Next City

Philly Reduced School-Based Arrests by 84% Over a Decade

Amanda NeMoyer and Naomi Goldstein | The Conversation — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Across the United States, arrest rates for young people under age 18 have been declining for decades. However, the proportion of youth arrests associated with school incidents has increased.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, K-12 schools referred nearly 230,000 students to law enforcement during the school year that began in 2017. These referrals and the 54,321 reported school-based arrests that same year were mostly for minor misbehavior like marijuana possession, as opposed to more serious offenses like bringing a gun to school.

School-based arrests are one part of the school-to-prison pipeline, through which students – especially Black and Latine students and those with disabilities – are pushed out of their schools and into the legal system.

Getting caught up in the legal system has been linked to negative health, social and academic outcomes, as well as increased risk for future arrest.

Given these negative consequences, public agencies in states like Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania have looked for ways to arrest fewer young people in schools. Philadelphia, in particular, has pioneered a successful effort to divert youth from the legal system.

Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program

In Philadelphia, police department leaders recognized that the city’s school district was its largest source of referrals for youth arrests. To address this issue, then-Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel developed and implemented a school-based, pre-arrest diversion initiative in partnership with the school district and the city’s department of human services. The program is called the Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program, and it officially launched in May 2014.

Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker named Bethel as her new police commissioner on Nov. 22, 2023.

Since the diversion program began, when police are called to schools in the city for offenses like marijuana possession or disorderly conduct, they cannot arrest the student involved if that student has no pending court case or a history of adjudication. In juvenile court, an adjudication is similar to a conviction in criminal court.

Instead of being arrested, the diverted student remains in school and school personnel decide how to respond to their behavior. For example, they might speak with the student, schedule a meeting with a parent or suspend the student.

A social worker from the city also contacts the student’s family to arrange a home visit, where they assess youth and family needs. Then, the social worker makes referrals to no-cost community-based services. The student and their family choose whether to attend.

Our team — the Juvenile Justice Research and Reform Lab at Drexel University — evaluated the effectiveness of the diversion program as independent researchers not affiliated with the police department or school district. We published four research articles describing various ways the diversion program affected students, schools and costs to the city.

Arrests dropped

In our evaluation of the diversion program’s first five years, we reported that the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia decreased by 84%: from nearly 1,600 in the school year beginning in 2013 to just 251 arrests in the school year beginning in 2018.

Since then, school district data indicates the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia has continued to decline — dropping to just 147 arrests in the school year that began in 2022. That’s a 91% reduction from the year before the program started.

We also investigated the number of serious behavioral incidents recorded in the school district in the program’s first five years. Those fell as well, suggesting that the diversion program effectively reduced school-based arrests without compromising school safety.

Additionally, data showed that city social workers successfully contacted the families of 74% of students diverted through the program during its first five years. Nearly 90% of these families accepted at least one referral to community-based programming, which includes services like academic support, job skill development and behavioral health counseling.

Fewer suspensions and expulsions

We compared data from 1,281 students diverted in the first three years of the school-based program to data from 531 similar students who were arrested in schools before the program began but who would have been eligible if the diversion program existed.

Diverted students were significantly less likely to be suspended, expelled or required to transfer to another school in the year following their school-based incident.

Long-term outcomes

To evaluate a longer follow-up period, we compared the 427 students diverted in the program’s first year to the group of 531 students arrested before the program began. Results showed arrested students were significantly more likely to be arrested again in the following five years.

Although we observed impacts on arrest outcomes, the diversion program did not appear to affect long-term educational outcomes. We looked at four years of school data and found no significant differences in suspension, dropout or on-time graduation between diverted and arrested students.

Finally, a cost-benefit analysis revealed that the program saves taxpayers millions of dollars.

Based on its success in Philadelphia, several other cities and counties across Pennsylvania have begun replicating the Police School Diversion Program. These efforts could further contribute to a nationwide movement to safely keep kids in their communities and out of the legal system.

This piece was originally published by The Conversation.

Amanda NeMoyer is an Assistant Research Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Drexel University. Naomi Goldstein is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Drexel University.

The Most Influential Role in Politics Isn’t the One You’re Thinking About

Anthony Flint — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

This is an excerpt from “Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems.” It is published here with permission from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

As the world confronted unprecedented challenges over the last several years, from the accelerating climate crisis to the all-consuming COVID pandemic, I had the opportunity to interview 20 mayors from around the globe. The conversations — newly collected in a recently published book, Mayor’s Desk — reveal different approaches to making cities more sustainable, equitable, and well-functioning. But what struck me most was that these innovative leaders, using ingenuity and grit to instigate and nurture change, are part of a cohort of earnest problem-solvers, whether at the helm of postindustrial cities struggling to attract new residents or rapidly growing tech hubs.

This new generation of leaders includes Randall Woodfin, who was the youngest mayor to take office in Birmingham, Alabama, in more than a century when he was elected in 2017 at age 36. Reelected in 2021, Woodfin has made revitalization of the city’s 99 neighborhoods his top priority, along with fostering a climate of economic opportunity and leveraging public-private partnerships.

In a city battered by population and manufacturing losses, Woodfin has directed COVID relief funding to critical needs like affordable housing, infrastructure, and blight removal, while securing additional federal funds to support the revitalization of three neighborhoods on the city’s west side. In this 2022 conversation, which is also available as a Land Matters podcast, Woodfin shared his insights on neighborhood revitalization, community investment, climate change, and universal income.

Anthony Flint: How do you think your vision for urban revitalization played into the large number of first-time voters who’ve turned out for you?

Randall Woodfin: My vision for urban revitalization — which, on the ground, I call neighborhood revitalization — played a significant role in not just the usual voters coming out to the polls to support me, but new voters as well. I think they chose me because I listen to them more than I talk. Many residents have felt, “Listen, I’ve had these problems next to my home, to the right or to the left of me, for years, and they’ve been ignored. My calls have gone unanswered. Services have not been rendered. I want a change.” I made neighborhood revitalization a priority because that’s the priority of the citizens I wanted to serve.

Flint: With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act bringing unparalleled amounts of funding to state and local governments, what are your plans to distribute that money efficiently and get the greatest leverage?

Woodfin: This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really supercharge infrastructure upgrades and investments we need to make in our city and community. This type of money probably hasn’t been on the ground since the New Deal. When you think about that, there’s an opportunity for the city of Birmingham’s citizens and communities to win.

We set up a unified command system to receive these funds. In one hand, in my left hand, the city of Birmingham is an entitlement city and we’ll receive direct funds. In my right hand, we have to be aggressive and go after competitive grants for shovel-ready projects.

With our Stimulus Command Center, we partner not only with our city council, but also with our transportation agency. We have an inland port, so we partner with Birmingham Port. We also partner with our airport and our water works department. All of these agencies are public agencies that happen to serve the same citizens I’m responsible for serving. For us, a collective approach to all these infrastructure resources is the best way. We have an opportunity with this funding not only to supercharge our economic identity but to make real investments in the infrastructure that our citizens use every day.

In July 2023, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, right, came to Birmingham to announce that the city would receive a $50 million neighborhood revitalization grant. Woodfin joined Fudge, U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, and Dontrelle Young-Foster, president and CEO of Birmingham Housing Authority, for the event. (Photo Courtesy City of Birmingham)

Flint: What in your view are the key elements of neighborhood revitalization and community investment that truly pay off for legacy cities?

Woodfin: This is how I explain everything that happens from a neighborhood revitalization standpoint: I first share the problem through a story. The city of Birmingham is fortunate to be made up of 23 communities in 99 neighborhoods. Consider going to a particular neighborhood in a particular block. You have a mother in a single-family household where she is the responsible breadwinner and owner. She has a child or grandchild that stays with her. She walks out onto her front porch. She looks to her right, and there’s an abandoned, dilapidated house that’s been there for years that needs to be torn down. She looks to her left, and there’s an empty lot next to her. When she walks out to that sidewalk, she’s afraid for her child or her grandchild to play or ride a bicycle on that sidewalk because it’s not bikeable. That street, when she pulls out from the driveway, hasn’t been paved in years. The neighborhood park she wants to walk her child or grandchild down to hasn’t had upgraded, adequate playground equipment in some time. She’s ready to walk her child or grandchild home because it’s getting dark, but the streetlights don’t work. Then she’s ready to feed her child or grandchild, but they live in a food desert. These are the things we are attempting to solve.

One is blight removal, getting rid of that dilapidated structure to the right of her. We need to go vertical with more single-family homes that are affordable and market rate, so we don’t have “snaggletooth” neighborhoods where you remove blight, but then have a house, empty lot, house, empty lot, empty lot.

That child — we have to invest in that sidewalk so they can play safely or just take a walk. We have to pave more streets. We have to have adequate playground equipment. We have to partner with our power company to get more LED lights in that neighborhood, so people feel safe. We have to invest in healthy food options so our citizens can have a better quality of life. These are the things related to neighborhood revitalization that I frame and address to make sure people want to live in these places.

Flint: What are your top priorities in addressing climate change? How does Birmingham feel the impacts of global warming, and what can be done about it?

Woodfin: Climate change is real. We’re not near the coast and so we don’t feel the impact right away that other cities do, like Mobile would in the state of Alabama. However, when certain weather events happen on the coast in Alabama, they do have an impact on the city of Birmingham. We also have the issue of tornadoes, which are increasing over the years; they affect a city like Birmingham that sits in a bowl in the valley.

The 35th Avenue Superfund site, shown in 1972, encompasses three neighborhoods in North Birmingham heavily polluted by coal, asphalt, and steel plants. The Environmental Protection Agency has remediated 650 properties to date, removing 90,000 tons of contaminated soil. (Photo by LeRoy Woodson / EPA/National Archives)

From a national standpoint, Birmingham has joined other cities as it relates to the Paris Agreement, but this conversation on climate change can’t be held in the isolation of a city. Unfortunately, the city of Birmingham doesn’t have home rule, and having the conversations with our governor — about the importance of the state of Alabama actually championing this issue and joining calls of, “We need to make more noise and be more intentional and aggressive about climate change”— has been a struggle.

Flint: What about your efforts to create safe, affordable housing, including a land bank?

Woodfin: I look at it as a toolbox. Within this toolbox, you have various tools to address housing. At the height of Birmingham’s population, in the late 60s [and] early 70s, there were about 340,000 residents. Now we’re down to 206,000 residents within our city limits. You can imagine the cost and burden that’s had on our housing stock. And when you add to that the homes that pass from one generation to the next and are not necessarily being taken care of, we’ve had a considerable amount of blight.

Like other cities across the nation, Birmingham has a land bank. This land bank was created prior to my administration, but we’ve attempted to make it more efficient. We’re driving that efficiency not just by looking toward those who can buy land in bulk, but also by empowering the next-door neighbor, or the neighborhood, or the church that’s on the ground within that neighborhood, to be able to participate in purchasing the lot next door. This helps to make sure, again, that we can get rid of these snaggletooth blocks or snaggletooth neighborhoods and go vertical with single-family homes.

We’re also acknowledging that in urban cores, it’s hard to get private developers to the table. With some of our ARPA funds, we’ve been setting aside money to offset some of these developer costs to support not only affordable, but market-rate housing within our city limits. We want to make sure our citizens have a seat at the table, and that they feel empowered — that there’s a path for them if they want to have a home.

Flint: Finally, tell us a little bit about your belief in guaranteed income, which has been offered to single mothers in a pilot program. You’ve joined several other mayors in this effort. How does that reflect your approach to governing this midsize postindustrial city?

Woodfin: The city of Birmingham is fortunate to be a part of a pilot program that offers guaranteed income for single-mother families in our city. This income is $375 a month over a 12-month period — no strings attached, no requirements on how they can spend the money. (Editor’s note: Since this interview took place, Embrace Mothers, the guaranteed income program, has ended. Learn more about the pilot outcomes here and here.)

Every city in this nation has its own story, its own character, its own set of unique challenges. At the same time, we all share similar fates and have similar issues. The city of Birmingham has its fair share of poverty. We don’t just have poverty, we have concentrated poverty, and guaranteed income is another tool within that toolbox for reducing poverty. Over 60% of Birmingham’s households are led by single women. That is not something I’m bragging about. That is a fundamental fact. A lot of these single mothers struggle.

I think we all would agree, no one can live off $375 a month. If you had this $375 additional funding in your pocket or your homes, would that help your household? Does that help keep food on the table? Does it help keep your utilities paid? Does it help keep clothing on your children’s backs and shoes on their feet? Does it help you get from point A to B to keep your job to provide for your child?

This is why I believe this guaranteed income pilot program will be helpful. We only have 110 slots, so it’s not necessarily the largest amount of people, but I can tell you over 7,000 households applied. The need is there for us to do every single thing we can to provide more opportunities for our families to be able to take care of their families.

Anthony Flint, author of Mayor's Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems, is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, contributing editor at Land Lines magazine, and host of the Land Matters podcast.

These Guerilla Bus Benches Are Spurring Berkeley to Step Up for Bus Riders

Maylin Tu — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:29:00 +0000

By day, Mingwei Samuel works as a software developer. Also by day — together with urbanist and writer Darrell Owens — he builds and installs benches at bus stops around Berkeley and Oakland that have no seating.

It’s a tale as old as social media: In November, Owens tweeted a photo of his 64-year-old neighbor sitting on the curb at a bus stop to draw attention to the lack of seating for bus riders.

Berkeley's official bus bench. (Photo by Mingwei Samuel)

“Which stop?” replied Samuel. “I can put a bench there.”

A month later, he had placed a wooden bench, built based on a template from the Public Bench Project, at the bus stop in downtown Berkeley. The response — from the city and from bench enthusiasts around the world — was immediate. On Dec. 17, he installed the bench; by Dec. 28, Berkeley had removed the bench and replaced it with an official metal one.

“I was expecting a positive reaction, but I wasn’t expecting how big the tweet would get and how much attention that would get on local news as well,” Samuel tells Next City.

More importantly, Owens’ neighbor – who has chronic pain and has trouble standing for long periods of time – doesn’t have to sit on the curb at the bus stop anymore. “What can I say, it blew me away,” he told Berkeleyside. “Now that I can have a place to sit, that’s awesome.”

After that first bench, Samuel and Owens teamed up to build and place even more benches. As of mid-January, more than six have been placed, with more in the works.

“No one’s really asked Darrell and I to stop,” says Samuel.

In fact, the City of Berkeley is mobilizing to bring more benches to more bus stops, according to former councilmember Kate Harrison.

“I think it’s lovely,” says Harrison, who resigned this week while calling out the city’s “broken” processes and failure to adequately addressing residents’ concerns. “I like this as a statement of public need. People are expressing what they really need to make riding transit effective.”

Why don’t more bus stops have shelters or benches?

As thrilling as guerilla bus benches can be, everyone Next City spoke to agreed that this is a job for the public sector. The city or transit agency should step up and provide seating at bus stops for all riders, they say.

“I think if we treated bus riding with the same sort of essential attitude as we treat car driving, then we’d definitely see better benches, better shelters at all the bus stops,” says Samuel.

Of the 512 bus stops in Berkeley, 50 of those have a bus shelter, meaning that 90% of stops have no shelter and no attached bench. It’s unclear if there is a separate list for stops with only a bench.

Riders using activists' guerrilla bus bench (Photo by Mingwei Samuel)

Historically, bus riders are not prioritized in the transportation system.

“Train riders tend to be higher income,” explains Mary Buchanan, research and policy manager at the TransitCenter foundation. “There tend to be more white train riders than white bus riders.”

