Agora 14 by Agora Journal of Planning and Design

c on v ergenc e

agor a

2007

growth management

2008

change

2009

detroit

2010

endur ance and adaptation

2011

connection

2012

public | private

2013

alternatives

2014

divisions

2015

progression

2016

perspective

2017

semblance

2018

tr ansformations

2019

c on v ergenc e

University of Michigan A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Agora Journal of Urban Planning and Design Volume 14: 2020

The Agora Journal of Urban Planning and Design is an annual, student-run, peer-reviewed publication of the University of Michiganâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069 USA www.agorajournal.squarespace.com ISSN 2331-2823 COPYRIGHT Agora Volume 14 2020 The Regents of the University of Michigan LICENSING This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial - Share Alike 40 International License TYPE DIN-Light, DIN-Medium, Warnock, Tr ajan PRINTING ArborOakland Group Royal Oak, Michigan, USA Printed in an edition of 500 DISCLAIMER The views and opinions expressed in this journal reflect only those of the individual authors and not those of the Agora Journal of Urban Planning and Design. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. All figures are created by authors unless otherwise noted.

acknowledgements

The publication of Agora 14 was made possible by the Victor Gondos Jr. Archives Fund. We would also like to thank the following individuals for their generous support for Agora 14: Timothy Berke Michael Borsellino Dr. Scott Campbell Dr. Lan Deng Morgan Fett Bri Gauger Dr. Robert Goodspeed Dr. Joe Grengs Dr. Lesli Hoey Christine Hwang Alexandra Judelsohn Dr. Kimberley Kinder Dr. Larissa Larsen Dr. Richard Norton Taru We would also like to give special thanks to our faculty advisors, Dr. Scott Campbell and Dr. Julie Steiff.

agor a staff

Editor-in-Chief Kim Higgins Creative Directors Keerthana Vidyasagar and Mrithula Shantha Thirumalai Anandanpillai Deputy Editors Cassie Byerly and Lauren Week Symposium Directors Neetu Rajkumar Nair and Rebecca Yae Manager of Distribution and Finance Emily Korman Communications Manager Meagan Gibeson Directors of Fundraising and Outreach Brittany Simons and Megan Rigney Staff Editors Clare Cucera, Meagan Gibeson, Samantha Henstell, Christian Hunter, Michelle Lincoln, Nathan McBurnett, Neetu Rajkumar Nair, James VanSteel, Rebecca Yae and Meixin Yuan Layout Editors Keyana Aghamirzadeh, Christian Hunter, Neeli Kakal, Emily Korman, Janney Lockman, Megan Rigney, Mrithula Shantha Thirumalai Anandanpillai, Anna Bronwyn Shields and Keerthana Vidyasagar

table of contents Formal Housing Provision Under Neoliberalism in the United States: Privatization as the New Enclosure and the Defense of Public Housing Meagan Gibeson

Urban National Parks and the 21st Century: The Evolution of National Parks and Equitable Conservation into the Urban Landscape Jack Pritchard

Shaking Up Small Business: The Impact of Seismic Retrofitting on Small Businesses in San Francisco

Lauren Week

Health as a Planning Problem: Combatting Diseases of Poverty Heather Kiningham

Good Neighbors or Unwelcome Guests: Examining the Impact of Short-Term Rentals on Local Housing Markets Kate Bell

92 106 122 134 150 160 172

When Resilience turns to Resistance: A Detroit Case Study Nina Jackson Levin

The Space of Bad Faith Bader AlBader

Alienations + Articulations: Tracing Israeli Land Policies through History Mekarem Eljamal

Facebook Urbanization: A Silicon Valley Case Study Ed Falkowski

Public Housing in Two Liberal Welfare States: A Comparison between the United States and the United Kingdom Naganika Sanga

From the Outside Looking In: Reflecting on Detroitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Food System Amanda Richman & Madeline DeMarco

Inclusionary Housing and Inclusionary Neighborhoods in China Weican Zuo

Not in My Backyard: Zoning, Smut, Citizen Participation, and Social Control Janney Lockman

12 26 38 54 66

letter from the editor For 14 years, the Agora Journal of Urban Planning and Design has served as a unique platform for exchanging ideas, examining urban issues through new perspectives, and providing real solutions to the problems planners face. This year is no different. I am honored to have had the opportunity to work with such a bright group of authors and staff editors, and I am blown away by the work they have produced. Beyond the accomplishment of publishing the journal for a 14th consecutive year, the 2019-2020 Agora team conducted a highly successful fundraiser, hosted a Salon event that fostered critical discussion among students and faculty, and instituted a new scholarship for the exceptional pieces chosen for the Symposium. The title of Agora’s 14th volume, Convergence, reflects the journal’s exploration of the tensions that exist within the urban setting and our roles within these tensions. This year’s Agora team published this journal in unprecedented circumstances. The novel coronavirus pandemic – which, at the time of publication, is escalating in the United States and around the globe – sent our staff into isolation, forcing our highly collaborative editing process to become fully virtual. It has also, and much more importantly, exposed existing tensions in our urban fabric that must be urgently addressed: predatory housing markets, unequal access to high-quality food, and the precarious nature of healthcare and childcare tied to employment that feels ever-unstable even under wellfunctioning capitalistic societies. Amidst these challenging circumstances, I hope this year’s edition of Agora offers a critical exploration of some of these tensions. Meagan Gibeson’s “Formal Housing Provision Under Neoliberalism in the United States” examines the history of public housing in the U.S. and proposes a shift in ideology away from housing as a market good and toward housing as a right. Madeline DeMarco and Amanda Richman’s “From the Outside Looking In: Reflecting on Detroit’s Food System” provides tools to document food systems and their accessibility in the City of Detroit, exploring what it means to document this information as ‘outsiders’ of a city whose narrative is so frequently co-opted by those who are not residents. Finally, Heather Kiningham’s “Health as a Planning Problem: Combating Diseases of Poverty” documents the close connections between public health crises, inadequate infrastructure, and poverty, and proposes policy solutions to address diseases of poverty. These issues are extremely pressing – now more than ever – and I am thankful for the brilliant work produced by our authors on these topics. Despite the unique circumstances in which we published Agora 14, I hope that the critical analyses in these extraordinary pieces can offer hope and optimism. The hurdles seem at times impossible to conquer, but these articles demonstrate that feasible and immediate solutions exist – there is another way forward. I am so proud of this volume of Agora, and of our incredibly hard-working team of 22 graduate students who pushed through uncertainty and hardship to publish the journal. I hope you enjoy reading Agora as much as we enjoyed making it for you. Kim Higgins Editor-in-Chief

letter from faculty The editors of Agora 14 are sending this text to the printers at an exceptional pandemic time, as students, faculty, and the Ann Arbor community shelter in place. In the months since Agora hosted its annual autumn Salon and issued its call for papers, shuttered classrooms, empty campus sidewalks, and remote video conferencing have displaced the usual collective bustle of campus life. We are all improvising in the moment, attempting to sustain and recreate the tight-knit community of our urban planning program and beyond. Amidst this anxious, uncertain, and surreal spring season, Agora staffers nevertheless persist, stalwartly editing, refining, moving forward. Some might say that in such crisis moments – faced with the immediate demands of securing groceries, staying safe, and maintaining some semblance of a normal daily routine amidst the isolation – it’s simply too hard to maintain focus on the long-term agenda of planning. Yet this is a moment when we need planning most of all: not just the specific professional knowledge to help rebuild collapsed local economies, distressed housing markets, unused public transit lines, and depleted community organizations, but also planning’s broader vision of community, of the importance of the public good, of calm rational problem solving, of taking care of immediate needs, and also of playing the long game. At a time of “social distancing,” we sorely need the faith and courage of planners to remind us of the power of social connections, and of both the vulnerability and the strength of urban communities. As you read these baker’s dozen articles of Agora 14, you will see this engagement with the promise, vitality, challenges, and injustices of urban life. The themes are richly varied and internationally comparative: land conflicts, food insecurity, the intertwining of urban resilience and resistance, the shortcomings of planning academia’s cautious political stance, innovations in community GIS work, the unintended consequences of zoning and regulating smut, the promise of urban national parks, diseases of urban poverty, and the troubling urban design consequences of the booming tech sector. Several leitmotifs emerge. Authors repeatedly return to the theme of inequality, from Detroit to China (two locations that are frequent touchstones in our program). And the deepening housing crisis (worsened by growing inequality, winner-take-all urban economies and short-term rentals) reminds us of this most basic need for shelter, and the state’s abject failure to accept responsibility and sufficiently fund and support affordable, dignified housing. Overall, we see, in these pages, planning’s pragmatic mix of both professionally attending to short-term urban needs and also critically confronting the larger, enduring issues of social justice, fairness, sustainability. Heartfelt congratulations to the authors and editors for a job well done in trying times. Getting Agora 14 out the door, on time, is a testament to your hard work, persistence, and commitment to scholarship, each other and the larger community. Scott Campbell Faculty Co-Adviser (with Julie Steiff)

Peter Philip Carroll Photographer: Tim AzzoliniÂ Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Location: Madrid, SpainÂ

Formal Housing Provision Under Neoliberalism in the United States

Privatization as the New Enclosure and the Defense of Public Housing MEAGAN GIBESON Master of Urban and Regional Planning 2020

ABSTRACT Property in the United States has been used as a mechanism for speculative investment and wealth generation since its earliest days. Policies meant to address ownership throughout the history of the country, like the Homestead Act and the G.I. Bill, highlighted and further embedded the idea that property – especially housing – is not only the best method through which to build wealth, but also an indication that the underlying ideology positions housing as a commodity. This ideology has been further reinforced by more recent policies by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, including HOPE VI and the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, which – coupled with austerity measures – have contributed to the perceived demise of public housing in the United States. But as we enter a new political moment, resistance to this ideology is becoming more widespread as alternatives to market-based solutions to ongoing housing crises gain mainstream attention. In confronting the insidious ideology that perpetuates the idea of housing as a commodity, the path is being paved for greater state participation in housing provision and stability for renters and low-income owners alike.

AGORA 14

…It requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman Republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economical forms of society.” – Karl Marx, 18671

ublic housing is facing a precarious moment: across the world, real estate power has grown unchecked for decades and threatened governmentowned and social housing. This power, paired with the neoliberal political project of disparaging publicly owned housing (as well as social assistance at large) through racist and classist tropes, has chipped away at popular support for the program in the United States and beyond as homeownership levels continue to rise.2 After decades of federal policies redirecting funds from publicly owned, operated, and maintained housing toward subsidies and incentive programs catered to the private housing market, many scholars and housing advocates are left to debate whether public housing in the U.S. is a thing of the past. As compared with the Global South and Europe, the United States has a particularly uninspiring track record in providing its residents with secure and stable housing. Countries like Brazil and Mexico spend twice as much of their gross domestic product on public housing provision than the United States does.3 Both have largescale housing programs at the national level, whereas the U.S. has drastically

reduced its federal capacity for funding, developing, and managing socially or publicly owned housing. Its recent and dramatic pivot toward mass privatization has met resistance, though perhaps not enough to stop the capitalist developer lobby from acquiring a stranglehold on the housing landscape. In this sense, the U.S. might serve as a cautionary tale for other countries teetering on the brink of neoliberal ideological seizure. But the tale less often told is one of hope for public housing: the private market is failing to provide an adequate number of housing units, leaving deep chasms in the provision of housing – particularly for extremely low-income groups. This market failure has prompted a recent revitalization of tenant organizing, demands for social services, and renewed support for public housing. As long as there is organized, working-class power to challenge capital’s hegemony, public and social housing stand a chance to serve as better, safer, and more stable housing than what the market can provide. By organizing within and outside of the state, activists and advocates for comprehensive, safe, and secure housing for all can change the political tide and preserve the future of public housing in the United States. In this way, all is not lost: public housing can and will be revitalized. This piece argues that housing provision is an issue of equity – instead of economy, as our political and economic structures might suggest – by briefly outlining the following: varying perceptions of the right to housing across multiple countries; the history of enclosure and our relationship to land, property, and housing; the state of public housing today in the U.S., particularly as it stands under neoliberal rule; and the path forward for housing practitioners concerned with long-term affordability and the revitalization of public housing. By allowing for the imagination of truly affordable, stable, and beautiful housing, advocates can rescue public housing and challenge the

GIBESON

power of the real estate state – and perhaps even neoliberalism at large.

HERE AND THERE: COMPARING THE RIGHT TO HOUSING ACROSS THE GLOBE Before considering the effects of neoliberalism on today’s housing landscape, it makes sense to consider alternative paradigms across the world; the obsession with private property rights, homeownership, and individual autonomy in the United States by no means represents the dominant model of property relations across the world. While nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is housing guaranteed, many other countries include positive rights to housing (often along with education, healthcare, voting rights, etc.) in their constitutions, and take much more earnest approaches to housing their residents. For instance, Brazil’s Constitution of 1988 states plainly that “education, health, nutrition, labor, housing, leisure, security, social security, protection of motherhood and childhood, and assistance to the destitute, are social rights.”4 Similarly, South Africa’s Constitution of 1996 seeks reparations for apartheid by guaranteeing housing for all.5 While there is still a deficit of housing, unhoused South Africans have legal standing for challenging the state in its failure to deliver adequate housing in a timely manner.6 Colombia’s 1991 Constitution reiterates its commitment to the concept of the social function of land: “there is the social angle, which centers the issue of distribution upon the state and redefines property not as an individual absolute right, but as a social function that entails responsibilities.”7 Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution goes a step further in protecting the social function of land and property, outlining exceptions to the guarantee of private property (e.g., if it is harmful to ecological preservation or

AGORA 14

future generations) and asserting additional positive rights for indigenous communities while acknowledging the Country’s colonial past.8 Outside of an explicit right to housing, views on homeownership and the privatization of land and property vary drastically across the globe. In Singapore, owner-occupiers use universally accessible home ownership, regardless of income, as a long-term asset-building strategy. This serves as a mechanism through which Singaporeans secure their income stream over the entire life cycle of 99-year leases in place of Western models of welfare.9 The vastness of this program could only be carried out by a robust state like Singapore’s, with sufficient capacity and the willingness to take on risks that the private sector would likely never choose to take on. In countries like Germany and Sweden, where ownership rates are relatively low, it is often because there is limited stigma around rentership as a class indicator and because social or public housing often means high-quality and even luxurious housing.10 The United States contrasts sharply with many of these examples: our Constitution guarantees no positive rights, thereby allowing for no straightforward legal recourse for pressuring the state to provide these rights; the state cannot be held accountable for failing to uphold its constitutional duties where there are none. The idea that Americans are not entitled to housing (or education, healthcare, and so on) is not simply written into the Constitution; rather, it is an embedded and prominent component of the American psyche, especially as it relates to housing and property. And unlike countries where rentership is seen as a desirable social position, in the United States, rentership is, at best, regarded as a stepping stone toward ownership and, at worst, a class signifier.

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS LAND GRABBING: ENCLOSURES, THE HOMESTEAD ACT, AND AN ENDURING IDEOLOGY In order to understand the current landscape of housing, we must first acknowledge the centuries of evolving land relations and conflict that influence our present moment. Without attempting to pinpoint the exact origins of American perceptions of property and, in particular, housing as a vehicle for wealth generation, it is useful to consider the process of preindustrial enclosure in England. In this process, formerly communal land, also known as the commons, was consolidated in order to augment the landowner’s profit through increased land value. Inherent in this mechanism is exclusion: one person’s ownership means another person’s lack thereof. Accompanying this process was the dissolution of ‘common rights,’ which E. P. Thompson describes as “class robbery” on the part of feudal lords.11 Marxist theorists argue that in this manner, pre-industrial landowners leaned on state mechanisms (such as enabling enclosure laws) to expropriate public land for private gain.12 This idea of exclusion via enclosure underpins the story of the American frontier as well. While perpetuating notions of freedom and liberty, the United States was built on stolen land and the displacement and genocide of entire peoples. The Homestead Act, one of the greater drivers of this enclosure, was an effort to redistribute wealth by creating opportunity for poorer (mostly Southern white) Americans to build wealth. But it was also a means of enclosure (and thereby exclusion): the Act promoted the idea that public money could be wielded to make land available as a vehicle for private investment. And while it was indeed redistributive, the Homestead Act was

also a means by which American boosters and the capitalist class deputized poorer Americans to stretch the Western boundary of the young nation. As expansion into the West pushed indigenous communities off the Great Plains, the Act was manifest destiny incarnate: the white man’s journey to tame the land he stole – with assistance from the state – and to build his wealth upon it. As Daniel Cole and Elinor Ostrom note, “once land becomes scarce, conflict over who has the rights to invest in improvements and to reap the results of his or her efforts can lead individuals to want to enclose land through fencing or institutional means to protect their investments.”13 While the West had no scarcity of land to cede to the homesteaders, this idea of extracting from and profiting off the land and one’s property, was well on its way to being deeply engrained into the American psyche.

As expansion into the West pushed indigenous communities off the Great Plains, the Act was manifest destiny incarnate: the white man’s journey to tame the land he stole – with assistance from the state – and to build his wealth upon it.” As we will see in a subsequent section, this standardized means of organizing land and the underlying ideology that permits capitalists to assign valuation to land would allow for the subsequent exploitation of corporate interests through speculative practices. These practices have shaped housing in the United States into a mechanism for investment while ignoring its social function, failing to provide adequate shelter for the lowest income

GIBESON

groups while allowing windfall profits for the capitalist class. “Dispossession by accumulation,” as defined by David Harvey, is a natural extension of the process of enclosure: with the dissolution of Keynesian economics and the rise of neoliberalism (which seeks to further privatize the commons), a new iteration of Western imperialism is borne and supported by the state through policies like the Homestead Act.14 Brett Christophers notes, “for Harvey, privatization, and the more general dispossession (by whatever means) of assets held publicly or in common, is not some marginal feature of late capitalism. It is, rather, at the very forefront of modern capitalist accumulation and growth.”15 Since the earliest days of our nation, the practice of dispossession by accumulation was not only the zeitgeist but a ubiquitous practice.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PUBLIC HOUSING IN THE UNITED STATES Less than a hundred years ago, public housing was a welcome addition to the provision of housing. Many tenants flocked to public housing built under the Public Works Administration starting in 1934, leaving behind their often well-worn and outdated homes. These homes were frequently dilapidated and lacked electricity or sanitary infrastructure. As Rhonda Williams notes in Public Housing Myths, “they expected decent housing. After all, the federal government – the self-avowed purveyor of American democracy and freedom – was their landlord.”16 By 1963, there were over 500,000 units of public housing across the States. But other forces were already converging to threaten the very existence of public housing. As white veterans began building wealth through homeownership with the help of the G.I. Bill, over one million black veterans were locked out of the very same benefit, deliberately stifling

AGORA 14

intergenerational mobility for black Americans.17 Working in tandem with the G.I. Bill was white flight to suburbia, and accompanied by a hefty portion of the tax base for many major metropolitan areas. Real estate agents engaged in ‘blockbusting,’ warning white buyers of imminent integration and the (unfounded) specter of lost property values produced by a multiracial neighborhood. With a revenue stream depleted by these majority white property owners, racism and the symptoms of disinvestment began eating away at the reputation of public housing. Meanwhile, New Deal reforms and the standardization of housing mortgages created accessible pathways to ownership (again often disproportionately benefiting white men) and allowed a securities market to emerge.18 This securities market quickly evolved into a predatory, crisis-triggering means of speculation by an elite few, based on the housing of millions of Americans. As the number of public housing units reached one million in 1973, racist and classist depictions of public housing complexes, like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini Green in Chicago, had diminished public support for government-owned housing. Soon after, Richard Nixon’s new federalism policies would promote the decentralization of the housing program administration and set the stage for the coming days of austerity.

THE RISE OF NEOLIBERALISM AND ITS CHOKEHOLD ON PUBLIC HOUSING With the election of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1979 and 1981 respectively, much of the Western economy shifted away from Keynesian liberalism and toward neoliberalism. With its principles of individual autonomy, a noninterventionist state, and a sheer faith in

market fundamentalism, this new set of economic ideals immediately threatened the provision of social services and publicowned goods.19 With the dissolution of the Keynesian redistributive state – arguably the safeguard against underlying forces of capitalism waiting to be unleashed via deregulation – social assistance quickly faced a grave prognosis. Deregulation and mass privatization meant the erosion of state intervention, allowing capitalist predators to descend upon once publicly provided services, including housing. As Manuel Aalbers and Brett Christophers aptly note, politicians supported the financialization of housing “as a bulwark against communism and revolts by giving working class residents a stake in the system, by making them dependent on wage labor, and by locating them further from the urban centers of oppositional movements.”20 The oft-cited benefits of homeownership – wealth generation as well as the moralistic assertion that ownership begets an involved yet docile citizen – are “generally not so much intrinsic features of homeownership as they are consequences of the political project of pushing homeownership at the expense of other tenures.”21 Nevertheless, government-run development of public housing complexes continued, and the program reached its peak at 1.4 million units in 1991.22 But the sentiments toward Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini Green, and the ‘failed’ public housing program lingered: responding to political pressure, Congress declared a ‘state of crisis’ and established the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing to investigate housing conditions and prepare recommendations based on the findings.23 Between 1989 and 1992, the Commission found that only 86,000 units were “severely distressed.”24 Although 8 percent this number represents less than 8 percent of the nation’s public housing stock – the Commission’s report to Congress inspired the legislation that created Housing

Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI). Although the Commission’s report suggested a strategy of preserving public housing stock, HOPE VI quickly became a project of redevelopment, demolition, and the selling off of publicly owned property. With HOPE VI, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) promoted a new era of mixed-income developments, conveniently propagating the idea that public housing projects often needed to be demolished to make room for these new communities. In this way, HOPE VI did away with HUD’s previous one-for-one replacement policy, which required every demolished unit to be replaced in order to keep the number of public housing units stable. Despite public outrage at this policy, which led to the displacement of tenants and a deeply diminished housing stock, HOPE VI continued to wreak havoc on public housing. Since 2012, the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program (RAD) has supplemented HOPE VI in supporting the neoliberal project of mass privatization and financialization. Perhaps most notably, this was achieved by enabling public housing authorities to convert their projects into Section 8 housing – thereby serving as a means of propping up the private housing market. Following the mixed-finance approach propagated by HOPE VI, RAD sought to address a gargantuan $26 billion capital needs backlog. Public housing authorities began collaborating with banks on debt financing packages as developers secured Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) financing, rewriting their own roles as housing providers. On its own, LIHTC has been shown to concentrate poverty by disproportionately siting credits in high needs neighborhoods – a product of allowing the private market free rein.25 HOPE VI, RAD, and LIHTC have collectively shifted the role of public housing authorities away from managing public housing and toward real estate brokerage. The “real estate state,” as defined by Samuel Stein in Capital City, had been gifted with this public

GIBESON

facilitation of redevelopment. As this was happening, austerity was taking its toll on social services at large. As public housing authorities sold off their properties to developers and private landlords, uneven investment ravaged cities. Market-rate developments replaced public housing, and neighborhoods that were once inhabited by hundreds of low-income public housing tenants now faced displacement as their neighbors faced gentrification. As Stein notes in Capital City, “those who cannot afford the resulting rising rents (or, in the case of homeowners, rising property assessments) are expelled: priced out, foreclosed, evicted, made homeless.”27 With this dissolution of political support and funding for public housing came a gap in housing provision, resulting in a disastrous market failure. Despite wildly high demand (there are only 29 affordable units for every 100 low-income households) the market has clearly failed at providing housing, especially for the lowest income groups.28

A new political moment is challenging the status quo by highlighting the hypocrisies inherent in neoliberal ideology: namely, by pointing out the fallacy of a meritocracy and the trust in the market to solve the housing crisis.” These forces, which punish the socially vulnerable and funnel wealth upwards, are by no means natural. If public housing is a disaster, it is only because it was designed to be so by the hegemonic forces propagating neoliberalism and the degradation of the state. As James Hanlon states in “The Origins of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program,” “public housing

AGORA 14

as a program is no longer viable in relation to factors that have more to do with political ideologies and overarching fiscal priorities than with the intricacies of regulatory procedures and cost analyses between different forms of assistance.”29 But if the failures of public housing can be tied to an insidious ideology, what happens when that ideology is challenged?

A NEW ERA OF PUBLIC HOUSING IN THE UNITED STATES Despite these disastrous policies, there is hope to be found in the resilience of public housing and the belief in social assistance more generally. A new political moment is challenging the status quo by highlighting the hypocrisies inherent in neoliberal ideology: namely, by pointing out the fallacy of a meritocracy and the trust in the market to solve the housing crisis. At the helm of this effort are programs like The Green New Deal for Public Housing, introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which seeks to “provide economic empowerment opportunities in the United States through the modernization of public housing.”30 The bill would slash over five million tons of carbon emissions through renewable energy retrofitting, creating over 200,000 jobs in the process.31 And while this bill is largely a symbolic gesture – unlikely to pass through the Senate – it represents both the weight of our country’s housing crisis and a rallying cry of a burgeoning, class-conscious majority demanding such sweeping reforms. If it is serving as a simple gesture in this moment, other wildly popular programs like Medicare for All similarly began as mere symbols for an alternative future, but have seen increasing public support in recent years (for example, this healthcare program now boasts a 70 percent approval rating across the general public).32 Programs that rewrite our economic and political structures are gaining popularity. These

programs, including The Green New Deal for Public Housing, are evidence that there is a better way forward and the public support needed to see it through. The New York City Public Housing Authority (NYCHA) serves as another important reminder that public housing is not inherently doomed to fail. NYCHA survived through decades of deep budgetary cuts, even as many of its counterparts in cities across the country were unable to weather austerity programs directly targeting their very existence. NYCHA’s provenance as a provider of housing – housing that people of equal income levels preferred over privatized housing, no less – reminds us of the original promise of public housing. It can and should be safe, stable, and desirable. NYCHA’s robust management and maintenance system ensured this, and until the specter of neoliberalism and its accompanying attack on public spending, NYCHA served as a shining example of how well public housing can be run under the right governance and funding structures. It serves as a guide to how we might reinvigorate public housing in other cities while continuing to provide housing for almost half a million New Yorkers.33 In the meantime, we can look to alternative housing models to empower the working class and anyone else who would benefit from housing outside of the market realm. These models abound; from community land trusts (CLTs) to real estate cooperatives, people all over the world are taking a stand against the real estate state. In the United States alone, there are over 225 CLTs seeking to stifle market forces.34 These organizations attempt to challenge the stronghold that the real estate market has over affordability by providing safe and secure housing far below market rate, thereby stymying inflation and preserving affordability in perpetuity. Housing cooperatives similarly challenge the market-based status quo by allowing their residents control over their

housing through democratic governance structures and affordable financing mechanisms.35 These organizations are often democratically governed, upending the norm of the exploitative landlord-tenant relationship so visibly rampant in the United States. Outside of the U.S., organizations like Fundo Imobiliário Comunitário para Aluguel (Community Rental Real Estate Fund, or FICA) in Brazil help us envisage a future in which we are no longer beholden to the whims of corporate developers and landlords by “protecting real estate and land from unchecked market forces and speculation, thus ensuring its use in an economical, just, democratic and sustainable manner.”36 In advocating for a reimagining of public housing, it is important to note that a shift in the ways we conceptualize rentership versus ownership is already happening: a recent study showed that 57 percent of adults find buying a home less appealing than previously, and 54 percent think renting has become more appealing.37 It will take persistent and challenging work, and must be paired with support for the fight for equitable housing on the ground by housing advocates, grassroots organizations, and the politicians they influence. We are in a dynamic political moment that does not come along often, with a resurgence of tenant activism and leftist organizing growing by the day. The Right to the City Alliance, which is inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 book of the same name, represents just one of many social movements dedicated to the housing justice proposed by the Green New Deal for Public Housing. Bans on rent control are being challenged from California to Illinois to New York. And with a historically popular presidential candidate calling for the nationalization of healthcare and housing, it is undeniable that the political winds are shifting.

GIBESON

ENVISIONING THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC HOUSING When considering the potential boons of reshaping our relationship to property and housing, it is easy to imagine how challenging the efficacy of the most easily accessible tools at our disposal can benefit the working class. These market-based mechanisms, which too often provide windfall profits to developers while deepening concentrations of poverty have been proven many times over to be incapable of providing adequate housing, especially for those at the lowest incomes.

These market-based mechanisms that too often provide windfall profits to developers while deepening concentrations of poverty have been proven many times over to be incapable of providing adequate housing, especially for those at the lowest incomes.” When considering the potential boons of reshaping our relationship to property and housing, it is easy to imagine how challenging the efficacy of the most easily accessible tools at our disposal can benefit the working class. These market-based mechanisms, which too often provide windfall profits to developers while deepening concentrations of poverty have been proven many times over to be incapable of providing adequate housing, especially for those at the lowest incomes. This confrontation will move us closer to a more equitable future where housing is seen

AGORA 14

as a right, not a profit-making vehicle. To close without mention of Red Vienna would be folly: as we celebrate its 100th anniversary, it is a fitting moment to remember some of the most inspiring examples of public housing. In the early 1920s, the Austrian capital was led by Social Democrats who prioritized the provision of luxurious public housing. They designed developments as a place to recreate, to recharge, to thrive; Karl Marx-Hof and Reumannhof, in particular, were resplendent buildings occupied by tenants across income levels as part of Die Ringstrasse Des Proletariats, or Boulevard of the Proletariat.38 Embedded in their designs were the trappings of everything public housing can and should offer its residents: verdant courtyards, natural light, and a bevy of shared facilities that catered to all walks of life, from childcare centers and libraries to swimming pools and public schools.38 There are lessons to be learned from these 100-year old public housing complexes. The time of racist and classist perceptions of public housing must come to an end. To provide the type of housing everyone deserves, we must agitate and demand it from the state, while always pushing for its decommodification. This is not to say these goals are not a long and winding political project – but in the meantime, housing advocates should push for policies that more readily enable alternative housing models, like CLTs and cooperatives. As Stein notes in Capital City, “land is a commodity and also is everything atop it; property rights are sacred and should never be impinged; a healthy real estate market is the measure of a healthy city; growth is good – in fact, growth is god.”40 But by supporting efforts that seek to challenge the hegemonic stronghold of neoliberalism, housing advocates and practitioners can push the needle and lead us toward a robust provision of luxurious, beautiful, publicly owned housing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meagan Gibeson is a second-year Master of Urban and Regional Planning candidate at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Her interests are focused around housing justice and shifting political economies, especially as they relate to neoliberal governance structures. With the Just Futures project, she researches the ways in which refugees access services across the state of Michigan and the barriers they face in doing so. Outside of her research and academic life, she organizes around issues of healthcare and tenant rights.

GIBESON

ENDNOTES 1. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1959), 54. 2. Laurie Goodman, “The U.S. Homeownership Rate Has Lost Ground Compared With Other Developed Countries,” UrbanWire, The Blog of the Urban Institute, March 12, 2018, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/ushomeownership-rate-has-lost-ground-compared-otherdeveloped-countries. 3. Nora Ruth Libertun de Duren, “Why There? Developers’ Rationale for Building Social Housing in The Urban Periphery in Latin America,” Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 72 (2018): 411. 4. Brazil Constitution, Title II, Ch. 2, Art. 6 (1988). 5. South Africa Constitution, Ch. 3 (1996). 6. Verna Nel, “Spluma, Zoning and Effective Land Use Management in South Africa,” Urban Forum (2015): 27. 7. Helena Alviar Garcia, “Looking Beyond the Constitution: The Social and Ecological Function of Property,” in Comparative Constitutional Law in Latin America, eds. Rosalind Dixon and Tom Ginsburg (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2017), 155. 8. Bolivia (Plurinational State of)’s Constitution of 2009. 9. James Lee, “Integrating Economic and Social Policy Through the Singapore Housing System,” in Housing East Asia, eds. J. Doling and R. Ronald (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 162. 10. Michael Schmitz, “Why Renting a Flat in Germany Is Totally Common,” ThoughtCo, 2019, https:// www.thoughtco.com/renting-flat-is-common-ingermany-1444348. 11. Libertun de Duren, “Why there?,” 412. 12. Brett Chistophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (New York: Verso Books, 2018): 116. 13. Daniel H. Cole, Property in Land and Other Resources, ed. Elinor Ostrom (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2011), 143. 14. Chistophers, The New Enclosure, 25. 15. Chistophers, The New Enclosure, 24. 16. Rhonda Williams, “Public Housing Tenants are Powerless,” in Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy, eds. Nicholas Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence Vale (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2015), 206. 17. Erin Blakemore, “How the GI Bill’s Promise Was Denied to a Million Black WWII Veterans,” A&E Television Networks, LLC, September 30, 2019, https://www.history. com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits. 18. James Hanlon, “The Origins of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program and the End of Public Housing,” Housing Policy Debate 27, no. 4 (2017): 615. 19. Jason Hackworth, “Progressive Activism in a Neoliberal Context: The Case of Efforts to Retain Public Housing in the United States,” Studies in Political Economy 75, no. 1 (2005): 34.

AGORA 14

20. Manuel Aalbers and Brett Christophers, “Centering Housing in Political Economy,” in Housing, Theory and Society 31, no. 4 (2014): 379. 21. Aalbers and Christophers, “Centering Housing in Political Economy,” 381. 22. Hanlon, “The Origins of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program and the End of Public Housing,” 615. 23. Hanlon, “The Origins of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program and the End of Public Housing,” 616. 24. Hanlon, “The Origins of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program and the End of Public Housing,” 616. 25. Ingrid Gould Ellen and Keren Mertens Horn, “Points for Place: Can State Governments Shape Siting Patterns of Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Developments?,” Housing Policy Debate (2018): 730. 26. Samuel Stein, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 13. 27. Samuel Stein, Capital City, 46. 28. Mary Cunningham, “The Homelessness Blame Game,” UrbanWire, The Blog of the Urban Institute, 2019, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/homelessness-blamegame. 29. Hanlon, “The Origins of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program and the End of Public Housing,” 612. 30. Daniel Aldana Cohen and Julian Brave NoiseCat, “Bernie and AOC’s Green New Deal for Public Housing Act Would Transform America,” The Nation, November 14, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/greennew-deal-public-housing/. 31. Cohen and NoiseCat, “Bernie and AOC’s Green New Deal for Public Housing.” 32. Yoni Blumberg, “70% of Americans Now Support Medicare-For-All—Here’s How Single-payer Could Affect You,” CNBC LLC, August 28, 2018, https://www.cnbc. com/2018/08/28/most-americans-now-support-medicarefor-all-and-free-college-tuition.html. 33. “Transparency and Reports.” New York City Housing Authority, accessed November 28, 2019, https://www1.nyc. gov/site/nycha/about/reports.page. 34. “Community Land Trusts: Community Land Trusts are a Proven Model for Communities to Control Land and Development.” Grounded Solutions Network, accessed December 1, 2019. https://groundedsolutions.org/ strengthening-neighborhoods/community-land-trusts. 35. Sukumar Ganapati, “Housing Cooperatives in the Developing World,” in Affordable Housing in the Urban Global South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions, eds. Jan Bradenoord, Paul van Lindert, and Peer Smeets (London: Earthscan, 2014), 104. 36. Fundo Imobiliário Comunitário para Aluguel (FICA), or Community Rental Real Estate Fund, https://fundofica. org/?lang=en.

37. Mary Ellen Podmolik, “Study Reveals Shift in Attitude on Renting vs. Owning,” The Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2013, https://www.chicagotribune.com/real-estate/ ct-xpm-2013-04-12-ct-mre-0414-podmolik-homefront20130412-story.html. 38. “Die Ringstrasse Des Proletariats,” Das Rote Wien im Waschsalon, accessed November 28, 2019, http:// dasrotewien-waschsalon.at/fileadmin/DOCS/2017/ RS_englisch.pdf. 39. Meagan Day, “We Can Have Beautiful Public Housing,” Jacobin, 2018, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/beautifulpublic-housing-red-vienna-social-housing?. 40. Stein, Capital City, 16.

GIBESON

Peter Philip Carroll Photographer: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Rebecca Yae Dala dala SĂŁo Location: stage. Paulo, Brazil

Urban National Parks

The Evolution of National Parks and Equitable Conservation into the Urban Landscape JACK PRITCHARD Master of Conservation Ecology and Landscape Architecture 2020

ABSTRACT Urban National Parks are uniquely situated not only to provide ecological refuge within the human -dominated built environment, but also to provide a space to reconcile our collective relationship with nature. If these spaces are not protected in equitable ways, with fair access and opportunity grounded in community placemaking, they might merely represent another form of NIMBYism (not in my back yard). In the context of dynamic changes and unprecedented threats to the stability of the natural world, we should look to Urban National Parks as spaces for reconciliation between utilitarian needs and the conservation of nature. What guidelines might urban planners, landscape architects, and ecological designers use to ensure this process is conducted in an equitable way? This paper seeks to put forth a framework for understanding and addressing these problems in the face of climatic and sociopolitical change.

AGORA 14

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT All National Parks and federal public lands are the ancestral homelands of indigenous American peoples. Their rights, access, and stewardship of these places are integral to both land and people. Through these words of acknowledgement, their contemporary and ancestral ties to the land and their contributions to the National Parks are renewed and reaffirmed.

ounded upon a fervent belief in the collective stewardship of shared natural and cultural resources, National Parks are central to the identity and character of the American landscape. In resource conservation, a critical analysis of how National Parks bridge the divide between the natural and cultural (or human-dominated) world is vital. When these spaces abut the ever-expansive built environment, does an integration into the urban landscape change their core mission? Incorporating conservation into places we do not typically consider ecologically significant challenges traditional conceptions and represents a new frontier in conservation, signifying a novel type of public landscape: the Urban National Park (UNP). From San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area to The National Mall & Monuments in Washington D.C., UNPs integrate cultural and natural landscapes into the fabric of American cities, denoting an innovative form of federal public lands. However, further examination highlights that the creation of these spaces within the matrix of urban centers holds the potential for parks and open space to merely represent another form of NIMBYism (not in my back yard). That is, there is a risk that conservation might be used as a cover for protectionist attitudes that oppose certain development, like public housing or services.1 This should not be

considered effective conservation because it exists within a far greater history of marginalization and stems from problematic perspectives on equity and access to public lands. Deliberate planning and design must be engaged to prevent exclusion from these important places and to equitably utilize shared resources to benefit all. While National Parks have an admirable aim to provide space “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” critically analyzing the formation of these landscapes presents a troublesome impasse: in this urban context, who are ‘the people?’2 In the prevailing perspective, if ecologists, planners, designers, and land managers are to meet the long-stated aim of National Parks, they must examine this question in both the establishment and curation of these landscapes. When consciously designed and managed, UNPs are uniquely situated to provide unparalleled ecological protections and equitable access to the measurable benefits of engagement with nature in ways that conventional national or municipal parks do not.

While National Parks have an admirable aim to provide space “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” critically analyzing the formation of these landscapes presents a troublesome impasse: in this urban context, who are ‘the people?’”2 Customarily, National Parks were established to set aside large swaths of seemingly unaltered, pristine landscapes far from metropolitan areas. UNPs, on the other hand, are located within or directly

PRITCHARD

adjacent to city cores. This is notable because it designates, on a federal level, that environmental protections of the landscape represent the highest potential value for urban land.3 This perspective is important because it recognizes conservation as the highest and best use, not only in places like rural Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park (emblematic of the National Parks System), but within the core of metropolitan cities. By creating new National Park units designated as UNPs, we can generate an opportunity for direct, accessible engagement with federal public lands to the over 80 percent of Americans who now live within urban areas.4 UNPs are not only a sanctuary for nature, but also a refuge for city dwellers who benefit from the psychological, social, and cultural ecosystem services and health benefits these places provide through outdoor activities.5 To incorporate UNPs equitably into cityscapes, designers and planners need to reconcile how and where the foundational concepts from works like Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, Anne Whiston Spirn’s The Granite Garden, and Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic apply to the conservation of urban ecology in the 21st century.6, 7, 8 In this modern urban context, the UNP might provide the framework for realizing these principles. If we are willing to take steps such as densifying the areas within and around cities to create space for UNPs, then we can concurrently conserve ecosystems we collectively rely upon and seek to protect. Moreover, these spaces can directly remove both physical and social barriers to accessing shared landscapes. In theory, this is a clear and commendable goal, but without conscious planning, UNPs can be ineffective conservation mechanisms. UNPs should not be used for NIMBYism, nor should they be used as leverage to develop otherwise undisturbed natural areas outside of the city boundary. As federal lands, these networks can be deliberately incorporated into regional planning, avoiding or reducing

AGORA 14

the hyper-fragmentation of ecosystems that places patches of natural landscape within built-up areas.9 The central conundrum, the question of who has access, highlights the importance of evaluating the characteristics of UNPs that might rectify inequities and eliminate barriers. If preserving the landscape does not serve the needs of the people within the city, then the benefit and enjoyment must be for the advantage of others outside the community. UNPs should not be created for those whose resources and privileges allow them disproportionate access to these benefits. There is a risk that these spaces – heralded as ecological refuge, cultural sanctuary, and public health panacea – might ultimately exacerbate social inequity. When addressing these inequities, we must ask what role urban design as conservation can play in a time of global anthropogenic climatic change, where human hands mark even the most remote landscapes. In the broad context of resource protection, is there truly a distinction between the urban, the rural, and the wild? And how can the benefits from this resource protection be shared in an equitable way? While certainly not a complete nor an exhaustive analysis of this multi-faceted issue, this paper seeks to explore these urgent questions and themes, ultimately proposing a framework for how designers might address these challenges.

