Commonweal Fair Growth Project
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Program Description
Commonweal's Fair Growth Project seeks to broaden public awareness about environmental issues. Through books, magazine articles, conferences, and lectures, the Commonweal Fair Growth Project disseminates information about how low-income and minority residents are disproportionately affected by environmental pollutants and ill-considered land use decisions. The program is part of a wider effort to bring environmental organizations and environmental justice groups together into an effective alliance.
For too long environmental groups have focused almost exclusively on environmental protection and preservation and have failed to broaden their agenda to include any initiative to address the exposure of poor and heavily-minority communities to environmental hazards. While the protection of wilderness and endangered species are important and legitimate goals, environmental groups have missed an opportunity to ally themselves with low-income, minority residents. This population frequently lives either in communities located on the fenceline with toxic industries or in neighborhoods laced with "brownfields" and "locally unwanted land uses" such as hazardous waste sites, incinerators, sewage plants, diesel bus depots, refineries, and other highly-polluting facilities.
Similarly, while environmentalists have waged a "smart growth" battle against sprawl, they have yet to address the land use decisions that use exclusionary zoning practices to keep low-income Americans out middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. In effect, environmentalists have advocated "smart growth" practices but the have been slow to recognize that this will remain an elitist movement unless it is also addresses "fair growth" concerns of low-income Americans.
The lack of attention to environmental issues by the largely white environmental organizations has been doubly problematic. First, it has meant that many of the financial and human resources, which have been effectively deployed to influence government regulatory policies, have not been put to use protecting our most vulnerable population. Second, it has kept minority groups from adding their voice, passion, insight, and political muscle to the environmental movement because they do not see the issues that concern them addressed. Nor have environmental justice advocates been invited "to the table" when important decisions are made about environmental and land use decisions.
Commonweal's Fair Growth Project seeks to bridge this divide by highlighting the plight of low-income and minority populations who find themselves poisoned on fencelines with industries, excluded from middle class and affluent communities, and imprisoned in unsafe, behavior-distorting prisons. The program also strives to describe positive examples of people who are solving environmental justice problems. Through its activities, Commonweal aims to help create a broader coalition of environmental, environmental justice and social justice groups.
Origins of Program
Commonweal's interest in environmental justice issues dates back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when Commonweal's Research Director, Steve Lerner, began a five year study of the institutional environment in American prisons and juvenile justice reformatories. Lerner wrote about how the institutional environment affects health and behavior in early issues of Common Knowledge, a publication which examined environmental threats to public health. He subsequently wrote four paperback books about conditions of life in the overcrowded dormitories run by the California Youth Authority. He described in detail how the intolerable conditions in these facilities affected the health and behavior of a heavily minority prison population (See Commonweal's Juvenile Justice Program and publications list for the titles of these monographs.)
In the 1990, Steve Lerner wrote about efforts to clean up some of the poisoned lands ("brownfields") in heavily-minority urban areas. (See Amicus Journal, a publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Winter 1990). The benefits of brownfield development, Lerner pointed out, were numerous. First, their development eliminated exposure of minority residents to poisons in their neighborhood. Second, the clean up and development of brownfield sites sparked investments and improvements in low-income communities. And third, decontaminating brownfields made available land for development in urban areas already served by infrastructure. This reduced the pressure to develop outlying rural areas that were of agricultural and ecological value. In other words, brownfield redevelopment reduced the need for sprawl.
The Diamond Relocation Campaign
More recently, in 2001, Commonweal President, Michael Lerner, went on a tour of Diamond, an historically African-American community in Louisiana on the fenceline with a Shell Oil refinery and chemical plant. The situation in the Diamond community was a poster child for environmental injustice. An 
African-American community, that traced its roots back to slave days, had been pushed to the fenceline of a heavily-polluting Shell Oil refinery and chemical plant. In 1973 and 1988 explosions at these plants caused loss of life and heavy property damage in both the Diamond and the adjacent white community of Norco. Diamond residents claimed that pollution from the refinery and chemical plant also caused allergies, skin disorders, respiratory disease, cancer, and other serious health effects.
In the 1980s and 1990s, a school teacher from Diamond, Margie Richard, began to organize her neighbors into the Concerned Citizens of Norco. They demanded that Royal/Dutch Shell pay for the relocation of residents out of harms way. This relocation campaign was ultimately successful and in 2002 Shell offered to buy the properties of any Diamond resident who wanted to move. Margie Richard 
was subsequently awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the Nobel Prize for grassroots environmental activists, for her organizing work in Diamond.