Bus stops are often a snarl of bureaucratic dysfunction with multiple agencies and departments working within the public-right-of-way. While the transit agency might decide where bus stops are placed, they usually have no jurisdictional authority to place a shelter or bench on the sidewalk, which is controlled by the city. Predictably, this leads to a lot of blame-shifting.

“[C]ities in our service areas maintain authority over their streets and sidewalks, including the placement of outdoor furniture,” AC Transit spokesperson Robert Lyles told Next City in response to a question about the agency’s role in adding bus benches. The city of Berkeley did not respond to a request for an interview.

“Transit riders — they don’t know or care, nor should they, which entity is responsible for providing this resource,” says Buchanan.

It is possible for a transit agency to provide better amenities for bus riders. One example is TriMet in Portland, Oregon. To streamline the process of adding bus shelters, the agency took over shelter siting and installation within its service area, leveraging its knowledge of the entire system and cutting through red tape.

“Leave the bus riders out of it. Leave advocates out of it. Stop pointing fingers,” Buchanan says.

While there are no signs that AC Transit intends to take over the bus stops in Berkeley or any other city, emails provided to Next City by Councilmember Harrison show that the agency is collaborating with the city to determine where new bus benches should go.

(Photo by Mingwei Samuel)

The California city that’s doing bus benches right

In 2022, then-mayor of Emeryville John Bauters made bus bench history when he spearheaded an effort to rapidly install seating at all bus stops in the city. Seven months and 50 quick-build “Simme-Seats” later, every bus stop without seating got a bench.

Since then, Bauters says that transit advocates across California have sought to emulate the Emeryville model.

“I just always lead with safety and accessibility,” says Bauters of his messaging strategy. Now a city councilmember, he has taken an assertive and outspoken approach to improving streets and sidewalks. “If it’s not safe or accessible to everybody, it’s not equitable.”

One difference: The city installed benches without engaging in a lengthy community engagement process. In other cities, NIMBYism has often blocked basic amenities for transit riders like bus shelters and benches. The key, Bauters says, is to prioritize the city’s values — in this case, safety and equity — and to ask the right questions.

“When it comes to infrastructure, [cities] go out and they go, ‘Do you like this?’ And there’s a lot of people who unsurprisingly, say, ‘No, I don’t want the bike lane. No, I don’t want the bus bench in front of my house, a homeless person will sleep on it.’”

It’s also important for cities to limit the number of departments and entities involved in the process, adds Buchanan. She named the city of Los Angeles, notorious for requiring eight different agencies and a 16-step approval process to install a single bus shelter.

According to Harrison, there will be no appeal process for bus benches.

“We will look at need and where there’s a lot of riders, and that’s where the benches are gonna go.”

She’s planning to propose a bus bench pilot program similar to what the city of Hayward is doing, as there is no process currently.

Inspired by Emeryville, Hayward is piloting quick-build bus benches at ten stops to study the effects on rider behavior. A staff report puts the cost of one Simme-Seat at $2,000, estimating that it would cost an estimated $600,000 to put seats at all 300 bus stops with no bench.

(Photo by Mingwei Samuel)

“It seems kind of silly to me to waste all the time and money collecting data on something we know just needs to be done,” says Bauters.

Harrison hopes to use funds from a 50-cent ride-hailing sales tax that is set to generate an estimated $1 million in 2024. AC Transit already has a list of bus stops ranked by equity criteria and seven outstanding requests for benches.

In the meantime, guerilla bus benches will continue to pop up in the East Bay. And Samuel wants people to know that the benches have improved since the first one he placed in downtown Berkeley.

“We added cross bracing. We replaced the legs with treated wood so it should last longer… a lot of thought has gone into making these benches safe and durable for the real world, even though they aren’t official.”

This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Maylin Tu is Next City's Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Social Impact Design. A freelance reporter based in Los Angeles, she writes about transportation and public infrastructure (especially bus shelters and bathrooms), with bylines in the Guardian, KCET, Next City, LAist, LA Public Press and JoySauce. She graduated with a BA in English from William Jewell College in Missouri.

Share the Road

Alison Sant | Planetizen (Op-Ed) — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

(Photo by nextbike / Unsplash)

If you’ve taken a city bike or electric scooter for a spin, used a ride-hailing app, ridden public transit, or even walked on an open street, you’ve experienced “shared mobility.” Shared mobility maximizes the limited space on city streets by making the ways we get around more efficient, right-sized, on-demand, and—you guessed it—shared.

Sharing our roadways is a custom we have forgotten for nearly a century. Today, as much as 30 percent of the land area in American cities is dedicated to roads, parking, and other automobile infrastructure.

But car-centric mobility has come at a huge cost. Cars eroded our common experiences and our common spaces as vehicles began to dominate our streets. Although nearly 92 percent of U.S. households have at least one car, they’re a costly investment: around $12,000 a year. Even worse is the human toll: 46,000 people died on U.S. roads in 2021.

It hasn’t always been this way. City streets were once shared spaces for walking, biking, transit, and the occasional automobile. Into the 20th century, Americans resisted automotive dominance of their roadways and demanded safe streets. They had reason to: In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton observes that before the car, pedestrians ruled the streets—crossing them at will, using them as places to play and gather.

Today, shared mobility aims to recreate that reality.

Shared mobility offers to reallocate the geometry of the street. A single car lane can only move 1,600 people per hour; a two-way bike lane can transport 7,500 and a transit lane 25,000 people in the same square footage. On a sidewalk, 9,000 people can brush past each other in an hour. Each shared car removes as many as 15 private automobiles from the road. One parking spot can support a charging station for 8 shared bikes. Shared mobility frees up space for residents to take bicycles, scooters, or buses—practical choices, given that most trips taken in cities are less than three miles.

(Graphic courtesy of National Association of City Transportation Officials)

Benjamin De La Peña, CEO of the Shared Use Mobility Center, emphasizes the need to find the right tool for the right trip. To go a few blocks or a quarter mile, “you can walk,” he says. “If it’s longer than that, or you’re a little tired or you’re a little older, but you can still balance, then you can use bikes and scooters. Or, for an even longer trip you can use public transportation. All of those options should be available rather than assuming a full-time vehicle is useful for everything.”

U.S. cities can learn from the global south, where “abundant and frequent transportation options are provided in a decentralized way,” says De La Peña. This “popular transportation” includes rickshaws, jitneys, tuk-tuks, and matatus–fleets of two-, three-, and four-wheeled vehicles that whisk travelers to their destinations.

Ideally, shared mobility is also electrified. Much attention has gone to electrifying private cars as a climate solution, but electrifying shared ride-hailing vehicles can reduce approximately three times as much carbon. In 2021, shared bike and scooter trips offset about 54 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions by replacing car trips. And it’s cost-effective: $1 million spent on a charging network for 120 EVs could electrify 650 shared bikes and scooters. That’s why advocates argue that funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law should go to electrifying shared mobility.

Most importantly, shared mobility must be abundant. “To the person waiting for the bus, it doesn’t matter whether that’s an electric or diesel bus, if it only comes once an hour,” says De La Peña.

Electrified or not, shared mobility is growing. By 2030, consumer spending on shared mobility globally could reach $1 trillion. Uber alone is investing in peer-to-peer car-sharing systems in the U.S., fleets of electric rickshaws in Delhi, and bus-on-demand in Cairo.

“We have created a world, especially in wealthy countries, that is very, very car-centric,” says Shin-pei Tsay, Global Head of Cities and Sustainability at Uber. “The future necessarily needs to be much more people-centered, much more multimodal, and much more compact…. people need a basket of mobility options to choose from and know that if they were to leave their car at home, they could seamlessly get through a city.”

Tsay describes shared mobility as a solution for cities where public transit does not provide enough options. “Shared mobility can be nimble; it uses the infrastructure that is already there and fills in the gaps around the edges of an entire system.” Ride-hailing can serve as a kind of mobility insurance: “They miss the bus. They know they can take a ride hail, even if it’s really late at night.”

In the United States, mobility options are especially relevant as transit agencies are reducing service amid pandemic-era declines in ridership and a looming fiscal cliff. Patterns of work and commuting have shifted dramatically since 2020, drawing fewer people into central business districts. This makes fixed structures of transit, with their reliance on farebox revenue, badly suited to current mobility demands.

But not all modes of shared mobility are equal. Although ride-hailing reduces the need for parking, it has increased congestion in cities as drivers log more than 40 percent of their miles without passengers. Ride-hailing may also discourage some from walking, biking, and taking transit.

Even more dystopian are driverless vehicles. San Francisco is one of the first cities in the country to test Autonomous Vehicles. In August, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow Waymo and Cruise unlimited expansion of their AV fleets in San Francisco. By August, about 550 robotaxis roamed the city’s streets.

A study by Missy Cummings at George Mason University shows that AVs are less safe than human drivers. In fact, robotaxis are four to eight times more likely to be involved in non-fatal crashes than human-driven cars. Incident reports in San Francisco catalog stalled cars blocking buses and bike lanes, failing to yield to pedestrians, driving into oncoming traffic, or interfering with fire trucks and other emergency responders. Among the most disturbing was a hit-and-run with a human driver who crashed into a woman in a crosswalk, launching her into the path of a Cruise which ran her over and stalled on her leg. The company’s vehicles were suspended from San Francisco and California streets as a result, and by late October the cars were pulled from roadways nationwide.

Michael Smith, a member of the direct-action group Safe Street Rebel, says: “AVs are a step in the wrong direction.” With 20 pedestrians killed every day in 2022, he believes the solution is not more cars, but fewer of them. Smith describes the rollout of robotaxis in San Francisco. “All of a sudden, all these robot cars started appearing. … It’s not like anybody voted for them or there was any public discussion about them.” Several Safe Street Rebel members saw robotaxis paralyzed in intersections. To indicate that a car was stalled, they put traffic cones on the cars’ hoods. In this way, they discovered that “coning” these cars disables them. To reset the car, a company employee must remove the cone and reboot it. “We thought, ‘Hey, we should really highlight this, and in a funny way, in order to get attention to the situation,’” says Smith. It worked: “Coning” quickly became a meme.

Smith is no Luddite: he studied robotics and has decades of experience in the transportation sector developing app-based systems like NextBus and Swiftly. But Smith is convinced that AVs are not ready for the road. Moreover, AVs contribute to congestion, are inaccessible to wheelchair users, and could eliminate low-wage jobs for drivers, exacerbating economic disparities. Accordingly, Smith says the billions being spent to develop robotaxis could be put to better use by investing in public transit, walking, and biking.

Ultimately Smith believes that AV’s will not replace private automobiles, they will just add driverless ones. For now, the Safe Street Rebel coning campaign has helped San Franciscans feel they can make a difference in their own city, even one dominated by the tech industry. As Smith says, “Sometimes you just need to go and do something yourself and get it done.”

Today, we are at a metaphorical crossroads as autonomous vehicles and electric cars promise a new, improved “motordom.” In one direction is the status quo, electrified and roboticized. In the other is a future that draws inspiration from the past.

Tsay hopes cities extend the gains made during the pandemic, with slow and open streets offering an opportunity to “be more inclusive and deal with historic inequities.” She also sees it as an opportunity to do more to limit GHG emissions and create green streets to manage flooding and heat. “The public right of way can be part of an entire system of climate mitigation while being very people-centered.”

As De La Peña observes, “The pandemic laid bare all of our assumptions of how you structure society, and the built environment.” In a time of emergency, we needed flexibility. “The more chaotic things become, the more adaptive you need to become… And that includes the use of our streets.” He sees great potential in redirecting the trillions of dollars spent on cars to reimagine mobility as a utility—one that is invested in, regulated, and available whenever you need it.

In short, De La Peña says, “The status quo is not working.” The solution is simple: share.

This op-ed was originally published by Planetizen.

Alison Sant is a partner and co-founder of the urban design practice, the Studio for Urban Projects. She is the author of “From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities” (Island Press, 2022), a book that examines how American cities are mitigating and adapting to climate change while creating greater equity and livability.

The Weekly Wrap: Nation’s Largest Union Calls for a Ceasefire

Roshan Abraham — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

(Photo by Manny Becerra / Unsplash)

Welcome to The Weekly Wrap, our Friday round-up of stories that explain the problems oppressing people in cities and elevate the solutions bringing us closer to economic, environmental and social justice.

Nation’s Largest Labor Union Supports Ceasefire

The labor union SEIU, which represents close to 2 million nursing, healthcare and homecare workers across the United States and Canada, has called for a ceasefire in Gaza, In These Times reports.

“SEIU’s almost two million members believe that wherever violence, fear and hatred thrive, working people cannot,” Union President Mary Kay Henry said in a statement. The statement called for an immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages. Additionally, Mondoweiss reports that members of the National Education Association are asking the union to rescind its endorsement of President Joe Biden until he calls for a ceasefire.

California County With Wildfire Threats Sees Building Boom

Grist reports that many California residents are building homes in fire-prone areas as regions outside large cities absorb population growth. The article points to one development of 4,000 planned homes in Winchester, a city in Riverside County, and 7,500 more that are in different phases of development, many of which are in high fire severity zones.

The outlet notes many of the new subdivisions are “in a zone that the state of California has classified as one of the riskiest parts of the state,” where brush fires have hit in recent years. Unincorporated Riverside County added the fifth most new housing units out of all California municipalities in 2022, behind only Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland, and San Francisco, according to Grist.

Mayors Ask Congress To Extend Discounted Internet

More than 170 mayors from across the country asked Congress in an open letter to extend the Affordable Connectivity Plan, which subsidizes internet access for low-income families, Smart Cities Dives reports. The law was enacted as part of the 2021 infrastructure law, but its funding will run out this spring, at which point 23 million households could see increases in their internet costs. Households in the program get up to $30 a month cut from their internet costs. The Federal Communications Commission has said it will block further enrollment in the ACP on February 8 unless Congress approves more funding.

Virginia Bill Would Study Displacement of Black Residents By Universities

A Virginia lawmaker introduced a bill to study the displacement of Black Virginia residents when the state’s colleges and universities were built, VPM News reports. The bill would set up a 19-member commission consisting of elected officials and citizens to file annual reports until 2027. The state would then decide whether to compensate those Black property owners or their descendants.

The bill comes after an investigation by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism and ProPublica that found the state uprooted Black neighborhoods to build its universities and that policies from college presidents led to a decrease in Black students. Under one president at Christopher Newport University, for example, Black enrollment dropped from 17% to 7% over 26 years, according to the investigation.

Online Shopping Pollutes Black and Latino Neighborhoods

According to a new report from the Environmental Defense Fund, the boom in online shopping has led to disproportionate health impacts on poorer New York City neighborhoods. This is mainly because the large warehouses that store goods are based near poorer communities. “Goods transport is the fastest-growing driver of greenhouse gas emissions and the largest absolute contributor to emissions in many regions,” according to the report. Researchers found that New York City has 2,421 warehouses that are more than 50,000 square feet each and that Black and Latino communities live near warehouses at rates 59% and 48% higher than normal. Across the country, the story is similar: 15 million people live within a half mile of a warehouse, with nonwhite and low-income populations mostly impacted.

Also: Streetsblog reports that Albany is considering legislation that would require studies of emissions and the feasibility of low or no emission zones in certain congested areas.

