Tag Archives: inclusive

Advancing Equitable Transit-Oriented Development

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photo by David Wilson

MZ Strategies has posted a white paper funded by the Ford Foundation, Advancing Equitable Transit-Oriented Development through Community Partnerships and Public Sector Leadership. It opens,

Communities across the country are investing in better transit to connect people of all income levels to regional economic and social opportunity. Transit can be a catalyst for development, and the demand for housing and mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods located near quality transit continues to grow. In some places like Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles (to name just a few) land prices and rents near transit have increased substantially creating concerns with the displacement of small businesses and affordable housing.

In response, multi-sector coalitions are forming in a number of regions to advance Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (eTOD), which aims to create and support communities of opportunity where residents of all incomes, ages, races and ethnicities participate in and benefit from living in connected, healthy, vibrant places connected by transit. These transit-oriented communities of opportunity include a mixture of housing, office, retail and other amenities as part of a walkable neighborhood generally located within a half-mile of quality public transportation. This white paper pulls together emerging eTOD best practices from four regions, and highlights opportunities to use federal finance and development programs administered by US Department of Transportation to create and preserve inclusive communities near transit. It offers lessons learned for other communities and a set of recommendations for the Federal Transit Administration to better support local efforts by transit agencies to advance eTOD.

Achieving eTOD involves an inclusive planning process during the transit planning and community development phases. This entails long-term and active engagement of a diverse set of community partners ranging from local residents, small business owners, community development players, and neighborhood-serving organizations located along the proposed or existing transit corridor, to regional anchor institutions and major employers including universities and health care providers, to philanthropy, local and regional agencies and state government partners.

Equitable outcomes require smart, intentional strategies to ensure wide community engagement. Successful eTOD requires planning not just for transit, but also for how this type of catalytic investment can help to advance larger community needs including affordable housing, workforce and small business development, community health and environmental clean-up. (1, footnote omitted)

The report presents e-TOD case studies from Minneapolis-St. Paul; Los Angeles; Seattle and Denver.  These case studies highlight the types of tools that state and local governments can use to maximize the value of transit-oriented design for broad swathes of the community.

 

Affirmatively Furthering Neighborhood Choice

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Professor Kelly

Professor Kelly

Jim Kelly has posted Affirmatively Furthering Neighborhood Choice: Vacant Property Strategies and Fair Housing to SSRN (forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review). He writes,

With the Supreme Court’s Inclusive Cmtys. Project decision in June 2015 and the Obama Administration’s adoption, the following month, of the Final Rule for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, local government accountability for ending segregation and resolving the spatial mismatch between affordable housing and economic opportunity has been placed on a more solid footing. Instead of being responsible only for overt, conscious attempts to harm protected groups, jurisdictions that receive money from HUD will need to take a hard look at their policies that perpetuate the barriers to housing opportunity for economically marginalized protected groups. The duty to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing, although somewhat aspirational in its formulation, requires HUD grant recipients to engage with fair housing issues in a way that the threat of litigation, even disparate impact litigation, never has.

For cities struggling with soft residential real estate markets, HUD’s concerns about land use barriers to affordable housing may seem tone deaf. Advocates challenging exclusionary policies have often focused on cities with high housing costs. Even a city with large vacant problems, such as Baltimore, was sued primarily because of its location with a strong regional housing market. But, concerns about social equity in revitalizing communities make the Final Rule’s universal approach to AFFH very relevant to cities confronting housing abandonment in its older, disinvested neighborhoods. This Articles has shown that attention to the Final Rule’s new Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) reporting system is warranted both as a protective measure and as an opportunity to advance core goals of creating and sustaining an attractive and inclusive network of residential urban communities. (30-31)

For those of us who have trouble parsing the contemporary state of fair housing law in general and the AFFH rule in particular, the article provides a nice overview. And it offers insight into how fair housing law can help increase “the supply of decent, affordable housing options to members of protected groups . . .” (2) Not a bad twofer for one article.