Conclusion

This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.… It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer must be destroyed.

—Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

The gruesome death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day 2020 and the turmoil that followed raised all over again every issue associated with the other Black victims of state violence, including Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Known for its progressive politics and its robust economy, Minneapolis seemed an unlikely location for such a tragedy. Yet as the New York Times reported, “Minneapolis’s deep racial divide is as much a feature of the city for its Black residents as its picturesque parks, robust employment and thriving businesses.” Citing one university professor, the Times identified a “Minnesota paradox”: a “pleasant place belied by gaping racial inequalities.”¹ Hardly paradoxical, as we have seen, the racial divide exposed and examined in the aftermath of Floyd’s death had by the early twenty-first century become a thoroughly American phenomenon despite wide-scale evidence of urban revitalization.

That divide was on display a month earlier in the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death. Accompanying support for more than a dozen uplifting community-based events, Open Society Institute director Danielle Toran wrote hopefully on her organization’s website of that moment as “a crucial inflection point in the history of Baltimore.” Gray’s death, she asserted, “was followed by a massive youth and young-adult-led movement to address the deep, systemic inequities in our city. In addition to spurring the community-informed consent decree and other reforms, it inspired a generation of activists and advocates continuing that work today. While the work is far from complete, it’s important to reflect on the events that took place five years ago, where we are now, and where we need to move in the future.”² The Baltimore Sun adopted a more sober view, writing, “The worldwide attention paid to this young man’s killing forced Baltimore—white, affluent Baltimore, in particular—to take stock of the city’s inequities and recurring failures. It was no longer possible to bury one’s head in the sand; lines had been drawn.” Yet despite some modest gains, the paper professed, “significant change eludes us.” Not only had the “OneBaltimore” project, billed as a comprehensive public-private initiative that would “focus on systemic problems that have faced our city for decades,” completely fizzled, the city had gone through five police commissioners since Gray’s death. With the novel coronavirus deepening fault lines in the city, the paper predicted, “The longer this continues, the greater we can expect the disparity to become.”³

That gap between high expectations for fundamental change and the reality of marginal reforms was not unique to Baltimore. There, as unemployment fell in the Trump years, median income and median property values rose, sure signs of prosperity. At the same time, however, the poverty rate also rose, by almost 12 percent. Far from an aberration, Baltimore’s experience was replicated in each of the cities reviewed here. Although median property values fell slightly in Camden and Milwaukee, they rose in each of the other cities, as did median household income, even in Camden. What is most striking, however, is that despite clear signs of revitalization, the poverty rate rose in every city except Camden and Detroit, where the rates were already exceptionally high, and in Washington, where an increase in the population through continued gentrification marked a loss of poor Blacks to other jurisdictions. This happened even at a time when the national poverty rate had fallen to 10.5 percent, the lowest estimate since records were first published in 1959.⁴ Most notably, poverty rose in a number of cities perceived as doing especially well, including Pittsburgh, by 27 percent, and New Haven by almost 18 percent. Despite significant differences in size and location, each of the cities reviewed here suffered the same tensions, as did Minneapolis, between investment in property and in human capital. “Those glaring disparities, which erupted onto the national stage after George Floyd was killed,” a Washington Post assessment of Minneapolis, concluded, “highlight the flawed premise, touted by President Trump and other Republicans, that economic prosperity is a remedy for racial inequality.”⁵

Such figures over such a short period can only be considered an estimate of trends. Still, they confirm observations that inequality continues to increase decades after the first urban crisis of the 1960s, when a robust federal response appeared to promise greater equity. Instead, both in cities and across the nation, the wealth gap between whites and Blacks and Latinos widened. After narrowing in the 1990s, it deepened considerably during the recession that emerged from the subprime lending scandal in 2008. While Detroit and Newark were especially hard hit, every city with a high minority population was targeted for subprime loans and suffered as a consequence. No national program effectively helped people unable to pay their mortgages. Even when local leaders attempted to solve the problem themselves, their programs proved inadequate or worse, as speculators stepped in and homeownership, a traditional means of wealth accumulation, fell out of reach of many who belonged to or aspired to the middle class. According to a 2016 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, white households in the middle-income quintile (those earning $37,201 to $61,328 annually) owned nearly eight times as much wealth ($86,100) as middle-income Black earners ($11,000) and ten times as much wealth as middle-income Latino earners ($8,600). As an extreme example, in Washington, D.C., white families were on average eighty-one times wealthier than Black families.⁶ “Fifty years since the bloody and brutally repressed protests and freedom struggles of Black Americans brought about the end of legal discrimination in this country, so much of what makes Black lives hard, what takes Black lives earlier, what causes Black Americans to be vulnerable to the type of surveillance and policing that killed Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, what steals opportunities, is the lack of wealth that has been a defining feature of Black life since the end of slavery,” Nikole Hannah-Jones concluded in the New York Times.⁷

