Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Robert Bullard
Robert Bullard is the Ware Professor of Sociology at Clark Atlanta University and is founder and director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center. Bullard and his wife did early research that demonstrated that hazardous waste dumps were disproportionately sited near African American communities in the South.
Bullard is also the author of Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color, Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta, and Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility.
This interview was conducted at Clark Atlanta University while across the city, in one of Atlanta's high-rise luxury hotels, thousands of developers gathered to discuss Smart Growth at a conference sponsored by the Urban Land Institute. The conference only tangentially addressed equity issues involved in land use decisions. Bullard held a press conference/ demonstration at the conference focused on the absence of a public transit system in Atlanta that would allow inner-city, minority residents to get to jobs in the suburbs. Atlanta's subway system, MARTA, was not permitted to extend into the affluent white suburbs in the north of the city where many jobs were being generated. Bus routes to these areas were also largely absent or structured to serve commuters coming in from the suburbs to work in Atlanta, not inner-city residents who wanted to get to jobs in the suburbs.
Interview
Steve Lerner (SDL): What have you seen from your own life that causes you to believe that race should be at the center of the sprawl debate?Robert Bullard (RB): Let me take you back 20 years to when I first got out of graduate school Iowa State University and moved to Houston, Texas. Iowa was a rural area and I was somewhat an anomaly in that my specialty was urban sociology at a university that was known for dealing with agriculture. Fortunately, I had some good professors who dealt with urban issues.
My first job was in Houston, Texas, in 1976 during the booming era. This was in the area that they called the "golden buckle" of the Sunbelt and Houston was it. It was the petrochemical capital of the world. It was fueled by market forces and labeled unrestrained capitalism. If you had the money you can do anything you want. It was growth driven: it was a growth machine.
Houston was also the only major city in the country that did not have zoning. So if you want to build it you could and growth was seen as good. So Houston ended up being 595 square miles: the fourth largest city in the country with an African-American population that was the largest in the South but basically invisible.
I wrote my first book: "Invisible Houston: The Black Experience in Boom and Bust" Texas A&M University Press. Even though it was written in 1987 it deals with sprawl and with the question of who benefits from the growth machine, this economic vitality that is cheer-led by civic boosters. When we started to look at who pays for the boom I became involved in the first law suit on environmental racism. As more people came to Houston during the boom, more people meant more garbage, and more garbage had to go somewhere. That is how, in 1979, Bean vs. Southwestern Management" became a lawsuit challenging environmental racism. It was basically about where the garbage would go because all the garbage was being transferred, basically, to where the black people were living. Houston had the largest African-American population in the southern United States - 500,000 black people live in Houston. And black neighborhoods received most of the garbage.
SDL: Were most of the African Americans in Houston living in one area?
RB: It was not one area. It was a series of areas that grew out of neighborhoods like Freedman's Town, an area founded in 1865 when slaves were freed. They [the freed slaves] were put out in the country and when Houston grew, it grew into these areas... places like Sunnyside and Carverville. You could see how the growth an economic vitality often times passed over these traditional African-American communities. And the growth was very controlled as it related to black neighborhoods. So, the economic renaissance, often times, during those periods, even in the boom times, did not "trickle down."
SDL: Were those black communities contained by exclusionary zoning?
RB: Houston didn't have zoning. Instead it had what they called "renewable deed restrictions." That was a fancy way of saying zoning. It meant neighborhood associations and large homeowners organizations could get together and every so many years and apply for their deed restrictions to be renewed. In those areas where there were a large percentage of renters there was no incentive to get the deed restrictions enforced. As a result, mixed-use development and industry development encroached on these residential areas. It was almost de facto expulsive zoning in which new kinds of zoning came in to replace residential zoning.
SDL: Was there white flight.
RB: At the time there was this informal knowledge about where you could live and where you couldn't live if you happen to be black. This was the case because of segregation, Jim Crow laws, deed restrictions, and, early on what they called restrictive covenants, which were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1948. Houston is very segregated along racial and ethnic lines. You had blacks segregated from whites and Latinos segregated from both blacks and whites. So you had three different kinds of areas. Some of that is changing now but you can still see identifiable [racially defined] areas. When we looked at the maps and census tracks in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s it was clear that you had some black suburbanization, but it followed that pattern and path of segregated areas...just like Prince George's County in Washington, DC and Maryland.
In 1991 we collaborated on another book called "Houston: Growth and Decline in a Sunbelt Boom Town" (Temple University Press) examined how in Houston there was a growth and decline cycle. Commercial boosterism pushed Houston to the top, oil was king, people said there will never be a recession, but then the bubble burst when there was an oil glut.
