City_Skyline_Squares-20

Washington DC

WASHINGTON DC

Incorporated 1790

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 68.4 sq. miles
  • 684,498 Total population
  • 11,196  People per sq. mile
  • 9.2% Forest cover
  • Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome
  • 15.1% Developed open space
  • $82,604  Median household income
  • 12.9%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 59.4% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 9.7% Housing units vacant
  • 0.2% Native, 36.6% White, 45.4% Black,  11% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 3.9% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

The Nation’s Capitol occupies the lands of Piscataway and Nacotchtank peoples who have continued to fight for their treaty rights. Since before the Civil War, the city has served as a major center for Black culture and organizing. Waves of growth, uneven investment, and dispossession structure patterns of segregation that are persistent to this day.

The low-lying city occupies the tidal confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. A hilly landscape surrounds the central city, with clay-rich soils and bedrock ridges creating many small drainages across the city. Like other East Coast cities, rising sea levels, increasingly strong and frequent storms, and heatwaves have collided with record snowfalls to stress the city’s infrastructure systems. Jurisdictional complexity has hampered city efforts to achieve compliance with federal regulations, mirroring persistent patterns of environmental injustice in the city. The city struggles to address housing shortages with the metropolitan area absorbing large amounts of displaced people. Booms in commercial real estate development and rising housing costs drive these patterns, as the city has yet to recover its peak population of over 800,000 residents in 1950.

Green Infrastructure in Washington DC

The majority of GI plans in Washington DC deal with stormwater management, although the city’s combined sewer overflow plan seeks to integrate natural processes into the urban environment. The Anacostia Watershed Restoration Plan focuses on climate resilience with a green infrastructure concept. The city was unique among those examined in having a wildlife-focused plan, which used the terminology of GI without defining it.

Reflecting this range of plans, the city defines a diverse set of GI types spanning ecological elements, hybrid systems, and green technologies. Similarly, plans focus on providing numerous social, environmental, and infrastructural functions with GI. Benefit-wise, city GI plans seek to deliver a diverse range of environmental, socio-economic, and infrastructure system benefits.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Washington DC

Key Findings

GI Plans in Washington DC commonly refer to the need to address equity and justice concerns, and yet equity was defined in only one plan. Procedurally, city plans have few binding mechanisms for equitable design, implementation, and evaluation. The city’s GI programs, however, are widespread and within city-supported redevelopment programs.

100%

explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

11%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

33%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

11%

define equity

0%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

11%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Washington DC Through Maps

The 8 wards of Washington DC display striking contrasts in their density, infrastructure, and amount of open space. The ‘green wall’ of Rock Creek Park has some of the wealthiest and whitest residents in the northwest portion of the city. Gentrification has displaced many lower-income residents, although the city has strikingly high vacancy rates distributed throughout. A majority of DC residents are rent-burdened, with rates remarkably high in the southeast portion of the city. 

How does Washington DC account for Equity in GI Planning?

GI plans in Washington DC weakly frame and define the relationships between green infrastructure, equity, and justice, with only one plan containing a definition of equity. The plans only perfunctorily include communities aside from the most recent Sustainability Plan which appeared to make an effort for widespread outreach. The city’s GI Plan discusses the need for community-based evaluation of city GI programs but does not provide robust mechanisms to do so.

While GI plans seek to mitigate stormwater and flooding hazards, they fail to robustly address multi-dimensional and intersecting issues of climate hazard management with changing property values. While the relationship between evolving GI programs and some forms of labor are explored, they require significant elaboration.

Envisioning Equity

The DC Sustainability Plan is the only document we examined that defines equity, however, it essentially aims for a ‘post-racial’ society without acknowledging structural issues or historical hurdles. This is a type of equity jiu-jitsu that appears unique to the district, as it invokes Title IV of the Civil Rights Act to expressly prohibit providing disproportionate benefit to social groups based on race as a criterion. The current logic framing equity limits consideration of the substantive impacts of GI on stormwater program cost burdens due to the omission of analysis or discussion of historical and current causes of racial inequality in the city and a fairly narrow conceptualization of green infrastructure.

Procedural Equity

The Sustainability Plan again led the way in setting up a relatively large-scale public outreach process, explicitly seeking to include those underrepresented in prior planning processes. However, survey responses seem highly curated and lack documentation of the demographics of participation. This lack, despite the claim of representativeness, especially of underrepresented communities, diminishes the value of the responses. All of the storm and sewer plans complied with federal regulations regarding public meetings and comment periods but did not discuss well-documented issues with community inclusion in such processes. A lack of inclusion carries through to design and implementation. 

The evaluation phase in the City’s GI Program Plan (a GI-specific component of the Long Term Control Plan), highlighted some best practices for inclusion, explicitly seeking public feedback on the performance of GI. However, the solicitation of community input was restricted to the stormwater management performance of GI, devised to ensure the appropriate maintenance of facilities rather than assessing the overall social impact of GI installations.

Distributional Equity

The distributional equity of GI in the city was not vigorously addressed in any DC plans. While plans contained a range of benefits intended to add value across the city, no plan fully considered what equitable distribution would mean. There was also limited-to-no engagement with the concept of contextual value, that the perceived value of GI may vary between communities and settings. And unlike best-practice cities, plans do not discuss the risks posed by value increases from GI projects, examine the causes of unequal distributions of environmental amenities and hazards, or how some communities have been made more vulnerable than others.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Despite a number of initiatives that have the potential for integration, green infrastructure planning in the District of Columbia remains fragmented with poorly articulated mechanisms for community engagement. DC is one of the fastest gentrifying cities in the country and has finally started growing its population again after decades of decline. World-famous congestion and burgeoning demand for alternative transit, walkable neighborhoods, high quality of urban life, and mounting climate risks all demand an expansion and improvement of a city-wide multifunctional green space network. Without community leadership and mechanisms for marginalized communities to have ownership over planning, it is unlikely current efforts will address the concerns of those facing housing displacement and dealing with systemic inequality caused by previous planning efforts. The city has garnered national attention for the creation of a community land trust in some of the lands surrounding the 11th street bridge project and attempts to ‘green’ southeast DC in place. Although given the displacement that has already occurred in inner southeast and Capitol Hill, it is unclear how successful this approach will be. The history of community organizing around housing is strong in DC and the city was a leader in the housing coop movement. To have a more equitable GI system, existing avenues for housing affordability should be strengthened as the city continues to make necessary investments in a multidimensional green infrastructure network. 

Community Groups

Numerous national organizations are based in Washington DC and focus on large-scale policy change (e.g. We Act). However, these organizations are not grounded in local issues facing current and long-term residents. A host of community groups have been working on economic justice and housing advocacy within the District, such as DC Jobs with Justice and others supported by the DC Childcare Collective. However, these broad coalitions do not appear to be focused on climate resilience or green infrastructure issues. Other environmental justice initiatives focus largely on ongoing toxic waste issues but intersect with the Long-Term Control Plan to some degree because they include the city’s Blue Plains Sewage Treatment Plant. Opportunities exist for these organizations to coalesce around a just transition framework, simultaneously addressing housing, environmental justice, urban redevelopment, and labor issues. In solidarity with these ongoing efforts, we provide several concrete recommendations below.

1. From Increasing Value to Restorative and Transformative Justice

The dominant rhetoric in DC GI plans is that of increasing the value of the urban environment while cost-effectively complying with regulations. While improvements in infrastructure systems are certainly necessary, their potential impacts should be framed by the concerns of those who have been most marginalized by existing planning processes. For example, using percentages of market-rate housing costs as a criterion for affordability guarantees a majority of current Black residents will not be able to afford newly developed ‘affordable housing’ without structural economic change due to the extreme income discrepancies between different populations within the district. Median white family income in the District is 3x higher than median Black family income. 

A restorative justice framework was utilized by previous DC administrations to build successful programs for youth empowerment, which led the city’s cultural revival following the race riots of the 1960s and subsequent mass exodus to the suburbs. Transforming how city planning occurs to address restorative justice will require coalitions of interest groups that have been historically fragmented and often antagonistic, such as nature conservation groups, and those concerned with housing and racial justice. The only existing framework that addresses jobs, housing, and environmental quality is that of a just transition.

2. Equitable Equity Evaluation

Like other cities, DC has created formal mechanisms, namely the Council Office on Racial Equity, for evaluating the equity of city policies and decisions. However, the framing of equity issues centers on eliminating racial disparities and prevents using race as a criterion for additional investment in communities and neighborhoods. While this logic is understandable, a larger transformation is necessary for communities themselves to evaluate the equity of city decision making, which they have often done quite vocally, but with limited uptake into city policy. While the existing Advisory Neighborhood Councils (ANC) do allow for some local control of planning and zoning decisions, they are also notoriously unreliable and often favor the interests of developers over community members. Evolving the ANC model to have direct votes over major proposals affecting neighborhood quality of life would be one strategy to allow for immediate feedback from communities on development plans. At a minimum, existing initiatives to address equity analysis should have a clear and transparent process to document and address public input, otherwise, equity washing will remain rampant.

Policy Makers & Planners

Planners and policy makers in DC currently have an outsized role in shaping the city’s green infrastructure programs. Despite related planning around habitat, environmental quality, and parks and recreation, these plans have no underlying conceptual unity for linking multi-functional green spaces with built infrastructure systems. Simultaneously, plans are largely silent on the social equity concerns of transformative environmental planning. To address these twin gaps, policymakers and planners can undertake three related projects: broadening the scope of current GI concepts, integrating existing planning efforts into a more cohesive city-wide vision responsive to the needs and demands of diverse residents, and embracing the idea of a just transition to go beyond GI when addressing GI’s social impacts.

1. Going Beyond a Stormwater Concept With an Integrated Green Infrastructure Concept

Green infrastructure-focused planners in Washington DC have largely implemented a stormwater control concept to comply with the EPA’s regulations. They have been significantly hampered by a lack of jurisdiction of almost 40% of the District’s impervious cover, which is on federal property. In the face of such a fundamental constraint, greater coordination with federal agencies and property owners is certainly necessary to meet their runoff control goals. Progress on this coordination has been slow and devastating to project budgets. 

Recognizing green infrastructure as a network of diverse green spaces that mesh with engineered systems to meet multiple social goals will give planners more leeway for planning interventions that will contribute to stormwater compliance, even if they are not formally considered as control measures by the EPA. An approach that goes beyond stormwater compliance is necessary to address the myriad of climate change impacts, which will profoundly affect the District’s most marginalized communities. Currently, only the habitat conservation plan seriously addresses the topic of heatwaves and flooding, both of which can be significantly mitigated through a city-wide green infrastructure network. 

The District has ample space for housing its current population and, with increases in density, could house significantly more people than it presently does. So, a serious conversation needs to be had on how to make space for nature and floodwater within the existing urban matrix. The Habitat Conservation Plan’s analysis of the impacts of climate change on different habitat types could be integrated into a large-scale planning framework, such as the Comp Plan, to create active transit corridors, daylight urban streams, and provide street tree canopy while improving higher density housing. 

2. Integrating Disparate Plan Efforts Into a Cohesive Citywide GI Planning Process 

With a more integrated concept and vision of GI, planners and policymakers in DC can start to integrate existing plans including the Vision Zero transit safety plan, the Parks and Rec Master Plan, the DC Habitat Plan, and the Anacostia Restoration Plan with limited bicycle planning efforts and stormwater planning through a comprehensive and community-led planning effort. While some planning efforts address a portion of this need, such as the small area planning process, the recent update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan, and the update of the city’s Parks and Rec Plan, they do not have any underlying conceptual unity with regards to planning for urban environmental quality. Environmental protection, infrastructure, parks, and open space are all treated as separate planning themes. A city-wide GI plan using an integrated concept of GI would allow for these separate planning processes to collaboratively envision and enact a more liveable future across the city. To ensure such a process is truly equitable, planners will have to evolve current inclusion and engagement mechanisms and invest a portion of their current budget surplus into community planning councils.

3. Going Beyond GI to Address GI’s impacts Through a Just Transition Approach

As in other cities, the social concerns impacted by GI planning cannot be addressed by GI planning alone. Housing, jobs, and environmental justice all require structural economic transformation and yet are deeply intertwined with urban quality of life, urban form, and the types of built infrastructure systems that urban residents rely on. A just transition approach focuses on eliminating polluting industries by transitioning to a clean and circular economy, improving the quality of housing, and valuing the labor required to do so. While the city historically had many manufacturing jobs, current opportunities are limited to government employment, consulting and government contracting, nonprofit sector employment, and the service industry. Reestablishing urban industries and focusing on creating more high-value labor opportunities in historically marginalized communities are necessary steps to build wealth with GI and prevent further housing displacement.

Foundations and Funders

Washington DC is the nonprofit capital of the world. And yet, extreme disparities in life expectancy, housing affordability, and incomes are remarkably persistent despite a vigorous and public culture of organizing in the city. While not a panacea, a city-wide green infrastructure system utilizing a just transition framework can address some aspects of systemic racism by creating high-paying jobs, improving environmental health equitably, and reducing cost burdens for infrastructure. While there are many potential avenues to iteratively improve the equity of GI planning in DC discussed above, we focus on one key recommendation for funders looking to have a positive influence in the city.

  1. Good Green Jobs Instead of Nonprofit Precarity 

Foundations, funders, and city government have all contributed mightily to the proliferation of nonprofit organizations fulfilling the civic roles once held by steadily employed public sector employees. Overall, this has contributed to the creation of an ever more precarious workforce, staffed by transient young people from outside of the city on their way to higher-paying jobs elsewhere. This neoliberalization of social and environmental governance has failed to produce the changes in society and the environment that it promised. The decline of public sector employment in the District has had a profound impact on the city’s Black community - who benefited from the growth of well-paying government jobs with defined pension plans. A green jobs force, as envisioned by many in the just transition movement, requires both dedicated public funding, and mechanisms for cost recovery. The current model of foundations funding nonprofits to do public sector work is inherently unsustainable. Rather, foundations and funders can support organizations working for structural change, which will eventually make their work obsolete.

Closing Insights

The Nation’s Capital highlights all of the tensions we have observed across cities in the US attempting to address equity with green infrastructure planning. These include a circumscribed or limited GI concept, a lack of clarity around the meaning of equity, and inconsistent means of including communities in the decisions that affect residents' lives. To embark on a new era of GI planning that addresses systemic inequalities, we envision a paradigm shift around ecological urbanism and a just transition, which entails direct democratic governance of infrastructure and urban planning.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-18

Syracuse

SYRACUSE

Incorporated 1825

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 25.6 sq. miles
  • 143,293 Total population
  • 5,725  People per sq. mile
  • 5.6% Forest cover
  • Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome
  • 13.2% Developed open space
  • $36,308  Median household income
  • 24.4%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 65.4% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 17.8% Housing units vacant
  • 0.9% Native, 50% White, 28.5% Black, 9.4% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 6.5% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

Syracuse occupies the homelands of the Onondaga Nation, members of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, who maintain their traditional government while confronting the dynamics of colonialism in the region. The city has steadily grown throughout its history, though the population has been stable for the last decade. 

