In 2017, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, analyzed the average life expectancy of its residents. Those in the more affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods in the eastern section of the city lived longest, the city found, with an average life expectancy of 79 to 83 years. In West Louisville—a historically disinvested area with a predominantly Black population—the average life expectancy was a full decade shorter. The stark difference, the city concluded, was “in part due to systemic oppression.” That systemic oppression includes a long history of discriminatory land use policies.
Throughout the 20th century, governments across the United States promoted segregation and inequity through planning and zoning policies including deed restrictions, redlining, and urban renewal. Like many other cities, Louisville is now confronting its legacy of unjust policies, including a racially restrictive zoning ordinance overturned by the U.S. Supreme court in 1917. Planners in this southeastern U.S. city created an interactive online exhibit that documents that history and have undertaken a comprehensive, community-based equity review of the city’s Land Development Code.
“Discrimination might not always be blatant, but it is still embedded throughout policy—not just in Louisville, but in many cities,” said Louisville Planning Director Emily Liu. “Just acknowledging that this history exists is very important. It’s not created by our current government structure, but we still must deal with this historical racial injustice.” Louisville announced the review of its Land Development Code in July 2020, and Liu’s department has now recommended a set of zoning reforms that will begin to dismantle unfair policies and help create a more equitable, affordable city.
On a recent life expectancy map of Louisville, the worst outcomes tend to align with neighborhoods “redlined” in a 1930s real estate map, illustrating the lasting effects of land use decisions. Credit: Louisville Metro.
The city, which is home to more than 600,000 people, has been building a foundation for this kind of policy change over the last few years. An updated Comprehensive Plan released in 2018 and a Housing Needs Assessment released in 2019 both focus on removing barriers to affordable housing and investing in communities affected by discriminatory policies. In early 2020, Develop Louisville—an interagency effort focused on planning, community development, and sustainability—commissioned an analysis of local housing regulations that create barriers to equitable and inclusive development. The events of 2020, including the high-profile shooting of Black medical worker Breonna Taylor by Louisville police and the economic uncertainties sparked by the pandemic, brought new urgency to the work.
“I believe this may be the first time in Louisville’s history that the concepts of equity and planning have been explored with an explicit intention to change or amend the code to achieve meaningful outcomes,” said Jeana Dunlap, an urbanist, strategic advisor, and 15-year veteran of community development in local government. “Local practitioners and policy makers have been chipping away for years, in many ways, to place underutilized properties into productive use and to advance housing choices and alternatives for everyone in the Metro area . . . [but] the concurrent crises related to the pandemic, evictions, and police brutality are informing the current response. Recognizing the need for continuous improvement in a racially charged climate and doing so in a post-COVID-19 environment is imperative to achieving better quality of life and place for everyone in Louisville.”
Dunlap, who grew up in Louisville, facilitated several community listening sessions held by the city’s Planning & Design Department last year. “A lot of people, when they hear about planning and zoning, it automatically puts them to sleep,” she noted wryly at one session. “But some of us may not fully appreciate just how much the Land Development Code, the regulations and how they’re enforced . . . impacts our daily lives.”
The online listening sessions were followed by online workshops on housing, environmental justice, and education. Planning & Design also created a phone and email hotline for those who were unable to participate virtually and doubled the public comment from four to eight weeks. Liu said the department has received a range of input, from residents who want the city to make more changes and do it faster, to those who are wary about the impact of specific changes such as allowing more accessory dwelling units.
Jeana Dunlap facilitates a public listening session about changes to Louisville’s Land Development Code. Other speakers include, left to right, planner Joel Dock, Planning Director Emily Liu, Planning Commissioner Lula Howard, Metro Council President David James, and Planning Manager Joe Haberman. Credit: Louisville Planning & Design.
The three phases of recommended zoning changes under consideration represent a holistic approach to rezoning that considers aspects of life beyond housing. Liu hopes the recommendations will be approved by the Louisville Metro Planning Commission this spring, at which point they will be taken up by Metro Council, a combined city-county governing body.
The first phase of recommendations includes removing barriers to constructing accessory dwelling units or duplexes to increase housing options and affordability. It would also reduce obstacles to creating small urban farms, community gardens, and similar enterprises to make use of vacant land and increase access to healthy food and open space, and would require that notices about potential development be mailed to nearby renters as well as property owners, to better inform communities of pending changes. These initial recommendations reflect policies that have begun to catch hold in other cities; for example, Portland, Oregon, now allows accessory dwelling units by right and Minneapolis has done away with single-family zoning entirely.