Then, "In Search of the New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s." looked at how southern cities have dealt with trying to get away from this stereotype that the South is backward and ignorant and there are no cities...there are just big small towns. And it looked at the fact that over half of all the African Americans in the United States live in the South where we are concentrated in major urban centers. In this book African-American writers, who live in these cities, wrote about doing research about the experience of African Americans in Memphis, New Orleans, Atlanta, Birmingham, Tampa and seven cities in all. It looked at housing, economic development, crime, residential patterns, access to opportunities in theses cities. It also addressed the whole question of fairness, equity, and equal opportunity. It asked why it was that Atlanta took off economically and was considered the capital of the New South. And it asked why it was that Memphis took so long to get a black mayor. It looked at why New Orleans was so dependent on the service industry and the petrochemical industry along the river.
When you talk about Memphis, Atlanta and Birmingham you are talking about the cradle of the civil rights movement. These cities started coming into their own and getting black mayors. And when the schools in these cities started tipped from predominantly white to predominantly black, just before that is when white flight skyrocketed. You are really not dealing with Smart Growth if you don't tackle the problems of inner city schools. And we don't see a lot of smart growth initiatives looking at schools. That is a hard issue where you can't run from the change in demographics of urban schools.
SDL: Did you experience this period of white flight personally?
RB: I grew up in the southern part of Alabama and went to school in the northern part so I had to travel 300 miles through Montgomery and Birmingham to get to Huntsville from 1964 to 1968. I lived to see Jim Crow being dismantled but before it was dismantled there was this knee jerk reaction. I remember standing in separate lines at the Greyhound bus terminal even though it had been dismantled we still had to go into separate bathrooms, waiting rooms, and use separate water fountains. This left an indelible imprint on me.
I have a chair in the department of sociology at this university [Clark Atlanta University] Atlanta University was founded in 1865 by the Freedman's Bureau and the department of sociology and I have an endowed chair that was founded by W.E.B. Dubois. So there is a legacy of this university and the Environmental Justice Resource Center is in the heart of it. So when I write about stuff I can't leave behind my experiences in Alabama, seeing the things I saw. My sense was that the University of Alabama had a duty to publish something about blacks in the south because of the historical legacy of that University and what happened during that era.
I don't run away from the race issue. But I don't say that race has to be entered in everything. But where it is apparent and where it has served as a barrier we should talk about it. To fail to do this would be a disservice to the communities that we work with.
SDL: I saw you today at the 4th annual Smart Growth conference in a room with a couple of hundred developers. I would say they were maybe 98 % white. I had met Carl Anthony at a previous Smart Growth conference in San Diego where he gave the talk about equity and Smart Growth. You gave one today as did Joe Brooks. And you will give another presentation tomorrow. What stage would you say we are at with the Smart Growth movement beginning to become conscious that they are missing equity issues and that they had better do something about it. Are we at the token phase? When you visited at Commonweal, you spoke about the need for parity in the relationship between environmentalists and environmental justice advocates. If the Smart Growth advocates want the Environmental Justice advocates to work on the same problems that they are interested in, then I assume you think it should be on an equal footing. When the environmental movement came to you and said they wanted to work with you on this outer beltway, you said: "Well, we want to work on clean air." So there has to be some parity in that relationship. Where are we today with that and how did you feel about giving this presentation today?
RB: I felt uneasy. I was put in a reverse missionary role in trying to educate these very smart and affluent people from organizations with lots of money that will have an impact on the lives of a lot of people with whom I work. The people I work with were not in the room. So in a sense I did not want to sound preachy but I wanted to relay the message that we have a lot of potential stakeholders and potential partners that are out there in the communities who will make the jobs of the people inside the conference easier if they will go halfway and respect the fact that there is a lot of information, a lot of knowledge encumbered and indigenous to a lot of these communities. They have been doing a lot of this stuff [working on environmental justice issues] for a long time but they have gotten no recognition. They have done it with very little money.
The people at the Smart Growth conference need to recognize what these Environmental Justice activists have been doing and saying. To do so will not take away anything from what the people in the conference are doing right now. One thing they might learn is how good life can be in urban core neighborhoods. You don't have to drive to get anywhere. All the major recreational and sports facilities are in the city, including the opera and the theatre. So when we talk about rediscovering the city, the people who live in the core already know the value of the city. They love their neighborhoods and the city.