Curated by Deonna Anderson

MORE NEWS

Here’s an assessment of California Forever, the possible tech billionaire-funded city in the state’s Solano County. It’s likely to be on the ballot in November. Urben Field Notes
Three Black-led organizations in Atlanta — Housing Justice League, The Guild and American Friends Service Committee’s Atlanta Economic Justice Program — are helping to lower rents for residents. Capital B Atlanta
The city of Calgary has invested millions in office-to-residential conversions. But how do the units rank on livability? The Tyee
WIC, the nutrition program for pregnant people and babies, is facing a budget shortfall. The 19th
The Los Angeles Housing Department, which mediates disputes between renters and landlords, has been displaced from office by its landlord. LA Public Press

RESOURCES

“The number of renter households spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities rose by 2 million in just three years to a record high of 22.4 million.” That’s according to America’s Rental Housing 2024, a new report released this week by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Access the report here.

EVENTS

Vanguard Alum Mallory Nezam will be presenting a lecture titled ‘Planners are Creative: Art, Culture and Imagination in Planning.’ At the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs on Wednesday, February 21 at 5:45 p.m. Pacific. Learn more and register here.
Next City is hosting transportation expert Jarrett Walker for a conversation about his new book, Human Transit, Revised Edition, and how to achieve successful public transit that will enrich any community. Feb. 21 at 12 p.m. Eastern. Register here!

This article is part of The Weekly Wrap, a newsletter rounding up stories that explain the problems oppressing people in cities and elevate the solutions bringing us closer to economic, environmental and social justice. Click here to subscribe to The Weekly Wrap newsletter.

Roshan Abraham is Next City's housing correspondent and a former Equitable Cities fellow. He is based in Queens. Follow him on Twitter at @roshantone.

A Virginia Church Plans to Convert Parking into Housing

Barry Greene, Jr — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

A church in Cumberland, Maryland. (Photo by Kelly / Pexels)

This story was published as part of our joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship For Reparations Narratives with Richmond’s VPM News.

As churches around the country move toward ways to redevelop their underused property for the public good, a Black-led suburban church just outside of Richmond, Virginia, has announced plans to redevelop one of its two locations into about 240 new housing units.

Sandston-based Village of Faith Ministries, led by senior pastor and elected official Michael Jones, is collaborating with a national homebuilder to help increase the housing stock in Metro Richmond.

The church is working to convert its Southside location — a 1.5-acre property in nearby Midlothian that includes a retail strip plus the church, itself converted from a former movie theater — into 192 apartments and 40 townhomes. The project will offer seven three-story buildings across the front section, with townhomes slated for the rear of the property in place of parking spaces.

Jones, who spent nearly two terms as part of Richmond’s City Council before being recently elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, says the church had originally purchased the property more than a decade ago as an investment for their congregation. Church leaders began looking for ways to reuse the property about five years ago, he says.

“We knew that, at some point in time, we would look to position ourselves to sell a portion of it, or all of it, to simply aid where our congregation is trying to go in the future,” Jones says. “We know that housing is a need.”

The 18-year-old ministry recently paid off its main property in Sandston. Redeveloping its Southside campus could help the church purchase a new building and pay it off within a few years, allowing church leaders to pass off a debt-free building to the next generation, says Jones.

While the church had been approached by several developers, ultimately the county’s building height restrictions impeded their plans.

“We tried to sell the back portion to do a housing project and assisted living facility for seniors, but to make the numbers work, the developer needed to go five or six stories high,” Jones says. “That was rejected by the county.”

According to Jones, Texas-based homebuilding giant D.R. Horton pitched a project that he thought would not only meet the church’s financial goals, but would also positively impact families within Chesterfield.

The development’s combination of apartments and townhomes will add much-needed housing diversity and density to the neighborhood. It will also offer future residents several amenities within walking distance: Situated beside and behind a grocery-anchored shopping center, the site strategically utilizes existing commercial surroundings, including banks, restaurants and a primary care office.

As faith-based communities around the U.S. seek to leverage their real estate to better serve their congregation and community’s needs, Jones says churches should be purchasing for the future, not the present – and they should use their resources to impact as many people as possible.

“Our churches should not be vacant Monday through through Saturday,” he says. With many U.S. congregations shrinking and aging, houses of worship are reactivating their property for the public good. Some are leasing their property out for commercial and retail use or developing community gardens, like the one Village of Faith has established at its Sandston campus.

But creating housing – especially affordable housing – has become a leading priority for churches.

Faith-based communities are increasingly finding unconventional solutions to help address the national housing crisis, from building tiny home villages to offering zero-interest loans. In response to so-called NIMBY resistance to new development (meaning “Not In My Backyard”), a growing faith-based YIGBY movement has responded with: “Yes, In God’s Backyard.”

The YIGBY movement says its mission involves “addressing the housing crisis by activating under-utilized faith community properties suitable for low-income housing.” Organized efforts are ramping up across the U.S., including its most recent win in California. In October, the YIGBY bill was signed into law granting religious institutions the authority to convert their land into housing, regardless of local zoning regulations.

Such conversions may soon become more common in Metro Richmond. Virginia’s version of California’s YIGBY bill, Faith in Housing for the Commonwealth, was heard by the state senate this week.

“Today in Virginia, too many of our neighbors and community members struggle to afford a place to call home,” the Commonwealth Housing Coalition said in a recent statement supporting the legislation. “We have an opportunity to help more faith based institutions help solve this problem by allowing them to build homes on their land.”

Barry Greene, Jr. is Next City's Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow For Reparations Narratives and a native of Southside Richmond, Virginia. Through his newsletter and moniker “density dad,” Greene is constantly working to spread awareness of the necessity to think of families with young children as well as seniors within the built environment. As a 2023 NACTO Transportation Justice Fellow, Barry aims to help Richmond return to its glory days of leading the industry in public transportation. You can catch him commuting by Brompton, bus or both in conjunction.

A Rare Success Story for Public Housing Conversion

Amy De La Hunt — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Wellston residents and government officials, including Wellston Mayor Nathaniel Griffin (center, wearing a gray suit) at the summer 2020 press conference announcing the selection of a developer for the project now called Wellington Family Homes. (Photo courtesy of Lisa D’Souza)

In the coming weeks, families will start to move back into rehabilitated public housing in Wellston, Missouri. For Mayor Nathaniel Griffin, their return offers both relief that a stressful phase that affected a quarter of the town’s residents is concluding and motivation to continue addressing the challenges Wellston still faces. “Until they left, I never knew there were so many HUD homes in our community,” Griffin says. “Our streets were just empty.”

After HUD advocated demolishing 201 public housing units in the small St. Louis suburb, unlikely collaborators spearheaded a yearslong effort to voluntarily convert them to private ownership instead. The result: A $44.5 million community reinvestment project that saved 186 of the homes. Griffin and other community leaders believe that although it was unique in many ways, the framework can ultimately be replicated in other struggling public housing projects. “We have a blueprint for how to change high-poverty communities from the ground up,” he says.

The Wellington Family Homes project includes 186 units on 65 separate parcels scattered throughout Wellston, totaling roughly a fifth of the town’s residences. The extensive renovations cover everything from new roofs and windows to cabinets, lighting, bathrooms, paint, flooring, and sidewalks. Work is expected to be completed by 2025.

Griffin, who once lived in public housing himself, recognizes why tenants had become accustomed to the units’ poorly maintained, deteriorating state over the years. Heating and air conditioning went out for months at a time after parts were stolen from the units; broken doors and windows weren’t repaired; routine maintenance was deferred for years. “When you live in these types of communities, you never know how you should be treated in quality housing,” he says.

Tenants also dealt with decades of ineffective and sometimes corrupt management by the Wellston Housing Authority. The problems ultimately led to HUD’s 2018 decision to close down the federally controlled authority — and to demolish the housing rather than returning it to local control, as it had previously done under similar circumstances in other cities. Wellston City Council approved the plan.

For Griffin, who had worked hard since being elected in 2014 to stabilize the formerly vibrant suburb after a decades-long decline, the situation felt crushing. He initially supported HUD’s plan too, but after it passed the council he realized how devastating the loss of population would be after the units were demolished and the city was left with property it couldn’t afford to redevelop. And after learning more about the condition of the homes, he came to believe most of them could be renovated.

“I was excited about getting the empty land, but then I realized I fell for fool’s gold. My chain was gonna turn silver and my neck was gonna turn green,” he says. “That’s when reality set in that I had to fight for this city.”

These homes are part of the Wellington Family Homes development's Halter Heights concept. (Photo by Amy De La Hunt)

After HUD announced the decision, a group of residents reached out to a trusted community anchor, the St. Augustine Wellston Center, to assist them in finding who might be able to help save their homes. “We were going to all the meetings [with HUD], thinking that they were gonna help us out financially and fix up some of the complexes out here in Wellston,” resident Flora Mix said in a 2020 interview. “Then all of a sudden we heard they were gonna close them down and everybody had to move. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not right… There should be something I can do.’”

At the behest of some of the center’s board members, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri assigned one of its newest attorneys, Lisa D’Souza, to accompany the head of its housing program to a town hall where community members were seeking more information about the impending demolition. Residents were unclear on what was happening and why. Many had signed paperwork effectively agreeing to be evicted without realizing what they had signed. The meeting was packed with many of the 500 public housing residents — who made up a quarter of Wellston’s population — as well as neighbors, local business owners and elected officials.

Legal Services of Eastern Missouri eventually signed on to represent the Wellston Tenant Association, an advocacy group formed in 2018 that granted automatic membership to all public housing residents in the city. D’Souza set about gathering information from HUD about the condition of the housing. She also formally asked HUD to halt its demolition plans and find an alternative solution.

Meanwhile, residents were also reaching out to Shannon Koenig, who worked for St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger. Koenig was a familiar face in Wellston thanks to her previous work in the county’s Office of Community Development administering HUD grants. She served as a point of contact between Stenger’s administration, the county’s housing authority and Wellston officials.

In 2018, St. Louis was still grappling with how to respond to Michael Brown’s 2014 death in Ferguson. Racial tension was high. Various reports had highlighted the stark differences between impoverished, majority-Black neighborhoods like Wellston and wealthy suburbs in adjacent ZIP codes.

These disparities weighed on Koenig. She was very aware of the “destruction of Black communities in St. Louis, and I was hearing from Mayor Griffin that demolishing the public housing was going to obliterate his city,” she says.

“I felt that they deserved to be heard and listened to — and to have an institution like county government act on their behalf for something they said they wanted, as opposed to government imposing their will on the housing authority and the city of Wellston.”

A series of fortunate events

D’Souza describes what happened next as a series of “fortunate happenstances.”

First, the longest-ever federal shutdown happened between December 2018 and January 2019. HUD couldn’t take any action — even communications were frozen — which gave the tenants time to organize.

Serendipitously, in preparation for a previous initiative that would have turned over the housing authority to local control, HUD had been training prospective new members for a tenant-led board. “The Wellston community had been learning what subsidized housing was and what it meant to have local control, which connected them around this topic,” D’Souza says.

In March, HUD transferred the units to the Housing Authority of St. Louis County, which voted two months later to approve the “demolition and disposition” plan. The prevailing opinion was that the renovations would be too costly — and, as D’Souza explains, the high price tag for repairs wasn’t HUD’s fault. “Congress had just not allocated money for subsidized housing commensurate with the need for the housing to be preserved.”

However, that’s when the second “fortunate happenstance” occurred. In May, Stenger, the St. Louis County executive, who also favored demolition, had to step down and was eventually convicted of corruption for pay-to-play schemes — including the sale of land in Wellston at less than market value to a campaign donor.

“The new county executive, Dr. Sam Page, was intent on showing he was unlike his predecessor and unlike the national administration,” D’Souza says. Moreover, he held a belief that “blighted neighborhoods became that way because of choices we made, not because of anything the people in those neighborhoods did or didn’t do.”

At the national level, HUD Secretary Ben Carson had publicly testified before a House committee that his agency wanted to help Wellston residents. Former U.S. Rep. Lacy Clay, whose Congressional district included Wellston, brokered a meeting where Carson and other HUD officials spoke with Griffin.

Griffin came away from what he recalls as a tension-filled conversation with an olive branch: 120 days to develop a plan to save the public housing units.

These row houses are part of the Wellington Family Homes development's Electric City Concept. (Photo by Amy De La Hunt)

Griffin, D’Souza and Koenig became key figures in a flurry of meetings with a core group of elected officials, affordable housing experts, and other stakeholders. They all described the meetings as historic due to the sense of unity toward a single common goal to do what was best for the residents of Wellston — and for a stated commitment to transparency, accountability, and responsibility in a municipality where corruption had been an ongoing challenge.

The hard work paid off. The group came up with a direction, laid out the details of financing and presented the plan, which HUD approved. To avoid any trace of the financial improprieties that plagued Wellston for decades, they chose a Louisiana-based developer, Knight Development, which had no local connections and was experienced in renovating scattered-site public housing.

An unusual voluntary conversion deal

The end result was a 4% Low-Income Housing Tax Credit project made possible through HUD’s Voluntary Conversion Program. “Voluntary conversion is not an often-used tool, but it is one way that public housing can be converted into privately owned affordable housing,” D’Souza explains. Fifteen of the units were determined to be structurally unsound and had to be demolished, but the remaining 186 were slated for thorough renovations.

When the complex deal finally closed in March 2023 — after years of delays due to the COVID pandemic, rising costs and other factors — the project was valued at $44,505,228.

Wellston Community Empowerment Corp., a nonprofit, was established in 2021 for the purpose of retaining local control over the development long term. The Housing Authority of St. Louis County, which owned and operated the public housing units for the families who remained, transferred the land to the WCEC before closing the tax credit deal. The housing authority retained a minute ownership stake, and assisted the developer and WCEC with transitioning the housing and getting to closing. Knight, the developer, is splitting a portion of its development fee with WCEC, and it will pay $4.6 million to the nonprofit over the coming years under a seller financing agreement.

Knight Development and the WCEC are the managing general partners; Knight oversees the day-to-day operations and shares construction oversight responsibilities with WCEC, while the tax credit syndicator CREA owns most of the development as a limited partner, a role typically played by passive investors. (Learn more about LIHTC ownership structures.)

The housing authority has committed 186 project-based vouchers to Wellington Family Homes, which means that for the next 20 years — and beyond if the contract is renewed — residents of the development will pay no more than 30 percent of their income on rent, and it will stay affordable to those with very low incomes. The project-based vouchers are funded through HUD. Residents who previously lived in the homes and meet income guidelines — like Mix and her fellow Wellston Tenant Association board members — will be given priority to move back in once renovations are complete. When construction began in 2023, fewer than two dozen households remained in the units; the rest had received tenant vouchers from the Housing Authority of St. Louis County that could be used on the private rental market until the situation in Wellington was resolved. After previous tenants who want to return have been accommodated, the remaining units will be opened up for other income-qualifying applicants.

D’Souza says the project-based vouchers, along with tax credits for the developer, made the financing possible. After 15 years, when the tax credit compliance period ends, the WCEC has the option to take full ownership of the housing. Griffin, who chairs its board, says the proceeds from the developer fee and the seller financing agreement with Knight Development, as well as any other income the nonprofit earns in the meantime, will be saved to ensure the nonprofit has the capacity to acquire and manage the housing down the road.

Mix’s family was among a wave who moved to Wellston during its heyday in 1968, and she returned to her childhood community in 2020, intending to peacefully retire. But the horrible conditions in the units prompted her to take a leadership role. “When we started this journey, we didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but we were determined,” Mix says. “It makes my heart proud to know I played a part in it.” She describes the deal as unbelievably positive for the community.

