{"id":164,"date":"2019-03-08T19:04:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-08T19:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/?p=164"},"modified":"2019-03-08T19:20:12","modified_gmt":"2019-03-08T19:20:12","slug":"why-history-matters-in-equitable-development-planning-next-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/164\/","title":{"rendered":"Why History Matters in Equitable Development Planning \u2013 Next City"},"content":{"rendered":"

nextcity.org\/daily\/entry\/why-history-matters-in-equitable-development-planning?utm_source=Next+City+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b047bef009-Daily_781_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fcee5bf7a0-b047b…<\/a>
\nWhy History Matters in Equitable Development Planning The researchers could have led with the numbers \u2014 homes purchased, local small businesses assisted, construction worker trainees placed, pounds of fruit and vegetables harvested.
\nInstead, in the second of three reports on the 11th Street Bridge Park project in Washington, D.C. \u2014 released today \u2014 the Urban Institute\u2019s Mary Bogle, Somala Diby and Mychal Cohen begin with a seven-page history of community and economic development in and around D.C.\u2019s Wards 7 and 8.
\nThose are the wards with the highest poverty rates and highest percentage of black residents in the District, and compared with Ward 6 on the other side of the future Bridge Park, dramatically lower rates of higher education, and much higher rent burdens.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s difficult to talk about achieving equity in the present day without taking a nod to the way that structural racism has manifested,\u201d says Diby. \u201cWe can talk really generally about how structural racism manifests in space, but to lay it out explicitly, to show how this is not accidental, there\u2019s a reason why this part of the city is facing what it\u2019s been facing \u2026 that\u2019s powerful.\u201d
\nNot to mention, it\u2019s a riveting history. The Anacostia neighborhood, now a predominantly black neighborhood, sits at one end of the planned park, which is due to open in 2023. It was once actually a \u201cwhite working-class enclave\u201d where one covenant forbade \u201cnegroes, mulattoes, pigs, or soap boiling.\u201d The shift in area demographics, the authors write in their report, \u201cwas the result of development decisions made over the 20th century that altered the landscape of D.C. significantly.\u201d
\nDuring the Great Migration, Bogle explains, \u201c[African-Americans] were drawn to D.C. because they thought they were going to get more equity for their kids in schools, and then they got to D.C. and what actually happened was they got put into crowded neighborhoods because that\u2019s where the public housing got put. Then schools declined over time.\u201d
\nMany of those neighborhoods were on the east side of the Anacostia River, in Wards 7 and 8. When the schools integrated after Brown v. Board of Education, most of the remaining white families decamped for all-white suburbs or other neighborhoods in the city that were off-limits to black families. A generation or two of disinvestment followed.
\nThat history is more than obvious to many long-standing residents of Wards 7 and 8. Many have lived through it, often being displaced through the policies of the Urban Renewal era or by other historic forces that led them to live in these areas today. Some of those residents talked to the Urban Institute researchers.
\n\u201cSeveral folks had lived in other parts of the city that had transformed in decades prior, and had seen whole neighborhoods change rapidly,\u201d Diby says. \u201cThat history is very real to them.\u201d
\nPerhaps most presciently for the 11th Street Bridge Park, it is also a history of broken promises.
\n\u201cThe qualitative data in the report surfaces an important thing to recognize, which is how tired residents are of being told things are going to get better, and then they don\u2019t get better,\u201d Bogle says. \u201cThere are a lot of people in Wards 7 and 8 who are pretty jaundiced through all this. Bringing them back to tables where they feel like their voices are heard and something meaningful will happen and they won\u2019t incur a greater rent burden as well, is a hard task, given all this history.\u201d
\nOne of the most important outcomes that the researchers attribute to the 11th Street Bridge Park Equitable Development Plan is a change to the plan itself: the addition of a new strategy for \u201ccultural equity,\u201d to amplify the arts and culture of the surrounding community, in revisions finalized in October 2018. The addition is in many ways a nod to the notion of preserving the memory of how these areas came to be what they are today, validating the lived experience of those who, by choice or by economic force, stayed in Wards 7 and 8 through the years of disinvestment, the crack epidemic and mass incarceration.
\nThe cultural equity work is already happening through the annual Anacostia River Festival and the Black Love Experience, a yearly event organized by Anika Hobbs, a Ward 8 resident and entrepreneur who spoke to the Urban Institute researchers.
\n\u201cThe 11th Street Bridge Project says, \u2018I see you,\u2019\u201d Hobbs said. \u201c\u2018I see the value in what you do, and let\u2019s do this together.\u2019 And I think that\u2019s completely different. And that removes the fear of that obliteration [from gentrification] I was nervous about.\u201d
\nThe report includes more \u201cconventional\u201d outcome measures as well. So far, the project\u2019s homebuyers\u2019 club has helped 70 participants purchase homes. Meanwhile 104 businesses received loans or technical assistance from the Washington Area Community Investment Fund as part of the equitable development plan (a total of $525,000 in loans), 31 construction worker trainees were placed and employed for at least 90 days after program completion, and 7,603 pounds of fruits and vegetables have been harvested on farms and plots funded through the Bridge Park\u2019s equitable development plan.
\nThe authors also included a forward-looking note of caution to ground expectations in historical reality:
\n\u2026 achieving a set of equitable development results is not the same as achieving actual equity (i.e., fairness and justice) for an historically marginalized community. After all, it is possible to imagine any number of equitable development projects being completed in a previously disinvested-in neighborhood without true equity ever being achieved. In other words, more affordable housing, small businesses, jobs, and cultural experiences may be preserved or created without there ever being enough of these things to prevent displacement of many current residents, much less to substantially mitigate the widespread effects of systemic racism on black and low-income residents living in places like DC\u2019s Ward 8.
\nThat\u2019s not to say equity isn\u2019t worth striving for, but rather, equity is not something that one project, no matter how ambitious and thoughtful, can achieve on its own. Equity is a generational aspiration.
\n\u201cWe wanted that section at the end discussing there\u2019s a difference between equitable development and equity as a result,\u201d Bogle says. \u201cThe Bridge Park alone isn\u2019t going to make it on equity \u2014 and they know that. It\u2019s going to take a lot of partners.\u201d
\nThis story is part of The Power of Parks, a series exploring how parks and recreation facilities and services can help cities achieve their goals in wellness, conservation and social equity. The Power of Parks is supported by a grant from the National Recreation and Park Association.<\/p>\n

Mary Bolton 202-390-1208<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

nextcity.org\/daily\/entry\/why-history-matters-in-equitable-development-planning?utm_source=Next+City+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b047bef009-Daily_781_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fcee5bf7a0-b047b… Why History Matters in Equitable Development Planning The researchers could have led with the numbers \u2014 homes purchased, local small businesses assisted, construction worker trainees placed, pounds of fruit and vegetables harvested. Instead, in the second of three reports on the 11th Street Bridge Park project in Washington, D.C. \u2014 released today \u2014 the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-housingarchive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}