregated blacks from white, deed restrictions that prevented sales to anyone but whites, redlining by federal government agencies and the entire banking and insurance sector that kept black citizens out of the housing market, exclusionary zoning that has dominated the structure of cities for nearly a hundred years by ensuring middle- and upper class whites never have to live with large numbers of poor people, especially poor black Americans.

What I believe many if not most white Americans want today is a . . .

Separate and Who Gives a Damn if It’s an Equal World

 . . . despite that option having bitten the legal dust many decades ago in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).

For many whites, the beauty of our legal system is they have that Separate and Unequal World courtesy of government-sponsored racial ghettoization coupled with the Supreme Court’s decisions that allow people with resources to exclude poor people from their landscapes.

As we have seen today in our examination of American history, powerful institutions controlled by whites, namely the federal, state, and local governments, real estate industry, banks, insurance firms, and many others shaped urban landscapes in their favor, restricting by law and custom where and under what conditions people of color could live. For nearly 200 years of American history, racial discrimination has been intentional and systemic policy.

You in the audience know that housing discrimination is not a thing of the past, in 2009 the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against leading mortgage lender Wells Fargo, alleging the company steered Black and Latino homebuyers into riskier subprime loans and charged them more than it did white customers. Wells Fargo settled the suit in 2012 by agreeing to pay $175 million in damages. In December 2012, the DOJ settled a similar lawsuit with Bank of America for $335 million over loan discrimination by its Countrywide Financial unit. In June 2014, the city of Miami sued JPMorgan Chase, accusing the bank of engaging in discriminatory lending practices in minority neighborhoods since at least 2004 in violation of the U.S. Fair Housing Act. In November 2014, the city of Los Angeles filed similar claims of predatory mortgage lending in minority neighborhoods against JPMorgan Chase for allegedly steering minority buyers into high risk loans they could not afford. In mid-January 2017, the U.S. Justice Department accused JPMorgan Chase & Co of violating the U.S. Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act between 2006 and 2009. The lawsuit stipulated that JPMorgan Chase showed "reckless disregard" for the rights of at least 53,000 African American and Hispanic borrowers by allowing mortgage brokers to charge them more for home loans than they did for other borrowers. On the same day the DOJ suit was filed, the bank agreed to pay $55 million to settle the suit while maintaining it had not discriminated against minority borrowers.

Today white people no longer have to rely on redlining, restrictive covenants, or overt racial discrimination to keep the races separate. Today we have more subtle legal mechanisms like exclusionary zoning that protect us from being blamed for segregation and housing discrimination. We aren’t the Jim Crow Southerners, the KKK, the horrid race baiters. We publically repudiate overt racism as something from the past. We had nothing to do with that ugliness. But whites do not want to admit they have created a situation of plausible deniability, a narrative of racial innocence that allows them to benefit from discrimination and segregation but to avoid the guilt and the blame.

Saying the U.S. has racial problems ignores the reality that what we have is a persistent, centuries old, white supremacy problem that started in our Colonial Period and continues today. Whether we change that present and our future is up to us.

Many people who believe in political correctness would rather I use the kinder, gentler term, white privilege. But that term does not and cannot convey the systemic domination of blacks by white Americans throughout our history. By white supremacy I am not referring to the KKK or various neo-Nazi or White Power groups but to the dominant American culture.

Skeptics might ask as to what specific evidence documents the white supremacy that supposedly afflicts our country? The answer should be obvious and starts with our enslaving Native Americans and then black Africans, and continues with the Naturalization Acts that denied citizenship to anyone but whites, with the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands that violated their Congressionally-guaranteed treaty rights in ethnic cleansing that provided American settlers with basically free land, with Jim Crow terrorism and racial discrimination and segregation, with the Chinese Exclusion Law (1882) that prevented Chinese from immigrating to the U.S. and from becoming citizens once here, with the forced relocation and imprisonment of American citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps during WWII as the Supreme Court refused to consider the Constitutional issue of incarcerating U.S. citizens without due process, or with the multi-century bigotry against Hispanics in the Southwest, including the illegal, forced removal of about 600,000 U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage in the Southwestern states to Mexico in the early 1930s (Balderrama and Rodriguez 2010); and with our centuries-long treatment of women as second-class citizens.

I do not want anyone to have the false impression that states in the West were largely free from prejudice against black Americans. To illustrate that point, in 1859, when Oregon was admitted as a state, its constitution explicitly prohibited blacks from living and working in the State, owning property, and executing legal contracts. Until 1926, it was illegal for blacks to even move into the State and for decades was a bastion of Ku Klux Klan activity. Racially offensive language in the state constitution was not removed until 2002. History matters to today’s reality as in 2018 the Oregon population was 84 percent white and two percent black; Portland remains one of the most segregated cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line and is the whitest major city in the U.S. with a population that is 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent black.

Concluding Thoughts

Not only do most middle- and upper-class Americans not want to live anywhere near blacks specifically or poor people in general, but they also want to keep themselves secure in residential areas where black folks weren’t. To do that they created municipal zoning regulations that made it difficult if not downright impossible for poor people with skin colors darker than peaches and cream to relocate to the milk and honey suburbs.

The U.S. has a history of public policy discrimination against people of color. But, if you take a dispassionate look at American history, you’ll see a nation of citizens who are deeply conflicted. They desperately want to believe the aspirational words enshrined in the Declaration of Independence have always been this country’s reality. But they also don’t want to live next to, or have their children go to school with, or, far, far worse, marry blacks. Actually, what many white Americans truly want is a Separate and Who Gives a Crap if It’s an Equal World, despite that option having bitten the legal dust many decades ago in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

The means of effective community and economic development are not beyond our reach, our imagination, or our understanding. Changing cities is not an exercise in high-energy physics or brain surgery. It only requires a nationally-based political will and that, as of this time, is sadly in short supply.

One approach to American history is to see it as a precious gem with many facets. Some people holding conservative views see only certain facets of that gem, the ones where the glorious words of the Declaration of Independence reside and everyone lives in a blissful state of unfettered liberty; the facet where property rights are king and our innate goodness makes us a shining city on a hill. The facet where America was the first nation to codify and embrace the concept that every human is endowed with unique natural rights that cannot be taken away without due process. The facet where the power of our unique new nation came directly from "the consent of the governed.” In that approach, intentions are more valued than actions.

Others holding progressive worldviews may see completely different facets of that gemstone, the ones where our flaws and miscues reside, flaws like slavery, our callous appropriation of the lands of native peoples, our white-only mentality, the horrors of Jim Crow and separate and unequal, Government-sponsored redlining and ghettoization, and our willingness to discriminate against people based on income and class. In that approach, actions are more valued than intentions.

If Thomas Jefferson was right when he said “knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, and knowledge is happiness,” I challenge you to learn all you can about your country’s history, not just the praiseworthy or the dishonorable, but the totality.

I encourage all of you to embrace the many facets of our history, to take the approach where both intentions and actions are valued, and to see America for the complex gem it is, a great country founded on an extraordinary philosophy of liberty and justice that was compromised by the clay feet and mistakes of the flawed humans who made our nation what it is. Seeing only a select few facets of our complex history does a major disservice to the past and puts our future in jeopardy.