PRIORITIZING NATURAL SYSTEMS IN EQUITABLE WAYS UNPs differ from both traditional national and municipal parks because they represent a directly accessible shared landscape whose ownership and stewardship, grounded in resource conservation, has far greater potential to be equitable. With the explicit aim of protecting resources for all Americans, conventional National Parks and their benefits symbolize a shared American culture.10 But they are a piece of the culture

not enjoyed equitably by all Americans. Meanwhile, more localized municipal parks, with few exceptions from ecologically progressive communities, do not evoke the spirit of shared resource protection in the ways that National Parks do. The concept of the National Park system is profoundly democratic: collective ownership of the most ecologically and culturally unique landscapes in the country. In theory, every tax-paying citizen is a stakeholder in the stewardship of these resources. However, access to these places has historically been grossly unequal. Participation that requires the means to take time off from work and pay for entrance, accommodation, and transportation is deeply alarming and antagonistic to how we view these mutual landscapes. Furthermore, analysis of spatial relationships between National Parks and minority populations show that there is a clear relationship between visitation and the location where a majority of minority populations live, one that is “disproportionately represented at closer and smaller national parks.”11 This highly inequitable access frames National Parks as a commercialized commodity to experience rather than a landscape we collectively own and benefit from. While this is a problem that has long plagued the National Park system, the increasing reliance on automotive transit has made traveling to these remote areas

more difficult for lower-income populations, placing our parks in the unfavorable light of ecotourism on public landscapes. Not only are conventional National Parks far away from where the majority of people live, they are intentionally designed landscapes made to accommodate vehicle traffic. Incentivized by motor fees as a source of revenue for the parks, the National Park Service (NPS) deliberately created opportunities for car-reliant sightseeing into the design and management of parks to attract more motorists.12 As a result, cars have become the primary if not sole way to access many National Parks. While effectively designed to minimize the destruction of resources and direct the inevitable and otherwise unregulated flow of traffic coming to the National Parks, this integration of roads and motorist accommodations into the management of these spaces creates an impediment to traveling to and navigating within the parks for those without access to a car. Furthermore, these reciprocal dependences on cars and their related necessary infrastructure has become a challenge to the modern management of the parks; these sensitive landscapes cannot handle the burden of those that visit. We are quite literally loving these places to death.13 Even more alarming, this burden is for the enjoyment of an overwhelmingly white population.14 These landscapes are intended to be owned

Figure 1. Cars and crowds along Glacier National Park’s “Going-to-the-Sun Road” (Pritchard, 2018).

PRITCHARD

equally by all Americans, not just those with the means to utilize them. While these inequities are certainly not surprising given America’s troubled history of inequality and racism, designers and conservationists must acknowledge them while integrating green space into the built environment to avoid similar exclusionary mistakes. While National Parks in American culture may reflect shared values and experiences, in practice there is a dilemma of unequal access and benefits.15 It is time these values and experiences are more equitably dispersed and more representative of all Americans. UNPs exemplify a step in the right direction by taking down geographic barriers to access, representing potential for places of ecological conservation to be shared equally by all Americans. When conservation of these natural systems does not provide equitable access, it also prevents equal access to the measurable benefits of interacting with quality nature. Research shows that spending time outside and interacting with the surrounding ecosystem improves cognitive function through Attention Restoration Theory (ART), reduces stress through marked decreases in cortisol levels, and increases overall well-being.16, 17, 18 These proven benefits further solidify the need for high-quality nature reserves located closer to the urban core with equal access for all, as provided in the NPS mission. Practitioners should be aware of the potential for UNPs to be commandeered to further aggravate social inequity. If those who can whisper in the ear of the decisionmaker support only landscape conservation that directly benefits them personally (in wealth, health, or otherwise), it cannot be considered democratic. Moreover, if these spaces are protected in ways that benefit the few over the many, they should not be considered successful acts of conservation. When conservation is used to strictly oppose rational, environmentally attentive development proposals, then the act is not

AGORA 14

actually conservation, but a thinly veiled critique of the project, echoing a sentiment that sounds an awful lot like “not in my back yard!” How do we remedy this? By ensuring that there is space and access for all. UNPs are uniquely situated to create more accessible federal public lands that are utilized by nontraditional user groups. UNPs can designate ecological conservation as a highest and best land use closer to the city core. These spaces often operate on different scales than the conventional National Park by having a direct relationship with the built environment and providing an unparalleled opportunity for equitable access.

RETHINKING THE NATIONAL PARK: “THE TROUBLE WITH URBAN NATIONAL PARKS” Understanding that there is a need for more equitable access to our National Parks (and federal public lands more broadly) is only half the story. As we concurrently reexamine our relationship to nature, perhaps we need to rethink how landscape conservation occurs within the built environment and ultimately what a National Park is. As William Cronon suggested in his 1995 paper, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” there is a central paradox in our relationship to nature: Wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not.19 This incorrect notion that nature is a place devoid of humans has deep consequences for the UNP. At risk of stating the obvious, the converse of this must then be true – the urban landscape is never devoid of the natural.

The idea that nature and humanity are intrinsically intertwined is central to the field of urban ecology and design. Highlighting this perspective that humans are part of nature rather than separate from it allows us to use the vision of the National Park as a tool for conservation in urban spaces. To do so, we need a set of beliefs and principles to guide us in establishing and managing these spaces. National Parks were originally intended to be “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” protecting pristine natural resources and setting them aside as refuges of the wild landscape.20 Since then, the NPS has evolved into an agency that also prioritizes the preservation of cultural resources, and even environmentally degraded land ripe for ecological restoration, engaging in community revitalization throughout their jurisdiction.21 Perhaps this – the bridge between human and nature in the urban landscape – is the

agency’s next evolution. Are we not a part of the nature we seek to protect? Climate change has underscored our role as an inseparable part of global natural systems. Even the most remote wild landscapes are now impacted by human activity at the urban core.22 This is fundamentally changing the way we view the NPS and its role in conservation. Broad threats to resource conservation link landscapes and regions in a new, undeniable way. There is a profound need to create functional ecosystems through parks and open space within the built environment. To protect the far-off landscapes delineated by traditional National Parks, we must also recognize the need for simultaneous and deliberate conservation efforts at the urban core. The two are inseparable. In recognizing this, we can look to the National Parks as a model for conservation within the matrix of the urban landscape.

Figure 2. Overlooking the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (Pritchard, 2016).

PRITCHARD

As Ian McHarg first called for decades ago in his seminal work Design with Nature, we should prioritize the conservation of spaces that have the highest potential for protecting ecological value, targeting development within a matrix of suitable areas aimed at doing the least environmental harm.23 He coined the term “Urban Suitability Selection Process,” which recognizes that our “cities are not comprised entirely of buildings, and countryside is not entirely without them.”24 Through this process, he proposes that designers examine the landscape to define areas that are “preponderantly suitable for urban uses” while requiring the conservation of those spaces throughout the region where ecosystem function is the best use.25 Applying this framework to a contemporary understanding of restoration ecology and design, there is an opportunity to restructure what we conceptualize as the built environment of our cities and concurrently reshape their ‘nature.’ Because of the level of ecosystem disturbance in all modern metropolitan landscapes, we should not only look to the most obvious, most pristine or unique places, but also attempt to build spaces for stewardship and ‘nature’ into the very fabric of communities. The NPS can help fill this role of urban landscape steward while simultaneously requiring a rethinking of how public lands are integrated into urban landscapes and how they might serve functional roles in the community. Through conscious design, these spaces can encompass a network of affordable residences, address food security through community gardens, and create opportunities for public gathering – all while protecting sensitive natural and cultural resources. The trouble with creating National Parks in urban landscapes is that they are often viewed as places where these types of community resources do not occur. Can UNPs, with views of the built environment, perhaps devoid of natural vistas and

AGORA 14

the environmental splendor fueling ecotourism, step up and realize the NPS mission to protect resources and revitalize communities? For example, how might the opportunity to restore a remnant prairie on an abandoned lot in Detroit equate to the National Park’s grandiose displays of majestic nature? Without the allure of a traditional National Park, such as Yosemite’s Half Dome or Yellowstone’s Old Faithful, can we create park units that focus on repairing and connecting people to the land they call home? McHarg highlights that the land use patterns driven by the American dream failed to recognize “that a subdivision is not a community” or that “the sum of subdivisions that make a suburb is not a community,” and that “the sum of suburbs that compose the metropolitan fringe of the city does not constitute community nor does a metropolitan region.”26 Reconciling the need for community-based placemaking with the restoration of ecosystem function is a common goal across disciplines – from ecological design and urban agriculture to applied ecology and beyond.27, 28 We should look to Urban National Parks as a place for this collaboration to occur.

It is important for practitioners to reconcile conservation and community because if they do not consciously consider these issues, UNPs might suffer the same fate as many conventional national or municipal parks: becoming playgrounds for the elite with often ineffectual protections for ecosystem functions. Designers must avoid what Anne Whiston Spirn describes as “delightful, but superficial, manifestations of nature” that “ignore the underlying natural processes.”29 This discussion is particularly pertinent today because the lines between urban, rural, and wild are increasingly blurred. Spirn argues: Real solutions to the problems of both city and suburb can now be achieved only through understanding the place of each within the larger region and by viewing city, suburbs, and countryside as a single, evolving system linked by the processes of nature and the social and economic concerns of humans.30 Pairing conservation with regional design is relevant to the ecologist, landscape architect, and planning practitioner because design is the common ground between implementing scientific knowledge and meeting the needs and values of society.31 Creating UNPs is a way to structure these design goals while simultaneously breaking down the physical and social barriers of access to public lands. Aldo Leopold’s holistic Land Ethic is poignant in this evaluation of land use, conservation, and community. He recognizes the need

to reevaluate our relationship to the land and develop an ethical perspective towards how we utilize natural resources in nonexploitative ways: A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the landcommunity to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellowmembers, and also respect for the community as such.32 If we follow the philosophies of Cronon, McHarg, Spirn, and Leopold, as most professionals claim to, we must recognize the need for UNPs to be different than the traditional model of a National Park. UNPs must represent a place for the future of conservation and community to converge in the urban landscape. Our greatest advances in conservation and community come when we are willing to re-envision the way we operate under conventional systems that aim to protect natural landscapes. We often fall short due to the societal obstacles of equitable access and inherent biases that are built into our design. Natural and cultural resources are all around us. Once we acknowledge this, we can begin to create communities intrinsically tied to the natural world. We need to seek the most equitable and democratic way of protecting biodiversity through deliberate design that restores natural systems, rehabilitates cultural resources, and establishes unbiased access to the land. This is the Urban National Park.

PRITCHARD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jack Pritchard is a graduate student in the School for Environment and Sustainability pursuing dual Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degrees in Conservation Ecology and Landscape Architecture. Prior to coming to the University of Michigan, Jack obtained his Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture and Natural Resources from Cornell University and worked with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and National Park Service on the Trails Stewardship Crew at Golden Gate National Recreation Area. He was recognized as a 2018 Wyss Scholar for the Conservation of the American West and works as a live-in Caretaker at the University of Michiganâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nichols Arboretum. He is currently writing his thesis on the intersection of trail design and forest restoration at Redwood National and State Parks. Jack is an avid fly fisher, backpacker, and amateur botanist.

AGORA 14

ENDNOTES 1. Michael Dear, “Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome,” Journal of the American Planning Association 58, no. 3 (1992): 288–300, https://doi. org/10.1080/01944369208975808. 2. National Park Service, “Management Policies: The Foundation; 1.1 The National Park Idea,” Department of the Interior, accessed February 5, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/ policy/mp/chapter1.htm. 3. Avery Emison Carson, “Integrating Conservation Uses into Takings Law: Why Courts Should View Conservation as a Possible Highest and Best Use,” North Carolina Law Review 86, no. 1 (2007): 278–80. 4. National Park Service, “Urban Parks and Programs: By the Numbers,”Department of the Interior, accessed February 5, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/urban/bythe-numbers.htm. 5. Terry Hartig, Agnes E. Van Den Berg, Caroline M. Hagerhall, Marek Tomalak, Nicole Bauer, Ralf Hansmann, Ann Ojala, Efi Syngollitou, Giuseppe Carrus, Ann Van Herzele, Simon Bell, Marie Therese Camilleri Podesta, and Grete Waaseth, “Health Benefits of Nature Experience: Psychological, Social and Cultural Processes,” in Forests, Trees and Human Health, eds. Kjell Nilsson, Marcus Sangster, Christos Gallis, Terry Hartig, Sjerp de Vries, Klaus Seeland, and Jasper Schipperjin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 133. 6. Ian L. McHargh, Design with Nature (New York: Natural History Press, 1969), 55. 7. Anne Whiston Spirn, “Part I: City and Nature,” in The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984), 9. 8. Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 237. 9. Samuel Brody, “The Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences of Sprawling Development Patterns in the United States,”Nature Education Knowledge 4, no. 5 (2013): 2, https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/ library/the-characteristics-causes-and-consequences-ofsprawling-103014747/ 10. Roderick Nash, “The American Invention of National Parks,” American Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1970): 726, https:// doi.org/10.2307/2711623. 11. Joe Weber and Selima Sultana, “Why Do So Few Minority People Visit National Parks? Visitation and the Accessibility of ‘America’s Best Idea,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 3 (2013): 437, https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2012.689240. 12. Ethan Carr, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture & the National Park Service (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 6-7. 13. National Park Service, “National Park System Sees More Than 330 Million Visits,” NPS Office of Communications News Release, Department of the Interior (2018), accessed February 5, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/ orgs/1207/02-28-2018-visitation-certified.htm.

15. Nash, “The American Invention of National Parks,” 726. 16. Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan, “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature,” Psychological Science 19 (2008): 1207. 17. Catharine Ward Thompson, Jenny Roe, Peter Aspinall, Richard Mitchell, Angela Clow, and David Miller, “More Green Space Is Linked to Less Stress in Deprived Communities: Evidence from Salivary Cortisol Patterns,” Landscape and Urban Planning 105, no. 3 (2012): 225. 18. Diana E. Bowler, Lisette M. Buyung-Ali, Teri M. Knight, and Andrew S. Pullin, “A Systematic Review of Evidence for the Added Benefits to Health of Exposure to Natural Environments,” BMC Public Health 10, no. 456 (2010): 7, https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/track/ pdf/10.1186/1471-2458-10-456. 19. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or; Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 80-81. 20. National Park Service, “Management Policies: The Foundation; 1.1 The National Park Idea.” 21. National Park Service, “Quick History of the National Park Service,” Department of the Interior, accessed February 5, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/articles/quick-npshistory.htm. 22. IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013): 5, https://archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/ WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf. 23. McHargh, Design with Nature, 161. 24. McHargh, Design with Nature, 158. 25. McHargh, Design with Nature, 158. 26. McHargh, Design with Nature, 153. 27. Paula Horrigan, “Rust to Green: Cultivating Resilience in the Rust Belt,” in Community Matters: Service-Learning in Engaged Design and Planning, eds. Mallika Bose, Paula Horrigan, Cheryl Doble, and Sigmund C. Shipp (London: Routledge, 2014), 173. 28. Chiara Tornaghi, “Critical Geography of Urban Agriculture,” Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 4 (2014): 552, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513512542. 29. Spirn, “Part I: City and Nature,” 33. 30. Spirn, “Part I: City and Nature,” 37. 31. Joan Iverson Nassauer and Paul Opdam, “Design in Science: Extending the Landscape Ecology Paradigm,” Landscape Ecology 23, no. 6 (2008): 636. 32. Leopold, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, 240.

14. Weber and Sultana, “Why Do So Few Minority People Visit National Parks?,” 437.

PRITCHARD

Photographer: Andriana S. Miljanic Location: Antigua, Guatemala

Shaking Up Small Business

The Impact of Seismic Retrofitting on Small Businesses in San Francisco LAUREN ASHLEY WEEK Master of Urban and Regional Planning and Juris Doctor 2023

ABSTRACT In 2013, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed legislation establishing the Mandatory Seismic Retrofit Program. Requiring all ‘soft-story’ buildings – defined as structures with ‘soft’ wall lines – to seismically reinforce their ground floors, the law is an example of proactive environmental resiliency planning. However, the legally sanctioned passthrough of capital improvement costs onto tenants has resulted in an unintended consequence: extreme rent burden. While residential occupants with a financial hardship have been provided an appeals process by the City of San Francisco, no equivalent exists for commercial tenants. This piece analyzes the impact of mandatory seismic retrofitting on small businesses across three San Francisco Supervisor Districts: 1, 2, and 5. The correlation between retrofit construction and high rates of business turnover, ownership change, and vacancy illuminates the tension between planning for environmental resiliency and ensuring small businesses are economically resilient. Moreover, it illustrates the need for a financial hardship appeals process for commercial tenants.

agora 14

an Francisco is known for its history of disruption: where pioneers once searched for gold, data miners now wait for Google buses; where bohemians embraced counterculture, a new experimental generation learns to code; and while earthquakes molded, and continue to endanger, the City’s topography, entrepreneurs now shape and threaten the Bay Area’s cultural landscape. As the contemporary imagery illustrates, the region’s current iteration of disruption is deeply embedded in the technology sector. While headlines often highlight the tensions caused by technology and its surrounding industry, less attention has been paid to San Francisco’s other entrepreneurs – small business owners. As the city confronts rising rents and changing demographics, many small businesses are at risk of ‘disruption’ and can be forced to close. However, these consequences of gentrification are not the only factors causing San Francisco’s small businesses to shutter their doors.

The Mandatory Seismic Retrofit Program, passed by the City in 2013, accounts for a quarter of commercial vacancies in some San Francisco neighborhoods.1 The program’s goal to retrofit all seismically unstable buildings is imperative for the health, safety, and resiliency of San Francisco. However, just as an earthquake disturbs the city’s bedrock, the ordinance disrupts the small businesses that serve as the economic and cultural foundation of many neighborhoods. Although the City intended for closures and vacancies caused by retrofitting to be temporary, the increased rents following remodels have led to enduring changes for San Francisco’s small business community. I assess the impact of mandatory seismic upgrades on San Francisco’s neighborhood commercial districts by analyzing three San Francisco Supervisor Districts: 1, 2, and 5, and tracking the number of businesses that closed before, during, or after the retrofit permitting process. The resulting turnover, ownership change, and vacancy rates illuminate the tension between planning for environmental resiliency and ensuring that small businesses are economically resilient.

MANDATORY SEISMIC RETROFIT PROGRAM

Figure 1. Vacant small businesses at Haight Street and Scott Street in San Francisco (Week, 2020).

In 2013, the City of San Francisco passed Ordinance 66-13, which established the Mandatory Seismic Retrofit Program.2 According to the U.S. Geological Survey, within the next 30 years, the probability of a 6.7 magnitude earthquake occurring in the Bay Area is 72 percent.3 Due to the looming threat of a high-magnitude earthquake, the program aims to stabilize and reinforce San Francisco’s aging building stock. The legislation specifically targets residential and mixed-use buildings with a ‘soft-story condition.’ Defined as “wood-frame, multiunit residential buildings” with “soft, weak, or open-front wall lines” on the ground floor, examples of ‘soft-story’ buildings include residences with garages or first floor

WEEK

commercial spaces.4 These buildings are “particularly vulnerable to severe damage and collapse” following seismic activity.5 In the event of an earthquake, ‘soft-story’ structures will account for 66 percent of devastated and uninhabitable housing in San Francisco.6 The program has affected over 5,000 buildings across the city.7 Municipal agencies have categorized each of these structures into four tiers. Due to my research’s emphasis on the impact of the program on small businesses, I will only analyze Tier IV properties, defined as “any building containing ground floor commercial uses.”8 Such properties, which account for 1,009 structures in San Francisco, are in the midst of retrofitting before the program’s September 15, 2020 deadline. Under guidelines mandated by the San Francisco Rent Board, capital improvement costs associated with mandatory retrofits can be fully passed on to tenants over a 20-year amortization period. Although the City offers an appeals process for residential tenants with hardship, no equivalent exists for commercial occupants. Due to the conjunction of the Mandatory Seismic Retrofit Program and passthrough policies stipulated by the Rent Board, San Francisco’s small businesses are faced with a legally sanctioned and annually guaranteed rent increase for two decades – with no available legal protection. The turnover, ownership change, and vacancy rates determined by this research call for a comparable financial hardship appeals process for commercial tenants.

the application date of each address’s retrofit permit and the completion date of construction.9 The Treasurer and Tax Collector’s Office maintains the location information of each registered small business, as well as closures and ownership changes.10 Since physical site visits were not possible, Google Maps, Yelp reviews, and lease listings further supplemented the research. First, I used Google Maps to confirm how many commercial spaces each Tier IV structure has: some addresses have multiple small businesses on the ground floor, while others were erroneously categorized as Tier IV and had none. I removed all Tier IV addresses with no identifiable commercial space from the sample frame. Additionally, by using the timeline feature of Google Maps, identifying businesses reported as “closed” on Yelp, and seeing if specific addresses were available for commercial lease, I attempted to confirm the status of small businesses in cases where business records were conflicting or not up to date. A comparison of a property’s construction timeline against its commercial lease start and end dates (as determined by a combination of business records, Google Maps, Yelp, and commercial leasing websites) revealed the fate of each small business: survival, sale, or shut down. By tabulating the number of businesses shut down, sold, or currently vacant, then dividing their sums over the total number of impacted commercial spaces, I translated these results into a turnover, ownership change, or vacancy rate.

METHODOLOGY

SUPERVISOR DISTRICTS

I used San Francisco’s geographic information system, Planning Information Map, and DataSF, an aggregator of planning-related datasets, to collect all Tier IV addresses and associated construction permit and business registration information. Records maintained by the Department of Building Inspection disclose

11 Supervisor Districts divide the City of San Francisco. Representing the political boundaries of the city’s elected legislative body, districts provide comparable areas for analysis due to their relatively distributed population sizes. This study will analyze Districts 1, 2, and 5. Together, these districts offer a statistically significant sample

agora 14

size of impacted commercial spaces. Moreover, their diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic demographics provide a representative picture of San Francisco’s overall diversity and allow for a comparison of the program’s impact on different types of neighborhoods. In theory, construction and its consequences will more severely change the character of districts with more vulnerable populations, such as those with a large percentage of immigrant or lowerincome communities. Temporary closures and increasing rents disrupt the specialty Chinese grocer or African-American arts and music retailer more than the highend clothing boutique. Lastly, although the forces of gentrification have impacted the entire city, the University of California, Berkeley Urban Displacement Project has identified these districts as either low risk or historically high-income and expensive.11 This helps decrease the confounding impact of gentrification on rising commercial rents and business change. Combined, the districts represent 85 Tier IV buildings and 180 commercial spaces.

District 1: The Richmond Bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the west, the Presidio to the north, Arguello Boulevard to the east, and Golden Gate Park’s southern edge, District 1 is commonly known as The Richmond. Since the early 20 th century, The Richmond has catered to the housing and commercial needs of a variety of immigrant communities. Two commercial corridors along Geary Boulevard and Clement Street continue to serve these residents. The City has flagged 17 Tier IV structures among these thoroughfares, which accounts for 32 commercial spaces.

Figure 3. Clement Street in The Richmond (Wikimedia Commons, 2014).

While the district was originally home to settlers of Irish and German ancestry, its demographics shifted post-1950. ChineseAmerican families began to escape the crowded conditions of Chinatown to settle in The Richmond throughout the second half of the 20 th century. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in an influx of Russian immigrants.12 These communities continue to shape the culture and demographics of the district and its 79,970 residents. Two defining characteristics of The Richmond are its 34 percent foreignborn population (on par with the city’s 35 percent) and slightly lower-than-median household income of $83,215 ($88,643 for the city).13 Figure 2. Districts 1, 2, and 5 in relation to the City of San Francisco (map created by author).

Excluding San Francisco’s southern neighborhoods (which are majority

WEEK

single-family residential, not well connected by transit, and far away from job centers – characteristics that make these neighborhoods less susceptible to gentrification), The Richmond has been least impacted by redevelopment and consequential displacement compared to similarly located and connected districts.14 Thirteen of the 17 census tracts within The Richmond’s boundaries qualify as lower-income. According to the Urban Displacement Project, a majority of these lower-income tracts have not experienced the displacement associated with gentrification and are not losing lower-income residents.15 Further analysis conducted by the Urban Displacement Project also illustrates limited commercial gentrification in The Richmond relative to comparable districts. Almost 50 percent of The Richmond’s commercial census tracts have never gentrified, while an additional 12 percent have not experienced gentrification since 2000.16 District 2: The Marina Although comprised of many subneighborhoods, the majority of District 2 can be delineated as the Marina. The district serves as the city’s northern gateway from the Golden Gate Bridge and is often associated with its charming architecture and affluent populace. In fact, with a median household income of $128,633 (compared to the city’s overall median of $88,643), the Marina is one of the wealthiest districts in San Francisco.17 For many years, the Marina lay dormant as an undeveloped marshland. Today it features luxurious waterfront properties and business districts dotted with trendy boutiques, high-end restaurants, and artisan cafes. Primarily located along Union, Lombard, and Chestnut Streets, these commercial corridors feature 27 Tier IV structures and 49 commercial spaces. A history of affluence has molded the Marina’s contemporary socioeconomic character. After the 1906 earthquake

agora 14

Figure 4. Chestnut Street in The Marina (Adam Fagen, Flikr, 2013).

devastated the city’s eastern housing stock, development slowly trickled west along the Pacific shoreline. However, the reveal of the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition stimulated rapid investment that has shaped the district’s architectural character and price range.18 The Marina’s exclusivity has also influenced its demographics. The district is the least racially diverse of the selected areas: 78 percent of its population identifies as white.19 The Urban Displacement Project classifies the Marina as a district not experiencing gentrification. However, this categorization holds true for very different reasons. The number of census tracts measured as moderate- to high-income represent another statistical indication of the district’s wealth: 16 out of 18 census tracts house majority moderate- to high-income residents. The Urban Displacement Project has labeled the remaining two tracts as “data unavailable.”20 Due to the lack of lower-income households, the Marina does not need to fear the forces of gentrification; the district has successfully insulated itself to receive the Urban Displacement Project label of historically “exclusionary” and is therefore not in danger of gentrification because there are relatively few lowerincome households to displace. Ongoing or advanced exclusion describe six of the census tracts for which data is available,

while nine are at risk of exclusion: the remaining analyzed census tract has already gentrified.21 Regarding commercial gentrification, 61 percent of Marina census tracts have never experienced gentrification. Since 2000, small businesses have been displaced due to commercial gentrification in only one tract.22 District 5: The Haight Iconic gathering spaces such as Hippie Hill and the corner of Haight and Ashbury converge at the center of District 5. The Haight’s history erupts with revolution, free love, and countercultural movements. However, before the hippies and the Beats, the Haight housed the upper class and bourgeoisie. The opening of Golden Gate

Park in 1879 stimulated the residential development of the district. Wealthy families and city elites soon moved into the area to enjoy the large, open lots, the “luxuriant carriage entrance” located on today’s Panhandle, and the nearby park.23 Ashbury Street once held the moniker ‘Politician’s Row.’24 Decades later, it would be famous again as the address of the Grateful Dead. The commercial corridor along Haight Street no longer caters to a bygone bourgeoise clientele. The district’s contemporary retail is spread across 41 Tier IV structures, and its 99 commercial spaces often feature bohemian businesses ranging from smoke shops to Tibetan gift and spiritual stores.

Figure 5. ‘Shaken’ Small Businesses at Divisadero Street and Haight Street. Prior to retrofitting, this building housed two smoke shops, a café, and three family-owned restaurants: a burger joint, a pizza-by-the slice counter, and a Korean sandwich shop. After retrofitting, only the pizza restaurant remains. An artisan coffee and tea café, ‘instagrammable’ bubble tea shop, sit-down sushi restaurant, and ‘fusion’ Indian wine bar now occupy the other spaces (Week, 2020).

WEEK

The Haight’s divergent history influences its diversity today. Of a total population of 84,030 (the largest of the three districts), 19 percent identify as Asian, 62 percent identify as white, 9 percent identify as Latinx, and 10 percent identify as black.25 The Haight’s reach into the historically African-American

S t ruct ure s Total Tier IV Structures Impacted Commercial Spaces P o p ul a t i o n Total % Asian or Asian-American % African-American or Black % White %Hispanic or Latinx (of any race) % Foreign Born Median Household Income % in Poverty Ge nt ri fi ca t i o n Total Number of Census Tracts* Number of Lower-Income Census Tracts Number by Displacement Typology Not Losing Low-Income Households At Risk of Gentrification Ongoing Gentrification Number of Moderate- to High-Income Census Tracts Number by Displacement Typology Advanced Gentrification Not Losing Low-Income Households At Risk of Exclusion Ongoing Exclusion Advanced Exclusion Data Unavailable Number of Commercial Census Tracts Number by Gentrification Typology Did Not Gentrify Gentrified between 1990-2000 Gentrified between 2000-2013 Gentrified during Both Periods

neighborhoods of Western Addition and the Filmore explains the higher-than-average proportion of black residents in the district. (Only 5 percent of San Francisco’s residents identify as black.)26 The Haight’s more diverse racial composition separates the district from The Richmond and the Marina.

District 1

District 2

District 5

17 32

27 49

41 99

79,970 40% 2% 49% 8% 34% $83,215 11%

68,390 15% 1% 78% 7% 17% $128,633 6%

84,030 19% 10% 62% 9% 24% $91,055 13%

17 13

18 0

20 12

7 2 4 3

0 0 0 16

1 1 10 8

0 0 2 1 0 1 17

1 0 9 5 1 2 18

3 0 2 3 0 0 20

8 2 5 2

11 6 1 0

15 1 3 1

Table 1. Characteristics of District 1, 2, and 5 (Structures data calculated by author; population data from San Francisco Planning Department; gentrification data from M. Zuk and K. Chapple, Urban Displacement Project). *Supervisor District boundaries do not perfectly align with census tracts. If a majority of a census tract falls within a Supervisor District, it was counted within that District.

agora 14

Diversity also defines the Haight’s proportion of lower-income versus moderate- to high-income census tracts. Among its 20 identified tracts, the Urban Displacement Project has classified 12 as lower-income and 8 as moderate- to highincome.27 Unlike The Richmond, the Haight has experienced widespread gentrification that has affected almost all of its lowerincome population. Ongoing gentrification plagues 10 of the district’s lower-income tracts and threatens one other. Only one census tract is not losing lower-income households.28 Within the moderate- to high-income areas, three continue to exclude lower-income households, two are at risk of exclusion, and the remaining three are at an advanced stage of gentrification.29 Despite these mixed levels of residential gentrification, the Haight’s commercial tenants have been relatively safeguarded from displacement caused by redevelopment: 75 percent of commercial census tracts have never gentrified. Only three commercial tracts gentrified between 2000 and 2013.30

Impacted Commercial Spaces Total Business Turnover Before During After Overall Turnover Rate Post-Construction Turnover Rate Total Ownership Change Ownership Change Rate Total Vacant Vacancy Rate

RESULTS The turnover, ownership change, and vacancy rates for Districts 1, 2, and 5 are documented in Table 2. Turnover Rates Turnover signifies that a new entity replaced the original small business at some point in the retrofitting process. Calculations correlating to the turnover rate were split into two categories: 1) overall, and 2) postconstruction. The overall rate captures all turnovers after 2013 (when the legislation was passed) to account for preemptive closures in response to small businesses’ concerns over temporary shutdowns during construction or potential increased rents due to the San Francisco Rent Board’s passthrough rules. The post-construction rate includes only turnovers that occurred after the initial retrofit permit was filed. While I could not find average turnover rates for San Francisco, research conducted by the Federal Reserve found that 19 percent of businesses across all industries turned over – i.e., entered or exited the economy in 2015.31 Across large metro areas such

District 1

District 2

District 5

32 18 3 5 10 56% 47% 5 16% 5 16%

49 27 6 12 9 55% 43% 4 8% 11 22%

99 54 10 20 24 55% 44% 10 10% 11 11%

District Averages Average Overall Turnover Rate Average Post-Construction Turnover Rate Average Ownership Change Rate Average Vacancy Rate

55% 45% 11% 16%

Table 2. District 1, 2, and 5 turnover, ownership change, and vacancy rates (calculations by author).

WEEK

as San Francisco, business turnover in the retail sector was less than 18 percent as of 2014 (the last year for which data is available).32, 33 The services sector in large urban areas experienced a turnover rate of less than 21 percent in the same year.34 Although the comparison between the local and national statistics is not perfect, it suggests that the program has severely impacted San Francisco’s small businesses. The Richmond suffered from a turnover rate of 56 percent overall and 47 percent post-construction. The Marina lost 27 small businesses between 2013 and 2019, correlating to an overall turnover rate of 55 percent and a post-construction rate of 43 percent. Lastly, on par with the other included districts, the Haight’s turnover rate stands at 55 percent overall and 44 percent post-construction. Despite differences in population and class and differing stages of gentrification or exclusion, seismic upgrading similarly impacted small business turnover in all three districts. Ownership Change Rates The ownership change rate tracks the sale of small businesses from one owner to another throughout the retrofit timeline. A change in ownership potentially indicates a forced sale caused by the program and the uncertainty of its consequences. Thus, even if a small business survives, small business owners suffer. This distinguishes the ownership change rate as the study’s most covert calculation. Since the same small business continues to operate, residents and visitors to a district see no physical or cultural change taking place. However, although not specifically assessed by this study, ownership change may indicate a sale from a mom-and-pop business owner to a large-scale business operator or corporate entity. The disruptive impact of the seismic retrofit program remains hidden among business records, which document who owns a district’s small businesses and thereby reaps the economic benefits of what should be a community-serving economic

agora 14

development tool. The ownership change rates for The Richmond, the Marina, and the Haight, respectively, are 16 percent, 8 percent, and 10 percent. While the rate of ownership change was similar in the Marina and the Haight, small business owners impacted by the program in The Richmond were almost two times more likely to sell. The Richmond has the highest proportion of lower-income census tracts and the largest immigrant community. In conjunction with the effects of the Mandatory Seismic Retrofit Program, these factors may contribute to the vulnerability of the district’s small business owners and their likelihood to sell. However, since this district is most impacted by commercial gentrification, it is difficult to separate the forces of redevelopment and ensuing displacement from the program’s influence on small business owners and their decision to sell.

Temporary closures and increasing rents disrupt the specialty Chinese grocer or African-American arts and music retailer more than the high-end clothing boutique.” Vacancy Rates Research conducted by the San Francisco Planning Department estimates that healthy vacancy rates fluctuate between 5-10 percent.35 San Francisco does not currently achieve this with a citywide average of 12 percent commercial vacancy.36 A comparison between the citywide average and the vacancy rates calculated in this study, which account only for vacancies in Tier IV structures, reveals the impact of the program.

The Richmond surpassed the city’s average at 16 percent. Interestingly, the Marina, with the highest median household income, lowest poverty rate, and a geographic concentration of affluent and white residents, has the highest vacancy rate at an enormous 22 percent. Despite evading the forces of gentrification due to its long history as an expensive (and therefore price-exclusionary) area, the district suffers from the worst vacancy rate. Some analysts and politicians believe that San Francisco’s extreme vacancy rates are indicative of landlords holding commercial spaces until they can procure higher rents.37 This theory is not proven; however, it stands as a possible explanation for the Marina’s high vacancy rate. The district has some of the fastest-growing rents in San Francisco.38 Lastly, the Haight sustains a nearly healthy vacancy rate at 11 percent. The district’s relatively low vacancy rate offers another datapoint supporting the theory of speculative landlords. As of 2019, a majority of the district’s commercial rents were decreasing.39 Vacancy rates illustrate how differences in a district’s characteristics and gentrification or exclusion stage may affect retrofitting’s impact on small businesses.

LIMITATIONS AND POTENTIAL FUTURE RESEARCH Due to limited bandwidth and resources – the data collection process occurred over a period of two weeks and was not funded in any capacity – I could not conduct site visits of each Tier IV building. The somewhat limited reliability of certain databases further hinders the viability and applicability of my analysis. For example, not all businesses report their closures to the City, while some businesses never register. Despite the aid of the Google Maps timeline feature, Yelp reviews, and commercial lease listings, without physically examining commercial spaces in person, I could not always determine the status of a small

business. This may have led to imprecise counting. Site visits would greatly improve the accuracy of future research. Moreover, such observations would add meaningful qualitative data: did building owners use the retrofitting process as an excuse to redevelop and reposition the entire property to attract ‘higher value’ commercial tenants? Have new small businesses, or conversely, persisting vacancies, changed the character of commercial corridors? Do restaurants, retail, and services continue to serve a district’s historic residents, or have they transformed to entice new shoppers, and in the long-term, new residents? Other forces causing business turnover, ownership change, and vacancy also place limitations on the study. I have already discussed the compounding factor of gentrification. Although conversations around gentrification often focus on housing and the displacement of residential occupants, the market mechanisms and population shifts impacting tenants also affect small business owners. Thus, the forces of gentrification convolute the data surrounding turnover, ownership change, and vacancy. Furthermore, personal matters – such as moving, retirement, or unrelated financial concerns – may also impact a small business’s decision to close or sell. Without interviewing or surveying every affected small business owner, it is difficult to confirm the true reason for closure or ownership change. Moreover, the pressures of capitalist competition also lead to ‘natural’ turnover, sale, and vacancy, as highlighted by the Federal Reserve research. This study does not directly account for these forces. Future research should attempt to survey all impacted commercial tenants. Additionally, focus groups or interviews can supplement the surveys by collecting more in-depth feedback from a sample of affected business owners. Together, surveys, focus groups, and interviews should investigate

WEEK

the reasons small businesses survived, shuttered, or sold. Furthermore, they should conduct a systematic inquiry into the types of businesses, owners, and customers served in post-construction commercial spaces. Do post-retrofit small businesses provide essential goods and services, such as cultural foods or laundry facilities? Have small businesses been sold to limited liability corporations, or do they remain in local residents’ hands? Are post-retrofit businesses affordable for lower-income customers? Surveys, focus groups, and interviews, in conjunction with a more detailed review of business records, can help answer these important questions.

CONCLUSION San Francisco’s aim to become a more resilient city is vital for its long-term health and safety. Due to the likelihood of a high-magnitude earthquake, mandatory seismic retrofitting remains an important and necessary program. However, limited foresight and noncomprehensive policy analysis has shaken the core of San Francisco’s neighborhood commercial districts. Due to the legally sanctioned passthrough of capital improvement costs onto tenants allowed under the Mandatory Seismic Retrofit Program, small businesses have been put at risk for disruption. Across the three surveyed San Francisco Supervisor Districts, an average of 55 percent of small businesses have turned over, 45 percent of which closed post-construction. An additional 11 percent have been forced to change ownership, while 16 percent of commercial spaces

agora 14

remain vacant. These rates reveal that the Mandatory Seismic Retrofit Program has negatively impacted San Francisco’s neighborhood commercial corridors. Resiliency planning is a necessary priority given the threat of an imminent high magnitude earthquake; however, programs and policies should and can be adopted to relieve the tension between planning for environmental and economic resiliency. Based upon the pre-existing residential hardship appeals process, a similar program can be implemented moving forward for commercial tenants. To qualify for the program, a business’s revenue must fall under a certain threshold. The business should also fulfill an essential neighborhood-serving purpose or be culturally significant to the district. By offering a hardship appeal to qualifying commercial tenants, the City can foster thriving neighborhoods and help safeguard San Francisco’s neighborhood-serving small businesses – the bedrock of resilient local economies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The San Francisco Office of Small Business originally developed the idea and hypothesis guiding this research. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to work with the City and County of San Francisco and hope the conclusions of this research offer guidance in future policy analysis and implementation. Moreover, I hope this research can aid and support San Francisco’s vital and resilient small business community.

about the author Lauren Ashley Week is pursuing a dual Juris Doctor and Master of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan. As a Bay Area native and the daughter of small business owners, she is passionate about fostering resilient, community-focused commercial corridors in San Francisco. Prior to graduate school, Lauren studied womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s entrepreneurship as a FulbrightNehru Fellow in India. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Legal Studies and Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley.

WEEK

ENDNOTES 1. Shwanika Narayan and Roland Li, “Shuttered Stores: North Beach’s Crisis,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 2019, https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SanFrancisco-s-North-Beach-is-littered-with-13972898.php. 2. Ordinance No. 66-13, City and County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors (March 25, 2013), https://sfgov.org/ esip/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents/10118Legislation_Final.pdf.

17. San Francisco Planning Department, “San Francisco Supervisor Districts Socio-Economic Profiles.” 18. Marlene Goldman and Shannon Moore, “San Francisco: The Marina,” SFGate, accessed January 8, 2020, https://www.sfgate.com/neighborhoods/sf/marina/.

3. U.S. Geological Survey, “What Is the Probability That an Earthquake Will Occur in the Los Angeles Area? In the San Francisco Bay Area?,” U.S. Department of the Interior, accessed January 8, 2020, https://www.usgs. gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-will-occur-losangeles-area-san-francisco-bay-area?qt-news_science_ products=0#qt-news_science_products.

19. San Francisco Planning Department, “San Francisco Supervisor Districts Socio-Economic Profiles.”

4. California Health and Safety Code, § 19161 (October 22, 2018), https://codes. findlaw.com/ca/health-and-safetycode/hsc-sect-19161.html.

22. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.”

5. Ordinance No. 66-13. 6. Ordinance No. 66-13. 7. Janelle Bitker, “As Seismic Retrofits Loom, SF Restaurateurs Wonder Whether They Can Survive,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 10, 2019, https://www. sfchronicle.com/ food/article/As-seismic-retrofits-loomSF-restaurateurs-13835942.php#photo-17399316. 8. Department of Building Inspection, “For Property Owners,” City and County of San Francisco, accessed January 8, 2020, https://sfdbi.org/property-owners. 9. San Francisco Planning Department, “Property Information Map,” City and County of San Francisco, last modified 2020, http://sfplanninggis.org/PIM/. 10. DataSF, “Registered Business Locations,” City and County of San Francisco, accessed January 8, 2020, https:// data.sfgov.org/Economy-and-Community/RegisteredBusiness-Locations-San-Francisco/g8m3-pdis. 11. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Urban Displacement Project, 2015, https://www. urbandisplacement.org/. 12. Western Neighborhoods Project, “A Short History of the Richmond District,” OutsideLands.org, accessed January 8, 2020, http://www.outsidelands.org/richmond. php. 13. San Francisco Planning Department, “San Francisco Supervisor Districts Socio-Economic Profiles: American Community Survey 2012-2016,” City and County of San Francisco, March 2017, https://default.sfplanning.org/ publications_reports/ SF_NGBD_SocioEconomic_ Profiles/2012-2016_ACS_Profile_SupeDistricts_Final.pdf.

16. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.”

20. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.” 21 M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.”

23. Jane Mofatt, “A History of the Haight Ashbury,” FoundSF, October 5, 1956, http://www.foundsf.org /index. php?title=A_History_of_the_Haight_Ashbury. 24. Mofatt, “A History of the Haight Ashbury.” 25. San Francisco Planning Department, “San Francisco Supervisor Districts Socio-Economic Profiles.” 26. San Francisco Planning Department, “San Francisco Supervisor Districts Socio-Economic Profiles.” 27. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.” 28. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.” 29. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.” 30. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.” 31. Jason P. Brown, “The Widening Divide in Business Turnover between Large and Small Urban Areas,” Economic Review 103, no. 3 (2018): 7. 32. Large urban areas are regions of 4 million people or more. According to the definition provided by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Core Based Statistical Area measurement, San Francisco is considered a large urban area if one includes the multiple counties that make up the region, and not just the area within the City and County of San Francisco boundary lines. 33. Jason P. Brown, “The Widening Divide in Business Turnover between Large and Small Urban Areas,” 14. 34. Jason P. Brown, “The Widening Divide in Business Turnover between Large and Small Urban Areas,” 13.