Residents in the intensely segregated city have long fought for environmental justice. De-industrialization profoundly impacts the city’s labor markets, while ecological restoration and highway removal promise to reshape the city’s future. Climate change threatens the city with heat waves, increased flooding, and the possibility of prolonged drought.

Green Infrastructure in Syracuse

Syracuse GI plans examined included its current Comprehensive, Land Use, and Sustainability Plans. Like several other cities examined, Syracuse GI deals only with stormwater management, and the city itself has limited influence on the Onondaga County Department of Water Environment Protection’s regulated storm and sewer programs (which fall outside the scope of this analysis). The city has long supported the County’s ‘Save the Rain Program’ with its Sustainability, Comprehensive, and Land Use Plans which we examined for this project.

These GI plans focus on disconnecting impervious cover from the city’s combined sewer system using a limited set of hybrid facilities and green technologies, including rain barrels, pervious pavers, bioswales, and green roofs.

Syracuse GI plans describe the benefits of addressing these persistent issues primarily as improving water quality, recreation opportunities, reducing the cost of infrastructure, and improving urban aesthetics.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Syracuse

Key Findings

Only Syracuse’s Sustainability Plan explicitly refers to equity, and even that plan does not define it. All plans examined had some basic mechanisms of inclusion in place, but did not thoroughly consider the causes of inequity and injustice, nor do they make detailed plans to address inequalities in the distribution of hazards and benefits of GI.

33%

explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

67%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

33%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

33%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Syracuse Through Maps

Syracuse has a dense urban core abutting lake Onondaga, with green space unevenly distributed around the urban periphery.  Rent burden, income, and vacancy rates are all spatially clustered and appear highly correlated with race. 

How Does Syracuse Account for Equity in GI Planning?

Syracuse GI plans are largely silent on equity and justice issues. GI is generally framed as a universal good and as part of a larger program of urban improvement that emphasizes a need for new real estate development. No plan in Syracuse addressed all ten dimensions of equity in our evaluation tool.

Envisioning Equity

A definition of equity was not found in a single Syracuse plan. The Comprehensive Plan describes a vision for the city that has equity implications but does not focus on equitable development. The Sustainability Plan states that social equity is a major goal, but focuses on economic development and improving urban quality of life without engaging in questions of current inequities. The Sustainability Plan also referred to the need to address food justice but a stormwater-focused GI concept was seen as potentially competing with urban agriculture for space, rather than complementary to an urban food system concept. 

Overall, no plans examined current inequalities or disparities in the city. They framed persistent issues of poverty and unemployment as resolvable by attracting new markets for real estate development alongside investments in schools.

Procedural Equity

The city’s GI plans have some basic mechanisms of inclusion in plan formation, although implementation and evaluation are generally problematic. Inclusion in planning is generally limited to meetings and steering committees composed largely of local experts and city agencies. There is limited documentation of public comments, or how and why individuals were appointed to steering committees. No effort appears to have been made to include those disproportionately and negatively impacted by previous planning decisions. The Comprehensive Plan states that the city neighborhood planning initiative, Tomorrow’s Neighborhoods Today, will have committees that reflect the needs of individual neighborhoods; however, it does not describe a process to achieve such representativeness. 

Design-wise, there are some avenues identified for community involvement in zoning and smaller-scale planning but there are no participatory design processes described. Similarly, plan implementation is largely a process run by city agency professionals, with no clear avenue for public participation. The Comprehensive Plan will be reevaluated as part of the update process but it is not clear if this will include an evaluation of the impacts of GI on affected communities. Similarly, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) premiums described within the Land Use Plan, a major vehicle for GI implementation in the city, will be internally evaluated by city agencies for their effectiveness. The Sustainability Plan was alone in describing some type of community-based evaluation. However,  it does not explicitly involve the community in evaluating plan effectiveness and only makes vague commitments to a ‘reputable’ community sustainability rating system.

Distributional Equity

Syracuse GI plans do not have a robust discussion of managing multiple hazards with GI, although there are some mentions of addressing more than one hazard at the same time. For example, the Comprehensive Plan discusses the need to improve traffic safety at schools by integrating GI into streetscape design. And while the Sustainability Plan discusses managing stormwater runoff, mitigating the urban heat island, and addressing traffic safety all at the same time, there is no analysis or discussion of the distribution of these hazards or how some communities have been made more vulnerable to them than others. The Land Use Plan discusses some legacy contamination issues in relation to GI, yet neglects any examination of their social or spatial patterns. All Syracuse GI plans use broadly similar language around quality of life and reversing urban decline.  Yet they do not acknowledge the contextual nature of the value and hazards that may accompany redevelopment such as displacement and gentrification, nor the unevenness in the distribution of GI value. 

The Sustainability Plan describes a need to install GI with incentive programs for property owners. This would provide some limited distribution of financial benefits in exchange for homeownership. Otherwise, Syracuse GI plans are silent on labor issues.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

GI planning in Syracuse has a long way to go to address the city’s issues of entrenched poverty, segregation, and environmental injustice. While GI may partially address longer-running environmental justice concerns of the city’s combined sewer overflows, ongoing work seeks to understand how the benefits of GI intersect with uneven social vulnerability in the city. As the city seeks to reinvent itself through highway removal and ongoing ecological restoration programs, debate continues about how to prevent housing displacement during the current wave of reinvestment. Here we provide several concrete recommendations for how future GI planning can evolve to address equity issues.

Community Groups

Syracuse’s grassroots community groups have been fighting for racial and environmental justice for a long time. These groups have the place-based knowledge to determine the current and potential meanings of equity and justice and their experiences must be centered in the evolution of urban planning in the city. Based on our reading of current plans, community experiences can inform two large necessary evolutions of urban planning. These are:

1. The Meaning of Equity and Justice 

Current plans do not address equity or justice explicitly. Today, the language of environmental justice is being used to discuss the large-scale redevelopment and highway removal in the urban core, which, if done correctly, presents an opportunity to right historical wrongs. However, plans do not discuss those historical wrongs, or how they continue to shape the present. Community groups should articulate their specific needs and visions for accountability and justice in ways that redistribute power to frame environmental justice issues in the city or else risk their experiences being swept aside in the rush to redevelop.

2. Transforming City Planning to achieve Procedural Equity

Community groups in Syracuse seem largely left out of current planning efforts. While some have called for greater inclusion within urban planning in the city, there are no clear avenues for communities to shape how those planning processes are formed. Drawing upon current best practices, greater outreach at the earliest stages of planning is needed. Also, communities should be provided with the resources to set planning agendas and develop a community-based planning process that serves their needs.

Policy Makers & Planners

Syracuse GI plans are primarily focused on stormwater management despite the city being poised for a major redevelopment project. The city has a historic opportunity to not only address the environmental injustice of I-81 but to restructure the fabric of the city core to meet the needs of residents. To achieve these twin goals, we have three major recommendations for policy makers and planners in the city.

1. Embrace a More Integrative Concept of Green Infrastructure

Employing a more integrated concept of green infrastructure is crucial for Syracuse city planning going forward. This would provide greater coherency and linkages between existing initiatives, and allow for a more comprehensive and engaged GI planning process. The integration of ongoing planning efforts relevant to a city-wide GI system with those focused on stormwater management will more effectively meet stormwater management goals while simultaneously supporting objectives for alternative transit and increased park spaces. Merging stormwater programs with a landscape concept of GI will connect the city’s urban forestry program, tree canopy ordinance, and city-wide open space and trail network schemes with its stormwater management planning.

2. From Professionalization to Participation

GI planning and design within the city and county are largely run by GI professionals and their skills and knowledge are useful. Yet, if expert opinion is all that is considered when planning for and designing GI, then GI will be out of touch with the experiences, needs, and desires of residents. While Syracuse government and planners define the city as a habitat designed for people, they can extend this thinking to characterize the city as a habitat designed by people for people. With this logic in mind, planners can embrace ongoing GI implementation and urban redesign as an opportunity evolve processes that shape environmental justice.

3. Urban Redevelopment That Supports Current Residents

Like many other cities we examined, Syracuse uses its GI programs to attract new real estate investment and growth rather than support residents’ needs and aspirations. The existing residents and businesses are the backbone of any attempt to reinvent a city and incentivizing new development exclusively will lead to their displacement. Elaborating a city-wide GI system presents opportunities to build community wealth in place.

Foundations and Funders

Syracuse’s GI programs already benefit from several foundations and funders undertaking work in the city. These institutions can improve the equity impact of their work in one important way in the city.

  1. From Funding Distribution Gaps to Building Community Power

Several projects in Syracuse seek to improve green infrastructure by making environmental amenities more widespread and reducing disparities in exposure to managed hazards. These programs, while admirable, fall short of addressing underlying causes of environmental racism; unequal access to political and economic power is a primary driver of inequity in urban systems. Investing in organizations that build community power to transform urban planning processes, so that they are run by the communities they intend to serve, can and should be a major focus of funding efforts within the city. Given that the city sits within the territory of one of the oldest direct democracies in the world - the Haudenosaunee confederacy - it would do well to learn how to operationalize democratic planning drawing upon the systems that cared for the land from time immemorial.

Closing Insights

Despite a decade of leadership on green infrastructure implementation for stormwater management, plans in the City of Syracuse are largely silent on equity issues. Building meaningful processes of community leadership within planning systems remains a major need. Still, the city can address the legacies and realities of environmental and social injustice by implementing a more integrative concept of GI to shape environmental and infrastructure planning efforts, providing the necessary resources for community-led planning, and restoring Indigenous systems of governance.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-19

St. Louis

ST. LOUIS

Incorporated 1764

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 66.1 sq miles
  • 311,273 Total Population
  • 5,041 People per sq. mile
  • 0.8% Forest cover
  • Temperate Grasslands, Savannas, and Shrublands Biome
  • 6.4% Developed open space
  • $41,107 Median household income
  • 18.6%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 61.6% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 20.4% Housing units vacant
  • 0.2% Native, 43.6% White, 46.2% Black, 4% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 3.3% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander

*socio-economic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and Land Cover Data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The City of St. Louis occupies the homelands of the Osage Nation.  French settlers founded a  trading post near the area, which depended upon harmonious relations with Native peoples and incorporated a township there prior to the land claims of the United States. With the enactment of the Louisiana Purchase, treaties with Native peoples were broken and tribes were forcibly removed to make way for westward expansion and American settlement. 

Since that time, the city has had several boom and bust cycles. It has a long and complex history of its Black culture since prior to the civil war and was a pivotal area for the determination of the continuation of slavery in the USA. Built along the banks of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, the city faces climate-related hazards of flooding, heat waves, drought, and issues related to its combined storm and sewer system, which is managed by a metropolitan agency (outside the scope of this analysis). The city’s industrial sector, a major source of jobs, has yet to recover, and like many others, the city faces complex economic challenges inseparable from national policy. Contaminated brownfields face an uncertain future as St. Louis seeks to redevelop itself while addressing persistent issues of structural racism and segregation.

Green Infrastructure in St. Louis

We scanned ten documents that potentially dealt with GI planning in the City of St. Louis. Of these, we excluded several that addressed GI but were not led by the City itself, including the collaboratively written OneSTL regional comprehensive plan and stormwater compliance planning led by the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District (MSD). Green Infrastructure in the City has a complex and multi-level governance arrangement outside the scope of this analysis. City plans we did examine included the City of St. Louis Sustainability Plan and the North Riverfront Commerce Corridor Land Use Plan. While the NRCCLUP did not define GI, the Sustainability Plan explicitly used a stormwater concept of GI. Both plans seek to support regional initiatives in implementing city-scale GI focused on stormwater management.

GI Plans in the City sought to manage stormwater using a range of facility types across all categories of ecosystem elements, hybrid facilities, and green materials and technologies. Despite a diversity of elements, including trees, bioretention, blue-green corridors, green roofs, and rain gardens, plans omitted discussion of trails, networks, agricultural areas, and floodplains.

Functionally, GI plans focused on a range of hydrological functions seeking to manage stormwater flows through a variety of means (e.g. infiltration, retention, flow attenuation) along with improving water quality and the performance of the stormwater system.

Defining Green Infrastructure in St. Louis

Key Findings

St. Louis’s Sustainability Plan focuses on equity and sought an inclusive process of plan creation, yet does not address all ten dimensions we evaluated. The North Riverfront Commerce Corridor Plan mentions equity but does not address equity issues other than a general focus on supporting future economic development. Many opportunities exist to improve the equity of St. Louis GI Planning, but these will likely require changes in metropolitan planning systems.

100%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

50%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

50%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

St. Louis through Maps

An older city within a large metropolitan area, St. Louis has a dense urban core and riverfront area, surrounded by a lower density grid with several large open spaces and evenly distributed smaller municipal parks. The city is extremely segregated with regards to race and income, patterns reflected in vacancy rates of housing units, and rent burden. While the Northern riverfront is intensely developed, it has a very low population density compared to the southern portions of the city.

How does St. Louis account for Equity in GI Planning?

No plan in St. Louis defines equity. The Sustainability Plan does draw upon equity as a core concept, and provides a basic framework for equitably planning for GI, but falls far short of sustainability planning efforts in other cities. GI is primarily seen as a tool for cost-effectively managing stormwater while fostering redevelopment.

Envisioning Equity

The Sustainability Plan devotes a whole plan section to discussing equity without ever defining it. It also omits any real discussion of historical problems or the causes of current inequalities in the city. It considers itself a best-in-class plan and a leader in addressing equity issues. Yet, it utilizes a problematic frame, one that deems the goals of fostering innovation and gentrifying the city through the attraction of motivated young professionals into historically marginalized areas in need of redevelopment as desirable. With an absence of discussion about the causes of inequality, it is not surprising that the city has such an unmet demand for justice. Community survey responses within the plan identified segregation and diverse racial disparities (e.g. income, housing quality, environmental quality, policing) as primary planning challenges. These challenges do not appear to be substantively addressed by the plan itself, especially with regards to green infrastructure which, to be fair, has a very limited conceptualization of providing stormwater services. The vision for the North Riverfront Plan focuses on business development and neighborhood improvement and does not appear to grapple with causal processes of inequality. Like the Sustainability Plan, it is extremely future-facing and omits any discussion of how historical planning decisions have contributed to the landscape of inequality today.

Procedural Equity

The Sustainability Plan undertook a multipronged outreach effort, representing current best practices in plan formulation. However, many of the stakeholders identified and involved were selectively invited and disproportionately represent the business community. The concerns of survey respondents are not substantively addressed and the presentation of survey responses does not allow for the assessment of population representativeness, especially marginalized communities. 

