Race, Urban Issues and Land Use in Ohio

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Race, Urban Issues and Land Use in Ohio

• Presentation for the OSU Extension Land Use Team
• January 10th 2007
• Jason Reece, AICP
• Senior Researcher
• Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race
  Ethnicity
• The Ohio State University
• Reece.35_at_osu.edu

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The Challenge Persistent Racial Disparities
and Inequity

• Although racial attitudes are improving steadily,
  racial disparities persist on every level, such
  as
• Income, poverty, employment, health, crime,
  incarceration, education, assets, and housing
• This national racial disparity is reflected in
  our regions

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Todays Presentation

• Ohios urban challenges impact everyone
• What is the connection between race, land use and
  sprawl?
• What are the land use issues impacting urban
  communities of color
• Sprawl, disinvestment, exclusion, segregation
  from opportunity
• Best practices and other successful policy
  reforms

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Urban Ohios Shared Challenges

• With eight metropolitan areas, Ohio is one of the
  most urbanized states in the nation
• Nearly 77 of the States population live in an
  urban area and 27 live in core cities
• With the exception of Columbus, all of Ohios
  urban areas are struggling and all of Ohios
  regions face similar challenges
• Segregation and school inequities
• Vacancy and foreclosure
• Economic distress and job sprawl
• Sprawling population growth
• Inefficient patterns of infrastructure investment
• Significant racial, regional inequities

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Impacts of Inequities

• Segregation drives education disparities,
  depressing the educational ability of many people
  in the region
• Segregation keeps much of the African American
  labor force isolated from economic opportunity,
  creating workforce shortages for employers
• Fragmentation creates redundancy in government
  services and creates inter-regional economic
  competition, when the region should be acting as
  one unit to draw people and jobs from around the
  world
• Inequities drive sprawl, wasting existing urban
  infrastructure, causing environmental harms and
  impacts to farm land

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What is the connection between race, land use and
sprawl?
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Space, Race and Land Use

• Space is how race plays out in American
  society-and the key to solving inequities in
  housing, transportation, education, and health
  careSprawl is the new face of Jim Crow. -- john
  powell
• Social and racial inequities are geographically
  inscribed
• There is a polarization between the rich and the
  poor that is directly related to the areas in
  which they live

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Policies Enforcing InequityHistorical
Government Role

• If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is
  necessary that properties shall continue to be
  occupied by the same social and racial classes.
  A change in social or racial occupancy generally
  contributes to instability and a decline in
  values.
• Excerpt from the 1947 FHA underwriting manual

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Policies Enforcing Inequity Contemporary
Government Role

• Spatial Racism is not natural or neutral it
  results from government policies, such as
• Zoning laws prevent affordable housing in many
  suburbs
• Housing policies concentrate subsidized housing
• Municipalities subsidize the relocation of
  businesses out of the city
• Transportation spending favors highways,
  metropolitan expansion and urban sprawl
• Court decisions prevent metropolitan school
  desegregation
• School funding is tied to property taxes
• These factors support racial segregation and
  isolation from opportunity

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Spatial racism The Civil Rights Agenda for the
21st Century

• Overt racism is easily condemned, but the sin is
  often with us in more subtle formsof spatial
  racismSpatial racism refers to patterns of
  metropolitan development in which some affluent
  whites create racially and economically
  segregated suburbs or gentrified areas of cities,
  leaving the poor -- mainly African Americans,
  Hispanics and some newly arrived immigrants --
  isolated in deteriorating areas of the cities and
  older suburbs.
• Francis Cardinal George, OMI Archbishop of Chicago

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What Causes these Challenges?Effects of Sprawl
By pushing good jobs, stable housing, and
educational opportunities further into the
suburbs, sprawl creates segregated, impoverished
areas of the central city and inner-ring suburbs
that are locked off from access to meaningful
opportunities.
Source University of Boston Geography Dept.
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How Does Sprawl, Fragmentation and Spatial Racism
Impact Communities of Color?