14. Adam Brinklow, “Map Shows which SF Neighborhoods Gentrifying Fastest,” Curbed San Francisco, November 17, 2017, https://sf.curbed.com/2017/11/17/16670116/ uc-berkeley-urban-displacement-map-gentrificationoakland.

35. San Francisco Planning Department, “Informational Presentation on Retail Study and Neighborhood Commercial Districts,” City and County of San Francisco, February 15, 2018, https://commissions.sfplanning.org/ cpcpackets/Retail%20Study%20and%20Neighborhood%20 Commercial%20Districts.pdf

15. M. Zuk and K. Chapple, “Mapping Displacement and Gentrification.”

36. Narayan and Li, “Shuttered Stores.”

agora 14

37. Cathy Reisenwitz, “What San Francisco Gets Wrong (and Kind of Right) about Retail Vacancies – Unintended Consequences,” The Bay City Beacon, October 14, 2019, https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/ politics/whatsan-francisco-gets-wrong-and-kind-of-right-about/ article_9d2f105c-eeec-11e9-a0b0-27d8e4e7b5e9.html. 38. Crystal Chen, “See Which SF Neighborhoods Had the Fastest Growing Rents This Past Year,” Zumper, March 21, 2019, https://www.zumper.com/blog/2018/03/see-whichsf-neighborhoods-had-the-fastest-growing-rents-thispast-year/. 39. Chen, “See Which SF Neighborhoods.”

WEEK

Photographer: Peter Philip Carroll Location: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Health as a Planning Problem Combatting Diseases of Poverty HEATHER KININGHAM Master of Social Work and Public Policy 2020

ABSTRACT Diseases of Poverty (DOP), a group of parasitic and bacterial diseases characterized by their high prevalence and debilitating effects on poor communities, affect almost 12 million Americans per year. With over 20 variations, including hookworm and Chagas, DOP can have profoundly detrimental impacts on the individuals and communities affected. We can understand the issue of DOP within the United States as a result of two main factors: the lack of private and public knowledge of DOP and failing infrastructures across the South. Because many determinants of DOP are outside the direct control of the health sector and are laden with social, economic, and environmental influences, an effective policy solution should focus on improving disease-promoting environments and the failing water and waste infrastructure systems in which at-risk individuals live. Policies focused on water and waste infrastructure can play a proactive role in preventing the spread of DOP through ensuring safer and cleaner living spaces, aiding in the prevention â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not just treatment â&#x20AC;&#x201C; of DOP. More specifically, a multi-level infrastructure policy that targets funds and resources to rural, low-income communities through cooperation between all levels of government is essential to address DOP. I propose a DOP infrastructure program specifically for rural, low-income communities in which the federal government provides block grants to state governments and sets guidelines for spending while localities are responsible for the collection, use, and application of state-appropriated funds.

agora 14

iseases of Poverty (DOP) are commonly thought to be a problem of the U.S.’s past, or of the Global South. However, DOP affect around 12 million Americans per year.1 DOP are chronic and debilitating parasitic and bacterial diseases that thrive in unsanitary living environments.2 The failing water and sewage infrastructures in rural and impoverished communities across the United States leave many people vulnerable to the risks of DOP. These diseases, such as hookworm and Chagas, have a disproportionate effect on those in extreme poverty and can have chronic and disabling impacts, including death.3 Those affected are generally concentrated in extremely impoverished geographical pockets with large minority populations in the Southwest and South, such as the Mississippi Delta and southern Texas.4 Often, the victims are overlooked because of the lack of awareness and understanding of these diseases. Altogether, there are more than 20 DOP that drive a cycle of crippling poverty in conjunction with social, economic, and environmental factors.5 In this piece, I examine the persistence of DOP in the U.S. and offer policy solutions to combat DOP from an urban planning perspective.

infestation include iron deficiency, weight loss, and tiredness; greatly slowed cognitive development and stunted growth are some of the more serious long-term effects.7 This case is not unique; many DOP have similar effects on mental and physical development which add to the barriers that prevent people from escaping deep poverty. A lack of knowledge, research, and medical intervention only exacerbates DOP and contributes to the interdependent relationship of infectious and parasitic diseases with poverty.8 In recent decades there has been a shift from a focus on infectious diseases to a focus on chronic health challenges, such as obesity and diabetes.9 This leaves DOP widely unaddressed. It is likely that many impoverished Southerners have

THE RISE AND FALL... AND RISE AGAIN OF DISEASES OF POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES Most DOP were thought to be eradicated in the late 20 th century due to tremendous strides in public health. However, many of these diseases have reemerged in the past several decades because of widening wealth gaps and the unaddressed failing infrastructures across the U.S. For example, although hookworm was thought to have been eradicated in the 1980s, recent studies of rural Alabama show that the parasite survives at a breathtaking scale.6 The immediate symptoms of hookworm

Figure 1. Location of counties with the highest poverty rates in the U.S. – at least 2 standard deviations above the mean – and the associated DOP (Peter J. Hotez, Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases, 2008).

kiningham

suffered from DOP for decades with little acknowledgement, research, or medical diagnoses.10 Even non-profit and philanthropic organizations have overlooked DOP in the U.S., funding projects and research and development (R&D) in the Global South, but providing virtually no support for domestic DOP eradication.11 The organization Families USA reported that in 2007 the National Institute of Health’s funding for DOP comprised less than 1 percent of its total research budget.12 In addition, the current scale of the problem cannot be fully articulated due to a lack of in-depth research and knowledge regarding DOP prevalence within the U.S.13 The U.S. medical field has a blind spot when it comes to DOP, resulting in a lack of timely diagnostic testing and a dearth of interventions.14 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that a “majority of physicians are not even trained to recognize or diagnose neglected tropical diseases affecting poor Americans, much less manage or treat their illness.”15 This is supported by a 2010 CDC survey on physician knowledge surrounding Chagas. The study revealed that almost half of U.S. primary care physicians and a third of cardiologists never considered the disease when treating patients, and approximately half of them weren’t aware of the disease’s symptoms.16 Over 20 varieties of DOP can also often masquerade as more common diseases such as the flu. This lack of medical diagnoses leaves these diseases untreated for years, completely debilitating those infected.17 Combatting DOP is not just a public health concern, but a matter of taking care of U.S. communities who have no viable way to address DOP themselves. Those most vulnerable to DOP are often those living in situations of extreme poverty. Poverty impacts living conditions and can favor the spread of – and exposure to – DOP through inadequate housing conditions and poor infrastructure.18 Further, researchers worry

agora 14

that the effects of DOP related to failing and inadequate infrastructure will only be exacerbated as temperatures rise due to climate change. Warmer temperatures allow for continued breeding of DOP during winter months, exposing vulnerable populations to a longer window for contracting DOP.19 Because those in extreme poverty have very few resources and limited access to health care, it has been nearly impossible to even begin to address sanitation conditions or treatment of infections.20 Addressing DOP is vital to protecting the nation’s health and addressing a neglected population’s struggles in accessing necessary care. Dealing with DOP in impoverished communities would signal an attempt to reduce social disparities of health in the U.S.

SOLVING THE CHALLENGES TO ADDRESS DISEASES OF POVERTY To successfully address DOP within the U.S., we must first understand the issue as a result of two main factors: the lack of private and public knowledge of DOP and failing infrastructures across the South. It is important to both heighten awareness about DOP and increase available funding streams for communities experiencing high levels of DOP to properly address failing and non-existent water and waste management infrastructure. A comprehensive analysis that includes these factors is crucial in determining a successful DOP-reduction policy.

PROPOSED INTERVENTIONS TO ADDRESS DISEASES OF POVERTY While R&D has been an effective tool used to curb the spread of various diseases, it addresses only part of the problem. DOP

are unique in that they affect only those in extreme poverty, making investment in DOP R&D unappealing to private investors and research organizations.21 Health education campaigns have also historically been used to bring widespread awareness to important health issues. However, people affected by DOP often live in rural and impoverished areas and are less connected to the internet and other outlets, so public service announcements and information campaigns are not easily accessible.22, 23, 24

disproportionately affect those in deep poverty is the effects of disinvestment and limited resources on inadequate living conditions, including water and sewage infrastructure. Those in extreme poverty are more likely to live in environments that leave them vulnerable to unsanitary conditions, unsanitary animals, contact with sewage, and inadequate temperature control. These living conditions create habitats where infectious and parasitic diseases can thrive, exposing people to possible infection.26

Lastly, while increased training of medical professionals about DOP can be helpful with diagnosis and treatment, many of those affected by DOP do not engage with the formal health care system, as they often do not have health insurance or access to health clinics.25 The bottom line is that many determinants of DOP lay outside the direct control of the health sector and are laden with social, economic, and environmental influences. Therefore, to reduce both the contraction and health implications of DOP, the most effective and efficient solution is through targeting water and waste infrastructure policy.

In the past several years, the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine partnered with the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise to research the relationship between a lack of infrastructure and exposure to hookworm in Lowndes County, Alabama. Over a third of Lowndes County residents are impoverished, the majority are African American, and many are exposed to unsanitary sewage and water conditions.27 Because an estimated 80 percent of Lowndes County is not covered by any municipal sewage system, many homes are forced to connect their toilets and sinks to straight pipes that dump waste in nearby creeks or backyard pits.28, 29 Baylor and the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise found that two out of five people had hookworm as a result of weakened or non-existent infrastructure that nurtured breeding conditions.30

One of the most striking reasons DOP

The bottom line is that many determinants of DOP lay outside the direct control of the health sector and are laden with social, economic, and environmental influences. Therefore, to reduce both the contraction and health implications of DOP, the most effective and efficient solution is through targeting water and waste infrastructure policy.â&#x20AC;?

Figure 2. A home with a failing septic system in Lowndes County, Alabama (Anna Leah, Huffington Post, 2018).

kiningham

An effective infrastructure policy should focus on improving the disease-promoting environments and failing water and waste infrastructures in which atrisk individuals live.” An effective infrastructure policy should focus on improving the disease-promoting environments and failing water and waste infrastructures in which at-risk individuals live. More specifically, a multi-level infrastructure policy solution focused on primary prevention in rural, low-income communities is best suited to directly address the source of DOP’s prevalence in the U.S. Fixing infrastructure in highrisk areas can improve the lives of whole communities and pave the way to fixing dilapidated infrastructure across the U.S. Infrastructure policy solutions must be tailored to directly address environments in which DOP thrive. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), around 20 percent of U.S. households use onsite septic systems. In Alabama, over 800,000 private septic systems are not hooked up to municipal piping; 200,000 (25 percent) of those systems are failing.31 Such infrastructure failures are not confined to Alabama; they plague rural communities across the country.

INSUFFICIENT FUNDS AT LOCAL LEVELS Current policies that attempt to address DOP and failing water and waste management systems are severely underfunded, are disjointed, or lack the specificity and focus needed to repair the infrastructure of impoverished rural communities facing DOP. Throughout

agora 14

the country, there are thousands of communities with failing infrastructure that need assistance but have no avenues to fund expensive infrastructure projects. For example, in Lowndes County, Alabama, the median household income in 2018 fell below $28,000, while a single septic tank system can cost up to $10,000.32 With over 200,000 failing septic systems in Alabama alone, to fix each individual tank across the country would cost over $4 billion – almost eight percent of the entire federal budget.33 Small water infrastructure systems with fewer users often experience higher charges and fees, leading to reduced compliance and poor management in communities that cannot afford these higher prices. The EPA estimated that as of 2012, rural communities needed $68 billion in funding for systems to meet water quality standards. Of that, small communities with populations of under 10,000 made up around $33 billion of funding needs – primarily for improved wastewater treatment and sewer overflows.34 It is clear that small rural communities and states cannot handle these infrastructure issues alone; there must be large-scale federal assistance to better address environments where DOP thrive. Currently, the EPA and Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversee various federal programs designed to tackle failing water and waste management systems. However, the EPA and USDA programs are deeply under-resourced and underfunded. The EPA’s funding for the programs that assist rural localities is now 40 percent below the 2001 level. This allocated funding is far below the projected investment needs, estimated to be around $600 billion.35 In addition, at the end of 2007, the “USDA reported a $2.4 billion backlog of requests for 928 water and wastewater projects for its grant and loan programs.”36 While there are well-funded programs that may help reduce the environments DOP need to thrive, such as the Clean Water

Act (CWA), they are not uniquely tailored to rural infrastructure needs. The CWA provides funds for both rural and nonrural communities, forcing all localities to compete for funds. This competitive situation, paired with persistently low levels of funding, leaves many small, impoverished communities at a disadvantage.37 The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administers the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which provides funds for a broad range of housing needs including water and waste disposal projects. Because of this, water and waste disposal funding compete with other housing needs. Thus, the CDBG puts only 10 to 20 percent of its funds towards water and waste management infrastructure.38 Further, only 30 percent of CDBG funds are available for rural localities. The 2018 reauthorization of the Farm Bill included the Rural Septic Tank Act in the House of Representatives and the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development Act in the Senate.39 This legislation aims to expand USDAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grant program to provide grants of up to $15,000 to nonprofits that assist rural households with installing or maintaining individually owned decentralized wastewater systems in hopes of addressing failing rural sewage systems across the South.40 While this is a crucial step in managing the spread of DOP, it falls short by providing funds only to nonprofits and not directly to local governments or individuals to address wastewater infrastructure concerns. In rural communities, locals are often the ones who know community needs best. In such isolated areas, nonprofits may not be abundant or may not be the best-suited entities to efficiently and successfully identify and address the most pressing wastewater issues. There must be more avenues through which local communities and governments can directly access funds to address DOP.

TARGETED INFRASTRUCTURE POLICIES FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES There remains a great need for water and waste infrastructure funding in rural communities across the country. Currently, there is no comprehensive infrastructure policy that efficiently and effectively engages all levels of government to address DOP in extremely impoverished rural communities. The existing fragmented and unspecific policies, although attempting to ease financial burdens on states and localities trying to resolve water and waste disposal problems, do not directly identify or address the particular promoters of DOP plaguing rural communities across the U.S. experiencing extreme poverty. There is a dire need for an intricate policy solution that is devoted to reducing DOP in rural U.S.

A sincere DOP-reducing program will acknowledge the inequity driving DOP and ultimately attempt to redistribute funds to improve living environments for those in extreme poverty.â&#x20AC;? A DOP infrastructure policy must be publicly financed. DOP thrive in situations in which individuals cannot pay for any amount of intervention. Such economic situations provide no incentives or returns for private funders or partners to meaningfully invest in local infrastructure, leaving it up to the government to bear the cost and burden of resolving the poverty-induced public health crisis.41 To provide enough funds to cover a complex DOP infrastructure plan, the

kiningham

federal government must raise additional revenues. Whatever the means for garnering the project funds, they should not negatively impact low-income individuals. A sincere DOP-reducing program will acknowledge the inequity driving DOP and ultimately attempt to redistribute funds to improve living environments for those in extreme poverty.

FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL COOPERATION To address both current and future cases of DOP, I propose an infrastructure policy plan tailored to the waste and water infrastructure needs of rural, low-income communities. This policy plan would connect federal, state, and local governments through designated financing structures, oversight roles, and implementation strategies that incorporate community-centered solutions. Such a policy solution would foster the strengths of federalism through playing to each level of governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s institutional scope and abilities, share responsibility, and increase participation to ensure adequate funding and implementation. The federal government is best situated to deliver and allocate funding to ensure a comprehensive and uniform DOP policy plan across state and regional jurisdictions. Therefore, under this policy solution, the federal government would provide grants to state governments and set guidelines for spending. A majority of funding must be explicitly allocated to improve the water and waste infrastructure of communities with current cases of DOP. The rest should be distributed to infrastructure improvement projects that will reduce future risk of DOP from the impending impact of climate change and general infrastructure concerns. Grant funds provided to states should go to low-density, rural communities that have median incomes at or below the national poverty level. All funding must be

agora 14

given to communities with evidence of high DOP concerns. The federal government should also oversee and enforce the distribution of funds to ensure that states are equitably and adequately addressing the infrastructure needs of communities. States are uniquely situated as intermediaries between federal funds and the communities in need. A stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role is to dispense funds to rural communities with recorded cases of DOP that meet the aforementioned grant criteria. The other portion of funds must be reserved for preventative infrastructure projects. To ensure that the program successfully combats future cases, communities at a high risk of DOP with lower median incomes and higher minority populations must be prioritized to receive funding. States should be permitted to allocate funds to nonrural communities if there is evidence that those communities have infrastructure concerns that correlate with potential exposure to DOP. States also play a central role in collaborating with underfunded localities to create action plans to address infrastructure concerns.42 Local governments are at the front line of infrastructure improvements and should be responsible for the collection, use, and application of state-appropriated funds. Qualifying municipalities should be given some discretion on how to improve or prevent unsanitary infrastructure conditions in their communities. Discretion on infrastructure improvements allows for innovation in addressing DOP within the framework of the grant program. Additionally, because the most vulnerable populations are also often underrepresented, each qualifying locality should be required to hold public forums or meetings or conduct surveys that directly engage underrepresented populations within the community to ensure the equitable use of funds. Managing unsanitary and desolate infrastructure requires collaboration

between all levels of government. Each community has different geographical, social, and economic barriers that intersect to determine risk of DOP contamination, making a blanket policy approach ineffective. Instead, a successful infrastructure plan requires the incorporation and collaboration of each level of government to respond to the infrastructure needs of communities across the country.43

CONCLUSION DOP are a hidden health risk that plagues rural communities in extreme poverty. To immediately combat the rising concern of DOP within the U.S., a policy plan that addresses failing infrastructures in impoverished rural communities must be introduced. Medical and public health

interventions are important. However, because DOP are concentrated in communities of extreme poverty, such interventions are very difficult to efficiently and effectively implement in a manner that prevents and treats DOP for those most in need. Current water and waste infrastructure policies attempt to address failing systems but lack the specificity and direct allocation of funds to rural and impoverished communities where DOP thrive. Successful policy will seek to combat current cases as well as prevent future risk of contamination that is bound to increase due to the widespread lack of infrastructure maintenance and the impending effects of climate change. It is time to put forth a solution that assists the most vulnerable populations and seeks to end the cycle of poverty promoted by crippling diseases across the U.S.

about the author Heather Kiningham is a dual Master of Social Work and Master of Public Policy candidate at the University of Michigan. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from American University in Washington, D.C. in 2015. After graduation, Heather worked as an international trade paralegal before moving back to her hometown near Ann Arbor. She is interested in social and health policies and how macro social work can be utilized in policy interventions to reduce health inequities.

kiningham

endnotes 1. Phineas Rueckert, “Millions of Poor Americans Are Contracting These ‘Diseases of Poverty’ - But Can’t Afford Pills to Cure Them,” Global Citizen, December 11, 2017, https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/hookwormdrug-prices-poverty-alabama/. 2. Peter J. Hotez, “Neglected Infections of Poverty in the United States of America,” Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases 2, no. 6, (2008): 1, doi: 10.1371/ journal.pntd.0000256. 3. Hotez, “Neglected Infections of Poverty,” 1-3. 4. Peter J. Hotez, “Tropical Diseases: The New Plague of Poverty,” The New York Times, August 18, 2012, https:// www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/tropicaldiseases-the-new-plague-of-poverty.html. 5. Melinda Burns, “America’s Hidden Diseases,” Pacific Standard, November 6, 2010, https://psmag.com/socialjustice/americas-hidden-diseases-25138. 6. Megan L. McKenna, Shannon McAtee, Patricia E. Bryan, Rebecca Jeun, Tabitha Ward, Jacob Kraus, Maria E. Bottazzi, Peter J. Hotez, Catherine C. Flowers, and Rojelio Mejia, “Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama,” The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 97, no. 5, (2017): 1625, https://doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.17-0396. 7. Tegan Hedley, “These ‘Diseases of Poverty’ Are Making a Comeback in Modern America,” VT, January 3, 2018, https://vt.co/news/us/diseases-poverty-makingcomeback-modern-america/.

19. Sian Griffiths and Xiao-Nong Zhou, “Why Research Infectious Diseases of Poverty?” Global Report for Research on Infectious Diseases of Poverty (Geneva, Switzerland: WHO Document Production Services, 2012), 22. 20. Brett Walton, “UN Expert Connects U.S. Water and Sanitation Struggles to Poverty,” Circleofblue.org, Circle of Blue, December 15, 2017, https://www.circleofblue. org/2017/world/un-expert-connects-u-s-water-sanitationstruggles-poverty/. 21. Lindsey Gilpin, “These Lessons from Rural Africa Could Help Eradicate Poverty-Related Tropical Diseases in the U.S. South,” Southerly Mag, August 30, 2018, https://southerlymag.org/2018/08/30/if-the-u-s-wantsto-eradicate-poverty-related-diseases-it-could-learnlessons-from-nigeria/. 22. Hotez, “Tropical Diseases.” 23. Michael J.R. Martin, “Rural and Lower-Income Counties Lag Nation in Internet Subscription,” United States Census Bureau, December 6, 2018, https://www. census.gov/library/stories/2018/12/rural-and-lowerincome-counties-lag-nation-internet-subscription.html. 24. Griffiths and Zhou, “Why Research Infectious Diseases of Poverty?”, 28. 25. Hedley, “These ‘Diseases of Poverty’ Are Making a Comeback in Modern America.”

8. Anna Rees, “Diseases and the Links to Poverty,” RESET, last modified January 2015, https://en.reset.org/ knowledge/diseases-and-links-poverty.

26. Praise, Hotez, and Slutsker, “Neglected Parasitic Infections in the United States: Needs and Opportunities,” 783–785.

9. Burns, “America’s Hidden Diseases.”

27. Pilkington, “Hookworm, A Disease of Extreme Poverty.”

10. Peter J Hotez, “America’s ‘New’ Diseases of Poverty,” The Huffington Post, January 8, 2014, https://www.huffpost. com/entry/americas-new-diseases-of-poverty_b_4557630. 11. Ed Pilkington, “Hookworm, A Disease of Extreme Poverty, Is Thriving in the US South. Why?” The Guardian, September 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2017/sep/05/hookworm-lowndes-county-alabamawater-waste-treatment-poverty. 12. Burns, “America’s Hidden Diseases.” 13. Monica E. Praise, Peter J. Hotez, Laurence Slutsker, “Neglected Parasitic Infections in the United States: Needs and Opportunities,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 90, no. 5 (2014): 783–785, doi: https:// doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.13-0727. 14. Praise, Hotez, and Slutsker, “Neglected Parasitic Infections,” 783-785. 15. Hotez, “America’s ‘New’ Diseases of Poverty.” 16. Hotez, “America’s ‘New’ Diseases of Poverty.” 17. Marissa Fessenden, “Why Infectious Tropical Diseases Are Returning to America,” Smithsonian Magazine, August 14, 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ smart-news/infectious-tropical-diseases-are-returningamerica-180956269/. 18. World Health Organization, Global Report for Research

on Infectious Diseases of Poverty (Geneva, Switzerland: WHO Document Production Services, 2012), 12.

agora 14

28. Pilkington, “Hookworm, A Disease of Extreme Poverty.” 29. Brett Walton, “Diseases of Poverty Identified in Alabama County Burdened by Poor Sanitation,” Circleofblue.org, Circle of Blue, September 19, 2017, https://www.circleofblue.org/2017/world/diseasespoverty-identified-alabama-county-burdened-poorsanitation/. 30. Walton, “Diseases of Poverty Identified in Alabama County.” 31. Lindsey Gilpin, “The Rural South’s Invisible Public Health Crisis,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 6, 2018, https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/ local/alabama/2018/07/06/story-first-series-wayscommunities-addressing-rise-poverty-related-tropicaldiseases-poor-sewage/754311002/. 32. Melissa Brown, “In the Black Belt, a Template for Fixing Failing Sewage Infrastructure,” Southerly Mag, July 25, 2018, https://solutionsu.solutionsjournalism.org/ stories/in-the-black-belt-a-template-for-fixing-failingsewage-infrastructure. 33. Sarah Jones and Emily Atkin, “The Water Stinks.’ For Many Rural Americans the Only Choice Is Toxic,” Mother Jones, February 15, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/

environment/2018/02/the-water-stinks-for-many-ruralamericans-the-only-choice-is-toxic/. 34. Congressional Research Service, Rural Water Supply and Sewer Systems: Background Information, February 29, 2016, https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-64.html. 35. Chye-Ching Huang and Roderick Taylor, “Any Federal Infrastructure Package Should Boost Investment in Low-income Communities,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 28, 2019, https://www.cbpp.org/research/ federal-budget/any-federal-infrastructure-packageshould-boost-investment-in-low-income. 36. Congressional Research Service, Rural Water Supply and Sewer Systems. 37. Congressional Research Service, Rural Water Supply and Sewer Systems. 38. Congressional Research Service, Rural Water Supply and Sewer Systems. 39. Office of Rep. Terri Sewell, Rural Septic Tank Access Act Passes in Farm Bill Vote, December 12, 2018. 40. “Senator Jones Applauds Passage of ‘Farm Bill’ that Protects Alabama Priorities,” Opelika Observer, July 5, 2018, https://opelikaobserver.com/senator-jonesapplauds-passage-of-farm-bill-that-protects-alabamapriorities/. 41. Huang and Taylor, “Any Federal Infrastructure Package Should Boost Investment in Low-income Communities.” 42. Brown, “In the Black Belt, a Template for Fixing Failing Sewage Infrastructure.” 43. Moritz Buehner, “3 Alternative Ideas for Waste Management in Developing Countries,” iPoint Systems Blog, July 2, 2018, https://www.ipoint-systems.com/ blog/3-alternative-ideas-for-waste-management-indeveloping-countries/.

kiningham

Photographer: Andriana S. Miljanic Location: Antigua, Guatemala

Good Neighbors or Unwelcome Guests?

Examining the Impact of Short-Term Rentals on Local Housing Markets KATE BELL Master of Public Policy 2020

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, short-term rentals have proliferated in local housing markets across the United States. The rising popularity of this home-sharing model has caused concerns about the impacts these rentals have on local rent prices and housing supply. Policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels have introduced a host of regulatory measures to curb adverse impacts and restore balance to the market, maintain housing affordability across tenure groups, and ensure compliance with state and local law. However, short-term rentals still manage to strain local housing markets with each passing year. Rather than enacting blanket legislation, policymakers should adopt comprehensive planning strategies focused on both short-term rentals and other contributors to housing mismatches perpetuated by this industry, tailored to meet the needs of their specific communities.

agora 14

he proliferation of short-term rentals (STRs) in housing markets across the country has been staggering over the past decade. While the home-sharing model is touted as having benefits such as providing hosts with extra income to cover mortgage payments and offering guests more authentic experiences while traveling, short-term rentals also have adverse impacts on local rent prices and housing supply. As short-term rental platforms gain popularity, policymakers have introduced a variety of regulations to alleviate these impacts and restore balance to the market, maintain affordability for renters and homeowners alike, and ensure compliance with state and local law. Yet even with these measures in place, short-term rentals continue to raise housing policy concerns. This piece begins with a broad overview of the short-term rental model, major market players, and a brief history of the industry’s recent proliferation in the United States. The issue scoping section will lay out some of the benefits provided by STRs and some of the issues posed by them, such as negative neighborhood externalities, foregone government revenue, and impacts on the local housing market supply. The literature review provides estimates of the impact of short-term rentals across multiple housing market metrics and identifies gaps in which further study is needed. The third section showcases various government interventions to temper the impact of short-term rentals on their respective housing markets and evaluates whether they are effective and can be adapted to meet the needs of other jurisdictions. The piece concludes by determining that further comprehensive policy interventions tailored at the state and local levels to meet the unique needs of individual housing markets, such as zoning reform and ordinances regulating STRs, are needed to counteract the housing mismatches and affordability concerns perpetuated by this industry.

ISSUE SCOPING Long-standing assumptions about renter demand and demographics are being challenged by the proliferation of a new, e-commerce-focused housing business model sweeping the country: short-term rentals. The permissible length of stay in STRs varies from property to property, and residents are typically charged on a nightly or weekly basis to live in pre-furnished rooms or entire units. Legal definitions of what constitute STRs vary by location; however, the most common definition refers to a stay of 30 or fewer consecutive days.1 With the advent of the sharing economy – a form of peer-to-peer global exchange conducted through online platforms directly connecting buyers with sellers – renting residential property on a short-term basis has become more ubiquitous in recent years.2 Companies like Airbnb, VRBO, HomeAway, and FlipKey provide homesharing platforms where homeowners can list their properties to prospective tenants, collecting service or processing fees in exchange for aggregating properties and connecting homeowners and guests.3 These services are accessible worldwide. As of 2017, Airbnb alone boasted over four million listings across 191 countries – more listings than the next five largest hotel brands combined.4 The rapid proliferation of STR listings is indicative of the model’s popularity among consumers. STRs typically offer rates that are cheaper than many nightly hotel rates, even when guests rent out a full housing unit. In 2013, users who reserved a fullunit listing on Airbnb saved on average 20 percent compared to booking a hotel room for the same amount of time; those who rented a single bedroom saved just under 50 percent.5 Additionally, home-sharing fills a niche in the travel market that is currently underserved by the traditional hotel industry. STR units offer fully furnished accommodations in a home-like setting across geospatial areas, from the

Bell

heart of a downtown district to quaint, rural farmlands. In fact, in many cities, over 70 percent of listed Airbnb properties currently sit outside of hotel districts.6 Bookings on platforms like Airbnb generate an average of $41 in customer savings per night in the United States relative to hotel stays.7

On a more granular level, residents living near STRs express concern about how these units and their guests impact the neighborhood, citing the amount of noise and trash produced by visitors that have no stake in keeping the area clean or quiet for more permanent residents.13

Consumers are not the only economic beneficiaries of STRs. Additional nightly and weekly rentable housing units accrue tourism dollars not captured by the traditional lodging industry. For example, in San Diego, California, STRs were estimated to add over $480 million to the area’s economy in 2017 and were linked to the creation of roughly 3,000 jobs serving these guests.8 Additionally, several platforms advertise their services to help homeowners “make ends meet” by renting out unoccupied rooms or full units to help with expenses such as mortgage payments or to augment income.9 Even for homeowners with multiple properties who are not struggling to keep up with such payments, the STR model offers an opportunity to rent out vacation abodes or second homes at the owner’s convenience. This model allows homeowners at various income levels to turn a profit by ensuring that their unused rooms or units are occupied, even for just one night.

A final critique of the STR industry directly relates to the mismatch between local housing supply and demand. Opponents assert that STRs substantially reduce local housing supply and are responsible for raising overall housing prices. Homeowners who choose to convert rental properties into more profitable STRs contribute to displacement as long-term renters cannot keep up with the corresponding housing costs. Such strains on the local housing supply, coupled with rising prices, escalate the affordable housing crisis facing communities across the country.

These benefits do not exempt the STR industry from criticism. The STR market has led traditional hotels to slash their nightly rates to remain competitive, yielding lower profits and spurring calls from lobbying groups like the American Hotel and Lodging Association for stiffer regulations on STR platforms and listings.10, 11 Local government leaders also lambast aspects of the industry that evade revenue collection, as STR guests do not tend to pay the average 15 percent accommodation tax rate levied on tourists who stay in traditional hotels or motels. As the informal lodging sector gains more popularity, this foregone revenue is likely to continue growing and put a greater strain on municipalities’ fiscal outlooks.12

agora 14

Opponents assert that STRs substantially reduce local housing supply and are responsible for raising overall housing prices.” Though the proliferation of STRs is a nationwide phenomenon, local housing markets are unique and thus face various and differing challenges, making these issues ones of local policy concern. The remainder of this piece will focus on how the presence of STRs impacts local housing supply and affordability by reducing the number of units in an area’s long-term rental stock and increasing housing prices within individual housing markets.

LITERATURE REVIEW As the short-term rental industry continues to expand and anecdotal evidence of the

industry’s effects on consumer behavior grows, researchers and policymakers are urgently trying to better understand homesharing’s full effects. While empirical research is limited on the specific effects of STRs, some researchers have developed models illustrating how internet-based sharing platforms alter how suppliers and consumers calculate the benefits they receive for using these products or services. The models suggest that in a world where goods can be shared, consumers’ incentives to own a good change based on expected usage.14 For some people who own a given good, the sharing marketplace offers the possibility of maintaining ownership of that good while renting it at their leisure instead of owning it for personal use alone.15 Others who do not want to own a good in the absence of a sharing platform will choose to own it specifically to enter the sharing marketplace.16 These competing effects make the net impact on demand difficult to estimate. While these models provide some insight into how the existence of STRs and sharing platforms may alter consumer behavior in the housing market, homesharing has distinct market effects compared to other shared goods. Prospective guests searching for a place to stay on a nightly or weekly basis on STR platforms usually have permanent housing. Therefore, the act of renting one of these units for a short period of time does not affect a guest’s desire for long-term housing. These two markets remain spatially distinct from one another for consumers staying in STRs.17 Thus, the effects of home-sharing on a local housing market stem from the local market’s housing supply rather than the demand from the sharing market’s users. Yet some location-specific studies indicate that the prevalence of STRs drain the local supply of affordable housing. One such examination in Los Angeles found two market distortion mechanisms at play: first, an upward pressure on rents due to the conversion of resident-occupied units to year-round

home-shares; and second, the ‘hotelization’ of neighborhoods as property owners are incentivized to rent units through homesharing platforms rather than to long-term city residents.18 A driving force of this shift towards hotelization is the ability to charge a rate that is both cheaper than a standard hotel stay and more expensive than an area’s going rent. Findings suggest that commercially minded STR owners are jumping on this trend. In Boston, for example, 45 percent of all revenue generated from listings on Airbnb are earned by just 12 percent of STR owners.19 This disproportionate revenue generation indicates that in some markets, STRs are seen as investments rather than their advertised use as supplemental income to small-scale homeowners.

In Boston, for example, 45 percent of all revenue generated from listings on Airbnb are earned by just 12 percent of STR owners.”19 To assess whether STR units cause rents to increase, researchers used housing and rental price indices from the online real estate database Zillow and a national sample of Airbnb unit listings. The findings indicate that short-term rentals have a positive impact on the prices paid by two housing tenure groups: homeowners and renters; on average, a 1 percent increase in a market’s STR listings results in a 0.018 percent increase in rents and a 0.026 percent increase in home prices.20 Recent work focused specifically at the city level in Boston, Massachusetts used a hedonic estimation approach – a method to estimate the value of a good to consumers by assessing the values of each of a good’s component parts – with individual

Bell

rental listings and a full web scrape of all Airbnb listings in the city proper over a six-month timeframe. The study reached similar conclusions, with a one standard deviation increase in short-term rental usage increasing Boston’s rent prices by 0.4 percent.21 However, the extent of the industry’s effects on housing supply and affordability are not constant across all markets. Smaller cities and towns, for example, tend to have fewer long-term rental housing units available, which leads to intensified impacts. A study of 237 municipalities with populations below 100,000 in Oregon found that in 16 cities, STRs make up over 5 percent of the housing stock; among the home-sharing stock for all of the towns sampled, 38 percent of listings are full units used by short-term guests for more than 30 days per year.22 These STRs could place upward pressure on rents, but they could also fulfill an unmet need by providing temporary accommodations in places without traditional hotels. Little theoretical and empirical work has been done to analyze how the home-sharing economy impacts social welfare. More research needs to be done to answer key questions regarding the demographics of people both positively and negatively affected by the proliferation of STRs. Evidence related to which groups are more likely to experience displacement due to rising housing costs or are able to remain in their homes in quickly appreciating markets by renting spare rooms on these home-sharing platforms will be critical information for policymakers as they fashion solutions for their respective housing markets.

REGULATORY EFFICACY OF EXISTING GOVERNMENT INTERVENTIONS Most regulatory interventions of the shortterm rental industry have been concentrated at the state and local levels. However,

agora 14

as tensions between traditional lodging providers, housing advocacy groups, and home-sharing platforms mount, the battle is beginning to shift to the halls of Congress. In September 2019, a bipartisan group of House members introduced the Protecting Local Authorities and Neighborhoods Act (H.R. 4232), a bill that would make homesharing platforms liable for publishing any listings that violate state or local laws.23 The legislation would strip online STR platforms of their existing legal immunity over content posted by third-party actors by excluding home-sharing sites from the protections granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields website owners from being held liable for content posted by outside users. Though the bill has stalled as of the time of this publication, the vigor of the underlying debate has not subsided. Fair housing advocates and hotel lobbyists are seeking tougher federal enforcement to hold homesharing sites accountable for profiting off illegal listings that drive up housing costs. Meanwhile, STR companies insist that federal action would disrupt the progress and collaboration between these platforms and state and local governments.24 State-level regulation is more prevalent, though the extent of restrictions varies widely across states. One major concern for states is the collection of lodging, sales, and STR income taxes. The New York state Attorney General’s Office found that STR hosts in New York City owed upwards of $33 million in unpaid occupancy taxes from 2010 to 2014 alone.25 This foregone sum has spearheaded state lawmakers to explore new approaches to facilitate and enforce proper tax filing and reporting to capture this revenue. Existing collection methods also vary across the country. As of 2018, 25 states mandate that short-term rental owners collect sales tax, and 14 states place the statutory burden on the home-sharing platforms facilitating each booking.26 Airbnb has even entered into voluntary agreements with state, county, and municipal tax

agencies in almost every state (with the exceptions of Delaware, Georgia, and Hawaii) to collect and remit sales and occupancy taxes on behalf of their hosts. Such agreements have come under scrutiny for their lack of transparency. Reports of state agencies ceding control of the payment and audit process to homesharing platforms support claims that the agreements do not go far enough to hold STR companies accountable and actively undermine compliance with state tax and regulatory laws.27 For example, some states, like Vermont, have laws that prohibit holding home-sharing sites responsible for remitting taxes since the platforms do not directly host financial transactions.28 It is also important to note that these collected taxes do not directly address housing supply and affordability issues; rather, lodging taxes generally support tourism-promotion activities. Without making changes to how these funds are distributed, solidifying the tax remittance structures for short-term rentals is unlikely to yield progress in preserving affordable housing. The most intensive regulations undertaken at the state level are those restricting the prevalence of STRs in a given housing market. Many such regulations limit the number of units property owners are allowed to rent out for 30 consecutive days or less. In New York, for instance, apartment buildings with three or more units are not authorized for STR use unless the owner or permanent tenant is also present during the stay.29 While this type of regulation comes closest to preserving units for long-term tenants and maintaining more affordable rent prices, ensuring compliance is difficult. The volume of listings, scant resources allocated by states to enforce compliance, and insufficient communication with local municipal organizations hinder the efficacy of these state regulatory measures. The final front for government regulation is at the local level. Yet, as with state efforts, these regulations and their effectiveness

vary widely. A few states have hindered the ability of local governments to take any action by outrightly prohibiting any sort of ban on STRs, though most states leave regulation up to local authorities. Several cities have adopted restrictions regarding the number and type of units available to be rented via home-sharing platforms. These restrictions range from de facto prohibition, as in Oakland, California, to a generally indiscriminate approach allowing for all kinds of STRs year-round, as in Columbus, Ohio.30 Other cities, like Nashville, Tennessee, have legislated a more residence-oriented approach, tightly restricting the number of STRs allowed for units where the owner is not the primary resident.31 New Orleans, Louisiana, on the other hand, places a greater focus on the presence of hosts, capping the number of days where a unit can be rented without the host on-site at 90 days per year.32 Illustrating the flexibility municipalities have in fashioning regulations to fit their unique housing market needs, some cities have installed hybrid regulation models that limit the number of STRs by type only in specifically designated zoning districts. For many cities with these regulations on the books, STR units must also go through a municipal permitting process that ensures the units are code compliant. Measuring the efficacy of these various regulatory structures in preserving affordable housing is difficult. Some estimates report that over 15 percent of units listed on home-sharing platforms were likely removed from the long-term rental market for the express purpose of serving as full-time short-term rentals in certain markets.33 However, these estimates should be considered with caution. The obfuscation of rental listing data by prominent short-term rental companies like Airbnb render data collection cumbersome and available information inaccurate. Other reports estimating STR impacts in cities like New York have listing numbers differing by margins upwards of 5,000.34

Bell

The precise impact of siphoning units off the long-term market and into for-profit STR units is difficult to pin down given the obstacles to accurate data collection. More comprehensive data-gathering and enforcement provisions are needed to accurately estimate how effective these strategies have been over time. Further complicating matters for local jurisdictions is the conflicting desire to drum up local tourism and the need to maintain a robust, affordable housing stock for the marketâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s renters. As tourism grows in areas with limited hotel capacity, municipal officials are tasked with weighing the trade-offs between imposing tighter regulations on a popular, cheaper alternative to traditional lodging facilities and discouraging benefits to the local economy from the influx of tourists wishing to stay in STRs. These cost-benefit calculations may differ drastically from city to city and town to town based on the unique composition of their respective housing markets and their attractiveness to tourists. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all strategy is not conducive to tackling the issues presented by STRs in local housing markets.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS The home-sharing model has exploded across the United States, and all levels of government are paying attention to how short-term rentals affect communitiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; housing markets. While the impacts these units have on increasing rent prices and restricting the local housing supply for long-term residents are difficult to gauge and vary by location, pressure is nonetheless mounting on government agencies to act. The next step for policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels is to find ways to strike a balance between preserving affordable rental housing and facilitating tourism and smallscale entrepreneurship for single-unit

agora 14

short-term rental hosts. To balance these competing interests, policymakers should introduce a more comprehensive regulatory framework with proactive measures to tackle the many issues presented by the proliferation of STRs. At the local level, municipalities should enact regulations that are responsive to the needs of their given communities. As housing markets are dynamic and change quickly over time and even across neighborhoods, cities and towns should tailor their respective regulations by zoning rather than blanket city-wide standards. The standards for which units can be considered STRs should be determined at this granular level. Zoning reform offers the type of flexibility required across municipalities with unique housing market needs. For areas with tight or high-volume and competitive housing markets, existing zoning could be used as a basis to enact stricter measures such as barring STRs in all single-family residential districts or lowdensity multi-family districts. This could contain the proliferation of these units to more tourist-heavy areas with established hotels and motels instead of primary residential neighborhoods and could reduce negative neighborhood externalities. At the same time, this type of reform could place these single-family or low-density multi-family units back on the market for long-term renters or buyers, potentially resulting in a more established community of neighbors rather than a constant stream of short-term guests. Yet this policy is not without downsides. Policymakers should be sure to consider potential negative effects of these reforms on long-term renters in high-density, mixed-use areas who might see their already high rent prices increase beyond their means, pushing these renters out of their homes. In communities without these tight housing markets or in smaller communities, however, such sweeping changes would be unnecessary and ineffective. Many of these areas tend

not to have large multi-family complexes; restricting STRs to these zones would effectively prohibit the industry altogether. A more fitting approach would be to have each municipality revisit its zoning codes and revise them in a manner that reflects specific community demands. For many cities, zoning codes have not been updated in years and fail to reflect how market disruptions like STRs affect housing patterns. However, these alterations often cannot be implemented quickly. Changes to zoning codes typically require city governments to pass legislation after extensive public hearings and comment periods and are often met with intense community debate. Therefore, zoning reform should be viewed as a long-term planning tool to address the changing housing marketplace due to STRs rather than a quick fix to eliminate or reduce current STRinduced pressures on the market. In addition to zoning reforms, general codes and ordinances can be established to directly regulate the STR industry within a municipality’s boundaries. Once again, these can and should be tailored to each unique housing market. In areas with seasonal residential fluctuations – like popular vacation destinations such as Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; or Vail, Colorado – restrictions on the amount of time properties may be used as full-unit STRs might make more sense rather than a hard cap on the number of STR properties allowed per owner. A hard unit cap could hamper the robust tourism industries that are the backbones of these local economies; making otherwise vacant properties unavailable for use for short-term visitors could reduce potential tourism revenue with little benefit for the local, longer-term rental market. A time limit to capture the peak tourist season while preventing year-round de facto hotels from filling the rental market would do well to support these areas’ major industries without inflating rental prices year-round.