While the growing disparities within cities might have owed something to the Trump administration’s efforts—not always successful—to pare back the welfare state, it is clear that the root causes lay much deeper. Racial bias, in real estate and in the political decisions that determined its disposition, maintained well beyond the civil rights era inequalities of opportunity that left Blacks in particular in disadvantaged positions, even within the most progressive cities. The ill effects of urban renewal, when they came in the early twenty-first century, were more subtle than they had been a generation earlier, but the consequence of social if not always physical displacement of longtime residents was no less devastating as condos, boutiques, and trendy specialty businesses replaced destinations of necessity, such as hardware stores and pharmacies. Although Black politicians, as they ascended to power, gained previously denied influence, they nonetheless remained constrained by financial imperatives in meeting their constituents’ most pressing needs. As political scientist Peter Eisinger pointed out years ago, such leaders were not excluded from existing growth coalitions, but they were hard pressed to redirect the prevailing bias in favor of subsidies and against redistributive programs. Wholesale assaults on poverty, housing, and unemployment, he asserted in an observation still relevant, were very much on local agendas, but they remained politically unrealistic as largely uncharted territory.⁸

As overwhelming as constraints have been on cities, they have not been without the will to enact programs aimed at more egalitarian outcomes. When Susan Fainstein described at the height of the Great Recession in 2010 the elements that would constitute “a just city,” she listed seven criteria for ensuring equity: inclusionary provisions for decent and affordable housing as part of any new construction; permanent affordability for such housing and one-for-one replacement for public housing units demolished; adequate compensation and access to a nearby location for businesses displaced through new construction; preference to local businesses in economic development programs; community benefits required of new megaprojects; increased tax support for public transit; and active deliberation among planners to ensure egalitarian solutions in new development.⁹ While the record in the first years of the twentieth century was tentative in some instances and uneven in others, a number of the cities discussed here by 2020 had begun to realize those objectives. The levels of subsidy to business—reflecting the prevailing orthodoxy in development—was much higher than the benefits fought for and realized in the form of community benefits, housing allowances, and new employment opportunities. As if to prove that such programs could not be rolled back, even when placed under the highest level of critical scrutiny, the New Jersey legislature in December 2020 rushed through legislation overhauling the state’s economic development programs designating $11 billion of its $14 billion total to a new package of tax incentives, once again ensuring disproportionate support for South Jersey as a result of Steve Sweeney’s role as Senate president. While the new bill included some public protections against the kind of inside dealing that had been so manifest in Camden under the state’s 2013 legislation and gave a nod to community benefits, it did not insist that community members be included as part of the negotiating process.¹⁰ At the same time, a good number of other cities had moved beyond sporadic efforts to capture new wealth for social purposes by institutionalizing measures for ensuring equity.

Oakland’s Office of Equity, Newark’s Commission for Equitable Growth, and Pittsburgh’s OnePGH initiative each represent important steps toward that goal.¹¹ While their origins are recent, a number of important actions have flowed from their creation. In Pittsburgh, an external consulting report aimed at reorganizing the city’s redevelopment authority recommenced five priorities intended “to balance the need for continued growth with the imperatives of equity and inclusion,” insisting that they be pursued in conjunction with the city’s Office of Equity, established in May 2019. Most remarkably, the report suggested, “Given the URA’s [Urban Redevelopment Authority’s] complicated history of urban renewal, the URA should publicly acknowledge its past mistakes and communicate the extent to which it is engaged in promoting a diverse and equitable workplace.” In March 2020, Sam Williamson, who had for years opposed lucrative development deals as district leader of the Service Employees International Union, became chair of the URA. “Our mayor’s goal, the URA board’s goal,” Williamson said, “is to make sure that we have development policies that lift people out of poverty, that help to grow the economy of the city in a way that is putting us on a footing to succeed in the 21st century.” Mayor Bill Peduto confirmed that confidence months later when he announced a new comprehensive planning process addressing “the issues of equity, the issues of systemic racism, the issues that have plagued this city for decades.” In addition, Peduto announced a pilot universal basic income program to direct $500 stipends to some two hundred families earning less than 50 percent of area median income starting in 2021. Drawing on the findings of the 2019 equity audit, half those stipends were to be reserved for households headed by Black women.¹²