“We are pleased to see housing conditions improving for Wellston residents after a long history of struggle,” said HUD Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing Richard J. Monocchio. “Not only does it remedy issues from the past but allows residents and the community to look to the future with quality housing.”

Remarkably, throughout the entire process, the people and organizations involved in negotiations on the initial agreement remained engaged. In particular, Griffin credits Koenig and D’Souza with providing pivotal support. “We did some laughing and crying,” he recalls. Importantly, the three were able to share their perspectives and learn together even while under tremendous pressure. “We were able to walk each other’s journey by listening to each other.”

Koenig, who has headed the Housing Authority of St. Louis County since 2021, agrees. “It took blood, sweat and tears to get [to closing],” she says. “It’s wonderful to change the course of history, and I hope it continues on this trajectory for Wellston.” The community has already received several million dollars of investment in complementary development, economic, and blight removal activities to support the long-term success of this revitalization effort.

In October 2023, HUD officials visited Wellston to tour construction progress, meet key stakeholders and talk about future initiatives. The tone was so convivial that several officials, including Monocchio, ended up shooting hoops together with the mayor’s 4-year-old grandson.

“They saw that we have a village here to build something special,” Griffin says.

This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.

This article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our weekly Backyard newsletter.

Amy De La Hunt is a St. Louis-based writer and editor who covers community development, education, immigration and all things culinary for a wide range of publications. She shares snippets from her editorial life at @amy_in_words.

How D.C. Neighbors Closed a Dangerous Street in Front of an Elementary School

Mark Simon | Greater Greater Washington (Op-Ed) — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The Bancroft Safe Street after one month. Also see the team training and day one of operation. (Video by Rick Reinhard)

Bancroft Elementary in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Northwest D.C. is carving a new path to make the street in front of the school safe for students and closed to traffic during arrival and departure times. Here’s how we made this happen and what we learned. Every neighborhood school with dangerous streets out front should consider it.

A popular school both in the neighborhood and among Spanish language-dominant students from outside the neighborhood, enrollment has risen now to 772 from just 473 a decade ago. There’s something about the socioeconomic mix of the dual language school that parents and students love. They want to keep it as it has been – a gem. So when our call to action went out, both young parents and older community residents responded, donating hours of volunteer time to “man the barricades” and make the street safe.

A car-induced safety crisis outside the school

School had opened for the 2022 school year and Principal Jessica Morales shared that she was despondent. Car chaos on the street led to many near misses.

Drivers came off Piney Branch Parkway and parents looked for spots to drop off or pick up students in front of the school, squeezing student and parent pedestrians to the edges of the narrow sidewalk as they lined up each day outside our overcrowded school. Drivers honked, angry. Multiple times, cars and trucks came to a standstill facing each other, unable to move, while elementary students darted across the street. In a conversation, Principal Morales called it “an accident waiting to happen.”

A few parents and community member activists in the Mt. Pleasant Village, a neighborhood nonprofit founded by senior residents for social connectivity and to encourage aging in place, went into action.

Neighbors take action

Our goal: to get the street in front of the school closed off to all traffic for the 8:00 am hour of arrival and 3:00 pm hour of dismissal during the 2022-23 school year. We just wanted the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) to try it out. Although temporary and permanent street closure in front of schools has become commonplace in Europe, particularly in Paris, London, and cities in Italy and Scotland, and on this side of the Atlantic in Toronto and New York City, it had never been done in D.C.

When we requested help from DDOT and from D.C Public Schools (DCPS), the response was a lack of a sense of urgency. They hadn’t budgeted for it, weren’t staffed to do it, and were concerned it might not work. But a one-day DDOT pilot in October 2022 at eight schools, one in each of the eight wards, went smoothly.

We met with our Ward 1 D.C. Councilmember Brianne Nadeau. She was supportive and encouraged us to just do it. She contacted the then-DDOT Director, Everett Lott. But she warned us that the bureaucracies move slowly. Both she and Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George had sponsored “safe routes to school” acts on the D.C. Council, and so were supportive of our energy.

The president of the Mt. Pleasant Village, Bill Emmet, wrote a strong letter to Lott. We began a drumbeat about the crisis of lack of safety on Newton Street NW in front of Bancroft. DDOT assigned a staff member, Regina Arlotto, to work with us.

We set a revised goal: To be ready to begin right after spring break in April. We decided not to wait for permission to begin recruiting volunteers to staff the barriers that DDOT said it could provide on either end of the 1700 block of Newton Street.

Then the lawyers at DDOT and DCPS got involved. They insisted that a legal Memorandum of Agreement was needed to guarantee volunteers would be provided and other commitments by DCPS and DDOT. It soon became clear that the earliest we could hope to begin was September 2023. So we and the Bancroft administration started preparing parents and residents, presenting at PTO, community, and tenant association meetings, while DDOT distributed flyers to neighboring homes.

The Chancellor didn’t sign the boilerplate Memorandum of Agreement until the week before school opened. It required that we provide at least four volunteers to move barriers to close the street, two at each end. Fortunately, we parents and neighbors hadn’t waited for permission to organize our barricade teams. The Bancroft PTO and the Mt. Pleasant Village each recruited about half of the 35 volunteers who committed to staff the barricade one morning or afternoon per week for the entire year, and on day one of the 2023 school year we were ready to go.

What unfolded exceeded all our expectations.

Street closures begin

Since September, at around 8:30 to 8:45 each morning, it’s been like a reunion party. Parents and students approach the school, many arriving in small groups on foot. The street in front of the school becomes a safe socializing spot. The boy who just learned to ride a bike shows off. Halloween becomes a costume show-off moment. And each day brings a new level of recognition of the socioeconomic and cultural diversity and friendliness of our school.

We had all anticipated pushback from those parents and neighbors who drive. However, what we thought would be an inconvenience to drivers became the opposite. What had previously been a scramble each day for parent parking spots in front of the school became a process of everyone turning left at the block and those needing to drop off going around to the other side – a shift planned with Regina Arlotto, our contact at DDOT, and Latricia Morgan, our DDOT safety tech. Fewer options meant a more orderly process.

In the first week of closure, a couple of neighbors wanted the barricades moved to get their cars out, and a couple of parents sought special permission to have the barricades moved. But quickly every driver got the message that this permanent hour of closure was working. The exceptions and complaints disappeared.

From traffic chaos to a stronger community

In the end, DDOT stepped up and became – and continues to be – a great partner for our Safe Street experiment. They made improvements to the street signage, the curbs, the traffic assisting barricades. They provided four large but light barricades and fluorescent vests for our volunteers. They trained the volunteers before the first day of school in September and checked in on how it’s going several times during the fall. Latricia Morgan, the regular DDOT safety tech who directs traffic at Mt. Pleasant Street and Newton Street, is the biggest fan of the initiative and her enthusiasm is infectious.

But perhaps the best outcome of all was the sense of community this Safe Street initiative has achieved in our little neighborhood. The Mt. Pleasant Village recruited volunteers. Young parents who moved recently into the neighborhood for its excellent dual language school also recruited volunteers. Together we volunteer and learn from each other.

The potential conflict that we anticipated between parents who drive from other parts of the city and those able to walk never occurred. Instead, the alienating traffic chaos has been replaced with a visible, engaging, powerful sense of community.

It is a continuing effort to maintain the level of volunteers needed. The chart of regulars also lists alternate volunteers, ready in case a regular has a conflict. We communicate on WhatsApp groups (a side benefit is older residents learning to use WhatsApp!).

The success of the Bancroft Safe Street Initiative is so appreciated that everyone wants to step up and help. Just the sight of our volunteers brings “thanks” and big smiles from parents each morning and afternoon. We’re happy to share how to do it.

This op-ed was originally published by Greater Greater Washington.

Mark Simon has been a resident of DC’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood for 50 years, is a former high school teacher and teacher union president in Montgomery County, and is a former DCPS parent. Mark serves as the Community Representative on Bancroft Elementary School’s Local School Advisory Team (LSAT).

Can Theater Contribute To Equitable Housing?

Jan Cohen-Cruz (Op-Ed) — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

(Photo by Rich Ryan / Touchstone Theatre)

As much as we need tangible solutions to the growing housing crisis, we also need experiences that build empathy for the people suffering most. As a teacher and practitioner of community-based performance, I believe theater can be a vehicle for strengthening personal connections across economic circumstances. In fact, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Last year, Touchstone Theatre brought “The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe” to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. The project, devised by theatrical duo Mark Valdez and ashley sparks, also known as Mark-n-Sparks, explores how theater can contribute to local equitable housing efforts.

“Art and story have the power to build empathy and understanding,” the duo says. “Our process and performance place those most impacted proximate to those with the power to affect change, so that we can truly start to see one another.” It is that capacity to concretely connect people to one another that theater brings to the housing challenge.

Just hear how the mayor of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was moved by a performance of the play in his city: “We’ve never seen anything like our housing crisis now. The Bethlehem I grew up with, which always welcomed people, giving steelworkers and others an opportunity, does not exist anymore,” Mayor Willie Reynolds reflected in remarks after the performance.

“Now it can’t be just that we or our family are happy or our kids are set,” he said. “We must create that opportunity for others, through the hard work that everyone’s doing and through listening to the message and experiencing the interconnectedness like the people at Touchstone Theatre created in this show.”

Mark-n-Sparks’ experiment has unfolded in five different cities to date, each time combining the production of a scripted play about the housing crisis adapted to the host city with interactive events co-created with local housing activists.

At the heart of the experience is serious community engagement, both in the play and in auxiliary events. The show relies heavily on actors who also facilitate audience participation. Addressing spectators directly, they invite housing stories and playfully test their knowledge of housing terms and history. The performance isn’t about teaching but is rather a rigorous group discussion. They want the audience to engage emotionally and intellectually, and to use their imagination — for ultimately, we must imagine what more equitable housing would look like in order to attain it. The key to this project’s success, and what distinguishes it from both a typical play or a traditional community planning forum, are these multiple opportunities to interact.

To look at only what exists is dire. The housing crisis in Bethlehem and the Lehigh Valley mirrors much of the country. For every 100 “extremely” low-income families, only 30 housing units are affordable and available to Lehigh Valley residents. One-third of Lehigh Valley households are cost-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of gross income on housing costs. Lehigh Valley is among the most competitive small rental markets in the U.S. – the second-most, per one source. The risk of housing loss has only increased because of pandemic-related job loss.

Groundwork

The project in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley unfolded intermittently between September 2022 and September 2023. And it took a full cast of characters to make it happen.

First, local liaison Mary Wright from Touchstone Theatre — which has operated in Bethlehem for over 40 years — identified local housing activists from health, government, higher education, community-based organizations, veterans groups and churches to participate. Building this network was possible because she already knew so many locals through the theater’s shows, youth programs, community events and day-to-day encounters typical of small-town life.

(Photo by Graham Burrell)

Then, five to eight people at a time sat in a circle for 60 to 90 minutes, each sharing personal stories in response to Valdez’s prompts. The first: Where do you consider home and why? Each person responded through a three-minute story as the others listened, opening up to share feelings and facts, connecting the people in the circle to home and housing, their own needs and those of others. Participants experienced each other as individuals with yearnings about home, values regarding community, and ambivalence about change. While multiple points of view about housing are embedded in the stories, no one can argue with someone’s personal experience. This connected people with their own and each other’s personal experiences around housing.

Then Valdez linked individual experiences to collective history by directing participants with a new prompt: Tell the housing story of your community. Participants described Bethlehem as a place where diverse people came to build a life, notably immigrants to work in the dominant industry, Bethlehem Steel. Anna Smith, director of Community Action Development Bethlehem, described her economically modest neighborhood, where landlords who lived nearby could be reached when a tenant needed repairs. Now most landlords are corporate and based elsewhere, with no personal connections or local accountability, she explained. Given the market in student housing, landlords have options. The Steel has closed and Smith’s neighborhood has fast been gentrifying.

Valdez’s next prompt asked: Where do you see possibilities? Numerous advocates have remarked that “The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe” brings back a missing ingredient to housing efforts: imagination. Our thinking gets smaller when it is focused on policies that can get passed. Making a moment to envision is nourishing.

An interactive Community Future Forum

Then sparks partnered with three local housing professionals — Smith, executive director of the Lehigh Council of Churches Abby Goldfarb, and Bethlehem’s Deputy Director of Community Development Sara Satullo — to plan an auxiliary activity.

Touchstone liaison Mary Wright had noted that she knew of no effort to articulate a shared vision across organizations about the future of housing. That became the forum focus. Goldfarb added that getting away from the day-to-day details and dream was her favorite part of the process. Housing planning commissions do long-term projects, but they rely on experts, not broad public inclusion.

Over 70 people from across Lehigh Valley’s rural, suburban and urban geographies attended a six-hour forum, envisioning a 2050 where no one is unhoused. Through interactive and story-driven facilitation, sparks created space for locals to engage with each other and housing leaders. It was a striking contrast to the way experts speak at locals in community meetings. Attendees heard a range of viewpoints from the round table where eight people sat, the speakers shifting each time a new topic was introduced.

Civic engagement was also integrated into the event; Satullo gave a Zoning and Planning 101 presentation to help everyone understand the basics of how government approaches housing development. Participants created a human timeline based on how long they’ve lived in the Valley. They took deep breaths together. They discussed how equitable housing is supported or inhibited by values, beliefs, policies, and imagination. Money, they learned together, is only part of the solution.

The production

The show was performed by local actors four times, two weeks later. It’s a time-traveling, playful, immersive and interactive experience that draws on popular culture to communicate housing-related facts, fears, future fabulations and stories of Americans facing home insecurity.

Spectators who arrived weren’t just part of the audience: They received name tags and were called on by name throughout the experience. They immediately learned a line dance, taking them into their entire bodies and requiring them to let go of how they looked — and just engage. They moved around for the first half of the 90-minute show, shifting with the play’s action to any of the five surrounding stages. They saw each other as much as they saw the actors.

(Photo by Christopher Shorr)

The play’s basic framework is customized and shaped around the particulars of each place that hosts “The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe,” reflecting communities back to themselves. Each iteration features local success stories; in Lehigh Valley, a local Latina leader who was a single parent in a rental described taking a class about home ownership and subsequently buying a home. Each production includes life expectancy data that highlights the largest discrepancy between neighborhoods; in Bethlehem, that’s a 14-year gap.

The characters spoke and dressed like humans, but were zebra-esque with animal ears and movements — hands up, elbows bent in front of their chests. Valdez and sparks wanted the characters to be animals to immediately catapult spectators into an imaginative space. The main character was a glamorous cabaret singer with a fabulous black-and-white wardrobe. Tumultuous songs (e.g., “Surabaya Johnny,” “Mississippi Goddam”) integrated emotional expression with housing challenges.

Actor Bill George, Touchstone’s founder and a well-known local performer, spoke to the audience in character as an elder with dementia who was selling his home to pay for his care. Then George broke the theatrical frame and shared his own personal story: If he or his wife should ever face a major health problem, they’ll lose their beloved home and land. This fluidity between the imaginary and the real brought home the sobering outlook for housing for the elderly.

Audience participation took a particularly creative turn when spectators were divided into small groups to play a game. Through discussion and mutual agreement, they selected or created one marker – playfully called a “sprinkle” – to decorate a gameboard. Each marker represented different categories like values or policy; policies were based on current local legislative initiatives and the values were generated from the community forum. Each marker reflected the solutions or actions that each group decided to prioritize. The goal of the game was to have a conversation grounded in local policy actions and collectively imagine what it will take to create a “beautiful housing future.”