For year-round markets with tight housing capacity, a focus on capping the number of STR properties allowed per owner would be more effective. Cities could adopt ordinances that establish ownership caps ranging from the strictest one unit per owner to a more lenient two- or threeunit limit. Such restrictions would enable multi-property owners to take part in the STR market while simultaneously behooving these owners to lease their remaining units to longer-term occupants. City officials should consider the equity implications of these local cap laws. Property owners facing these caps may choose to renovate their STR units or use the homes they own in more desirable neighborhoods for homesharing, while not providing the same care to units outside of high-demand areas. To combat this, policymakers should consider incorporating equity standards and measurements into any ordinances pertaining to STR restrictions. Again, such policies should be tailored to the specific demands of each housing market and be updated over time. Localities also need to consider more tangential approaches to resolving the housing mismatch perpetuated by shortterm rentals. As hotel space is limited and costlier than STRs, municipalities should consider revising zoning statutes or instituting tax breaks for additional hotel construction within their city limits. This will enhance competition in the local hotel market and drive hotel rates and short-term rental demand down. Additionally, local and state governments should consider diverting the revenues generated from the lodging taxes remitted on short-term rental stays from tourism promotion. To directly address the perceived strain on affordable housing, these funds could instead be used solely for affordable housing preservation and development. The efficacy of the suggestions above is contingent upon consistent and reliable enforcement. Revising the zoning code

Bell

or enacting regulations at the local level is effective only if cities and towns know the location and the number of STRs and who owns them. A simple yet resourceintensive way to document and monitor STRs would be to create a registry housed within a city department familiar with code enforcement. Property owners would have to receive approval from the city to operate the STR in accordance with local laws and zoning regulations. The registration and enforcement program can be funded partially through application and registration fees as well as through taxes levied from each STR stay. An evaluation, reporting, and penalty protocol would need to act in concert with this registration system. One potential reporting mechanism would be to create a complaint hotline housed within the STR enforcement division that neighbors can access via telephone, mobile app, or website to report STR abuse or illegal home-sharing units. Reporting such units is not enough, however; successful monitoring and enforcement requires real consequences to prevent future abuse of the system. City officials should consider adopting steep fines â&#x20AC;&#x201C; perhaps increasing on a step rate schedule for repeat offenders â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to disincentivize property owners from forgoing proper registration channels. Such penalties and fees would need to be higher than the potential revenues the property owners would receive from using these units as STRs to reduce the likelihood that these operators would view such fines as a cost of

doing business. These enforcement and data-gathering proposals are both time- and cost-intensive and would likely be beyond the capabilities of individual municipalities. Therefore, enforcement and data gathering should be a joint effort between state and local governments. Higher levels of government can provide resources to properly enforce provisions set forth by municipalities; local governments can provide a more accurate read of the conditions on the ground, such as which neighborhoods are facing rapidly appreciating housing costs. Enacting complementary and cooperative legislation at both state and local levels that mandates full transparency of owner and property data for units listed on home-sharing sites is likewise critical for proper enforcement. These recommendations serve as a starting point as officials consider ways in which to temper the adverse impacts on local housing markets, such as upward pressures on rents and neighborhood hotelization, introduced by this new home-sharing model. By pursuing a comprehensive regulatory strategy as described above using both zoning and more general regulatory mechanisms, leaders can help preserve local housing ecosystems across the country and ensure that affordability remains feasible for more residents without sacrificing the economic benefits of homesharing for property owners and guests alike.

about the author Kate Bell is a second-year Master of Public Policy candidate at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy focusing on local, state, and urban policy. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Politics at Mount Holyoke College in 2015. Prior to attending the Ford School, Kate served the people of Boston, Massachusetts as a Neighborhood Liaison for City Councilor Josh Zakim.

agora 14

endnotes 1. Dayne Lee, “How Airbnb Short-Term Rentals Exacerbate Los Angeles’s Affordable Housing Crisis: Analysis and Policy Recommendations,” Harvard Law and Policy Review 10 no. 229 (2016): 232. 2. Marla Nelson and Renia Ehrenfeucht, “The Sharing Economy and the Ongoing Dilemma of Planning for Informality,” Planning Theory and Practice 20 no. 2 (2019): 267. 3. “Pricing and Fees,” Airbnb Help Center, accessed on December 13, 2019, https://www.airbnb.com/help/ article/1857/what-is-the-airbnb-service-fee?topic=250. 4. Avery Hartmans, “Airbnb Now Has More Listings Worldwide than the Top Five Hotel Brands Combined,” Business Insider, August 10, 2017, https://www. businessinsider.com/airbnb-total-worldwidelistings-2017-8. 5. “Airbnb vs Hotels: A Price Comparison,” Priceonomics, June 17, 2013, https://priceonomics.com/hotels/. 6. John Byers, Davide Proserpio, and Georgios Zervas, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” Journal of Marketing Research 54 no. 5 (2017): 688.

18. Lee, “How Airbnb Short-Term Rentals Exacerbate Los Angeles’s Affordable Housing Crisis,” 234. 19. Sarah Jimenez, “The Growth of Commercial ShortTerm Rentals: How Boston Can Protect Affordable Housing and Quality of Life,” Community Labor United, September 2017, http://massclu.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/10/clu_shorttermrental_report_prf7.pdf. 20. Kyle Barron, Edward Kung, and Davide Proserpio, “The Effect of Home-Sharing on House Prices and Rents: Evidence from Airbnb,” Working Paper, 2017: 30. 21. Horn and Merante, “Is Home Sharing Driving Up Rents?,” 21. 22. Sadie DiNatale, Rebecca Lewis, and Robert Parker, “Short-Term Rentals in Small Cities In Oregon: Impacts and Regulations,” Land Use Policy 79 (2018): 407. 23. U.S. Congress, House, Protecting Local Authorities and Neighborhoods Act, H.R. 4232, 116th Congress, introduced in House on September 6, 2019, https://www.congress. gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/4232/text.

7. Chiara Farronato and Andrey Fradkin, “The Welfare Effects of Peer Entry in the Accommodation Market: The Case of Airbnb,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 24361 (2018): 5.

24. Tonya Riley, “The Technology 202: Airbnb Now Part of Congress’s Debate over Silicon Valley’s Legal Shield,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2019, https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/thetechnology-202/2019/10/14/the-technology-202-airbnbnow-part-of-congress-s-debate-over-silicon-valley-slegal-shield/5da3b24f88e0fa3155a710c2/.

8. Mariel Concepcion, “Short-Term Rentals Are Fighting Back for Their Place in Tourism Sector,” San Diego Business Journal 39 no. 40 (2018): 12.

25. “Airbnb in the City,” New York State Office of the Attorney General, October 2014, https://ag.ny.gov/pdfs/ AIRBNB%20REPORT.pdf.

9. David Wachsmuth and Alexander Weisler, “Airbnb and The Rent Gap: Gentrification through the Sharing Economy,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50 no. 6 (2018): 1148.

26. Savannah Gilmore, “More States Taking Action on Short-Term Rentals,” National Conference of State Legislatures, September 10, 2018, https://www.ncsl. org/Portals/1/Documents/legisbriefs/2018/September/ ShortRentals_Sep2018_35_v01.pdf.

10. Farronato and Fradkin, “The Welfare Effects,” 18. 11. “The Hotel Industry’s Plans to Combat Airbnb,” The New York Times, April 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2017/04/16/technology/document-hotelindustry-plans-to-combat-airbnb-excerpt.html. 12. Daniel Guttentag, “Airbnb: Disruptive Innovation and the Rise of an Informal Tourism Accommodation Sector,” Current Issues in Tourism 18 no. 12 (2015): 1201. 13. Shirley Nieuwland and Rianne van Melik, “Regulating Airbnb: How Cities Deal with Perceived Negative Externalities of Short-Term Rentals,” Current Issues in Tourism (2018): 3. 14. John Horton and Richard Zeckhauser, “Owning, Using and Renting: Some Simple Economics of the ‘Sharing Economy,’” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 22029 (2016): 3. 15. Keren Horn and Mark Merante, “Is Home Sharing Driving Up Rents? Evidence from Airbnb In Boston,” Journal of Housing Economics 38 (2017): 15. 16. Horn and Merante, “Is Home Sharing Driving Up Rents?,” 15. 17. Horn and Merante, “Is Home Sharing Driving Up Rents?,” 15.

27. Dan Bucks, “Airbnb Agreements with State and Local Tax Agencies: A Formula for Undermining Tax Fairness, Transparency and the Rule of Law,” American Hotel and Lodging Association, March 2017, https://www.ahla.com/ sites/default/files/Airbnb_Tax_Agreement_Report_0.pdf. 28. Lillian Colasurdo and Michael Desrochers, “Shortterm Rental Working Group Report: 2017 Report to the Legislature,” Vermont Department of Health – Agency of Human Services, October 1, 2017, https://legislature. vermont.gov/assets/Legislative-Reports/2017-Act76ShortTermRental.pdf. 29. David Wachsmuth, David Chaney, Danielle Kerrigan, Andrea Shillolo, and Robin Basalaev-Binder, “The High Cost of Short-Term Rentals in New York City,” McGill University School of Urban Planning – Urban Politics and Governance Research Group, January 30, 2018, http://www. sharebetter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/High-CostShort-Term-Rentals.pdf. 30. Norikazu Furukawa and Motoharu Onuki, “The Design and Effects of Short-Term Rental Regulation,” Current Issues in Tourism (2019): 5. 31. “Short Term Rental Property Permit Information,” Metro Government of Nashville & Davidson County,

Bell

Tennessee, accessed December 15, 2019, https://www. nashville.gov/Codes-Administration/Short-Term-Rentals. aspx. 32. New Orleans Code of Ordinances, Article XI – Standards for Short-Term Rentals, last updated December 9, 2019, https://library.municode.com/la/new_orleans/codes/ code_of_ordinances?nodeId=PTIICO_CH26BUBUREHOST_ ARTXISTSHRMRE. 33. “Short Changing New York City: The Impact of Airbnb on New York City’s Housing Market,” BJH Advisors LLC, June 2016, http://mobilizationforjustice.org/wp-content/ uploads/Shortchanging-NYC.pdf. 34. James Allen, “Disrupting Affordable Housing: Regulating Airbnb and Other Short-Term Rental Hosting in New York City,” Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law 26 no. 1 (2017): 174.

agora 14

Photographer: Lauren Ashley Week Location: Old City, Hyderabad, India

Photographer: Austin Kronig Location: Ahmedebad, India

Peter Philip Carroll Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Dala dala stage.

Photographer: Sarah Jammal Location: Cleveland, OH FlatsÂ

symposium:

CONVERGENCE The Symposium section of Agora acts as a unique platform that highlights salient issues within urban planning. Over the years, this section of the journal has focused on planning for crises, addressing police brutality, and investigating what makes a place “refugee ready.” This year, we turned to our own experiences as students of urban planning. In academia, we have been lucky enough to learn about, criticize, embrace, and debate the theoretical underpinnings of the urban planning field. From day one, we have recognized that answers to the problems of urban planning are rarely clear cut. Yet as we come closer to becoming “masters” of our program and moving into our professional lives, we are frantically trying to grapple with the growing gap between our trainings, values, interests, and the constraints of reality. Surely, others at the University are grappling with their own convergences. This year’s Symposium gives voice to this notion: As people who care about the places in which we live, we face a multiplicity of tensions and see them converge in the fields of housing, transportation, land use, economic development, sustainability, and other areas of urban interest. How do your theoretical trainings and values conflict with the political, legal, and structural realities of your field of urban interest? How can we as people who influence and transform the places in which we live navigate these tensions? Our aim is to not only identify these convergences, but also to spark dialogue and normalcy around them. The Symposium section explores two unique intersections that we face as planners and stimulates critical reflection. Where “The Space of Bad Faith” inspires us to act, “When Resilience Turns to Resistance” fills us with hope and reminds us to persevere. We hope these pieces spark you, too.

Neetu Nair and Rebecca Yae Symposium Directors

The Space of Bad Faith BADER ALBADER Ph.D. in Architecture

ABSTRACT Provoked by Ananya Roy’s activist lecture tour, this essay questions the efficacy of academia’s social critique and the notions of agency and vocation that emerge therefrom. Moving from Roy’s reinterpretation of liberalism and Marxism to an appraisal of academic space as a faithless one shorn of its intended social and urban impact, this essay wonders out loud if academic production is too safe a space when it comes down to the political. Academics are necessarily involved in the production of sociopolitical conditions which are the subject of academic criticism. Rather than disavowing their connection to the nation state, academics should acknowledge their role in it. Taking cues from popular culture, this essay polemically prods scholars toward a discomfiting disengagement from the academic comfort that may stand in the way of difficult engagement with the world beyond academia. Aspirational as this is, the hope is that the practice of humbling (self-) honesty short-circuits to a hubristic heroism, mortal as that may be.

-Clark Kerr1 “There is very little danger that our images of the good society, or the good city, will be abused by leaders mad for power, by turning them into yet another tyranny, or that our words will send waves of good society warriors to their ignoble death, as they try to scale the impossible walls of utopia. If indeed I thought that was the case, I would stop writing now.” -John Friedmann2

n his inaugural address as the University of Michigan’s 10 th president, Harold Shapiro pronounced that the university was at once society’s servant and its critic.3 Though this duality appears schizophrenic, the two modes of academe coexist in a convenient symbiosis comprising discrete but coextensive professional and scholarly tracks. This is not to deny that the university affords space for its members to alternate between these two hats, but they have grown comfortable wearing their favorite of the two. They are generally content with occupying different institutional registers, the cerebral gazing over the servile. But as Shapiro’s formulation suggests, to be critical is not enough to be of service. Academics ought to acknowledge that, in their capacities as intellectuals and mentors, they are necessarily involved in the production of sociopolitical conditions which are the subject of academic criticism. Turning the critical gaze to academic criticality means puncturing its image as a benignly rarefied indulgence and coming to terms with the fact that theory has nonquietistic consequences. Given their relative privilege, I wonder what it would look like for critics to try on new headgear or expose

their crowns altogether. I am here provoked by Ananya Roy’s recent scholarly turn. Acutely aware of the advent of the “Age of Trumpism,” she has embarked on an international academic lecture tour to challenge the new(ly barefaced) status quo.4 Her lectures are fitting denunciations of the illegalities of legal power and the criminalization of innocent behavior. More subtly, they are critiques of the inhospitality of internalized political identity and of an academic life unexamined. A scholar of global and postcolonial urbanism, Roy has long critiqued the flattening of global urban and sociocultural differences perpetrated by urban studies, asserting that the particularities of cities in the Global South ought to be studied on their own terms and not against EuroAmerican urban models. To use Arif Dirlik’s terms, Roy’s postcolonialism is a product of her position as one of those “Third World intellectuals who have arrived in First World academe.”5 As a scholar of Indian origin producing scholarship at American universities, Roy finds herself in the mouth of a dragon she wishes to slay. It is no surprise that her recent scholarship turns

albader

[E]xperience with academic reform illustrated how radical some professors can be when they look at the external world and how conservative when they look inwardly at themselves – a split personality.”

to this tension between her position as critic of the forms of knowledge produced in the Western academy and her privileged position as a producer within it. When Roy exclaims that her goal as a scholar is to effect a “divestment from whiteness,” she essentially condemns the ‘classic’ liberal notions that emerge from said ‘whiteness.’ While it may not be difficult for us to accept her critique of ‘personhood’ and ‘property,’ more challenging is its implied critique of academic criticality, of “white Marxism.” The tradition of the ethnically European intellectual paying perfunctory scholarly homage to socio-economic justice is no longer acceptable. It is about time that scholars put their money where their pens are. But what does this mean other than provincializing Europe? For one, it entails questioning what counts as academic expertise, and perhaps even an emergence from under the thick but comfortable blanket of scholarly dogma. Critical theory, at the mere level of theory, perpetuates

The very opponent that the theorist disarms is not structural hegemony but the reader’s mental capacity to (re)act.” the oppressiveness which it seeks to unmask because the unfortunate by-product of the theorist’s expertly woven web is an inescapable sense of hopelessness; “What happens,” as Frederic Jameson so forcefully put it, “is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or

logic – the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example – the more powerless the reader comes to feel.”6 Ironically, the scholar’s power feeds off the recipient’s powerlessness in a paradoxical conflict of interest; the very opponent that the theorist disarms is not structural hegemony but the reader’s mental capacity to (re)act. Jameson elaborates the mechanism through which such a reversal takes place: Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.7 Jameson’s critique builds on the charitable premise that scholarship is, for the most part, earnestly serious, but accounts not for the possibility that it may be self-serious, or even sanctimonious so as to dispel the myths of its irrelevance, of its superfluity. Does knowledge production itself not constitute an indulgent (self-)distraction, an intellectual alibi from worldly engagement, a “culture industry” as the Frankfurt School would say? 8 More importantly, Roy asserts that academia’s established forms of criticism are complicit in racial capitalism – that is, the production of spatial inequality under liberal democracy. The inadequacy of Marxist notions may be remedied, in her opinion, by embracing W. E. B. Du Bois’s work, which foregrounds urban racial banishment. Rendered in more contemporary terms, the reinterpretation of liberalism must take place through the lens of “poor group activism.”9 This line of reasoning is certainly not novel. At least as early as Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism revealed that the theory’s normative reading of history and exclusive re-writing of the present was an ethnocentric call to action, Marxism has been marked as a racialized

The academic relationship to the profane is no less than a vicarious one. No matter how Vulcan academics may strive to be, on their shoulders falls the burden of the Jedi amidst a fractious world.18 Fallibly privileged, theirs is the last station in the two-decade-long minting of national standard bearers.19, 20, 21 Roy recognizes that the pursuit of truth is not above worldly affairs. Her contentions are premised on the unforsakeability of politics. The political can no longer be untangled from the existential. If the rise of the nation-state was indeed a liberalist alternative to god and king, as Benedict Anderson argues, the baby of pastoralism must have been thrown out with the water of paternalism.22 In the new world order, patriotism replaced ecumenicism and the nation-state became the new denomination, a novel geopolitical tribe making total war possible.

This means that we have to resist the urge to continue feeding a discursive perpetual motion machine. Reconsidering the limits of the academy as we know it requires that we reshape the theoretical selfunderstandings with which we have grown comfortable, as Roy has begun to do. To co-opt Robinson’s title, Roy’s is a ‘person of color’ Marxism, or a non-professorial Marxism. But retooling our thinking is only the beginning. To reinterpret the ivory tower, we would be well served to remember what this lapidary label originally meant. While it is widely understood today as a metaphor for academia’s elitist insularity, the term was originally coined for a different but not unrelated purpose: it castigated academia’s political intransigence – namely, its hesitance to readily embrace antiCommunist patriotism.12 While academia may indeed be applauded for attempting to resist the hysteria of the Red Scare, to merely applaud the academic establishment is to accept complacency, if not the sociopolitical complicity of which Roy speaks. Bluntly put, there is no such thing as a principled (read: academic) withdrawal from society. Even mythical Wakanda came to accept that an enlightened hermit kingdom was no beacon of light for the world.13, 14, 15 The academy is no virtuous city; endless brooding and academic agonism over profound truths are trivial relative to the trials and tribulations of life.

The inverse of Monarchy and Faith being collective atheism, abstract politics became the sole modern realm of collectivity, granting the restless human the subjectposition of citizen whose worthy and valiant self-sacrifice was redirected towards a secular, but just as inaccessible, cause. Inherent to the nation-state model then is the sacrifice of lives and trampling of bodies. Within this paradigm, human compassion is only legitimate when coupled with nationalism, for the glory of the nation is modernity’s larger-than-life purpose of life.23, 24, 25, 26

To use a Game of Thrones analogy, scholars are the Starks, Lannisters, and Tyrells of an intellectual Westeros, fighting with words over a lectern throne while the world around them falls apart.16 What our Intellecteros is missing is a Daenerys, an

This aggregate form of vanity similarly afflicts Marxism, whose reification of class underwrites the discharging of humans from the barrels of a tautological cause. One of theory’s roles is to articulate a “salve for the anxiety of approaching self-

albader

insurgent playing the same game but very differently: unshackling slaves, winning fealty, building an army by saving both lives and livelihoods.17 The scholarly class may perhaps identify with the Starks, but it would behoove it to acknowledge its own stark feudality.

philosophy.10 Neither is Roy’s attempt to reawaken the dormant new; one only has to read Andrew Abbott’s work on academic professionalization and disciplinary formation to recognize the cyclicality of knowledge production, the fractal ebb and flow of the same set of ideas in a worldhistorical arabesque of human knowledge.11

Figure 1. “Is the lectern throne an academic’s perennial precious?” (Illustration by author).

dissolution.”27 These articulations take different forms, like the nation and the party, which become worth dying for. Roy is rightly critical of the scholars who pull that trigger but would never put themselves in the barrel. They are a ‘class consciousness’ – a party – just intelligent enough not to paint themselves as such, for to claim the paternalistic designation of organized governing collective is to dissolve the veneer of benign wisdom. This makes sense in light of Roy’s assertion that “the most important terrain of politics is the university.”28 If the humanities tell us what it means to be human, then they necessarily also demarcate that which is subhuman. How bloody were the American and French Revolutions that scholars so admire, and how bloody were the Haitian and Russian Revolutions they care not to admire! How worthless were the past lives and bodies of the

royalists, how worthless are the lives of today’s extra-nationals! Theorists shield themselves from such externalities, ignoring the inconvenient truth that justice is rarely bloodless. The truth is that theory can be deadly, and the rule of law can be deadly. Just as they serve to assert the value of human life, they allow us to assign value to the denial of life.29, 30 Academic calls to arms are not always metaphorical.31, 32, 33 Even when they are, theoretical enactments are liable to take on necropolitical lives of their own.34 Though we are not remotely likely to stop

Bluntly put, there is no such thing as a principled (read: academic) withdrawal from society.”

Roy claims one sword along with which comes a concurrent right to its acumination. She does not simply accept her academic ‘license to kill’ but commandeers it in order to recast the dragon on the shoulders of which she soars as a sacrificial lamb.37 Less putting words in her mouth than putting a dagger in her hand, her scholarship is one that acknowledges its self-righteousness and turns scholarship against itself. To use an Inception metaphor, the only way out of an elaborate dream is to shoot oneself in the head.

As much as we hate to admit, saviors come “not to bring peace, but a sword.”36 In a way,

about the author Bader AlBader is a doctoral candidate in architecture at the University of Michigan. His research examines the spaces and institutions of higher education and the ways in which they contribute to the development of cities and states, particularly in the Arab World. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute and a Master of Arts in Architecture from Rice University.

albader

producing theories, technologies, and images of a different tomorrow, we should at the very least wrestle with the real possibility that “our words will send waves of good society warriors to their ignoble death, as they try to scale the impossible walls of utopia” – and with the unfortunate reality that the route to the latter often runs through the former.35 Exceedingly challenging as it is to articulate what is worthy of the (citizen’s and scholar’s) ultimate sacrifice, an opportunity looms to redefine that which is worthy of being sacrificed.

endnotes 1. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), viii. 2. John Friedmann, “The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (June 2000): 461-62. 3. Shapiro’s 1980 speech is quoted in Jacqueline Mullen and Jackson Voss, “Servants and Critics,” State & Hill (Fall 2017): 6. This conceptualization of the university underpinned Shapiro’s career as a higher educational leader; see Eric Quiñones, “Universities fill dual role as servant and critic,” Princeton Weekly Bulletin 95, no. 15 (February 13, 2006). 4. One of these lectures took place at the University of Michigan on November 17, 2017. For more on her present calling, see Ananya Roy, “The Infrastructure of Assent: Professions in the Age of Trumpism,” Avery Review 21 (2017). 5. Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 339. 6. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 57. 7. Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 57. 8. See Theodor W. Adorno and J. M. Bernstein, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001). 9. Ananya Roy, “The City in the Age of Trumpism: From Sanctuary to Abolition,” lecture at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, November 17, 2017. 10. See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983). 11. For example, see Andrew Abbott, “The Disciplines and the Future” in The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University, ed. Steven Brint (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 12. See LaDale C. Winling, Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 13. See Carli Coetzee, “Between the World and Wakanda,” Safundi 20, no. 1 (2019). 14. See Karl Baumann, “Why Utopia,” Infrastructures of the Imagination: Building New Worlds in Media, Art, and Design. (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2018): 313-16.

Supremacy,” On Being, July 21, 2016, https://onbeing. org/blog/omid-safi-the-white-walkers-of-whitesupremacy/. 17. See Zeynep Tufekci, “The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones,” Scientific American Blog, May 17, 2019, https://blogs.scientificamerican. com/observations/the-real-reason-fans-hate-the-lastseason-of-game-of-thrones/. 18. For more on fallibility, see Sara Martín, “ObiWan Kenobi and the Problem of the Flawed Mentor,” Foundation 48 no. 132 (2019). 19. For relatively recent examples of how higher education has been positioned at the service of citizen formation, that is, the production of the national subject, see Patricia King, Marie Kendall Brown, Nathan Lindsay, and Jones Vanhecke, “Liberal Arts Student Learning Outcomes: An Integrated Approach,” About Campus 12 no. 4 (2007). 20. Also see Gert Biesta, “What Kind of Citizenship for European Higher Education? Beyond the Competent Active Citizen,” European Educational Research Journal 8, no. 2 (2009). 21. For globalization-borne challenges to this relationship, see Miriam Faine, Sue Plowright, and Terri Seddon, “Higher Education and Social Cohesion: Universities, Citizenship, and Spaces of Orientation,” in Creating Social Cohesion in an Interdependent World: Experiences of Australia and Japan, eds. Ernest Healy, Dharma Arunachalam, and Tetsuo Mizukami (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 22. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). 23. Citizenship can be read and critiqued as nationally bounded solidarity. See Veit Bader, “Citizenship and Exclusion: Radical Democracy, Community, and Justice. Or, What Is Wrong with Communitarianism?” Political Theory 23 no. 2 (1995). 24. Also see Arthur Helton, Lou Henkin, Oscar Schachter, and Anne Bayefsky, “Protecting the World’s Exiles: The Human Rights of Non-Citizens,” Human Rights Quarterly 22 (2000). 25. And see Stephanie DeGooyer and Alastair Hunt, “The Right to Have Rights,” Public Books, May 3, 2018, www. publicbooks.org/the-right-to-have-rights/. 26. For more on the underbellies of citizenship and nationality, see Veit Bader, ed., Citizenship and Exclusion (London: Macmillan, 1997). 27. Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: Life, Death and the Illusion of Control (London: Granta, 2018), 191. 28. Roy, “The City in the Age of Trumpism.”

15. For more on utopianism as a productive interlocutor with design, see Fiona Kenney and Vaissnavi Shukl, “Black Panther’s Utopian Project: The Innovative Potential of Fiction and Speculation by Non-Architects,” Dearq 26 (2020).

29. See Faith Taylor, “Reproduction at the End of Humanity: Refusing Apocalypse and Dismantling the Threat of the New,” Public Seminar, August 28, 2019, https://publicseminar.org/essays/reproduction-at-theend-of-humanity/.

16. See Omid Safi, “The White Walkers of White

30. See China Miéville, “The Limits of Utopia,” Salvage 1

albader

(July 2015). 31. See Omer Bartov, “Extreme Violence and the Scholarly Community,” International Social Science Journal 54, no. 174 (2002). 32. For a historical example, see Trevor Barnes and Claudio Minca, “Nazi Spatial Theory: The Dark Geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 3 (2013). 33. For a contemporary example, see Uri Yacob Keller, “Academic Boycott of Israel and the Complicity of Israeli Academic Institutions in Occupation of Palestinian Territories,” Economy of the Occupation: Socioeconomic Bulletin 23 (2009). 34. For an example of the use of scholarly theories and conceptual practices in war making and occupation, see Eyal Weizman, “Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” Radical Philosophy 136 (2006). 35. Friedmann, “The Good City,” 462. 36. Matt, 10:34 (New Living Translation). 37. For an example of an academic coming to terms with complicity and an inchoate attempt at ‘going rogue,’ see Ann Light, Chris Frauenberger, Jennifer Preece, Paul Strohmeier, and Maria Angela Ferrario, “Taking Action in a Changing World,” Interactions 25, no. 1 (2017).

When Resilience Turns to Resistance A Detroit Case Study NINA JACKSON LEVIN Ph.D. in Social Work and Anthropology

ABSTRACT This article is the theoretical accompaniment to Resilience/Resistance: A Short Film About Detroit. The short film offers a character study of two sisters, Annette and Earlene, long-time residents who illustrate the broader story of the present-day negotiation between resilience and resistance at stake within the City of Detroit. This character sketch brings to bear an emotionally ranging response to the complexities of the recent re-urbanism driving the public narrative of Detroit. Working to complicate the use of the term ‘resilience’ within this redevelopment story, this piece and the accompanying short film offer the possibility that resilience and resistance are entangled phenomena. Resilience/Resistance asks the question: resilience for whom? In the case of Detroit, I propose two modes of resilience that coexist yet conflict: mechanical (outcome-oriented) and ecological (process-oriented) resilience. I argue that where the “urban core” of the downtown revitalization project strives for mechanical resilience, long-time residents embody ecological resilience by contrast.1, 2 Within the tension between mechanical and ecological resilience frameworks dwells the possibility – or necessity – of resistance. All images accompanying this piece are stills from the Resilience/Resistance film. The companion film to this article can be found on the Agora blog.

Detroit’s 139-square mile geography”) as the empirical basis for laying claim to the City’s ‘comeback.’15 A selective narrative that heralds a city’s rebirth based upon development within less than 5 percent of its entire geography silences residents for whom those developments do not signify ‘renaissance.’ Furthermore, such an account fails to acknowledge the kinds of generative cultural activity that are and have been alive within Detroit, not just throughout but also in spite of economic downturn. Therefore, the question remains: resilience for whom? Is resilience a double bind if, in fact, it serves some but not all? Through the Filming Future Cities project, I set out to complicate the concept of resilience at play within the narrative of Detroit. I found that where resilience emerges, so too does resistance. Writing as an outsider to the urban planning discipline, I offer an alternative perspective on issues at the heart of the urban studies field. In doing so, I reflect on the process of making a short film titled Resilience/ Resistance: A Short Film About Detroit. The making of this experimental documentary was supported by the ethnographic film project Filming Future Cities (created by Dr. Damani Partridge, University of Michigan Department of Anthropology and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies) and the graduate course Doing Photoethnography (created by Dr. Jason De León, former University of Michigan faculty member and current faculty member at University of California, Los Angeles Department of Anthropology). Through moving and still images mixed with soundscapes produced within and about the City of Detroit by musical artist Shigeto, I explore the liminal paradox between the concepts of resilience and resistance through a character study of two native Detroiters and sisters, Annette and Earlene. This text serves as the theoretical accompaniment to the short film, which can be viewed on the Agora blog. As lifelong Detroiters, Annette and Earlene have lived

Figure 1. Resilience/Resistance (Jackson Levin, 2018).

The City of Detroit is a place where resilience has found rhetorical footing. Over the past 20 years, resilience has dominated the narrative of Detroit’s resurgence of cultural and economic activity within the “urban core.”13 Academic literature and popular press alike have treated Detroit’s ‘urban renaissance’ as a resurrection from the dead.14 However, this mythology is built on limited conceptual and geographical notions of resilience, providing escalating investments in the 7.2-square-mile Greater Downtown (just a “a slice of

JACKSON LEVIN

Across academic literature, resilience serves as a major explanatory framework to understand an amorphous and exhaustive litany of social issues. The term originally derives from the Latin word resiliere, which means to bounce back.3 Claims to ‘bouncing back,’ however, are theoretically vague despite their ever-increasing popularity: ‘resilience’ has seen an eight-fold increase in the probability of use in scholarly databases in the past 20 years.4 This term has emerged in the fields of disaster preparedness, environmental sustainability, economies and markets, public policy, child welfare, urban and regional development, national security, humanitarian response, and international relations.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Such rapid and widespread conceptual uptake of resilience as an explanatory framework reflects an urgency to mitigate increasing precarity.12

through the various chapters of glory and struggle in the story of Detroit and serve as expert witnesses to the changes taking place in the City today. The film elicits the sisters’ experiences in and of the City, showcasing their memories of the past, perspectives on the present, and concerns and hopes for the future of Detroit.

Figure 2. Annette and Earlene at “They Say” on Jos Campau St. (Jackson Levin, 2018).

REFLECTIONS ON THE MAKING OF RESILIENCE/ RESISTANCE: A SHORT FILM ABOUT DETROIT I met Annette and Earlene at a store opening event on the East Side of Detroit in September 2018. The inaugural celebration featured live jazz, a food truck of Yum Village’s Afro-Caribbean cuisine, and congenial chatter amongst the strangers and acquaintances attending the event. Annette stood out in the crowd, dressed head to toe in a white track suit with intricate red beads dripping from her neck, wearing a hat that cast the right side of her face in shadow, and carrying a small patent leather briefcase. I couldn’t miss her. Earlene was beside Annette, warm and reserved, smiling from beneath her dark sunglasses and with her fists tucked into the front pockets of her black sweatshirt. The two sat beside me at one of the tables near the food truck and we

started chatting immediately. We shared an instant conversational chemistry; within a matter of minutes, we had discussed a range of topics from the intimate to the mundane. When I asked what her briefcase contained, Annette told me that – among several other jobs – she is a spiritual advisor. She proceeded to offer an oracle card reading of my spiritual state. It was unclear whether she was seeking payment for this work, so – sheepishly – I asked her as much while she unpacked a tablecloth, candles, bells, angel figurines, and decks of oracle cards. She said this reading was a gift. I offered in return to take photographs of her card reading for use on her website as, after all, I had my camera around my neck (I had been attempting to, at any given moment, document Detroit for this film project). She obliged, and so began our relationship as anthropologist and interlocuter, mediated constantly thereafter by the presence of the camera. A certain degree of serendipity was on my side in that moment: it is not always the case that querents encounter interlocuters who are as open, trusting, and engaged as Annette and Earlene. I emailed the photos of Annette to her the following day and left a voicemail asking if I could take her and Earlene out to lunch to interview them about their perspectives on the city. The following day, Annette returned my call and we arranged to meet at their local favorite, They Say on Jos Campau Street near the waterfront on the East Side. The four-hour conversation we shared at the restaurant became the central narrative for my documentary.

MECHANICAL RESILIENCE VS. ECOLOGICAL RESILIENCE The use of the term ‘resilience’ is flexible to a fault. Its function ranges as broadly as the contexts in which it has come to hold

JACKSON LEVIN Figure 3. Listening (Jackson Levin, 2018).

Figure 4. Serendipity (Jackson Levin, 2018).

Figure 5. Divine light (Jackson Levin, 2018).

Figure 6. Kindred Spirits (Jackson Levin, 2018).

meaning. Such a capacious application can result in a lack of conceptual clarity.16 In order to ensure accuracy within the relevant context, it is essential to define boundaries around the term ‘resilience.’17 In the case of Detroit, I propose two modes of resilience that coexist yet conflict: mechanical resilience (outcome-oriented) and ecological resilience (processoriented).18 In mathematics and physics, mechanical resilience implies the capability of a material or system to return to balance after being displaced. In biological discourse, ecological resilience signifies the persistence of relationships within a system and a measure of the ability of those systems to absorb changes of state.19 A mechanical approach to resilience views the phenomenon as outcome-oriented. Such a framework imagines resilience as a static premise achievable either before or after an adverse event. The dominant narrative characterizing Detroit’s

revitalization adopts this framework: after falling on the hard times, Detroit experienced “exogenous shock,” which caused a vacuum in the municipal agenda.20 After years of widespread deterioration, targeted refurbishment of the central business district – that is, economic investment in the 7.2-square-mile Greater Downtown – sparked “urban allure” and rekindled a healthy pulse in the City.21 This is one common, albeit crude and inaccurate, narrative for Detroit that reflects a mechanical application of resilience, one in which the City has returned to a state of stability after a contained instance of hardship or disruption. In contrast to mechanical resistance, an ecological approach to resilience is a process-oriented phenomenon. Such a framework imagines resilience as a dynamic process that incorporates adaptation and flexibility into its very premise. Adapting, innovating, and reformulating

are constant aspects of resilience within this framework. In ecological resilience, ‘before’ and ‘after’ are less significant than ‘during’ the process of change. In the instance of Detroit, staking a claim in the City’s mechanical resilience suppresses the notion that the residents are and have been resilient in an ecological mode, not because of but rather in spite of the “urban allure” of the ‘resilient’ downtown area.22 Within the tension between mechanical and ecological resilience frameworks dwells the possibility – or rather, the necessity – for resistance. The interaction between resilience and resistance reverberating throughout the city, from the Greater Downtown to the edges of Outer Drive, is made evident in stories like those of Annette and Earlene.

EXPLORING MECHANICAL VS. ECOLOGICAL RESILIENCE ON SCREEN: EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTATION As longstanding residents of Detroit living through a moment of acute attention to the urban core, Annette and Earlene embody ecological resilience. In the film, the two sisters discuss the ways in which they have adapted to changes and challenges posed by the rise and fall of economic conditions in the City. I asked them to talk about their perspectives on the changes in the City over their lifetime with particular emphasis on the past 10 years. Annette replied with sincerity that she “love[s] that the City is coming back and all of that,” but followed with a caveat: “Don’t throw us away in the process; the ones that stayed here, was born and raised here, went to school here, worked here.” Earlene interjected with zeal: “There you go!”23 Annette shared her paradoxical struggle with the resurgence of economic and cultural activity in the

downtown area as it forces into precarity the conditions of her housing. In response to claims related to revitalization, Annette said: The only thing that’s coming back is downtown area…to draw in more contracts…but nobody is talking about where we the elderly are gonna go when they get through raising the rent, or building any houses or anything affordable along the river bank or along the river line so we all can enjoy besides just the rich folks that’s coming back and that can afford all of that.24 Annette and her husband, who is 20 years her senior, have been living for two decades in a historic apartment building on the waterfront that is rented exclusively to senior citizens. Following our lunch, I visited Annette at her apartment to film a cursory tour of the lobby.25 The building offered a grand entrance: two double doors atop stone steps flanked by statuary pillars opened onto a carpeted hallway decked with chandeliers. A polished, wooden clawfoot table in the center of the entrance was decorated with a tall vase of flowers. Two parlors, to the left and right of the front doors, offered upholstered furniture – worn but classic. From the left-hand parlor, the riverfront was visible at the edge of the lawn. A security guard in an entrance booth and a resident traipsing down the hallway both eyed me curiously as my camera traced the crown molding on the high ceilings, but Annette explained my presence as we continued past them (“I’m helping her with a school project”). Around the corner, the smells of laundry detergent and cigarettes mingled, and the thumping of vending machines could be heard in time with the ding of the elevator. The hallway wrapped rectangularly around the building, leaving open at the center a sweeping ballroom. Behind locked, glass French doors, the open dance floor was empty, alight with the grey October light streaming in through grand skylights overhead. Annette explained that the ballroom was once the heart of the

adaptation. When the urban core rebounds from shock and demonstrates mechanical resilience, it casts a tremor amongst residents throughout the City, producing further instability. Such a tension thrusts the burden of resilience onto citizens as opposed to lifting their burden through the City’s supposed renewed stability.

Therefore, the question remains: resilience for whom? Is resilience a double bind if, in fact, it serves some but not all?”

In order for the urban core to achieve mechanical resilience, long-time residents must respond to the impacts of downtown developments by intensifying their proclivity for ecological resilience. In this way, ecological resilience is no longer a neutral expression of resilience, but rather becomes an active mode of resistance. Being adaptative, flexible, and resourceful in the face of a powerful albeit myopic account of downtown revitalization is an act of impedance. Resilience transmuted becomes resistance. The case of Annette and Earlene complicates claims to resilience in Detroit by parsing out two modes of resilience and resistance that inherently operate in contentious tandem.