When we talk about bringing various people together and creating partnerships, I think right now we are at the very beginning stage of trying to really diversify our thinking in terms of who should be in a room like that. That is a radical change because it means, in some cases, developers have to go beyond a discussing a specific site to talk about what will be the multiplier effect on the surrounding area and whether or not a particular development project has the potential to create spill over effects that are positive. Further they should address the question of whether communities can be involved in directing these positive spill-over effects so that they won't just create gentrification. What we need is neighborhood revitalization that is community driven and community endorsed.
Instead, what we often get now is that when something is built it then takes on a life of its own and spills over into the neighborhood. It makes property values go up and as a result elderly people are displaced and renters are kicked out. Even the people who owned buildings in the old neighborhood who accept a buy out find that the money they get seems like a lot at the time but won't buy them much elsewhere.
So the relationship between developers and neighborhood activists does not have to be adversarial. It could be complementary. That doesn't mean that everybody will agree on everything but I think there will be a lot of cases where people will agree more than they disagree. And that is where you find overlaps. I don't think we have mechanisms in place within the larger Smart Growth movement to do that type of investment in human capital and relationships. The Smart Growth focus is more on physical construction as opposed to human capital building. I'm not saying that it is not there. But the dominant paradigm is: how do I get financing, how do I get support from city and county officials and permits, and when do we start breaking ground.
SDL: It would have been sent a different message if the Smart Growth conference had been held here at Clark Atlanta University, an historically black college.
RB: It would have been totally different because the conference hotels are very antiseptic and isolated and people from the communities are invited in or not invited in. That was a very weird place to hold this meeting.
SDL: Would you welcome a reinvention of Smart Growth gatherings where they come to your university.
RB: I would welcome it and I think it is something we could plan together as opposed to us doing the same thing they did. It was curious to me today when I looked around the book display at the Smart Growth conference hardly any of the books, with the exception of ours, dealt with equity. The issues we are talking about really need to be infused into the literature because people read that stuff. If they are reading stuff from the American Planning Association and if equity is not in there, I think some of those people will not go outside the reading list. So I think it is important that when we talk about planning we talk about how our knowledge and information is packaged, who are messengers are, and how message development gets developed.
The paper we wrote was entitled: "Race Equity and Smart Growth: Why People of Color Should Speak for Themselves." It examines what the data are and looks at the historical development of smart growth. It looks at issues such as gentrification, redlining, transportation, schools and it packages them and put them into a framework. We look at issues such as energy policy, green space, and other things that fall off the radar screen because people say: "Well, that is a social issue." We look at human settlement patterns. Community is physical, spatial, and social. We are trying to use a think tank approach of gathering community people, academics, policy analysts to come together to frame our issues. We want this to be relevant to the way in which communities go through this vision process to decide what the community should be like 25 or 30 years from now as opposed to a project that has a life of 2 years in terms of construction after which the developer is gone. That is what we are trying to do and we are getting support. We want to make sure that we include groups that have been doing this stuff all along including environmental groups, community development groups, and groups involved in improving the schools.
We sent the paper around to various stakeholder groups with the idea that we are expecting feedback. So we want to hear what ULI thinks about our equity initiative because at some point in time we would hope that there will be some convergence. I think urban communities and working class communities and communities of color, have to organize and conceptualize a vision of how we see our communities ten or twenty years down the road.
Right now many of our organizations are just beginning to deal with cross-cutting issues such as schools, housing, and transportation. A lot of our organizations only deal with housing; transportation; welfare to work. So we want ask people if we should call this smart growth, community development, or community revitalization. Whatever we call it people can say: "Ok, we are working with groups that deal with these kinds of issues. So by the time they get to the room they have the confidence and the wherewithal to respond on par to someone who is the head of a big apartment building consortium. That takes resources and in some cases it takes resources away from those programs that you are doing. This is new to funders who are supporting mostly white, environmental organizations involved with Smart Growth. These groups are just now beginning to talk about environmental and economic justice with smart growth issues. So we are trying to educate our more progressive funders. Some of them say: we don't fund environmental justice. We say: understand what environmental justice is: the smart growth stuff that we are talking about is environmental and economic justice. That has been a slow process. No disrespect: do you really understand what environmental and economic justice is? Let's talk about it. We ask them to look at the transportation work we are doing. It's how you package what you are doing, how you define it, and how you write it up. We have been telling our groups: this is not a new thing. This is acknowledging that there is a movement and a train out of the station on smart growth and that your community is going to be impacted. You better be ready and positioned to respond and be proactive on it.