No one should forget that although racism may be systemic in America, bigotry and prejudice are personal attitudes that are distributed across the socio-political spectrum. Saying the U.S. has racial problems ignores the reality that fundamentally what we have is a white problem.

I close with two of my favorite messages from James Baldwin and El Hajj Malik el Shabazz, who, thirty years after their deaths, still have much to teach us.

Not everything that is faced can be changed . . . but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

James Baldwin

“ . . . tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”

El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X)

Legal Cases

Ambler Realty Co. v. Village of Euclid, Ohio, 297 F. 307 D.C. Ohio (1924).

Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U.S. 252 (1977). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/429/252/case.html

Blyew v. United States, 80 U.S. 13 Wall. 581 581 (1871). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/80/581/

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/

Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/245/60/case.html

Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/271/323/

In re Ah Yup, 5 Sawy. 155 (1878). For more information, see: https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/ncc375/rp/index.html

Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409 (1968). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/392/409/case.html

Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/323/214/case.html

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/

Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. ___ (2013). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/12-96/

Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel, 119 N.J. Super. 164 (1972) 290 A.2d 465. Available online: http://law.justia.com/cases/new-jersey/appellate-division-published/1972/119-n-j-super-164-0.html

United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875), Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/92/542/case.html

Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/169/649/case.html

Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/170/213

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Schuessler, Ryan. 2014. The Ferguson Next Door in Missouri Holds Powerful Lesson. Al Jazeera America, December 21, 2014. Available online: //america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/21/a-neighboring-missouritownmightholdlessonsforferguson.html.

Seitles, Marc D. 1998. The Perpetuation of Residential Racial Segregation in America: Historical Discrimination, Modern Forms of Exclusion, and Inclusionary Remedies. Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law 14(1): 89-124. Available online: http://www.law.fsu.edu/journals/landuse/Vol141/seit.htm.

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Shapiro, Thomas M., Tatjana Meschede, and Sam Osoro. 2013. The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide. Brandeis University Institute on Assets and Social Policy; Research and Policy Brief, February 2013. Available online at: http://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Author/shapiro-thomas-m/racialwealthgapbrief.pdf.

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Voluntary Individual Pro-Environmental Behavior and Climate Change

by Robert T. Ernst, PhD

Note: this post is a version of an article published in the journal, Practicing Planner, in Fall 2013.

Introduction

It would be wonderful, in terms of decreased carbon footprint, if more people used fuel efficient cars and LED light bulbs, or rode bikes to work and to shop, or if more local political jurisdictions adopted climate change mitigation and adaptation  measures. It would be even better if most Americans lived in houses that produced more energy than they used, rejected energy- and carbon-intensive 21st Century lifestyles, and returned to residential and consumption patterns typical of 1950. But, other than making people feel better about prospects for their future, the question should be raised as to whether voluntary individual environmental virtue makes a difference in today’s world of climate change.

To be upfront, on this question I am a pessimist and do not believe what individuals or individual local political jurisdictions do voluntarily to cut carbon use makes a significant difference in terms of climate change. This statement is made despite my understanding that cities are engines of economic activity and as such generate the far greater majority of greenhouse gas emissions and are critical elements in climate change mitigation/adaptation strategies. The following materials help explain why I hold that conviction.

For sake of argument, let’s assume if every American and all local political jurisdictions practiced voluntary environmental virtue, on average that practice would reduce carbon dioxide use to quantities last recorded in 1950[1] when residential air conditioning was practically unknown, houses were much smaller, suburban sprawl was in its infancy, and cars, although larger and fuel inefficient, were significantly fewer in number and people traveled less. If everyone and all local political jurisdictions in the U.S. would change their lives and operations to conform to that assumption, personal production of CO2 would drop to about 8.5 tons annually and the country-wide total would fall to the general neighborhood of 2.65 billion tons.

Obviously, the critical part of the above sentence starts with If and leads to the question of what is the real world probability of getting 313 million Americans and the more than 30,500 counties and incorporated cities to make that great leap backward to 1950 in terms of energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) production. Let’s start this inquiry with a number of social-cultural factors that influence judgments and decisions.

Social-Cultural Aspects of Pro-Environmental Behavior

Research over the past several decades in psychology (Weber and Stern 2011) has established evidence that indicates individual and collective decisions are more influenced by worldviews, values, and affective processes than they are by analytical processes, which are characterized by formal logic, mathematics, and probability (Weber 2006, 2010). As a pertinent example, risk perception research by Kahan et al. (2011 and 2012) determined that when scientific information conflicted with shared ideological values and beliefs (notably conservative political worldviews), those communally shared values were affirmed and the science was not. That situation may also be explained in part by the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger 1957), wherein people will avoid information that causes feelings of uneasiness (dissonance) and add new “information” that is compatible with their existing belief system.

Critical to this discussion of pro-environmental actions are the roles political ideology and values play. McCright and Dunlap (2000), Dunlap and McCright (2008), and Dunlap and Jacques (2013) analyzed American denialist challenges to environmental problems. They determined that the disagreement stemmed from collaborative efforts by a powerful conservative political movement composed of right-wing foundations, think tanks, and environmental skeptics aligned with the Republican Party. McCright and Dunlap (2011) presented additional evidence that between 2001 and 2010 the views of the American public on environmental issues have become increasingly polarized along both partisan (Democrat versus Republican) and ideological (liberal versus conservative) positions. That evolution has certainly affected the way cities and urban planners operate with respect to environmental issues.

Another significant social-cultural problem that affects individuals, organizations, and cities is inertia, or the innate human resistance to change, especially to change that is interpreted by many as not in evidence but that is predicted or anticipated (Zárate et al. 2012). Naturally, cultural inertia affects institutions and political jurisdictions as well as individuals. As humans, we tend to value things with which we are familiar far more than things that are either unfamiliar or are not yet extant. As a result, we have cognitive biases against getting rid of things we should discard based on pure rationality, whether they are outmoded technology, ineffective politicians, or incorrect views of the future. It is not that people or jurisdictions are stupid or simply too lazy to change but that their actions are strongly influenced by a set of psychological short-cuts that our brains take without us realizing what is going on, short-cuts that make what is familiar and seen much more comforting and reassuring and difficult to dismiss than what is unfamiliar and unseen.

For large-scale organizational change to occur, some type of system-wide failure must overcome our innate cultural inertia and precipitate that transformation (Weick and Quinn 1999). In the case of climate change, if between 41 to 64 percent[2] of the U.S. population rejects scientific evidence that a system-wide failure—human caused global warming—has or will occur, then inertial resistance to the need for widespread socioeconomic change will be high. Many, if not most, Americans and local political jurisdictions are either comfortable with their present energy- and carbon-intensive lifestyles and operations to willingly change their environmental behaviors or their mindsets are too focused on ideologically-based skepticism (McCright and Dunlap 2003 and 2011) to accept scientific evidence that human caused failure of the climate system is here and appropriate action is required now if our culture, as we know it, is to survive.