Michael Lerner was directly involved in brokering the settlement between the Diamond residents and Shell officials. Other Commonweal staff workers including Sharyle Patton, and Michael Rafferty were also actively involved. Steve Lerner interviewed several dozen Diamond and Norco residents, Shell officials, and environmental justice activists who were drawn into the struggle. Living on the Fenceline presents a synopsis of this struggle and the interviews. He subsequently wrote a book about the relocation campaign entitled Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor. The book will be published by The MIT Press in November, 2004.
Fair Growth
The siting of hazardous waste dumps and highly-polluting chemical plants adjacent to low-income and heavily-minority populations is not the only form that environmental injustice takes today. In many parts of the U.S., land use decisions are made that discriminate against the interests of poor and minority groups. In fact, many of our land use decisions favor affluent home owners in the suburbs over the interests of lower-income renters in our urban areas.
For example, the mortgage interest deduction that home owners can write off is a huge subsidy that renters do not enjoy. In fact, more government money is devoted to the mortgage interest deduction than is directed at the construction of affordable housing. Similarly, government subsidies are often provided for the extension of roads, sewer systems, and the construction of new schools in our fast-growing suburbs, while the needs of upgrading urban infrastructure is ignored. The fact that we are willing to give more financial aid to the housing needs of affluent Americans than to poor ones is reason enough for re-examining government priorities in this area.
Low-income and heavily-minority communities also find themselves unable to move into middle-class and affluent fast-growing suburbs where the majority of new jobs are being generated. While there is no legal prohibition against poor or minority people moving to these suburbs, various forms of fiscal zoning effectively keep them out. The most blatant of these are the exclusionary zoning ordinances that, in some instances, prohibit the construction of any multi-family housing complexes in whole counties. Making it illegal to build apartment complexes is an effective way to be certain that poor people are kept out. Other exclusionary zoning rules ensure that the code requires large lot sizes and house sizes so that nothing will be built in their jurisdiction that a low-income American can afford.
The end result of these exclusionary zoning practices is that many low-income residents are kept in urban census tracts with high levels of poverty. This in turn means that many urban schools are filled with a high density of children who come from low-income families. It has also meant that many cities do not have a sufficient tax base to meet the needs of their residents. Without the money for adequate policing, garbage disposal, road repair, and public schools, many affluent white families leave the city in search of better conditions in the suburbs. This white flight further exacerbates the drain on the city's tax base and concentrates poverty and the problems associated with it.
Rules that keep low-income Americans from finding housing in many suburbs also makes it difficult for them to travel to jobs in the suburbs. Mass transit is not set up to move people efficiently from the cities to jobs in the suburbs and as a result many wage earners have to take two or three buses to get to suburban jobs; or they have to buy and pay to maintain a car to get to work. This adds to traffic congestion and means that low-income workers are able to spend less time with their families and with their children after school lets out.
Exclusionary zoning has become such a barrier to affordable housing that even the children and grandchildren of people who already live in the suburbs can't afford a place near their parents or grandparents. As a result, even the children of relatively affluent families can't afford to live in the community where they were raised.
There are solutions to the problems posed by misguided land use decisions that are dividing the places where we live along racial and economic lines. We can end residential economic and racial segregation through a deliberate policy that provides incentives for communities to enact inclusionary zoning ordinances that promote the introduction of affordable housing into middle class areas. Subsidies and economic penalties can also be devised to promote the construction of mixed-income communities where there is a diversity of income groups. But such reforms face strong local opposition.
Much of the resistance to the introduction of affordable housing is based on fear. Many homeowners are afraid that if an affordable housing complex is built in their neighborhood their property values will go down, crime will go up, and the quality of their lives and schools will plummet. This is understandable given some of the past mistakes that were made introducing high-rise poverty towers into neighborhoods. However, the new, scattered, low-rise approach to the construction of affordable housing has demonstrated that it can be introduced into neighborhoods without deleterious affects. And the benefits of having greater diversity in our communities are numerous.
For the past two years, Steve Lerner has been conducting interviews across the United States with affordable housing experts, developers, architects, non-profit advocacy groups, low-income tenants and others. He has assembled a group of these interviews into a collection: Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth. Out of these interviews, Lerner is writing a book tentatively entitled Fair Growth: Building Mixed-Income Communities. The Emerging Movement to Dismantle Economic and Racial Residential Segregation in the United States.