The North Riverfront planning process was led by special interests. Although multiple public workshops were held, their purpose was to 'inform' and receive limited feedback, and were primarily attended by businesses. The outreach strategy was not well-defined, and ultimately, the plan was oriented  towards business development. 

In terms of designing policies and programs, the North Riverfront Plan included conceptual design development in its workshops, but again, the approach was not inclusive. The Sustainability Plan emphasized the role of design competitions with some limited partnerships between city agencies and community groups to foster innovation but did not discuss how a competitive model may further disadvantage marginalized communities. 

Implementation-wise, the city appeared convinced that the public would voluntarily implement many of the initiatives identified in both plans, even though there are no clear mechanisms or funding systems in place to support community-led implementation. The North Riverfront Plan commits to the Sustainable Tools for Assessing and Rating communities (STAR) rating system as an evaluative mechanism, has clear performance targets for stormwater GI facilities, and provides a direct route of communication for implementation concerns but it is not clear if there is a formal manner for addressing the concerns of affected communities. The Sustainability Plan includes several metrics but has no built-in mechanisms for assessing plan impacts.

Distributional Equity

Despite city commitments to understand historical racism, GI Planning in St. Louis does not robustly consider distributional equity issues.Plans seek to manage several hazards related to flooding, water quality issues, and traffic safety along with blight and environmental hazards but do not discuss their uneven distributions or injustices. Plans also look  to use GI to add multiple values to the urban landscape  but fail to acknowledge the context or potential downsides of targeted investments, especially in marginalized communities. 

Plans have limited discussion of labor issues. The Sustainability Plan focuses on the need for sustainable job development but does not connect this need with city-wide GI development. The North Riverfront Commerce Corridor Plan focuses on the job opportunities associated with redevelopment and new business development but also does not connect jobs growth and GI.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

St. Louis is another midwestern city with extensive stormwater-focused GI programs that seeks to use GI as part of larger-scale redevelopment efforts. These programs, however, are run by the metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District, which has been a leader in the implementation of Green Stormwater infrastructure. Thus, there remain many opportunities to improve GI planning equity at the city-scale, even with more than a decade of GSI implementation in the region. 

Community Groups

St. Louis has large coalitions of community groups working on environmental justice issues, many of whom have been deeply involved in other ongoing struggles for racial and social justice. The city’s rich organizing history and culture have survived numerous eradication attempts and continue to be involved in local, national, and international movements for social justice. Yet, the vision and determination of these groups are not reflected in current city GI planning, despite the existence of community-created plans that seek to address environmental justice through commitments of public resources and democratic planning. Central issues of existing justice coalitions, including worker’s rights and health disparities, can be partially addressed through just transition-focused GI planning and development. 

 1. Supporting Just Transition through integrative Green Infrastructure

St. Louis’ US representative Cori Bush has been an outspoken advocate for addressing climate justice and a just transition in the city and beyond. A just transition in St. Louis can be supported through city-wide GI planning that takes into account the varied needs and perceptions of marginalized and oppressed communities. A city-wide GI network to address the city’s climate challenges, and not just its storm and sewer system issues would require elaborating a place-based vision for a more integrative concept of GI than just water treatment facilities. It would include networks of alternative zero-carbon transit, street trees, and restored riparian corridors coupled with broader renewable energy, building rehabilitation and housing programs that provide well-paying jobs to residents. It would also entail a justice-focused conception of GI in the city that centers Native relationships and visions with the land. Such an effort can be supported by existing community-focused research projects seeking to address multidimensional equity issues in the city, such as St. Louis University’s Institute for Healing Justice and Equity. Further, coordination for the creation of a just vision for regional GI that includes Indigenous foodways can leverage the relationships supported by the Whitney Harris World Ecology Center at UMSL.

Policy Makers & Planners

St. Louis City policy makers and planners have not engaged with issues of equity in their current GI plans. In contrast, St. Louis County has committed to an equity planning process. but it is not yet clear what influence it will have on the city. Suburban St. Louis, especially in the wake of the Ferguson uprising, has been a pivotal arena for how equity planning can positively influence deeply fragmented cities dealing with systemic injustice. Policy makers and planners could greatly assist grassroots-led efforts to achieve social and racial justice in the city through two related avenues.

1. Integrative City-Wide GI

The city of St. Louis faces several climate-related challenges that intersect with legacies of environmental injustice and urban spatial planning, namely extreme heat, droughts, flooding, and water quality. Green Infrastructure can mitigate the impacts of climate change and address pollution issues but must be integrated into the city’s ecosystem as well as built infrastructures. Such a vision for GI in the city goes beyond the water quality mandate set by the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) consent decree to address combined sewer overflow issues. Since the city is not the lead entity on Green Stormwater Infrastructure planning, it can put forth a more integrative vision of a city-wide GI system and use this to guide investments in GSI and other green assets - potentially aiding MSD in achieving compliance at a lower cost. An integrative vision of Green Infrastructure includes diverse networked habitat types, engineered facilities, and clean technologies. An integrative approach can also increase the equity of the current park system by focusing on creating new types of green spaces in disadvantaged communities, so long as they are attentive to the concerns of the need to green in place.

2. Transforming Planning to Address Equity and Injustice

If  city plans do not define and commit to equity and justice principles, they are unlikely to address equity issues. Policy makers and planners can study the resources that have been compiled on the meanings of equity and justice, along with our evaluative tool, to embed an understanding of equity within current planning systems. The transformation of current city-based GI planning practices will be necessary so that communities become leaders in, and beneficiaries of, planning efforts. 

Foundations and Funders

Environmental organizations in St. Louis continue to grapple with internal racial equity issues. These struggles, including a lack of inclusion and an absence of major commitments to transforming current city planning systems, indicate a need to foster deep-seated change in the city’s environmental organizations and center issues of equity and justice in city planning. Foundations and funders can support the above-identified initiatives directly by supporting grassroots efforts for neighborhood and city-wide integrative green infrastructure planning. Ultimately, they must invest in community capacity to create lasting and meaningful institutional and structural change in the city’s decision making systems. Like in other cities, these types of initiatives can be unified under a just transition umbrella, which is being pursued by several area funding organizations.

  1. Supporting Community Organizing and Planning for a Just Transition

Some regional organizations have undertaken community-based planning work as part of larger pushes to achieve environmental justice through a just transition framework. These models require well-organized communities to guide the process to realize equity in both the process and outcomes of planning. Such efforts can be supported within the city to address multiple community stressors at once, and ideally, lead to new city-wide norms on how community needs drive city-level planning processes.

Closing Insights

Like many other cities, St. Louis GI planning has yet to confront the systemic racism shaping the city. For GI planning to be equitable and achieve justice, several interrelated areas of transformation must be addressed in terms of the guiding principles of plans, how they are written, by whom, and for whom. In this sense, grassroots organizations should be treated as the necessary creative assets required for the city’s positive transformation.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-17

Seattle

SEATTLE

Incorporated 1869

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 142.1 sq miles
  • 708,823  Total Population
  • 8,452 People per sq. mile
  • 4% Forest cover
  • Temperate Conifer Forests Biome
  • 6.1% Developed open space
  • $85,562 Median household income
  • 6%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 58.1% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 6.1% Housing units vacant
  • 0.4% Native, 63.8% White, 7.2% Black,  6.7% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 15.3% Asian, <0.3% Pacific Islander

*socio-economic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and Land Cover Data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The largest city in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle’s name and identity are inseparable from its occupation and dispossession of Duwamish lands. The Duwamish have maintained their presence in the city, and are an active force for environmental justice and ecological restoration. The city faces severe seismic risk and landslides. Climate-related challenges include sea-level rise, localized flooding, and increasingly severe droughts and wildfires during the region’s dry summers. The city also struggles with water quality deterioration and species loss caused by land use change and heavy industry. 

The city has some of the lowest vacancy rates in the country. Housing prices have soared in recent years, and gentrification is a major concern of residents and area organizations. The city is still shaped by its legacy of purposeful segregation and racial discrimination. Vibrant immigrant communities and place-based organizations continue to marshal people and resources in the struggle for equity and justice.

Green Infrastructure in Seattle

We scanned numerous documents pertaining to green infrastructure in Seattle, finding six current plans relevant to our analysis. These included the city’s extensive stormwater management strategy written for compliance with Clean Water Act regulations. The city also has a dedicated GI Implementation Strategy, and the city’s GI programs are supported by its 2035 Comprehensive Plan. All of these plans focus on stormwater management.

GI strategies in Seattle utilize a broad range of ecosystem elements, hybrid facilities, and materials and technologies. Green roofs, rain gardens, and cisterns are integrated into blue-green corridors of trees, bioretention, and other stormwater management features.

The functions of this nascent system focus on a range of environmental and technological services. Hydrological functions are preeminent, focusing on infiltration, retention, flow attenuation, and evapotranspiration, along with pollutant removal and combined sewer overflow reductions and general drainage system performance enhancement.

Seattle GI plans did not articulate the benefits of GI within their GI definitions.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Seattle

Key Findings

Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan focuses on equity and addresses all ten dimensions within our equity screen, albeit inconsistently. The remaining 5 GI plans weakly address the concept, although they take some steps to be inclusive in their planning. The GI Strategy emphasizes addressing environmental justice issues through GI, but focuses on a ‘value added’ distributional approach that does not confront the underlying causes of inequity. Many opportunities exist to improve the equity of Seattle GI planning. 

33%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

33%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

17%

define equity

66%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

17%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

17%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Seattle through Maps

Seattle is an exceptionally dense west coast city, constrained by its location on a near-peninsula bordering Puget Sound. Vacancy rates are very low overall, though are quite high both in the upscale downtown areas and in some working-class communities bordering industrial zones. 

The city is racially segregated with minoritized communities residing south and north of the urban core. High levels of city-wide rent burden are clustered in the north and south of the city as well as the university district. These neighborhoods have much greater racial and ethnic diversity, mirroring ethnic and racial inequalities in income, although overall rates of poverty are some of the lowest in the country. 

How does Seattle account for Equity in GI Planning?

Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan provides a working definition of equity and attempts to address the concept in each of our ten equity categories. However, other stormwater and GI-specific plans inconsistently address equity issues. A welcome emphasis on justice does not meaningfully translate into strategies to protect residents from housing displacement, or have non-property owners capture the value of GI investments.

Envisioning Equity

Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan has a fairly robust framing of equity and justice issues along with a functional definition that emphasizes community involvement in decision making processes, relationships, and outcomes. However, definitions and discussions of equity and justice are largely ahistorical and do not discuss the underlying causes of inequality in the city.

Procedural Equity

Seattle GI plans commit to fair treatment and community inclusion in decision making, guided by Seattle's Comprehensive Plan policies. The language of these policies carries through to all other city GI plans, many of which mandate mechanisms for community inclusion and public comment. However, public comment processes are notorious for box-checking and not requiring substantive action on the part of planners, as communities generally comment after the majority of planning work has occurred. 

The Green Stormwater Infrastructure implementation strategy solicited community input through three listening sessions. However, it did not provide clear documentation as to who was involved, what their involvement entailed, or how input from marginalized groups was solicited or obtained. Mechanisms for sustaining community involvement beyond planning also appear to be inconsistent. Finally, despite including statements that suggest that communities should be involved in design, no real procedures are elaborated to that end. 

The one exception was in the City’s Long Term Control Plan, which discussed community engagement mechanisms utilized by the Seattle Department of Transportation for designing a community greenway east of Delridge Way. This does not appear to be a universally applied practice. The Comprehensive Plan commits to an integrated interdepartmental approach to implement community planning recommendations and makes very concrete asks of the community to be involved in the process. Yet, resources have not been dedicated to compensating community members for their involvement despite a commitment to securing ‘sufficient funding’ for that purpose. 

While this community involvement policy has good intentions and commits to creating dedicated project committees for plan implementation ‘reflect[ing] the community's diversity,’ it is unclear how this diversity will be transparently documented, and who will evaluate the efficacy of these involvement mechanisms. The only real mechanisms for community-based evaluation of plans appear to be in the plan update process. However, if the plan creation isn’t procedurally equitable, it will not truly allow for corrective action. Otherwise, regulatory plans have specific water quality targets but do not include consideration of how infrastructure investments affect communities, aside from sewer rate increases.

Distributional Equity

Seattle’s GI plans vary in how they address the distributional dimension of equity. The Comprehensive Plan sought to manage a wide range of hazards with GI and mentioned the risks of displacement associated with GI projects. However, the plan did not address issues of why some populations have been made more vulnerable to hazards, including uneven exposure and consequences. The other GI plans examined focused solely on affecting the distribution of water quality issues, without examining their current inequities or relation to other urban hazards. In terms of the value added by GI, the Comp Plan identified numerous benefits and acknowledged that adding property value is potentially problematic, but did not articulate an anti-displacement strategy. The Comp Plan also failed to address the contextual nature of value, in that the same types of GI may be perceived very differently by different communities. 

The GI Implementation Plan’s approach to addressing equity was very similar to the Comp Plan in terms of community inclusion and addressing distributional equity. The GI Implementation Plan explicitly sought to employ members of the houseless community in parks and GI facility maintenance but it did not address the deeper wealth inequalities that such a labor hierarchy reproduces. Like other cities, Seattle embraced a model of competitive grant funding for community-based projects. This shifts labor and accountability to NGOs, further entrenching a project-based funding cycle that can erode longer-term capacity for community organizing.

The Long Term Control Plan focused on improving water quality through cost-effective infrastructure investments that also affect the level of service and timeliness of construction. These water system-focused improvements, however, were seen as having many knock-on benefits by improving the health of the aquatic environment, which inverts the multiple-benefit paradigm. Other stormwater-focused plans emphasized GI impacts on water quality improvements but did not address multiple values or equity. Labor issues were largely ignored by Seattle GI plans, which often required volunteers to maintain GI facilities, and reproduced problematic incentives to engage homeowners in these efforts.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Seattle has large-scale and well-developed green stormwater infrastructure programs that have significant potential to address the city's numerous social equity and climate change challenges. Concurrently, the city has an existing environmental justice committee and agenda but those priorities are not effectively embedded in its current GI plans. Evolving existing EJ approaches to maximize their effectiveness will require a targeted transformation in existing planning processes and embracing a more integrative city-wide GI planning concept. To that end, we offer several concrete recommendations below.

Community Groups

Seattle has many community groups working on environmental justice issues. The city has also served as an inspirational center for labor organizing. Current plans expect community groups and NGOs to apply for competitive grants to implement community-scale green infrastructure. However, community groups and NGOs did not appear to be included in shaping current GI planning efforts. Opportunities exist for the city government to support these community groups in fulfilling the city’s regulatory obligations. Yet doing so respectfully, and in a manner that meets diverse community needs, requires care. Below we highlight several areas where community groups could advocate for transformations in current planning processes and outcomes.

