Monday Mailing - June 8, 2020

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 39 08 June 2020 1.

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Quote of the Week:

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

– President Barack Obama.

Oregon Fast Fact

Oregon’s state constitution included a clause barring AfricanAmericans from residing in the state until 1926.

FAQ: What to Expect for Phase 2 of Oregon’s Reopening Plan (Katie McFall) UO Faculty Report Outlines a Framework for Economic Recovery April Jobs Report: It’s Bad Everywhere, But Rural Areas Lost a Smaller Proportion ‘Now is the Time to Step Up’: Statements from Organizations Serving Rural America Toward a Racially Just Workplace The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. How Small Family Forests Can Help Meet the Climate Challenge Poor Neighborhoods Are Only Getting Poorer RESOURCE – Planning Beyond Mass Incarceration RESOURCE – Planning for Equity Guide

1. FAQ: What to Expect for Phase 2 of Oregon’s Reopening Plan About two-thirds of Oregon counties will further loosen COVID-19 restrictions over the next few days, as vast parts of the state move forward with Phase 2 of Gov. Kate Brown’s reopening plan.

As more places start opening up for the summer, here’s what you need to know.

To access the full story, click here.

2. UO Faculty Report Outlines a Framework for Economic Recovery

With Oregon’s economy facing a contraction of historic proportions driven by the coronavirus pandemic, a team of UO faculty members have assembled a framework for helping the state best begin its recovery from the crisis.

To tackle an issue as broad as the state’s economy itself, the UO faculty members come from a broad spectrum of disciplines and have collaborated with ECONorthwest, a firm with deep UO ties, on a report that offers guidelines to government and economic development groups on how to quickly and effectively help jumpstart Oregon’s economy once it is safe to do so.

To access the full story, click here.

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3. April Jobs Report: It’s Bad Everywhere, but Rural Areas Lost a Smaller Proportion

Just about every corner of the country lost huge numbers of jobs between March and April of this year, but rural places fared far better than the nation’s largest cities.

April was the first full month of lockdowns and business closings due to the Covid-19 outbreak, so nearly every county suffered job losses. But the decline in employment diminished as one moved away from the centers of the nation’s largest cities, according to employment data just released by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The counties at the centers of the metropolitan areas of a million or more lost 15.1% of their jobs from March to April of this year.

To access the full story, click here.

4. ‘Now is the Time to Step Up’: Statements from Organizations Serving Rural America A long list of groups working on rural issues across the country released statements about protests prompted by the killing of African American citizens by police.

Those statements are below, along with photographs from vigils and demonstrations that have occurred in small cities and towns around the country. We found many of the photos via a Twitter thread by Ann Helen Petersen of BuzzFeed.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Toward a Racially Just Workplace

“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which [one] has overcome while trying to succeed.”

Booker T. Washington, the educator, author, activist, and presidential adviser, wrote those words more than a century ago as a way of encouraging his African-American compatriots — many of them recently emancipated from slavery — to persist in the fight for equal rights and economic opportunities. He was proud of what he and his peers had achieved. He surely believed there was satisfaction in struggling against and surmounting bad odds. And yet we must also assume that he, along with millions of other freedom fighters, wanted future generations of black Americans to suffer fewer hardships. He hoped today’s black leaders would find easier paths to success.

Has that dream been realized? Having spent the past 20 years conducting and reviewing research on African-Americans’ advancement, particularly in the workplace, and having collected our work and others’ into a book, we must report that the answer is partly yes but mostly no.

To access the full story, click here.

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6. The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.

The novel coronavirus has claimed about 99,000 American lives through May 19, according to reported statistics. Data about the race and ethnicity of the deceased is known for 89% of these deaths, which we have compiled from Washington, D.C. and the 40 states from which we have obtained data. While we have an incomplete picture of the toll of COVID-19, the existing data reveals deep inequities by race, most dramatically for Black Americans.