The second phase, which would be executed in the next 12 to 18 months, includes allowing more multiplexes and tiny homes. It would also require a review of covenants and deed restrictions associated with new subdivisions to ensure they are equitable. The second and third phases also include environmental justice actions such as mitigating pollution in residential areas near highways and requiring environmental impact reviews for certain underserved areas. “We’re trying to correct and mitigate as much as possible,” Liu said.
“We increasingly are seeing cities grapple with the racist history of their zoning,” said Jessie Grogan, associate director of Reduced Poverty and Spatial Inequality at the Lincoln Institute. “Louisville is providing a model for other cities by taking the time to talk about it directly, and to say, ‘Our previous zoning—sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly—had racist designs. We need to think about how specifically to correct that.’”
Yonah Freemark and Gabriella Velasco of the Urban Institute, who wrote about the organization’s experience advising Louisville on its rezoning effort, agree that the city is at the forefront of this work: “This thorough review of rulemaking and the public process that accompanies it provides a model for other cities looking for ways to reform their land-use regulations.”
While the comprehensive review and the proposed reforms resulting from it represent a significant step, Liu knows that creating a more equitable city will likely be an ongoing process. “I’d say it’s a lifetime commitment for any planner,” she said. “We have a lot of young planners here who are committed to making changes, so . . . I’m very hopeful for the future that our generation and the next generation of planners will continue to make sure that everything we build or create is for all.”
Liz Farmer is a fiscal policy expert and journalist whose areas of expertise include budgets, fiscal distress, and tax policy. She is currently a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute’s Future of Labor Research Center.
Photograph: Waterfront Park in downtown Louisville. Credit: Bill Griffin, U.S. Department of Interior via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0.
Why Integrating Land and Water Planning Is Critical to a Sustainable Future
By Heather Hansman, March 26, 2021
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Rick Schultz doesn’t hate grass outright. He can see the use for it in some places—kids should be able to play soccer somewhere, sure—but there’s no need for it in road medians or sweeping lawns in arid places, says Schultz, a water conservation specialist at the municipally owned utility in Castle Rock, Colorado.
Located on the southern fringes of the Denver metro area, Castle Rock is one of the fastest growing communities in the country. Its population has skyrocketed from 20,224 in 2000 to nearly 72,000 today. Seventy percent of Castle Rock’s water supply comes from non-renewable groundwater, so as the town grew, officials had to figure out how to stretch that supply. In 2006, the water utility and the planning department started collaborating to address that issue.
The community created a water master plan that set guidelines—like where it made sense to have grass—to delineate how and where they could conserve water while still accommodating growth. Schultz says they had to think outside of traditional land use regulations and water supply patterns to work toward long-term sustainability, steering disparate parts of the planning process toward smart growth: “We needed to push the boundaries a little if we wanted a better outcome.”
Since then, Castle Rock has introduced financial incentives, regulatory changes, and even behavioral science strategies to ensure that water supply is actively considered as part of every planning and development process. From offering incentives to developers who install water monitoring systems to requiring landscapers to pursue professional certification in water efficiency, Castle Rock has become a leader in this area, recognized by the state of Colorado for its efforts and for sharing best practices with other organizations.
In communities across the United States, water managers and planners are emerging from the silos they’ve traditionally operated in to find new ways to work together. This is in part because climate change is causing turbulence for the water sector nationwide, in the form of prolonged droughts, damaging floods and wildfires, severe storms, and sea-level rise. The urgency of developing resilience in the face of these threats is becoming increasingly clear. Collaboration is also increasing because, although communities face many different challenges and operate with countless variations on municipal structures, many are rediscovering a singular truth about land and water: when you plan for one, you have to plan for both.
“Water engineers are beginning to recognize they cannot provide sustainable services without involving those in the development community—including planners, architects, and community activists,” explains the American Planning Association’s Policy Guide on Water (APA 2016). “Leading edge planners are reaching across the aisle to water managers to help advise on their comprehensive plans, not only to meet environmental objectives, but also to add value and livability, rooted in the vision of the community.”