1. GI Labor as Wealth Building Strategy

Given that the city’s programs for GI are weak on labor issues, Seattle’s robust organizing community could advocate for a more explicit equity-centered approach in the work  of designing, implementing, and maintaining GI. Unlike other cities, the idea of a liveable wage has been mainstreamed and sets a more acceptable minimum for maintenance practices. Additionally, Seattle could focus on training GI professionals in the communities where GI practices are planned, along with other strategies for building community wealth. Securing routes to homeownership in marginalized communities, either individually through appropriate labor compensation, or through a public option, is the only way GI investments that increase property values can contribute to sustained wealth building rather than displacement.

2. Demand Operationalization of Equity and EJ Principles in City Planning

Given that there are existing resources dedicated to addressing environmental justice in the city, community groups should insist that current GI plans reflect the work of the EJ committee over the GI lifecycle.

3. Securing Dedicated Long Term Support for Community Greening and Housing

Seattle as a city has remarkably low rates of poverty compared to similar-sized metropolises, and yet, issues with houselessness persist and may not be reflected in official census statistics. The ongoing growth of the real estate market in Seattle leaves the most marginalized communities behind and excludes the majority of Seattle families. Community groups can advocate for a GI strategy that goes beyond competitive grant cycles and incentivizing GI installations for homeowners. Such an approach could focus on including genuinely affordable housing as part of GI-based redevelopment together with other strategies for greening in place.

Policy Makers & Planners

Seattle policy makers and planners acknowledge the need for GI to equitably address multiple challenges while considering long-standing environmental justice issues. These admirable goals may not be achievable with the concepts and strategies outlined in current GI plans. To support the equitable and sustainable management of Seattle’s ongoing growth, we offer several concrete recommendations to policymakers and planners below.

1. Genuinely Inclusive Planning

Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan involved extensive outreach and survey activities in its initial stages. However, discontent over how planning occurs in the city is persistent and vocal, even with the displacement of many marginalized groups out of the city and into the suburbs. Current plans need to meaningfully involve residents in designing, implementing, and evaluating the efficacy of city policies and programs meant to achieve plan goals. Think of this as equitable planning 2.0...getting off of the drawing board, out of the document, and engaging people in the work that the plan requires to achieve its vision.

2. Linking Housing and Environmental Justice

Seattle plans acknowledge the relationship between infrastructure investment, green improvements, and the potential for displacement. And yet, current plans have no mechanisms in place to address these issues. Proven strategies, like taxes on luxury development (which have some of the highest vacancy rates in the city), building infrastructure for genuinely mixed-use communities, and including housing provisions in bond measures and city spending on green improvements are some of the strategies that could be drawn upon. The city’s South Park neighborhood exemplifies many of these tensions. It is time to take action and heed resident demands for affordable housing and the curtailment of upscale development.

3. GI beyond the Stormwater System

Despite having a park system that appears to be one of the more equitably distributed in the country, Seattle plans do not appear to articulate a systemic vision of green infrastructure across the city. While parks, green stormwater planning, transportation, and built-environment design may seem ‘naturally’ siloed, each domain has profound influences on the others. Seattle planners and policy makers can look beyond the regulatory confines of the EPA, and like other cities, embrace a more integrated approach for GI system planning to realize numerous benefits from multi-functionality.

Foundations and Funders

Seattle GI plans have established a process for community groups to apply for GI project funding. Foundations and funders can support community organizations in building capacity to plan for cohesive, intersectoral GI projects that address the entwined concerns of housing and a healthy urban environment. 

  1. Supporting Community Organizing for Intersectoral Environmental Justice

Numerous organizations working on environmental justice are already well-positioned to further a just approach to GI at the community project scale. However, foundations and funders could prioritize projects that build longer-term capacity in communities rather than just single installations and mitigate the gaps in Seattle GI planning around implementation, design, and evaluation. Two key needs are for community-based evaluations: (1) existing city approaches, and (2) implementation of strategic policies around housing affordability and community wealth-building in the face of large-scale speculative real estate investment.

Closing Insights

GI planning in Seattle has many promising avenues for greater inclusivity to achieve just outcomes. Grassroots communities should continue to advocate for a more robust conceptualization of equity in city planning that includes participation and community leadership through plan implementation and evaluation. City policy makers and funders can support communities in these efforts, by valuing community labor, and creating institutions for community ownership of GI. Ultimately, Seattle must address its historical legacies and present inequities if it is to heal its relationship with the land and water it has occupied, and people it has displaced to bring itself into existence.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-16

San Juan

SAN JUAN

Incorporated 1521

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 46.4 sq. miles
  • 331,165  Total population
  • 8,377 People per sq. mile
  • 6.3 % Forest cover
  • Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests biome
  • 5.9% Developed open space
  • $21,986 Median household income
  • 38.4%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 68.1% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 24.8% Housing units vacant
  • <0.1% Native, 1.5% White, 0.2% Black, 98% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 0.2% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The capital of the colony of Puerto Rico, San Juan’s legacy and present realities cannot be separated from the forcible extermination of Taino people during Spanish colonial conquests, subsequent legacies of mass importation of enslaved Africans, its military occupation by the United States, and generations of state-sanctioned repression under extractive economic systems. These dynamics have produced an intensely segregated city with some of the lowest per capita incomes in the United States.

Enforced poverty takes place amidst a backdrop of tropical bounty and turbulent weather. Climate change and hurricanes have subjected the city to extreme weather events and flooding, and the city has yet to fully recover from the impacts of the 2017 hurricanes Maria and Irma. Like much of the island, the city’s infrastructure systems were hit particularly hard, and recovery has been hampered by its colonial relationship with the United States.

Green Infrastructure in San Juan

The only plan referencing green infrastructure (Infraestructura Verde in Spanish) was the Plan Ordenacion Territorial or the City Wide Master Plan. In it, the primary benefit of realizing GI functions was to provide ecological habitat.

The plan introduces the GI concept in reference to the Rio Piedras river corridor bisecting the city while connecting coastal and mountain ecosystems. The plan refers to the river corridor as an ecological system, but omits its terrestrial connections, focusing on the river channels themselves. The functions of the river corridor as GI are restricted to its role in improving water quality and ecological connectivity. This idea relates to the landscape concept but does not fit neatly within it.

Defining Green Infrastructure in San Juan

Key Findings

San Juan’s lone GI plan referenced the need to consider equity but did not define it and there were no mentions of justice. Public participation appeared limited to the initial planning stages with limited means of inclusion in design. Distributional equity was considered somewhat robustly for environmental hazards, quality of urban life, and the role of labor in shaping the urban fabric but these goals were not strongly linked to the city’s green infrastructure system.

100%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

0%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

0%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

San Juan Through Maps

San Juan is a predominantly Latinx city, with significant Native roots falling outside US census categorizations. Significant open spaces can be found throughout the city, the southern low-density suburbs have considerably more access to dispersed green spaces. The city has strikingly large disparities in income and rent burden. Vacancy rates are split between areas being developed for upscale and seasonal rentals and neighborhoods that have faced significant disinvestment.

How does San Juan account for Equity in GI Planning?

Equity and justice do not feature prominently in San Juan’s Comprehensive Plan. While the plan frames several equity concerns around overall urban quality of life and labor market transitions, GI is not connected to these other equity-focused planning efforts. Procedures for involving communities are generally lacking.

Envisioning Equity

San Juan’s GI plan does not extensively discuss equity issues despite some use of the concept in framing its overall goals of improving the quality of public services and urban quality of life. Justice is not addressed.

Procedural Equity

While the Comprehensive Plan appears to have input from local governments and a wide range of city agencies, it does not appear to be a collaborative process. Instead, the plan focuses on extensive analysis of existing conditions, and proposes interventions in the urban fabric, with the plan serving a coordinating function for local governments making development decisions. The plan mentions the need for contextual design, and acknowledges the influence of colonial architecture in transforming the city, but has no provisions for community leadership in project design, implementation, or evaluation.

Distributional Equity

While San Juan’s GI plan discusses the distribution of environmental hazards, it does not explicitly use GI as a hazard mitigation strategy. The plan’s emphasis on quality of life, cleanliness, and order is weakly integrated with its limited discussion of green infrastructure. And, while the plan discusses the role of labor market transitions in reshaping urban form, it does not tie these urban transitions to the development of the city’s green infrastructure system.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

San Juan faces a number of structural political challenges to its self-determination as a city government. However, the country as a whole has maintained long-running movements for genuine political and economic independence. Despite being omitted from current plans in San Juan, a movement led by academics and researchers has been afoot to formalize and develop a city-wide green infrastructure system. To address these interdependent issues, we offer several recommendations on how the city could develop an equitable green infrastructure system. 

Community Groups

San Juan has several movements working to achieve climate justice which will require a deep transformation of existing grey infrastructure systems and the elaboration of a city-wide green infrastructure system. One organization within the larger movement, Estuario, focuses on a landscape-level ecological planning concept and has led afforestation and reforestation efforts within the city and beyond. Additionally, some researchers have found that GI has long been autonomously maintained and expanded by residents for aesthetics and food production. There remains a need to evolve GI so that it’s treated as part of the city’s critical infrastructure systems, and to center the needs of communities that have been made most vulnerable to climate-related hazards and extractive economic systems.

1. Develop Contextual Practices for Community-led Planning

San Juan GI plans have no robust mechanisms for community involvement. While participation is not a panacea, grassroots organizations can model and pilot community-led planning and budgeting efforts to rebuild the communities most impacted by recent hurricanes who also face the greatest future risks.

2. Define Equity and Justice in the context of San Juan’s planning

Boricuas have made global headlines advocating for justice in government. This active and forceful discourse has yet to translate into meaningful transformations of urban planning systems in San Juan. Community groups should push for relevant definitions of equity and justice to reframe planning needs, including meaningful community involvement and leadership.

Policy Makers & Planners

Green infrastructure planning in San Juan is relatively undeveloped despite the city’s tradition of parks and open space planning, and more recent efforts to center climate resilience in the city’s infrastructure systems. Policy makers and planners must elaborate the meaning of GI in ongoing city planning efforts and create real mechanisms for addressing community concerns around equity and justice.

1. Build GI as a System

Focusing on the linear corridors of the Rio Piedras systems is an excellent start for articulating a city-wide system of green infrastructure. Formalizing a city-wide vision for GI, that accounts for the diverse types of municipal and private green spaces, will be required to have a cohesive system that addresses the city’s rising climate challenges.

2. GI as Part of the Infrastructure Economy

San Juan’s struggles with climate resilience cannot be separated from its larger challenges with critical infrastructure vulnerability to climate change. The city is facing intersecting crises of massive social inequality, climate chaos, and crumbling infrastructure. Addressing these challenges simultaneously can stimulate new economic growth, and as the Comprehensive Plan notes, investing in labor market restructuring can have lasting impacts on urban form, and vice versa. Investing in the city’s infrastructure systems, including green infrastructure, and prioritizing local firms and high-wage labor, ideally with support from the US Federal government, can address those interlocking challenges.

Foundations and Funders

Foundations and funders already play an important role in elaborating visions and data that shed insight on San Juan’s climate challenges and emergent green infrastructure system. However, with  the lack of a formal GI planning framework, ideas and information can only inspire voluntary and piecemeal efforts. There remains a need to invest in community-led planning efforts and to create working models for multi-scalar GI planning within the city. To that end, we provide one key recommendation for philanthropic organizations working in the city.

  1. Supporting Community Organizing for Intersectional Environmental Justice

As noted above, environmental justice movements, often grounded in life and death struggles for community well-being, have been engines of social, environmental, and infrastructural transformation in San Juan. Foundations and funders can prioritize these grassroots initiatives so that community capacity to advocate for structural change continues to grow and to build community-based institutions and planning processes that can lead to necessary systemic transformations.

Closing Insights

Despite vibrant social movements and efforts to grapple with rising climate challenges, current GI planning in San Juan has a long way to go to be able to address the city’s interlocking challenges of colonialism, entrenched poverty, inequality, and crumbling infrastructure. These great challenges come with great opportunities to build community planning capacity and to elaborate a genuine and grounded vision for what equity and justice mean in the city.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-14

Portland

PORTLAND

Incorporated 1845

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 145.0 sq. miles
  • 639,387 Total population
  • 4,792 People per sq. mile
  • 11.5% Forest cover
  • Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome
  • 6.7% Developed open space
  • $65,740 Median household income
  • 9% Live below federal poverty level
  • 63.8% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 6.3% Housing units vacant
  • 0.6% Native, 70.6% White, 5.6% Black,  9.7% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 8.1% Asian, 0.6% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The city of Portland occupies the homelands of a number of Indigenous Nations, lands seized through flawed treaty processes and unmet responsibilities. The city serves as a hub of resource extraction and manufacturing.

Portland’s growth has been inseparable from the development of the Columbia River Basin, and its impacts on regional fisheries, and landscapes. The city has served as a flashpoint for conversations on environmental justice, real estate development, gentrification, white supremacy, and a just transition. Citywide watershed restoration intersects with regulatory stormwater programs to improve quality of life and address the mounting impacts of climate change.

Green Infrastructure in Portland

Portland plans for green infrastructure using a wide array of planning instruments. GI is integrated into comprehensive, climate, sustainability, and transportation planning, alongside numerous watershed and stormwater planning efforts. These diverse plans reinforce one another by having a high degree of conceptual integration, with only a few instances of landscape and stormwater-specific concepts, and several plans that do not define GI.

Despite the use of integrative GI concepts, Portland GI plans fall in the middle of the pack in terms of the diversity of elements formally considered Green Infrastructure. Plans focus on a number of defined facility types, including street trees, and bioretention and stormwater facilities, but omit parks, networks, corridors, and trails.

Portland plans seek to provide key social, environmental, and technological services with GI, despite the employment of a limited number of GI elements. Named functions include improving transportation, providing a sense of identity, regulating heat, improving air and water quality, alongside the main focus on stormwater management.

Similarly, in line with its new urbanist planning paradigms, Portland GI plans define a wide array of benefits related to urban quality of life, climate resilience, and improving environmental quality alongside the performance of grey infrastructure systems.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Portland

Key Findings

GI Plans in Portland attempt integrative city-wide planning, but functionally only focus on stormwater control measures. Some plans center equity and justice concerns with robust definitions, visions, and public participation processes. Many others do not and are problematic in their use of urban greening within extensive redevelopment proposals.