SDL: You have emphasized that there are a variety of federal laws, including the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Laws etc. which, if they were enforced, would go a long way towards solving some of these problems. Would you elaborate? I am particularly interested in the transportation aspect of this because here are hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions that are spent on highway infrastructure construction and maintenance and much less going into to transit and forms of transportation that would benefit low-income and minority people. I take it that one possible strategy is to sue them.
RB: Our book, "Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility" touches every aspect of transportation as it affects the individual and the community. We talk about access to jobs, health care, and schools. So, transportation infrastructure in this country, for the most part, was subsidized with federal funds. That means that where residential subdivisions are being built they need roads and these roads are being subsidized. When we talk about subsidies and welfare in this country, for the most part, we think about poor people and the black, unmarried woman with two kids on welfare assistance. But when we talk about subsidies that are somehow used to disenfranchise, polarize, isolate and discriminate against people, I have problems with federal funds being used for those kinds of things.
There is a law called Title VI of the Civil Rights Law of 1964, which basically says that no federal funds can be used to discriminate against citizens based on race or color. The law says that you can't have federal funds going to projects that discriminate. So when we talk about the roads that are being built at the same time that public transit is being dismantled, we are talking about some discriminatory impacts.
People of color are more dependent on transit than are other Americans. Nationally, 36 percent of African Americans ride transit compared with 8 to 9 percent of whites. About 25 percent of African Americans don't own cars. Some of that is by choice; it is not all because of poverty. If federal funds are being used to fund any project that has a discriminatory impact then it should trigger a lawsuit Title VI. We have worked on a number of types of cases. One is out in Los Angeles. It is a case that was settled, for $1.5 billion, a Title VI case. It was pushed by the Labor Communities Strategy Center and the Bus Riders Union. Another case is in Macon, Georgia, which is about an hour an a half south of Atlanta. This is a case where the Macon County City Council and Bibb County decided not to take federal funds for a bus system, for various reasons, but at the same time they would take federal funds for building roads. The roads were built from Macon into the suburbs and exurbs which is basically where the whites live. The bus system does not go beyond the city lines and it has a 95% black ridership. So there was a title VI law suit that was filed on that case argued by a Mercer University Law professor, David Oedel. It was settled and the settled and it meant that Macon and Bibb county settled the claim and they basically said they hadn't done anything wrong but now they had to take federal funds and build a bus system that is equitable and gets to where people need to go.
We have a transportation equity project that we have funded through Turner and Surdna foundation and for the last two years we have been working with grassroots groups here in Atlanta and with folks in LA. In the last two years about 12 groups have been working in Atlanta on this including the NAACP, SCLC, the Rainbow Coalition, Push, the Southern Organizing Committee, and a whole bunch of neighborhood associations. They organized themselves into Metropolitan Atlanta Transportation Equity Coalition (MATEC). Last Thursday 11 of the groups filed a Title VI complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation charging transit racism. There was also a complaint filed against MARTA for not providing accessible transit for people under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is another federally mandated act. This complaint went in last Thursday and the group is having a press conference tomorrow at the Smart Growth Conference. It took us two years to get this group to understand the connection that transportation is a civil rights issue. There is a long history of this. Plessey v. Fergusson in 1896 was a transportation case. Then there was Rosa Parks who was not willing to sit in the back of the back of the bus. MARTA has proposed to raise the fares 17 percent to become the highest fares in the country. What MARTA is doing is discriminatory in the way they are delivering services to black communities in the south and white communities in the north.
SDL: Is it true that the system has been designed to not connect the black bus system with the white suburbs where the jobs are? And have local politicians arranged it so the white suburban bus systems do not hook up with MARTA?
RB: Yes. The thrust of the complaint, which is short of a lawsuit, is that for the last 28 years MARTA has been collecting a penny sales tax from the people who live in the city of Atlanta, Kalb County, and Fulton County and they built an infrastructure for MARTA. Now MARTA is building out to the borders of these counties that do not want MARTA. And MARTA is making it very easy for Gwinnett County and Fulton County to create their separate and unequal bus systems that will link to MARTA. DeKalb County created its own system in 1991 because they did not want to be part of MARTA. DeKalb County buses run from DeKalb County express into MARTA, and then they can take MARTA anywhere. What our coalition is saying is that you need to take care of your core passengers. Some 75% of MARTA's riders are African America and a large percentage are transit dependent and many are disabled. In order to build those two new stations in the north that will be open in December, it is two miles of rail and it is costing $464 million per mile and costs $4-6 million to operate - yet they still can't find $6 million to keep the fares from going up from $1.50 to $1.75. Marta is refusing to take money from the state and it is the only major regional transit agency in the country that does not receive state funding. There are issues about where the bus shelters are and where the clean CNG, natural gas buses are distributed fairly. They are mostly in the north while in the south of the city, which is a predominantly African American section, they run the old diesel buses. When you look at the Title VI items that are covered in terms of racial disparities, it is clear that in the north of the city, where affluent live, there are CNG buses that are very clean. They are the newest buses and they have lifts and all that. By contrast, down in the south of the city they don't have that and that is discriminatory.