A large number of ideological conservatives and right-wing organizations, as well as local political jurisdictions directly or indirectly influenced by conservatives, are convinced climate change, sustainability, New Urbanism, smart growth, livable cities, traditional neighborhood design, and related planning ideas are U.N. sponsored, liberal-socialist conspiracies designed to strip individuals of their property rights and their freedom.[3] If we eliminate those core conservatives from the universe of Americans who would voluntarily return to energy and material consumption patterns characteristic of 1950, that step removes a certain percent of the population and would allow an assessment of how many Americans would voluntarily change their lifestyles to produce less CO2. The question is how that percent can be calculated since this paper does not contain a sophisticated and expensive sampling procedure that was part of a national survey that asked appropriate questions.

To overcome that difficulty, I assume that Republican and Democratic Americans are proportional to the numbers of votes cast for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential Election and that independents are relatively equally split between both parties. I realize that assumption is not accurate but it provides a reasonable base from which to calculate percentages in the absence of more exact information. The results of recent national Gallup poll (Saad 2013) that examined concerns about global warming by political party are used to determine the percentage of Americans willing to decrease energy consumption. The poll found that 25 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans did not worry a great deal about global warming. Multiplying the numbers of Presidential votes cast by party by those percentages and adding the totals result in 41 percent of the total American population who would likely reject calls to reduce energy consumption and carbon production to 1950 levels. For purposes of this assessment, that group is labeled Core Conservatives #1.

Another part of that 2013 Gallup poll asked party members if they thought global warming was a serious threat in their lifetimes. Fifty percent of Democrats saw no threat as did 82 percent of Republicans. Multiplying the numbers of Presidential votes cast by party by those percentages and adding the totals result in slightly over 64 percent of Americans who do not worry about global warming. That group was labeled Core Conservatives #2. If we eliminate both sets of core conservatives from the universe of Americans who would voluntarily return to energy and material consumption patterns characteristic of 1950 to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change, that step removes somewhere between 41 percent and 64 percent of the population.

Another percent can be eliminated that would never entertain the thought of living in a non-air conditioned house containing only 983 square feet, which was the 1950 average, or consider basically throwing away their investment[4] in a large-lot single family suburban residence to move into a smaller home in a more densely populated city. Based on my experience as a practicing urban planner and knowing the size of the average new house in 2012 was about 2,500 square feet, that number might even be higher than 75 percent of the total population, especially if we include those who do not yet live in such a spacious residence but aspire to. If we assume two-thirds of that 75 percent is already accounted for in the previously cited 41 to 64 percent (since Republicans are more suburban-oriented than Democrats), we have somewhere between 66 to 89 percent of the population disinclined to leap backward into the future to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.

Next, we have to consider that segment of the population that enjoys a low-density suburban lifestyle and would not willingly abandon it. Let’s assume that percent not already accounted for would equal five percent of the population (admittedly a guesstimate). The remaining 6 to 29 percent of the U.S. population constitutes a relatively small number of environmentally virtuous individuals on which to hang national hopes of averting potentially catastrophic effects of anthropogenic climate change.

Scale, Local Jurisdiction Governance, and Climate Change

Individual and jurisdictional pro-environmental behaviors typically involve multi-scalar and cross-boundary issues, e.g., CO2 produced in one jurisdiction or at a specific site does not remain within jurisdiction boundaries or at the local scale. Therefore, it makes sense to examine the climate change challenge from viewpoints familiar to all planners: geospatial scale (Sayre 2005; Wilbanks 2007) and governance.

Climate changes build collectively from micro-scales to the global scale (Wilbanks and Kates 1999), the largest organizational level with which humans deal, astronauts and astroscientists being exceptions to that generalization. But most people typically live the majority of their lives at much more constrained geospatial and temporal scales that are defined by personal action, which can range in geographic extent from as small as a homeless person’s shelter on the street to larger than the metropolitan areas in which much American life takes place. It should be evident that many hundreds of thousands or even millions of small-scale, voluntary pro-environmental actions by individual people, local political jurisdictions, and industries must coalesce to affect global conditions, which is obviously the case in terms of climate change.

On the global effects level, humans inject around 35 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.[5] On the national level, about 5.3 billion tons of CO2 are produced annually in the U.S.,[6] which in 2012-2013 at the personal level of detail means each American is responsible for producing about 17 tons of CO2. Based on information developed by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center of the U.S. Department of Energy, CO2 use by Americans doubled from 1950 to the present (Borden et al. 2011).

If we stay on the national level scale, we have to consider what has happened in terms of CO2 emissions in the U.S. from 1950 to the present. Over that interval, the U.S. share of global emissions has declined from 44 percent to about 15 percent, a paper decline largely due to increasingly higher production of carbon by non-Western countries—e.g. China and India—as well as a recent slight actual decrease in carbon use by Americans, which is probably due to power generating plants switching from coal to natural gas.[7] The obvious question is, if individuals in developing countries like China and India, are rapidly increasing CO2 production, which they are, what global benefit would result if between six and 29 percent of the U.S. population drastically changed their lifestyles and cut their CO2 production in half? The answer should be obvious.

In terms of pro-environmental decision-making associated with local scale, those of site and local political jurisdictions, widespread change initiated by individual jurisdictions as well as by coordinated and collaborative cross-boundary pro-environmental behavior or governance also seems problematic. A number of reasons have been advanced by planners for the failure of local political jurisdictions to adopt more environmentally responsible plans in terms of smart growth, sustainability, or ecological planning, which I regard herein as surrogates for mitigating the adverse effects of climate change.

When opportunities in U.S. cities were examined for obstacles to climate change mitigation using the example of the Cities for Climate Protection Program, Betsill (2001) found that institutional barriers—such as inappropriate bureaucratic structure, lack of administrative capacity, and budgetary constraints—made it difficult for municipalities to implement targeted policies and actions. The question her research raised was whether local initiatives could make meaningful contributions to climate change mitigation in the absence of substantive governance changes at the state and national levels; for similar conclusions, see McCann (2003).

Downs (2005) addressed the issue as to why few cities have adopted smart growth principles. His research centered on numerous practical difficulties in changing long-established powers and authority of local government as well as in changing, in a short time period, existing cultural preferences—such as residential land use patterns characterized by low-density and high demand for vehicular transportation. Much like Betsill, Downs argued that the political resistance at state and local levels to such changes would be extraordinarily difficult to overcome.

Analysis of barriers to the adoption of urban-ecological planning techniques by Berke (2007) provided several observations pertinent to governance similar to those proposed by Betsill and Downs, particularly that local governments have built-in difficulties that hinder such adoption. One specific problem Berke (2007, p. 68) raised is that the level of detail required by local governments in gathering data that would be incorporated into traditional planning tools is inadequate for ecological management, which requires far more detailed and complex information. Another, even more critical barrier Berke identified was the spatial mismatch between the local scale characteristic of non-state political jurisdictions and the regional to national scale of ecological issues (including climate change mitigation), making multi-scalar and cross-boundary relationships very difficult to address in an ecologically sound manner, especially since local American government is not structured to deal with multi-level decision-making challenges, a conclusion shared by Betsill (2001) and Downs (2005).