89%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

56%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

89%

seek to address climate and other hazards

77%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

56%

define equity

44%

explicitly refer to justice

88%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

22%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

56%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Portland through Maps

Portland is a predominantly white city, which is not surprising given its legacy of overt racial exclusion and white supremacy, which were part of official state policy. Many minoritized communities have faced serial displacement, and patterns of segregation in the city reflect rates of rent burden and differences in incomes. The city’s vacancy rate appears to be driven by areas of speculative real estate development, with some exceptions, and is generally much lower than older east coast cities. A dense urban core is surrounded by low-density neighborhoods. Several large parks provide the majority of the city’s green space, with smaller and medium-sized parks unevenly distributed throughout the city.

How does Portland account for Equity in GI Planning?

Portland GI plans address equity idiosyncratically. While the Portland Plan, 2035 Comprehensive Plan, and Climate Plan address all 10 dimensions of equity, with the latter two offering best-in-class definitions and framings, sewer and stormwater system plans are essentially silent on equity issues.

Methods of public engagement are similarly spotty. Despite several plans emphasizing and showcasing participatory planning practices, few mechanisms exist for substantive and binding public engagement through the rest of the planning life cycle. 

Portland GI plans display more consistency in addressing existing disparities in the distribution of hazards and with intentions to add value to the urban landscape. Plans weakly address labor issues, if at all.

Envisioning Equity

Several Portland GI plans stand out for their thoughtful definitions and framings of equity and justice, which represent best practices in this body of plans, but still fall short. For example, the Portland 2035 Comprehensive Plan addresses distributional, recognitional, and procedural elements of equity and justice, but does not include transforming decision-making processes. Instead, they rely on inclusion in an overall framework of mitigating rather than eliminating harm. The Climate Plan similarly advances redistribution of benefits and burdens through intentional and targeted policies, but not transforming the policy making process itself. Framings of equity and justice are pervaded by a deficit framing centering the need to increase opportunities and amenities for disadvantaged communities. The strong definitions within the 2035 Comprehensive Plan inform both the Transportation and Central City Plans. Other plans either use much weaker definitions or none at all. The city’s plans frequently refer to the Portland Equity Framework, which appears to be an elaboration of the Portland Plan’s definition of equity and not a binding set of policies or procedures.

Justice was less consistently addressed than equity. The Climate Plan provides a strong definition drawing upon transformational justice concepts in the climate justice movement, emphasizing that how under-represented groups are included in decision making must change, rather than just changing the distributions of risks and benefits through city agency initiatives.

Procedural Equity

In comparison to many other cities, Portland plans emphasize inclusive planning practices. These stress the importance of affected communities participating in city planning decisions and their implementation. This rhetoric, however, did not appear to be backed by any specific or binding mechanisms, procedures, or dedicated resources for community involvement in designing or implementing GI policies, projects, or programs. Additionally, Portland plans had very few mechanisms for communities to meaningfully evaluate the efficacy of plan implementation. One exception, the Transportation Plan, included a best practice for responsible community engagement. That plan calls for an independent review committee to assess the process and outcomes of its specified community engagement practices as part of the plan’s implementation. Yet, even in that case, it was not clear who would comprise the committee and how the needs, concerns, and experiences of the involved communities brought to light in this process would be addressed.

Distributional Equity

Portland GI plans extensively discussed the distributional equity of GI in terms of its relationship with intersecting urban hazards and the multi-faceted nature of the value of urban space. Plans were much weaker in discussing labor issues associated with GI. Several plans, including the Comprehensive and Climate Plans, stressed the importance of using GI embedded within the urban form to manage climate-related hazards. Plans also acknowledge the relationship between GI investments and the potential for housing displacement but did not meaningfully address it through proposed interventions. Policies targeting marginalized communities for GI improvements without mechanisms in place to address displacement are highly problematic. The same plan framed labor inequalities as a problem of building greater ‘upward mobility’ without naming and examining the uneven and racist conditions that are part of existing labor markets and wage inequality.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

The City of Portland, like many others, has a dedicated Office of Equity and Human Rights charged with ensuring that city agency decisions address racial and social equity issues. Portland plans are also somewhat unique in the breadth and depth of discussions of equity issues in the city, and their much greater consistency in defining and naming equity and justice issues in comparison to other cities. However, notable gaps remain in how city plans conceptualize and operationalize equity and justice issues, despite decades of steadfast coalition-based community organizing.

Community Groups

Numerous community groups have tirelessly advocated for environmental and social justice within the City of Portland. These same communities have faced displacement due to urban renewal and highway development that affected most if not all of the city's ethnic and racialized communities while sparing the city’s predominantly white western downtown. The demands of community groups have in many ways created the progressive image and stance of Portland administrations. They will likely continue to be the primary force for positive change, given the city’s ongoing rapid transformation as a global hub of speculative real estate investment, and significant conflicts of interest affecting those governing existing planning processes. Below we offer ways to address several key issues and gaps within current plans that may support community organizing efforts towards just GI systems.

1. Demanding Transformation in City Planning and Decision Making

Portland plans are big on community inclusion, and the engagement of communities in decisions that affect their lives appears to be mandated by the Comprehensive Plan. However, with no specified forums, or resources for communities to become informed about the nature of ongoing city planning efforts, existing conflicts over green infrastructure and housing issues will likely be exacerbated by the scaling up of city greening efforts. Community groups can and should push for meaningful mechanisms of inclusion based on principles of Free Prior and Informed Consent, have the city provide resources for communities to lead their own planning and evaluation processes, and have binding mechanisms for dispute resolution.

2. From ‘targeted investment’ to reparations

Minoritized and oppressed communities in Portland do not need more targeted investment by outsiders or by a city government that has failed to prevent record-breaking rates of gentrification. Community groups can and should call for reparations for prior decisions that have caused harm, especially given the apparent willingness of planners to admit to past wrongs.

Policy Makers & Planners

The City of Portland is internationally recognized for struggling with equity and racial justice issues. Progressive administrations and plans must go beyond the rhetoric of inclusion and address structural inequalities in the city affecting the equity of green infrastructure. The city has taken on massive cost burdens for Clean Water Act compliance and has undertaken numerous watershed planning and protection initiatives. It has also led the conceptual integration of green infrastructure into urban form. Despite all this progress, green infrastructure approaches remain siloed within a stormwater management focus. Below we offer several tangible recommendations for addressing gaps in current plans. 

1. Genuinely Integrated Green Infrastructure

Portland plans utilize integrated green infrastructure concepts, yet omit key urban ecological elements such as parks, trails, farms, networks, and corridors. At the same time, the city has taken on large-scale floodplain and riparian restoration projects, extensive tree inventories and tree planting, and promoted complete street design standards. The city should go further in promulgating an urban ecological infrastructure approach that considers all of these interconnected ecological elements cohesively and supports individual, community, and city agency efforts to weave together ecological and infrastructural elements throughout the city. Without such fine-grained integration, the multiple desired benefits of GI will not be achieved. Such an approach omits the creation of ecological sacrifice zones and will be required to scale current efforts to equitably green the city across all neighborhoods, especially those currently lacking GI.

2. Get Serious about Transforming Systems that Cause Harm

Portland planners conceive of themselves as progressive in their targeting of marginalized communities for additional GI investments. This is certainly an admirable goal in terms of reducing disparities in access to environmental goods. However, without addressing underlying structural inequalities in employment, intergenerational wealth transfer, and policing, among other issues, such targeted investments in a landscape of inequality will continue to accelerate housing disparities and displacement. The only way to address the downside of uneven greening and housing is to embrace approaches that reduce ongoing harms in marginalized communities and invest in core community capacities to lead planning and budgeting efforts, as well as shifting housing away from a speculative real estate based model using a variety of planning interventions.

3. Wealth Building through Redistributing Labor, Wages, and Expertise

Some city plans acknowledge that the majority of compensation for the labor required by GI is in the white-collar work of planning, analysis, and design, with significant compensation in construction, and scant or no resources committed to maintenance. And yet, in minoritized communities, maintenance jobs are the only ones that are made available to local community members, and may not be compensated. Building community wealth, therefore, requires either compensating maintenance labor at living wages, which are quite high given the exploding cost of living within the city, along with a serious focus on training and upskilling impacted communities to participate in other aspects of required GI labor.

4. From Exploration to Transparent Metrics, Data, and Processes

The city has committed to a comprehensive city-wide watershed monitoring framework (PAWMAP) which could be an opportunity to track broader equity metrics. The Watershed Action Plan states that these metrics will be "explored" but doesn't provide a timeline or starting point for how they will be integrated into the overall governance of programs, or utilized to adjust approaches. The city should create meaningful mechanisms to give communities power over evaluating city initiatives and changing course as problems arise.

5. Consistency Across Plans for Housing Security

There are key contradictions in some city-endorsed initiatives and planning frameworks, despite a few plans containing functional definitions of equity and justice issues. For instance, the Central City Plan acknowledges how the Lloyd EcoDistrict approach poses risks of further displacement of marginalized communities in the area, but this risk is not acknowledged within the Lloyd EcoDistrict Plan itself. Given aggressive rates of housing displacement and houselessess within the city, securing affordable housing as part of large-scale investment-oriented programs, like the EcoDistrict approach, should be a top priority.

6. Embracing the Floodplain, but not Creepily

Portland GI plans appear to focus on continued hard infrastructure investments within the floodplain to protect existing industrial uses. This poses a paradox as the disconnection, armoring, and infill of the floodplain has been one of the largest environmental impacts of urban development, and any large-scale restoration of ecological function in the city will require floodplain reconnection of both the Willamette and Columbia rivers. Furthermore, hard flood defenses are extremely expensive and maintenance intensive. Optimizing the use of existing and underperforming industrial areas and brownfields to shrink their footprints would allow for more space in the floodplain for restoring riparian ecosystems.

7. Don’t Just ‘Put an Equity Bird on It’

Portland GI plans mention equity frequently. Yet it is not always clear what is meant by the term, as they generally refer to equity as an outcome of city decision-making structures, while also acknowledging that prior decisions are a major source of current inequality. These commitments to change are admirable, but if equity does not consist of identifiable, measurable, and experienced transformations in how city decisions are made, and in their outcomes, then equity becomes just another ‘bird.’ The city must commit to meaningful, and community-defined, equitable decision-making processes and measures of what equitable outcomes of city green infrastructure programs look like, which requires going beyond current inclusion mechanisms.

Foundations and Funders

Portland GI plans, in particular the 2035 Comprehensive Plan, provide a regulatory framework for community inclusion in city-led planning initiatives. However, mechanisms of meaningful community involvement, and resources for community planning capacity building, are weakly articulated, if at all. To address long-standing justice concerns, foundations and funders can play an important role in supporting the development of equitable processes. This includes demanding transformative change in how current GI plans are implemented and ensuring that the needs of marginalized communities are centered in future planning efforts. Below, we offer a recommendation to do so.

  1. From Complete Streets to Whole Communities

Portland communities have led the charge on numerous environmental justice issues, and have provided working models for how inclusive, justice-oriented green infrastructure initiatives can build community wealth and address structural inequalities. Existing funding models for complete streets programs and community-led initiatives often threaten community well-being, especially in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Funders should move away from single project-based funding models, especially those that don’t track outcomes or invest in community institutions and grassroots organizing to push for transformative change.

Closing Insights

Equitable GI in Portland, OR requires a transformation of how current GI plans are created, implemented, and evaluated. Existing policies provide a functional start for addressing long-standing equity and environmental justice issues, but must go further in transforming the systems responsible for historical and present harms. By working together, community groups, city officials, and funding organizations can provide the necessary momentum for a just transition and an equitable city-wide GI network.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-15

Sacramento

SACRAMENTO

Incorporated 1859

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 99.9 sq. miles
  • 495,011 Total population
  • 5,060 People per sq. mile
  • 0 % Forest cover
  • Temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome
  • 14.8% Developed open space
  • $58,456 Median household income
  • 13.6%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 64.7% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 6.5% Housing units vacant
  • 0.4% Native, 32.4% White, 12.7% Black, 28.9% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 18.6% Asian, 1.7% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The Golden State’s Capital, Sacramento carries a legacy of organizing genocidal exterminations of Native Peoples throughout California and occupies the unceded homelands of the Miwok peoples. The forced removal and state-sponsored murder of Native Peoples intensified when the United States coercively claimed the territory of California after the Mexican-American War and fostered the gold rush. Like with other western cities, the city became a destination for agricultural refugees in the Dust Bowl era, and massive, diverse migrations in the 20th century. Despite this diversity, the city remains intensely segregated along racial lines, mirroring issues in the statewide prison system.

At the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, the city inhabits a rich riverine ecosystem within California’s Central Valley, draining into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a famously endangered estuarine ecosystem. Increasing climate change-related challenges of droughts, fires, and heatwaves compound long-term environmental change caused by the basin-wide industrialization of agriculture and massive hydraulic infrastructures. Climate-related fires and exploding real estate markets have created a statewide housing crisis.

Green Infrastructure in Sacramento

Sacramento plans for green infrastructure through its 2035 General Plan, The City Parks and Recreation Plan, and The Central City Specific Plan (CCSP). The latter plan does not define GI, the Parks and Recreation Plan focuses on a city-wide parks system using a landscape concept, and the General Plan defines both the need for a city-wide network of green spaces and a system of green stormwater infrastructure using landscape and stormwater concepts without appearing to integrate them.

Since the Comprehensive Plan uses both stormwater and landscape concepts, it contains the majority of types of GI, consisting of hybrid facilities and ecosystem elements. It is notable that Sacramento does not explicitly refer to bioswales and green roofs but includes parks, trails, and blue-green networks in addition to general mentions of stormwater management features.

Sacramento GI is managed so that it provides environmental functions, focusing on general stormwater management. The benefits of GI in Sacramento planning are more diverse, focusing on the environmental and socio-economic advantages of good water quality, recreation, livability, community building, education opportunities, and psychological well-being among others.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Sacramento

Key Findings

Sacramento GI plans use the language of equity but rarely define it. They are also uniquely consistent, but not robust, in their mechanisms of public engagement. Plans should do more to address inequities in GI hazards and labor needs, and grapple with the contextual nature of GI’s value.

100%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

33%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

33%

define equity

0%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

33%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Sacramento through Maps

Sacramento sits on a biologically rich confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers. The city is ethnically diverse and highly racially segregated. These patterns are reflected in a patchy and uneven distribution of incomes and rent burden around the city. A polycentric pattern of density contrasts sharply with high vacancy rates in the urban core. Green spaces are unevenly distributed around the city and are dominated by larger parcels of parks and river corridors.

How Does Sacramento Account for Equity in GI Planning?

GI plans in Sacramento consistently use the word equity in relation to the intended impacts of GI, yet only the 2035 General Plan defines it, using a universalist concept of fair access to goods as well as participation in public planning for the future. Framings of equity are more problematic as they do not address the historical causes of injustice or the needs of current residents; instead, they focus on attracting new residents. Plans are silent on justice.