Lehigh River mural designed by Zoë Miller (Photo by Zoë Miller)

And beyond?

Theater characteristically creates images that reinforce dominant themes. At the forum, the image of the Lehigh River flowing throughout the valley was central. Participants wrote responses to various aspects of housing: obstacles were inscribed on paper shaped like sticks that impeding the river’s smooth flow, values were written on paper shaped like the rock along the banks, and so forth. This data was affixed to a large mural of the river.

Students in a community-based participatory research course at local Lehigh University took this data, analyzed it, and created a zine (still under construction) for community partners to use as a dialogue guide to talk about the future of housing. Their professor, Kate Jackson, is in conversation with local housing activists to disperse it at their events.

As student Grace Rosevear puts it, the project “taught me that in order to start creating solutions to problems like the housing crisis in the Lehigh Valley, it takes everyone to get involved, meaning not just interventions by researchers and policymakers, but involvement from other voices within the community who are actively living this reality.”

Touchstone’s Mary Wright is also in communication with Valdez and sparks about featuring the third piece in their housing trilogy – “Housewarming,” about the impact of climate migration on housing – in the theater’s 2025 festival.

A river is to a community as veins and arteries are to a human body, connecting and nourishing all parts. “The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe” contributes a tangible way to build community connectedness in the fight for more equitable housing. The immersive theater project brought locals an experience of one another as more than their public selves, touching their deeper waters such that no one will be all right until all have decent homes in this wide, wide world.

Jan Cohen-Cruz was an evaluator for New York City's Public Artists in Residence program. Her and Pam Korza’s research on artist-municipal partnerships is the basis for the website ‘municipal-artist.’ Jan writes extensively about socially engaged performance including books on street theater, August Boal, and most recently, with Rad Pereira, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965-2020, by Those Who Lived It.

The Tools That Will Bring the Value of Public Investment Back to the People

L. Lo Sontag (Op-Ed) — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

SoFi Stadium (Photo by London Bridges / Unsplash)

I was raised in Inglewood, California, a community that was vibrant and comfortable, despite being hypersegregated. Just south of Los Angeles, the city was home to one of the largest swaths of Black homeowners on the West Coast with little help from L.A. County.

Then Stanley Kroenke, the billionaire sports investor and real estate magnate who owns the L.A. Rams, came back to town.

Kroenke had come once before, when he attempted to build a Wal-Mart in our city. We successfully told him to leave. But in 2014, he came back with a vision for a massive football stadium, and he imported outsider “skinfolk” to champion him. And he won.

SOFI Stadium opened in 2020 and hosted both Beyonce and Taylor Swift’s world tours this summer. (And just a few minutes away, the 17,700-seat Intuit Dome is set to open later this year.) It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of stadiums and their public giveaways of valuable taxes; as an urbanist, I find football stadiums a wasteful use of resources in their current economic formation. While SOFI brags that it was entirely privately funded, that is – to put it politely – not exactly true. Its developers expect to recoup up to $100 million in local tax dollars in just the first five years of operation, the AP reports.

Most recently, the Federal Transit Administration has agreed to provide the City of Inglewood with a $1.6 billion capital grant for the Transit Connector, a monorail connecting the Metro K line to the SOFI Stadium. Los Angeles transportation infrastructure, whether it is a freeway or a train, is constructed and financed with tax dollars. All of its residents should benefit financially, as we all pay for the public infrastructure that keeps our economy moving. Instead, SoFi Stadium is America’s second-highest grossing venue, with more than $107 million in gross revenue as of 2022 — and Inglewood residents are being left behind.

When SOFI Stadium needed a system for people to get to the venue, $1.6 billion in funding seemingly magically appeared. But it’s not magic: It’s the people’s money. And there are mechanisms, however underutilized, to spend that money on the public rather than private developers. Land value capture gives us the financial tools to support commercial property owners in sharing their good fortune with the people who pay for their roads and trains.

Breaking the investment-displacement cycle

My neighborhood is being gentrified. Gentrification, we know, typically leads to improved infrastructure. But we also know the value of that infrastructure often cannot be accessed by the original residents of these formerly hypersegregated neighborhoods, often low-income and minority families. Statistics show historically-excluded, hypersegregated members of communities are disproportionately pushed out during gentrification.

In my neighborhood, the new infrastructure includes the reopening of the Morningside Park Library (my childhood library, which the community had been asking for over a decade to reopen), enhanced public facilities and transit upgrades (such as the monorail to SOFI Stadium). These investments enhance the quality of life of future residents, but they’re paid for by the tax dollars of the residents being pushed out.

Here’s how the situation typically plays out: A rich person notices a location in a historically excluded community. The private interest goes to the local government. Publicly funded infrastructure improves the area, which often involves resident removal through denial of jobs and increase of police presence, as well as publicly supported problematic finance vehicles like TIFs and later private investment. The profit goes almost entirely into the private investor’s pocket, as if they did it all alone.

That cycle can be broken at the beginning if we stop creating hypersegregated communities that are excluded from public infrastructure – and if we move toward creating inclusive communities that, from the outset, institute value capture on unearned profit by commercial entities, gained from publicly financed infrastructure.

If you want to make inclusive communities you must respect the public space, publicly funded projects — and the public. Building and maintaining roads, internet service, water and power are not minor investments. They are extensive public works projects. They are investments in our society that all workers pay for and commercial landlords should also support. As Winston Churchill once noted, “Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day — and all the while the landlord sits still.”

How to capture investment for the public

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stieglitz’s Henry George Theorem states, in simple terms, that land value increases with public infrastructure expenditure — and that since the netted income gained by the private commercial owner is unearned, it should be shared with the community.

Through land value capture, we can take a portion of the value that is gained through the public investment of infrastructure and give it to the people. That netted unearned income can be used to finance schools, affordable housing, or a slew of other democratically chosen initiatives. Capturing the land value will also help lessen the boom-and-bust cycles in land values and reduce sprawl, promoting more efficient land use by developers.

If, say, the SOFI Stadium hosts the FIFA World Cup in 2026, one group of economists has projected that “the estimated economic impact will be two-thirds greater than the $356 million delivered by Super Bowl LVI that was held at SoFi Stadium in 2022.”

That’s in no small part owing to the already publicly funded projects as well as projected future projects that are publicly funded, such as the $1.6 billion investment in the monorail. A portion of the revenue that SOFI Stadium and other commercial entities around the stadium would receive is unearned; it exists owing to the roads that are publicly financed, the internet that has been enhanced with public dollars, and the public transit that carries people there. That unearned revenue should be shared with L.A. County and the City of Inglewood.

To do so, there are a suite of policy options that have been proven to benefit the public, including land banking, land leasing and land readjustments. Another underappreciated instrument is linkage fees, an effective cost-recovering method. Like development impact fees, they are levied by local governments on new development, but they also consider indirect effects of the community associated with development. A local government can vote to impose these fees on developments to augment funds to offset the negative impacts of the development. Those fees can be set aside to fund affordable housing and analogous purposes: education, public space enhancement, like pedestrian infrastructure improvements, capital construction projects and more. In Somerville, Massachusetts, for example, commercial developments over 15,000 square feet are subject to a $2.93 per square foot linkage fee which funds Somerville’s Jobs Creation and Retention Trust.

Another powerful method is incentive zoning. Though zoning has traditionally been used as a practice to enthrall the working class, a community could use zoning with land value capture for the common good. Right next to Somerville, the city of Cambridge has a 100% Affordable Housing Overlay zone – an exemplary model for how to use planning and economic tools to bring about true social equity and change. With AHO, affordable housing is mixed-income and included in an entire area where development is occurring, so hypersegregated excluded communities don’t get reconstructed elsewhere. Developers can provide infrastructure or contribute funding.

UCLA Emeritus Professor Donald Shoup, who researches urban land economics and public finance, discusses the idea of land value capture through parking districts in his seminal book “The High Cost of Free Parking.” He suggests that municipalities remove the public subsidy of the private enterprise that is free parking — and that they should instead send 100% of the funding to street projects.

It’s not much different than the idea behind Business Improvement Districts, or BIDS. Given that the SOFI Stadium is being publicly subsidized by this billion-dollar grant, the surrounding community should benefit.

Capturing that value can serve as a source of revenue that finances housing for middle-income workers near public transit, increases public transit access, and makes riding a bicycle and walking reasonable options. This people’s budget can be targeted to benefit the working and middle class, whose low salaries make it impossible for them to live close to public transit or save a down payment for a home. New York City constructed Co-op City as a development for 50,000 low and middle-income workers; Los Angeles could make its dysfunctional density more rational with this style of development.

Land value capture can be managed with a revitalized California Redevelopment Agency (CRA) with a mission that is markedly different from the prior iteration. Its focus must be long-term and regional across Southern California, rather than hopscotching across political boundaries. “Fixing” so-called blight by inadvertently pushing out residents and driving sprawl owing to the support of bad policy that focuses on the wealthy and their private developments. A new CRA can be transparent and democratic, using the unearned profit of commercial entities to reimagine a Metro Los Angeles and SoCal region that focuses on its people and its functional boundaries.

Public infrastructure allows Los Angeles to live; Los Angeles stops working without its public infrastructure and public works. But for Los Angeles to be fair to its working class, it needs to figure out a way to share its wealth and wonder with all of Los Angeles.

Land value capture offers us a suite of tools through which we can limit sprawl and build a Metro Los Angeles where the wealth we all create is shared.

This article is part of The Bottom Line, a series exploring scalable solutions for problems related to affordability, inclusive economic growth and access to capital. Click here to subscribe to our Bottom Line newsletter.

L. Lo Sontag is the Inaugural Sadie T.M. Alexander Economics Fellow at The New School. She was the 2021-2022 Ethic and Equity Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. She is currently working on a documentary about sprawl.

How Philly Used Its Franchise Agreement With Comcast to Win Better Internet Access for All

Cinnamon Janzer — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

How is it that internet carriers like Spectrum came to dominate service in New York City, while others like Xfinity reign supreme in cities like Minneapolis? While residents are familiar with the major internet providers in their cities, they’re less familiar with the agreements that brought them there.

Across the country, internet access often reaches homes through the public right of way — the edges of privately owned land under which public lines are laid. Utility providers of everything from water to electricity and internet use these lines to deliver their services to customers.

To use these public lines, internet providers from Comcast to Cox enter franchise agreements with local governments. These agreements give internet companies access to thousands or millions of customers, depending on a city’s size, and lay out what they’ll provide in exchange, like free, publicly accessible hotspots.

And, as Philadelphia activists realized, these agreements can be negotiated to help close the digital divide for residents.

In 2013, the Philly-based Movement Alliance Project (MAP) got a tip from a friend of the organization who had taken a job with the city. This person explained that the franchise agreement between Comcast and the city, which is renewed every 15 years, was coming up for renewal.

MAP’s work centers around community organizing for strategic social change; the telecoms world was new to them and its then-policy director Hannah Sassaman. Yet they saw an opportunity to make a major difference in the lives of Philadelphians and they took it, launching what became CAP Comcast — which stands for Corporate Accountability Project.

By organizing communities and lobbying city leaders, two years later when the franchise agreement was renewed, the coalition saw major victories in the form of expanded affordable and free internet access, increased customer service improvements, and more protections for cable and internet workers.

“We had a particular interest in this for a few reasons,” explains Sassaman, who is currently the executive director of the People’s Tech Project, an initiative sponsored by MAP. “First, Comcast, a Fortune 50 company, is also headquartered here.”

Plus, she says, Philly was receiving what Sassaman says was “some of the most expensive [rates] for the lowest customer service in the city that, at the time, had the third worst broadband penetration of any city in the country — mostly low-income Black communities didn’t have access to broadband.”

After learning about the power and possibility within the city’s franchise agreement with the telecoms giant, MAP set out to do what it does best: leveraging its long-standing community relationships with everyone from taxi drivers and firefighters to community groups like LA21, a non-profit serving the West Philly small business community, a predominantly Black neighborhood designated as a federal Promise Zone.

“Folks were pretty clear that they hated their service,” Sassaman says, and that Comcast wasn’t paying their fair share of taxes thanks to a 10-year abatement from the city. The community conversations MAP had centered on the impact that technology has on the things Philadelphians care about.

“We weren’t out there selling this. We were saying that we know your kids need to get online, that you need access to the internet to get a job, that public access TV is one of the few things that actually tells our stories accountably and that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fight for it,” she says.

MAP and fellow community members showed up to city council meeting after city council meeting to air their grievances and detail their demands. “We told their stories to the city council members, to the mayor, and to the technology office and it made a massive difference,” Sassaman says.

So did lobbying the city to publicly release the findings of a third-party survey of Comcast’s performance, which garnered national news coverage. The city eventually shared the grim findings that detail lengthy service outages, average monthly bills of over $150, and “five times the regulatory-mandated number of busy signals when users try to contact customer service.”

While Sassaman says their efforts resulted in major improvements to the franchise agreements in the form of “something like 12 difference means-tested ways for folks to qualify for different services and [Comcast] offering internships for public school students,” they didn’t get everything they demanded, like the company supplying every child in the city with a computer.

Both Sassaman and Jackie Williams, LA21’s director of operations, say that looking back, they would have done things differently knowing what they know now.

“Making sure that city offices are funded as a part of the deal or having a permanent digital inclusion effort to make sure the city is empowered and tasked with observing the community-based elements of the agreement, we didn’t do that,” Sassaman says.

“I wish we had really focused on how we could help small businesses get internet access,” adds Williams, whose organization helped spread word of the CAP Comcast effort to its community members when it was underway. “We talked about it a little bit, but the concern was more with the digital divide” on the individual and community levels instead of the business dimension.

There’s more to it than just individual wins and losses, though. Sassaman sees it as a replicable model that cities and communities around the country can learn from and apply to their own franchise agreements.

“The thing that’s most important is that communities are clear about how technology aggravates and impacts their lives,” she says.

Cinnamon Janzer is a freelance journalist based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, U.S. News & World Report, Rewire.news, and more. She holds an MA in Social Design, with a specialization in intervention design, from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Cultural Anthropology and Fine Art from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

The Weekly Wrap: A Bipartisan Bill Could Bolster the Child Tax Credit

Roshan Abraham — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

(Photo by Fellipe Ditadi / Unsplash)

Welcome to The Weekly Wrap, our Friday round up of stories that explain the problems oppressing people in cities and elevate the solutions bringing us closer to economic, environmental and social justice.

A Bipartisan Boost to the Child Tax Credit Faces Tough Odds

On Tuesday, members of Congress announced a bill that would expand the child tax credit as well as business tax credits, according to The Hill. As of now, only $1,600 of the $2,000 annual child tax credit can be returned to parents as tax refunds. Under the bill, all $2,000 could be refunded to parents by 2025. Even if the bill were to pass both houses of Congress, it would still not be equivalent to boosts to the child tax credits that came with federal pandemic relief. Those changes boosted credits to $3,000 for children over 6 years old and $3,600 for children under six. The pandemic child tax credit expansion cut child poverty in half in 2021, but all those gains were lost when it expired in 2022.

New IRS Program Pulls In Half a Billion Dollars From Millionaires

A boost to the Internal Revenue Service in the Inflation Reduction Act has already yielded $520 million in 2023 alone, according to Truthout. The IRS contacted 1,600 millionaires who had over $250,000 in tax debt as part of a new initiative to go after millionaires who owe the government money. But this is just the tip of the iceberg: IRS officials estimate that wealthy people avoid paying $160 billion in taxes each year. Recouping that money will require not only a more robust IRS but also closing loopholes in the tax code.