Other research on key challenges concerning the powers of local government and conflicts between local goals for economic development and climate change mitigation have demonstrated the restricted ability of local actions to affect climate change (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003). Related research focused on environmental issues in England, including sustainability and climate change mitigation, found that forms of governance required to address those issues stretched across geographical scales and beyond urban boundaries (Bulkeley and Betsill 2005, 42). They argued that the ‘urban’ governance of climate protection involved “relations between levels of the state and new network spheres of authority which challenge traditional distinctions between local, national and global environmental politics.” When Betsill and Bulkeley (2006) analyzed how U.S. cities in the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) Program might be conceptualized as part of global environmental governance, they found that only by taking a multi-level, multi-scalar perspective could the social, political, and economic processes that shape global environmental governance be captured.

Research in the U.K. by Wilson (2006) addressed the difficulties of adopting spatial planning policies at the local level in terms of mitigating or adapting to climate change. She determined that, other than the issue of climate change’s contributions to local flood risk, the wider implications for biodiversity and water resources are not yet integrated into plans. She attributed that failure to a “lack of political support and lack of engagement of the planning profession with climate change networks” (Wilson 2006, 609). But she also pointed to local level difficulties in acknowledging the need to react to climate change, stemming in part from the relatively short-term perspectives of local plans being out of sync with the long-term implications of climate change, a governance issue similar to those raised by Betsill (2001), Downs (2005), Bulkeley and Betsill (2005), and Berke (2007).

Although relatively few U.S. cities have adopted specific climate change action plans, Tang et al. (2010) examined 40 such plans in terms of local jurisdictional efforts to mitigate climate change. Their study focused on plan quality as expressed through local awareness and analysis that led to actions. Tang and colleagues found high levels of climate change awareness, moderate levels of analysis, but limited action approaches, part of which the authors attribute to the lack of enabling legislation or directives generated by state government that would put pressure on local jurisdictions to enact effective mitigation policies and implementation measures, another governance issue.

Perhaps the best summation of the present situation with respect to climate change governance is provided by Shove (2010, 1283), when she writes: “. . . that [climate change] policy, as currently constructed, is necessarily incapable of conceptualizing transformation in the fabric of daily life on the scale and at the rate required.”

Remarks

This paper began by considering the possibility of most individual Americans and local political jurisdictions leaping backward into the future in terms of energy and carbon use. After some examination it seems that possibility is unlikely unless pro-environmental behaviors on the part of cities and counties, commercial and industrial firms, and the general population are mandated and enforced through new federal policies, laws, and regulations. Short of the U.S. being transformed into the type of command and control political-economic system in existence during World War II (Delina and Diesendorf 2013), it seems unlikely that voluntary actions on the part of individual Americans who are environmentally virtuous could play a significant role in the national or global reduction of carbon.

The reality is the U.S. and other developed nations have sufficient time to avert the worst effects of climate change if they desire (Hale 2010). A necessary condition for that to happen is the populations of those nations must generate the political will to demand that national and international policies be adopted and laws and regulations put in place at all levels of political jurisdiction to ensure climate change mitigation measures are implemented within a very short time period.

Practicing planners are perfectly positioned in that nested jurisdictional hierarchy because the majority of the individual phenomena that underlie environmental processes, resource use, economic activities, population dynamics, and climate change arise at site and local scales (Wilbanks and Kates 1999). The two central challenges in terms of the success of global climate change strategies is controlling local scale emissions and initiating effective mitigation/adaptation policies and actions locally. As Wilbanks (2007, 286) has succinctly pointed out: “Scale matters most because it is directly related to how and where governance decisions are made that affect sustainable development.”

The question then arises as to what practicing planners, whose work is predominantly at the local scale, can do to help stimulate changes at various levels of government that address climate change mitigation. Although the answer is complex I believe planners are well positioned to apply lessons learned from exemplars like Rosa Parks, Rachael Carson, Arthur Marshall and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Marjorie Carr, Jack Ohanian, and David Anthony. All were activists who struggled against daunting odds and succeeded in ways no one anticipated. Rosa Parks changed the way Americans understood the battle for human dignity and civil rights (Williams 2002). Nearly single-handedly, Rachael Carson (1962) changed our collective perception of the use of hazardous chemicals in the environment. Arthur Marshall and Marjory Stoneman Douglas fought for decades and were able to save the Everglades from total destruction (Grunwald 2006). And Marjorie Carr, Jack Ohanian, and David Anthony created a grassroots movement that defeated the Cross Florida Barge Canal despite facing staggeringly powerful opposition from the federal government and the State of Florida as well as from wealthy and politically connected canal supporters (Noll and Tegeder 2009).

The combination of highly motivated individuals, determined non-governmental organizations, credible evidence complied by scientists, and sympathetic political leaders at every decision-making level can result in positive change. It is a lesson no one who is concerned about the environment can afford to forget. Research by Chawla and Cushing (2007, 438) demonstrated that lesson is reality-based and not wistful thinking. Their analysis of the world’s most serious environmental problems suggested that the effect of private actions is limited unless they are combined with organizing for collective public change. Although many practicing planners are highly skilled at public organization, the question is whether they, local political jurisdictions, individuals, NGOs, and other stakeholders are sufficiently motivated to act decisively now.

The questions posed by Bulkeley and Betsill (2003 and 2005), Downs (2005), Wilson (2006), and Berke (2007) concerning how the political structure of cities affects pro-environmental behavior raises even more daunting issues. Changes in governance and administrative behavior, especially those that are multi-scalar and cross-boundary in nature, are always difficult. Making those changes in a relatively short time period is even more so, especially if the involved political jurisdictions currently exhibit a nested, hierarchical structure that may need to experience transition (Shove and Walker 2007).

Although for reasons detailed above I remain pessimistic about meaningful reductions in CO2 tonnages occurring in time to avoid potentially catastrophic effects on the world economy and on civilization as a whole, I firmly believe that targeted and coordinated actions by planners, cities, and committed individuals and organizations still have the possibility of success. However, due to the ever increasing rate humans are injecting CO2 into the atmosphere, the time available to achieve positive outcomes in terms of climate change mitigation is limited.

References

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Betsill, Michele M. 2001. “Mitigating Climate Change in US Cities: Opportunities and Obstacles.” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 6, 4: 393-406.

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Notes

[1] Most atmospheric scientists, the European Union, and the State of California advocate setting a target for industrialized nations of achieving an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, based on 1990 levels, by 2050 in order to stabilize CO₂ concentrations at about 450 ppm by 2050. Although I applaud that ambitious target, for purposes of this paper I believe it is more pragmatic for the U.S. to use a 50 percent reduction by 2050 as our hypothetical goal.

[2] See calculations on p. 5.

[3] For two informal, subjective, but well researched descriptions of this situation, see Flint (2011) and Mencimer (2011).

[4] I use the term “throwing away” since few buyers would be willing to risk purchasing such a residence or would offer to purchase it at such a reduced price that re-investment in another residence would be problematic.