SDL: What about the utilities issue. I read that some utilities companies average the rates so that a fast growing, affluent, largely white county outside the city is getting its utility infrastructure built. And who is paying for it? Disproportionately the people who are paying for it are poor and minority residents from the inner city who already have their infrastructure in place and they are paying for the extension out into the suburbs. What is going on there?
RB: It is all a pattern and a history of discrimination. It becomes even clearer that we need public interest groups that can tackle these issues because they are crosscutting. Look at the problem of inequitable insurance rates. If you own a $100,000 house in Atlanta and live in a predominantly African American neighborhood, you are going to pay $700 a year for insurance, whereas someone in the suburbs will pay $300. That means that the company will capture 75% of the dollar and make a profit of 25% in the city whereas in the suburbs they pay out 95%. So the loss ratio is higher in the suburbs but the people in the city subsidize those low rates in the suburbs. That is discriminatory. There was a lawsuit and the decision said that insurance companies could not do that any more but still the rates are higher. These insurance rates are not based on crime rates, they are based on race. We have a lot of affluent, middle-income neighborhoods in the south of Atlanta. DeKalb County is the second most affluent African-American community in the country, second only to Prince George's County in Maryland. But if you talk about amenities, there is no shopping center and no restaurants. And the transportation system does not get you where you need to go.
That is the kind of thing you start ticking off when you do a matrix of these disparities. We are not talking just about poor people. We are talking about those kinds of amenities that do not exist south of Interstate 20. We cannot have a healthy metro Atlanta when the southern part of the region is basically ignored because we are talking about concentrated poverty, unemployment, no access in terms of mobility or access to jobs. It means that we cannot be healthy until we start taking care of those things that we have systematically denied. It is not by accident. It is kind of hard to imagine that you have a whole area of $250-300,000 homes in the south where you have doctors and lawyers and you don't have a full-service grocery store. Just now you are starting to get some of the major chains into those areas. I don't care if you make $100,000 or $10,000 you have to eat. We have been knocking, knocking, knocking. I think Magic Johnson has it right in terms of what he has been doing with his Magic Theaters, going into black communities and setting up theaters and proving that you can make a profit. This is not about welfare, this is not non-profit, and these are business people. And he is doing ok.
SDL: What about the notion that it may make sense to require that a certain percentage of new building projects is dedicated to affordable housing. In Montgomery County they do that. And there are no problems because they do 10 to 15% of affordable housing with new projects of over 50 units.
This also gets at the question of whether we want to deconcentrate poverty. And one way to do that voluntarily would be through vouchers so city residents could move closer to work in the suburbs. The Fannie Mae people said that sounds nice but there is no appetite for it in Congress. So where are we with fair share affordable housing? And if it is not by that route, how are we going to stop the replication of economically segregated communities across the country.
RB: That is the question. And if we do not have the will the commitment and the fortitude to tackle that we will have a society and cities that are basically economically segregated and it will be almost like walled communities.
SDL: There are currently 8 million Americans in gated communities.
RB: They are running from poor people. Decent and affordable housing should be a basic right. To have access to a job should be a basic right. It may not be in the Constitution but it is a moral responsibility. If you ask people: "Do you think everyone should have the right to a decent house and how are we going to do that? I think the government should force; it should be part of every mandate. When you go back to talking about subsidies there are very few projects that do not receive some government subsidies. Look at the way roads are funded. There are very few private roads that extend from cities to suburbs. At some point in time you have to get off the private road and onto a public road. In terms of infrastructure, sewer systems, water systems, when we deal with all these subsidies in terms of infrastructure there are levers.
SDL: Are these levers that could be used to dismantle exclusionary zoning?
RB: I think the levers are there it is just a question of whether there is the will to use them. When we talk about the impact of employers, these companies have to run vans back into the city with their employees because there is no transit.
SDL: In Washington they give low wage employees who work in the suburbs a slice of pizza on their van ride back to the city. I think they should call it the Soweto Express.