How We Got Here
Picture the view from an airplane as you fly over rural areas or the outskirts of any major city: the way the right-angled boundaries of agricultural fields and housing plots contrast with the twisting braids of river channels and the irregular shape of lakes and ponds. Land and water are very different resources. They have been managed differently—and separately—as a result.
The divide between water and land planning has deep roots. Although water is connected to all parts of sustainable growth, from ecosystem health to economic viability, planners and water managers have long worked separately. From volunteer planning boards in rural communities to fully staffed departments in major cities, planners focus on land use and the built environment. Water managers, meanwhile, whether they are part of a municipally owned utility, private water company, or regional wholesaler, focus on providing a clean and adequate water supply.
“I can’t think of a single city where [planning and water management] are contained within a single division,” says Ray Quay, a researcher at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability who has served as both assistant director of land planning and assistant director of water services in Phoenix, Arizona. Quay says regional and watershed-wide development choices about growth often don’t line up with water supply.
“A typical divide would be that planners plan for growth while assuming the water utility will be able to supply water, while water utilities don’t participate in decisions about community growth, they just build infrastructure to serve the new growth that comes to them,” adds Jim Holway, director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, which was created by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2017 to advance the integration of land and water management.
Ivana Kajtezovic, planning program manager at Tampa Bay Water, a regional wholesale drinking water utility in Florida, confirms that lack of alignment. “Tampa Bay Water doesn’t have a say in growth in the counties and cities we serve,” says Kajtezovic. “Our only mission is to provide drinking water, no matter the growth or the speed of growth. Land use decisions are made by the counties and cities we serve.”
In a 2016 APA Water Working Group Water Survey, 75 percent of land use planners felt they were not involved enough in water planning and decisions (Stoker et al, 2018). “We know that land and water are connected, and no one ever argues that they’re separate,” says Philip Stoker, assistant professor of Planning at the University of Arizona, who conducted the APA survey. “It’s only people who have separated them.”
This divide is partly a result of historical regulatory structures. “Water is very much state law-based, with some federal hooks into various aspects of it,” says Anne Castle, former assistant secretary for Water and Science at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Federal management involves regulations such as the Clean Water Act and agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and water rights are allocated at the state level. Meanwhile, although there is federal and state oversight of some public lands, most of the regulation and planning related to private land happens locally or regionally, reflecting individual and community rights and desires. While there are state-level initiatives to “put more emphasis on the consideration of water in developing land,” Castle says—including in Colorado, where she is based—there are still wide gaps in priorities and responsibilities.
Communities across the country are dealing with unique issues, of course, but Stoker’s survey suggests the barriers to solving them are similar: lack of time, lack of resources, fear of a loss of jurisdictional power if they surrender some control, and differences in education, experience, and technical language. It can be hard to surmount those issues. “Logically it should be easy, but when institutions grow up with a single focus, it’s hard to change their mission and expand into other places,” says Bill Cesanek, cochair of the APA Water & Planning Network. Cesanek says things work better when planners share the responsibility for determining where the water to meet future demands will come from.
Land and water planners have to work together, agrees Quay, and need to be realistic about where, how, and whether their communities can grow. “One of the really critical factors is political will,” he says. “We should be thinking about what’s most important for our community, and we should be allocating our water to that.”
According to Holway of the Babbitt Center, that’s becoming more common. “With growing demand for water in the face of increasing challenges to acquiring new water supplies, utilities and land planners are having to figure out how to work together to maintain a balance between supply and demand.”
“Too Much, Too Little, Too Dirty”
According to the APA Policy Guide on Water, water-related threats often fall along familiar lines: not enough water, thanks to increased population growth and climatic stress on top of already fully allocated or overallocated water supplies; too much water, due to flooding and rising sea levels; or compromised water quality due to agricultural and urban runoff and other sources of contamination. In every case, the urgency is growing.
Map of drought conditions across the United States, March 2021. Credit: The U.S. Drought Monitor is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Credit: Map courtesy of NDMC.
Not enough water. In the Southwest—especially the overtapped Colorado River Basin, which serves 41 million people in seven U.S. and two Mexican states—persistent drought means diminishing snowpack, dwindling supplies in natural aquifers, and shrinking reservoirs. Researchers predict that Colorado River flows will decline by 20 to 35 percent by 2050 and 30 to 55 percent by the end of the century (Udall, 2017).