[5] http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2ts1990-2011 

[6] http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2ts_pc1990-2011

[7] See The Economist. “America's falling carbon-dioxide emissions: Some fracking good news.” May 25th 2012: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/05/americas-falling-carbon-dioxide-emissions

Moving Beyond Conventional Environmental Planning

By Robert Ernst and Jerry Weitz, FAICP

Note: this post is a version of an article published in the journal, Practicing Planner, in Spring 2013.

Researchers have documented numerous examples of the lack of broad-based commitment by planners to practice a more responsible environmentalism in cities throughout the United States and Canada (Brody and Highfield 2005; Tomalty 2009; Stevens et al. 2010; Garde et al. 2010). A key challenge for practicing planners is to create cities that are not compartmentalized from the environment. When planners propose to protect the environment, the most common response has been to apply conventional planning tools and processes: inventory the resources, pose policies to protect them, seek community acceptance, get local elected officials to adopt the policies in a comprehensive plan, and then implement the plan and policies with regulations, programs, and other actions.

The conventional approach to environmental planning has not functioned adequately for several decades. Communities, as served by planners, have not arrived at the desired end state of urbanization that is respectful of, and even enhances, the environment. Certainly part of the failure to achieve our environmental aims can be attributed to planners. In this essay we identify some possible reasons why we have not reached that end, and we speculate about what planners might do differently to reach the desired end of environmentally responsible land development and urbanization.

Target Refocusing: Creating Better Cities

Systemic landscape changes, such as habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity, are typically triggered by individual and coalescing local actions, such as cities built and operated as if they were completely unrelated to the environment. In North America, that topic has occupied the attention of many practicing urban planners (Campbell 1996). However, that focus on making cities more functional does not mean all or even most practicing planners are actively pursuing environmentally responsible urbanization, despite its having gained the status of an international “best practice” as New Urbanism, smart growth, sustainability, and ecological cities (World Urban Forum 2006; United Nations 2007).

Although many practicing planners are in the process of developing local and site scale solutions to the challenge of creating cities that are not compartmentalized from the environment, when North American planners as a whole are considered that movement seems to be in the initial stages (Saha and Paterson 2008; Upadhyay and Brinkmann 2010). A detailed survey by Brody et al. (2010, 591) of more than 1,500 agency personnel from key state, regional, and local agencies and interest groups involved in climate change policy and actions found that those agencies “were not engaged in climate change policy, nor is the issue on their agendas.” The study also determined that, for local and state decision-makers, climate change issues (including more environmentally responsible cities) were of low-priority.

Since the adverse effects of irresponsible urbanization and climate change are interrelated, the 2010 Brody study raises questions as to how to engage local decision-makers in needed urban-environmental change. A number of other studies (Brody 2003a; Tang et al. 2011; Brody et al. 2012) suggest specific techniques—education, ecological values, and targeted stakeholder participation—may successfully involve individuals and decision-makers in actions that result in more responsible urbanization. Since planners deal with socioeconomic and environmental variables and public education-outreach as a normal part of their professional responsibilities, they are perfectly positioned to address responsible urbanization at critically important local and site scales where almost all landscape change necessarily begins (Wilbanks 2003, 2006). Practicing planners need to actively pursue environmentally responsible urbanization and development at the site, local, and regional scales, where we can be most effective. The goal is to make existing tools more accessible to planners so that better cities and more responsible urban development may result from their application (Brody 2003b).

Assess Before Participation and Planning

It should come as no surprise to experienced planners, but any effort to arrive at policies and programs that improve settlement patterns in relation to the environment must begin with appropriate assessments. Planners should complete a detailed resource inventory establishing ecosystem zones, habitats, boundaries, functions, biodiversity of wildlife and vegetation species, land cover, soils types, geological-topographic features, natural and human-caused hazard areas, climate/micro-climates, watersheds, floodplains and wetlands, lake or marine resources, groundwater recharge areas, and dedicated conservation property and its ownership-management status.

Because natural resources and environmental challenges span local boundaries and regions, planners should invite other governmental jurisdictions to participate in the preparation of a shared, jointly maintained natural resource database using GIS. Where feasible to do so, the locality or region should partner adjacent political jurisdictions, as well as with businesses and institutions, to complete the inventory.

The assessment of natural resources and environmental impacts resulting from urbanization and land development must be completed prior to engaging in the planning process. If environmental inventories and assessments come during planning instead of before the process has started, the findings that enlighten planners and the public may be manifested too late to be fully appreciated and implemented.

Assessing the current situation regarding the urban-environment nexus should include a self-assessment by planning staff to identify the full range of adverse human effects urbanization and land development have on natural resources and the environment. A key to completing this step successfully is to identify interconnections between urban socioeconomic factors and the natural environmental resource system. We recommend that planners issue a “State of the City” report that clearly highlights the effects of urbanization on the environment. Before initiating a process of creating a plan, planners should formally request that the governing council adopt by resolution the findings in the State of the City report about how certain urbanization practices adversely affect the environment.

As a part of the State of the City report, or in a separate work product, planners should also identify best practices used in other communities (policies, regulations, programs, actions, and other measures) to mitigate adverse land development impacts on the environment and determine their potential applicability locally or regionally. Ultimately, planners will propose an initial set of guiding principles articulating what it means to be a better city in terms of the environment. Before publishing those potential best practices, however, planners must examine them for conflicts. Where conflicts exist, the principles must be revisedor otherwise reconciled. Hence, it is important that planners use the resource inventory to set objectives and priorities and identify management-action alternatives for each significant resource area.

Involving Elected Officials First, Not Last

Many public planning processes begin with appointment of a task force or steering committee that makes recommendations that ultimately do not gain the support of local elected officials. If that hasn’t happened in your community, you’ve seen or heard about it occurring in other localities. Perhaps planners should start with the jurisdiction’s political leaders, who must ultimately approve and implement new approaches and initiatives. This suggestion doesn’t mean planners should draft plans in consultation only with elected officials, but that some preliminary “buy in” to the process and discussion of likely policy outcomes (including actions) need to be established and firmly grounded before engaging in more inclusive planning processes.

Participation and Consensus Building in the Pursuit of Shared Values

It may be that we are failing to achieve better urban-environmental relationships because we are not executing appropriate citizen-stakeholder participation processes. Serious questions should be raised as to how to we engage local decision-makers, stakeholders, and citizens in effectuating needed urban-environmental change.

As planners, we know what we want to achieve in any participation program. So we imagine the jurisdiction’s future where the quality of life is enhanced for all. We create a vision statement, and we explore the full range of possibilities for achieving that vision. We seek participatory processes that are authentic, genuine, open, welcoming, transparent, and responsive to citizen needs and expectations. Planners want participants to gain ownership in the planning process and resulting product. Ideally, we want ideas, concepts, goals, and principles to bubble up from the hearts and minds of participants, rather than have them handed down from decision-makers. This desire may lead us to overlook the important power that elected officials have and will exercise during the process, usually at the end when asked to adopt a plan and implementing measures.