Procedurally, Sacramento GI plans are consistent about including residents in the early stages of planning. This inclusion appears to be driven by state-level regulations around public participation in public planning processes. Participatory mechanisms do not carry over into the design, implementation, or evaluation of GI policies and projects.

Sacramento plans emphasize using GI to universally increase the livability of neighborhoods. To some extent, climate-related hazards are examined contextually in the 2035 General Plan but are more weakly considered than the values of GI. GI labor needs and issues are barely discussed, with current allocations of city resources favoring developers. Marginalized communities are expected to steward GI, including the provision of volunteer labor to aid police in reducing crime in city parks.

Envisioning Equity

Green infrastructure in Sacramento is a key component of the city’s vision to be ‘the most livable city in America.’ These aspirations are framed with no discussion of redressing prior harms from city planning and policy. Most problematically, plans aspire to target ‘slums’ and ‘blighted’ areas for improvements with nary a word about the deeply problematic history of similar urban renewal initiatives. The Parks Plan includes rhetoric about city investments improving personal development, positive relationships, community engagement, and physical and psychological safety, but does not address why there are disparities in these human attributes in the first place.

Procedural Equity

Despite planning law in California requiring open meetings for public planning processes, much of the 2035 Comprehensive Plan appears to be led by an extended technical process before soliciting any substantive public input. A series of attempts to solicit, incorporate, and share public feedback on the draft plan before its approval by public hearing did not show awareness of, or employ, best practices for participatory methods. The Central City Plan had a similar process as the 2035 Plan, though it was also guided by several volunteer advisory commissions. The composition of those commissions privileged developer and landowner interests and not those who would be most affected by the planning decisions. There were no substantive mechanisms for including affected communities in the design, implementation, or evaluation of GI.

Distributional Equity

Sacramento GI plans do not robustly consider the distributional dimension of equity. While the 2035 General Plan identifies and includes a diverse set of intersecting hazards to be managed with GI, it does not grapple with their social distributions, how some communities have been made more vulnerable than others, or the potential unintended consequences of the city’s approach towards hazard management. While the CCSP focuses on reducing flood hazards in the central business district, it does not discuss how pre-existing and current flood infrastructure entrench flood vulnerability. Most strangely, it discusses urban renewal projects without discussing the hazards of displacement caused by current planning efforts. Both the General Plan and Parks Plan rely on volunteerism for GI stewardship, with the Parks Plan explicitly calling for communities to collaborate with police to increase park safety, rather than discussing or addressing the underlying social conditions causing a need for police, or any sort of community-based alternatives.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

As a member of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, Sacramento seeks to address equity issues through urban planning. However, the city’s current GI plans, two of which have a much larger scope than only GI, appear to entrench the problems caused by prior planning efforts. They will likely replicate the atrocities of previous urban renewal efforts, accelerating displacement in minoritized and marginalized communities. While equity in planning must be defined by those impacted by plans, we provide several recommendations to improve the equity of current planning efforts.

Community Groups

Many community groups working on racial and economic justice in Sacramento do not appear to be represented in current GI plans. This exclusion is concerning, given California mandates for public participation in planning. The early stages of more open participation often devolve to a model of advisory boards that are disproportionately staffed by development interests. In the long-term, these issues can only be addressed through structural transformation of city-level decision-making and policy. Community groups, however, appear to have several key areas where their influence could address inequities in current GI plans.

1. Embed Equity within City Planning

The current Government Alliance on Racial Equity-led city initiatives are certainly a step in the right direction, and the creation of a specific equity plan for the city will hopefully improve processes for addressing racial and environmental justice and their outcomes. However, current plans and decision-making systems stand to reinforce ongoing inequities. Community groups can and should advocate for transformed planning processes that give equal if not greater weight to community voices and that represent renters and other marginalized groups.

2. From Model Projects to Model Plans

The organization Environmental Justice Coalition for Water (EJCW) has led a model stream restoration project on Morrison Creek in South Sacramento. Such projects showcase how communities can effectively collaborate with state and city agencies and each other to dramatically improve environmental conditions on the ground. These types of initiatives would be even more successful, and much less likely to lead to housing displacement if they were undertaken city-wide. Community groups can and should advocate for current planning initiatives to be led by coalitions of community groups themselves. 

3. Address Equity and Justice

Given the history of organizing for racial justice in California and Sacramento, it is inexcusable that city plans do not acknowledge historical or current justice issues. 

City plans should explicitly define equity and justice in their appropriate contexts. Communities harmed by past and present city policies and plans must be the ones who define those terms, along with the potential conditions of repair and the transformations required, so those harms are never experienced again. Community groups can take the lead on defining equity and justice to shape the application of current planning efforts, as well as emergent city initiatives.

Policy Makers & Planners

Current plans have made some attempts to address deep-seated equity and injustice issues in Sacramento. However, plans could go much further in defining equity and justice – beyond the minimum statewide standards of consultation. Plans should get serious about addressing climate hazards, and should focus on creating well-paying jobs to build community wealth.

1. Define Equity and Justice

The city has committed to a 5-year equity plan by participating in the GARE initiative described above. However, city agencies should go further in having operational definitions of equity and justice in the specific context of Sacramento’s troubled racial history and present. Utilizing the framework we provide through this project, these terms must address genocidal dispossessions of land from Native Nations, along with the myriad of other injustices experienced by minoritized communities throughout Sacramento’s history and present. Drawing upon the lived experience of Sacramento communities, these definitions should be embedded within, and shape, city plans and policies.

2. Go Beyond Minimum Standards of Consultation - Embed Within the Lifecycle

The city can choose to go beyond the statewide standards for public participation and be a leader in showing what public inclusion means in land use planning. Using the framework we provide in this project, consultation would include specified processes for centering community experiences and giving communities real power during the design, implementation, and evaluation of planned activities. 

3. Get Serious About Climate-related Hazards

It is concerning that the numerous climate-related hazards unevenly impacting Sacramento communities are not robustly analyzed by current green infrastructure plans. These multidimensional hazards, including heat waves, droughts, extreme weather, and flooding, should be analyzed with respect to how certain communities have been made more vulnerable than others. That these analyses are not being conducted and contributing to the framing of the distributional dimensions of GI’s equity in the city is another point to be remedied.

4. Real jobs, wealth, and urban vitality

Requiring community members to conduct GI maintenance and policing in Sacramento is highly problematic, akin to asking marginalized communities to facilitate their own displacement and enable greater violence against themselves. City policies and plans could instead focus on transferring wealth to marginalized communities through alternative models of community-led design and implementation and skill-building. Further, in the spirit of restorative justice, they could invest in alternatives to policing green spaces, and instead focus on supporting community cohesion through anti-displacement efforts and investments in underlying public services.

Foundations and Funders

Foundations and funders can play an important role in improving the equity of green infrastructure planning in Sacramento. To address the massive omission of critical and community points of view in shaping Sacramento’s GI planning processes, foundations and funders can support community organizations advocating for planning transformation and working on broadening participation in existing processes. Funders can also provide material support for initiatives that simultaneously address housing and environmental justice.

1. Broadening and Deepening Participation

Sacramento plans highlight major shortcomings in the operationalization of statewide policies and mandates for public participation in land use planning at the municipal level. The plans examined have minimal inclusion, with meeting times and locations that likely severely limit participation of impacted communities. These shortcomings in the initial stages of planning continue through project design, implementation, and evaluation. There is an urgent need to evolve the participatory paradigm in California to reflect the lived experience of communities affected by land use planning.

2. Advocating for Transformation

Sacramento must transform both its urban form and its decision-making systems to deal with the connected challenges of housing insecurity, massive income inequality, and environmental and climate justice issues. This could be accomplished by developing labor initiatives that use this urban transformation to build wealth in marginalized communities. The national need for large-scale municipal reinvestment in social and physical infrastructure is especially poignant in cities like Sacramento where disparities are so stark.

3. Providing Material Support for Housing and Environmental Justice

Since existing planning systems are highly problematic in terms of how they address the equity of GI, there is an urgent need to implement new planning mechanisms to meet community needs. There is certainly a need to evolve state and city policy to be genuinely participatory on the terms of impacted communities. There can and should be an equal emphasis on transforming models of community-based ownership of green infrastructure and other assets, including housing.

Closing Insights

Equitable green infrastructure in Sacramento requires a transformation of existing planning systems, a critical look at the relationship between housing precarity and green infrastructure investments, and the strengthening of state and municipal level mandates for plans to address historical and ongoing justice issues. With an energized and supportive civil society, policy makers and planners can enact meaningful shifts today for a greener and more equitable future.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-13

Phoenix

PHOENIX

Incorporated 1867

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 518.9 sq. miles
  • 1,610,071 Total population
  • 3,110 People per sq. mile
  • 0% Forest cover
  • Deserts and xeric shrublands biome
  • 7.4% Developed open space
  • $54,765 Median household income
  • 15.1%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 60.3% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 9.7% Housing units vacant
  • 1.6% Native, 42.5% White, 60.7% Black,  42.6% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 3.7% Asian, 0.2% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The center of the Sunbelt region, Phoenix has experienced skyrocketing growth and sprawl in recent decades. The city occupies the homelands of Hohokam and O’odham peoples in the Salt and Gila river valleys. An oasis in the Great Basin Desert, the city relies on ancient and modern canal systems for its water supply in the face of an increasingly unstable climate. 

Green Infrastructure in Phoenix

Official city plans addressing GI in Phoenix include PlanPHX, the Phoenix Strategic Plan, and the Strategic Infrastructure Plan, all of which defined GI using a landscape concept emphasizing city-wide networks of connected ecological elements. The City’s Separated Stormwater System Plan uses the term green infrastructure but does not define it, despite Phoenix’s history of do-it-yourself green stormwater infrastructure. While many documents referred to the 2010 Shade Master Plan, that plan did not utilize the green infrastructure concept or reference equity.

City plans defined GI as networks of hybrid facilities and ecosystem elements, including trails, habitats, parks, street trees, and natural lands. These ecological networks function to mitigate environmental harms while serving as part of the city’s infrastructure systems to mitigate heat, manage stormwater, and improve pedestrian mobility. Yet, definitions of GI did not describe any of the benefits of GI explicitly.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Phoenix

Key Findings

Plans in Phoenix do not define or address equity and justice. Only one plan uses the word equity, and in general, plans do not appear to be created or implemented with thoughtful public engagement. Distributional equity of GI planning is also largely emergent. Despite some promising beginnings, the city has a long way to go to plan equitably for green infrastructure.

25%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

50%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

0%

explicitly refer to justice

50%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

50%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Phoenix through Maps

Many observers might be surprised by the extensive seasonal wetlands present in Phoenix. The city occupies broad seasonal river valleys with extensive canal systems. Larger open spaces are near the more affluent neighborhoods in the sprawling suburbs. Income and density are inversely related. The city appears highly segregated by income and race. Rent burden is more unevenly distributed, but generally high. Like other quickly growing cities, vacancy rates are highest in the older downtown area.

How does Phoenix account for Equity in GI Planning?

No Phoenix plans focus on equity. While PlanPHX does explicitly use the term, it is not defined. Justice outside of the criminal justice connotation is not mentioned in any plan. When framing the social impacts of GI, it is generally referred to as a universal good, providing equal benefit to all. Phoenix was one of few cities that acknowledged its location on Native lands, and yet it appropriates both Indigenous history and identity.

Aside from PlanPHX, plans in Phoenix did not have robustly developed public engagement mechanisms, nor did they indicate intentions to include community groups in their overarching policies for design, implementation, or evaluation.

All plans examined in Phoenix sought to use GI to manage the distribution of hazards, especially climate-related hazards, and add value to the urban landscape, but were not sensitive to the needs of different communities. Labor issues were largely underdeveloped.

Envisioning Equity

No plan in Phoenix offered a strong view of an equitable GI system. PlanPHX used the word 'equity' in its vision and back cover statements but did not define the term. Despite a lack of definition, that comprehensive plan offered a broad and universal vision of equity and stressed that the plan must be implemented in a way that is sensitive to the specific needs of different communities. However, the comprehensive plan did not address how communities have been or continue to be, marginalized. GI is primarily seen as providing universal goods, improving infrastructure for all residents, and supporting universal access to multi-modal transportation. Existing plans are silent about justice.

Procedural Equity

Plans examined for Phoenix did not articulate robust mechanisms of public inclusion. PlanPHX asserted that it was created with deep public engagement. It provided a number of best practices to solicit public input, including a variety of meetings, social media tools, and regular reporting to participants. The plan also committed to a more deeply participatory process for its complementary neighborhood planning processes. While it was not possible to evaluate how genuinely participatory or democratic the planning process was, the plan required voter approval and is subject to binding regulations concerning public participation. While not ideal, this is certainly a best practice in the plans we reviewed. 

For GI, PlanPHX did not specify any mechanisms of participatory design and relied on neighborhood plans for implementation. Passing implementation to a more local planning process is promising, but the plan did not identify what resources were available to communities to lead those efforts, or exactly which binding mechanisms would be used to facilitate interdepartmental coordination to best serve affected communities. In terms of evaluation, there were frequent mentions of continuous community engagement, and a planned series of meetings, but collaboration on benchmarks was vague and no binding evaluation mechanisms were identified or discussed. 

There was no mention of public engagement in either the overall Strategic Plan or the Strategic Infrastructure Plan. The MS4 Stormwater Plan appeared to follow a check-the-box approach for facilitating interdepartmental coordination across the GI lifecycle. It explicitly engaged with business and developer communities in its discussion of design initiatives, including the complete streets manual, but the appointed task force could not be evaluated for how well it represented affected communities. While the MS4 Plan had provisions for evaluating compliance with stormwater regulations, mechanisms to evaluate other community-level impacts were lacking.

Distributional Equity

Phoenix GI plans intend to use various types of GI to mitigate the climate-related hazards of heatwaves, droughts, and flooding, and long-standing water and air quality concerns. Additionally, the Strategic Plan seeks to reduce traffic hazards through GI, and the MS4 Plan references the need to understand and control polluted runoff from brownfield sites and industrial spills. None of the plans contain a discussion of how some communities have been made more vulnerable than others nor a detailed analysis of hazard exposure distributions. 

Value-wise, the Comprehensive Plan focuses on equitable cost distributions of green infrastructure. The plan centers on defraying costs for developers and the use of a 1% sales tax for open space acquisition, despite sales taxes taking a larger percentage of income from lower-income taxpayers.  

