Onlining about Redlining: MLK Day 2022

1930s HOLC map of Cedar Rapids at National Archives (Author's photo)

If it already had felt strange to have the celebration of inclusive community that is the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration online, technology added insult to injury when the Facebook Live feed of the evening event at Coe College was inaudible. Pastors Stephanie and Keeyon Carter, who started Wellington Heights Community Church, gave the keynote address. Linn-Mar High School senior Kayla Purchase and student assistance counselor Janessa Carr (co-founder of the Marion Alliance for Racial Equity) received the Dr. Percy and Lileah Harris "Who is My Neighbor?" Award (King 2022). I trust "Lift Every Voice and Sing," one of the greatest songs ever written, was sung. (See video of the event, below.)

Gathering at St. Paul's Methodist in January 2020 ("the before-times")

In the afternoon, participants in a powerhouse panel on housing issues argued that while redlining in its purest form has been outlawed for more than 50 years, its impacts continue to be felt today, in spite of a broad array of ameliorative programs in which the City of Cedar Rapids is participating. Years of exclusion from housing opportunity, along with violent suppression, put blacks and other Americans of color at a substantial disadvantage in terms of economic opportunity (with spillover effects into all aspects of daily life). That's the essence of systemic racism.

 

L to R: Betty Johnson, Clint Twedt-Ball, Tonyamarie Adams, Jeff Pomeranz

 

Clint Twedt-Ball, Executive Director of Matthew 25 in Cedar Rapids, cited the book Know Your Price by Andre Perry (Brookings Institution, 2020) which found houses in white neighborhoods fetched prices 48 percent higher than comparable houses in predominantly black neighborhoods. Over the decades that added to a huge amount of lost money, which, Twedt-Ball noted, could have been spent on solving social problems. It also means that blacks have a more difficult time securing home loans even today.

Tonyamarie Adams, Cedar Rapids realtor and Neighborhood Building Assistant at Matthew 25, noted that today more energy goes into new construction than on poor neighborhoods where people need help like the Taylor Area and Time-Check, and that she has yet to find a lender of African descent. Where, she asked, are lenders who are willing to work with people who are struggling? 

Moderator Anne Harris Carter read from a 1930 description of Cedar Rapids neighborhoods

Cedar Rapids City Manager Jeff Pomeranz noted that, as problems persist and he and others have a lot to learn about them, this year, for the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is an official city holiday. (Really? The first?) The city participates in a number of programs designed to help disadvantaged people, including Paving for Progress, which invests in infrastructure maintenance according to perceived need not the value of the neighborhood; Neighborhood Finance Corporation, which provides home loans and down-payment assistance; Community Development Block Grants; Section 8 Housing Assistance, which provides rental assistance in hopes that stability can lead to homeownership in the long run; low-income housing credits for developers; PATCH, which helps people fix up their homes; Urban Dreams, which creates opportunities for younger people by connecting them to jobs; and a two-year plan to use American Recovery Act money to fund scholarships to Kirkwood Community College. (A complete list of housing services available in Cedar Rapids is here.)

And yet, problems persist. Assessment of some of the programs show they're not widely known, and don't reach many of the people they're intended to reach, Pomeranz said. Moreover, if the programs were more widely used, they would quickly run out of funding. It seems that, if we take the problems of housing opportunity and overall economic opportunity seriously, we're going to have to do more than incremental fixes. Maybe we need an approach like that cited in the chat by Karla Twedt-Ball of the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation: Evanston, Illinois, has started a reparations fund to compensate for housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. is a day to start thinking outside the policy box. Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan notes that "while [King] was more liberal than radical, it's hard to imagine that he would be so revered if he were a 30-something activist today--a Black man marching in the streets and advocating for fair wages, voting rights, racial justice and a more equitable form of capitalism" (Givhan 2022). King's true legacy, Givhan argues, is not the glossy picture of "a warmhearted preacher who just wanted everyone to get along," but those people who today continue to "advocate for change [and] do the hard work of organizing." 

The ongoing impacts of redlining is only one fundamental problem of housing policy. It is widely acknowledged that, as Mayor Tiffany O'Donnell noted in the chat, "Home ownership = generational wealth." This is a true--at least for most people whose families were able to buy homes in the mid-20th century with help from the Federal Housing Administration, 30-year mortgages, and suburban development--but problematic statement. Besides the question of how equitable is an arrangement where certain children inherit wealth, it is not clear how long this arrangement is financially sustainable for anyone. As homes appreciate in value, they become less affordable for homebuyers and sometimes depending on property tax rates even for current owners (Phillips 2020: 61). On the other hand, when wealth is tied up in home values, even kind-hearted people have strong incentives to resist racial and economic integration, and increased density, which threaten the value of their houses (Cortright 2017).