The drought also has cascading impacts on water systems. For instance, increasingly frequent and large wildfires in dry Western forests are causing watershed contamination in areas that haven’t previously dealt with it, like the headwaters of the Colorado. During fires and for years afterward, according to the EPA, water can be polluted by ash, sediment, and other contaminants, which forces water managers to scramble for solutions. “I do think there’s a much greater trend of land use planning and water management collaboration occurring fastest in places that are facing scarcity,” Stoker says.
Too much water. Over the last 30 years, floods in the United States have caused an average of $8 billion in damages and 82 deaths per year (Cesanek 2017). As climate change fuels more extreme weather events, Quay says, floods are exceeding parameters defined by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that have traditionally guided planning decisions. Quay says it’s hard to adapt because our stationary planning guidelines and laws aren’t set up for those extremes.
Places like low-lying Hoboken, New Jersey—where rising sea levels and superstorms like Hurricane Sandy have inundated sections of the city—are building water system resilience into their planning. The city is incorporating features like manmade urban sand dunes that work as physical barriers and can divert storm surges to newly built flood pumps. “The stormwater system is at the same level as the river—[stormwater] has nowhere to go, so they’ve had to build a really innovative resilience planning program,” Cesanek says.
Contaminated water. During heavy rains, which are increasingly frequent due to climate change, the combined sewer system in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, overflows into neighboring rivers and Lake Michigan, polluting the waterways, compromising the ecosystem, and affecting the water supply. “Stormwater gets into our combined and sanitary systems. Nothing is water-tight,” says Karen Sands, director of Planning, Research, and Sustainability at Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD). Sands says MMSD has had to align at-odds geographic and jurisdictional layers to find solutions that protect the watershed. One of those solutions is the construction of 70-acre Menomonee stormwater park, built in conjunction with city planners, which is expected to treat 100 percent of runoff from industrial and commercial areas nearby. It both ensures a clean supply of water now, and preemptively manages demand for the future.
Chi Ho Sham, president of the American Water Works Association, a nonprofit international organization for water supply professionals, says one of the group’s biggest concerns is water quality, particularly protecting water at the source, limiting pollutant use, and creating barriers to slow or prevent contamination. “From my point of view, our job is to work very collaboratively with landowners,” he says. “Water managers cannot do it alone.”
Infrastructure and Equity Issues
The U.S. population is projected to reach 517 million by 2050, and the fastest-growing cities are in the South and West (U.S. Census Bureau 2019). You can’t keep people from moving to Tempe or Tampa Bay, but this population growth is occurring in regions where the pressure on both water quality and quantity is already high. In some places, this rapid growth has forced the hand of planners and water managers, who have implemented water conservation and reuse measures to ensure there will be enough water to go around.
To complicate matters, our nation’s water infrastructure hasn’t kept up with changing demographics. Old lead pipes are disintegrating, and water treatment plants are overwhelmed by the amount of water they need to process. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s drinking water a D grade, estimating a cost of $100 billion for all the necessary infrastructure upgrades (ACES, 2017).
There is also a divide between places that can afford to upgrade their infrastructure and those that cannot. Addressing that inequity is crucial to securing future water supplies for everyone, says Katy Lackey, senior program manager at the nonprofit US Water Alliance, a national coalition of water utilities, businesses, environmental organizations, labor unions, and others which is working to secure a sustainable water future.
“We believe water equity occurs when all communities have access to clean, safe, and affordable drinking water and wastewater services, infrastructure investments are maximized and benefit all communities, and communities are resilient in the face of a changing climate,” she says. Reaching that goal will require new ways of working.
How to Work Together Well
Participants in a Growing Water Smart workshop, which helps communities better coordinate the work of planners, water managers, policy makers, and others. Credit: Sonoran Institute.
Integrated planning starts with getting people in the same room to understand the needs of their community, the gaps in current processes, and how they can better work together, says Holway of the Babbitt Center. From there, formalizing goals around planning and water is critical, whether those goals are reflected in a comprehensive or master plan for community development, in a more specific plan based on conservation and resilience, or in zoning and regulatory changes.
“We are focused on identifying, evaluating, and promoting tools to better integrate land and water, with input from a diverse group of practitioners and researchers,” Holway says, noting that Babbitt Center Research Fellow Erin Rugland has produced several publications for practitioners, including a matrix of available tools for integrating land and water (Rugland 2021) and two manuals focused on best practices (Rugland 2020, Castle and Rugland 2019).
