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Building Blocks: Community Planning for Racial Justice (Room C202) Across the U.S., luxury housing developments are forcing people of color from their homes, robbing them of affordable housing, good jobs, and good schools, while their communities become dumping grounds for other people’s garbage. But there’s good news! Community planning can be an effective tool for organizers and advocates fighting gentrification and environmental racism. Come and find out new strategies to fight displacement and promote racial equity.
Moderator - Maya Wiley, Center for Social Inclusion
Joseph H. Neal, South Carolina State Representative
Collete Pichon-Battle, Moving Forward Gulf Coast
Jason Coburn, Columbia University
Notes:
Race structure in our communities is main element in of gentrification
--problems with property taxes
--racial stigma about crime
--history of segregation, low self-esteem in schools, community, and relationships
Planning can create potential realities
--Home-ownership, lower for Black
--54 percent of Blacks live far from job, 48 percent of Latinos, and a third of whites
Discriminatory, and exclusionary city planning
Urban Renewal, highway construction, redlining, → create a landscape of hazards
Health impacts of development:
--Jobs housing mismatch
--retail wages can not afford housing
--displacement disrupts healthy families, social ties
--homelessness
A Community Benefit Agreement, can help with over-planning process and community involvement
--a healthy development tool to assess master plans and in state, a potential model of success
Core organizing is key; tap into resources; use multi-prong strategies
Rep. Neal, South Carolina
--Govnt. Wants to take away land by Blacks who are direct descendants of plantation workers
Regentrification confine people to ghettos
--the land, defines who we are
--crime a product of economic distress
Places hit by Katrina with a tax base were able to rebuild unlike parts of New Orleans
Environmental justice is about people, not just clean water and a green area
--Environmental planning must include economic development of the community
Resources:
Overview of workshop and resources (PDF)
Presenter bios (PDF)
Racism in planning presentation - Jason Corburn (PDF)
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