RB: It is like South Africa. When I tell people that here in Atlanta they get upset. Understand that employers need workers and that if workers do not have access to housing in those areas because of restrictive building codes, then they are going to get workers to those work sites anyway they can, even if they have to bus them, van pool them or otherwise get them up there. We think employers will have to be more proactive in pressuring or influencing some of these county commissioners when it comes to these fair share affordable housing ordinances. They have not been as active as they could be. When they start feeling it in their pocketbook that's when I think they will start.
SDL: Perhaps employers will stick with the van and bus solution because of pressure from residents in the suburbs not to permit affordable housing to be built
RB: We are talking about class and race in many cases. The children of affluent residents in the north of Atlanta are not vying for these service jobs working in McDonalds and as clerks. But these are entry level jobs that people in urban areas will snap up. And they have to pay more because of the shortage of workers.
SDL: I've seen it at the airport at BWI and Dulles where there are kids from the city working there who are doing all the menial jobs and they have a long commute. Could the construction of mixed-income housing help alleviate this problem?
RB: I think it is a good first step. But we can have mixed-income housing and it can still be all white. It is important that the advertising of these mixed-income housing units are done in a way that is not discriminatory. Too often we find that the marketing of affordable housing is biased because it is not marketed to everybody. It is targeted. And that is illegal under the Fair Housing Act. I think we have a lot of work to do and I don't think we are there yet. Affordable housing is not considered a right yet. Housing is a commodity and it can be traded on the market. When we make it a commodity if you don't have money you can be homeless and that is considered fine because you don't have a right to a house. In some areas we have an over supply of housing but because people do not have money we have a homeless problem. Similarly, where housing has escalated in cost it has created homelessness. This is driven by market forces.
SDL: The gentrification and displacement issues are beginning to creep into these conferences such as the ULI conference going on downtown here in Atlanta...
RB: But you notice that gentrification is almost like a dirty word. And the government will come in and defend it and say gentrification is not necessarily bad because we are making the community better. It is as if people are saying: "This is going to be a really great area now that you [low income residents] are gone."
SDL: It brings up a strange dynamic. I heard a community activist say that when they see signs that the neighborhood is starting to get fixed up, when the parks are improved, they can see the handwriting on the wall that soon low-income residents will be forced out. It will take three years and the rents will go up and the taxes will go up and local residents who have lived here for decades will be forced out. It is sad to think that when the neighborhood is improved the long term, low-income residents have to leave. Angela Blackwell's PolicyLink group has a kit on gentrification tool kit that addresses this issue. How do you look at the problem posed by gentrification? Can you have neighborhood improvement without displacement?
RB: The "Residential Apartheid" book deals with this. There is a history here. One form of gentrification occurred in urban renewal in the 1950s, model cities in the 1960s, community development block grants in the 1970s, revenue sharing. There was gentrification occurring in all of those programs but who benefited? Homeowners benefited. So when we talk about urban pioneers, the back to the city movement, this stuff is not new. It is a continuation of a cycle of white flight, riots, and now the children of the mothers and the fathers who left are returning.
SDL: I saw a cartoon about this. It showed whites leaving the city, then minorities following them into the inner-ring suburbs. It showed whites moving into the outer-ring suburbs and then leapfrogging back into gentrified parts of the city.
RB: The people who were able to dig in and stay in the city through the hard times were homeowners. That's why we have been fighting like hell to increase home ownership opportunities for people in urban core neighborhoods and to establish strong neighborhood coalitions and home owners associations. That is not to say that it will end all pressures on these people to sell out when gentrification of their neighborhood begins. In some cases the pressures are too great. If someone comes with $300,000 in cash in a suitcase an offers to buy a house in east Palo Alto that was bought for $30,000 some 25 years ago that is a lot of pressure. There is also the problem of taxes going up on these homes when gentrification begins.
We want to see Fannie Mae and all these other agencies increase home ownership opportunities for those communities under pressure. They are also under pressure from predatory lenders who are targeting those home owners and a lot of elderly people and they lose their homes. Some of these people have raised families and sent their kids off to college and now they are house rich. If someone calls them about putting up new siding, next thing you know they are putting siding up and they are losing their home. Atlanta is one of the major predatory lending target cities.
SDL: This does nothing for renters and we have 30 million renters.
RB: This doesn't begin to help them. Right now something like 68% of whites own homes and 47 % of African Americans own a home. So still the majority of African Americans are renters. Renting is a priority for African Americans. When we talk about losing rental units, through knock downs or whatever, and losing affordable apartments, the pressure is upon us. This requires organizing and mobilizing and getting government to respond. In many areas our governments have majority blacks in city councils but they don't control how real estate is being developed. However, they have a lot of discretion, which they are not using, to make sure that specific types of affordable projects are built. I don't think they are doing enough to ensure that the rights of renters are protected.