While not intentional, planners often overlook existing community networks or at least fail to capitalize on them during the participation and planning process. To be successful, we must determine the strength and nature of existing community networks and develop effective strategies to mitigate or minimize weaknesses and constraints in those networks. This would put planners into a role of consensus building and policy advocacy prior to full engagement of the community in the planning process. Ethics of the planning profession require us to engage populations not ordinarily active in jurisdictional affairs, especially minorities and lower income groups and individuals that may have reduced confidence in their ability to influence jurisdiction decisions.

Success depends on building the social capacity and public will to address real world environmental challenges. Planners sometimes use politically charged terminology such as the word, “sustainability.” We need to approach environmental problems in ways that avoid politically charged terminology and focus on shared communal values to achieve progress.

We must employ education and citizen involvement programs to arrive at those shared environmental values. Planners need to motivate our community members to pursue substantive changes to urbanization so it occurs in an ecologically beneficial way. We are not succeeding, in part, because we aren’t using all of the citizen participation and consensus building approaches at our disposal. We can improve our participation processes by addressing pre-conceptions and hidden agendas up front, and by soliciting statements of perspectives and experiences from participants. Again, the goal is to create a shared understanding about what it means to create a more environmentally friendly city.

We anticipate that planners will respond to our advice as “easier said than done.” It may be that to get to shared environmental values that planners must first conduct training workshops on urban-ecological relationships and strategies for improving those relationships. We must identify environmental values people of all political persuasions share and can support. These may include saving money by cutting energy and infrastructure costs, breathing fresh outdoor air, swimming in clean water, catching fish that aren’t laced with chemical poisons, bringing back wildlife diversity, restoring wetlands and riparian systems, and improving urban parks. Success may require providing opportunities for community groups and individuals that involve meaningful environmental improvement and restoration opportunities within the jurisdiction.

Revisit the Planning Toolbox

Not all planners are able to grasp the extent to which ecosystem science has informed us about how urbanization affects the environment. Further, planners may be overlooking the basic tools that can be employed to achieve more environmentally responsible urbanization. Quite a few toolboxes or toolkits are available for planners interested in contemporary urban environmental or sustainability initiatives (see Brody 2003b for an illustrative list). However, most of those toolboxes have not resulted in a meaningful integration of urban planning with ecosystem science.

We encourage planners not to overlook the conventional tools of environmental policy implementation: cost-benefit analysis to determine scheduling and budgeting parameters; capital improvement programming; planned unit developments, purchase and/or transfer of development rights programs, urban growth boundaries, landscape ecological principles of land use planning and design, mitigation banking, density incentives for compact development and clustered housing, stormwater management ordinances, low-impact development practice guidebooks, habitat and damaged ecosystem restoration projects, critical area overlay districts and ordinances, energy savings awareness campaigns, urban forestry management, intergovernmental agreements for protecting natural areas crossing jurisdictional boundaries, and many others.

Inadequate Implementation and Monitoring

Planners are undoubtedly skilled at directing our communities as to how to implement plans. But we suggest that planners have not spent enough time tying policies and implementation measures together before the policies are adopted. In suggesting environmentally responsible policy, it must be evident to planning process participants and decision-makers what policy effectuation means in terms of regulations and implementation measures. It is insufficient to propose policies without at least presenting tentative or interim schedules and budgets for the actions needed to implement the policy. And, it is not enough to suggest implementations and set out a tentative schedule. There must be mechanisms for reviewing progress. Milestones for every six months of the implementation phase should be articulated. Progress should be reported annually. The resulting plan must inform and guide policy decisions and operations at all levels of local government.

Conclusion

The goal of creating better cities is for political jurisdictions to be able to plan, design, and construct urban development so the environment is not typically altered, degraded, and even, in all too many cases, destroyed. That goal includes making the idea of a better city and region directly relevant to the public and to a full palate of stakeholders. In this essay, we have identified some of the reasons planners may not be attaining the goal of environmentally responsible urbanization and land development. In review, we recommend a refocusing on regional and local environmental problems. We urge the completion of environmental assessments prior to engaging in the planning process itself, and we suggest articulating non-conflicting principles and their most likely policy implementation measures to implement those principles. We suggest that elected officials should be apprised of those measures, and that they should buy into the process, before broader participation processes are undertaken. Participation processes have not but should emphasize identifying shared environmental values. We also urge planners not to overlook the obvious but growing toolbox of implementation measures that can help mitigate the environmental impacts of urbanization and land development. We also suggest greater attention to connecting policy and implementation and inclusion of monitoring techniques.

The primary advantage of the process outlined in this essay is that it focuses on building the social capacity and public will to address real world environmental, social, and economic challenges at local scales in a scientifically valid manner and is not limited to simply constructing more efficient urban socioeconomic infrastructure. Its coordinated approach links planning tools and incentives that integrate socioeconomic and environmental objectives in the context of local community involvement.

Leading effectively toward a more socially just, economically sustainable, and environmentally responsible future is like walking gingerly through a mine field of conflicting positions and opinions. But that complex skill is one planners must quickly come to perfect (Jepson and Edwards 2010) if we are to make a significant difference in terms of more responsible urbanization and land development.

Brief Bios

Robert Ernst has a PhD in Geography from the University of Florida and is a specialist in land-based systems, including comprehensive urban and regional planning, policy/strategic planning, economic development, land use, and environmental impact studies. His nearly 40 years’ practical experience includes managing large-scale assignments involving multi-disciplinary teams and devising and implementing public involvement strategies. He has provided consulting services to local political jurisdictions; regional, state, and federal agencies; foreign governmental agencies; and private land development and natural resource firms in the United States and overseas. Ernst recently retired and lives with his wife in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Jerry Weitz, PhD, FAICP, is editor of Practicing Planner. He is an associate professor and director of the urban and regional planning program at East Carolina University and a planning and zoning commissioner for Greenville, North Carolina.

References

Brody, Samuel. 2003a. “Measuring the Effects of Stakeholder Participation on the Quality of Local Plans Based on the Principles of Collaborative Ecosystem Management.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 22: 407-419.

Brody, Samuel. 2003b. “Implementing the Principles of Ecosystem Management through Local Land Use Planning.” Population and Environment 29: 511-540.

Brody, Samuel D., and Wesley E. Highfield. 2005. “Does Planning Work? Testing the Implementation of Local Environmental Planning in Florida.” Journal of the American Planning Association 71(2): 159-175.

Brody, Samuel, Grover, Himanshu, Lindquist, Eric, and Arnold Vedlitz. 2010. “Examining Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Behaviors among Public Sector Organizations in the United States.” Local Environment 15: 591-603.

Brody, Samuel, Grover, Himanshu, and Arnold Vedlitz. 2012. “Examining the Willingness of Americans to Alter Behaviour to Mitigate Climate Change.” Climate Policy 12: 1-22.

Campbell, Scott. 1996. “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development.” Journal of the American Planning Association 62: 296-312.

Garde, Ajay, Saphores, Jean-Daniel, Matthew, Richard, and Kristen Day. 2010. “Sustainable Neighbourhood Development: Missed Opportunities in Southern California.” Environment and Planning B, 37: 387-407.

Jepson, Jr., Edward J., and Mary M. Edwards. 2010. “How Possible Is Sustainable Urban Development? An Analysis of Planners’ Perceptions about New Urbanism, Smart Growth and the Ecological City.” Planning Practice and Research 25: 417-437.