“We worked all our lives to be where we at,” Annette says as the film opens, “and now, I’m constantly feeling threatened.”26 Annette’s rent has increased each year of the past decade, resulting in housing insecurity for her and her neighbors. “Every year the rent goes up, up, up. They have plans to put the rent up so high that we can no longer afford it, so where will we go then? …All of the neighborhood houses are gone… so, those are some of the things that I worry about.”27 About the threat of displacement, Annette says, “my plan is to keep it moving. I don’t want to move, but I feel like we’ve been forced to make a decision, you know. Because…I can see it coming.”28

Our conversation about the current state of Detroit’s development sparked nostalgia in Annette and Earlene for previous iterations of the cityscape. Laughing at their recollections, the sisters reminisced giddily about their childhood on the East Side (it is notable that long-time residents often locate the City according to cardinal directions, whereas more recent parlance names the city by neighborhoods – Woodbridge, Corktown, New Center – thereby commodifying geographic units). Remembering visits to their grandparents’ home, Annette said, “When we ate, we picked our food out the garden.”29 “Yeah we did,” Earlene chimed in, “our grandmother had every type of vegetable that there was.”30 About eating meat in their childhood, Earlene continued, “Our grandparents went to the farm, they bought the half a cow, they knew what the meat was. They kept a meat chart – you know when you open up a cabinet, you look up that meat chart right

Annette’s case of precarious housing articulates the tension between mechanical resilience and ecological resilience currently at play within the City of Detroit. Furthermore, her case demonstrates the production of resistance caused by the friction between mechanical and ecological resilience. Resilience for the downtown area drives long-term residents to adapt, adjust, and modify their lifestyle in the City. In the case of rising rents, resilience for the urban core invokes resistance from its long-time citizens. A resilient downtown requires its denizens to absorb shock, adapt, and recover in response to selective developments. Here mechanical and ecological resilience coexist yet conflict: for Annette and Earlene, resilience for the downtown means resistance through

JACKSON LEVIN

building’s social pulse. Now, however, the landlord does not permit residents to use the space, as he reserves it for paid events.

there?”31 Earlene mimed swinging open a pantry door and running her fingers down a butcher’s diagram. “They had these, like, metal tables,” she explained, smoothing her hands across the edges of the restaurant table where we were filming. “And they had these grinders that were attached to the table. And me and my sister” – she gestured toward Annette – “when they stuffed the meat down, we would have that roll.” She mimicked cramming meat into the top of a funnel and grasping a handle with both hands in front of her. “And we were like rolling, rolling, rolling”32 – Annette and Earlene both grabbed imaginary handles and simultaneously acted the part of two children grinding meat in their grandmother’s kitchen, as if they were rowing a boat. “And then this meat came down, and somebody’s holding the bowl.” Earlene pretended to scoop up the ground meat from the edge of the table, making Annette giggle as she relived the memory. “It was the funniest thing!” Earlene leaned into the camera and pointed at the viewer. “East Side Detroit, y’all.” 33 The two sisters burst out laughing.

though the backdrop against which they grew up is as much a part of their family – like a sibling. That Annette and Earlene radiate such palpable pride for their hometown, that their lives are built on a kind of local love for place and family that is one and the same, and that between them they stoke the embers of treasured memories of a version of the city that no longer exists make Annette and Earlene both resilient and resistant. Already in their lifetime, these sisters have lived through multiple iterations of the cityscape, the most recent downtown developments being just one of many chapters in the saga of a complex, evolving Detroit. Annette and Earlene have spent a lifetime adapting to and with changes in the city; throughout, their pride of place endures unassailable. Even in the face of exclusionary developments, rising rents, and threats of displacement, Annette and Earlene preserve a celebratory spirit

This scene always makes viewers smile. Annette and Earlene’s laughter is irresistibly contagious. Both women exude a genuine affection for one another and for the life they have shared in Detroit. Their love for their city is evidently as strong as their love for one another, as

Figure 7. Annette at her apartment, smiling

Figure 8. Real Woman Warrior of Detroit

(Jackson Levin, 2018).

recording equipment when she asked about the context of this project, as she herself is a student with a communications major at a nearby university. I told Carissa how I had met Annette and Earlene by happenstance, and how they were willing participants for my Filming Future Cities project. She was excited by the idea and equally willing to participate. She and I exchanged numbers and made arrangements to meet the following week. Placing the last pieces of the camera in its kit, my iPhone still on the restaurant table recording, I asked Carissa what resilience means to her as a native Detroiter. I will leave the last word of this article to Carissa, as her response directly articulates the persistent, pervasive, and unassailable ecological resilience that characterizes long-time residents of Detroit in the face of mechanical resilience rolling out downtown:

In the 18 months that passed between our serendipitous meeting and the writing of this article, I maintained periodic contact with Annette and Earlene. When the film was screened at the Los Angeles Underground Film Festival in August of 2019, I printed a movie poster–sized gazette and mailed it to them. Annette has expressed hopes of developing a larger film project together, The Broken Dreams and Promises of Woodlawn Manor (Annette’s working title), that tells a more complete story of her beloved building and its elderly tenants. Perhaps another installment in my collaborative storytelling of Annette and Earlene’s Detroit will transpire. It would be a loss not to document and elevate the voices of these long-time residents, the enduring stewards of a resilient, resistant Detroit.

You know what? It’s a natural quality that we have. You know? Born and raised here you just pick up things, you adapt to things that will make you livable anywhere. It makes you intolerable to BS, it makes you rough around the edges, it makes you a little bit aggressive, it makes you passionate. I love being from this city. I feel like I can do anything and be anywhere and be just as strong.

As Annette, Earlene, and I concluded our lunch at They Say on the day of filming, I profusely thanked our server, Carissa, who accommodated our impromptu film set graciously. I started to pack away the

about the author Nina Jackson Levin is a third-year doctoral student in the Joint Ph.D. Program in Social Work and Anthropology. Jackson Levin received her Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature in 2013 and her Master of Social Work in 2016 from the University of Michigan. She uses multimedia and sensory ethnography to ask questions about rupture and repair in relationships. Her dissertation explores family making and reproductive health among adolescents and young adults with cancer whose fertility is affected by treatment. Resilience theory informs her inquiry in multiple domains of social work and anthropology research, from (in)fertility to urban revitalization.

JACKSON LEVIN

of their Detroit through memories of the past, concerns for the present, and hopes for the future. Such undefeated pride makes Annette and Earlene – according to Annette’s bedazzled black and red t-shirt, “Real Women Warriors of Detroit” – real resilient, real resistant.

endnotes 1. Shoshanah B.D. Goldberg-Miller, “Creative City Strategies on the Municipal Agenda in New York”; Rus, Kilar, and Koren, “Resilience Assessment of Complex Urban Systems to Natural Disasters.” City, Culture and Society 17 (September 2018): 2, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.ccs.2018.08.004. 2. Katarina Rus, Vojko Kilar, and David Koren, “Resilience Assessment of Complex Urban Systems to Natural Disasters: A New Literature Review,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 31 (October 2018): 311-312, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. ijdrr.2018.05.015.

Affairs 37, no. 1 (February 2015): 1, https://doi.org/10.1111/ juaf.12173. 15. Hudson-Webber Foundation, Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, Detroit Downtown Partnership, Midtown Detroit, Inc, Invest Detroit, and Data Driven Detroit, “7.2 SQ MI: A Report on Greater Downtown Detroit,” 2014, https://detroitsevenpointtwo.com/. .16 Evans, “Resilience, Ecology and Adaptation in the Experimental City,” 223. 17. Seeliger and Turok, “Towards Sustainable Cities.” 18. Rus, Kilar, and Koren, “Resilience Assessment of Complex Urban Systems to Natural Disasters,” 311-312.

3. Rus, Kilar, and Koren, “Resilience Assessment of Complex Urban Systems to Natural Disasters.”

19. Rus, Kilar, and Koren, «Resilience Assessment of Complex Urban Systems to Natural Disasters,» 311-312.

4. Alastair Ager, “Annual Research Review.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 54, no. 4 (April 2013): 488-489, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12030.

20. Goldberg-Miller, “Creative City Strategies on the Municipal Agenda in New York,” 1.

5. Hulya Dagdeviren, Matthew Donoghue, and Markus Promberger, “Resilience, Hardship and Social Conditions,” Journal of Social Policy 45, no. 1 (January 2016): 1-3, http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.umich. edu/10.1017/S004727941500032X. 6. J.P. Evans, “Resilience, Ecology and Adaptation in the Experimental City,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, no. 2 (February 2011): 223, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00420.x. 7. Lauren E. Johns, Allison E. Aiello, Caroline Cheng, Sandro Galea, Karestan C. Koenen, and Monica Uddin, “Neighborhood Social Cohesion and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in a Community-Based Sample: Findings from the Detroit Neighborhood Health Study,” Social Psychiatric Epidemiology 47, no. 13 (December 2012): (1899-1900) https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-0120506-9. 8. Kevin C. Desouza and Trevor H. Flanery, “Designing, Planning, and Managing Resilient Cities: A Conceptual Framework,” Cities 35 (December 2013): 89-90, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2013.06.003.

21. Goldberg-Miller, “Creative City Strategies on the Municipal Agenda in New York,” 2. 22. Goldberg-Miller, “Creative City Strategies on the Municipal Agenda in New York,”2. 23. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance: A Short Film About Detroit. (00:07:07). 24. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:01:29). 25. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:02:13). 26. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:00:08). 27. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:02:13). 28. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:02:59). 29. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:07:30). 30. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:07:36). 31. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:07:41). 32. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:08:05). 33. Jackson Levin, Resilience/Resistance, (00:08:14).

9. Lindsay Hill and Angie Hart, “Gaining Knowledge about Resilient Therapy: How Can It Support Kinship Carers?,” The British Journal of Social Work 47, no. 5 (July 2017): 12900-1292, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/ bcw143. 10. Janet Ledesma, “Conceptual Frameworks and Research Models on Resilience in Leadership,” SAGE Open 4, no. 3 (July 2014): 1-3, https://doi. org/10.1177/2158244014545464. 11. Sarah R. Lowe, Laura Sampson, Oliver Gruebner, and Sandro Galea, “Psychological Resilience after Hurricane Sandy: The Influence of Individual- and Community-Level Factors on Mental Health After a Large-Scale Natural Disaster,” PLoS One 10, no. 5 (May 2015): 2. 12. Ager, “Annual Research Review.” 488. 13. Goldberg-Miller, “Creative City Strategies on the Municipal Agenda in New York.” 1. 14. William K. Tabb, “If Detroit Is Dead, Some Things Need to Be Said at the Funeral.” Journal of Urban

100

101

JACKSON LEVIN

Photographer: Lauren Ashley Week Location: Prinsep Ghat, Kolkata, India

Photographer: Katherine Downs Location: Bil’in, Palestine

Alienations and Articulations Tracing Israeli Land Policies Through History MEKAREM ELJAMAL Master of Middle Eastern & North African Studies and Urban and Regional Planning 2021

ABSTRACT Contemporary conversations about Palestine and Israel often place land and claims to land at the center of the conflict; however, such discussions rarely concern the structures of land policy and ownership at play. Reflecting on Israel’s recent dispossession of the Bedouin village of Umm alHiran in the Naqab, this paper takes a historical approach to understanding the land tenure systems of Israel and the previous governing regimes over Palestine. Through a comparative analysis of Ottoman, British, and Israeli land laws, this piece shows how Israel’s ability to alienate and accumulate Palestinian land as state property was facilitated by the land systems that preceded it. The centrality of western forms of articulating ownership, especially land cultivation, thread together the land policies of these three regimes. While the implications of such articulations on the native Palestinians varied between Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule, the continuity between the three ultimately provided Israel the space to manipulate conceptions of ‘abandoned’ and ‘waste’ lands to their benefit as they dispossessed Palestinians of their property from the inception of the state to today.

106

agora 14

“M

any would say it’s a second Nakba for the Palestinians in the Naqab,” stated Suhad Bishara, the Director of Land and Planning Rights for Adalah, to describe the state of land appropriation in the Umm alHiran, an unrecognized Bedouin village in the Naqab, the southern region desert of Israel.1 Since its inception, Israel has unabashedly maintained its right to alienate land and property from those it views as infringing upon its rights to the land. This continued entitlement is made all the more apparent in the case of Umm al-Hiran, as Bishara deliberately invokes the 1948 mass expulsion of Palestinians by Israel in relation to Israel’s current dispossession of the unrecognized village. The use of Umm al-Hiran as a case study challenges common discourse around Israeli land accumulation. Generally, conversations about Israeli land theft center on its illegal annexation of Palestinian land in the West Bank. Through Umm al-Hiran, I challenge the view that Israeli land practices in the West Bank are ‘exceptional’ and beyond the norm. Rather, this case proves that Israeli land theft is the norm and follows in the tradition of past regimes ruling over Palestine, as I trace a longer legal lineage of land dispossession policies, illuminating the connection between Israel’s current land alienation practices and British and Ottoman land tenure systems. Threaded throughout Ottoman, British, and Israeli land laws is the importance of communication and its role in defining property. Carol Rose outlines this in her article, “Possession as the Origin of Property,” explaining how claiming ownership of property hinges upon how the claims are articulated and communicated and how such articulations are received by external parties.2 Within the context of Palestine, Rose’s ideas around articulating ownership dovetail with the Lockean ideal of labor as the determining factor behind property and the colonial need to see land as both terra nullius and wasted. By tracing

the representation and discussion of empty and waste lands through the Ottoman and British land tenure policies, we arrive at the reiteration of such elements as key to the rhetorical and legal articulations of Israeli land ownership. The culmination of the piece brings us into the contemporary era and reinforces the pervasiveness of intelligibility in articulations of land ownership as I return to Umm al-Hiran and the residents’ protests against the village’s demolition to make way for a new Jewish settlement.

DEFINING LAND UNDER THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE Ottoman land reform took place during the Nahda, or renaissance period, of the Middle East during which the region increased its engagement with the West. During the Nahda, the Ottoman Empire undertook the Tanzimat, which were reforms moving Ottoman law away from a religious basis toward a secular one - a reangling of Ottoman bureaucracy to conform to Western conceptions of governance. Fitting into this larger schema of the Tanzimat, details of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code exemplified this borrowing from the West during the Nahda. While the Tanzimat, and specifically the land laws, may not have intentionally aimed to be intelligi//ble to its Western counterparts, the reality of pulling from Western formats, especially the British and French, provided a legal structure that conveniently fit with the goals and norms of these later colonizing powers and allowed the British to generally maintain the organizing and maintenance structures of land tenure.3 With the Ottoman Empire’s imperialism in mind, the divisions of land outlined in its Land Code exemplify intentions of state land accumulation. A majority of mulk land cannot be appropriated by the state; rather, it stays in the hands of individuals or non-state bodies.4 However, tithe-paying and tribute lands are two subcategories of mulk land that can revert back to state

eljamal

107

hands because they were at one point under state purview.5 The state distributed tithe-paying lands after a victorious land conquest and allowed for tribute-paying lands to remain under the control of the non-Muslim inhabitants after conquest.6 For tithe- and tribute-paying lands, once the owner initially determined by the state dies, the land transfers to mierié land. This caveat to mulk lands of the tithe and tribute variety restricts the transferability of land across generations and continues to build the state pot of property.

Mulk is privately owned land upon which the government levies taxes. Mierié defines the category of state-owned lands. Timar is an area of land granted to a military official in lieu of a salary from which the officer is able to keep all the profits from the land’s cultivation. Metrouké lands correlate to the contemporary conceptions of commons. Mevat is dead or waste land.

With the empire’s imperialism in mind, the divisions of land outlined in the Land Code exemplify intentions of state land accumulation.” The Land Code explicitly describes mierié lands as including “arable fields, meadows, and winter pasturing grounds, woodlands and the like,” drawing explicit attention to the natural state of these lands.7 A clear parallel can be made between this description and John Locke’s perspective on land, as Locke places value on land that has the opportunity for exploitation.8 The Ottomans cannot exploit the lands already held in mulk beyond the taxes applied to lands held by non-Muslims since they agree with Locke’s labor-property relationship. This belief is affirmed later in the Land Code, wherein the results of any land cultivation by mulk owners belong to the owners themselves.9 Defining mierié lands within a natural context underscores the opportunity of these lands; they are ripe for exploitation – to be molded to fit the needs and desires of the state. Ottomans could use this land as a way to pay the timar for their military officials, but by maintaining this

108

agora 14

Terra nullius is empty land, uninhabited land belonging to no one.

land’s classification as mierié, rather than tithe-paying land, the government maintains ultimate ownership and has leeway to make future adjustments as it sees fit. The nature- and state-land relationship will be revisited in unpacking Israel’s development initiatives. With the last two categories of land – metrouké and mevat – Rose’s conversation about intent and Locke’s theories on labor return to the fore. Metrouké lands include areas such as highways and village grazing grounds.10 As commons, ownership and usufruct are expansive, prompting the Ottoman Empire to include a clause later in the Land Code stating, “no one shall erect any buildings or plant trees on a public road…. In general, no one shall do any act of possession on a public road.”11 Article 93 of the Land Code explicitly defines what is considered an articulation of intent: an act that involves labor leading to a more permanent presence.12 The placement of this clarification and assertion of intent, though, is important and highlights the categories in which the Ottoman Empire places value. Mierié lands are prominently featured in the first section of the Land Code, signaling their utmost importance

to the Ottoman Empire. However, Article 93 implies a certain esteem for collectively held land, protecting the commons from acts of possession that would generally denote property as being individually held. Returning to the earlier question of whether Ottoman incorporation of European legal structures was a strategy to evoke affinity from the Europeans, this value marker placed on collective property challenges this position because the Europeans valued private property more, as Locke’s statement makes clear: “since [God] gave [the world] to [men] for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed that he meant it should always remain in common and uncultivated.”13 Finally, mevat refers to dead land that is uncultivated and distanced from any settled areas. This category becomes of the utmost importance once we reach the Israeli articulations of ownership.14 The Land Code does not prohibit cultivation of mevat land. Laboring the land is encouraged by the state; however, working mevat land

will not result in the laborer acquiring mulk land immediately.15 In the case of mevat, the Ottoman Empire splits from Locke’s simple formula that labor and nature equate to personal property, adding the extra requirement of paying title-price to receive the deed for the land. Once the land is cultivated, it converts from mevat to mierié, maintaining the state’s ownership until the full-title price of the land is met, at which point the land then switches to mulk. Key to mevat land is that it is not owned by the state; anyone who is in need of land to cultivate can choose to work mevat land without permission from others. As Rose discusses, law and legal structures play a key role in communication of property. The Ottoman Land Code codifies the government’s articulation of ownership and decrees title-deeds as the official communication of ownership. According to Article 8 of the Ottoman Land Code, title-deeds and holding an updated title-deed “showed [the owner’s] right of possession.”16 Ottoman Empire residents

Figure 1. Battir, Palestine - Property divisions delineated by utilizing the natural topography (Eljamal, 2014).

eljamal

109

did not favor these material documents as the West did, or as the larger governing body was requesting they make their claims to property. In Bedouin communities of Palestine during this time, articulations of land ownership consisted of two parts: oral history and visibility. Power and authority over land debates were vested in tribal confederations. These tribal confederations governed land use over collectively agreed upon boundaries, and they relied on collective memory and oral history rather than government-decreed documentation to preserve land divisions.17 To supplement the histories and memorial documentation, and very much comporting with Rose’s extolment of vision, Bedouins used stones and flora to delineate property lines.18, 19 Just as Bedouins had a mixed approach to property delineation, utilizing both traditional modes of oral history and the documentative styles coming from the larger state bodies, the Ottoman Empire too recognized the role of various methods of communicating land ownership. While there is overwhelming support for and reliance on title-deeds and official documentation of land ownership, the Ottoman Land Code contains a clause that places trust in the past modes of property documentation, namely oral history. In cases where historical land markers erode or are made unintelligible, elders from adjacent communities gathered at the site in question to recall the past boundaries and, from their histories, boundaries are redocumented.20

CONSTRUCTING LEGAL FOUNDATIONS DURING THE BRITISH MANDATE Ottoman history and initiatives during the British Mandate intersected to establish a strong foundation upon which the successive Israeli government would stand. Three years before the British Mandate period in Palestine began, the British government made clear its intention in

110

agora 14

dealing with land affairs there. In 1917, Lord Arthur Balfour penned the Balfour Declaration, in which he asserted the British duty to secure a Jewish homeland in Palestine. All of the British land initiatives and ordinances coming out of the Mandate period were in service to Balfour’s previous commitment to Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. This intention was reiterated explicitly in Article 4 of the British Mandate of Palestine. In this foundational document detailing British rights of rule over Palestine, land is mentioned twice. The first mention reaffirms Balfour’s Declaration and the second deals with the preservation of history, specifically around issues of archaeological digs and antiquities, a tactical justification Israel has since adopted in alienating Palestinian land.21 British history in Palestine began with voicing Britain’s intentions to alienate and reallocate the land.

British history in Palestine began with voicing Britain’s intentions to alienate and reallocate the land.” Since the Ottoman Land Code drew extensively from British law, once the Ottoman Empire fell and the League of Nations appointed Britain the ruler over Palestine, the British did not have to make significant alterations to the general structure of the existing land tenure system; the Ottoman Land Code was constructed within the Western-facing Tanzimat format. The British codified continuity between Ottoman law and British Mandate law through Article 46 of the Palestine Order in Council, stating, “the jurisdiction of the Civil Courts shall be exercised in conformity with the Ottoman Law in force in Palestine on November 1, 1914.” Based on the Palestine

Order, rules and regulations set forth by the Ottoman Land Code in 1858 stood during the British Mandate Period. However, this is not to say that the laws were kept exactly the same during the regime transition. While Ottoman articulations of property ownership through title-deeds aligned with British expectations of property communication, there were great disparities in the implementation of these systems. Due to its vast size and decentralized structure, the Ottoman Empire struggled with enforcing the Land Code. In the law’s early years, title-deeds accurately communicated a plot of land’s owner; however, as original recipients of the deed died, people tended not to update and register the inheritors of the lands.22 With the discrepancy between landowners in reality and those documented, the British engaged in a rigorous project of land reregistration.23 Britain’s long international colonial history influenced the legal mechanisms used during the Mandate era in Palestine. The impact of their colonial practices become most apparent in their changes to mevat land. At its base, colonialism holds that native populations waste the land in their possession by either not using it at all or inefficiently cultivating it. From the colonialist perspective, the Ottoman process of granting title-deeds to those who labored mevat land and paid the title-price was not good use of land. In 1921, one year after the British gained control over Palestine, they passed the Mevat Land Ordinance. This new law not only ended the Ottoman tradition of granting title-deeds for cultivated mevat lands, but it also prohibited any future cultivation of this land category.24 The law further stipulated that those who cultivated mevat land prior to the 1921 law must register their land within two months of the law’s publication.25 Under British land doctrine, mevat lands were not specifically claimed as state lands; they simply remained uncultivated, dead land owned by no one. Histories of colonial land practices

At its base, colonialism holds that native populations waste the land in their possession, either not using it at all or inefficiently cultivating it.”

converge to serve the intent established by Balfour. The High Commissioner, with his vast and vague powers to manage public lands, was explicitly given the directive to “encourage close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands [emphasis added].”26 With such a directive, it was necessary for the British Mandate government to determine which lands in Palestine qualified as waste lands that could then be appropriated for Jewish settlement. In order to maximize lands available for Jewish settlement, the British needed to curtail Palestinian claiming of mevat lands, thereby justifying the 1921 Mevat Land Ordinance. Moving away from the texts of land law, a major difference between the Ottoman and British Mandate land systems is in the delegation of power, rights, and responsibilities. The Ottoman Land Code mentions the landowners, land thieves, and the state, making no mention of an individual government position with duties of managing lands. In contrast, an appointed High Commissioner is assigned rights over and obligations to the land system during the British Mandate era. As noted earlier, these duties ranged from the broad responsibility to realize the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to Jewish settlement to the more specific ability to “make grants or leases of any such public lands…or [the High Commissioner] may permit such lands to be temporarily occupied on such terms or conditions as he may think fit subject to the provisions of

eljamal

111

any Ordinance.”27 This position will figure centrally again once we turn to Israeli land authorities. British articulation over Palestine’s land did not have to go through the same negotiation and reangling seen during the Ottoman Empire since Britain’s communication of control via land policy is seen as the norm and understood by the rest of the West. Instead, the British focus on intelligibility was directed towards the early Zionist community that Balfour reassured in his 1917 letter. Members of the British Mandate government needed their legal articulations over property to be understood in reference to their intent to support Jewish settlement and nationhood in Palestine. Their two acts of refining land laws set by the Ottomans and clarifying the intent behind their own land definition and acquisition complete, the British paved a path for Jewish land accumulation during the Mandate era and afterwards.

ISRAELI RHETORICAL ARTICULATIONS OF LAND PROPERTY The two approaches to Zionism of relevance to a conversation about property and ownership are religious and political Zionism. Through religious Zionism, a clear connection ties claims to the Land of Israel with ideas around first possession. An early pioneer of religious Zionism claimed “the belief that Israel will return to its own land originates with the inherent relationship between Israel and the land and with the promise that the Holy One, Blessed be He, will give the land to His children,” a sentiment that remains prevalent to this day.28 Other early religious Zionists used words such as “reclaim” or “return” in their writings, implying that those currently on the land are not the original owners of it.29 As Israel became formally established, the rhetoric around religious Zionism and political Zionism began to converge. Zvi

112

agora 14

Yehuda HaKohen Kook, a religious Zionist, said on the 19 th anniversary of Israeli’s independence: This is the state that the prophets envisioned. Of course, it has not yet attained perfection. But our prophets, our sages and those who followed them, said: “The seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will return and will reestablish settlement and independent political rule in the Land.”…Indeed, surely as a result of the return of Israel to their Land there will come about the increase of Torah and its glorification. But the first step is the settlement of Israel on their land!30 Claim to the land stemmed from Biblical rights, but in the modern context, articulation of such land rights needed to be repackaged to also incorporate the Lockean value of labor as claims to ownership. While religious Zionists use the Torah as evidence of their first possession rights to the land, Palestinians pass down keys and land documents from the British Mandate period to articulate ownership of land.31 The documents they once placed little value in and chose not to update after the Ottomans first mandated the use

The documents they once placed little value in and chose not to update after the Ottomans first mandated the use of titledeeds in the 1858 Land Code, now became key evidence of ownership since the 1948 Nakba as Palestinians juxtapose legal documents denoting ownership against religious claims.”

of title-deeds in the 1858 Land Code now became key evidence of ownership since the 1948 Nakba as Palestinians juxtapose legal documents denoting ownership against religious claims.

Uninhabited, the land wastes away, purports the colonial mind.” The phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land” has widely been attributed to political Zionist Israel Zangwill.32 This rhetoric of emptiness fits with the terra nullius rhetoric used in other settler-colonial states, including the British. The Israeli government continued this rhetoric after it took control of Palestine in 1948. With empty land, the focus is only on what the land does not have; this Zionist slogan, though, strategically couples the emptiness with a landless people. Uninhabited, the land wastes away, purports the colonial mind. The Zionist notes the land’s emptiness and proposes itself as the solution. Inherent to this claim of Jewish settlement as the solution to wasted Palestinian land is the belief that the result of Jewish settlement will be a blossoming of such lands. Such efflorescence comes in two forms: monetary and agricultural. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an early propagandist of Zionism, writes, “Jewish colonization was bringing a rain of gold to Palestine…. Between 1920 and 1938 Jews pour about 100 million pounds into Palestine.”33 While this example emphasizes monetary growth over agricultural, the decision to use the word “rain” alludes to features necessary for agricultural blossoming. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion furthers the claim to the land through references to agricultural prosperity by stating variations of “we will make the desert bloom,”

including when he delivered the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.34 Such statements from Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky keep the attention on the applied labor of Jews, unlike the earlier slogan of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” However, Ben Gurion alludes to the presence of others in the Naqab when saying, “if the state does not conquer the desert – the desert may liquidate the state.”35 By employing the language of colonial conquest, Ben Gurion seems to suggest there is danger associated with the native Bedouin population. In any variation of these quotations from Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky, though, their intent is clear: the Land of Israel belongs to them through the labor of agriculture and capital conquest. Kibbutzim were early manifestations of Israel’s bond between labor and land possession, actualizing Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky’s dreams of Jewish colonization through agriculture. In addition to the institutions of kibbutzim physically replicating the rhetoric of land rights via labor, the individuals on the kibbutz did as well. Called the ‘New Jews,’ they were physically strong and tough from working the land. The Hebrew term for this New Jew is a tzabr, which is also the word for the prickly-pear cactus. The association of the New Jew with the prickly-pear cactus was an attempt to show how natural the New Jew is as an inhabitant of the land.36 The prickly-pear’s association with belonging and indigeneity, though, is not unique to Israelis; Palestinians also use the prickly-pear cactus to symbolize their own rootedness in the land. For example, Sahar Khalifeh’s book dealing with debates over modes of resistance to reclaim Palestine is entitled al-subbar, the Arabic word for prickly-pear. Even more relevant to property claims is the fact that prickly-pear cacti once demarcated property boundaries in Palestine. Continuing the thread of plants, the natureand state-land relationship discussed as

eljamal

113

part of the Ottoman mierié classification is also present in Jewish National Fund tree-planting initiatives. Belonging and rootedness in Israel tied itself to the ‘blooming Israel’ rhetoric. In addition to embodying a plant in the idealized New Jew, building new forests across the country was a strategy for laying further claim to the lands by putting their labor into a rooted plant that eventually becomes immovable property. The Ottomans objected to planting new trees on public lands due to their permanence, and the Israelis took the same permanence logic and applied it to lands they wanted to pull into their purview. Beyond the new forests as acts of their own claims to land, they also erased Palestinian structural articulations to ownership. Many of the forests were built on top of depopulated Palestinian villages.37 Along with fitting Lockean values of labor, this act of tree plantings was also intelligible to a broader audience due to its visible nature. The previous owners of the land, whether legitimate or illegitimate, were rendered invisible, covered by the fruits of the new owners’ labor. All of these Israeli rhetorical claims based in nature, especially in the case of reforestation, are made on behalf of the entire Jewish collective while they are displacing and alienating large amounts of individually held Palestinian property. Moving away from the nature-based rhetoric and towards a conversation about legal articulations of property, I end on Jabotinsky’s rhetoric that brings in the legal history Israel inherited. Jabotinsky’s famous 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” articulates and acknowledges the stage the British set for Zionism. He writes: This [Zionist coonization] is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security

114

agora 14

that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.38 On an international scale, Jabotinsky quite clearly voices the intention of future Zionist endeavors to continue on the path of British legal structures that already facilitated property alienation.

ISRAELI LEGAL ARTICULATIONS OF LAND PROPERTY Foundational to Israeli alienation of Palestinian property was a series of emergency regulations established in 1948, specifically the Abandoned Areas Ordinance, Cultivation of Wastelands Law, and the Absentees’ Property Law. Together, these laws facilitated the legal alienation of Palestinian property. The Abandoned Areas Ordinance facilitated the widespread use of the Absentees’ Property Law. Article 1 of the Ordinance defines abandoned land as “any area or place conquered by or surrendered to armed forces or deserted by all or part of its inhabitants, and which has been declared by order to be an abandoned area”; once declared abandoned, the land falls under state purview and all other Israeli laws. The Ordinance gave the Israeli government state-wide margins to deem an area abandoned. The unlimited range of power extended beyond the ability to classify lands as abandoned and goes on to empower the Prime Minister and other government officials to “make such regulations as he may deem expedient as to matters relating to…the expropriation and confiscation of moveable and immovable property, within any abandoned area.”39 This law delineates few restrictions of the state’s authority to classify, alienate, and claim dominion over these lands and simultaneously disregards whether the state’s own actions created the circumstances behind an area’s abandonment.

Similarly, under the Absentees’ Property Law, breadth of power comes into play as a way to maximize amalgamation and accumulation of property into state control. Absentee property is that whose ordinary owner was not present at the property from November 29, 1947 to May 19, 1948.40 Once declared ‘absentee property,’ land and improvements fall into the state’s hands, ignoring the reason for the owners’ absence, fitting with language of the Abandoned Areas Ordinance. The Cultivation of Wastelands Law has its roots in the 1921 British Mevat Land Ordinance, which protected uncultivated land from Palestinian claimants. In addition to cordoning off these swaths of land from Palestinian use, the rigorous land registration initiative under the British meant the Israeli government knew which lands were classified as waste land. While waste land did not immediately fall into the hands of the British, the Israeli legal system outlines several avenues through which the state can claim waste land. According

to the Abandoned Areas Ordinance, waste lands qualify as abandoned and thus can be amassed by the state. Additionally, under Article 4 of the Cultivation of Wastelands Law, if the “Minister of Agriculture is not satisfied that the owner of the land has begun or is about to begin or will continue to cultivate the land, the Minister of Agriculture may assume control of the land in order to ensure its cultivation.”41

LAND LAW HISTORIES CONVERGE IN UMM AL-HIRAN In the context of the Umm al-Hiran case, the history of British Mandate rule makes another appearance in the form of unrecognized villages and the Dead Negev Doctrine (DND), whose name itself connects to an understanding of ownership through Lockean values of labor. Israel deems many of the villages in the Naqab as ‘unrecognized villages’ and therefore has

Figure 2. Haifa, Palestine - Graffiti on abandoned property in Wadi Salib, a historically Palestinian neighborhood (Eljamal, 2015).

eljamal

115

no responsibilities to them even though the inhabitants of the villages are Israeli citizens. The DND adds another layer to this complication because, for all intents and purposes, it rejects and denies Bedouin claims to the land, rendering their villages mevat lands. It follows that any actions taken to remove the Bedouins from the land are not acts of dispossession; rather, they are acts of protecting state lands.42 The DND also claims that Bedouins are not considered indigenous, thereby absolving Israel of the rights and responsibilities outlined by international bodies for the protection of such communities.43 In Umm al-Hiran, the histories of land management from the Ottoman Empire to the British colony to Israel contribute to its precarious existence. Reallocation of Bedouin land across the Naqab began very early in Israel’s existence through claiming lands for Jewish National Fund restoration

projects and Jewish resettlement.44 Beginning in 2003, Israel issued a series of eviction and demolition orders for Umm al-Hiran, with the plans of building a new Jewish settlement and forest in its place. Article 1 of the Cultivation of Waste Lands Law defines waste land as “land capable of yielding crops and which, in the opinion of the Minister of Agriculture, is uncultivated.”45 Taking into consideration the articulated goal of ‘making the desert bloom,’ the State of Israel clearly believes in the agricultural potential of the Naqab. The future implied in these statements, though, also means that the current use of the land by the Bedouins for their own pastoral purposes does not count as cultivating the land. The standards for cultivation remain unclear because if the new plan for Umm al-Hiran is a settlement, how then does the Bedouin use of the land for settlement not meet the use requirements?

Figure 3. Al-Khalil, Palestine - Located in Al-Khalil (Hebron), a town heavily militarized by Israeli soldiers occupied by Israeli settlers, this graffiti asserts the Palestinian roots of the land (Eljamal, 2014).

116

agora 14

The DND itself was not a policy plan; however, it set a foundation for other policies to follow its directive. One such policy that emerged from the DND framework is the 2011 Prawer-Begin Plan, or the Prawer Bill, which aimed to “solve the Bedouin question.”46 Following the colonial rhetoric of ‘modernizing the savage,’ the Prawer Bill’s solution was to evict Palestinians in unrecognized villages and resettle them in more urban sites.47 The Israeli State used aerial photographs to determine whether or not land was inhabited or cultivated to the extent necessary to deem it possessed.48 The aerial photographs cannot account for Bedouin pasturing or agriculture practices, so if a land is caught in a time of rest and lacks the structures that are perceived as signaling habitation, then the land is reduced to that single snapshot and ostensibly can be alienated for the sake of the state under its authority given by the Cultivation of Waste Lands Law. This very much connects with Rose’s ideas about vision being part of property, and the way in which Israel is using these photos relates to a critique that has been levied against vision. The critique of vision eclipsing time becomes relevant in this case, despite Rose’s assertions against this consequence of vision.49

conclusion The Israeli state manages to articulate its claims of ownership over Umm al-Hiran through several legal layers. Recent legal claims to the land are reinforced by laws from 1948, which are again supported by authorities constructed at the state’s founding. To a global community, it looks as though Israel is operating within its legal structure: the Prawer Bill does not therefore stand out as exceptional, and continuity can be seen as credibility. Israel’s claims to land ownership cannot be viewed as novel practices of a young

country. The state constructed its land tenure systems and practices precisely through the framework provided by the historical imperialism that dominated Palestine. Since the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, articulation of ownership hinges upon labor, which roots an individual to the tract of land and transforms mevat lands to spaces of productivity. Such Ottoman values of labor, and even more importantly the attempts to uncover the ‘highest and best uses’ of lands, resonate strongly with the British colonial mindset and are thus built upon as an opportunity for domination. What was once ‘dead’ land available for Palestinians to claim and cultivate becomes amalgamated property for the British Empire, consolidated under its land laws. Israel further builds upon this definition of waste to include emptiness, abandonment, and absenteeism, allowing the state to dispossess Palestinians of their land, growing its own coffers. Land viewed as waste land is seen as an issue; in reality, though, the British and Israeli governments value and covet purportedly wasted land as an opportunity. A wider definition of waste land means a broader sphere for alienation. Thus, land laws that date back to the Ottoman era and uphold the Lockean perspective of labor as a communication of property ownership work hard to eliminate the opportunities for Palestinians to claim historic and current ownership through this method and other modes of articulation developed and established by past regimes, as is apparent through the case of Umm al-Hiran. Through this exploration into the tactics and strategies of land accumulation and alienation, we see how such methods of communication are not temporally confined; rather, imperial and colonial strategies maintain their prominence today, raging in contemporary Israel and successfully continuing to alienate Palestinian land.

eljamal

117

about the author Mekarem Eljamal is a dual Master of Arts candidate with the Center for Middle Eastern & North African Studies and Master of Urban and Regional Planning candidate at the University of Michigan. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies in 2016. Her research interests focus on placemaking processes of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Mekarem is also the Associate Editor of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative with the Arab Studies Institute, where she works to support and instill a more nuanced manner of teaching the Middle East and North Africa.

118

agora 14

endnotes 1. Matt Surrusco, “‘When I Look at the Prawer Plan, I See Another Nakba,’” +972 Magazine, July 14, 2013, https://www.972mag.com/when-i-look-at-the-prawerplan-i-see-another-nakba/. 2. Carol M Rose, “Possession as the Origin of Property,” in Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership, eds. Robert W. Gordon and Jane Radin (Westview Press, 1985), 20.

refugees/father-to-son-keys-to-palestinian-homecherished-idUSL2223730920071123. 32. Adam M. Garfinkle, “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase,” Middle Eastern Studies 27 no. 4 (1991): 540. 33. Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Fata Morgana Land,” The Jewish Herald, February 24, 1939, 1.

3. Aida Asim Essaid, Zionism and Land Tenure in Mandate Palestine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 58.

34. David Ben Gurion, “Proclamation of Independence,” 1948.

4.Ottoman Land Code, Article 2.

35. Orri Avraham, “Farming a Desert–and Bulldozing a Habitat,” The Jerusalem Post, November 6, 2007, https:// www.jpost.com/Health-and-Sci-Tech/Science-AndEnvironment/Farming-a-desert-and-bulldozing-ahabitat.

5.Ottoman Land Code, Article 2. 6.Ottoman Land Code, Article 2. 7.Ottoman Land Code, Article 3. 8.John Locke, “Of Property,” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Cook, n.d., 137. 9. Ottoman Land Code, Article 26. 10. Ottoman Land Code, Article 5. 11. Ottoman Land Code, Article 93. 12. Ottoman Land Code, Article 93. 13. Locke, “Of Property,” 137. 14. Ottoman Land Code, Article 6. 15. Ottoman Land Code, Article 103. 16. Ottoman Land Code, Article 8. 17. Ahmad Amara, Alexandre Kedar, and Oren Yiftachel, Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 53.

36. Carol Bardenstein, “Threads of Memory and Discourses of Rootedness: Of Trees, Oranges, and the Prickly-Pear Cactus in Israel/Palestine,” Edebiyat 8 (1998): 12. 37. Carol Bardenstein, “Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan V. Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 158-59. 38. Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall,” Raszviet, November 4, 1923. 39. David Ben Gurion, “Abandoned Area Ordinance,” 1948. 40. “Absentees’ Property Law 1950,” 1950, Article 1. 41. David Ben Gurion, “Emergency Regulations (Cultivation of Waste Lands) Ordinance,” 1948.

18. Rose, “Possession as the Origin of Property,” 268.

42. Amara, Kedar, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands, 14.

19. Amara, Kedar, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands, 53.

43. Amara, Kedar, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands, 14.

20. Ottoman Land Code, Article 126.

44. The Attempted Expulsion of the Arab Bedouin in the Naqab: The Example of Atir–Umm Al-Hieran (Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, September 2011), 14.

21. League of Nations, “Mandate for Palestine” (UNISPAL, 1922), Articles 4 and 21. 22. Amara, Kedar, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands, 50. 23. Amara, Kedar, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands, 78. 24. Martin Bunton, Colonial Land Policies in Palestine 1917-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44. 25. Amara, Kedar, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev, 67. 26. “The Palestine Order in Council, 1922” (UNISPAL, 1922). 27. “The Palestine Order in Council, 1922,” Article 13. 28. Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky, The Zionist Ideas (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2018), 91–92.

45. Ben Gurion, “Emergency Regulations (Cultivation of Waste Lands) Ordinance,” 1948. 46. Amara, Kedar, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands, 38. 47. Noura Erakat, “Rethinking Israel-Palestine: Beyond Bantustans, Beyond Reservations,” The Nation, March 21, 2013, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ rethinking-israel-palestine-beyond-bantustansbeyond-reservations/. 48. Amara, Kedar, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands, 235. 49. Rose, “Possession as the Origin of Property,” 268. Jewish Herald, February 24, 1939, 1.

29. Troy and Sharansky, The Zionist Ideas , 90-101. 30. Troy and Sharansky, The Zionist Ideas , 244. 31. Yara Bayoumy, “Father to Son, Keys to Palestinian Home Cherished,” Reuters, November 23, 2007, https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-israel-

eljamal

119

Photographer: M. Falkenbach Location: Vienna, Austria

Facebook Urbanization A Silicon Valley Case Study ED FALKOWSKI Master of Architecture 2021

ABSTRACT Silicon Valley arose in the 1940s and 1950s as a leading computer and technology hub. Facebook joined that boom in 2006, acquiring its Menlo Park, California office from Sun Microsystems in 2011 and constructing the office buildings MPK 20, 21, and 22 nearby in 2016. Additionally, Facebook submitted plans to expand in mid-2020 with a development, Willow Village, that includes residential, retail, and other mixed uses. This piece analyzes the three campuses through the lenses of phenomenology and American Pragmatism, and determines that Facebookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s campuses are concerning phenomenological places that are quickly turning Menlo Park into a Facebook monopoly. This is problematic from a pragmatic point of view as it leads to corporate interest being the primary driver of urbanistic change in Menlo Park. In order to promote a more equitable built environment, Facebook needs to strike a balance between a strong sense of place, an integration with the surrounding communities, and a more serious attitude towards the urban developer role it has claimed in Menlo Park.