"Dr. King was bold," writes E.J. Dionne (2022). The racial wealth gap is the result of decades of systemic inequity; it demands that we be bold, too.

SEE ALSO: 

"Housing Policy," 1 July 2021

"MLK Against the Mob," 21 January 2021

Linda Evans, "MLK Jr. Day," Vegan Linda, 18 January 2022

Shane Phillips, The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (And Keeping It There) (Island, 2020)

Jeana Quinlan, "Commemorating Martin Luther King Day," The Cosmos (Coe College), 21 January 2022, 1-2

Allen Vandermeulen Jr., "A Prayer of Invocation Based on King's 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail," The Here and Hereafter, 17 January 2022 

 

Condition of the State 2022

St. Luke's Hospital emergency entrance

[UPDATE: The day after the governor's address, Iowa Department of Public Health announced that 182 Iowans had died of COVID in the previous week; COVID-related hospitalizations rose to 923 from 792, the highest in over a year; and the 14-day positivity rate rose to 21.2 percent.]

The Iowa legislature begins its 2022 session this week, and if early remarks by Republican leaders are any indication, it looks to be another year of fabricating problems to solve while ignoring the actual problems. Iowa's 188 percent increase in deaths from COVID during the previous week make it 5th in the nation, while its vaccination rate of 59 percent is falling farther behind the nation as a whole (63 percent). Hospitals and caregivers across the state suffer from overwork and stretched capacity (Parker 2022). But as far as the Governor and the legislature are concerned, the pandemic is beyond over. It was not mentioned at all in the Condition of the State address, except in connection with her demand that "Schools. Stay. Open." At least that's more than climate change or systemic racism or economic inequality got.

What climate? My backyard, August 2020. A rare December derecho followed in 2021

 

We in Iowa like things cheap. We're also into nostalgia, and self-congratulation (and taking credit for federal government spending). After introducing a couple who moved to Iowa, where people are nice, from California, where people are not nice, Governor Reynolds presented her "bold" vision for the "state of opportunity:" cutting income taxes to a flat rate of 4 percent, with no tax on retirement income no matter how wealthy you are; cutting "onerous" regulations on child care providers and training teachers; banning "explicit" books from school libraries; and using state education funds for private schools.  Also, there were plenty of swats at the federal government, bureaucrats, employable people supposedly making a living off unemployment benefits, and people in other states who refuse to teach and want to ban police. In Iowa, we like our rhetorical meat like we like our politics: very, very red. 

"Explicit" book banned in Ankeny

Senate leader Jack Whitver, R-Ankeny, told Iowa Public Radio's "River to River" yesterday that Iowa is looking to its western neighbor South Dakota as a role model, while rejecting that of its eastern neighbor Illinois. Illinois certainly has its share of problems, but it has way outpaced Iowa and South Dakota in job creation: Illinois increased employment by 4.1 percent between November 2020 and November 2021, while Iowa was less than half of that, at 2.0 percent, lower than any of its neighbors except... South Dakota (1.8 percent). South Dakota leads Iowa in deaths per 100,000 people from COVID, 286-254, and it is 10th in the nation in occupied ICU beds per capita. And as an added bonus, its porous tax system has made it a haven for foreign money laundering (Cenziper, Fitzgibbon and Georges 2021)!

South Dakota and Iowa are low-tax, low-service states, competing with each other on the basis of cheapness. That's a policy choice, and seemingly one that majorities in both states are happy with. But it is a choice, one that reflects a worldview that the cheapest product is the best. People in a marketplace don't always choose the cheapest product, though. Some prefer amenities, a social experience, or ethical values. We in Iowa are choosing the cheapest life. Our policies will attract those who share our values of cheapness and nostalgia, like those people Senator Whitver referenced who work in Iowa but live across the border in South Dakota because the taxes are lower. The 21st century may have other ideas.

SEE ALSO: "Iowa: It's Unreal," 13 January 2021 

Daring to Dream About Highway Removal

Protesting a proposed freeway through Washington, 1970s

Following the positive experience of San Francisco, after that city dared not to rebuild the intracity Embarcadero Freeway destroyed in the Bay Series Quake of 1989, a number of cities are removing the limited access highways that were shoved through their city centers decades ago. Milwaukee in 2002 replaced the Park East Freeway with McKinley Boulevard, resulting in mixed-used development and increased value in the surrounding land (CNU n.d.). Other successful removals occurred in Portland Oregon (1974) and Seattle (2001), and internationally in Seoul (2003) and Madrid (2000s) (Walker 2016).

