The White Problem in Planning
FR O M T H E E DI TO R
WILLIAM CURRAN-GROOME
WILLIAM CURRAN-GROOME
Will is a second-year master’s candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Before coming to UNC, he worked in public health and social services research with a nonprofit in Philadelphia. Will’s academic interests center on land use policy and its influence on housing affordability.
This past year has been in large part defined by three interrelated phenomena: a resurgence in Black Lives Matter protests and activism catalyzed by the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by the police; the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic; and the ouster of Donald Trump and the Republican Party from control of our federal executive and legislative branches of government. Each of these events has highlighted how the social, political, economic, legal, and physical institutions of our country have been designed and employed to benefit whites at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. In response, we asked authors to address issues raised by Goetz, Williams, and Damiano (2020) in their article titled Whiteness and Urban Planning, in particular how urban planning has worked to normalize and perpetuate whiteness--its invisibility, the exclusion by which it is defined, and the extractive nature of white affluence. The articles in this issue touch on many of the domains where planning intersects with whiteness, and they contribute valuable perspectives and analyses as we seek to build more racially just and reparative planning systems. The roles of federal housing policy in building white advantage have been documented in an extensive body of literature. This literature also captures how federal housing policy has simultaneously excluded BIPOC groups from wealth-building opportunities and destroyed vibrant BIPOC communities. Frank Muraca (MCRP ‘20) builds on this work by examining the prevalence and impacts of “Urban” Renewal projects on rural communities in North Carolina, demonstrating the influence of federal Renewal dollars in creating and segregating white affluence. Rachel Eberhard (MCRP ‘16) examines contemporary efforts to mitigate housing discrimination, arguing that the Biden Administration has the opportunity to improve the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, expand housing opportunities, and eliminate racial barriers to housing access.
6