122

AGORA 14

y ongoing architectural thesis work critiques the suburban office campuses of tech giants and traces their developmental trajectory. I visited tech giant campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area in October 2019 to better understand their conceptions of work and how these manifest in their built forms. In this article, I use Facebook as an example of larger trends in the technology sector through discussions of Facebook’s development and takeover of Menlo Park, a suburb located approximately 30 miles down the peninsula from the skyscrapers and high-rise offices of downtown San Francisco. Through the lenses of phenomenology and American Pragmatism, I critique three Facebook developments: the original Menlo Park campus, the MPK buildings, and the forthcoming Willow Village. These developments show Facebook’s trajectory as an urban form maker. I find the developments to be both

Figure 1. Aerial view of Facebook headquarters (Karl Mondon, Bay Area News Group, 2015).

Appearing as a single building wall, the Menlo Park campus is a compound decidedly separate from the city of Menlo Park.” troublesome phenomenological places and pragmatically problematic. The essay ends with suggestions regarding Facebook’s isolationism and how Facebook might approach a solution by balancing space designated for humans and for machines, by utilizing the pragmatic idea of the public sphere, and by being more cognizant of the concept of everyday space. My visit to Facebook headquarters included its first campus at 1 Hacker Way, which I will refer to as Menlo Park, and its expansion campus at 1 Facebook Way, also known as MPK 20, 21, and 22. The Menlo Park campus was originally owned by Sun Microsystems, the creators of the Java programming language. It was leased by Facebook in 2011 and purchased five years later. Facebook expanded its office space with MPK 20 in 2015 and with MPK 21 in 2018, both designed by world-renowned ‘starchitect’ Frank Gehry. MPK 22 is currently being built. The three MPK buildings are seamlessly linked to create one massive building (Figures 1, 2, and 3).

Figure 2. View of MPK 21 rooftop (Eleanor Gibson, Dezeen,

Figure 3. Aerial view of Facebook campus (Paul Moran,

2018).

Level 10 Construction).

FALKOWSKI

123

Two colleagues and I took an early morning train from downtown San Francisco and opted to walk the four miles to Facebook from the train station through the Belle Haven neighborhood. The neighborhood looks like many suburban developments: wide roads through quaint one- and twostory houses and manicured lawns (Figure 4). As we arrived at the Menlo Park campus, it was obvious the campus was supposed to be seen and approached by moving vehicles.1 Appearing as a single building wall, the Menlo Park campus is a compound decidedly separate from the city of Menlo Park.

VOLUNTARY PRISONERS

inhabitants of this Architecture, those strong enough to love it, would become its voluntary prisoners.”2 As people continued to migrate from London into the new settlement, London would fall into disrepair and then could be rebuilt. Facebook’s campuses reminded me of Exodus on several occasions. The front door of Facebook leads to a reception building through which every visitor must pass. This sole door is the only outward face among a wall of buildings that shield and protect the campus. Applying the concepts of Koolhaas’s Exodus, the reception building acts as the “first step of the indoctrination program” and a “voluntary

In his thesis Exodus, architect Rem Koolhaas, the co-founder of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), explores the premise of a small city being built in the center of London. Koolhaas envisioned that this city would provide infinitely tantalizing amenities that would entertain people and keep them in the new city, writing: “The

Figure 5. Koolhaas’s “The Strip: Aerial Perspective” (Koolhaas, Exodus, 1972).

Figure 6. Koolhaas’s conception of the “Reception Area” Figure 4. The Belle Haven neighborhood (Falkowski, 2019).

124

AGORA 14

(Koolhaas, Exodus, 1972).

public realm.”3 The building serves as a beacon to visitors, where employees meet their outside guests and help them check in; only then can employees chaperone visitors inside the campus (Figure 5 and 6). The Exodus city within a city also features an area for the “frontline of the Architectural warfare” - the “Tip of the Strip.”4 The Tip is meant to be an area of confrontation. Facebook’s reception building recreates this concept with the immediate restrictions it places on visitors, including us: we could not wander, let alone walk to any bathroom without being accompanied by security, and no photos were allowed inside office buildings. All of these security protocols put us on edge: why all the secrecy? What are they hiding away here? Surprisingly, the reception building opens immediately to a heavily foot-trafficked urban street (Figure 7). The imposing building walls that shelter the campus from the outside completely melt away on the interior. Office buildings with glass facades

greet the street, a plethora of shops line the path, and people rush between buildings, stroll to get a snack, and take walking meetings with colleagues. This urban street anchors the campus and provides a small community cluster After we finished touring the Menlo Park campus, we were shuttled to MPK. MPK comprises three buildings stitched together into a warehouse of incomprehensible production. The buildings were planned using Burolandschaft, an office planning technique from the 1960s that arranges desks into cells wedged between informal seating, houseplants, scattered conference rooms, and work pods. The pathways snake around the workspaces, making the buildings feel even larger. You cannot see from one side of the building to the other in either direction. Skylights serve as the main source of light in the space; massive cuts in the ceiling plane break up the endless array of ducts, pipes, and wires crisscrossing the exposed ceiling (Figure 8 shows a scale model of the buildings). While wandering through the space, we saw several snack stations and cafes, two main dining areas, and several shops and vendors. Facebook is engaged in what Exodus calls the “hedonistic science of designing collective facilities which fully accommodate individual desires.”5 All shops and restaurants are open from eight

Figure 7. Facebook’s internal urban street (Falkowski, 2019).

Figure 8. MPK scale model (Falkowski, 2019).

FALKOWSKI

125

in the morning until eight at night and rotate through fully catered menus each week. The kicker: everything is free. Facebook pampers its employees to ensure their loyalty to the company; they do not want employees to switch jobs and work for a competing company. Because every tech firm provides similar amenities, the companies must constantly upstage each other to recruit and retain employees. With the myriad amenities provided, there is no reason to leave the building – much less leave the job. Halfway through our tour of the MPK campus, we were brought to the roof garden. On one side of the property is a suburb kept at arm’s length by a highway and defunct rail line. On the other side are miles of salt flats and marshlands (Figure 9). The views confirmed that Facebook desires isolation. With nothing of architectural note outside the bounds of the campuses - besides miles of single-family housing - one gets the impression that employees are trapped there. The voluntary prisoners do not seem to mind.

neighborhood scale, however, Facebook’s campuses sit in isolation. This conflict diminishes the success of the buildings. To discuss the tension between the internal and external ethos of Facebook’s buildings, I will use phenomenology, an architectural philosophy used to define what a good place is. Christian Norberg-Schulz was a Norwegian architect who reinterpreted Martin Heidegger’s concept of dwelling to define what makes a good place through phenomenology. His theory revolves around the following concepts: space, the three-dimensional organization of a place; character, a place’s atmosphere and the materials and details of objects within a space; lived space, which involves both space and character; and place, the combination of landscape, settlement, space, and character. Under NorbergSchulz’s theory: space + character = lived space and lived space + landscape = place In The Place of Houses, Charles Moore, Gerald Allen, and Donlyn Lyndon build upon Norberg-Schulz’s definition of character via a discussion on rooms. Rooms, they argue, can be defined as “unspecified spaces, empty stages for human action, fixed in space by boundaries; animated by light, organized by focus, and then liberated by outlook.”6 The character of a room is based on its dimensions in relation to the people who occupy the space, the intended and actual uses of the space, and qualitative descriptors.

Figure 9. MPK rooftop and Menlo Park Salt Flats (Falkowski, 2019).

A SERIES OF ROOMS Facebook equips its buildings with topnotch amenities anchored strongly to its brand and messaging. From a broader

126

AGORA 14

In order to critique Facebook from a phenomenological perspective, I will look at both campuses through these definitions. The original Menlo Park campus is organized as a small village of office buildings. Each of these buildings is two to three stories, organized around the interior urban street. In the center of the Menlo Park buildings, there is a plaza that acts as the

heart of campus and hosts many outdoor activities throughout the day. The plaza and urban street feel lighthearted and honest, which contributes to a feeling similar to that of an idyllic small town.

Farther outside the parking lot’s perimeter are salt flats on one side and a highway secluding the campus from the city of Menlo Park on the other. The overall landscape isolates the campus from the city.

The Menlo Park campus is successful in scaling up Moore et al.’s concept of rooms to an urban scale. If a room is a stage for human action and a building is a combination of rooms, a building can be considered a backdrop for human activities. If the best buildings are able to maintain a certain character between multiple rooms, then the best urban plans can tie multiple buildings together in a similar fashion. In the Menlo Park campus, the urban street is the central corridor to the ‘building’ and the buildings to each side of the corridor are ‘rooms,’ with each building offering an individual focus. In this way, the campus provides great space.

Although the Menlo Park campus is spatially strong overall, the buildings’ character is eerily similar and consistent, and the isolation caused by the landscape is troubling. Each of these factors contributes to a feeling that something is off. Utopia has some cracks that point to larger underlying problems.

Nonetheless, the campus struggles due to the buildings’ similar characters. It reminded me of sterile New Urbanist communities such as New Town in Missouri or Seaside in Florida (Figure 10). The buildings are too constrained in massing, look, and material palette. This character flaw can be partly attributed to the campus’s original owner, as Facebook inherited the campus from Sun Microsystems. The interior landscape of the campus is quaint, with small thoughtful plantings. Directly outside the building wall, however, a sea of parking surrounds the campus.

Figure 10. Seaside new urbanist development in Florida (Scott Doyon, Placeshakers and Newsmakers, 2015).

strong space + consistent character = average lived space and average lived space + poor landscape = below-average place MPK is one massive warehouse built in three parts. The buildings rest upon piloti to allow at-grade parking. To wander around the exterior of these buildings is to always look up at an unbroken, imposing massing. MPK is cheaply built, which heightens the atmosphere of industrial production. The more time you spend inside, the smaller you feel. The amenities in this space – two cafeterias, a café in a redwood forest biome, and an expansive rooftop garden – are increasingly out of scale with the humans occupying the buildings. At about a half-mile long, the pure scale of the warehouse makes it inherently urban. A building this large no longer needs the city. Instead, it competes with the city; or rather, it is the city.7 The cost of bigness is a surrender to technology, the risk of becoming impersonal, and the risk of occupants losing autonomy. The Burolandschaft planning style creates an uncertain path through the building, making the pathways disconnected segments to the larger organizational device.8 Because there is no breakdown of space, there is no focus. The space at MPK is overwhelming. The

FALKOWSKI

127

A failure to orient or a failure to identify creates a feeling of placelessness.” dimensions are far from human scale, the placement of the buildings’ office furniture is hectic and seemingly random, and the combination of bigness and busyness renders foci or repose impossible. Despite the off-putting size, the character remains fresh throughout the building. Because the building is so large, the interior design can tackle spaces as biomes. These biomes are variable and interesting, and they effectively communicate when you have transitioned spaces. The trouble is that visitors don’t know where that space is in relation to anything else. While the interior landscape of the building is disorganized due to the Burolandschaft style, the rooftop garden is calmingly isolated. The rooftop mirrors the biomes of the interior with a myriad of plant types. MPK suffers from isolation like the Menlo Park campus, with highway, salt flats, and train tracks separating it from the city. MPK’s space is industrial and distracting, the character is completely inconsistent, and while the interior landscape is messy, the exterior landscape aids in repose and refocusing. Different factors again contribute to larger underlying problems overwhelming space + strong character = average lived space and average lived space + below-average landscape = below average place According to Norberg-Schulz, to dwell is to be located in space and exposed to that local environment’s character. To dwell, a person must be able to both orient within and

128

AGORA 14

identify the place from the outside. To orient is to know where one is; to identify is to understand a certain place and the place’s distinct characteristics. A failure to orient or a failure to identify creates a feeling of placelessness.9 As the office becomes the employees’ primary place, they cannot orient with aspects of the office in relation to the outside world; they cannot dwell and, therefore, they may feel placeless. In buildings like MPK 20, 21, and 22, an employee cannot see outside in any direction. In Menlo Park, building walls surround all sides. With no external structure to connect to, the landscape is deprived of meaning as an extension of something larger, and one is left attempting to find meaning within a network of manmade elements.10 A sense of placelessness occurs as people do not interface with the environments and communities outside of the office walls. Equally problematic from a phenomenological perspective is the abundance of technology. The massive presence of technology in the Facebook buildings has deprived them of their unique characteristics, rendering them placeless. Moore et al. call the emphasis on technology the “machine domain.”11 This domain consists of the spaces required by machines, the clear spaces surrounding machines, and other fixed objects needed for particular mechanical acts. As technology continues to advance, we surrender the human domain to find room for updated technology. The presence of technology in Facebook’s buildings overrides unique characteristics and creates a feeling of placelessness. A comparison of the two campuses demonstrates how Facebook’s understanding of space has evolved since renting in 2006, until acquiring Menlo Park in 2011, and expanding into MPK in 2018. Since both campuses are in the same landscape, the major difference between

them is their space and character. While both campuses are similar in height, the differences in their buildings’ width and length, material palettes, and overall campus planning create two separate building languages. In Menlo Park, although the urban street is interior to the campus, it is still on the outside of its buildings, thereby uniting a series of buildings along a spine. This creates a feeling reminiscent of a quaint village. While isolated, the village is easily understood by first-time visitors. In contrast, by moving the urban street into the interior of the campus and snaking it confusingly through the buildings, MPK creates a separation between those who know the space and those visiting. The difference represents an evolution of thinking among key decision makers at Facebook: they aim to give preference to the workers and their work and to discourage interfacing with the public. This evolution is not a positive contribution from an urbanist standpoint.

FUTURE OF WORK? THE WILLOW VILLAGE DEVELOPMENT Facebook has chosen to continue development in Menlo Park. The Willow Village project has been in the works since a 2011 charrette followed by a 2017 initial proposal. Facebook is looking to pick the project up again in 2020, now with a developer in tow.12, 13 The project plans to take over the existing Menlo Park business district by building 1.75 million square feet of office space, 1,500 housing units, 200,000 square feet of retail, and a hotel with between 200 and 250 rooms on a 60-acre site.14 This new development is a double-sided coin: positive growth for both Facebook and the City of Menlo Park at the cost of homogenizing the professional population and furthering Facebook’s monopoly of the local job market.

Phenomenologically, the Facebook campuses evoke strong senses of place as destinations themselves. However, these places cannot integrate with their surrounding context because they have isolated themselves from it. The offices at Facebook provide amazing amenity space and interesting programs but are inaccessible to a larger public. The public investment and infrastructure work the City has asked Facebook to undertake also directly benefit Facebook’s corporate brand: the public works Facebook has taken over support the company’s private infrastructure as much as the town’s.15 In the developer agreement for Willow Village, Facebook only needs to perform several obligations to “investigate the possibility of” a tunnel underneath a major road, to restripe nearby bicycle lanes and crosswalks, and to develop new paths and trails.16 The City has endowed Facebook with the right to develop Willow Village with very limited obligations to the public. Facebook does not have to worry about the impact of future development on the City’s public facilities, including, but not limited to, city streets, water and sewer systems, utilities, traffic signals, sidewalks and curbs, gutters, parks, and other City-owned public facilities that may benefit the property and other properties in the city.17 As long as Facebook can make a case that it benefits the property and surrounding properties, the new development can go ahead without any fear of projected futures. These problems have already manifested themselves in Facebook’s role as a miasma suffocating local business. Because the company provides all amenities for its employees, they have no reason to leave the confines of the office and invest in the local economy. The local job market has also experienced less demand for non-tech, non-creative class workers, and therefore it devalues mixed professions. It also manages to gentrify the area as the market becomes saturated with tech employees.18, 19, 20

FALKOWSKI

129

campus

residential

phys. boundary

rail

business

institution

highway

roads

parking

Figure 11. Willow village neighborhood layout (Falkowski, 2020).

The development agreement tries to tackle these issues but does so in a half-hearted way. According to the agreement, Facebook must purchase from local vendors only if they have competitive quality, price, and terms.21 Thus, this requirement can be easily avoided. The Willow Village development will double the 1.8 million square feet of office space in Menlo Park, introducing 8,700 more employees to reach a new total of 18,000.22 The mixed-use development will bring in different professions, but the increase in Facebook employees will offset that diversification. The entire population of Menlo Park sits at 32,000 as of 2010, meaning that Menlo Park risks being majority-ruled by Facebook employees.23 This will pose a challenge to existing communities whose interests are not tied to Facebook. Moreover, the development

130

AGORA 14

will host only 1,500 housing units; this will not meet the needs of incoming employees and will further exacerbate the housing affordability crisis.24 Paradoxically, the City of Menlo Park is guaranteeing Facebook entitlement to to tax credits equal to all taxes paid, without limitation, for on-site retail operationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; sales taxes. The City is also granting this credit to all future taxes.25 These massive tax incentives encourage continued investment from Facebook, but by investing a lot of local revenues into one basket, this action chokes off other local economies. It also increases risk for the City if tech companies as a whole, or Facebook specifically, declines.26, 27 On a positive note, Facebook is beginning to learn from and address its previous shortcomings regarding building typology diversity. The Willow Village project will

include a four-acre public park on a portion of the site near both a middle and high school, a full-service grocery store, and a pharmacy, all of which will be within walking distance and open to Bell Haven, the nearest neighborhood. Willow Village’s emphasis on mixed uses will bring typological diversity to the architecture of the city and will be a big step away from Menlo Park’s overall suburban development model up to this point (Figure 11). The Willow Village development is a step – albeit small – in the right direction. Aggregations of single-use projects do not promote socially diverse, environmentally sensitive, and economically sustainable communities.28 Norberg-Schulz recognizes that a place that is fitted for only one particular purpose will soon become useless, and it seems Facebook is becoming wise to this as well.29

recommendations and conclusions I have used Facebook as an example of larger trends in the technology sector, including an approach to campus planning that leads to community isolation, impressive campus design that only looks inward, buildings that have fully stocked amenities and programs that veer towards the generic or overwhelming, and developments that have negative impacts on local communities. With these major problems identified, I conclude with potential solutions to these problems. Between building and urban scale, the foremost need of the campuses is to deal with isolationism. American Pragmatism defines a public sphere as a discursive arena separate from the state and the economy, a space of democracy that everyone can enter.30 Isolating the community from the company means there is no in-between space to open up public discussion and debate. The lack of exchange opportunities, where a city is

explored through a transect of places for social encounter, is one way to critique Facebook.31 The theory of exchange opportunities assesses if there are ample places throughout the city that allow these discursive arenas to exist. Such public spaces do not currently exist in Menlo Park. The ideas of the public sphere and exchange opportunities are crucial for American Pragmatism. The theory encourages cooperation through pluralism, recognizing that people will not share beliefs and will necessarily be in conflict with one another. Public discourse allows for self-reflection, democratic organization, and effective social policies.

Public forums and encouragement of healthy public discourse and debate create a richer urban environment that would encourage interaction of the public and private sphere.” When tech campuses seclude themselves, they deny exchanges with the city and its communities. They also deny a public discourse that arises from those exchanges. The employee population is too homogenous to participate in exchange opportunities between ages, professions, and experiences in the public realm. Public forums and encouragement of healthy public discourse and debate create a richer urban environment that would encourage interaction of the public and private sphere. At the building scale, architects need to reconfigure and reconsider the machine domain. Moore et al. understand that when machines receive more careful attention than humans, buildings become not a place to dwell but a setting for equipment.32 The

FALKOWSKI

131

Menlo Park campus hides its machine domain well; machines do not consume the buildings. MPK, however, suffers from the machine domain. The difficulty, then, is the necessity of machines in the type of work that Facebook undertakes. This is especially important in the Willow Village development. With new building typologies come new machine domain typologies. It is important to balance infrastructural loads and human needs, which can be achieved through potential public-private collaborations. Enacting these suggestions will lead us closer to everyday space: “The juxtapositions, combinations, and collisions of people, places, and activities create a new condition of social fluidity that begins to break down the separate, specialized, and hierarchical structures of everyday life.”33 These suggestions advocate for dissolution of the current boundary between the technology sector and the rest of us. Despite the existing problems at Facebook and other tech campuses, I am hopeful that the Willow

Village development will set a precedent for more positive tech-driven urbanization practices. Ironically, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture is working with Facebook on Willow Village.34 Koolhaas has a very real ability to prevent his thesis from coming to life: “The existing physical structure of the old town will not be able to stand the continuing competition of this new architectural presence. [The city] as we know it will become a pack of ruins.”35 The design decisions executed in Menlo Park and MPK do not achieve phenomenological place but instead opt for isolation. These decisions have thus far set a stage for Exodus to occur. As Facebook prepares for Willow Village, it has an opportunity to reverse that trend. Other tech giants should take notice because the lessons learned from the Willow Village project will impact the future of the Silicon Valley urbanist model.

about the author Ed Falkowski grew up in Central Massachusetts and has spent the last eight years in the Midwest. He attended Washington University in St. Louis for his undergraduate studies, worked in Wisconsin for two years, and is currently pursuing his Master’s of Architecture at Taubman College at the University of Michigan. Ed is interested in the intersection between architecture and urban design; his work interrogates the various scales of building, neighborhood, and city.

132

AGORA 14

endnotes 1. Margaret Crawford, “Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life,” in Everyday Urbanism, ed. John Leighton Chase (New York: Monacelli Press, 2008), 26. 2. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Strip (London: Architectural Association School of Architecture, 1972), 238. 3. Koolhaas, Zenghelis, Vriesendorp, and Zenghelis, Exodus, 242. 4. Koolhaas, Zenghelis, Vriesendorp, and Zenghelis, Exodus, 244. 5. Koolhaas, Zenghelis, Vriesendorp, and Zenghelis, Exodus, 238. 6. Charles Moore, Gerald Allen, and Donlyn Lyndon, The Place of Houses (California: University of California Press, 2000), 82. 7. OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, “Bigness, or the Problem of Large,” in Architectural Theory: Volume II, An Anthology from 1871 to 2005, eds. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Christina Contandriopoulos (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 568. 8. OMA, Koolhaas, and Mau, “Bigness,” 568. 9. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 19. 10. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, 189. 11. Moore, Allen, and Lyndon, The Place of Houses, 81. 12. Sandy Brundage, “Menlo Park Community Gets Ready for Saturday’s ‘Charrette’ at Facebook,” The Almanac, March 3, 2011, https://www.almanacnews. com/news/2011/03/03/menlo-park-community-getsready-for-saturdays-charrette-at-facebook-. 13. Kate Bradshaw, “Facebook Unveils Plans for Giant New Development in Menlo Park,” Palo Alto Online, July 7, 2017, https://www.paloaltoonline.com/ news/2017/07/07/facebook-unveils-plans-for-giantnew-development-in-menlo-park.

gentrification/. 20. Richard Florida, “Tech Made Cities Too Expensive, Here’s How to Fix It,” Wired, April 26, 2017, https://www. wired.com/2017/04/how-to-save-the-middle-class/. 21. City of Menlo Park, “Staff Report,” 184. 22. Bradshaw, “Facebook Unveils Plans for Giant New Development in Menlo Park.” 23. City of Menlo Park, “2010 U.S. Census of Population and Housing Data,” City Demographics, accessed February 12, 2020, https://www.menlopark.org/816/ City-demographics. 24. Bradshaw, “Facebook Submits Revised Plans for Willow Village.” 25. City of Menlo Park, “Staff Report,” 178. 26. Eileen Brown, “Why the Influencer Marketing Bubble Will Burst Soon,” ZD Net, October 31, 2018, https://www. zdnet.com/article/why-the-influencer-marketingbubble-will-burst-soon/. 27. Marjorie Van Elven, “Is Influencer Marketing a Bubble Just Waiting To Burst?,” Fashion United, August 8, 2018, https://fashionunited.uk/news/business/ is-influencer-marketing-a-bubble-just-waiting-toburst/2018080831167. 28. Charles C. Bohl and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, “Building Community Across the Urban-to-Rural Transect,” Places 18, no. 1 (2006): 4. 29. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, 18. 30. Crawford, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 24. 31. Bohl and Plater-Zyberk, “Building Community,” 16. 32. Moore, Allen, and Lyndon, The Place of Houses, 81. 33. Crawford, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 34. 34. John Tenanes, “Investing in Menlo Park and the Community,” Facebook, July 7, 2017, https://about. fb.com/news/2017/07/investing-in-menlo-park-andour-community/. 35. Koolhaas, Exodus, 239.

14. Kate Bradshaw, “Facebook Submits Revised Plans for Willow Village,” The Almanac, February 8, 2019, https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2019/02/08/ facebook-submits-revised-plans-for-willow-village. 15. City of Menlo Park, “Staff Report,” Agenda Item G-4: Community Development, March 27, 2018, 174-176. 16. City of Menlo Park, “Staff Report,” 174-176. 17. City of Menlo Park, “Staff Report,” 169. 18. John Harris, “Street Battle: The Activists Fighting to Save Their Neighbourhood from the Tech Giants,” The Guardian, April 3, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2019/apr/03/facebook-amazon-google-bigtech-activists-new-york-berlin-toronto-. 19. Robin Zabiegalski, “The Tech Industry is Forcing Gentrification in Major US Cities – What Can We Do to Fix This?,” The Tempest, May 1, 2017, https://thetempest. co/2017/05/01/now-beyond/tech-money/tech-industry-

FALKOWSKI

133

Public Housing in Two Liberal Welfare Regimes

A Comparison between the United States and the United Kingdom NAGANIKA SANGA Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning

ABSTRACT Public or social housing is an important legacy of welfare-state regimes. Housing studies have sought to understand specific national policies by applying Esping-Anderson’s model of welfare state typology. This research aims to highlight how two nations, both of which fall under the same welfare regime typology of the ‘liberal welfare state,’ differ in their treatment of public housing policy, despite the apparent convergence of their policy efforts over the years. Through comparative historical analysis of the United States and the United Kingdom spanning over a hundred years, this piece suggests that institutional agencies play a crucial role in the success of public housing policies. These institutional agencies not only succeed in neutralizing the impact of policy shocks, but also influence policy efficiency and development trajectory due to their enduring nature in spite of changing political and economic perspectives. The piece also offers several lessons from the UK’s public housing policies for the U.S.

134

agora 14

elfare state theory would lead us to expect that the United States and the United Kingdom – both liberal welfare states – would exhibit similar approaches to housing policy. However, planning researchers and practitioners tend to view U.S. and UK housing policies as dissimilar systems based on the number of assisted housing units and the relative extent of federal government engagement in their respective housing markets. In this analysis, I seek to understand this discrepancy in perception and the similarities and dissimilarities of housing policy across both countries using historical comparative analysis. I adopt a descriptive methodology examining the historical development and transformations of public housing policy in the U.S. and the UK. Despite a considerable amount of research available on housing studies in each country, academic historical comparative analyses are limited in number. Where comparisons do exist, they tend to focus on specific elements like responses to the global economic downturn and mortgage deductions. While researchers have shown both academic and general interest in housing policies ‘across the pond,’ a comprehensive evaluation examining broader trends and policies is not readily available. Therefore, this study uses a wide array of documentary evidence, including academic research, professional reports, and periodicals, to draw this comparison. I examine the overall approaches and philosophies that frame each country’s individual housing policy choices historically as well as the policies’ current-day impacts. The interaction between the following elements determines the context and efficacy of broader social housing policy beyond typical market dynamics:

1. Perception of housing as a right, following either a ‘universalist’ or ‘selectivist’ model;

2. Political economy of the welfare state;

3. Agencies and institutional structures. While the first two aspects are frameworks I chose to employ before comparing the two countries, I ultimately found that the third element helped to explain their dissimilarities in a compelling way. Institutional structures explained the UK’s better performance in the delivery of public housing. While broader socio-political and economic regimes have a direct impact on housing policies and their objectives, policy delivery channels along with their historical antecedents also play a prominent role in determining the efficacy of such policies.

HOUSING AS A RIGHT Government-assisted housing development, commonly known as social housing in the UK and public housing in the U.S., takes on varying forms in different national and political environments. What counts as public housing depends on the socioeconomic conditions and the target groups it caters to in different contexts. In most cases, public housing policy targets low- and medium-income groups.1 It is often intended to promote equity and level the field for disadvantaged social groups. Rental housing remains the most prevalent form of public housing.2 The existing theories and definitions of the ‘right to housing,’ or need-based housing, interact differently with a given government’s broad-based policy approach to housing. Bo Bengtsson explains the right to housing as “a ‘political marker’… understood only in terms of how the relationship between the state, citizens, and housing provision is perceived in a particular national housing discourse.”3 Even if governments acknowledged housing as a ‘right,’ their intervention in the provision of housing would vary across diverse socioeconomic and political groups.4 Two common understandings of such approaches are ‘universalist’ and ‘selectivist’ approaches.5 Universalist

SANGA

135

systems are ones in which governments enjoy broader control over housing policy and development, such as in Scandinavian countries or Singapore. Selectivist, or interventionist, systems are those in which the government works only for a specific target group of the population, such as the poor, senior citizens, and/or military personnel. In selectivist systems, the government is not involved in the broader development and control of housing policy. In brief, these differences may be explained by the conceptualization of housing as an investment asset beyond a rights-based approach’s understanding of housing as a ‘necessity.’ This asset-based view of housing also favors the idea that markets can effectively regulate housing supply and demand.6 Overall, reliance on markets for housing provision has resulted in public policies that have gradually distanced themselves from the idea of housing as a public good.7 Given similar approaches to housing, policy delivery and successes are often reliant not just on market conditions but also on the structural mechanisms and political economies that facilitate and constitute them.

HOUSING POLICY IN A WELFARE STATE Welfare state theory for housing is firmly entrenched in the idea that housing is an extension of basic human needs and that it is as essential as services like healthcare and education.8 Proponents, therefore, often appeal to human morality in deeming housing a public or welfare good.9 The literature on welfare states discusses social assistance in terms of three pillars: pensions, healthcare, and education. Scholars who study the inclusion of housing in the welfare state regime refer to housing as “the wobbly pillar under the welfare state.”10 Whereas social democratic welfare states like Scandinavian countries usually

136

agora 14

embrace housing fully as a welfare good, other countries in Europe and the Western hemisphere have a variable approach to housing. The latter incorporated housing as part of their welfare regime only partially in the aftermath of the World Wars. As a remnant of this welfare state regime, successive governments over the years in these countries have continued to deal with housing as a fourth pillar, albeit differently from the other three pillars of a welfare state. As seen earlier, housing is different from other welfare goods because of its trade value and the ‘asset-based’ benefits it can generate for an owner or family.11 Therefore, housing occupies a nebulous status based on the state regimes that treat it as a public or welfare good, a merit good, a private good, or a combination of these categories. There are several models of state regimes, including Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s welfare state typology,12 Peter Hall and David Soskice’s ‘varieties of capitalism,’13 and Robert Boyer’s theory of four types of advanced capitalism.14 I chose to apply the Esping-Anderson welfare-state typology for two reasons. Apart from being the founding classification of state regimes, the EspingAnderson framework is also typically used in comparative housing policy studies, and the framework focuses on the welfare state as opposed to capitalist political economies. In assessing public housing policies, the welfare state regime theory offers a cohesive lens for analysis when combined with the idea of housing as welfare good. The U.S. and UK both fall under EspingAnderson’s “liberal-welfare state regime” type. Esping-Anderson suggests that welfare states display a wide array of characteristics based on their typology. He categorizes them as liberal, conservative, or social-democratic regimes.15 Liberal welfare regimes exist mostly in AngloSaxon countries like the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. According to Esping-Anderson, liberal countries adopt

few right-based approaches, and any welfare interventions are targeted based on need-based priorities. One of the most prominent differences in the housing policies of the U.S. and the UK is their approach to housing as engendered in their respective politicaleconomy perspectives. Housing in the UK is considered an ‘entitlement,’ occupying a significant position in the character of the British welfare state system.16 In the U.S., however, increased government involvement in the introduction of public housing was opposed because housing was considered a private enterprise.17 Therefore, over the years, U.S. housing policy has explicitly targeted groups of the population that are not served or are severely underserved by the market. Accordingly, based on Jamileh Manoochehri’s categorization, the UK’s housing policy is ‘universal’ in approach while the US is more ‘selective.’ This categorization is a major departure from Esping-Anderson’s characterization of the UK as a ‘residual’ or ‘selective’ welfare state in regard to housing policy. Change in the housing sector and related policy relies mainly on the type of housing tenure the government chooses to encourage. As David Mullins and Alan Murie state, successive governments in the UK actively worked to eliminate private landlordism.18 By contrast, the U.S. government actively encourages private landlordism and rewards entrepreneurship.19 This policy preference in the U.S. is evolving and heavily emphasizes the importance of the free market.20 Affordable housing policy in the U.S. was historically designed to be a subsidiary to market forces and intervene only where there was an absolute need for government intervention. Public housing itself served as a temporary measure to support families in the short term, rather than a means of providing a long-term home.21 The narrow interpretation of the ‘right to housing’ results in a significant difference in the

quality as well as the quantity of affordable housing subsidized by the government.22 The UK’s economy and population are both significantly smaller thant hose of the U.S., while the rates of poverty and unemployment are similar. However, the UK provides more social housing than the U.S. as a proportion of the population.23 If one were to judge the strength of each country’s social housing policies on this aspect alone, the UK currently performs better than the U.S. Manoocheri extends this claim, saying that “universalist housing policies lead to high social housing standards while selectivist policies lead to lower standards,”24 which implies that UK social housing performs better overall. This piece aims to examine this claim, finding possible reasons for such success.

PUBLIC HOUSING SCENARIO: A STATISTICAL COMPARISON The U.S.’s overall housing stock, 110.7 million units, is almost four times that of the UK’s 26.5 million units (as of 2012).25 Both the UK and U.S. have a similar proportion of homeowners in their overall housing stock at around 65 percent.26 However, as depicted in Table 1, the total number of households assisted in the U.S. (7.6 million) through subsidized low-income housing is nearly comparable to that of the UK (6.2 million) in aggregate numbers.27 Social housing (through direct subsidies and housing provision) in the UK constitutes about 23 percent of its overall housing stock.28 The cost burden for rental households in the U.S. is significantly higher than that of the UK, with almost 50 percent of the U.S. population paying more than 30 percent of their gross income towards rental housing.29 Overall, there is a significant difference in the constitution of rental markets in the U.S. and the UK. The government directly or indirectly supports an enormous 76 percent of the rental market in the UK,

SANGA

137

U SA

T o t a l h o u s i n g s t o c k ( i n US dollars ) T o t a l s u b s i di z e d l o w - i n c o m e ho us i ng i ncl ud i ng s ub s i d i e s ( numb e r o f ho us i ng u ni t s )

In di c at or

110.7 million

26.5 million

7.62 million (7% of total stock) (22% of total rental housing)

6.17 million (23% of total stock) (76% of total rental housing)

S o ci a l / p ub l i c ho us i ng ( numb e r o f ho us i ng u ni t s )

1.16 million* (1% of total stock)

4.97 million** (20% of total stock)

D i r e c t r e n t a l s u b s i d i es ( numb e r o f ho us i ng u ni t s )

2.28 million (7% of total rental housing)

1.21 million (15% of total rental housing)

A v e ra g e re nt a l e x p e nd i t ure

33% of pre-tax income

22% of post-tax income

R e nt a l e x p e nd i t ure

51% of pop spends more than 30% of pre-tax income; 20% spends >50%

36% of pop spends more than 30% of post-tax income

Table 1. Subsidized rental housing in the U.S. and UK in numbers (compiled from Alex Schwartz, Journal of Housing and Built Environment, 2011). * Excludes stock constructed using project-based subsidies, which accounts for 1.78 million housing units (2 percent of housing stock) ** Housing associations and council-owned social housing

as seen in Table 1. This stock, in turn, provides the government with considerable leverage in controlling the housing market on the whole, a particular advantage of a universalist system. However, the opposite scenario plays out in the U.S., where private developers control almost 80 percent of the rental housing market. Housing tax credit programs contribute to 7 percent of the remaining 21 percent share of the rental market subsidized by the government.30, 31

under-development, supply-demand mismatch, reduced government outlays, weariness by private financial investors, burgeoning maintenance issues, and many others.35, 36, 37, 38, 39 However, there are important differences in the degree and causality of each of these issues that are easily understood with the help of a historical analysis of public housing policies in both countries.

These numbers signify a severe shortfall of assistance to extremely low-income renters in the U.S. As of 2014, the U.S. federal government provides rental assistance to only 26 of every 100 extremely low-income renter households that need assistance.32,33 If markets were left to provide affordable housing without any government assistance, it is estimated that markets could only cater to 21 among every 100 households that require support in accessing affordable rental housing.34

HISTORY OF PUBLIC HOUSING: THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE UNITED STATES

Despite the variance in numbers, the overall substantive issues in governmentsubsidized housing in both countries are the same: aging housing stock, socioeconomic

100 138

agora 14

Before World War II Housing emerged as a function of local government in the UK as early as 1909 through the Housing, Town Planning, etc. Act of 1909.40 A number of laws were passed in the late 19th century to enable the government to clear â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;squalorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and unhealthy areas within cities for public health purposes; however, the 1909 Act was the first to give local governments in the UK the power to develop land and build

housing.41 This Act was further bolstered by the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 (the Addison Act), which mandated local councils to construct housing for war veterans.42 Following this legislation, local governmentled housing construction extended into the 1930s and resulted in the rapid expansion of housing stock in the UK. Around the same time, Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) in the U.S. were established in 1939. While there was a lull in construction during World War II, a parallel surge in the construction of private and social housing ensued in both countries in the post-war period. From then on, significant shifts in public housing trends more or less coincided in both countries, as Figure 1 shows. However, the rate of construction and the aggregate number of new public housing units were significantly higher in the UK

than in the U.S.; by the 1960s, local councils built and owned almost a quarter of the UKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s housing stock.43 With increasing funding constraints and increased pressure for delivery of affordable housing, both countries saw a severe degrading of construction standards and requirements starting in the early 1950s.44 The 1950s-1980s The early post-war period saw some consensus between the two major political parties in Britain concerning spending on social welfare.45 There was widespread acknowledgement that, at minimum, the country needed to rapidly increase the housing stock.46 This approach changed gradually until the late 1970s when Margaret Thatcherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s government took over, beginning the transformation of UK housing policy to accommodate the neoliberal agenda.47 After continual increases, social housing

Figure 1 . A comparative timeline of social housing development in the U.S. and UK (compiled by author).

SANGA

139

stock in the UK started to decline. With the introduction of Thatcher schemes like Right to Buy and Large-Scale Voluntary Transfer, social housing stock declined from 32 percent to 18 percent of total housing stock.48 In England alone, almost two million houses were transferred from councils to buyers between 1981 and 2011 under the Right to Buy program.49 Meanwhile, in the U.S., public housing projects were attracting severe criticism for their lack of safety, increasing crime rates, severe physical deterioration, and rising operation costs.50 In addition to halting any new construction and dismantling unsafe and run-down structures (e.g., Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis in 1972), the U.S. looked to the UK’s example of selling public housing units.51 This idea did not prove successful due to the undesirable type, size, and location of public housing units when compared to prevalent low-density and spacious market-rate units.52 Many authors argue that the loss of good (and bad) public housing stock in the UK not only affected the size of affordable housing stock but also drastically altered the property dividends that otherwise contributed to the credit-worthiness of the PHAs and councils.53, 54 These agencies had to deal with crumbling housing stock and mounting operation and maintenance costs.55 As a result, both the U.S. and UK adopted a two-pronged strategy where the government explored opportunities for maintaining the remaining public housing stock on the one hand while instituting assistance programs for affordable housing on the other. 1980s-2000s The U.S. and UK adopted divergent approaches to public housing policy during this period after following somewhat similar approaches during the 1970s. To optimize resource distribution and consumption, the UK turned to the institutional handover of housing stock to Housing Agencies (HAs)

140

agora 14

– non-profit bodies that have spearheaded much of the UK’s affordable housing development since the late 1980s. Since then, the UK has constructed more than 90 percent of its total affordable housing stock.56 As of 2009, HAs owned almost half of the social housing stock. However, with increasing tenant opposition to the conversion of council housing to social housing managed by HAs, these conversions were whittled down after 2002.57 With the loss of active control over the affordable housing market, the UK introduced other assistance programs, including direct rental subsidies, in the 1990s.58 Thus emerged the current duality of the affordable housing market in the UK. Local councils own a certain portion of the affordable housing stock, known as council housing, and HAs hold the remaining units. In addition to their own units, HAs often manage council housing as Arm’s Length Management Organizations (ALMOs).59 During this period, the U.S. instituted assetbased property management techniques to operate existing housing stock more efficiently. To spur the construction of new affordable housing units, the U.S. also introduced various programs, including project-based funding and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program.60 Unlike the UK, the U.S. has not seen a notable transfer of housing stock, with the exception of HOPE VI projects,61 which were introduced with a broader objective of community regeneration and revitalization than the provision of affordable housing per se.62 Another notable difference in the formulation of affordable housing policy between the two countries is the emphasis in the UK on promoting homeownership.63 In tandem with the Right to Buy scheme, the UK introduced low-cost homeownership initiatives, most notably shared ownership. Shared ownership allows low-income families who aspire to homeownership to buy a determined

amount of equity (usually 25 percent) of a dwelling unit, while incrementally ‘staircasing’ remaining payments through installments in the form of rent.64 The U.S. has also provided homeownership schemes through PHAs; however, PHAs have never participated widely in such schemes. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently introduced a pilot program, “Moving to Work,” that allows PHAs to offer a range of affordable housing choices (including homeownership) to lowincome households.65 One of the most cogent criticisms of U.S. housing policy is that mortgage tax deductions encourage homeownership specifically for middle- and upperincome families. Such tax incentives result in massive subsidies for welloff families.66 This policy preference to subsidize homeownership for the wealthy despite the country’s failure to adequately provide housing for low-income families – even within the rental housing market – is a significant indicator of the U.S. government’s housing policy priorities. 2000–early 2010s Both the U.S. and UK governments turned to the social-enterprise business model in the early 2000s.67 While the UK relies on non-profit organizations such as HAs, the U.S. depends on private developers to supply affordable housing. In addition to substantial government grants, HAs in the UK and private developers in the U.S. have to raise private capital through other avenues and loans. HAs in the UK rely on cross-subsidized revenues from the sale of market-rate, higher-value units to raise finance; private developers in the U.S. mainly turn to the sale of tax credit certificates through LIHTC to private financial investors.68, 69 Despite similarities in market-based approaches of U.S. and UK housing policy, their modus operandi and key concerns vary. HAs receive direct grants from the

government that far exceed the support rendered by the U.S. government either directly or indirectly through tax credits.70 Additionally, HAs in the UK have greater control over the management of their properties, which allows them to crosssubsidize from more strongly performing assets to weaker ones.71 In the current policy framework, PHAs in the U.S. do not enjoy similar portfolio-wide management following the 1998 Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, which introduced the Asset-Based Management Approach. This change affects the creditworthiness of the PHAs, in general, to borrow against their property from the market.72 Additionally, strong inclusionary planning initiatives in the UK facilitate the production of affordable housing in tandem with the private market. Section 106 agreements introduced as part of the Town and Country Planning Act of 1990 in the UK enable local councils to insist on the reservation of a certain proportion of the proposed private market development to cater to affordable housing needs.73 HAs are then tasked with the development and management of these affordable units.74 Even though the accrual of affordable housing stock through this process is not substantial, it requires no direct or indirect monetary inducement by the government and helps create incomelevel integrated neighborhoods.75 While inclusionary zoning was prevalent in the U.S. much earlier than in the UK, it is not as widespread, and even where city governments have adopted the practice, it is not always mandatory.76

Response to Credit Crisis Both the U.S. and UK went headlong into a severe credit crunch and subsequent housing crisis starting in 2007; however, the impact on the housing market was much more significant in the U.S.77 Between 2006-2009, housing construction completion in the U.S. fell by almost 60 percent, twice the rate of the UK during the

SANGA

141

same period.78 The percentage change in mortgage foreclosures in that same time period was steeper in the U.S. at a little over 200 percent, when compared with 128 percent in the UK.79 U.S. housing prices declined more steeply, at 27 percent, than UK housing prices.80 Accordingly, the impact on affordable housing markets in the UK and the U.S. differed too. In the UK, the collapse of housing markets affected HAs’ ability to sell their market-value housing stock, including shared-ownership schemes. In addition, the decline in housing starts meant no housing construction through Section 106 agreements.81 Banks also turned away HAs or issued loans to them on very unfavorable terms, in contrast with the privileged lending HAs had enjoyed before the recession.82 The situation was more serious in the U.S., where reliance on private financial investors for affordable housing provision through LIHTC severely affected the affordable housing market.83 Governments responded to the crunch in the affordable housing sector differently over time. The UK initially witnessed an upsurge in government funding and support.84 Efforts were made to continue the production of affordable housing units; HAs’ completions increased by 14 percent in 2008, while the private sector completions decreased by 23 percent.85 However, this scenario changed drastically when more conservative measures were employed along with severe budget and subsidy cuts for the affordable housing sector. As a result, the production of social housing units in the UK declined to a little less than 1 percent per annum in 2011.86 There was also a shift in social tenancy tenure policies with the introduction of Fixed-Term Tenancies (FTT) that determine the eligibility of tenants’ continuation on a periodic basis.87 Meanwhile, the U.S. government intervened in the sagging market and provided an enormous financial stimulus to help the banking and housing mortgage sector

142

agora 14

recover. Part of these initiatives was the provision of direct subsidies through the Tax Credit Exchange Program instead of tax credits to help developers undertake proposed LIHTC developments.88 Since 2010, the U.S. has emphasized the promotion of integrated and mixed housing developments through policies like the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI),89 but the developments have often come at the cost of decreasing affordable housing stock after redevelopment.