Those focused on the importance of integrating land and water say there are several factors that contribute to successful collaborations, including:
Build relationships. Stoker found that getting people out of their silos is an important first step. “In the places that have been the most successful at integrating land and water planning, the utilities and planners were friends. They knew that if they worked together, they would benefit,” he says. Stoker cites Aiken, South Carolina, where water managers helped build the comprehensive plan, as an example, adding that this kind of collaboration is important at every scale. In Westminster, Colorado, water managers participate in preapplication meetings for any new development. From the beginning, they have a chance to advise on how choices made about things like plumbing and landscaping will impact a project’s water use and fees.
Westminster is one of 33 western communities that have participated in the Growing Water Smart program, a multiday workshop run by the Babbitt Center and the Sonoran Institute with additional funding from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the Gates Family Foundation. Growing Water Smart brings small teams of leaders together to communicate, collaborate, and identify a one-year action plan.
“The heart of Growing Water Smart is getting land use planners and water managers from the same communities together to talk to each other, sometimes for the very first time,” says Faith Sternlieb of the Babbitt Center, who helps to facilitate the program. “Once they start sharing resources, data, and information, they see how valuable and important collaboration and cooperation are. It isn’t that they didn’t want to work together, it’s that they truly thought they had everything they needed to do their jobs. But they don’t often have the time and space they need to think and plan holistically.”
“What has worked in my experience is to form relationships with the planners making decisions,” confirms Kajtezovic of Tampa Bay Water. “To the extent possible, I communicate with them and explain the importance of source water protection.”
Be creative and flexible. Once relationships are formed, creativity and flexibility are key. Because every community is facing different planning challenges, “context is incredibly important,” says Quay. This is true not just among different regions, but within regions, and sometimes even from one community to the next. “What works in Phoenix won’t necessarily work in Tempe [a city of nearly 200,000 just east of Phoenix], so we can’t just adapt best management practices, we have to think about best for who.” He recommends identifying a broad, flexible set of tools that can be used and adapted over time.
Be willing to learn. Because of specialization, planners and water managers “don’t speak the same language,” says Sham, who says the AWWA has been working on collaborative education about source water protection for members and landowners. Sometimes it feels like added work on the front end, and he says people can be reluctant to take on work that’s not in their purview, but developing a shared language and understanding is crucial for long-term sustainability.
John Berggren helps communities coordinate land and water planning as a water policy analyst for Western Resource Advocates. He says one of his first steps is to educate local leaders and get them excited about including water in their comprehensive plans. “We get them interested and concerned about conservation, to create top-down support for planning departments and water utilities,” he says. Once water is codified in a comprehensive plan, he says, that allows planners and utilities to come up with creative, progressive solutions.
Be comprehensive. The integration of land use and water planning works best when it is included in state-level regulations or in comprehensive plans at the community level. According to the Babbitt Center, 14 states formally incorporate water into planning in some form, and that number is growing. For example, the 2015 Colorado Water Plan set a goal that 75 percent of Coloradans will live in communities that have incorporated water-saving actions into land use planning by 2025; communities across the state are working on that process, and 80 communities would have to take action to hit the 2025 deadline. Colorado also recently passed state legislation that outlines water conservation guidelines for planning and designates a new position in the state government to support the coordination of land and water planning.
Since 2000, when Arizona passed the Growing Smarter Plus Act, the state has required communities to include a chapter in their comprehensive plans that addresses the link between water supply, demand, and growth projections. It’s happening in less dry places, too. The Manatee County, Florida, comprehensive plan matches water quality with need to make the best use of non-potable water. It includes codes for water reuse and alternative water sources to increase availability, and to make sure that water gets to the most appropriate destination.
To incorporate water into comprehensive plans, Quay says, communities need a concrete idea of the type and amount of their available resources. Water managers and planners can then work together to identify new and alternative water sources like treated wastewater and graywater (household water that has been used for things like laundry and can still be used for flushing toilets); to identify projected demand; and to outline how to meet it.