Although Maurice Cox left Detroit for a similar planning position in Chicago in 2019, the office of Detroit Future City, citing the need to establish a common definition of economic equity and “engage civic and community leaders, and residents around the effort,” established its own Center for Equity, Engagement, and Research in January 2020. Months later, the center released what it called an Economic Equity Vision for Detroit, which it described as a path to deliberate action holding each other accountable in disrupting racist systems “so that Detroit can be prosperous, inclusive, and thriving.” Following the lead of Pittsburgh and Oakland, it called for the development of economic equity indicators and a dashboard by which the public could monitor progress toward its goals. In November 2020, the Kresge Foundation put $1.5 million behind the center’s effort as part of a larger $7 million national initiative supporting equity activism. “Place is where the dynamics of accountability are possible,” Kresge CEO Rip Rapson asserted, “where issues of race and justice and injustice are so clearly manifest that you can name them and spot them.”¹³

In Oakland, city officials revised the city’s initial “slow streets” program prompted by the pandemic to embrace equity standards after Black residents objected to its emphasis on amenities favored by whites, such as street closures and expansion of bike lanes. After a series of listening sessions in East Oakland, where traffic accidents disproportionately involved people of color, the planning department revised its approach under the name “essential places,” with the new goal of helping pedestrians in low-income areas move around more safely. Most striking, the city reopened the case of Oscar Grant a decade after his shooting by Bay Area transit police on New Year’s Day 2009 after his family noted similarities with the murder of George Floyd. Caught on video by a bystander, Grant’s death had provoked wide-scale protests and inspired the 2013 feature film Fruitvale Station.¹⁴

Anticipating protest demands to “defund police” following George Floyd’s death, a number of cities had begun to apply an equity lens to budget decisions. Before Tom Stosur retired as Baltimore’s planning director in 2018, the city announced a reorganization of its community development efforts based on the commitment “to equitable community development that brings new resources and opportunities to long-disadvantaged neighborhoods and their residents.”¹⁵ In 2019 a majority of Washington city council members introduced a Racial Equity Achieves Results Amendment to the city code requiring racial equity training for District of Columbia employees and explicit consideration of racial equity in the Department of Planning and Budget’s operation and performance-based budget. The city subsequently established an office for racial equity, with authority to review all city budgeting for its equity effects.¹⁶ In Oakland, a coalition of community and labor organizations operating under the name Refund Oakland pressed the city council to adopt what they called a moral budget by investing significantly in affordable housing, addressing homelessness, and preventing displacement. Such actions, it insisted, were compelled by “decades of divestment from vital services, systematic neglect of flatland neighborhoods, institutional racism, and exploitation.”¹⁷ In April 2020, Milwaukee County adopted an ordinance creating a budget tool aimed at greater equity in services. Months later Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett formed a working group on racial equity, justice, and accountability composed of activists as well as government officials to consider police reform, including budget reallocations for public safety.¹⁸ With additional precedents set, as they were in New Haven, and embraced in Pittsburgh, Oakland, and Newark particularly, there was hope that underserved communities could capture a greater share of the returns from new investment than the occasional trickle-down community benefits agreement might offer. Variations on this approach appeared in unlikely places.