Such highways had destroyed neighborhoods, facilitated white flight, and brought traffic congestion and air pollution to the places it severed. (For problems created in Los Angeles, see Masters 2014.) "The damage done to cities was twofold," writes Benjamin Ross.

By subsidizing long-distance commuting, expressways accelerated the stampede to the suburbs and sucked the life out of urban neighborhoods. Beltways around cities, justified as bypasses to divert through traffic past congested downtowns, rapidly became crowded rush-hour routes. Meanwhile, the new highways devastated neighborhoods, tearing down what lay directly in their path and spreading a pall of noise, soot, and fumes over what remained standing (2014: 48).

Today in Baltimore, a group called Fight Blight Bmore wants to remove an uncompleted project that displaced 900 families in the 1970s (Reklaitis 2021). There's A New Dallas in Texas, Minnesota has Reconnect Rondo St. Paul, and New Orleans the Claiborne Avenue Alliance. In Seattle, a movement called Lid I-5 is seeking to use overdue reconstruction of that 1961 highway to put a new development atop it (the "lid") that would reconnect the Capitol Hill and First Hill neighborhoods with Downtown, and enable new housing, parks, and shops to be built there (Argerious 2021). CNU's Freeways Without Futures report nominates that one and fourteen others from New York City to San Francisco for removal, at least from sight as in the Seattle case, if not entirely. In other state DOTs, the message has yet to land; the Texas Department of Transportation is determined to take out some more Houston by expanding I-45.

The federal government is starting to show interest. In March 2021 President Biden proposed $20 billion in transportation funds to "reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access," citing examples from New Orleans and Syracuse of earlier projects that did the opposite. This follows on efforts late in the Obama administration to encourage cities to use transportation money more flexibly (Walker 2016). The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act cut funding for "reconnect neighborhoods" to $1 billion, perhaps enough to do one or two trial runs somewhere.

At that rate, it will be a long time before reconnect neighborhoods funding gets to Cedar Rapids. Still, building I-380 in the late 1970s involved plowing through a number of older neighborhoods, including Czech Village and Little Mexico (Jordan 2021a, 2021b). I-380 is not strictly an intracity highway, as it runs 50+ miles from I-80 west of Iowa City north into Waterloo, carrying 48000 vehicles a day in the city, declining to 24000 by the Benton County Line. Since its construction, however, it has been joined by a number of other limited access highways around the city where capacity far exceeds current usage, particularly the extension of State Highway 100 around the west side of town, about which I was ambivalent but since it's been built we might as well use it. 

The idea, then, would be to disperse I-380 traffic in the center of Cedar Rapids a number of ways. Through traffic could bypass Cedar Rapids by taking US 30 to the SR  100 extension, adding seven miles to what is now an eight-mile stretch--a rounding error for a long-distance trip. Intracity traffic would use either a four-lane boulevard that would replace the highway, or the US 30-to-SR 13 route along the southern and eastern edges. (In slightly more detail, where there are parallel frontage streets, as on most of the west side, I'd keep those and develop the space between. Most of the east side would need a new street, and to work around the railroad yard, the Cold Stream, and such like.)

Surely there could be a higher better use of the space than this:

300 block of 3rd St SW (Google maps screen capture)

The core of the city would enjoy restored connections and land for housing and businesses, allowing for the city to develop around proximity rather than the speed of cars (Tomer, Kane and Fishbane 2019; see also Tomer and Kane 2020). 

1. Residential and commercial development on the west side of the river--Kingston, Czech Village, and Hayes Park--would be connected to neighborhoods currently on the far side of the highway, making for a continuous walkable area where prosperity could spread and be shared.
2. Access to Cedar Lake, currently safe only for cars due to the highway entrance at H Avenue, would be improved for the surrounding neighborhood, with area for development between the lake and Mound View.
3. Continental Terrace, the apartment complex high on the hill off Glass Road, would be connected to shops on Center Point Road, again with area for development between the two.
   

 

Walking but not walkable distance from two grocery stores, a pharmacy, a hardware store, and a trail (Google maps screen capture)

I'm not saying this conversion is likely to happen, but you know, the more I reflect on it the more excited I become. What a difference it would make for housing supply, business opportunity, sustainability, vibe... you name it!

SEE ALSO

Joe Cortright, "Why the Proposed $5 Billion I-5 Bridge is a Climate Disaster," City Observatory, 4 January 2022

Helen Hope, "Three Forward-Thinking Moments from the 'Undoing the Damage of Urban Freeways' Webinar," Smart Growth America, 11 May 2021

Benjamin Ross, Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism (Oxford, 2014)

Robert Steuteville, "Eight Ways for 'Receiver Cities' to Prepare," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 9 December 2021