At the same time, plans tout the multiple values of GI, including service level costs of other infrastructure (transportation and stormwater), and the added property value of replicating “traditional systems canals and gardens.” In other words, current plans seek to redistribute wealth upwards within the city while replicating historical patterns of development without acknowledging or addressing inequities. PlanPHX also explicitly calls upon impacted communities to implement the plan’s visions. While this recognizes the broad involvement required for successful GI implementation and maintenance, the plan makes no commitments of support for communities to do so. The city Strategic Plan mentions ‘green jobs’ but does not specify how they will be grown. The Stormwater Plan emphasizes that new forms of job training for existing employees will be required for the city’s GI program to be successful, as will volunteer labor. The Strategic Infrastructure Plan made no mention of jobs.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Despite decades of community activism and research on endemic environmental racism and injustice in South Phoenix, current plans make no mention of these issues aside from their relevance for Clean Water Act compliance. PlanPHX's vision of a connected oasis “...embodied by a pervading sense of … equity” can be realized, but the concerns and needs of frontline communities must lead any planning efforts to do so. Below, we offer recommendations for those concerned with equitably planning and implementing city-wide green infrastructure in Phoenix.

Community Groups

Many groups are working on racial, social, climate, and environmental justice in Phoenix. However, their concerns and missions are not reflected in current city plans. Given the urgency, scale, and complexity of advancing climate adaptation and a just transition in Phoenix, we offer several proposals for how a city-wide GI system could support existing calls for equity and justice.

1. GI Where it is Needed Most for Who Needs it Most

To date, the city does not appear to have undertaken any real analysis of where GI is needed most, aside from some of the technical analyses required by the city’s MS4 permit. Existing research has shown that there are tremendous disparities in heat exposure in neighborhoods of varied racial composition and income. Community groups can demand that the city accept these analyses as well as other work on the distribution of pollution exposure to center the needs of marginalized communities in further GI planning and implementation.

2. Equitable Planning for Planning Equitably

While PlanPHX used best practices in soliciting public opinion via several avenues, these practices fall short in representing the needs and concerns of minoritized communities. Planning for equity, as the city claims to do, requires centering the needs of those who have been marginalized the most. By definition, it cannot cater to mass appeal for blanket statements of need or priority. Community groups can and should demand to lead city-wide and neighborhood planning efforts. They should also be compensated for participating in this work.

3. GI for a Just Transition and Environmental Justice

Green infrastructure can certainly provide many benefits if it is context-appropriate and maintained, but it cannot erase or remove legacy or ongoing contamination. At best, it can mitigate minor environmental threats. Efforts to eliminate the sources of toxic chemical pollution must be implemented alongside urban greening to make urban environments healthy places to live. The only way to accomplish this is through a just transition framework that builds ecological consciousness and techniques into both the built environment and the urban ecosystem. Movements on the Navajo Nation and across Arizona can serve as partial models and provide a basic framework to address specific environmental injustices in Phoenix’s urban communities.

Policy Makers & Planners

Current plans do not address equity or justice concerns despite ongoing demands from impacted communities. How can policy and planning center the needs of those who have been most marginalized and oppressed within the city? Below we offer several concrete recommendations for improving the equity of existing policies and transforming city planning for green infrastructure. 

1. Define and Operationalize Equity

At a minimum, city plans using a vision of an equitable future as their key message should define what they mean by the term. As we lay out in our framework and research process pages, equity must go beyond the visions and frameworks of plans and become embedded within the project lifecycle – from project planning to evaluation.. Equitable planning must also address current and past injustices for which the city is responsible. Only then can the uneven distribution of hazards, goods, and labor of the urban landscape be productively addressed.

2. Abandon Regressive Taxation and Come Clean on Vacant Lands

As mentioned above, funding open space acquisition using a city-wide sales tax is essentially a punitive tax on the poor. Additionally, a long-running controversy in the City of Phoenix not mentioned within current plans revolves around the city’s incomplete inventory of vacant lands that it owns. Other cities have utilized such assets to provide the backbone of their city-wide green infrastructure networks; Phoenix should investigate the potential to follow suit, instead of ceding public assets to private developers.

3. Support DIY GI in a Systematic and Comprehensive Way

Phoenix is known for its DIY green stormwater infrastructure and rainwater capture. These ideas and practices are somewhat reflected in the city’s MS4 Plan, but since it does not define GI, it is difficult to determine whether citizen-led efforts can be included and supported by city agencies. The city should invest resources in supporting self-determined infrastructure in Phoenix communities. Funds that would be otherwise expended on technical planning exercises could be used to support grassroots initiatives complementing city-led technical planning with their local knowledge.

Foundations and Funders

As the Southwest’s largest metropolitan area, Phoenix has numerous active foundations and funders working on a variety of racial and social justice initiatives. From addressing the legacies of redlining, to supporting area foundations and critical social services, funders play an important role in the shaping of social movements in the region. This vital work can support the development of an equitable city-wide GI network in the city. Based on our analysis of current plans, in addition to supporting intersectional organizing efforts seeking transformation, foundations and funders can influence ongoing planning processes in several key areas.

1. Neighborhood Planning Capacity, Coordination, and Oversight

The admirable goals of PlanPHX and the potential of a city-wide GI network will largely be met through the ongoing neighborhood planning process occurring in the city. However, despite some legislative safeguards, the city government appears to have provided limited to no resources for communities to lead neighborhood planning efforts or for their coordination towards achieving a city-wide GI vision. Foundations and funders can fill this critical gap by investing in community-based planning organizations, coordinating city-wide efforts to achieve equitable and sensible distributions of green infrastructure networks, and funding watchdog groups to make sure regulations are being met. Since long-term funding of community-led planning is likely unsustainable for funders, efforts should work towards reshaping the planning process so that a portion of the city’s planning budget goes to funding community-led planning efforts and creating meaningful mechanisms for evaluating their effectiveness.

2. Equitable Financing of Citywide GI for Restorative Justice

The current funding structure for open space acquisition and GI development in Phoenix relies on a regressive sales tax, private developer investment, and some limited public investment, primarily in stormwater infrastructure improvements. Foundations and funders can contribute directly to community-scale green infrastructure projects as part of making GI financing more equitable but such an approach is likely not sustainable. Similar to other nationwide work on equitable financing of GI, foundations and funders could support local efforts to adapt and transform financing policies within the city to address historical harms, achieving equity in cost distributions as well as restorative justice.

3. Improving the Knowledge Base for environmental Justice and Equitable GI

Restorative justice efforts to address disproportionate historical and current exposure to environmental hazards in Phoenix would benefit from an integrated analysis of the social distribution of environmental hazards and community assets. Current work has demonstrated that environmental justice communities have maintained and developed community cohesion and institutions while facing many hazards. These types of analyses can and should integrate a greater variety of community perspectives, specific sources of toxic chemical hazards, and current and potential future green infrastructure assets. Those assets would include potential land acquisitions, public right-of-way improvements, and the use of city-owned vacant properties.

Closing Insights

Phoenix has a functional framework to plan for a city-wide green infrastructure network; however, current plans do not do so equitably, nor do they include meaningful leadership from affected communities. Many opportunities exist to (1) update thinking within city policy and planning on the meaning of equity, and (2) transform current planning practices. Now it is up to Phoenix to leverage these opportunities to advance GI equity.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-09

Milwaukee

MILWAUKEE

Incorporated 1846

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 96.2 sq miles
  • 596,886 Total Population
  • 6,206 People per sq. mile
  • 2% Forest cover
  • Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests Biome
  • 9.5% Developed open space
  • $40,036 Median household income
  • 22.1% Live below federal poverty level
  • 65.5% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 10.9% Housing units vacant
  • 0.5% Native, 35.1% White, 38.3% Black, 19% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 4.2% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socio-economic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and Land Cover Data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The area occupied by the City of Milwaukee has served as an important gathering place for several Native Nations, including Menomonee peoples, since time immemorial, and continues to be a center of Indigenous organizing. Since its colonization in the mid-19th century by European peoples, the city has developed as an agricultural export hub and industrial center. These industries attracted significant numbers of Black workers after the Civil War, and numerous immigrants contributed to population growth through the 20th century. Like other midwestern cities however, industrial decline and racist policies have made the Metropolitan region one of the most segregated in America.

Throughout its development, the city has made large investments in public works and infrastructure to improve conditions for urban residents.  Like other former manufacturing centers, the city’s economy is now largely dominated by service industries and is experiencing uneven growth in property values. Climate change threatens the city with heatwaves and extreme precipitation events, exacerbating existing environmental justice issues. In the face of these challenges, numerous non-profits and city initiatives seek to accelerate a just transition.

Green Infrastructure in Milwaukee

The City of Milwaukee plans for Green Infrastructure through a dedicated GI Plan, a city-wide Green Streets Plan, a comprehensive Citywide Policy Plan, and its sustainability plan, ReFresh Milwaukee. The city has long been recognized as a leader in using Green Infrastructure for stormwater management in its separated sewer areas, and must plan alongside the Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewerage District overseeing the combined sewer system service much of the city (whose plans fall outside the scope of this analysis). More recently, its extensive green stormwater infrastructure programs have been combined with city-wide approaches for urban greening, building on twin legacies of sanitary infrastructure and parks planning. 

Reflecting this broad and integrated approach, Milwaukee led among cities in terms of the diversity of elements considered as part of its green infrastructure system. While the city includes networks and corridors, it appears to omit trails from consideration.

Functionally, GI plans focus on regulating urban hydrology. GI functions also include filtering air and are unique among cities examined in defining health as a core function. 

The benefits attributed to GI by Milwaukee GI plans are diverse, pertaining to numerous socio-economic, technological, and environmental benefits along with its contribution to overall urban resilience. Mirroring the omission of trails, recreation does not appear to be a focus of GI planning.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Milwaukee

Key Findings

Milwaukee GI plans provide an example of how a city can create a GI-based economic sector that develops new forms of expertise and builds wealth in urban communities. Milwaukee GI plans refer to the need to consider equity, and in some cases justice, but do not define either term. Despite a proliferation of non-profit led initiatives for consultative planning, GI plans would benefit from elaboration of dedicated inclusive means for implementation and evaluation. 

75%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

25%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

50%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

25%

explicitly refer to justice

75%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

25%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Milwaukee through Maps

Milwaukee is a diverse and yet highly segregated city, with uneven distributions of income, rent burden, and vacancy correlating with racial composition. The urban core, in particular, has never recovered from higher income, and predominantly White, families moving to the suburbs post-World War II. In contrast, the waterfront and southern portions of the city have attracted residents and businesses with significant reinvestment in existing and new development. Patterns of green space are unequal and appear to track income, with larger parks and green spaces in more affluent suburbs and the redeveloped waterfront.

How does Milwaukee account for Equity in GI Planning?

Despite a legacy of grappling with equity issues, Milwaukee GI plans do not define equity or justice. 

Some plans include promising mechanisms for public engagement; and have some best practices for community engagement, however, there is room for improvement and consistency. 

All of the Milwaukee plans that address GI seek to redistribute multiple hazards and improve multiple values of urban lands, but weakly consider context and existing disparities. Plans are also notable for their GI-related labor strategies.  

Envisioning Equity

GI plans in Milwaukee focus on providing universal benefits to all city residents. The Refresh Milwaukee Sustainability Plan offers the most extensive discussion of equity issues, with a welcome focus on equitable wealth building through job creation. Despite an emphasis on honoring diverse experiences and perspectives, there is extremely limited discussion of historical and ongoing processes causing urban inequality. 

The Sustainability Plan mentions environmental justice as a core goal, however, there is no discussion of specific redress or transformation of decision-making processes. The city-wide GI Plan and Comprehensive Plan rely on the same general framing as the Sustainability Plan but do not forcefully link the city’s extensive GI programs to specific equity concerns. 

Procedural Equity

Milwaukee GI plans have some leading examples of community led GI implementation, notably in its Walnut Way city supported programs. These innovative approaches for including communities in the early stages of planning and project design fall short in meaningfully involving communities throughout the GI lifecycle, which plagues many non-profit-led initiatives. Like other Sustainability plans, the Refresh Plan has best practices in surveying public opinion. This process is led by an appointed leadership board that has broad engagement with city agencies, civil society, and the business community. However, it is unclear how well the respondents represent the city’s population and further, whether historically disenfranchised and marginalized communities have a voice in the process, despite extensive outreach efforts. 

Another bright spot is in the design process outlined in the city-wide GI plan, which seeks to build community capacity through job training, along with technical and financial assistance. In short, the plan attempts to build design expertise into the communities targeted for GI projects. Specific methods to implement this collaborative design process are unclear. In the broader scope of GI planning, the lack of substance and clarity in the plan raises the possibility of failing to meaningfully engage communities throughout planning stages, despite intentions to do so. While there are mechanisms in place to track complaints, there are no discernible procedures to respond to the input and to change course in the event of unforeseen problems or issues. The Sustainability Plan relies upon volunteers to evaluate whether the Plan is meeting its self-defined targets. The Green Streets Stormwater Plan also has some evaluative components, but they are limited to internal city agency processes.

Distributional Equity

Milwaukee GI plans are exceptional in addressing labor issues by explicitly seeking to build a highly skilled GI labor force that benefits marginalized communities. They do so through commitments in the city-wide policy plan and GI plan to build a diverse GI labor force in several related economic sectors. This strategy seeks to serve as a model for other cities, aims to have members of marginalized groups become GI experts and professionals, and generate economic value both within city work and by consulting and advising on programs across the world.

Otherwise, the distributional impacts of GI are unremarkable. All GI plans focus on a range of hazards but do not discuss differential, uneven, or contextual vulnerability or how GI may shift risks of different types, although the city and local nonprofits are actively studying these issues. Value-wise, plans are similar to other cities in that they extol the virtues of GI’s multiple benefits but only weakly address how benefits, risks, and potential unintended consequences associated with city-led GI may vary across communities.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Like other cities, Milwaukee has embraced official equity planning and created an Office of Equity and Inclusion since the beginning of this project. However, as of the writing of this analysis, neither of these initiatives address the city's green infrastructure programs. Milwaukee has a long history of urban ecological education, outreach, and research, focusing on reconnecting urban communities with their resident ecosystems, which is reflected in its focus on creating a citywide green infrastructure system. Given the inconsistency in addressing equity issues in the city's current GI plans, we offer several recommendations to stakeholder groups that are working on GI and equity issues across the city.

Community Groups

Residents and communities in Milwaukee have long been working on environmental and social justice issues. The city has one of the oldest chapters of the NAACP and has long been an area of intensive organizing and struggle around racial justice issues. Community groups appear focused on attracting investment into neglected neighborhoods. This work has been supported by reclaiming narratives of what makes spaces valuable undertaken by the Milwaukee Environmental Justice Lab. Despite city and community-led initiatives, the Building Movement Project’s Race to Lead series found significant gaps in the racial equity of nonprofit sector leadership in the City. These tensions highlight several issues at the intersection of urban greening, governance, and community organizing that align with our findings of inconsistent community inclusion in GI planning. Flagship projects, such as the Walnut Way initiative, offer scalable models within the city. To expand upon these initiatives,. we offer two recommendations to improve the equity of community-oriented green infrastructure.