SDL: When I ask about how renters can become owners I am told there are programs that help people raise the down payment on a house, but many renters are barely able to meet the rent.
RB: I don't have an answer because this is a society where property ownership is king. For example, I am working on a case in Seattle. It is a Title VI case against Sound Transit. It says that Sound Transit is discriminating when it builds its light rail line from north to south. In the north of the city the tracks tunnel underground so there is no displacement. But when it gets to the south of the city [where the low-income residents live] it goes at grade and it displaces. It goes down Martin Luther King Boulevard and it will displace minority businesses, minority home owners, and renters. In this case renters have fewer rights than homeowners. It is the owners who have the rights that are protected in terms of buy outs and receiving market rates. So, you are right, renters are very vulnerable because this is a society of private property ownership. That is the way it is designed. Tax breaks? You don't get a tax break as a renter but as a property owner you get a subsidy.
SDL: A lot has been said about subsidies that encourage sprawl. The flip side of that is disinvestment and concentration of poverty. If you were czar for the day, which subsidies would you change. If this were a rational society and if we were looking to make things better for people what would you do? If our goal was to have fewer problems, cut down on traffic congestion, pollution, the concentration of poverty, crime and bad schools, what would you do? If we were actually trying to solve some of our critical social problems and we were looking at the subsidy side of this, which ones would you try to change?
RB: I think the transportation subsidy is one that we would definitely have to tackle. Because transportation subsidies control how we run our road building programs; and how road building programs subsidize and buttress subdivision and sprawl. Changing the transportation subsidy would definitely start to rein in a lot of the sprawl. It would allow us to redirect funds that we spend on new roads and new construction and start directing that back into building clean, affordable, efficient public transportation. That could also create new kinds of spill-over effects in terms of new construction in urban core areas and attract and improve the infrastructure of urban core areas. And hopefully that would have an impact on people becoming involved in the schools. There is more money in transportation than there is in public housing. So transportation is the key to a lot of things.
SDL: there are many powerful forces aligned to see that nothing happens to change transportation subsidies including the auto industry, the asphalt industry, the road construction industry, and engineering firms. There is huge bureaucratic inertia on this issue. People have been trained in how to build highways and getting them to retrain and retool to do it differently is a huge piece of work.
RB: It is. It is a piece of work. It almost has to be an emergency, a call for all hands on deck. We almost got there just before the last election of our governor, When Governor Barnes came in the first thing he did was create this super transportation agency, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority. There was inertia with the Georgia Department of Transportation and the Atlanta Regional Council, our MPO, which were not moving and not doing anything. So Barnes created a super agency that sucked away some of the power and authority to create regional transit, land use, density entity. The fact that even some of the big companies in Metro Atlanta understand that they cannot be prosperous with their employees stuck in traffic and breathing dirty air was part of this. Even the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce understands that it cannot attract and keep businesses in this area if people think of Atlanta as "Sprawlanta" and the sprawl poster child. So when you begin to see the boosters of this growth machine start to rethink this then there is some hope. Bell South, for example, moved its offices from the suburbs to near a MARTA stop. Bell South is one of the largest employers in Metro Atlanta. So these are positive signs, good signs. It is not hopeless.
I tell people we all breathe the same air in Atlanta. There is no black air and white air. I have an interest in seeing that we get the air cleaned up. And I am an advocate for using transit and I use it whenever I can. And we are a strong supporter of MARTA but MARTA has to be fair and accessible and do right by the people who are paying for it. The people [in the suburbs] who are not paying for it shouldn't have a voice. There are [suburban] people who say they are not sure they want to be linked to MARTA so these people can go all over our area. They have express buses going from the suburbs to the city and then deadhead [return empty] when they go back to the suburbs. That is not Smart Growth.
SDL: Do the buses really go out empty?
RB: Yes. It is so stupid. But if you understand the workings of the people who are setting it up, in their mind that's fine.
SDL: Other than the transportation subsidy what other subsidies would you try to change?
RB: I think you have to address the fact that our society is really polarized and we are becoming more and more segmented by race and class.
SDL: Do you believe that we are becoming racially and economically more segregated?
RB: Yes. I believe we are. Because of the way our cities are laid out it is not just black/white segregation any more. In terms of segregation of Latinos, for example, in Metro Atlanta, "new" minorities now being segregated and having their own enclaves in many cases where English is not even spoken. I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, what I am saying is that in a sense where communities are isolated and there is very little contact or interaction across racial, ethnic and geographic lines that means that we don't know as much about each other as we should. We may be operating on stereotypes with little information and misinformation.