Saha, Devashree, and Robert G. Paterson. 2008. “Local Government Efforts to Promote the ‘Three Es’ of Sustainable Development: Survey of Medium to Large Cities in the United States.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 28: 21-37.

Stevens, Mark R., Berke, Philip R., and Yang Song. 2010. “Creating Disaster-Resilient Communities: Evaluating the Promise and Performance of New Urbanism.” Landscape and Urban Planning 94:105-115.

Tang, Zhenghou, Brody, Samuel, Li, Ruopu, Quinn, Courtney, and Nan Zhao. 2011. “Examining Locally-Driven Climate Change Policy Efforts in Three Pacific States.” Ocean & Coastal Management 54: 415-426.

Tomalty, Ray. 2009. “The Ecology of Cities.” Alternatives Journal 35(4): 18-21.

United Nations, Habitat for Humanity. 2007. Urban Planning Best Practices on Creating Harmonious Cities: City Experiences. Submitted to the expert group meeting. Rome, November 29-30, 2007. Accessed October 5, 2011, from http://www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/Urban%20planning%20best%20practices.pdf

Upadhyay, Naimish, and Robert Brinkmann. 2010. “Green Local Governments in Florida: Assessment of Sustainability Performance.” Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 6: 18-27. Accessed October 24, 2010 from http://sspp.proquest.com/archives/vol6iss1/1002-015.upadhyay.html.

Wilbanks, Thomas J. 2003. “Dealing with Scale,” in World Resources Institute, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-being: A Framework for Assessment, 107-126. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Wilbanks, Thomas J. 2006. “How Scale Matters: Some Concepts and Findings,” in Walter Reid, Firket Berkes, Thomas Wilbanks, and Doris Capistrano (Eds.). Bridging Scales and Knowledge Systems: Concepts and Applications in Ecosystem Assessment, 21-35. World Resources Institute, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

World Urban Forum. 2006. Reinventing Planning: A New Governance Paradigm for Managing Human Settlements. A Position Paper. Accessed October 5, 2011, from http://www.commonwealth-planners.org/papers/reinvent.pdf

How Trump Got Elected

Here’s how I believe Donald Trump got elected.

Millions of white voters are mad as hell because they have been left behind by policies favoring the rich and powerful put in force by both Republicans and Democrats, though more so by Republicans. They knew from bitter experience the so-called "American Dream" was nothing but a cruel, unattainable fiction for them and their children. Thus, they rallied behind a self-promoting, populist, bigoted demagogue named Donald Trump because he viciously attacked the Democrats and Hillary for those policies—as well as establishment Republicans—and put the blame for the decades-long decline of whites squarely on their shoulders. Those disaffected voters bought that argument based on emotion rather than reason and turned a blind eye to Trump's obvious and repulsive character flaws because they bought into his angered attacks and his brash, anti-establishment, in-your-face persona. For them, he was the answer.

According to Trump, the problem was the Dems favor undocumented and other immigrants, blacks, Muslims in general, Syrian refugees in particular, free trade pacts that damage our own economy while loudly pillorying Clinton as a dirty, rotten, lying crook who belongs in prison, with or without benefit of a trial and conviction. Disaffected and enraged voters bought Trump’s bluster lock, stock, and barrel. It simply didn't matter that Trump is an unprincipled demagogue who mocked a disabled reporter, bragged about sexually assaulting numerous women, and spouted multi-faceted misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia in the matrix of a shameless, unadulterated narcissism.

From this post-election vantage point, meaning hindsight of course, assigning blame is fairly easy. First, Hillary’s wounds were self-inflicted: her thoughtless and potentially criminal use of a private server to send and receive official State Department emails, her highly questionable relationship to the money-making features of the Clinton Foundation, and her sleazy coziness with Wall Street and the Big Banks as she raked in $18 million for giving more than 80 paid speeches to banks, corporations, and trade associations. And second, the Democratic National Committee crawled in bed with Hillary and then put its finger on the scale to ensure she won the nomination. They were as happy as five-year-olds at a birthday party with an establishment politician they knew could be controlled and would be more than willing to accommodate the wishes of the major Democratic contributors. As a further incentive, the DNC knew that picking Hillary would eliminate the always irritating Bernie Sanders and his ragtag legion of uncontrollable supporters who actually believed he wasn’t for sale.

Those actions cost the Democrats the Presidential election because far too many Americans hated both Clintons and what they stood for and would go to ANY lengths to defeat Hillary. The unpalatable truth for too many Americans is that Hillary was a flawed candidate who came across as an untrustworthy and business as usual politician.

Democrats must accept their responsibility in Hillary’s defeat. They backed a marginal candidate who they desperately wanted to be better than she was. They backed a candidate who had a shrinking window for success that was slammed shut by James Comey, with malice or not. They backed a candidate who had the smallest chance of defeating Trump of any Democratic candidate and refused to see the consequences of that choice.

Okay, what’s done is done. My advice to leftists is to suck it up, put the election behind you, and get on with your lives and political activities. We survived eight long years of George W. We can do the same during four years of Trump.

Here’s our real problem. We wanted to believe in a country where decency and civility mattered. Where someone so crude, so hateful, and so mean-spirited didn't stand a chance in a national election. A country where a candidate so flawed, manifestly unqualified, and clueless about political process as Donald Trump could never be taken seriously. Because America and Americans were fundamentally better than that.

The truth is our national problem is much bigger than Trump or Clinton. For many decades both nationally elected Republicans and Democrats turned their backs not only on minorities but also on the white working class while they bellied up to the Big Business trough that is Washington and got fat on the easy money. And here I'm talking about every presidency since Jimmy Carter. Unlike minorities that are split into many diverse groups, the white working class had the numbers and the political and organizational clout to strike back at the status quo. They did that by supporting a shameless demagogue who spouted anti-establishment rage that they bought because that's what they felt in their hearts and souls. Their anger and resentment took wing on Trump’s bombast and in their desperation they did what the political elite decided long ago was unthinkable: they voted. And Hillary lost.

One personal result of this election is that, although I am not cheerily optimistic about our future as a country, I am no longer totally jaundiced about who we are as a people. What happened this election, among other things like white supremacy raising its ugly head, was that disenchanted people voted to change a system they saw not only had turned its back on them but also was actively working against their interests. What better example of a functioning democracy is there? Obviously I think Trump is a terrible solution to a critical problem but maybe his election is a wake-up call, a call to do something about a problem we as a nation had refused to recognize. My only caveat is that in trying to address that challenge we do not as a nation devalue and underserve minorities.

Author's Note: After reading a fascinatingly prescient article by Amanda Taub in Vox, published on March 1, 2016, and available online at http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism, I have realized my thoughts above needed to be revised. The following paragraphs owe a substantial debt to Taub's ideas and words.

Additional Factors in Trump's Election
Trump appealed to many people who were convinced that they had been left behind by the tide of social change emanating from Democrats in Washington. His appeals were directed to those who placed great value on social order, tradition, conformity, authority, and hierarchies, all of which offered ways to prevent chaotic change that threatened to turn their world topsy-turvy.