A 2022 deal with Republicans who threatened to shut down the government resulted in Congress reducing the amount of money added for the IRS as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, from $80 billion to $60 billion over 10 years. A deal reached with Republicans last week would cut that funding faster than previously expected.

Report Finds Companies Now Avoid Bragging About Climate Accomplishments

In a twist, Grist reports that corporations are choosing not to report their own successes in environmental sustainability, according to a report released by a Switzerland-based climate consultancy. The change could be the result of recent European Union laws against misleading “greenwashing,” in which companies suggest they’re part of the solution to the climate crisis. Now companies are staying quiet in an effort to avoid accidentally telling a fib. The consultancy calls this “greenhushing.” The phenomenon was most pronounced at the most environmentally-friendly companies.

Public Transit Ridership Is 74% of Pre-Pandemic Numbers

The steep drop-off in ridership that began with the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders and continued as companies allowed remote work has upended the budgets of public transit systems across the country. Now, U.S. public transit ridership is inching closer to where it was before the pandemic. New Geography reports that in October 2023, the country’s public transit had 74% of the riders that it had in November 2019. In the New York City metro area, ridership was up to 78% of 2019 levels, in Los Angeles, it was 82%, and in San Diego 93%. In Cincinnati, an outlier, public transit ridership is 2% higher than it was in 2019. Amtrak, which is privately owned but run by a federally-appointed board of directors, gained 3.1% more riders in the same time period.

A Bipartisan Proposal For Affordable Housing Funding

In a City Limits op-ed, Rachel Fee, executive director of the New York Housing Conference, voiced support for the bipartisan Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act of 2023. The act would, among other things, change a requirement that recipients of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits fund at least 50% of their projects with private activity bonds in order to receive the full tax credit. The bill would reduce that to 25%, making it easier to apply. Fee estimates that reducing this cap would help finance 60,000 affordable homes in New York state alone.

Curated by Deonna Anderson

MORE NEWS

This bill would create a dedicated social housing agency in the District of Columbia and finance the construction of city-owned mixed-income affordable housing. DCist
Here are 6 trends that could shape US cities in 2024. Smart Cities Dive
In Miami, a new mental health center offers alternatives to incarceration. Building Design+Construction

RESOURCES & OPPORTUNITIES

PolicyLink recently published Grounding Justice: Toward Reparative Spatial Futures in Land and Housing, a framing paper for its work in the space. It also announced its inaugural class of Spatial Futures Fellows, 11 leaders from across the country who are working to advance reparative spatial justice in their communities. Learn more about what they’ll be doing in 2024 here.
The Honnold Foundation’s Core Fund supports solar energy initiatives worldwide, with a special focus on projects that are innovative, grassroots, and community-driven. The organization is accepting applications for the grant until February 2. Learn more here.

EVENTS

The Urban Institute is hosting a conversation about zoning reforms that improve access to housing for all. February 5 at 3:30 p.m. Eastern. Register here.
The Next City team is planning events throughout 2024. Be on the lookout for them on our event page here!

Roshan Abraham is Next City's housing correspondent and a former Equitable Cities fellow. He is based in Queens. Follow him on Twitter at @roshantone.

Puerto Rico Is Using Residents’ Home Batteries To Back Up Its Grid

Gabriela Aoun Angueira | Grist — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

People sit outside in Old San Juan during a blackout caused by a fire at a power station on June 10, 2021. (Photo via Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images via Grist)

Puerto Rico has begun using batteries connected to residents’ rooftop solar panels to provide backup power for its grid, helping prevent blackouts and offering an alternative to fossil fuel-burning peaker plants. It could be the first step toward building one of the largest virtual power plants of its kind.

The yearlong pilot, launched late last year by Puerto Rico’s utility Luma Energy, will pull power from up to 6,500 households during energy shortages. It is part of a transformational effort to modernize a deteriorating grid and transition to clean energy.

If the program is successful, it could lead to a much larger virtual power plant with the potential to make peaker plants, which run only when demand spikes, unnecessary. “It could be really significant,” said Ben Hertz-Shargel, a grid expert at the research firm Wood Mackenzie, adding that if it were expanded to include all home batteries on the island, it would be larger than any residential-storage virtual power plant in North America.

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, are networks of distributed energy resources — like home batteries, electric water heaters, or heat pumps — that can help the grid. They can manage energy demand, such as by adjusting smart thermostats during peak hours. Some can also supply power to the grid, by drawing from home or even EV batteries.

The Department of Energy is promoting them as a way of addressing the anticipated growth in energy demand in the coming years. Many states, including Vermont, California, and Texas, already have at least one type of VPP running, but around 20 states have none. Tripling the country’s VPP capacity by 2030 could supply 10 to 20 percent of its peak demand by then. Doing so could also save the U.S. as much as $10 billion annually by preventing the need to build new infrastructure or fire up peaker plants.

“Why spend money on more natural gas peaker plants when VPPs will save all Americans $10 billion per year, and give the money to people who have already paid for smart water heaters, batteries, and other smart devices?” Jigar Shah, head of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, told Grist.

Puerto Rico is uniquely equipped for a residential-storage VPP, because nearly all of its rooftop solar arrays include at least one battery. After Hurricane Maria wiped out power across the archipelago in 2017, rooftop-solar adoption rates soared, and so did demand for energy storage.

“Solar systems in Puerto Rico without batteries were not the product anymore,” Javier Rúa-Jovet, chief policy officer at the Puerto Rico Solar and Energy Storage Association told Grist. “It had to be with batteries because the driver was going to be resiliency.”

More than 100,000 households now have rooftop solar, and the archipelago is installing about 4,000 new systems per month. Growth should speed up even more with the help of new federal funding programs, including an effort underway by the Energy Department to spend $500 million on systems for vulnerable households.

All of those panels are already offsetting the archipelago’s power needs by about 600 megawatts — more than its largest coal-powered peaker power plant generates, according to Rúa-Jovet. Leveraging their batteries too could do even more. “It’s like Puerto Rico right now has an untapped, 500-megawatt clean-power peaker plant,” he said.

The pilot program, which hopes to enroll 6,500 customers, could provide about 26 megawatts of power. As of the end of December, nearly 2,000 households had enrolled, according to a Luma representative, representing 12.4 MW of capacity.

Luma has tapped the VPP three times so far, including once last week. The frequency is expected to ramp up in the summer when temperatures get hotter.

The program’s design addresses common fears about energy sharing and lingering mistrust of Luma and the government-run utility that preceded it. Customers can determine how much power they want to keep in their battery for their own reserve. They receive a notification before a dispatch occurs, and can opt-out of it if they want to keep their battery full.

There is also a financial benefit for them — Luma is paying solar providers $1.25 per kilowatt-hour, and the companies split the revenue with their customers. Sonnen is offering enrollees a flat annual rate of $750 with a possible year-end bonus depending on how much the batteries are dispatched. Sunrun is paying customers $1 per kWh contributed.

“That’s three times the value of net metering,” said Rúa-Jovet, referring to the compensation customers receive when they sell solar energy to the utility. “It can mean a free battery for someone in a 10-year window.”

Hector Ríos lives with his wife in a two-bedroom house in Cabo Rojo on the southwestern corner of Puerto Rico’s main island. Electricity prices are “out of control,” he said, sometimes over $300 a month, and filling his diesel generator during blackouts cost about $25 per day.

Last year, Ríos got a Sunrun rooftop solar system with a Tesla Powerwall battery. He enrolled in the energy-sharing pilot in November. “It sounds like a good idea, but I’ll be honest with you, I don’t fully understand the concept,” he told Grist. “An opportunity to make money by selling generation from your battery seemed too good to be true.”

Ríos was part of his first energy-sharing event in December. His battery was drawn down to about 20 percent, which was where he had set his minimum reserve. “It all seemed to go fine,” he said, but added that he might adjust how much power he keeps for himself. “I can change that at any point and would probably set it at 30 or 40, just to give myself a little more protection, and know that I could make it through the night if something happens.”

The value proposition for Puerto Ricans goes beyond savings on their energy bill, said Rúa-Jovet. “I think it goes to Puerto Rican pride. We’re doing something groundbreaking, and you’re preventing blackouts for everyone.”

Blake Richetta, the CEO of battery manufacturer Sonnen USA, told Grist what’s happening in Puerto Rico is “a great first step, but it is literally a first step because we can do so much more.”

In Germany, where Sonnen is based, more than 144,000 of its home batteries automatically dispatch daily to help stabilize and bolster the grid in real time. Richetta said that with all of the enthusiasm around revolutionizing its energy system, Puerto Rico is primed for a similarly advanced system.

“They could have the real blueprint for energy transition,” he said. “The energy IQ of Puerto Rico is going really high, and people are ready to make this leapfrog forward.”

This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

Gabriela Aoun Angueira is a climate solutions writer at Grist.

The Land Trust Helping India’s ‘Slum-Dwelling’ Women Design Climate-Resilient Homes

Sabah Gurmat — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 16:39:00 +0000

Residents of an informal settlement in India’s Ahmedabad city work on painting their home with sun-reflective white paint. (Photo courtesy Mahila Housing Trust)

Summer in India’s northwestern metropolis of Ahmedabad was never easy for Meenaben Soni. Soni, who lives with her family in a cramped two-bedroom house in the city’s informal settlement of Vishwasnagar, struggled to perform her work as a tailor as temperatures regularly hit upwards of 40 degrees Celsius – that’s 104 Fahrenheit – in the arid state of Gujarat for months at a time.

Given her tin-roofed home, she says, “(I) struggled to sit next to my sewing machine and lost out on work,” even with access to ceiling fans and electricity.

Things changed for the seamstress when Soni chanced upon the concept of “cool roofs” in 2016. Along with other women from her community, she had been invited to attend meetings organized by the Mahila Housing Trust (MHT), an Indian nonprofit that works with low-income women to build climate-resilient homes.

The MHT helped them replace their tin roofs with the organization’s modular roofing system, ModRoof. Produced out of packaging and agricultural waste, it allows for ease of installation, construction and replacement of individual panels.

The ModRoof is also waterproof and durable — and reusable, making it more cost-effective for residents. If residents wish to add additional floors to their home, the existing roof can be replaced on the new top floor; if they move to a different home, they can bring the roof with them.

Today, seven years since first raising a loan to invest in a ModRoof, the temperature of Soni’s home has decreased by nearly 6 degrees Celsius – about 11 degrees Fahrenheit. Where once she had to use three fans to maintain temperatures, today she uses only one ceiling fan. Her monthly electricity bills too, have halved from 1000-1,200 Indian rupees down to 500-600 Indian rupees (from about $12-14 USD down to $6-7).

“There was a risk of heat-stroke earlier,” Soni tells Next City. “My husband hasn’t been admitted to the hospital after we installed the ModRoof. Our children can also study in comfort. The neighborhood’s other children also come to our house to study. I can see our dreams slowly coming true.”

Meenaben Soni working on her sewing machine in her home in the Vishwasnagar settlement. (Photo courtesy Mahila Housing Trust)

Established in 1994, the Mahila Housing Trust was formed with the help of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a collective of over 2.5 million informal women workers and representatives across India. Envisioned as a project to improve housing and infrastructural conditions of lower-income women in the informal economy, its efforts are funded by partnerships, donations and grants. In addition to building climate-resilient and energy-efficient housing, its work today includes securing equitable access to water and sanitation, microlending initiatives, improving community infrastructure and participatory governance.

As temperatures rise across the world, India remains one of the biggest victims of heat stress. In 2022, a World Bank report claimed that from 2030, over 160 to 200 million people would risk being exposed to a lethal heatwave in India every year. Moreover, nearly 34 million Indians are likely to face job losses owing to the impact of heat stress on productivity. The same year, India was forced to ban its wheat exports thanks to a devastating heat wave affecting crop production and local prices.

The vast majority of the country’s poor and lower-income communities who live in crowded informal settlements face the biggest brunt of this heat stress, which is expected to worsen with climate change. Meanwhile, new research carried out by a group of scientists from 10 countries found that climate change made last year’s April heatwave in India 30 times more likely. In fact, nearly 17,000 people in the region have died due to heat stress between 1971 and 2019.

One such deadly heat wave occurred over a decade ago in the city of Ahmedabad, back in May 2010. Temperatures crossed 48 degrees Celsius, leaving more than 800 people dead. The scale of loss forced the city’s administration to adopt the first ‘Heat Action Plan’ in 2013, devising a warning system and collaborating with nonprofits like the MHT to build sustainable homes for the region’s most vulnerable communities.

Today, the MHT is working with lower-income groups across the country as they build climate-resilient homes for the poor and most disproportionately affected. This includes bringing in cost-efficient modular roofs, reflective white paint and insulated ceilings to lower-income homes. With more than 30,000 cool roofs or modular roofing systems installed across nine Indian states, the organization also collectivizes women residing in informal settlements by conducting training sessions and workshops on climate change and measures to tackle heat stress. In the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, MHT notified women in the city of Jodhpur about a heat wave through color-coded alerts displayed on street posters and sent to their cellphones.

Experimenting with sustainable alternatives

For women like Dipikaben Mallik, painting her roof with solar reflective white paint changed the temperature of her home by “nearly 4 or 5 degrees.” Priced at an affordable 300 rupees ($3.6 USD) per liter, MHT provided the paint to over 963 homes in informal settlements to cool their roofs. Mallik, who has so far painted only one of her rooms, says she wants to “paint the entire roof of the house with the solar reflective paint, and get most of its benefits.”

The paint contains specialized pigments with high solar reflecting and thermal emitting powers, making it a more climate-friendly alternative than normal paints on the external walls of houses.

Low-cost measures like this have helped these women to live and work in comfort. The ability to focus on their work without exertion thanks to heat stress has also led to an increase in productivity. Moreover, their children can study in the comfort of their homes. Residents in these settlements have also reported that their usage of fans and coolers has reduced which has, in turn, reduced their electricity bills.

A 2022 study by the University of New South Wales found that switching to ‘cool roofing’ could lower interior temperatures and reduce energy bills. “More than 250 cool roof technology projects around the world have succeeded in decreasing city average air temperatures by 2.5°C to 4°C,” researchers explained. “And there are new technologies in development that will be able to decrease by 5°C.”

Meanwhile, other studies looking into the impact of reflective, white-painted cool roofed schools in both India and Greece found that indoor temperatures dropped by 1.5-2 degrees Celsius and 1.3-2.3 degrees Celsius respectively. Though there’s no conclusive proof that these measures are the most effective in the long run, the response has so far been positive.

Lakshmiben sits outside her newly renovated shop-cum-home, with a bamboo door and bamboo roofing replacing the older structure. (Photo courtesy Mahila Housing Trust)

For 54-year-old Lakshmiben Gohil, living with her son, daughter-in-law and three grandkids in a cramped settlement in Ahmedabad’s Rajiv Nagar has never been easy. Gohil, who makes a living by running a small grocery shop from her home, struggled to sit at the shop counter for long hours. Her home-cum-shop’s tin sheet roof attracted high temperatures during summers, causing exhaustion. The Trust helped Lakshmiben’s family in constructing a bamboo roof at her house and installed a door made of bamboo fiber.

“More than a year ago, we got the bamboo roof installed,” says Lakshmiben. “Since then our home remains cooler even during the hot summer months. Rain-water leakage has also stopped.”