WHY THE UNITED KINGDOM PERFORMS BETTER Based on the discussion above, the key component that explains the UK’s better performance in public housing initiatives is the institutional framework for affordable housing provision. Following are some of the specific institutional initiatives underlying critical differences between the U.S. and the UK models.

In the U.S., however, the process is transactional, guided mainly by financial disbursements and accountability.” Strong National Policy and Institutional Interaction The UK’s strong national social housing policy and its interaction with various institutions involved in the housing sector provides a firm basis for a well-understood and transparent housing policy.90 In the U.S., however, the process is transactional, guided mainly by financial disbursements and accountability. A separate regulator for social housing in the UK, the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), helps monitor

the performance of HAs across a set of economic and consumer-oriented standards including governance, financial viability, and organizational effectiveness at providing affordable housing. While HUD endeavors to fill this role in the U.S. through annual and five-year audits, it is often a loose process given the scale of independent effort required. Integration with Local Development Plans There is a close connection between the work of housing associations and local governments in the UK, where a local government is responsible for preparing housing strategies outlining the needs of the council as a whole with a particular focus on the affordable housing sector. This connection makes the provision of affordable housing central to the operation of a city government. This modus operandi is not typical in the U.S., where the nexus between the public housing agencies or commissions and local authorities varies from state to state.91 Institutional Capacity The UK differs from many other countries because of its concentrated efforts to enhance institutional capacity for social housing agencies at both the national and the local level. This emphasis helps provide an efficient delivery mechanism to cope with the demands imposed on a welfare state. This is significantly different in the U.S., as Chuck Wehrwein and David Orr state: The multiple debts, equity and philanthropic sources necessary to create deeply affordable homes, create a timeconsuming, overly complex and inefficient process that also entails significant risk. There is very little public policy focus on the strength and sustainability of the organization.92 Focus on Socioeconomic Integration The socioeconomic characteristics of the public housing market in the U.S. are significantly different from those of the

UK given its â&#x20AC;&#x153;legacy of racial segregation and discrimination,â&#x20AC;? exacerbated by its selective social housing policy.93 Recent policy efforts through the CNI and Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) are steps in the right direction. However, they are still only contributing partly to the replacement of the existing housing stock and are not in any way leading to the addition of affordable stock. Existing inclusionary housing efforts in the U.S. lack a more comprehensive policy approach to integrated housing development at higher levels of government as in the case of national level efforts in the UK through Section 106 agreements.

ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Apart from the institutional differences described above, U.S. public housing policy would benefit from making some substantive changes to mirror those exemplified in the UK system. Expand Public Housing Budgets One of the most serious threats faced by public housing is the increasing risk of government funding cuts. Given policy impacts on the built form as well as human development aspects of housing, longterm and snowballing effects are often induced by even a single percentage point cut in funding. Early intervention in terms of expanding direct funding mechanisms for affordable housing is one of the most important initiatives to ensure sufficient support for dwindling public housing stock in the U.S. Provide Both Consumer and Producer Subsidies Weak norms and construction standards employed during the public housing construction boom resulted in burgeoning maintenance and operation costs. In such a scenario, government or quasi-government agencies increasingly look to the private sector for investment and management.

SANGA

143

Such privatization instilled a culture of asset management that has strengthened the government’s view of housing as a commodity rather than a public good. The UK provides an excellent example of a suitable combination of both producer and consumer subsidies. Moreover, there is considerable overlap in this process that ensures service to those who need it most. It is this twofold approach that makes the UK social housing model more successful. In addition to adopting this twofold model with an increase in budgetary support for affordable housing, the U.S. requires aggressive efforts in circumventing the negative impacts of its preferred ‘selective’ social housing policy in ensuring integrated communities and equal opportunities. Rethink Mortgage Tax Credits Mortgage tax credits favor those in the middle- and upper-income groups rather than those whose housing needs are the greatest. The UK abolished its mortgage tax credit program in 2000, though it continues in the U.S. as one of the largest federal welfare benefit programs. In the U.S. the program has been criticized as a means of appeasing the typical ‘median voter,’ a homeowner with a mortgage. Through mortgage tax credit program, critics argue, is how U.S. operates as a ‘hidden welfare

state’ to maintain the political and economic status quo.94 The US should abolish mortgage tax credits in a phased manner and channel a majority of these budgetary savings to affordable housing needs.

CONCLUSION A historical and comparative assessment of social or public housing policy in the U.S. and UK offers interesting insights into the convergence of housing policies and their broader trends in two liberal welfare systems. However, closer examination reveals subtle differences in the structure and functioning of housing policy that are based on the variations in their respective political economies surrounding affordable housing. This study also reveals how institutional mechanisms play a pivotal role in shaping how liberal welfare regimes meet the affordable housing needs of the poor and disadvantaged sections of their communities. These subtle differences play a greater role in influencing the way housing policies intersect with other social and macroeconomic policies and governance structures that ultimately yield different results. It also cautions against the blind exportation of policy ideas from one context to the other.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Naganika is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning. Before joining the Ph.D. program, she worked as a Policy Analyst in the areas of international development, governance studies, housing policy, and information systems. At the University of Michigan, she studies housing policies and urban politics in a comparative context in India and the United States.

144

agora 14

ENDNOTES 1. Bo Bengtsson, “Housing as a Social Right: Implications for Welfare State Theory,” Scandinavian Political Studies 24, no. 4 (2001): 255–75. 2. Björn Hårsman and John M Quigley, Housing Markets and Housing Institutions : An International Comparison (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 338. 3. Bengtsson, “Housing as a Social Right: Implications for Welfare State Theory,” 256. 4. Jamileh Manoochehri, Politics of Social Housing in Britain (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang AG, 2012), 231.

20. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 443-51 21. Michael E. Stone, Social Housing in the UK and US: Evolution, Issues and Prospects (Goldsmiths College, 2003), 77. 22. Harris Beider, Diane Levy, and Susan Popkin, Community Revitalization in the United States and the United Kingdom (Urban Institute, 2008), 27. 23. Beider, Levy, and Popkin, Community Revitalization in the United States and the United Kingdom, 12.

5. Manoochehri, Politics of Social Housing in Britain.

24. Manoochehri, Politics of Social Housing in Britain.

6. Raquel Ronik, “Place, Inhabitance and Citizenship: The Right to Housing and the Right to the City in the Contemporary Urban World,” International Journal of Housing Policy 14, no. 3 (2014): 293–300.

25. Alex Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized Low-Income Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” Journal of Housing and Built Environment (2011): 356.

7. Ronik, “Place, Inhabitance and Citizenship,” 295.

26. Anita Blessing, “Repackaging the Poor? Conceptualising Neoliberal Reforms of Social Rental Housing,” Housing Studies (2015): 156.

8. Joris Hoekstra, “Housing and the Welfare State: Changing Perspectives and a Research Agenda,” in ENHR 2013 Conference in Tarragona (Delft, 2013). 9. Peter King, Housing, Individuals and the State: The Morality of Government Intervention (London, UK: Routledge, 1998), 192

27. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 356. 28. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 356.

10. Ulf Torgersen, “Housing: The Wobbly Pillar Under the Welfare State,” Scandinavian Housing and Planning Research 4 (1987): 116–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/028157 37.1987.10801428.

29. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 358

11. Herman Schwartz and Leonard Seabrooke, The Politics of Housing Booms and Busts (Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 252.

30. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared.” 355-61.

12. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 260. 13. Peter Hall and David Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 560. 14. Robert Boyer, “How and Why Capitalisms Differ,” Economy and Society 34, no. 4 (2005): 509–57. 15. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, 9. 16. U.S Congress, House, The Future of Housing in America: A Comparison of the United Kingdom and United States Models of Affordable Housing, 114th Cong., 2nd sess. on May 12, 2016, 2-122 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/ CHRG-114hhrg24066/pdf/CHRG-114hhrg24066.pdf. 17. Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States (New York, USA: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 484. 18. David Mullins and Alan Murie, Housing Policy in the UK (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 336. 19. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 206-23.

31. Housing Partnership Network (HPN), Lessons of the International Housing Partnership (Housing Partnership Network, 2016): 23. 32. Households with income at or below 30 percent of the area median income. 33. Liza Getsinger, Lily Posey, Graham MacDonald, Josh Leopold, and Katya Abazajian, The Housing Affordability Gap for Extremely Low-Income Renters in 2014 (Urban Institute, 2014), 48, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/ publication/89921/2017.04.26_2016_gap_map_report_ finalized_0.pdf. 34. Getsinger et al, “The Housing Affordability Gap for Extremely Low-Income Renters in 2014,” 11. 35. HPN, Lessons of the International Housing Partnership. 36. Hårsman and Quigley, Housing Markets and Housing Institutions: An International Comparison. 37. Lawyue, “What the United Kingdom Can Teach Us about Affordable Housing.” 38. Diane Levy, Harris Beider, and David Price, Atlantic Exchange: Case Studies of Housing and Community Redevelopment in the United States and the United Kingdom

SANGA

145

(Washington D.C: Urban Institute, 2010), 29 39. Beider, Levy, and Popkin, “Community Revitalization in the United States and the United Kingdom.” 40. Hal Pawson, “Restructuring England’s Social Housing Sector Since 1989: Undermining or Underpinning the Fundamentals of Public Housing,” Housing Studies (2007): 767–83. 41. Manoochehri, Politics of Social Housing in Britain, 13.

61. Chuck Wehrwein and David Orr, “Sharing Best Practices and Strategies among the Leading Affordable Housing Developers and Owners,” in British-American Peer-to-Peer Exchange (Washington DC: Housing Partnership Network, 2007), 9. 62. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 190-91.

42. Manoochehri, Politics of Social Housing in Britain.

63. Susan J Popkin, Mary K Cunningham, and Martha Burt, “Public Housing Transformation and the Hard-tohouse,” Housing Policy Debate (2010): 1–24.

43. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 353–74.

64. Moira Munro, “Evaluating Policy Towards Increasing Owner Occupation,” Housing Studies 22, no. 2 (2007): 255.

44. Blessing, “Repackaging the Poor? Conceptualising Neoliberal Reforms of Social Rental Housing,” 9. 45. Peter Malpass, “The Wobbly Pillar? Housing and the British Postwar Welfare State,” Journal of Social Policy 32 no. 4 (2003): 589–606. 46. Malpass, “The Wobbly Pillar? Housing and the British Postwar Welfare State,” 591. 47. Manoochehri, Politics of Social Housing in Britain.

65. HUD, “U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Moving to Work (MTW), 2016, https://portal. hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/public_ indian_housing/programs/ph/mtw. 66. Robert Hardaway, “The Great American Housing Bubble: Re-Examining Cause and Effect,” University of Dayton Law Review 55, no. 1 (2010): 33-59 67. Stone, “Social Housing in the UK and US: Evolution, Issues and Prospects,” 19.

48. Mullins and Murie, Housing Policy in the UK, 93-102.

68. Malpass and Mullins, “Local Authority Housing Stock Transfer in the UK: From Local Initiative to National Policy,” 674.

49. Blessing, “Repackaging the Poor? Conceptualising Neoliberal Reforms of Social Rental Housing,” 156.

69. Popkin, Cunningham, and Burt, “Public Housing Transformation and the Hard-to-house,” 622.

50. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 163-98.

70. HPN, Lessons of the International Housing Partnership, 9-10.

51. Blessing, “Repackaging the Poor? Conceptualising Neoliberal Reforms of Social Rental Housing,” 156. 52. Blessing, “Repackaging the Poor? Conceptualising Neoliberal Reforms of Social Rental Housing,” 156. 53. Peter Malpass and David Mullins, “Local Authority Housing Stock Transfer in the UK: From Local Initiative to National Policy,” Housing Studies 17 no. 4 (2002): 673–86. 54. Rachel garshick Kleit and Stephen B Page, “The Changing Role of Public Housing Authorities in the Affordable Housing Delivery System,” Housing Studies (2014): 621–44.

71. HPN, Lessons of the International Housing Partnership, 10. 72. Stone, “Social Housing in the UK and US: Evolution, Issues and Prospects,” 20. 73. Christine M. E. Whitehead, “Planning Policies and Affordable Housing: England as a Successful Case Study?,” Housing Studies 22, no. 1 (2007): 25–44. 74. Stone, “Social Housing in the UK and US: Evolution, Issues and Prospects,” 21.

55. HPN, Lessons of the International Housing Partnership, 2.

75. Mullins and Murie, Housing Policy in the UK, 178-211.

56. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 358.

76. Nico Calavita and Alan Mallach, Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion, and Land Value Recapture (Cambridge, USA, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010), 396

57. Malpass and Mullins, “Local Authority Housing Stock Transfer in the UK: From Local Initiative to National Policy,” 678. 58. Blessing, “Repackaging the Poor? Conceptualising Neoliberal Reforms of Social Rental Housing,” 162. 59. Peter Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State. The Development of Housing Policy in Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 256.

146

60. Kleit and Page, “The Changing Role of Public Housing Authorities in the Affordable Housing Delivery System,” 622.

agora 14

77. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 356. 78. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 355. 79. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized Low-

Income Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” computed from Table 1 on Page 355. 80. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 356. 81. Manoochehri, Politics of Social Housing in Britain. 82. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 363. 83. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 364. 84. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 356. 85. Schwartz, “The Credit Crunch and Subsidized LowIncome Housing: The UK and US Experience Compared,” 365. 86. Matt Griffith and Pete Jefferys, Solutions for the Housing Shortage (Shelter, 2013), 55. 87. Suzanne Fitzpatrick and Beth Watts, “Competing Visions: Security of Tenure and the Welfarisation of English Social Housing,” Housing Studies 32, no. 8 (2017): 1021–38. 88. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 154. 89. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, 190. 90. Mullins and Murie, Housing Policy in the UK, 1-10. 91. Kleit and Page, “The Changing Role of Public Housing Authorities in the Affordable Housing Delivery System,” 640. 92. Wehrwein and Orr, “Sharing Best Practices and Strategies among the Leading Affordable Housing Developers and Owners,” 5. 93. U.S Congress, House, The Future of Housing in America: A Comparison of the United Kingdom and United States Models of Affordable Housing, 8. 94. C. Howard, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 272.

SANGA

147

Peter Philip Carroll Photographer: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Rebecca Yae Dala dala SĂŁo Location: stage. Paulo, Brazil

From the Outside Looking In Reflecting on Detroit’s Food System AMANDA RICHMAN & MADELINE DEMARCO Master of Public Health 2020 Master of Public Health 2020

ABSTRACT The Detroit Food Policy Council (DFPC) encourages the development of a sustainable and equitable food system in Detroit. The University of Michigan’s Public Health Action Support Team partnered with DFPC in 2018 to help achieve this vision. This partnership aimed to develop descriptions of the local food system in each City Council district to help DFPC understand local food environments and stakeholder communication strategies. To create these profiles, the research team used quantitative and qualitative methods such as geographic information system (GIS) mapping, stakeholder interviews, food system tours, and secondary data analysis. As outsiders to the City of Detroit, the team sought to respect Detroit’s communities by embracing an asset-based approach that emphasized the principle of food sovereignty and reflecting community-identified priorities gleaned through stakeholder interviews and food system tours. This report does not contain policy recommendations so that communities can utilize the information in ways that best align with their priorities.

150

agora 14

ood justice involves “addressing historic and systemic disparities around power that manifest [themselves] in the food system,” according to Shane Bernardo, a Detroit activist and organizer.1 As a movement, food justice addresses economic injustice and inequities in affordability and access to quality and healthy food. In Detroit specifically, this movement focuses on local communities, farms, and food businesses to create a more just and sustainable food system. Working within the food justice movement requires an examination of local economies and analysis of inequitable food access to identify priorities for future food sovereignty and security policies. We carried out this project to help stakeholders better understand their local food systems to craft such policies.

methodology Beginning in fall 2018, students from the University of Michigan School of Public Health’s Public Health Action Support Team (PHAST) partnered with the Detroit Food Policy Council (DFPC) to develop tools that help stakeholders in each Detroit City Council district better understand their local food environments. By conducting literature reviews to understand the historical context shaping each district, we developed profiles of the local food environment for Detroit’s seven City Council districts. This research process helped the research team identify retail food resources and community organizations working in each district’s food system. Power mapping enabled us to identify influencers, implementers, and decision-makers in each Council district. This provides DFPC with a better idea of whom to reach out to with any policy recommendations developed based on the data presented in this report. We also conducted in-depth interviews with key stakeholders to identify the food-related assets and challenges experienced in their respective districts and to help us understand the process of developing

Utilizing an asset-based approach demonstrates respect and empowers our community partners to capitalize on their pre-existing strengths.” effective messaging strategies. In addition to Council District profiles, the team developed spatial maps of Detroit’s food environment. Such maps identified retail food locations like grocery stores, dollar stores, and farmers’ markets, as well as food pantries and community gardens. These elements of the food environment were then compared to other layers illustrating food access in Detroit. Using data from PolicyMaps, Detroit Food Map Initiative, and Detroit Community Markets, we identified areas designated as having limited supermarket access and retail food leakage. Retail food leakage is the amount of money being spent outside of the community on food because the community cannot fulfill its inhabitants’ needs.2 We then identified neighborhoods that could present effective opportunities for intervention using these metrics.3, 4, 5, 6 We have since presented the completed report to the DFPC and the Grocery Initiative, and we are working with them on developing future projects that examine the food retail environment in Detroit more closely. This future work could include conducting workshops that train others on using the mapping technology or examining other places – such as schools – where community members access food.

mapping the local food enviroment To present a snapshot of Detroit’s Food System, we utilized a set of tools developed by the Reinvestment Fund, a national

demarco & richman

151

Figure 1. Retail food leakage overlaid with limited supermarket access (LSA) areas, denoted by shades of pink, and full-service grocery stores, dollar stores, and farmers’ markets. See America’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative resource page at investinginfood.com/ resources for additional information (America’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative, 2020; Malcolm Cunningham et al., 2019).

organization that brings together a variety of stakeholders to invest in projects that impact the health, wellbeing, and financial security of communities. Using the Reinvestment Fund’s tools, we assessed equity in food access at a granular level, including measures of retail food leakage and Limited Supermarket Access (LSA).7 Using data about these indicators from Policy Maps, we developed snapshots of the local food environment in each Council district. We examined the food environment at the City Council district level because each district has an inherent and dedicated decision maker (the Councilperson representing that district) that DFPC can collaborate with to fulfill its advocacy work and priorities. Although this research focuses on food environments at the Council district level, available data were often

152

agora 14

accessible only at the zip code and census tract levels. The data we found that most closely corresponded with the Council district boundaries were at the census block group level. As a result, we compiled information by census block groups and manually mapped it onto each Council district to map data at the Council district level. The Reinvestment Fund designates LSA areas based on the affordability of food in relation to the local median income, distance to grocery stores, and car ownership rates. Low-access scores are calculated from limited-access data; this score is an indicator of disparity, demonstrating how much farther a block group’s population must travel to the nearest supermarket compared to

benchmark distances established for nonlow-income communities.8 We developed a map presenting these indicators per census block group in each City Council district overlaid with the location of full-line grocery stores, dollar stores, and farmers’ markets. A full-line grocery store is one that sells a line of dry groceries, canned goods, or nonfood items as well as perishable items such as fresh produce, meat, and dairy products.9 This map serves as the primary visual for the quantitative data we collected for this project, enabling a better visualization of food access and availability in Detroit.

our role as outsiders As we gathered information for this study, we were challenged with the best way to present and disseminate our findings as outsiders to the Detroit community. One of the DFPC’s goals is developing and maintaining a city in which the residents are educated about healthy food choices and understand their relationships to the food system.10 Our team sought to achieve this goal but struggled with navigating the tensions associated with being outsiders to the community in which we were working. The DFPC strives to contribute to a city where everyone is treated with respect, justice, and dignity – especially in the food space – and it was important to us that we entered into these spaces with the same values. We therefore focused on an asset-based (rather than deficit-based) approach centered on our partner’s needs.

Retail food leakage is the amount of money being spent outside of the community on food because the community cannot fulfill its inhabitants’ needs.”

Figure 2. A community garden located at the Detroit Artisan’s Collective in Brightmoor, District 1 (DeMarco, 2019).

We made this decision to avoid feeding into negative stereotypes. Utilizing an assetbased approach demonstrates respect and empowers our community partners to capitalize on their strengths. We also made a conscious decision not to offer any conclusions or policy suggestions based on the data in our final products. We felt the most appropriate solution was to collect and summarize the data so that community members and stakeholders could use it to make their own conclusions based on their values and priorities. The DFPC emphasizes the importance of choice when it comes to food and nutrition. This plays into the concept of “food sovereignty,” which Detroit Food Justice defines as not just people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, but also the right to choose and define their own food and food systems.11 Taken together, these ideas underscore the importance of a community’s access to food and food choice. Such an approach is often at odds with many other common assessments of food availability and security that measure the availability of food in a binary way. These binary assessments only evaluate whether or not food access exists within a community, neglecting the ability of community members to choose healthy or culturally appropriate foods.

demarco & richman

153

We embraced this narrative of choice and food sovereignty in our data collection and presentation processes by leaning into the many different sources of food and nutrition in Detroit. This included tracking not only what kinds of food retail and production spaces exist in the city, but also where they exist. Focusing on these local food communities in the context of LSA scores and retail food leakage gives our audiences a better picture of the realities of the food system in Detroit by indicating how geographically, financially, and culturally accessible these resources are to community members.12 Additionally, this method identifies in-need areas that might be otherwise overlooked, such as communities with a high concentration of dollar stores and few to no full-line grocers, areas lacking urban agriculture, or regions not covered by food assistance or advocacy organizations. To emphasize the above principles, we made a concerted effort to ensure that our research process was informed by DFPC and other community members. Although we could not use a full community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach for this project because of resource and logistical constraints, we did try maximizing community involvement throughout the process by regularly communicating with and incorporating feedback from DFPC. From the beginning, DFPC was closely involved with the planning of this project. We had many conversations about tailoring the project and its content based on DFPC’s self-identified needs and priorities, and we continued seeking feedback about other components, such as preferred dissemination format. Further, we incorporated the views of community members and key stakeholders involved in Detroit’s food system into the project. We conducted a variety of interviews with stakeholders representing diverse identities within Detroit’s food system. Additionally, we talked to multiple community members during mini food system tours to understand

154

agora 14

Figure 3. Eastern Market, District 5 (Malcolm Cunningham, 2019).

their perspectives on the assets and challenges facing Detroit’s food system. The information gleaned from these conversations informed the Council District profiles we created, as it enabled us to include information that better reflected each community’s vision and priorities.

key findings This project provided insight into where residents of Detroit are getting their food. Through our data collection process, we determined that there are currently seven fewer full-line grocery stores in Detroit than there were in 2010.13 Interestingly, the number of dollar stores in the city has doubled in this same time period.14 This provides insight into the economic and nutritional realities facing Detroit. Dollar stores, especially chains, can utilize economies of scale and various subsidies to purchase shelf-stable food products, which enables them to sell goods at lower prices than local grocers.15, 16 As a result, dollar stores are a more attractive option economically for community members, many of whom are living paycheck to paycheck.17 However, this disrupts the local food system as dollar stores take customers from local grocers; offer fewer options for fresh produce, dairy, and meat; and employ fewer people than local grocers, reducing

job opportunities for community members.18, 19 We found that indicators of the local retail food environment such as LSA and food retail leakage are useful for identifying these types of geographic inequities at a district-wide and neighborhood level. Our results show that dollar stores are most prevalent in areas experiencing the highest rates of food retail leakage. For example, nearly one-third of all dollar stores in Detroit are located in regions experiencing food retail leakage.20 This finding indicates that there is still a need for food retail in these regions, and dollar stores are filling those gaps instead of local grocers or fullline grocery stores. Given its implications for the equity and livelihood of Detroiters, it is vital to see how this shifting landscape continues affecting local markets, or if Detroit’s fight to achieve food sovereignty reverses this trend. Finally, we discovered the importance of considering community context. Throughout our data collection process, we constantly encountered instances where the stories told by the data were quite different than the lived experiences of community members with whom we conducted stakeholder interviews. For example, despite the prevalence of terminology such as ‘food desert’ in the literature, many of the community members we spoke with actually found the food desert label problematic and not representative of their lived experiences. They identified better indicators such as undercounted food resources and lack of opportunity. These findings highlighted the importance of taking a CBPR-inspired approach and involving community members and stakeholders in research.

limitations Developing and maintaining a sustainable food system in Detroit has enormous health, financial, and urban planning implications for the city. Utilizing a variety of mapping tools such as PolicyMaps, LSA scores, and

food retail leakage measurements as well as qualitative interviews and conducting a literature review enabled us to come up with individual profiles of the food systems within each City Council district. However, some limitations to this approach do exist. For example, based on the data available to us, we could only look at full-line grocery and dollar stores in our analysis. This approach excludes other businesses such as small corner stores; although these types of stores may not sell fresh produce, many people rely on them for food purchases. Additionally, our analysis excludes Hamtramck and Highland Park, which have grocery stores, and other places through which Detroiters may access food. However, we excluded these two locations from our analysis because they are independent cities not incorporated into Detroit. Beyond calculating food retail leakage and LSA scores, we could not account for the fact that people do not shop for food solely within their City Council district’s borders. Finally, because we could only speak with a small group of community stakeholders, we could not fully represent the community’s experience of food accessibility, the acceptability of the local options, or other barriers to access not captured by these measures in their entirety.

conclusion We hope that the key components of our partnership with DFPC, such as embracing an asset-based approach, emphasizing food sovereignty, and reflecting communityidentified priorities, serve as a model for other projects that involve collecting data from and disseminating results to unfamiliar spaces in a humble and respectful way. These components were instrumental in the success of our project and in fostering sustainable community partnerships. In terms of the project’s next steps, disseminating our findings to our community partners will provide them with the additional resources necessary to make

demarco & richman

155

policy decisions that would increase access and availability to healthy and culturally appropriate foods for community members. Since presenting the completed report to the DFPC and the Grocery Initiative, we have continued our work with them by developing future projects that more closely examine the food retail environment in Detroit. Additionally, the American Indian Health and Family Services of Southeastern Michigan

has received a grant to continue its work addressing inequities in the food system and will also develop policy solutions based on the data provided in our report for its district. We hope this is just one of many examples of how other stakeholders can use this report as a tool for making decisions that address inequitable food access in their community.

additional team members This piece was published with permission from the following team members who also contributed to this research: Amanda Canavatchel Master of Public Health candidate, Health Behavior and Health Education Angela Hong Master of Public Health candidate, Nutritional Sciences Katlyn Klemoia Master of Public Health candidate, Epidemiology Kevin Liu Master of Public Health candidate, Nutritional Sciences Emily Torres Master of Public Health candidate, Health Behavior and Health Education Master of Social Work candidate Cate Vreede Master of Public Health candidate, Health Behavior and Health Education Malcolm Cunningham Public Health Action Support Team

about the authors Madeline DeMarco is a Master of Public Health candidate at the University of Michigan in her final year of study. Madeline is interested in communicating with and educating the public about genetics, as well as understanding local food environments. Madeline has a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Spanish, also from the University of Michigan. Amanda Richman is a Master of Public Health candidate studying epidemiology at the University of Michiganâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School of Public Health, and has a Bachelor of Arts in Health Sciences from Gettysburg College. Amanda is passionate about housing and food security and utilizing community-based participatory research approaches to address the social determinants of health.

156

agora 14

endnotes 1. Detroit Food Policy Council, “Detroit Food Metrics Report 2017,” Detroit Health Department, last modified December 2019, https://www.ecocenter.org/sites/ default/files/01.%20Detroit%20Food%20Metrics%20 Report%20%26%20Food%20Policy.pdf. 2. Buxton, “Retail Leakage and Surplus Analysis,” EDC of Wayne County, last modified February 18, 2020, whywaynecounty.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/ documents/RetailGapAnalysis_Site1_Secondary.pdf. 3. Reinvestment Fund, “Assessing Place-Based Access to Healthy Food: The Limited Supermarket Access (LSA) Analysis,” last modified July 2018, https://www. reinvestment.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ LSA_2018_Report_web.pdf. 4. “Reinvestment Fund Estimated Retail Food Leakage in Dollars as of 2016,” Policymap, last modified April 2, 2019, https://umich.policymap.com/maps?p=141880& amp;i=9966790&amp;btd=15&amp;period=2016&amp; cx=-83.09954293498805&amp;cy=42.35278709590449 &amp;cz=12. 5. Alex Hill, “Detroit Food Map,” last modified June 16, 2019, https://detroitfoodmap.com/. 6. “Detroit Community Markets,” Detroit Community Markets, last modified April 19, 2019, https://www. detroitmarkets.org/. 7. Julia Koprak, Bill Schrecker, and Morgan Robinson, “Access to Healthy Food: Leveraging Data for Community Results,” presented November 9, 2015 at the Community Indicators Consortium 2015 Impact Summit, Austin, TX, https://communityindicators.net/wpcontent/ uploads/2017/12/2015_Koprak_Schrecker_Robinson_ Access_to_Healthy_Food.pdf.

transcript/transcript.php?storyId=717664332. 16. Dollar General, “2018 Dollar General Annual Report,” last modified June 26, 2019, https://investor. dollargeneral.com/static-files/3a775a9d-4291-424c8bbe-3ae948d06da4. 17. United Way, “ALICE: The Consequences of Insufficient Household Income,” last modified December 17, 2017, 4, http://ouw.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/17UWALICE%20Report_NCR_11.27.17_ Lowres.pdf. 18. National Growers Association, “2017 Independent Grocers Survey Released” last modified May 15, 2017, National Grocers Association. https://www. nationalgrocers.org/news/2017-independent-grocerssurvey-released/. 19. “Reinvestment Fund Estimated Retail Food Leakage in Dollars as of 2016,” Policymap, last modified April 2, 2019, https://umich.policymap.com https://umich. policymap.com/ https://umich.policymap.com/ maps?p=141880&amp;i=9966790&amp;btd=15&amp; period=2016&amp;cx-=83.09954293498805&amp;cy=42 .35278709590449&amp;cz=12. 20 Renee Walker, Christopher Keane, and Jessica Burke, “Disparities and Access to Healthy Food in the United States: A Review of Food Deserts Literature,” Health and Place 16, no. 5 (2010): 876-884, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2010.04.013.f.

8. Reinvestment Fund, “Assessing Place-Based Access.” 9. Detroit Food Policy Council, “A City of Detroit Policy on Food Security: Creating a Food Secure Detroit,” last modified February 7, 2020, https:// detroitfoodpolicycouncil.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/ Detroit_Food_Security_Policy.pdf. 10. “Food Sovereignty,” Detroit Food Justice, last modified June 11, 2019, https://www.detroitfoodjustice. org/category/food-sovereignty/. 11. “Grocery Stores Full-Line,” Data Driven Detroit, last modified May 1, 2015, https://portal.datadrivendetroit. org/datasets/194bc647287f4e6b91c6401443845cce_0. 12. Joe Eskenazi, “Dollar Stores Are Thriving – But Are They Ripping Off Poor People?” The Guardian, last modified June 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2018/jun/28/dollar-store-ripping-people-offpoverty-inequality. 13. Cunningham et al., “A Snapshot of Detroit’s Food System,” 9. 14. Cunningham et al., “A Snapshot of Detroit’s Food System,” 9. 15. Noel King and Sarah Gonzalez, “Planet Money Episode 909: Dollar Stores vs Lettuce,” NPR, last modified April 26, 2019, https://www.npr.org/templates/

demarco & richman

157

Photographer: Owen Watson Location: Reykjavik, Iceland

Inclusionary Housing and Inclusionary Neighborhoods in China WEICAN ZUO Ph.D. in Architecture

abstract As housing prices soar and economic disparities increase across China, a growing number of cities have adopted inclusionary housing policies as a local means to produce public housing and foster economic and social inclusion. These policies require developers to provide a certain percentage of public housing in every new market-rate development. Based on a literature review, this paper first investigates the definition of inclusionary neighborhoods through the lenses of New Urbanism and ‘sense of community.’ An inclusionary neighborhood can provide its residents with a high level of social interaction, reinforced community identity, and strong community attachment, regardless of members’ different socioeconomic backgrounds. This paper then explores two elements that can affect social inclusion on a neighborhood scale, namely the physical design and communitybuilding activities of a neighborhood. Based on fieldwork conducted by the author in the summer of 2019, this paper looks at inclusionary housing developments in the city of Zhengzhou, China and further examines the relationship between these two elements and the creation of inclusionary neighborhoods. Finally, this paper considers how local governments and designers can work together to best achieve inclusionary neighborhoods in China.

160

agora 14

nclusionary housing policies first appeared in the United States during the 1970s in response to the housing affordability crisis and residential segregation of the preceding decades. Such policies helped create affordable housing and foster economic and social inclusion without relying on direct public subsidies, instead tapping the economic gains created from rising real estate values. Over the past two decades, inclusionary housing not only entered the mainstream of housing policy in the United States but also spread to other Western countries, including Canada, England, Ireland, France, and Spain, where it has taken different forms reflecting varied housing policies and land-use regulations.1 On the other side of the world, skyrocketing housing prices affect most cities in China, which is in the midst of massive real estate development after the country’s real estate market was reborn in 1998. Housing affordability has become a pressing social issue in China, causing tremendous social discontent. Under strong social and political pressures, China’s central government restructured its public housing system in 2007 and made ambitious plans to expand public housing provisions for low- and moderate-income households in the following five-year period.2 Local governments bear overall responsibility for providing and allocating public housing units based on local socio-economic conditions, but they are under the purview of the central government’s strong directives.3 To relieve budgetary pressures, many cities in China have moved from government-led, largescale, and concentrated public housing developments to a market-driven, scattered, and incremental approach, which requires new market-rate housing developments to include a minimum proportion of public housing units – similar to inclusionary housing policies in the West.4 Inclusionary housing in China is still in the stage of exploration. It is implemented primarily as a strategy to increase the

supply of public housing, whereas fostering social and economic inclusion appears to be a secondary goal.5 As researchers and policymakers realized that large-scale concentrated public housing developments cause and will continue to cause residential segregation and aggravated poverty, inclusionary housing policies are also tasked with addressing these concerns and promoting social and economic integration within communities.6 However, scholars have raised questions and debates around how inclusionary housing addresses its goal of fostering inclusion. Can inclusionary housing achieve a higher level of inclusiveness than homogeneous housing? Recent Chinese studies have indicated mixed results: some found mixed living in inclusionary housing developments helped increase economic and social opportunities for low-income residents, whereas others have indicated that due to the primary goal of fulfilling the government’s public housing quota, inclusionary housing in China has not yet achieved the mission of fostering social and economic inclusion.7, 8, 9 This conflict may result from the fact that there is no clear and consistent expectation of what social goals inclusionary housing developments should achieve. To initiate the discussion, this paper investigates what inclusionary housing should contribute to the neighborhood, and additionally, what an inclusionary neighborhood should look like. This paper explores the definition of inclusionary neighborhoods in the light of New Urbanism and ‘sense of community.’ Discussions on these two notions barely touch upon public housing developments; nevertheless, they shed light on the idea of socially inclusive neighborhoods. This paper presents two elements from this line of thought that may contribute to the development of inclusionary neighborhoods – the physical environment of a neighborhood and communitybuilding activities. Next, this paper draws from my fieldwork conducted in the City of Zhengzhou over the summer of 2019.

ZUO

161

This fieldwork indicates that although households of different social groups live near each other in inclusionary housing neighborhoods, such propinquity has led to little social or otherwise meaningful integration across socioeconomic class. This paper concludes with a discussion on how policy and practice might best address the goals that inclusionary housing has yet to achieve and maximize the impacts of inclusionary housing. Local governments and designers should work together and take advantage of well-designed inclusionary neighborhoods to generate significant social and economic benefits.

INCLUSIONARY NEIGHBORHOODS, NEW URBANISM, AND SENSE OF COMMUNITY Before 2007, public housing in China was developed in concentrated, large-scale projects of units exclusively for low- to middle-income households. Such projects may be built by private developers at the request of local governments but are managed by government agencies.10 Since local governments provide urban land at no charge for public housing, these concentrated public housing projects tend to be located at urban fringes, with poor access to public services and economic opportunities.11, 12 This has contributed to the social and spatial marginalization and aggregation of the poor in cities across China. As the demand for public housing continues to grow with rising housing prices, questions regarding how to address rapidly rising housing inequality and classbased residential segregation arise. In 2007, facing skyrocketing housing prices in the midst of massive real estate developments, the State Council of China reexamined its public housing developments and introduced inclusionary housing (peitao jianshe in Chinese), which required public housing to be produced mainly through inclusionary

162

agora 14

housing development (i.e., where developers provide a certain percentage of public housing within new marketrate developments). This approach is considered a promising method to produce public housing by relying more heavily on private developers instead of burdening local governments. Since 2007, a growing number of cities in China have adopted inclusionary housing policies, which could be an important step in reducing residential segregation and promoting social inclusion while meeting the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s massive need for public housing China is pursuing inclusionary housing as a means of promoting mixed-income, mixed-tenure housing developments to increase the supply of public housing and construct economically and socially diverse and integrated communities. The success of this approach is based on the premise that the spatial desegregation among residents of different income and social groups leads to positive social interactions, exposure to a wider diversity of people and lifestyles, and a higher tolerance for difference.13 However, the outcomes of similar inclusionary housing practices with aligned goals in Western countries are mixed. While some studies indicate that inclusionary housing is one of the very few successful housing strategies in integrating lower-income families into high-opportunity neighborhoods, others suggest that such mixed-income, mixed-tenure communities cannot generate the expected significant social mixing and inclusion.14, 15 New Urbanism and the Power of Design In order to contribute to a more equal, inclusive, and cohesive society, the built environment must be designed to promote social interaction. New Urbanism, which embraces socioeconomic diversity and a sense of inclusiveness, engages with this philosophy and pinpoints the concept of inclusionary neighborhoods. New Urbanist design centers on the human scale, prioritizes placemaking, and advocates

for a publicly oriented and walkable neighborhood that generates social interactions, promotes community stability, and reinforces community identity.16 It strives to encourage residents’ use of public spaces and investments in their physical surroundings and community, which would lead them to develop relationships with their neighbors and thus create a sense of community.17 New Urbanism is generally a pragmatic approach that believes in the power of design to foster economic and social benefits. Concept of ‘Sense of Community’ New Urbanism is often related to the notion of sense of community, which refers to an individual’s feeling of belonging to a community with a shared connection and attachment to place.18, 19 Therefore, this study also uses sense of community as the theoretical base to decode inclusionary neighborhoods. The existing literature on sense of community has explored the following four domains: community (or place) attachment defines the ways in which residents may feel a sense of belonging to their community; community identity describes residents’ personal and group interactions “with a specific physically bounded community with its own character”; social interactions are the formal or informal social occasions in which residents build their relationships with each other and with their community; and pedestrianism is the physical design of a community that makes it a walkable neighborhood and fosters street-side activities.20 Sense of community is often characterized as a major asset of the New Urbanist approach to urban design. However, it is often explored in the realm of phenomenology, with little connection to New Urbanism. Joongsub Kim and Rachel Kaplan, in their study on the New Urbanist communities Kentlands and Orchard Village in Gaithersburg, Maryland, investigate the role the physical environment plays in fostering a sense of

community in New Urbanist projects.21 Their study demonstrates that New Urbanist developments in fact can promote a sense of community. The results show that residents of a New Urbanist neighborhood strongly identify with their community, have a high level of social interactions, and feel more attached to their community. Their study also identifies some physical features of a New Urbanist neighborhood that are highly related to enhancing sense of community, including natural features, open spaces, the overall layout of the community, and architectural style of the community, andarchitectural style.22 While New Urbanism design can guarantee physical space for social interactions, the community-wide activities of a neighborhood, such as neighborhood festivals, performances, parties, etc., can provide time for social interactions and contribute to a sense of community. Community activities or events that are geared toward a broad cross-section of residents offer opportunities for residents across social groups to meet and interact. This may allow commonalities of interests and values to develop among residents of different backgrounds.23, 24 In practice, these community activities or events are often framed to be more attractive to children and youth, who can potentially play a bridging role and pull various members of the neighborhood together.25 Create Inclusionary Neighborhoods Aimed at fostering economic and social inclusion on a neighborhood scale, an inclusionary neighborhood can appropriate theoretical principles of New Urbanism and sense of community. Therefore, an inclusionary neighborhood is one that can provide its residents with 1) a high level of positive social interactions across different income or social groups that build social capital; 2) interactions with their community with respect to its unique social or physical characteristics; and 3) a sense of belonging and attachment to their community across

ZUO

163

racial and ethnic groups. Among these three dimensions, a high level of social interaction is the most fundamental and provides support to the other two. Critics have argued that although New Urbanist developments usually incorporate different types of housing (i.e., a mix of single-family houses, rowhouses, duplexes, apartments, etc.), they do not guarantee a socioeconomically diverse neighborhood; they only attract relatively affluent homeowners and affluent renters who are in need of different types of housing based on their current stage in life.26 However, inclusionary housing, which is usually implemented through local ordinances, requires the integration of lower-income families into market-rate developments in low-poverty neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the discussion of New Urbanism and sense of community sheds light on how best to promote social interactions and foster community identity and attachment to achieve social and economic inclusion. This paper identifies two elements that play vital functions in creating inclusionary neighborhoods: the physical environment of the neighborhood and diverse communitybuilding activities As mentioned above, some physical features of a neighborhood play an important role in both New Urbanist development and fostering a sense of community. Those physical features include but are not limited to housing types, architectural styles, public places (e.g., streets, parks, etc.), public buildings, and facilities. In the same vein, some physical features in an inclusionary housing project, such as the boundary of the neighborhood, overall layout, public spaces, and public facilities, can greatly affect – by either enhancing or prohibiting – residents’ social interactions across different income or social groups. Moreover, physical features, such as landscaping and public buildings, can contribute to unique physical character and allow residents to identify with the community.