That is why I say we are becoming more balkanized in our own little areas. In some cases it is inter-ethnic segregation where you have-low income blacks segregated from working-class blacks. That means you can go into a black community and say: do you know any poor people and they say no
SDL: What subsidy would you target to change that?
RB: We need to enforce the fair housing law and ensure that a person has an opportunity to rent in an area of their choice. That should be a right. It should not be stopped just because someone says: "We don't think you will want to live up there."
SDL: That is not so much a subsidy as racism, and redlining, and misdirection.
RB: It is but racism is subsidized. Melvin Oliver and Shapiro, in their book, Black Wealth White Wealth, write that every African American pays a discrimination tax of about $3,700 a year. That means that when we talk about discrimination and housing, racism is being subsidized by the amount of money we have to pay when we look for housing. We spend more time and money looking for an apartment than the average white person and that is a subsidy
SDL: Or a tax.
RB: The person who is discriminated against when they go to look for housing is paying extra. It comes out of their pocket because they have been turned down for no reason and they are spending their gas and they have to take off more time from work. They are charged a larger down payment, a higher security deposit, and higher rent. There are many tricks these real estate brokers use and a lot of it is discriminatory and illegal. But if every black or brown person followed up every time they were discriminated against, we would go crazy because it would be a full time job. So a lot for things you just ignore. You just go about your business and say: "I got to find a house." When you are told we have no opening and I say:" I just called and you said it was available." Then they say: "We just rented it." That is a big one. I am not sure we will ever eliminate institutionalized racism. That is a hard one but I think we have to work on it. We have to teach young people that America is founded on the principles of fairness and justice and equal opportunity.
SDL: Could get at that by having a group of undercover people going around all the time whose job expose housing discrimination?
RB: As a mater of fact there are private fair housing agencies that do that. When they bust people their budgets come from the settlement on cases involving insurance redlining and fair housing. The government has gone out of the business of doing this. They don't do it any more. Here in Atlanta it is Metro Fair Housing that does it and that is not a government agency.
SDL: It is fascinating work that you do.
RB: It is exciting. I tell people that I don't do dead white man sociology. They're dead. The stuff we do is living, breathing sociology and we work with communities. We tell them we don't do everything but the things we do we do well. And I try to get my students to understand how this ties to their own lives and make it real and make them understand that they have to give something back. Because the opportunities that black kids get when they go to college, they have to understand and not take it for granted, because there are a lot of black kids who are not going. So many black kids have no idea of whether or not they will make it to an institution of higher learning. So I tell the ones who do make it to college that they are privileged and they have some responsibility.
SDL: How does this office work?
RB: We have ten staff people. We have one lawyer and a GIS specialist who does mapping. We have a research associate who has an appointment in sociology. I have an appointment in sociology. We have people who are engineers. We have a training specialist. We are very interdisciplinary. We have three undergraduate students who intern here and one graduate student. We have a webmaster. We get 50-60,000 hits a day on our website. My office is the command center. We are a university group, we don't do any organizing, but we facilitate groups to position them to make policy and make inroads into governmental decision making.
I came here in 1994 from California and this was a conference room. I had a laptop and told them I was ready to work. I love it here. Clark Atlanta University is six historically black colleges with 15,000 students. It is a unique center in the world. We get students from all over the world. We get a large international student body and students from all the states. It is a good laboratory. People don't want to leave it. We have a good network to the state legislatures. We tell people: look back we are not a mega university. Clark Atlanta is 6,500 students. There was a merger in 1988 of Atlanta University founded in 1865 by the Freedman's Bureau and Clark College which was founded shortly thereafter. I got my master from Atlanta University so I came back. I wanted to set up a center but I didn't want to set it up in California because a lot of the work I did was on this side of the country. So I said why not Atlanta which is the hub for a lot of things and it is a transportation hub and you can get to anywhere quickly and direct. It is a springboard for a lot of work I was doing. There is never a dull day. We are community driven. We are an academic center and university based but we are community centered in terms of making sure that we work with communities and what we do is driven by community needs.
There are only four centers like ours in the country: Xavier University in New Orleans, the only black Catholic University in the country; Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston at Texas Southern; and Florida A&M in Tallahassee. All are located at historically black colleges and all are in the South. Howard doesn't have one. They are organizing an environmental studies program. They should have a center. We are helping Tuskegee University set up a center on rural sustainability issues. There is the center for bioethical studies, created by Clinton as an apology for the syphilis study, but they also want to create an environmental justice center.