Bamboo roofs are another renewable solution to combat heat waves. Made of resin-coated bamboo mats which are pressed to form a strong lightweight structure, these roofs are locally sourced. One recent study claims that bamboo-based roofs could make homes as much as 7 degrees Celsius cooler than regular sheet-metal roofs, but even as more research emerges, women like Lakshmiben claim that this alternative has also curbed rainwater ingress from the roof.

“We have been using only one fan for the past one year, which has reduced our electricity bills,” she adds.

Meanwhile, as temperatures continue to soar, the organization intends to continue working on heat-resilient housing by installing at least 5,000 more cool roofs across India by 2026.

Today, they’re also fostering a culture towards sustainability amongst these women, training them in rainwater harvesting, composting techniques, and using fuel-efficient stoves to reduce reliance on firewood.

By focusing on women, the MHT believes that their work towards sustainability has a longer lasting effect, explains Bijal Brahmbhatt, the director of the organization.

“Long-drawn climate change stresses are painful and have an inter-generational effect. When we involve women and adolescent girls, we can make sure that the work we do will benefit generations,” Brahmbhatt says.

This article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our weekly Backyard newsletter.

Sabah Gurmat is an independent journalist based in New Delhi, India.

Building Hope in Philadelphia Neighborhoods Under Siege

Denise Clay-Murray | MindSite News — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Le’Yondo Dunn, the YouthBuild school’s CEO, talking with students in his office. (Photo courtesy YouthBuild Philly Charter School)

It’s mid-morning at the YouthBuild Philly Charter School in North Philadelphia, and the halls are bustling with students changing classes and talking animatedly with teachers about classwork, apprenticeship programs and their plans for the weekend.

Former student Jadera Wright walks past the school’s familiar painted logo and flyers for construction apprenticeship programs, AmeriCorps assignments and notices for licensing tests. Wright, a recent YouthBuild Philly graduate who is currently working in security, smiles as she greets former classmates and people like the school’s lead social worker, Samantha Cranford, or Miss Sam as she’s known to her students.

She came back to help introduce MindSite News to her former high school, where the school year had just started at the time of this interview.

When Wright came to YouthBuild Philly at 19, she was dealing with grief and trauma related to violence in her neighborhood. She had lost her father figure to gun violence, and a friend who was like family to her had just been sentenced to jail. She had stopped going to her regular high school, but through YouthBuild Philly, she found a place where she could finish her education – and felt comfortable asking for help.

“My life just got crazy, and I was having nightmares for three years straight every night, back-to-back,” she said of her struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I’m the type of person that when I’m going through stuff, I distance myself. So, when I first came here, I wasn’t really trying to talk to nobody. I was comfortable. But I wasn’t comfortable enough to start talking. Then I got in touch with Miss Sam. Whatever I was going through, I could talk to Miss Sam. She made me feel comfortable and the other staff made me feel comfortable to the point where I could talk to them about anything.”

Gun violence has profoundly affected Wright, as it has many Philadelphians. The topic takes center stage on the city’s nightly news, but its impact on the psyche of children is discussed far less frequently.

A study published in JAMA Pediatrics 2021 by the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found that living within a few blocks of a shooting in the city’s neighborhoods led to an increase in mental health-related visits to the emergency room.

The researchers first looked at shooting data from the Philadelphia police department and found that, in an area of the city that spanned 12 ZIP codes, 2,929 people were injured or killed in a shooting over the five years from 2014 through 2018. That adds up to a shooting every three days.

Then, CHOP researchers looked at the number of emergency room visits for psychiatric emergencies, including PTSD, major depression, anxiety and opioid abuse among children aged 0 to 19 in those 12 zip codes during a 10-month period spanning 2020 and 2021.

That data, pulled from hospital records, was cross-referenced with the Police Department shooting data to see how many of these children lived within a quarter-mile (4 to 53 blocks) or an eighth-mile (2 to 3 blocks) of a shooting.

Children living within two or three blocks of a shooting were 40% more likely to go to the emergency room for a mental health-related emergency in the first week after a shooting and 86% more likely within two weeks compared with a control group of children who went to the ER prior to a shooting. Almost 90% of the children in the data set were Black.

Findings like these contributed to the creation of the Community Expansion grant passed by the City Council in fiscal year 2021. The $13.5 million program provided money to grassroots organizations doing trauma-informed outreach.

In order to qualify for the money, organizations had to have operating budgets below $15 million and a track record of working in the areas most affected by gun violence. Preference was given to organizations serving Black and Brown men and boys aged 16-34, said Erica Atwood, senior director of the city’s Office of Strategy for Criminal Justice and Public Safety.

When the city set up the Community Expansion Grants, it gave top priority to investing in community-based organizations with a track record of working in neighborhoods that had long suffered from gun violence, Atwood said.

“We wanted to focus on those that were doing mentorship and had trauma supports and we wanted to provide safe havens to young people that were at a higher risk of violence in our communities,” she said.

Youth Build Philly was one of 31 organizations that received money through the program. Le’Yondo Dunn, the school’s CEO, said the school serves precisely the students who are most affected by a wide range of economic disadvantages.

The school is “at the epicenter” of marginalization, he said in an interview with MindSite News, His students come from “neighborhoods where you cannot find access to fresh and healthy foods because grocery stores don’t exist.” Those neighborhoods are also places where many people haven’t completed high school and where there are high rates of drug use and of violent crime.

“Our students primarily come to us from those areas,” Dunn added. “And we know that when young people are disengaged, and they’re disconnected from school, they are more likely to either be perpetrators or victims of gun violence.”

In addition to vocational and academic studies, intensive job training on site, and community service, all six of the school’s tracks also include counseling, said Cranford, the school’s lead social worker.

The counseling is provided in a way that makes it accessible to all of the students, no matter what their comfort level, Cranford said. If a student doesn’t feel comfortable going to the counselor assigned to their track, they can be connected to someone else. And if they don’t feel comfortable asking for the help they need among their peers, they can request services through a self-referral QR code that’s posted in various spaces around the school, she said.

In addition to individual counseling, students are offered group counseling that includes a focus on trauma and works to help students with conflict resolution, stress management and anger management. There are also de-escalation rooms that give students dealing with anger a place to decompress, Dunn said.

In the end, it’s about making sure that anything that might be a barrier between a student and their education is addressed and removed, Cranford said.

One of the tenets of trauma-informed care at the school, she said, is approaching aggression or inexplicable behavior not by asking “What’s wrong with you?” but “What’s happened to you?”

“Every behavior is rooted in something,” Cranford said. “It would be really simple for us to say, ‘Oh, you’re acting out in class, let’s suspend you.’ And the reality is, until you ask that person what was going on that morning or what happened last night, you’re never going to know. Youth Build really takes advantage of that.”

The effort is appreciated by students past and present.

Saiyonn Thomas is a living legacy of YouthBuild.

His mother was a graduate of the program, as were two of his aunts, his godmother and his uncle, he said. When his mother’s mentor at the school heard that Thomas was about to become a father and drop out of school, he suggested he come to YouthBuild instead. He graduated from the school’s culinary program and is currently looking for a new job.

In April 2023, while he was still a student there, Thomas was shot in the hip while at a McDonalds near his home. The incident made him apprehensive about going out in his neighborhood, he said.

“I used to love being outside,” he said. “Now, nine times out of 10, if I’m not at work or with my son, I’m at home.”

While he was in the hospital, Thomas’s teachers and other YouthBuild staff members made sure that he knew he wasn’t alone.

“They sent text messages and emails,” he said. “Teachers came to the house to make sure that I was okay and to bring me whatever I needed. I came back to school early because they were so loving and caring. They treat you how you want to be treated.”

“They don’t want to let you quit,” he concluded.

This story was reported and first published by MindSite News, a nonprofit news outlet that reports on mental health, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative. Reporting was supported by the van Ameringen Foundation.

Denise Clay-Murray is a regular contributor to MindSite News and an editor/reporter for the Philadelphia Sunday Sun. Her work also appears in a variety of publications, including Philadelphia Magazine, Love Now Media, the Keystone, and Momentum by Medium. She co-hosts the City Council roundup program “Hall Monitor” and has been a fill-in host on WURD radio. Her awards include a Mid-Atlantic Emmy for producing a 2003 Philadelphia mayoral debate with CN8-TV. She served as president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists from 2003-2005.

Richmond Wants To Offer Benefits to City Workers in Domestic Partnerships

Barry Greene, Jr — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Photo courtesy Richmond Region Tourism / RVA Image Library / Out RVA

This story was published as part of our joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship For Reparations Narratives with Richmond’s VPM News.

In Richmond, Virginia, a new measure extending benefits to city employees’ domestic partners received unanimous approval during the first council meeting of the year.

Narissa Rahaman, executive director of statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Equality Virginia, says that offering and extending domestic partner benefits to all employees gives the city an opportunity to attract and retain a talented workforce while also embracing inclusivity.

“Even after nationwide marriage equality, it’s still important that municipalities and employers respect the diverse family forms that exist here in Richmond. We want to make sure that includes expanding domestic partner benefits to make sure that includes all families, no matter what that looks like,” Rahaman says. “For many LGBTQ couples, some of us choose to get married and some of us choose to not, and that has really no implication on the commitment we make with our spouses or partners.”

The Human Rights Campaign is the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying organization in the United States with roughly 3 million members. HRC annually produces the Municipality Equality Index, a report that provides a review of local laws and policies that affect LGBTQ+ people and their families. In its last assessment, Richmond fell shy of a perfect score, having points deducted for the lack of city services offered to LGBTQ+ residents — and for not offering full benefits to city employees in domestic partnerships.

The proposal was patroned by City Council President Kristen Nye, newly elected to the role. “It’s really commendable to see that Council President Nye is planning to make these changes, to really just recognize the diversity of our community and how we show our commitment to the ones we love,” Rahaman says.

A domestic partnership is when two individuals, whether of the same or opposite sex, reside together and share a domestic life without being married or united through a civil union. Despite the increased prevalence of domestic partnerships as an alternative to marriage, Virginia ceased to acknowledge domestic partnerships or civil unions following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. The state also does not recognize common-law marriage, which is when two individuals cohabit and consider themselves married without undergoing formal marriage procedures.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are nearly 9 million cohabitating couples nationwide. Currently, California; Maine; Nevada; Oregon; Washington state; and Washington, D.C., legally recognize domestic partnerships. Additionally, Hawaii offers reciprocal beneficiary relationships, an arrangement akin to domestic partnerships.

In 2006, Virginia passed a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, despite then-Gov. Tim Kaine’s objections. The Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges nullified Virginia’s ban in 2015, mandating that all states issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Last year, now-U.S. Sen. Kaine and Sen. Mark Warner urged the General Assembly to repeal the earlier ban. The pair said they aimed to protect marriage equality by highlighting that the state ban poses a threat to the rights of same-sex couples to marry in Virginia if the Obergefell ruling is ever overturned.

Later, during the 2023 General Assembly session, a modified proposal to repeal the amendment faced opposition in the Republican-controlled House of Delegates. Despite efforts by supporters to secure bipartisan votes by removing any explicit endorsement of LGBTQ+ equality, the measure failed. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, LGBTQ+ advocates have voiced concerns regarding the stability of marriage equality.

“We saw last year what happened with Roe v. Wade, and the Supreme Court weighing in on overturning that. There is a real palpable fear among LGBTQ couples, could that happen to marriage equality?” Rahaman says. “One reason why we want to repeal the ban that exists in our current constitution is solely to make sure that we’re affirming the marriages and the relationships that exist in every corner of Virginia.”

A Plan To Build Missing Middle Housing That Actually Works: Lessons from Vancouver to Auckland

Aysha Khan — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Since moving to Vancouver last year, I’ve become an avid viewer of local urbanism journalist Uytae Lee’s video series, About Here. In fact, I’ve become convinced he’s one of the greatest urbanist communicators out there, breaking down complex and non-sexy topics like the industrial land crisis, heritage conservation districts and effective bus signage into approachable, interesting and actionable videos that are still somehow nuanced and thoughtful.

In this video, part of a partnership with Small Housing, About Here breaks down the problem with most missing middle housing policy. More and more North American cities and states have scored victories to legalize and even incentivize middle housing – rowhomes, multiplexes, laneway houses and more – to densify single-family neighborhoods. But for all the fanfare, it turns out these moves haven’t resulted in many new developments.

“That doesn’t mean that missing middle housing is a lost cause,” he explains. “It’s just a matter of allowing these developments to be large enough to justify the price of land without burdening it down with too many other fees and requirements. If you get this formula right, you might end up with something like Auckland, New Zealand.”

Watch the video to learn more about how cities can adopt a proven and more effective model to help curb the housing crisis through missing middle housing.

Follow Lee and his videos on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

Aysha Khan is the managing editor at Next City.

America’s Biggest Universal Basic Mobility Experiment Is Taking Place in L.A.

Maylin Tu — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

(Photo by Manki Kim / Unsplash)

In May, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and LA Metro launched the biggest Universal Basic Mobility experiment ever attempted in the U.S., giving 1,000 South Los Angeles residents a “mobility wallet” — a debit card with $150 per month to spend on transportation.

The catch? Funds can be used to take the bus, ride the train, rent a shared e-scooter, take micro-transit, rent a car-share, take an Uber or Lyft, or even purchase an e-bike — but they can’t be spent on the cost of owning or operating a car.

The year-long pilot, ending in April, has the dual goals of increasing mobility for low-income residents and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s a radical experiment based on a simple idea: People know what they need. Give them the money to go where they want to go, and they will improve the quality of their lives.

It’s the biggest experiment in Universal Basic Mobility in the U.S., but it is not the first.

“Mobility wallets are catching like wildfire,” says Mollie D’Agostino, executive director of the new Mobility Science, Automation, and Inclusion Center at UC Davis. In California alone, Oakland, Bakersfield and Stockton (the site of a famous Universal Basic Income experiment that spurred an explosion of guaranteed income pilots and policies) have all implemented UBM pilots, as has Pittsburgh.

How L.A.’s mobility wallet pilot works

The pilot is targeted at low-income residents of South L.A. who don’t have access to a car. According to LA Metro, 80% of participants are enrolled in a financial assistance program, over 60% regularly take public transportation, 40% live in a non-car household and 50% don’t have a driver’s license.

For the first phase, in addition to online enrollment, Metro partnered with 20 community-based organizations to get the word out about the program.

“[With] eight of those, we went on to do actual in-person workshops with them at their community centers, at their churches — literally, a few of the workshops, we were actually signing up people in the pews,” says Avital Shavit, senior director at LA Metro.

Participants receive a debit card that is loaded with $150 every month for a full year. Funds that are not spent are rolled over to the following month. Although the card functions like a normal debit card, the money can only be spent on pre-approved transportation expenses — for example, loading an LA Metro TAP card, buying an Amtrak ticket or paying for a taxi.

Participants have also used the wallet in creative and resourceful ways, including saving up the monthly funds to purchase an e-bike and buying a subscription to an e-scooter platform.

The mobility wallet is part of a larger Universal Basic Mobility pilot, funded by almost $18 million from the California Air Resources Board and the City of Los Angeles. In addition to the mobility wallet, the pilot includes an e-bike lending library, an expansion of BlueLA, an electric vehicle car-share program and the installation of electric vehicle charging stations, among other initiatives.