164

agora 14

Besides the physical environment, diverse community-building activities can also influence the inclusiveness of a neighborhood. Holding communitywide activities or events regularly provides opportunities for increased social interaction and could eventually become a part of the social character of the neighborhood, reinforcing community identity and encouraging residents to get more involved in the community’s design.

INCLUSIONARY HOUSING DEVELOPMENT IN ZHENGZHOU, CHINA In China, research on inclusionary neighborhoods and housing policies is quite absent. It is understandable simply because the national effort to provide affordable housing in China (which does not include welfare housing allocated by work units before the 1980s) was initiated 50 years later than it was in the United States. Furthermore, inclusionary housing in China is more of a government-led campaign designed to fulfill the ambitious public housing provision goals set up by the central government. Hence, little attention has been paid to the inclusiveness of neighborhoods to date. In the summer of 2019, I visited the city of Zhengzhou, China to conduct preliminary research on its public housing developments. Zhengzhou is the capital city of Henan Province, which has experienced explosive urbanization especially since the millennium.27 By the end of 2018, Zhengzhou reached a population of 10.14 million and become one of China’s megacities. This rapid rise created severe challenges for the City, and housing affordability is one of the most pressing concerns.28 The spiraling housing prices make housing unaffordable for most working-class households, especially migration workers, who account for more than one-tenth of Zhengzhou’s population.

With the increasing population and the sky-high housing prices, the Zhengzhou municipal government took an active role in, and committed to the implementation of, public housing programs, including both homeownership-oriented housing programs and rental housing programs. Since 2001, about 130,000 public rental housing units have been built in Zhengzhou, benefitting more than 230,000 people.29 According to data obtained from Zhengzhou Housing Security and Management Bureau in June 2019, the total number of public housing units allocated in Zhengzhou since 2013 has reached 400,000. Based on the numbers, Zhengzhou has made great achievements in public housing development To ensure the provision of public housing units while relieving governmental budgetary pressures, the Zhengzhou municipal government required new housing developments to include at least 10 percent of the floor area for public housing beginning in 2011. Any local household in Zhengzhou without homeownership is eligible to apply for public housing within an inclusionary housing development if its monthly income per capita does not exceed six times the urban minimum living standard (3300 RMB or 472 USD per month); migrant households need to meet the income and asset thresholds and provide a proof of social insurance and employment contract (for at least one year) in order to qualify. This policy – which is similar to Western inclusionary housing policy – has changed the spatial distribution pattern of public housing on a city-wide scale. Before 2011, public housing units were mostly concentrated within a few giant neighborhoods in urban fringes. After 2011, public housing units have been distributed more evenly across the city, since they are integrated in every new market-rate housing development. Therefore, on a citywide scale, inclusionary housing policy in Zhengzhou has effectively reduced spatial segregation.

For my fieldwork, I examined and compared nine neighborhoods in Zhengzhou: three with high concentrations of public housing (public housing neighborhoods), and six commodity housing neighborhoods containing the mandated amount of public housing units (inclusionary housing neighborhoods). In each neighborhood, I interviewed staff who worked for the property management enterprise, and four to five residents (40 in total). Investigating the built environment of these neighborhoods and conducting in-depth interviews revealed that inclusionary housing in Zhengzhou has not yet succeeded in creating social and spatial inclusion on a neighborhood scale. The research also revealed that, although most expressed a basic level of satisfaction, many residents articulated some form of disappointment with the evident social and spatial division amongst middle-class market-rate residents and low-income public housing residents. Social and spatial isolation increased as public housing residents expressed feeling stigmatized by their higher-income neighbors within the neighborhood. Both market-rate homeowners or renters and public housing residents mentioned negative social interactions and feelings of detachment. Market-rate residents complained about the behavior of public housing residents, who in turn said they felt disrespected by market-rate residents or by management staff. “We are treated differently,” one of the public housing residents complained. “It’s suffocating.”30

There has been no interaction at all, and we see people all the time and people just kind of walk by and they don’t make an effort to get to know you.”

ZUO

165

Figure 1. Location of different types of housing in four

Figure 2. Iron fence separates public housing from

inclusionary housing neighborhoods (diagram by author).

commodity housing in the Poly Lily neighborhood (Zuo, 2019).

This phenomenon can be dissected from two perspectives – the neighborhoods’ physical environment and the lack of community-building activities. In terms of the neighborhood’s physical environment, I observed that public housing units are often located at the corners of project sites or are poorly oriented (i.e., facing noisy thruways). Developers generally have control over neighborhood planning and tend to place public housing units in the least desirable locations to save the best locations for more profitable market-rate units (Figure 1). In some cases, public housing units are even separated from market-rate units by physical barriers. For example, in the Poly Lily neighborhood, the only building designated for public housing has been encircled by an iron fence with an independent entrance (Figure 2). Public housing residents do not have access to the beautiful courtyards or public facilities in the market-rate housing section. According to the property manager, the developer built the fence in order to “facilitate better management.”31 Even though public services and facilities in inclusionary housing projects are generally better than those in concentrated public housing projects, due to the physical barriers, public housing residents in inclusionary housing projects do not have access to them. This spatial segregation of residents by income within the neighborhood

166

agora 14

reduces opportunities for informal social interactions among residents across different income groups. Laughing, one public housing resident in Poly Lily stated, “we are like sheep being kept in different pens.”32 Without social interactions, negative stereotypes of public housing residents held by market-rate residents can be reinforced over time, and thus public housing residents feel they are disrespected and gradually become detached from the community. A young couple living in a public housing unit said they were saving money to buy a market-rate apartment. As they explained, “we want to leave this community and have an apartment of our own. This place is not our home.”33 Additionally, the lack of community-building activities deepens this divide. None of the inclusionary housing neighborhoods I visited in Zhengzhou had any community-wide activities or events that would engage all of their residents. As mentioned before, community-building activities or events offer opportunities for social interactions among residents. Many residents expressed disappointment, not necessarily with overtly negative behavior, but with the level of unfamiliarity or underlying tension among neighbors. A public housing resident in an inclusionary housing neighborhood complained, “there has been no interaction at all, and we see people all the time and people just kind of walk by and they don’t

make an effort to get to know you.”34 Other residents stated that community-building efforts are very important and necessary in creating relationships across tenures and incomes.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Through the lenses of New Urbanism and sense of community, this study offers a definition of inclusionary neighborhoods that incorporates inclusive physical design of a neighborhood and the provision of community-building programming as critical tools to achieve a more cohesive community. Fostering social interaction across tenure and income groups is the first step in creating inclusionary neighborhoods. Social interactions among residents are more likely with a physical site plan that provides a layout that is conducive to encounters. With adequate social interactions, middleclass market-rate residents can move beyond mainstream media stereotypes and learn firsthand about families living in poverty, while low-income public housing residents can engage with and learn from residents of a different socioeconomic background, which may allow them to tap into new resources to advance their own ambitions.35 Moreover, the design of a neighborhood’s physical environment and communitybuilding activities could become the neighborhood’s unique social or physical character, which can reinforce community identity and community attachment. Consequently, residents would feel a sense of belonging to their community, even with the presence of other class, race, or ethnic groups. An inclusive neighborhood is one with adequate social interactions among residents across tenure and incomes, where residents have a strong sense of community identity and attachment

to their built environment. To build inclusionary neighborhoods in China, local governments should first put effort into streamlining inclusive design principles by persuading developers to eliminate any forms of physical barrier between housing blocks and mandating fair design in neighborhood planning. It is possible that such requirements will impose more costs or profit loss on developers; therefore, local governments could provide incentives for developers to offset the costs, such as density bonuses (the ability to build with increased density). Second, local governments should better support community-based programming. Local governments could provide financial resources and staff to support inclusionary housing neighborhoods as they organize community-wide activities or events on a regular basis. These two moves can help local governments achieve stronger and broader public support for inclusionary housing development and promote social inclusion citywide. In addition to local governments, designers should take responsibility in constructing inclusionary neighborhoods. Designers should consider physical features that play an important role in promoting social interactions and community identity in their designs, such as the overall layout, landscape, streets, public spaces, and facilities of a neighborhood. Moreover, given developer’s desire to minimize costs, designers should strive to design public housing units with appropriate standards to ensure quality public housing. Zhengzhou and some other cities in China have insisted that public housing units should be as well-designed in every respect as marketrate units. But in reality, public housing units often get much less attention in architectural design. Therefore, designers should work together with developers and local governments to put effort into constructing inclusionary neighborhoods. The relationship among inclusionary

ZUO

167

neighborhoods, New Urbanism, and sense of community needs to be further studied. More importantly, empirical studies need to be conducted to demonstrate the correlation between the design of neighborhoodsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; physical environment, community-building activities, and social inclusion. This study is limited in several ways. First, it focuses on several inclusionary housing neighborhoods in the city of Zhengzhou but conducts its literature review mostly from the Western school of thought. The discussion may not be generalizable to China as a whole and may not be suitable in the Chinese context.

Second, inclusionary housing in China is still in its initial development stage and residents are continually learning about it, with public preferences shifting over time. Therefore, more research (both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies) with better data is needed. Nevertheless, on a preliminary level, this research indicates that by broadening the definition of what an inclusive neighborhood looks like in policy, design, and programming, we are able to more succinctly evaluate its success as an effective housing model in China.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Weican Zuo is a second-year doctoral student in Architecture at the University of Michigan. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Xiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;an Jiaotong University in China and Master of Architecture from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include studying the dynamics related to contemporary models of public and inclusionary housing in both China and the United States, how to develop inclusive neighborhoods, and Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urbanization and sustainable urban development.

168

agora 14

ENDNOTES 1. Nico Calavita and Alan Mallach, Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective: Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion, and Land Value Recapture (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010): 2. 2. Wei Shi, Jie Chen, and Hongwei Wang, “Affordable Housing Policy in China: New Developments and New Challenges,” Habitat International 54 (2016): 231. 3. Jing Zhou and Richard Ronald, “Housing and Welfare Regimes: Examining the Changing Role of Public Housing in China,” Housing, Theory and Society 34, no. 3 (2017): 264. 4. Youqin Huang, Bolstering Inclusionary Housing in Chinese Cities (Chicago, IL: The Paulson Institute/Paulson Policy Memorandum, 2015), 2. 5. Zhigang Chen, Youqin Huang, and Xianjin Huang, “Public Support for Inclusionary Housing in Urban China,” International Journal of Housing Policy 19, no. 4 (2019): 476. 6. Chen, Y. Huang, and X. Huang, “Public Support for Inclusionary Housing in Urban China,” 462. 7. Chen, Y. Huang, and X. Huang, “Public Support for Inclusionary Housing in Urban China,” 463. 8. Huang, Bolstering Inclusionary Housing in Chinese Cities, 14.

Psychological Factors in Sense of Community: New Urbanist Kentlands and Nearby Orchard Village,” Environment and Behavior 36, no.13 (2004): 313-4. 19. David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis, “Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory,” Journal of Community Psychology 14, no. 1 (1986): 9. 20. Kim and Kaplan, “Physical and Psychological Factors in Sense of Community,” 315-17. 21. Kim and Kaplan, “Physical and Psychological Factors in Sense of Community,” 319. 22. Kim and Kaplan, “Physical and Psychological Factors in Sense of Community,” 326. 23. Rachel Kleit, “HOPE VI New Communities: Neighborhood Relationships in Mixed-Income Housing,” Environment and Planning A 37 (2005): 1416. 24. Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph, “Social Interaction in Mixed-Income Developments: Relational Expectations and Emerging Reality,” Journal of Urban Affairs 33, no. 2 (2011): 221. 25. Robert J Chaskin and Mark L Joseph, “Building ‘Community’ in Mixed-Income Developments,” Urban Affairs Review 45, no. 3 (January 28, 2010): 314.

9. Liping Wu, Qian Huang, and Shangyi Zhou, “Assessment of Social-Mixed Housing in Beijing Central City: Survey of Beitaipingzhuang and Beixinqiao Subdistricts” (in Chinese), Social Science of Beijing, no. 3 (2011): 77.

26. Hock, “Practice Theory Project Place,” 20.

10. Huang, Bolstering Inclusionary Housing in Chinese Cities, 2.

28. Wang and Tomaney, “Zhengzhou,” 110.

11. Fox Z.Y. Hu and Jiwei Qian, “Land-Based Finance, Fiscal Autonomy and Land Supply for Affordable Housing in Urban China: A Prefecture-Level Analysis,” Land Use Policy 69 (July 2017): 456. 12. Huang, Bolstering Inclusionary Housing in Chinese Cities, 2. 13. Diane K Levy, Zach McDade, and Kassie Bertumen, “Mixed-Income Living: Anticipated and Realized Benefits for Low-Income Households,” Cityscape 15, no. 2 (2013): 17.

27. Xuefeng Wang and John Tomaney, “Zhengzhou – Political Economy of an Emerging Chinese Megacity,” Cities 84, no. July 2018 (2019): 107.

29. Yanzhu Dong, “Zhengzhou Has Constructed 130,512 Public Rental Housing Unit in Total,” Zhengzhou Daily, October 2019, https://zzrb.zynews.cn/html/2019-10/30/ content_1120450.htm?spm=zm5087-001.0.0.1.ws2cZb. 30. Interview by Weican Zuo, Zhengzhou, China, July 14, 2019. 31. Interview by Weican Zuo, Zhengzhou, China, July 14, 2019. 32. Interview by Weican Zuo, Zhengzhou, China, July 13, 2019.

14. Heather Schwartz, Lisa Ecola, Kristin J. Leuschner, and Aaron Kofner, Is Inclusionary Zoning Inclusionary? A Guide for Practitioners (Arlington, VA: RAND Corporation, 2012), 20.

33. Interview by Weican Zuo, Zhengzhou, China, July 13, 2019.

15. Levy, McDade, and Bertumen, “Mixed-Income Living,” 18.

35. Rick Jacobus, Inclusionary Housing – Creating and Maintaining Equitable Communities (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 40.

16. Jennifer Hock, “Practice Theory Project Place: Fairview Village and Orenco Station [The Promise of New Urbanism],” Places 13, no. 2 (2000): 19-22.

34. Interview by Weican Zuo, Zhengzhou, China, July 17, 2019.

17. Hock, “Practice Theory Project Place,” 19-22. 18. Joongsub Kim and Rachel Kaplan, “Physical and

ZUO

169

Photographer: Megan Rigney Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Not in My Backyard

Zoning, Smut, Citizen Participation, and Social Control JANNEY LOCKMAN Master of Urban and Regional Planning 2020

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, cities began to regulate adult businesses through zoning and land-use regulation instead of obscenity-based regulations to great efficacy. These governmental efforts were supported by ordinary citizens using arguments about property value to keep adult businesses ‘out of their backyards.’ Today, former ‘smut districts’ in Detroit, Boston, and New York City are often the sight of high-value real estate and look very different from their seedy pasts. By using zoning and top-down planning tools like urban renewal to deal with adult businesses, cities succeeded in dispersing their porn districts. The regulations came at a cost, pushing out spaces that acted as sites for interaction across class and racial boundaries; areas with affordable shopping, dining, entertainment, and living options; and places where members of the LGBTQ community could be ‘out’ in public. When these areas are replaced with tourist traps and highvalue real estate ventures, little thought is given to the social costs of losing these spaces. As planners making decisions about what land uses are valuable and which are ‘nuisances,’ it is important to understand that we may not know the true value of a controversial space until it is gone.

172

AGORA 14

n the 1970s, city officials in Detroit, Boston, and New York City began to employ land-use regulations rather than obscenity laws to restrict sexual activity and adult uses. Obscenity laws relied on subjective definitions of the ‘obscene’ and were easily challenged in court on First Amendment grounds. Because these landuse regulations could not actually shut down adult businesses but prevented them from congregating, land-use regulations did not pose the same risk of violating an owner’s right to free speech and thus were less likely to be challenged in court.1 This shift was supported by small groups of ordinary citizens who opposed adult businesses and pressured elected officials to use their power to restrict these uses. The rhetorical tactics used by groups protesting adult uses reflect tactics used by opponents of other controversial development: the development can go somewhere, just ‘not in my backyard’ (NIMBY).2 Using arguments about ‘quality of life’ and ‘property values,’ small groups of concentrated opponents wielded considerable political power against adult business during this time.3 Opposition to adult businesses often took on a racist and classist timber. In Boston, Detroit, and New York City, ‘smut districts’ were threatening not only because they provided places where sex was on display, but also because these neighborhoods facilitated mixing of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic groups. The people who frequented or worked in these areas were ‘deviant groups’ stigmatized by the policy process and thus, even when concentrated in one neighborhood, were not able to protest as effectively as their privileged NIMBY opponents.4 Anti-porn advocates shifted the focus of land-use arguments from difficult-to-define ‘moral’ reasons to more tangible ‘economic’ reasons for restricting adult businesses; this shift could explain their success in redefining smut districts. Such districts were often located on valuable real estate

near the central business districts of these three cities.5 The consequences of using capital to displace the bawdy is apparent in many U.S. cities today, as politicians, developers, and business owners in these areas have used techniques like Tax Increment Financing (TIF) and Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) to incentivize development, raise property values, and reduce city property tax revenue in former porn districts.6 Yet brick-and-mortar adult businesses still exist: smut has not been defeated; it has simply been dispersed. Real estate developers have gained the most from efforts to remove adult business from high-value central business district land. Areas like Times Square, once a thriving smut district, had rents as high as $2,500 per square foot by 2015.7 This profitable future was hard to imagine in the 1970s, when all three cities were struggling economically. Adult businesses allowed landlords to collect rents, even as the rest of the cities lost businesses and population to the suburbs.8 The decision to shut down profitable, thriving adult districts in times of urban divestment seems counterintuitive, but it happened anyway. In the history of these spaces, complaints about the loss of authenticity and nostalgia for a pre-HIV/AIDS era of commercial sex run parallel to criticism of governmentdriven moralizing clean-up efforts.9 While the intrinsic value of a strip club or an adult bookstore is debatable, the areas where these businesses were located held value in their functions as diverse and relatively safe public spaces, places to go for the unhoused, homes to those who lived in residential hotels, sites of gay bars and safe spaces for LGBTQ residents to be ‘out’ in public, and affordable entertainment districts for youth of color. As planners and policymakers, we must learn from the loss of these spaces. We may not understand the full social value of a ‘nuisance’ space to people who are different from ourselves until it is no longer there.

LOCKMAN

173

DETROIT: ZONE IT OUT “History may link the new girlie era with ‘the fluctuating economy of an industrial city,’ or work out ponderous theories on ‘urban depletion in face of suburban expansion.’ But meantime – tonight – Detroiters and conventioneers will sit happily beating out the rhythm of bumps and grinds in any of the 24 night spots that now feature Girls! Girls! Girls!” – Ralph Nelson, 195910 The City of Detroit was a pioneer in the censorship of literature and film and later was the first city to use zoning to regulate adult businesses. After a 1957 Supreme Court decision ruled the City’s censorship tactics unconstitutional, regulations loosened and adult businesses began to concentrate in downtown Detroit along the Woodward Corridor and on the Detroit side of West Eight Mile, areas that formerly were filled with more conventional businesses like retail stores and restaurants.11 While some Detroiters saw adult businesses as a source of tax dollars and attraction to the city, others saw them as convenient scapegoats for suburbanization, deindustrialization, and racial tension in Detroit.12, 13 Some even perceived adult businesses as a major cause of Detroit’s economic decline.14 Much of the opposition to adult businesses came from vocal groups of local citizens.15 Homeowners in Detroit claimed that adult businesses would lower property values.16 Yet when Detroit introduced measures to regulate adult activity, these businesses simply moved to working-class jurisdictions with less ability to fight back.17 The demands of local citizens imploring their government to address adult businesses, paired with creative government officials using pornography as a proxy for more challenging issues, influenced strategies for battling adult businesses and land-use regulation in the city, and later across the country. The opening of an Adult World Bookstore

174

AGORA 14

in 1972 in northwestern Detroit’s Redford neighborhood began a campaign of citizen involvement and NIMBYism, and signaled a rhetorical shift from regulating pornography on grounds of obscenity to regulating it based on property value and nuisance laws. A local pastor, concerned about the sexual content purveyed at Adult World, implored his congregation to take political action in the name of morals and Christian decency.18 Soon, church members, neighbors, and community organizations were writing letters to city officials protesting Adult World. These letters diverged from morality arguments and instead reflected more generalized anxieties about race and economic decline. Letter writers espoused the need to protect children from sexual content and feared that the Adult World would lead to an “invasion” of outsiders and further the economic decline of the neighborhood and city.19 In the 1970s, the Redford neighborhood was one of the few remaining primarily white neighborhoods in the city, and it was more economically diverse than the surrounding suburbs or inner-ring neighborhoods.20 Prior to and throughout the 1970s, Redford resisted integration, a history reflected in the rhetoric of the Adult World letter-writing campaign, where writers implored city officials to preserve neighborhood character, property values, children’s innocence, and prevent ‘invasion’ – language adopted from earlier resistance against neighborhood integration.21 Others acknowledged that the patrons of Adult World were likely to be visitors from the white suburbs, who would be unwilling to allow such a land use in their own backyards.22 Some conceded that Adult

At the end of the day, everything has to go in someone’s backyard.”

World would be acceptable downtown, but not in a residential neighborhood. However, some of the letter writers threatened that the trend of ‘white flight’ and disinvestment would be exacerbated if such uses were permitted to continue.23 Less than a year after it had opened, Adult World closed of its own accord. The jubilation of residents was short lived, as an adult theater opened nearby in 1973.24 This letter-writing campaign did not successfully ban adult business from the neighborhood, but it did demonstrate strong citizen support for addressing adult uses.25 The Redford case is but one instance of the rhetorical shift from moral arguments against adult businesses to one of maintaining a ‘quality community.’ Other groups in the 1970s began to argue that adult businesses were detrimental to neighborhoods and did not belong in residential areas, but they were hesitant to touch free speech, promote censorship, or prevent others from enjoying pornography.26 Under more liberal courts and new Supreme Court decisions, restrictions based on obscenity charges could no longer be used to regulate adult businesses, as they could be construed as censorship.27 During the Adult World letter-writing campaign, the Detroit City Council was pursuing action on an ordinance designed to prevent new adult businesses from opening.28 Ultimately, City Council decided to extend the City’s Anti-Skid Row Act to adult businesses. Designed to prevent land uses associated with blight from congregating, this law prohibited a variety of businesses from pawnshops to pool rooms from being located within 1,000 feet of each other.29 Thus, the Detroit model, a zoning- rather than obscenity-based regulation on adult uses, was born. This model was replicated in cities across the country.30 Attacking pornography through land-use regulation followed the time-honored American tradition of employing land-use regulation as a form of social control. This adjustment

to the ordinance could not close existing adult businesses but would make it more difficult to open them, thereby working to disperse them and avoiding the risk of any one area forming a ‘smut district.’ Attacking these businesses on the economic grounds of adult entertainment’s ‘blighting’ effect on neighborhoods rather than on moral grounds proved to be less controversial.31 In October 1972, the Detroit City Council voted unanimously to pass a set of anti-porn ordinances that emphasized homeowners’ rights and the negative economic impact of adult businesses and imposed a mixture of zoning and licensing-based restrictions.32 Four years later, in the case of Young v. American Mini Theatres Inc., the constitutionality of Detroit’s anti-porn zoning ordinance was challenged in the Supreme Court. In a narrow decision, the ordinance was declared constitutional.33 By the end of the 1970s, most U.S. cities had passed similar ordinances.34

BOSTON: ZONE IT IN Boston’s approach to regulating adult businesses in the 1970s was reminiscent of the ‘cool parent’ who allows their teenagers to throw parties at their home because if they are going to drink, they should not drive. Concerned by the ‘blighting’ effect of adult entertainment, city officials restricted adult uses in Boston to an area known as the ‘Combat Zone.’35 The Combat Zone emerged after the combined forces of a fire in an old burlesque theater and urban renewal through eminent domain succeeded in shutting down Boston’s previous ‘skid row,’ Scollay Square.36 Historically a source of cheap entertainment in the form of movie theaters, bookstores, arcades, and single-room occupancy hotels and restaurants, by the 1950s, Scollay Square primarily provided shopping and lodging for working-class Bostonians and people with nowhere else to go.37 The Boston Redevelopment Authority

LOCKMAN

175

(BRA) replaced Scollay Square with a new City Hall, state and federal buildings, and private offices.38 By the early 1970s, adult entertainment in the city was concentrated in the Combat Zone, an area of lower Washington Street bounded by the shopping, theater, and garment districts, Chinatown and Park Square, and an area with mixed-use buildings including single-room-occupancy hotels for transients, retired merchant marines, and working-class men. BRA officials had designs for a redevelopment plan of Park Square that would include the construction of new hotels, apartments, office buildings, shops, and entertainment and would replace the Combat Zone with luxury apartments and a parking garage. Local residents opposed clearing the Combat Zone on the grounds that this would only scatter adult uses to other neighborhoods and formed the Park Plaza Civic Advisory Committee (CAC). In 1974, a study by the BRA and CAC proposed turning this area into a special ‘Adult Entertainment Zone’ and restricting the operation of adult entertainment facilities in the rest of the city. This solution would allow these businesses to remain in existence without ‘contaminating’ the rest of the city and make them easier to control.39 The Boston Zoning Commission approved this amendment to the existing zoning code, supported by neighborhood groups from Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and Chinatown (who were likely relieved that these undesirable uses would remain far from their homes).40 The City even began running a shuttle bus to and from the Combat Zone in an attempt to force other adult businesses to relocate.41 Once the City had confined adult entertainment to the Combat Zone, it ceased providing adequate services like lighting and sanitation in the area and ignored requests from businesses for additional police protection.42 Meanwhile, fueled by rumors of organized crime, the City lobbed petty charges like obscenity and poor lighting at

176

AGORA 14

adult businesses. Lack of City investment in the Combat Zone allowed criminal activity to concentrate in the area while police were busy harassing business owners.43 Although stigmatized and neglected by City officials and considered immoral by most Bostonians, adult entertainment in the Combat Zone helped attract mainstream business conventions and suburban residents to the City.44 These visitors, in turn, provided tax dollars desperately needed in a city that was suffering from declining commercial fishing, collapse of the textile industry, and loss of power as a banking center.45 Despite media depictions of mob activity and devious dealings, businesses in the Combat Zone were run much in the same way as other groups of neighborhood businesses: they formed a trade association, had a spokesperson, and lobbied the City for services.46 What was life like in the Combat Zone? The reality of the area is obscured by newspaper reports about mob activity and fictional representations of the Zone as filled with sailors, streetwalkers, and leering college boys.47 The Combat Zone was also home to Bostonians and transients who lived in short-term occupancy hotels (SROs), retired Merchant Marines, and homeless shelters.48 Men from a mix of socioeconomic groups typically patronized the Combat Zone.49 The Zone also provided one of the few public places in the city where gay and lesbian Bostonians could meet.50 The Combat Zone’s socioeconomic mix of patrons and its reputation as a place where one may encounter homosexuals made the area a further target for moral scrutiny. If a suburban husband could view a peep show in the Combat Zone while his wife shopped a few blocks over, then anyone could be contaminated by the temptations of the area and become a ‘john,’ or even a ‘queer.’51 The tension between economic benefits, lack of investment, and the mixture of class and race in the Combat Zone came to a head in 1976 when two Harvard football players

in a group visiting the “Naked i” nightclub were stabbed. According to reports, the students and their friends were attempting to retrieve a wallet allegedly stolen by two or three Black prostitutes as they were leaving the Zone. Several (the students claimed 6-10) Black men came to the defense of the prostitute, attacking the players and stabbing two of them.52 After the stabbing, citizens pressured city officials to reform the Zone.53 Anxieties about class, race, gender, and morality were highlighted by this case of Black visitors to the Combat Zone and Black sex workers versus white college students.54 The City began to require licenses, enforce building codes, and issue safety citations. In the 15 days following the stabbing, 93 people were arrested in the Combat Zone on charges including prostitution, liquor violations, and ‘night-walking.’ A total of 66 complaints for disseminating obscene material were drawn up.55 While Boston’s Combat Zone was not a neighborhood in the traditional sense, its renovation led to a loss of SRO hotels, which provided affordable housing for bachelors, retirees, and others.56 The practice of hotel living faded after WWII. In the years following urban renewal, these hotels were torn down or renovated for more profitable uses, leaving the men who lived there (considered ‘transients’ in the eyes of the state and thus ineligible for relocation subsidies) to fend for themselves.57 Following the Naked i incident, the city encouraged developers to replace adult businesses with more ‘legitimate’ establishments. New landlords raised rents, Emerson College and Suffolk University converted buildings into dormitories, and luxury apartments were constructed in what used to be a parking lot. Gradually, the Combat Zone began to resemble the rest of downtown.58

New York City’s Time Square: Who Needs Zoning When You’ve Got Urban Renewal? Much has been written on the transformation of Times Square: from its tenure as a theater district that became New York’s first truly public space, to an area considered the “sleaziest block in America,” to 42nd Street’s current status as a tourist destination.59, 60 Urban renewal-like forces facilitated the shift from a place where you could have sexual encounters in an adult theater to the paean to capitalism it is today. Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue describes the porn theaters of Times Square from the 1960s onward as places where men across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups could encounter each other (sexually or otherwise) and where someone who had nowhere else to go could spend time.61 Other accounts of Times Square in the 1970s and 1980s describe it as a relatively safe and affordable place where those living in low-income minority neighborhoods could see a movie, shop, or go out to eat. Considering the high volume of tourist, commuter, and pedestrian activity through the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the 8th Avenue subway station, the area had relatively low incidence of felonies.62 Yet many New Yorkers did not see this side of 42nd Street as it became a national symbol of urban decline.63 Accounts of Times Square do not sugarcoat that the area was primarily “male turf,” aside from female sex workers.64 White fears of the Black and Latinx visitors to 42nd Street fueled negative public perception of the area.65 There was doubt that the area could change without massive intervention.66 City politicians had promised to reform Times Square for decades; these efforts failed, partially because it was difficult to enforce interventions based on obscenity laws, and partly because porn is profitable. Times Square attracted tourists and provided jobs

LOCKMAN

177

in the city.67 In 1976, Mayor Abraham D. Beame set up a task force, the Mayor’s Office of Midtown Enforcement (OME), to return Times Square’s real estate to “good commercial uses” by enforcing obscenity laws; fire, health and building codes; and zoning law amendments.68 OME was good at its job, making a persuasive case for promoting real estate redevelopment as an argument against porn.69 For landlords in Times Square, adult businesses – with their high turnover and low overhead – were valuable in an area that otherwise might not have tenants. Properties slated for future demolition were purchased and rented out on short-term leases that allowed landlords to vacate tenants quickly while profiting off of the high rents these spaces garnered.70 Despite the high property value in Times Square, small parcels, multiple layers of title and lease holders, and costly acquisitions due to high rents supported by advertising signs – not to mention pornography and crime – limited real estate activity.71 In previous decades, the rabbit warren of landlords, tenants, and title holders in Times Square could have been resolved by crying “Blight!” and instituting a program of urban renewal.72 Yet in the post-Robert Moses era, people began to realize that perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to wipe out entire communities with the blunt instrument of eminent domain. City officials were hesitant to wield this tool to initiate large-scale development.73 Further, the sex industry enjoyed its centralized location and was unlikely to budge.74 During Mayor Ed Koch’s tenure in the early 1980s, the City’s Public Development Corporation (PDC) was tapped to lead the redevelopment effort for Times Square. The PDC could sell land acquired from the City to a single entity without going through auction or a competitive bid process, thereby avoiding the red tape that

178

AGORA 14

other City agencies faced in acquiring and disposing of land. It did not, however, have the legal authority to initiate the large-scale acquisition of property in Times Square, which would require condemnation and tax-abatements for developers. The State of New York, on the other hand, did have this power. The PDC partnered with New York State’s Urban Development Corporation (UDC), which could issue condemnation and provide state-level support for the project. This partnership between the PDC and the UDC gave the City the unique role of developer and regulator.75 Develop and regulate they did – the City could now use eminent domain to condemn land, then override local land-use regulations.76 The case of Times Square demonstrates how it is less legally sticky to control porn with real estate than on moral grounds. Redevelopment efforts under Mayor Koch and those who followed had the power of condemnation, and the joint power and resources of a unified City and State government. This gave the public sector a (questionable) leg-up on private developers.77 Over the next 20 years, Times Square transformed. By the time the constitutionality of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s zoning proposal to ban adult businesses from residential neighborhoods was upheld in court in 1998, Times Square had irrevocably changed.78

PUBLIC SPACES, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, AND SOCIAL COSTS “The combatants that appear to be the most effective in this battle against the profiteers of sex are the profiteers of real estate.” – John E. Yang, 198179 During the events leading up to the dispersal of adult businesses in Detroit,

the corralling of the Combat Zone, and the taming of Times Square, all three cities were in states of ‘urban crisis,’ facing depopulation and disinvestment as the forces of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and panic over integration threatened to further drain the population.80 It is difficult to imagine this level of divestment for most of these places today. Areas that were once smut districts are now some of the wealthiest areas in the city. This wealth is maintained by small groups of people through the use of economic development tools like TIFs and BIDs. At its best, a BID is a tool that can garner support from a diverse range of interests for investment in otherwise disinvested areas. It can step in to provide services like place marketing or sanitation where the government cannot.81 At its worst, a BID provides privatized security that further contributes to the privatization of urban public spaces that once provided opportunities for diverse social interaction.82 In Times Square, the local BID entity employs a private security force and facilitates a community court that tries those caught loitering, among other minor crimes, and punishes them with street sweeping.83 Detroit does not fare much better. Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert currently owns nearly 100 properties around Campus Martius in downtown Detroit, including the luxury Shinola Hotel and office buildings housing Microsoft, JP Morgan, and Quicken Loans.84 Billionaire Gilbert has received $618 million in tax incentives via a TIF district.85 This is a dramatic shift from an area rife with

We may not understand the full social value of a ‘nuisance’ space to people who are different from ourselves until it is no longer there.”

adult businesses in the 1970s.86 With real estate investment, there are also spaces of continued divestment that must make Faustian bargains for the promise of economic development. Do elected officials allow commercial sex to flourish and risk having their town receive the ‘Smut City’ moniker, or sacrifice jobs and revenue to another suburb? What is better, a porn theater or a boarded-up theater? Adult business or no business at all? 87 NIMBYs have the resources, time, and political clout to ensure that adult businesses do not end up in their communities, but at the end of the day, everything has to go in someone’s backyard. As an urban planner, when I read about the rich social (and, yes, sexual) fabric of adult districts, I wonder what other valuable functions are lost when public spaces change. It is impossible to hang on to every space, simply because we don’t understand how and why they are useful until they are gone. I don’t know if I would have felt comfortable going to Times Square in the 1970s or entering a porn theater then or now. Dwelling in nostalgia for lost adult theater districts plays along similar logical veins that cry for returns to an imagined, more morally pure existence. In more tangible ways, nostalgia can hamper planning efforts to provide affordable housing and improve the public transportation system; then again, so does the privatization of public space. Despite efforts on the part of politicians and developers to obscure public costs of private development, one could theoretically follow the paper trail of tax abatements, rent credits, and development incentives back to a number. The social costs may be difficult to quantify but are far more important. When people have nowhere to go, where do they go? When the stage upon which Jane Jacobs’ “intricate sidewalk ballet” of the city was once performed is privately owned, what happens to the dancers?

LOCKMAN

179

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Janney Lockman grew up in West Virginia. After attending Oberlin College, she moved to Colorado where she worked in active transportation and played in a bluegrass band. Dreams of working in the music industry brought her to Nashville, where she dabbled in aspects of the entertainment industry from booking to modeling, but ultimately made the most money bartending. Her frustrations with income inequality, lack of transportation options, and expensive housing in rapidly growing Music City led Lockman to pursue a planning degree at the University of Michigan. Her planning interests lie in rural economic development, transportation equity, and feminist planning. Janney’s piece, “Old Money, New Nashville: A Tale of Changing Wealth in Music City” was featured in Agora’s 13th volume.

180

AGORA 14

ENDNOTES 1. Benjamin Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit: Regulating Race, Sex, and Adult Entertainment, 1950-1975” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2013), 34.

33. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 323.

2. Ian Welsh, “The NIMBY Syndrome: Its Significance in the History of the Nuclear Debate in Britain,” The British Journal for the History of Science: Energy and Society 26, no. 1 (March 1993):15.

35. Eric Schaefer and Eithne Johnson, “Quarantined! A Case Study of Boston’s Combat Zone,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, eds. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuck (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002), 434.

3. Marilyn Adler Papayanis, “Sex and the Revanchist City: Zoning out Pornography in New York,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 3 (2000): 343.

34. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 328.

36. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 433. 37. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 434.

4. Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram, “Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy,” The American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 344.

38. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 434.

5. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 34.

41. Whitney Strub, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 174.

6. Eeckhout, “Disneyfication,” 390. 7. Lauren Elkies Schram, “Toys ‘R’ Us Leaving Flagship Times Square Location,” Commercial Observer, March 17, 2015, https://commercialobserver.com/2015/03/toys-rus-officially-leaving-flagship-times-square-location/. 8. Lynne Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon (Boston: The MIT Press, 2001), 55.

39. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 435. 40. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 436.

42. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 436. 43. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 439. 44. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 437. 45. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 432.

9. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 459.

46. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 438.

10. Ralph Nelson “It’s a Girlie Era, But Police Watch for Error,” Detroit Free Press, June 8, 1959.

47. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 437.

11. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 33.

49. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 440.

12. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 178.

50. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 441.

13. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 34.

51. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 441.

14. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 240.

52. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 442.

15. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 11.

53. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 443.

16. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 39.

54. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 445.

17. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 218.

55. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 446.

18. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 222.

56. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 446.

19. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 223.

57. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 71.

20. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 224.

58. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 447.

21. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 225.

59. Eeckhout, “Disneyfication,” 384.

22. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 237.

60. Eeckhout, “Disnetfication,” 386.

23. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 239. 24. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 244.

61. Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 65.

25. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 247.

62. Eeckhout, “Disneyfication,” 417.

26. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 276.

63. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 49.

27. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 262.

64. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 16.

28. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 244.

65. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 20.

29. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 263.

66. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 48.

30. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 33.

67. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 58.

31. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 264.

68. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 18.

32. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 300.

69. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 61.

48. Schaefer and Johnson, “Quarantined!,” 446.

LOCKMAN

181

70. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 47. 71. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 45. 72. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 21. 73. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 21. 74. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 23. 75. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 72. 76. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 74. 77. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, 79. 78. Papayanis, “Sex and the Revanchist City,” 341. 79. John E. Yang, “Whither Boston’s Combat Zone.” Boston Sunday Globe, February 8, 1981. 80. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 35. 81. Jerry Mitchell, “Business Improvement Districts and the ‘New’ Revitalization of Downtown,” Economic Development Quarterly 15, no. 2 (2001): 116. 82. Eeckhout, “Disneyfication,” 391. 83. Eeckhout, “Disneyfication,” 390. 84. Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliott, “How a Tax Break to Help the Poor Went to NBA Owner Dan Gilbert,” ProPublica, October 24, 2019, https://www.propublica. org/article/how-a-tax-break-to-help-the-poor-wentto-nba-owner-dan-gilbert. 85. Louis Aguilar, “Gilbert Seals $681M Tax Incentive Package for 4 Detroit Projects,” The Detroit News, May 22, 2018, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/ news/local/detroit-city/2018/05/22/tax-breaks-dangilbert-downtown-detroit-hudson-book-monroedevelopment/629505002/. 86. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 305. 87. Strassfeld, “Indecent Detroit,” 220.

182

AGORA 14

Photographer: Brittany Simmons Location: New York, New York LOCKMAN

183

Photographer: Tim AzzoliniÂ Location: Sevilla, Spain

con ve rg e n c e