• Sprawl and fragmentation cause detrimental
  impacts to inner city communities of color in
  multiple areas.
• Education
• Disinvestment
• Economic Opportunity
• Housing Opportunity

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Sprawl, Inequity Education
Produces Dysfunctional Schools
Sprawl
Segregation
50 years after the Brown Decision, Americas
schools have re-segregated into affluent white
districts and poor under-funded African American
and Hispanic districts
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Economic Segregation and Racial Segregation in
Public Schools Cleveland and Akron High Poverty
Schools (Red and Yellow) are Concentrated in
African American Neighborhoods (Areas in Gray)
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Cycle of School Segregation
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Sprawl, Fragmentation and Disinvestment in
Communities of Color

• Decades of suburban flight have drained low
  income inner city neighborhoods of people,
  business and investment
• High vacancy rates and poor investment harms the
  quality of life for inner city residents and
  limits the resources (tax base) for low income
  communities

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Sprawl without Growth

• Ohio is developing rapidly without the population
  growth to justify the rapid expansion
• This creates too much surplus housing and further
  exacerbates the vacancy problem

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Disinvestment and Abandonment

• In Ohios 6 largest regions the average African
  American neighborhood has approximately 2x the
  amount of vacant housing than the average white
  neighborhood

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Regional Context ofVacant Property

• Regions with concentrations of vacant properties
  must recognize vacant property is not a cause but
  a symptom of more significant equity issues.
• Sprawl and inner city disinvestment
• Concentrated vacant property areas generally
  contain the households least equipped to address
  the cumulative effects of vacancy on the
  character of the social and physical environment
  in their neighborhoods.

Vacant Property
Sprawl
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Sprawl, Inequity and Economic Opportunity

• A 2001 Brookings Institution study found a
  significant relationship between fragmentation
  and job decentralization in the 100 largest metro
  areas
• Job decentralization (or job sprawl) blocks
  access to employment for residents of the central
  city and inner-ring suburbs

Job Sprawl in Michigan
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Sprawl, Inequity and Economic Opportunity

• Jobs have moved away from the labor pool in many
  metropolitan areas, making connecting job-seekers
  with jobs a challenge which is compounded by poor
  public transportation
• 40 of all suburban jobs cannot be reached by
  public transportation
• Public investment disproportionately favors
  highways over public transportation
• Over half of the African American population is
  physically segregated from employment
  opportunities

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Sprawl, Fragmentation and Housing Opportunity

• Sprawl and Fragmentation reduce access to the
  housing market for low income residents
  (especially people of color)
• Suburban zoning regulations artificially drive up
  the cost of housing and do not allow enough
  rental housing
• New housing is unaffordable to low income
  residents and most people of color
• Disinvestment in the inner city reduces the asset
  value (wealth) of homeowners in inner city
  neighborhoods

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Zoning and Housing Opportunity in Columbus, OH

• Suburban lot size requirements in the Columbus
  suburbs drive up the cost of housing
• As a result, over 90 of all new single-family
  homes built between 2000 and 2002 were not
  affordable to more than 75 of all African
  American and Hispanic households

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Racial Segregation, Opportunity Segregation and
Racial Disparities

• Housing policies, land use patterns and patterns
  of regional investment and disinvestment converge
  to produce continued racial segregation in our
  society
• Often this racial segregation coexists with
  segregation into high poverty neighborhoods and
  separation from many of the opportunities in our
  metropolitan regions
• Producing a racial isolation in neighborhoods
  that are lacking the essential opportunities to
  advance in our society (fueling racial
  disparities)

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The Cumulative Impact of Sprawl, Fragmentation
and Spatial Racism Opportunity Segregation

• The cumulative impact of sprawl, fragmentation
  and spatial racism work together to segregate low
  income residents from opportunities such as
• Good schools, meaningful employment, safe and
  stable neighborhoods
• This is opportunity segregation