In Indianapolis in 2019 the city’s chamber of commerce reoriented its incentives program, which had relied for years on tax abatements, to introduce a companion training grant program with the purpose of reducing racial disparities in access to promising career opportunities. In addition to directing a portion of tax incentives to addressing barriers to employment, the city’s “inclusive growth” approach required businesses receiving incentives to choose from a menu of opportunities for social investment, including in addition to diversity hiring, access to transit and child care and investment in underserved communities. Requiring a minimum of $18 an hour for each incentivized job for “underserved” residents in line with what was described as the city’s “shared values” approach, sponsors promised to establish metrics for community impact as part of the city’s comprehensive land-use strategy. Coincidentally, the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership joined with Cinnaire, a Michigan-based community development financial organization, to launch a $15 million Equitable Transit-Oriented Development Fund to preserve or create affordable housing along mass transit lines.¹⁹ Ironically, given the astronomical level of incentives directed toward securing Amazon’s second national headquarters—$6.7 billion for Pittsburgh, $7 billion in New Jersey, and $8.5 billion in Maryland—the Arlington, Virginia, package the company ultimately accepted was more balanced. While Virginia offered the company $550 million in job-creation grants, nearly twice that amount went to build a pipeline of technical workers and to improve transportation. “In the absence of national policy to rationalize the corporate-subsidy game,” Brookings Institution’s Amy Liu asserted, “states and cities can impose caps on as-of-right subsidies, demand full transparency and accountability from individual companies and make incentives more inclusive, so they support businesses that pay salaries that can support families and invest in training workers.”²⁰

Widely criticized during the Amazon competition for the ill effects of its booming economy on access to affordable housing,²¹ Seattle nonetheless was also taking important steps to ensure equity in development decisions. As early as 2005, it had become the first in the country to launch a citywide initiative aimed at eliminating racial inequalities. Seeking initially to “put its own house in order,” over the next decade Seattle partnered with a number of community organizations with the goal of eliminating racial inequity throughout the city. Those collaborations directly influenced the city’s comprehensive plan, Seattle 2035, which identified racial and social equity as its first core value. Building on a set of social equity indicators similar to those applied in Pittsburgh and Oakland, the plan paid special attention to housing, setting as a primary objective the distribution of public investments to address current inequities. Addressing economic development more broadly, the plan set its goal of pursuing “strategies for community development that help meet the needs of marginalized populations in multicultural business districts,” encouraging “all businesses to pay a living wage, provide necessary employment benefits, and train and hire local residents so that the existing workforce can share in the city’s prosperity,” and exploring “opportunities to coordinate community-development activities with place-based workforce-development opportunities in communities with high unemployment.”²² The object of a highly politicized investigation by the Department of Justice in the fall of 2020 after President Trump called such diversity actions “divisive, anti-American propaganda,” the Seattle program drew a passionate defense from two of its founders.²³ And then there was Minneapolis.

Recognizing the city’s persistent history of racial bias, Minneapolis created a Division of Race and Equity in 2017. Introduced by city councilmember Elizabeth Glidden, the ordinance, modeled largely on Oakland’s Office of Race and Equity, required all departments to create race equity action plans, use race equity in all business practices, and work with community organizations to set goals and accomplish the work. As an early product of the new office’s effect, the city council adopted a Strategic and Racial Equity Action Plan in July 2019. It established seven measurable and actionable priorities to reduce racial disparities in Minneapolis, stressing especially city policy on housing, economic development, and public safety. Anticipating the city council’s subsequent decision to shift funding from the police, a handout listing tactical priorities highlighted the determination to restructure city funding processes, including grants, commissions, and contracts, to benefit communities most impacted by structural racism.²⁴ Despite such efforts, minorities remained far behind whites in education, income, and employment. According to an NAACP report issued in December 2019, the Twin Cities ranked ninety-second out of one hundred metropolitan areas for racial equity,²⁵ this despite being hailed two years earlier for eliminating single-family zoning, long considered a classification perpetuating segregation. Coupled with provisions for requiring affordable units in the construction of new apartments and expanding an affordable housing fund, the new zoning law was advanced by a new generation of progressive city leaders who calculated that greater density and affordability would overturn housing conditions that sustained disparities in income and opportunity between whites and minority residents. Described as “a social experiment of epic proportions,” the shift in land use became part of the city’s new comprehensive plan devoted to ensuring that all Minneapolis residents “will be able to afford and access quality housing throughout the city, that all Minneapolis residents will have access to a living wage job, and that all Minneapolis residents will have access to daily needs via walking, biking, and public transit.” All elements of the plan were important, the politically progressive Century Fund reported, “but it was the elimination of single-family zoning—unprecedented in audacity and scale for a major U.S. city—that caught the imagination of observers.”²⁶