  1. Intersectional Urban Greening

Current planning practices in Milwaukee have almost no mechanisms for community-based evaluation of GI plan implementation. This is surprising, given that the city is implementing an integrative concept of GI in the public realm and for stormwater system improvements. However, some plan updates promise the creation of community forums for evaluation. Given the broader trend towards inclusive planning, including the use of an equity lens and planning-focused city ordinances, there are opportunities to build transparent and binding mechanisms. Community groups can demand a greater voice in the evaluation of city programs and policies, building off of the inclusive approaches of the Sustainability Plan and the design charrette framework of the city-wide GI Plan. Greater community inclusion in GI planning can and should address the multifaceted concerns of marginalized groups. A primary way of changing the conversation in the next wave of GI planning is to center the existing work of concerned grassroots organizations to formally define the concepts of equity and justice. Further, those concepts must underpin community leadership of planning alongside well-developed frameworks that address distributional inequity.

2. Reclaiming Value and Mitigating Hazards

Milwaukee has high rates of housing vacancy and rent burden in marginalized neighborhoods. This market failure of providing affordable housing is a direct product of waves of racialized disinvestment in the city that continue to this day. Systemic GI investments can certainly raise property values, but not necessarily to the benefit of renters or property owners with limited incomes. Simply attracting external investment to these neighborhoods may cause similar gentrification issues to those observed in other cities, as largely speculative market mechanisms require profit returns to provide incentives for additional property investment. Milwaukee has a complex history of urban renewal that was both highly destructive and gave rise to a resurgent Black middle class. Prior efforts to attract external investment have led to significant displacement from some neighborhoods, albeit at a rate slightly lower than other US cities. While the city has an anti-displacement plan, that plan does not mention GI investments. There is a need to examine the relationship between public realm investments such as GI and the waves of displacement already occurring to not replicate these problems as GI programs expand. The same can be said for using GI to mitigate stormwater flooding in the city. Existing programs like the Water Centric City concept and its approach to skills and jobs development can be expanded to address structural economic justice in neighborhoods targeted for GI investments.

Policy Makers & Planners

Currently, Milwaukee policy makers and planners are grappling with equity and displacement issues but not actively in GI plans. This gap needs to be addressed because for urban dwellers GI is a key component of their quality of life. GI impacts infrastructure performance, property value, and many residential services. Additionally, since Milwaukee County is a member of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, there is a structure in place to address regional equity issues. To improve the equity of GI planning in the city of Milwaukee, policy makers and planners should consider the following gaps identified in current plans.

  1. Specifying Equity in Relation to GI

No GI plan examined in Milwaukee defined equity or justice. This is a major omission for a city that is a green infrastructure leader, has other active equity initiatives in place, and suffers from a high degree of segregation. While the Water Centric City concept and steps already taken to ensure community engagement in GI projects are admirable, these need to be supported by a broader understanding of the relationship between green infrastructure and racial justice. These definitions should come from the rich ecosystem of community organizations working on racial justice in the city as well as everyday residents grappling with neighborhood change and environmental issues.

2. More Inclusive and Equitable Planning

Milwaukee GI plans fall short in building meaningful community engagement throughout the planning lifecycle. There is a need to build in more consistency for communities to lead planning efforts that impact their lives. Such an approach, required in many of our study cities, relies on meeting communities where they are, including providing compensation and services that enable community participation and creating meaningful mechanisms for concerns that can be met through planning, legislation, and the modification of city programs.

Foundations and Funders

Multiple organizations have funded green infrastructure-related activity in Milwaukee. More work is needed to determine the impact and efficacy of current efforts to improve the equity of GI, especially since current GI plans do not have an equity focus. Existing efforts could be expanded in several concrete ways.

  1. Supporting Intersectional Organizing

As in other cities, significant community organizing energies are focused on anti-displacement strategies and economic and racial justice issues. With the large GI investments from city and metropolitan agencies, GI programs can be structured to address these interwoven concerns. However, this will require dedicated support for existing community movements.

Closing Insights

Milwaukee has been recognized as a leader in GI implementation and has adopted a city-wide integrated approach to develop and plan for a diverse GI system. However, despite a strong focus on labor sector development with the Water Centric City concept, inclusive design practices, and a collaboratively framed Sustainability Plan, equity and justice remain largely unaddressed by Milwaukee GI plans. The question remains how one of the more segregated cities in America will address its housing and racial justice crises through its extensive GI programs.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-10

New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS

Incorporated 1718

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 169.4 sq. miles
  • 389,648 Total population
  • 2,299  People per sq. mile
  • 0.5% Forest cover
  • Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome
  • 1.9% Developed open space
  • $39,576  Median household income
  • 17.8%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 71.7% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 19.7% Housing units vacant
  • 0.1% Native, 30.7% White, 58.9% Black, 5.5% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 2.9% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The City of New Orleans occupies the homelands of Chitimacha peoples and other Indigenous Nations, although this history has largely been erased. Native and Black identities are deeply intertwined through legacies of colonialism, slavery, resistance, and organizing. At the mouth of the Mississippi River, one of the largest, most heavily managed, and industrialized river basins in the world, the city faces profound long-term challenges related to river basin management, coastal habitat loss, rising sea levels, and increasing extreme weather associated with climate change. The city has served as an epicenter of conversations over climate justice since even before the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. 

While in many ways the city has rebounded, redevelopment and regeneration have been highly uneven and rife with climate gentrification. Despite population growth, many residents from marginalized communities displaced by the hurricane have been unable to return home.

Green Infrastructure in New Orleans

New Orleans’ GI programs focus almost exclusively on implementing a stormwater concept through the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (SWBNO) stormwater management and GI plans. Additional planning support for GI in the city comes from the New Orleans Master Plan (Plan for the 21st century) and the City of New Orleans Capital Improvement Plan.

Plans examined were in broad agreement about what constitutes GI, including ecological elements, engineered facilities, and green materials, although they did not include parks or greenspaces.

The functions of GI were focused on integration with the stormwater and flood control systems, as well as restoring some ecological functions of coastal habitats.

The benefits of GI were also focused on improving environmental quality and built infrastructure performance, as well as positioning the city as a leader in the water management sector.

Defining Green Infrastructure in New Orleans

Key Findings

The New Orleans Comprehensive Plan offers a strong framework for considering equity issues across city programs including GI planning. In the remainder of the evaluated plans, equity is not addressed directly or with any vigor. While plans seek to address the enormous disparities in exposure to the hazards managed by GI, mechanisms for public engagement are sparse and notions of justice remain underdeveloped.

25%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

25%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

25%

define equity

25%

explicitly refer to justice

75%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

25%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

25%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

New Orleans through Maps

The City of New Orleans is divided by the largest river in North America, the Mississippi River. Abundant freshwater and coastal marshes line the city’s eastern outskirts and much of the area within the city limits consists of water. The aqueous city has several higher elevation zones forming much of the denser parts of downtown and the backbones of historic neighborhoods. The city remains segregated racially and economically, with highly uneven distributions of income and rent burden.

How does New Orleans account for Equity in GI Planning?

New Orleans’ Comprehensive Plan is one of the few plans that addressed each of the 10 dimensions of equity we examined with our screen. Written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the plan uses a definition of equity that focuses on inclusive government and fair outcomes by confronting institutional racism and discrimination. Otherwise, framings of equity issues were weak and we found no other definitions of equity or justice within the other three plans.

While the Comprehensive Plan focused on inclusionary planning, procedures for public engagement across the GI lifecycle require further development.

Plans emphasize the role of green infrastructure in mitigating the highly uneven distribution of urban stormwater and flood hazards but with limited discussion of the value of GI and the labor it requires.

Envisioning Equity

The Comprehensive Plan grapples with both the legacies and the present realities of institutionalized racism contributing to the inequities present in the city today. Its vision for GI is largely rooted in a notion of universal good, though it also acknowledges the failures of prior planning efforts and persistent frustrations in the city’s marginalized communities. The Plan also discusses environmental justice, borrowing language from the state constitution which bans discrimination based on race in siting decisions. However, concepts of restorative and transformative justice are absent. This omission could allow for the persistence of institutionalized racism, and top-down styles of decision making that do not take into account the varied needs or experiences of communities themselves.

Procedural Equity

Following a pattern similar to many other cities, the Comprehensive Plan used numerous avenues to garner public input in its initial stages. The timeline for public engagement was, however, compressed, and several planning units appear to have merged without input from those living in them. Also, it isn’t clear what demographic groups were engaged or solicited for participation or how. While the plan selectively reports public comments, there is no way of knowing what other concerns were raised and then dismissed by planners. Other city plans were much weaker in their methods of public inclusion. It also appears that planning for compliance with water quality regulations within the city required local activist groups to sue the city. There are no substantive mechanisms outlined within plans for participatory design and program implementation. Current mechanisms for design and implementation are led by city agencies, and, in some cases, rely on an RFP process requiring communities to lead their proposals in a competitive bidding process. Plan evaluation also lacks clarity and substance. Although GI programs are monitored for their physical performance, there are no monitoring or reporting mechanisms in place for the larger set of concerns around GI’s social impact.

Distributional Equity

Not surprisingly for a post-disaster city, the comprehensive plans acknowledge many intersecting and differential hazards and prioritize GI projects in those communities that have higher exposure. However, the differential vulnerability approach, namely, acknowledging that some communities have been made more vulnerable over time due to how hazards are managed, is not referenced in the overall stormwater management plan, despite being mentioned in the city-wide GI strategy. Planning efforts to manage flooding and water quality risks intermittently reference the need to make transportation networks safer, but fail to focus on other overlapping climate hazards, such as more frequent heatwaves. Although both the Comprehensive and GI-specific SWNBO Plans describe that GI has many valuable aspects, these are considered to be universal and independent of context or the needs and perceptions of communities. The Comprehensive Plan acknowledges the need to address the potential for housing displacement but does not specify any ways to deal with the issue. This is problematic because the plan intends to target marginalized communities for GI interventions but offers limited mechanisms for those communities to influence the process. Approaches towards addressing labor distributions are largely undeveloped. The Comprehensive Plan borrows from Milwaukee’s ‘Water Centric City’ concept but without elaborating on specific job training programs. City plans for GI explicitly rely on volunteer labor and in-kind donations but do not discuss the equity implications of doing so.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

The City of New Orleans in combination with Policy Link and the Government Alliance on Race & Equity has committed to creating the Equity NewOrleans initiative. Despite several promising attempts to address equity through GI planning, there are notable gaps. Below, we outline several key areas to improve the City’s GI planning in collaboration with community groups, city officials, and funders.

Community Groups

City leadership’s commitment to equity must extend to the public realm investments in the city’s green infrastructure systems. The significant expenditures being made at both the city and federal levels to counteract flooding and improve the city’s storm and sewer systems must also support communities on the frontline of climate change. The long history of creative resistance to displacement by frontline communities in New Orleans is being severely tested by climate gentrification. In the current political climate, community groups can push to fill several key gaps in how current GI plans address equity issues.

1. Demanding Genuine Inclusion

While the Comprehensive Plan collected survey data in its formative stages, there are no substantive mechanics outlined for incorporating community input as part of green infrastructure decision-making. Neither SWNBO led plan makes commitments to meaningful public participation or ownership of the process. Demanding genuine inclusion in GI planning processes requires that the communities determine how they are engaged. These also should include the full lifecycle of GI programs, projects, and policies, including free prior and informed consent, and all that it entails, during planning, design, implementation, and evaluation. 

2. Addressing Housing Displacement and Climate Gentrification

Managing stormwater and flooding are premier environmental justice issues in New Orleans but green infrastructure mitigation measures must not contribute to the further displacement of the city’s marginalized communities. Communities facing GI-related displacement should demand that planners make good on promises in the Comprehensive Plan by following the guidance of anti-displacement campaigns such as greening in place.

Policy Makers & Planners

New Orleans City Planners have made commendable improvements in the most recent Comprehensive Plan to address some equity dimensions of GI. As our analysis above points out, work remains to be done to ensure that GI can address long-standing injustices to equitably manage hazards and improve the public realm. To that end, we offer several recommendations to address the gaps in current GI plans. 

1. Building Inclusion Over the GI Lifecycle

Without meaningful community engagement, GI programs will likely replicate existing inequities. Mechanisms for public engagement in the city’s current plans are lacking. Establishing dedicated resident councils and paying participants to engage in planning, design, implementation, and evaluation work is one way to kickstart the Water Centric City-based jobs concept included in existing plans and progress towards community control of resources. 

2. Proactively Addressing Climate Gentrification and GI Displacement

GI can make neighborhoods more climate-resilient, vital for a city like New Orleans. However, as evidence has already shown, climate and GI can combine with structural inequality to displace residents. It should be noted that the city has stated that it will study the issue. Strategies for addressing housing displacement, including dedicated bond funds for affordable housing, and building community wealth through GI as part of larger just transitions, have demonstrated success in keeping neighborhoods affordable for current residents. The team at Greening in Place has explored other options for anti-displacement. Rather than locking residents into existing segregated neighborhoods, progressive approaches would enable tenant organizing, stronger rent controls, creative solutions like low equity coops, alongside wage and jobs growth to structurally address housing choice.

3. Advocating for GI at Scale

New Orleans flood and climate vulnerabilities cannot be addressed by the city alone. The Mississippi River, delta, and surrounding coastline are some of the most altered ecosystems in the world, and ongoing federal efforts must evolve to build long-term climate resilience for the city. Advocating for changes in the broader basin and federal coastal protection strategies are necessary alongside city-level investments in GI. Fortunately, the Louisiana Watershed Initiative provides a working framework for such a multi-scalar approach and could be strengthened to achieve equitable climate resilience for the region.

Foundations and Funders

Numerous funding organizations were identified as crucial to implementing the city’s GI plans. There are several key areas where funders could improve the equity of the GI planning process and its outcomes.

  1. Planning from the Grassroots

Funders can dedicate resources for community organizing around intersectional environmental, housing, and social justice issues. These issues can be partially addressed through GI, but depend on restorative and transformative justice-informed approaches towards grassroots neighborhood improvements, and in some cases, retreat. Whatever rent-burdened strategy is selected by impacted communities, foundations can support demonstration projects to serve as models for evolving city programs that oriented towards more inclusive and equitable practices. Further efforts could include supporting nationwide knowledge and skills exchanges amongst community organizations with similar struggles. Collective capacity building will contribute to a just transition in the region's fossil fuel sectors and support the realization of the Water Centric City jobs concept.

Closing Insights

New Orleans is a city of the future. The way the city handles the rising threat of climate change and how they use GI as an element to address both climate and social justice challenges will be seen as a model by many. However, doing so requires different sectors of society to work collaboratively to address the intersecting trends of housing displacement and persistent environmental and social injustice, and implement genuinely inclusive and transformative planning.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.