There are currently three phases to the mobility wallet pilot, with future phases dependent on funding. The first phase is funded by $2.5 million from CARB and $2 million from the city. In the second phase, starting summer 2024 and funded by $4 million from the Southern California Association of Governments, the program will open up to 1,000 new South L.A. participants as well as 1,600 participants recruited from L.A. County as a whole. Phase three is already in the works: Metro is working with Caltrans to secure federal funding to continue the pilot.

Not all agencies have access to the same resources or funding, but LA Metro is hoping to expand access to these types of programs to other regions and agencies.

“We’re actually working with Caltrans to look at how we might do a statewide procurement for prepaid cards as a mobility wallet, so that it’s not just LA Metro or the city of L.A., but any agency across the state — that maybe anywhere in the nation could have the same purchasing power for these cards,” says Shavit.

Data for the first six months of L.A.'s universal basic mobility pilot. (Chart via LA Metro)

How the pilot is going

According to data from the first six months of the program, the majority of estimated trips taken have been on public transportation (40,087 trips out of 67,379). The majority of the funds (about $500,000) have gone to ride-hailing or taxi services like Uber and Lyft, for about 26,000 trips at an average cost of $20.

“Initially, we were surprised that there was so much use of Uber and Lyft,” says Caroline Rodier, a researcher at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. “But on the other hand, it makes sense, because there is pretty good transit service in that area.”

According to Metro, participants are taking the bus or train during normal commute times and taking ride-hailing services early in the morning or late at night, indicating that participants are using options like Uber and Lyft when transit options are less available. Another concern is safety — access to ride-hailing might provide a safer option.

After 37-year-old South L.A. resident Rebeca Hernández’s car broke down, she could no longer pick up her mother who works at a laundromat late into the night.

“The MW [mobility wallet] card has been very helpful to us. I use it to take the bus or train to DTLA and the supermarket,” says Hernández in an interview with Metro’s blog, The Source. “My mother uses it to take a taxi and come back home safely.”

The program has not been without its growing pains. Giving people money costs money.

“You would think it would be easy to give people a mobility wallet, but it’s not,” says Rodier. “There are a lot of administrative costs. And when you’re distributing that kind of benefit, you want to really keep your administrative costs low.”

One of the challenges is making sure that each eligible vendor can accept the mobility wallet as a form of payment. The card uses merchant codes on the backend to control which businesses and agencies are eligible.

Getting around without a car can still be challenging in car-dominated Los Angeles, even in transit-rich areas like South L.A. For any Mobility as a Service (MAAS) program to work, cities need a reliable transportation network that doesn’t require driving a privately-owned vehicle.

What does the future hold?

The mobility wallet pilot, which Shavit says might be supported throughout L.A. County to prepare for hosting the 2028 Olympics, isn’t just about increasing transportation equity. It’s also about how people pay for transit.

Currently, LA Metro customers must use either cash or purchase a TAP card to ride the bus or train. But what if they could use a credit or debit card?

“This next year, our current large fare payment contract is actually expiring,” says Shavit. “We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to look at a new fare system contract.”

Another long-term possibility is integrating different programs for income-qualified users onto a single card, so that people don’t need to juggle multiple cards to access transportation, health, food or other benefits. There is a nationwide push to make electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards open loop, or chip-and-pin, versus the current closed loop system.

But integrating federal, state and local programs is a broader challenge — a “golden goose,” according to Shavit — that Metro doesn’t have the power to implement.

As cities strive to shift people from cars to greener modes of transportation, making it easy and convenient to pay for a wide range of transportation options is a necessary hurdle. D’Agostino envisions that in the future, people could choose to purchase a mobility wallet instead of a parking pass or a highway pass.

“The wayfinding aspect of Mobility As A Service is pretty figured out,” she says. “But that payment integration piece [is] a real tricky part.”

This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Weekly Wrap: Philly Drops Bachelor’s Degree Requirement for City Jobs

Roshan Abraham — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

(Photo by Thomas Hawk / CC BY-NC 2.0)

Philadelphia Mayor Moves to Eliminate Bachelor’s Degree Requirement For City Jobs

Philadelphia’s newly-elected Mayor Cherelle L. Parker signed an executive order that will eventually remove the requirement of a bachelor’s degree for certain city jobs, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. As less than 34% of Philadelphia’s adult population has a bachelor’s degree, the move is intended to diversify the city’s workforce and is part of the mayor’s 100-Day Action Plan. Mayor Parker’s order directs city agencies to examine which jobs should have such requirements removed although a commission will have to approve some of the changes.

30-Day and 60-Day Shelter Limits for NYC’s Migrants Create Chaos

As new rules in New York City impose a 30-day shelter limit for single adult migrants and a 60-day limit for families, Gothamist reports that it’s already led to single adults sleeping in cars outside one of the city’s intake shelters. About 40 migrant families with children were also kicked out of shelters on Tuesday, and under the new guidelines, they’ll have to reapply for a place to sleep at the city’s intake shelter. It means that children will have to be shuffled around to different school districts every few months. Critics, including former city council speaker Christine Quinn, have said that the purpose of the rule is intimidation. Several recent migrants from Venezuela who were kicked out of shelter told Gothamist they are relocating to Philadelphia. New York City has 66,000 migrants in its shelter system, the Adams administration said.

Also…in her State of the State speech, Governor Kathy Hochul made no mention of Good Cause eviction protections that advocates have been pushing for years, City Limits reports. But she did announce a new unit to combat discrimination against Section 8 voucher holders, a rampant problem across the country.

Biden Administration Funds Clean Buses and EV Charging Network

The Biden administration announced $1 billion in grants to replace diesel-fueled school buses with more environmentally-friendly alternatives, including electric buses, the Washington Post reports. The funds will go toward the purchase of 2,700 cleaner buses in 280 school districts serving 7 million children. The money comes from $5 billion allocated in the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act for cleaner buses. Of the recipients, 85% will be in low-income, tribal, and rural school districts. An internal watchdog group within the Environmental Protection Agency cautioned some districts may not immediately have the infrastructure to accommodate a fleet of electric buses.

The Biden administration has also awarded $623 million for 47 electric vehicle charging projects, the AP reports. The money will fund a total of 7,500 new charging ports around the nation.

Successful Washington Cap and Trade Law Faces Ballot Showdown

A 2021 cap-and-trade law in Washington state could be eliminated through a ballot referendum that voters may face in November, Grist reports. Since its implementation, the law has generated over $2 billion for climate initiatives and will limit greenhouse emissions. The state still needs to verify signatures for the ballot petition, but the referendum, organized by a hedge fund manager, would also ban any future cap-and-trade laws from being enacted. The 2021 Climate Commitment Act brought many benefits, including free light transit rides for children in Seattle, but some voters are angry that the price of gas has skyrocketed to an average of $4.91 per gallon in June 2023, the highest price in the country at the time.

Black Farmers Face Land Theft Have Trouble Getting Redress from Government

Capital B News interviewed attorney and advocate Jillian Hishaw, who helps represent Black farmers who had their land seized or stolen. Hishaw is also helping applicants with the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, created by the Inflation Reduction Act to compensate farmers for discrimination faced while applying for USDA loans. But Hishaw says that the program is flawed because it requires farmers to sign away their right to appeal and due process in the event their application is denied. “I want people to understand that, when you sign this, just read the fine print. There’s no guarantee that you’re gonna get money, and if you do get money, there’s no set amount,” Hishaw told Capital B.

Curated by Aysha Khan

MORE NEWS

San Francisco has become the largest U.S. city to back a ceasefire in Gaza. Truthout
New York City manipulated public data and hid the realities of homelessness crisis for years, investigation finds. New York Times
Low-income households could benefit most from clean energy upgrades but often don’t have access to financing or government incentives. New York Times
As ‘mansion taxes’ catch on in U.S. cities, Los Angeles offers lessons. CityLab
Outdoor workers are at risk even on “cooler” summer days, study finds. Smart Cities Dive
Why is decades of progress in cars’ fuel efficiency ending? The Washington Post

RESOURCES & OPPORTUNITIES

The Partnership for Southern Equity launched Just Communities today. The initiative will amplify the organization’s efforts to promote a “Just Growth” urban development model throughout the American South and create a new national footprint for urban development. Learn more about it here.
AARP just launched its 2024 AARP Community Challenge grant program to fund quick-action projects to help communities become more livable by improving public places, transportation, housing, digital connections, and more. Local nonprofits and governments are invited to apply here.
The CIHR Healthy Cities Research Initiative is accepting applications for a workshop in Copenhagen on implementing urban policy for healty cities. Applications for the Fall 2024 workshop close Feb. 1; apply here.

EVENTS

The Right to Counsel Coalition in New York State will host its 2024 State of Evictions Forum on Jan. 17 in Albany. The forum will also be livestreamed on social media. Learn more here.
The Canada Housing and Renewal Association is holding a webinar on housing affordability and missing middle housing on Jan. 24. Register here.
The Next City team is planning events throughout 2024. Be on the lookout for them on our event page here!

Roshan Abraham is Next City's housing correspondent and a former Equitable Cities fellow. He is based in Queens. Follow him on Twitter at @roshantone.

Rethinking Streets to Drive Commerce and Connection – Not Just Cars

Bill Vitek (Op-Ed) — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Rendering of Denver's iconic 16th Street. (Image courtesy of Dig Studio)

In the heart of American cities big and small, the way we view our streets is changing. Long recognized globally for our absolute embrace of car culture, Americans are rethinking what streets can be and how they can function.

The concept of closing streets gained major traction during the pandemic, first out of necessity and then as a result of the success – both economic and social – of embracing more pedestrian-friendly urban thoroughfares.

There’s an overwhelming desire in the U.S. for more livable and walkable cities: A 2022 survey by the American Planning Association found that 83% of Americans support the creation of more pedestrian malls in their communities. A recent study by the Urban Land Institute adds another layer to this narrative, revealing that 70% of real estate developers believe pedestrian malls will be more important in the future than they are today.

These findings suggest that pedestrian malls are not just a passing trend but are becoming increasingly vital elements in shaping the urban landscape. But, as I’ve found in my work as an urban designer and landscape architect, a successful pedestrian mall requires far more than curb-less sidewalks or limited vehicle traffic. To take these streets beyond mere thoroughfares and truly realize their benefits, cities, landscape architects, planners, urban designers, and private industry must work together to realize the substantial social, economic, and environmental possibilities.

Streets as neighborhood activity hubs

Salt Lake City’s forthcoming Main Street pedestrian mall project has deep roots in visionary planning and community aspirations spanning decades. The idea of making Main Street a “pedestrian paradise” originates from Salt Lake City’s 1962 Second Century Plan, which called for a vibrant, pedestrian-centric Main Street, an ethos this latest project embraces along with modern urban preferences for walkable cities.

By also adopting the principles of the city’s 2016 Downtown Plan and responding to widespread support for pedestrian-friendly spaces, the planners, architects and designers at Dig Studio – where I work – are creating a “Together on Main” plan for the four-block stretch in the heart of downtown. The streetscape will support a rapidly expanding residential population by putting pedestrians and activity first.

The most important first step was understanding what the many diverse stakeholder groups need and want from the space – from local businesses, residents and visitors to the transit authority and the city government. Feedback from on-site workshops and surveys, both in person and online, is guiding the design of a functional hybrid street that seamlessly integrates transit, businesses and – most importantly – activation.

Armed with this input, Main Street is poised to become more than a means of getting from A to B. It will become a massive, inclusive and vibrant public living room, addressing the needs of Salt Lake City’s growing population while preserving vital transit operations.

Creating moments of joy

Part of turning these streets into destinations is creating the infrastructure to support ‘moments of joy’ for gatherings of all sizes. One example is the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado. Lauded as Boulder’s “crown jewel,” this four-block pedestrian mall is a beloved destination for local families, college students and tourists situated in the heart of downtown. Its whimsical and child-friendly environment, public art installations, pop-up street performances and stunning views of Boulder’s Flatirons provide a one-of-a-kind space where community and economy thrive.

In Denver, a massive redevelopment project of the iconic I.M. Pei-designed 16th Street Mall is currently underway. Similar to Salt Lake City, the goal is to create places that encourage people to gather, interact and connect. With that in mind, we’re working to transform the 1.25-mile length of the mall into a multi-faceted community hub, with programmed and unprogrammed activators – like cleverly designed seating areas that invite you to pause and people-watch as you shop or on your lunch hour. Safety and ADA-compliant accessibility are also key priorities to ensure a diverse range of age groups and visitors feel welcome.

The key is to determine what will make the space fun and interesting on a day-to-day basis while ensuring flexibility for events. That means the ability to accommodate crowds ranging from 200 to 2,000 to 200,000, by even fully shutting down 16th Street for large events like parades. To that end, the project is prioritizing infrastructure updates, working closely with engineers to ensure the revitalization of both physical and programming aspects — and creating a vibrant and adaptable urban space that resonates with the community.

Addressing environmental injustices

Pedestrian malls not only yield social and economic benefits, but they can also play a pivotal role in addressing environmental, health and equity issues within cities. Beyond the natural benefits to air quality that come with reducing automobile traffic, the design of these spaces can contribute to improved water quality, decreasing runoff from streets and parking lots and filtering stormwater before it runs through to the next basin. Consider the Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, which has reported a reduction of stormwater runoff by up to 60%.

These malls additionally aid in creating more green space in notoriously hot, paved urban areas like the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas, which has increased its natural shade cover by up to 20%. As part of the redesign, Denver’s 16th Street Mall project will now feature America’s largest installation of trees with a suspended paving system. The design will mitigate the urban heat island effect through an expanded urban tree forest and advance the city’s efforts to enhance its below-average urban tree canopy.

Spurring private development

Pedestrian malls aren’t altruistic – they can be a powerful tool to boost economic activity. Take Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. With over 200 shops and restaurants, it has become a hotspot both locally and as a major tourist attraction in L.A., generating over $1 billion in economic activity annually, according to a study by the City of Santa Monica. Likewise, construction is underway along San Francisco’s Market Street with the aim of revitalizing the city’s most prominent thoroughfare.

We followed a similar approach on Vermijo Avenue in Colorado Springs, transforming a former underutilized warehouse district into a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly streetscape with the goal of spurring private investment and anchoring the recently-built U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum. The curbless, festival-style street provides flexibility for a multitude of uses – from street fairs to farmers markets – and seamlessly connects downtown Colorado Springs with the museum.

Sustaining success

Perhaps the most important takeaway as cities look to meet the growing public demand for more pedestrian-oriented spaces is the importance of thoughtful and continuous activation strategies. A 2022 study by the Downtown Management Network underscores the critical role of robust activation programs, revealing that malls with such programs experience higher foot traffic, increased retail sales and more favorable attitudes from visitors.

This is not a case of “if you build it, they will come.” Sustained activation, encompassing diverse programming and events are the key to long-term success – from events like concerts and farmers markets, to the installation of public art pieces, to the creation of communal gathering spaces. Retail programming and community engagement further contribute to the vitality of these spaces.

Prioritizing thoughtful, ongoing activation helps cities ensure the immediate success of their pedestrian malls and cultivate thriving urban environments that endure.

In the evolving landscape of American cities, shared streets are proving to be catalysts for economic growth, social connectivity, and environmental sustainability. Embracing the potential of pedestrian malls is an opportunity to create enduring, vibrant spaces that enhance the quality of life for all people.

Bill Vitek is a Principal at Dig Studio, an award-winning landscape architecture, urban planning and design firm with offices in Denver and Phoenix. Bill has over three decades of experience envisioning healthy, sustainable places in cities across the US, with a focus on crafting memorable, well-designed environments that add lasting value for communities.

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