This was the point the country had arrived at when the pandemic struck in the spring of 2020: preliminary steps toward equity, fairness, and inclusion. Taken together, such efforts represented an alternative approach to development as currently practiced. Uneven in execution and result, they nonetheless were backed, and sometimes informed, by a growing network of organizational and institutional resources. Unions increasingly staked their future on the kind of coalition they built in New Haven. Foundations were shifting their focus to racial inequities, and universities were deepening their commitments to engaging community concerns. In addition to the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity, founded and directed by David Troutt in Newark, a number of university-based centers have been detailing the effects of metropolitan inequality, including the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California, the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity under the direction of Myron Orfield, and the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley.²⁷ Scholars behind these programs have come together with activists and philanthropists at a series of national “equity summits” in recent years under the auspices of the Oakland-based organization PolicyLink.²⁸ The Government Alliance on Race and Equity, formed in 2017, serves as a policy forum for local governments actively embracing an equity focus.

As promising as such developments have been, they fall short of altering the system sufficiently to protect the poor from the worst effects of capital accumulation strategies, first in abandoning their neighborhoods for a generation and once again in returning years later to ensure their marginalization or displacement as rents rise and commercial and civic functions shift to serve a more affluent clientele. To guard against the latest version of racial capitalism, some scholars embraced a concept originating with the French critic Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s of a “right to the city.” Featured in a 2018 exhibition under that title at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum celebrating neighborhood resistance to unwanted capital investments of the kind that remade the Southwest, the concept has been embraced by a number of critics, including David Harvey.²⁹ He contends that such a right “has to be construed not as a right to that which already exists but as a right to rebuild and recreate the city as a socialist body politic in a completely different image—one that eradicates poverty and social inequality, and one that heals the wounds of disastrous environmental degradation. For this to happen, the production of destructive forms of urbanization that perpetuate capital accumulation has to be stopped.”³⁰ Although this formulation lies well beyond the capacity of existing political regimes, the larger concept nonetheless offers a practical model for urban revitalization in the example of Brazil’s City Statute, which makes proposed new development contingent on whether it provides an adequate contribution to social needs.³¹ By elevating the use value of urban space to that of its exchange value, such a law mandates a balanced approach that could well be emulated in the United States as a complement to existing equity initiatives. But to get there, Susan Fainstein suggests, requires what she calls nonreformist reforms that operate within existing social frameworks but that can set in motion a trajectory of change in which more radical reforms become practicable over time.³²

Attributed to another Frenchman, socialist André Gorz, the concept of nonreformist reforms embraces a vision that extends well beyond reformist reforms, which Amna Akbar characterizes as “a tired continuation of liberal politics and legalism, expert-driven and elite-centered.”³³ Rejecting such incremental approaches, Fainstein envisions the coalescence of the energy of protest with the calculation of just policymaking, concluding that “there are obvious limits to what can be accomplished at the metropolitan level. At the very least, however, a concern with justice can prevent urban regimes from displacing residents involuntarily, destroying communities, and directing resources at costly megaprojects that offer few general benefits. More positively, it can lead to policies that foster equitable distribution of governmental revenues, produce a lively, diverse, and accessible public realm, and make local decision making more transparent and open to the viewpoints of currently excluded groups.” Such results might well achieve what New York Times columnist Charles Blow called “a Civil Rights Bill of 2020” incorporating what Martin Luther King had been seeking a generation earlier: quality education; decent, good-paying jobs; and fair housing.³⁴

To their credit, in an era of urban revitalization, alliances formed seeking to tap new wealth for critical social needs. In the process, they demonstrated the potential for overcoming racial inequities. As they carried forward, boosted by the emergence of a revived Black Lives Matter movement, they gave new life to their cause. Because the political and economic obstacles remained formidable, however, this would be a test equal in depth if not precisely in kind to that of the civil rights movement half a century earlier. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, echoing Henry George almost 150 year earlier, put it as the Covid-19 crisis reached a peak, “Even when the flaws of our society are so easy to point out, resolving them comes into immediate conflict with the very basic assumptions of governance in our country today. Repairing deep, historical, and continuing harm done to Black people will require deep, abiding transformations.” “Black lives can matter,” she wrote in another venue. “But it will demand a struggle to not only change the police, but to change the world that relies on the police to manage its unequal distribution of the necessities of life.”³⁵