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The Cumulative Impacts of Racial and Opportunity
Segregation
Segregation impacts a number of life-opportunities
Impacts on Health
School Segregation
Impacts on Educational Achievement
Exposure to crime arrest
Transportation limitations and other inequitable
public services
Job segregation
Neighborhood Segregation
Racial stigma, other psychological impacts
Impacts on community power and individual assets
Adapted from figure by Barbara Reskin at
http//faculty.washington.edu/reskin/
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Best practices and other successful policy
reforms
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Examples of Smart Growth or Regionalism that
Promotes Racial and Regional Equity

• Housing Initiatives
• Inclusionary zoning, opportunity based housing,
  workforce housing
• Growth Control Initiatives
• Growth boundaries, growth management (that
  preserves affordable housing in areas of
  opportunity)
• Tax Sharing Initiatives
• Tax base sharing, income tax strategies
• Public Infrastructure Initiatives
• Reinvestment in existing communities
• Removing subsidies associated with sprawl
• Transportation Initiatives
• Equitable transportation spending, public transit
  investments
• Public Education Initiatives
• Regionalized school districts, economic
  integration, magnet schools, school mobility
• Reducing reliance of property taxes for schools
• Inner City Redevelopment
• Land bank programs, increasing homeownership,

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Policy Reform Fiscal Equity

• Tax-Base Sharing Plans Minneapolis
• Fiscal regionalism
• Helps mitigate the resource disparity between
  central city and suburban communities
• Tax revenue sharing to avoid local conflict over
  expanded tax base
• Program covers 2.5 million people, seven counties
  and 2,000 local jurisdictions
• Appropriates approximately 40 of local
  commercial and industrial revenues back to a
  pool to be shared

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Policy Reform Growth Management

• Anti-Sprawl Initiatives Portland

• Oregons land use policies redirect private
  sector investment back into the central city and
  older suburbs
• Improving opportunity in the central city
• What about housing affordability?
• The Portland region was one of the more
  affordable housing markets on the West Coast
  according to recent research by Wells Fargo

Urban Growth Boundary in the Pacific Northwest
Source University of Washington
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Policy Reform Equitable Infrastructure
Investments
Source Michigan Land Use Institute

• Michigans Fix it First
• State policy reform to redirect transportation
  spending back to existing roads
• Previous policy prioritized spending for new road
  projects, causing disinvestment in many urban
  areas like Detroit, leaving Michigan with the
  worst roads in the nation
• The new policy has curtailed almost two dozen
  road expansion projects (mostly in suburban
  Detroit)
• Spending can now be directed to repairing the
  congestion and quality of roads in Detroits
  urban areas
• How does this impact the environment and equity?
• Fewer unnecessary road expansion projects in
  undeveloped areas
• More equitable reinvestment back into inner city
  communities

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Policy Reform Housing Mobility

• Fair Share Housing Laws (Montgomery County)
• Inclusionary zoning policies in suburban
  Montgomery County, Maryland
• These provisions have produced over 11,000
  affordable units since inception

Affordable Housing Built in Montgomery County,
Maryland
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Further strategies for promoting equity and
regional growth

• Specific strategies for undercapitalized cities
• Looking for the turning point
• Supporting key community assets and anchor
  institutions
• Support an economically diverse community
• Support revitalization not gentrification
• Think and act both regionally and locally
• Coalition building

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Specific Strategies for Undercapitalized Cities

• Strongly encourage reinvestment
• Stimulate private sector (subsidies, market
  analysis)
• Make area more competitive for investment
• Incentives for infill development
• Process underutilized land for redevelopment
• Land bank programs
• Housing programs targeted for increasing home
  ownership
• Promote access to suburban opportunity structures
  for impoverished residents
• Opportunity-based, regional, affordable housing
  strategies
• Need to avoid over-concentration of subsidized
  housing
• Regional inclusionary zoning policies

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