The latest overall COVID-19 mortality rate for Black Americans is 2.4 times as high as the rate for Whites and 2.2 times as high as the rate for Asians and Latinos.

To access the full story, click here.

7. How Small Family Forests Can Help Meet the Climate Challenge

Tim Leiby had wrapped up a fun but fruitless early-morning turkey hunt and was enjoying an old John Wayne flick when I arrived at Willow Lodge near Blain, Pennsylvania. A few flurries drifted down on this unseasonably cold May morning. After a quick scan of antlers mounted on virtually every wall of the cozy hunting lodge, we headed out for a socially distanced stroll through what Leiby calls “our little piece of heaven.”

This 95-acre woods in south-central Pennsylvania’s ridge-and-valley country is a hunting and hiking refuge co-owned by eight families. As much as he loves it, Leiby knows it could be even better. The forest is still recovering from heavy logging in the 1980s, and it’s full of invasive or unwanted plants — he points out striped maple, princess tree, and barberry — that do little for wildlife and keep desired hardwoods like oak and hickory from regenerating. “Barberry is a terrible invasive around here,” Leiby says. “It’s choking out the ground cover.”

Small family-owned forests like this one make up 38 percent of U.S. forests — together more than 1.5 times the area of Texas, and more than any other ownership type. While most owners want to do right by their land, they rarely have access to the needed expertise or resources.

That, however, may be changing. In April, the environmental nonprofits The Nature Conservancy (TNC), American Forest Foundation (AFF), and Vermont Land Trust announced two new programs, powered by a $10-million rocket boost from the tech giant Amazon, to funnel funds from carbon emitters to small landowners like Leiby eager to grow larger, healthier forests.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Poor Neighborhoods Are Only Getting Poorer

The latest maps of coronavirus cases in the U.S. confirm much of what we already know about the economics of location: People in poor neighborhoods have it worse. Health care isn’t as accessible, the ability to socially distance is less, and many residents fall into the role of essential workers, unable to work from home. What new research shows is that number of poor neighborhoods in metropolitan areas has actually doubled from 1980 — and most existing lowincome areas only fell deeper into poverty.

In two reports released by the Economic Innovation Group this month, researchers Kenan Fikri and August Benzow analyze poverty data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau between 1980 and 2018. The measure used by the researchers is the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), which has Page 3 of 4

been in place since President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty” in 1964. They acknowledge the metric has flaws. The poverty threshold is just one number — $26,200 in 2020— that stands for the “minimum level of resources adequate to meet basic needs,” according to the Census Bureau. That is to say the cost of what was considered a minimum in 1963 for a household of four, converted in today’s dollars.

To access the full story, click here.

9. RESOURCE – Planning Beyond Mass Incarceration

The policing and penal systems play an oversized role in shaping the built environment and budgets of cities, alongside the lives of urban residents. Law enforcement systems are also deeply inequitable with poor residents, and communities of color disproportionately harmed by the violences of the system. Planning’s contribution to the creation of durable spatial stratification in the built environment implicates planning in the class and race disparities in law enforcement systems. Planning research and theory has also supported this inequity by largely neglecting the relationships between policing and penal systems and planning. The articles in this volume address this neglect and employ a wide variety of core theories, methods, and methodologies from planning to engage with the relationships between planning and law enforcement. The articles are connected through attention to racial justice including analyzing moments where planning supported and produced injustice, and identifying opportunities to support greater equity, decarceration and even abolition where planning practice, education and research support the creation of systems of safety and care beyond mass incarceration.

To access this resource, click here.

10. RESOURCE – Planning for Equity Guide

APA's first-ever Planning for Equity Policy Guide identifies policy recommendations for planners to advocate for policies that support equity in all aspects of planning at local, state, and federal levels. The Planning for Equity Policy Guide provides specific, actionable policy guidance through an equity lens on cross-cutting topics and areas of planning.

To access this resource, click here.

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