Trump supporters identified with threats to the status quo, such as affirmative action, a black President, a growing political elitism that left them feeling helpless, whites becoming a minority in America, etc. They essentially did not care about his crassness or vulgarity or exaggeration to the point of lying because more than anything they wanted a leader who wasn’t afraid to use forceful action on a historically unprecedented scale to relieve or even to eliminate the sources of their fears.

Trump’s bombastic, direct leadership style appealed to a certain number of those who felt threatened because his personal style is simple, powerful, and punitive. They were convinced that he could solve problems that “establishment” national politicians were too weak to address or too beholden to the business-as-usual powerbrokers. Those problems included fear of specific (dangerous) "others", such as Mexican murderers and rapists, Muslim terrorists, black criminals, etc.

Trump attracted the support of many who were unusually susceptible to messages about the ways outsiders ("dangerous" others) and social changes (such as same sex marriage) threaten America, and so lashed out at groups that are identified as legitimate targets. In Trump’s world, social threats were perceived as especially dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, such as mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, limiting civil liberties across the board (such as allowing the federal government to monitor all phone calls, domestic and foreign, without warrants for calls to any number linked to terrorism), crushing the Black Lives Matter movement, creating an official list of Muslims living in the U.S., and banning foreign Muslim nationals from visiting the U.S.

In other words, it is flat out wrong to categorized Trump’s supporters as overt racists or xenophobes or only as members of an angry working class; the reality is far more complex and deserves a great deal of reflection.

As a final point, don't forget all those millions who voted for Trump largely because he wasn't Hillary. For many, who he wasn't was far more compelling than who he was.

Lessons My Brother Taught Me

For clarification, this essay was written several years ago and was posted in mid-October 2016.

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Bill was my younger brother by four years. Most of our early lives together he looked up to me in a type of hero worship as I taught him what little I knew about life. Our relationship matured through the years but we remained very close friends, sharing our failures and triumphs, our joys and sorrows, on a regular basis.

As I watched Bill die at age 56 from the ravages of bladder cancer that had metastasized throughout his body, I never dreamt our earlier roles would be reversed and he would teach me so many important lessons about living. Of course, along the way he also taught me about dying. About how to endure hellacious pain with grace, never once giving in to the urge to lash out in fear, anger or frustration at those providing his care. About how to accept graciously and without complaint the almost unthinkable indignities that accompanied his disease. About never whining, “Why me? Life is so unfair.” About being focused on the people around him instead of on himself. About showing kindness and consideration to every person who entered his room to change his soiled bedclothes, to reposition his pain-racked body, or to talk about what it meant to die.

For more than twenty years before his death, Bill had been a dedicated power-lifter. He had a gym in his basement filled with equipment, including sets of dumbbells from 5 pounds to 70 pounds, free weights, and several complicated stainless steel contraptions that looked like medieval instruments of torture. He wasn’t a body builder, eager to show off the size of his biceps or his pectoral muscles. He was much too reserved for that kind of display. His goal was to be strong, to be in shape. And he was. A real hard-body. But he never bragged about it and seldom mentioned it, even to his close friends. He was, first and foremost, a very private man.

As Bill’s disease progressed, he was forced gradually to give up his beloved weight training program. He fought it with a fierce intensity, refusing to quit outright. When the cancer spread to his pelvis, he had to discontinue all the exercises that required him to squat or stand. Until, finally, all he could do was sit and use dumbbells to strengthen his arms and chest. But then the ever increasing pain that radiated through his body forced him to put the weights down for the last time. Yet, he refused to be defeated by the cancer. He continued to think of himself as a power lifter, a strong man who was able to face harsh reality and make the hard decisions.

That’s one reason Bill’s oncologist told me that he survived longer than any previous bladder cancer patient in his group’s practice. Instead of the six to nine months he first told Bill that he had to live, my brother continued for three and a half years after initial diagnosis. He was indeed a fighter who never gave up, despite overwhelming odds and unimaginable pain.

When it’s a loved one who’s diagnosed with a terminal illness, we prepare ourselves for the idea and for the eventuality of death. But we are never ready for the actual process of dying. A process that frequently robs the person of dignity and even identity. Suddenly your loved one looks as though he were ninety years old and sometimes acts like an irrational, delirious stranger. In a matter of days the personality change can happen in front of your eyes. Until it is difficult to recognize the person he was.

But the indignities of death at the end of life do not define the real person. The pushing and prodding of well-meaning strangers. The “accidents” that have to be cleaned up. The drugs that rob you of alertness and cognition while cloaking the always present, always terrible pain. In my brother’s case, his final weeks were full of indignities that were painful to watch. But through it all, Bill kept his personality. I want to share a little story about Bill that should tell you a great deal about him.

When he was at St. Joseph’s Hospital and then at the Jewish Center for the Aged, he was placed on a morphine drip. After a few days he became confused and delusional. It was an awful thing to see and even more terrible to hear that he had to be sedated several times during the night because he became violent. Because Bill was always a gentle man.

One night after he had been brought to the Jewish Center, I was sitting next to him, trying to provide what little comfort I could. He grabbed my arm and said with fierce intensity, “I’m not psychotic. It’s the morphine.”

Naturally, I believed his physicians had ordered the best drugs to manage the awful pain and I sadly thought that my brother was confused and irrational. Two days later Bill purposely pulled over the morphine drip apparatus and broke it. And after it was replaced he broke that one. When they put the third out of his reach he bit through the plastic IV tubing carrying the morphine to his arm. Twice. So in desperation they discontinued the drip and gave him a different form of morphine by mouth. Within 24 hours Bill was no longer psychotic, delusional, or confused. He had had what doctors call drug-induced psychosis. He had known what was wrong but no one would listen. Not even me.

Before being stricken with cancer, Bill was a kind, gentle man. It’s a great tribute to his strength of character that he continued to exhibit those qualities until the moment he slipped into the unresponsive state that immediately preceded his death. His dry but well-developed sense of humor also never deserted him. About a month after he was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital and then transferred to the Jewish Center for the Aged, my son, David, visited Bill. As they were talking, a young, very attractive, curvaceous blond nurse strolled by. David took one admiring look and said to his uncle, “Wow, is that the nurse who gives you the sponge baths?” Without blinking an eye, Bill dryly replied, “No chance, it’s the ugly one.” And on the second last day of his life, when his twenty-year-old daughter, Natalie, kissed him and said, “Dad, I love you,” the smallest of smiles flitted across his horribly emaciated face. At once he repeated those precious words to her. Then she pleaded softly, “Say it one more time.” So he whispered back in a voice barely over the threshold of audible sound, “One more time,” and chuckled so softly we couldn’t hear his laughter but all of us watching understood instantly.

Most people who knew Bill knew he had no patience for organized religion of any kind. Not even for the Catholicism in which we were raised. But it turned out that those lessons he taught me about dying were the precise lessons I needed to learn about living a full and Christian life. He did it without one word of preaching or without being aware of how deeply his example influenced me and every person who came in contact with him in the last weeks of his life. For those lessons I am forever grateful.