Embrace the power of local action. Even if water-related planning is not mandated by the state or incorporated in a community’s comprehensive plan, water managers and planners can still find ways to collaborate. More specific local plans can include water supply and wastewater infrastructure plans; hazard mitigation and resilience plans, like floodplain and stormwater management; demand management; watershed processes and health; and plans for interagency coordination and collaboration. If those variables feel overwhelming, Berggren suggests that planners look to their peer communities for best practices. Although each community is different, he says, “no one needs to reinvent the wheel.”
Local policy shifts can also include form-based codes that outline water-related aspects of the built environment. In Milwaukee, Sands says best practices for managing flooding and pollution include “updating municipal codes and ordinances to encourage green infrastructure and more sustainable practices.” That green infrastructure, which mimics natural processes at the site level through things like bioswales and stormwater storage, can make communities more resilient to climate change, while restoring ecosystems and protecting water supply.
Water-wise policy shifts can also come in the form of zoning ordinances, like smaller lot sizes. Planners can use subdivision and land development regulations to promote on-site capture, infiltration, and slow release of stormwater. Some communities have adopted plumbing codes that require high efficiency fixtures, or building codes that permit water recycling, or submetering to increase efficiency in multifamily residences. Fountain, Colorado, has conservation-oriented tap fees, which incentivize developers to meet water efficiency standards beyond the building code. Developers can pay lower tap fees if they agree to options like native landscaping or including efficient indoor fixtures across a development.
The benefits of integrating land and water planning are myriad, from measurable results like adapting plans for development to ensure an adequate water supply to more indirect, long-term effects like reducing conflict between water users as supplies shrink. Back in Castle Rock, Schultz and his colleagues have observed that water-focused land use ordinances can have a big impact, and can benefit quality of life as a whole. It hasn’t always been easy, Schultz says, but the new way of doing things seems to be paying off: “We’ve shown that we can do better if we provide a good foundation.”
Lead Photograph: In Castle Rock, Colorado, planners and water utility managers have partnered on plans for sustainable growth. Credit: Robert Young via iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus.
ACES (American Society of Civil Engineers). 2017. Infrastructure Report Card. Washington, DC: American Society of Civil Engineers. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/.
Udall, Bradley, and Overpeck, Jonathan. 2017. “The Twenty‐First Century Colorado River Hot Drought and Implications for the Future.” Water Resources Research 53 (3): 1763-2576.
Lima es una ciudad extensa y de baja densidad, con barrios que a veces parecen extenderse infinitamente sobre sus cerros de arena. Diversa, compleja y ampliamente informal, Lima experimentó durante el siglo pasado masivas olas de migración interna: mientras que entre 1940 y 1993 la población del Perú se triplicó, la de Lima se multiplicó por diez. Su rostro actual es, en gran medida, producto de qué tanto pudo —o no— adaptarse a esta nueva realidad.
En el primer capítulo de Estación Ciudad, “El desborde de Lima”, discutimos cómo y por qué esta ciudad creció sin brindar alternativas de vivienda accesible para su población más pobre. Visitamos la comunidad de Alto Perú, un barrio de pescadores en el litoral de la ciudad, y a la familia Laynes, residentes del sector desde hace más de quince años. Desde ahí, podemos entender los factores que han llevado a tantas personas a instalarse y permanecer en el suelo no habilitado de la capital peruana, y por qué la ciudad no planificó pensando en ellas.
De acuerdo con Marcela Román, economista costarricense y experta en urbanismo, muchísimas ciudades de América Latina buscaron “excluir los usos que no queríamos en las ciudades. Y unos usos que seguimos sin querer son los usos para pobres, porque en los planes reguladores no estamos obligando a los municipios a que incluyan suelo para pobres”.
Además de esta opinión especializada y del testimonio de la familia Laynes, para desenredar la madeja de la informalidad de la vivienda en Lima entrevistamos a Martim Smolka, director del Programa para América Latina y el Caribe del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo, y a un equipo de periodistas del diario peruano El Comercio. El capítulo explora las consecuencias de no planificar la habilitación de suelo para vivienda; los costos escondidos que tiene la vivienda social cuando no contempla las necesidades de sus habitantes; las mafias que lucran con el suelo y los servicios que da el Estado una vez que se habilita el suelo ocupado; y las alternativas que pueden contrarrestar la segregación urbana, como la zonificación inclusiva.
Puede escuchar “El desborde de Lima” y los demás capítulos de Estación Ciudad en Spotify, Castbox, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts o donde sea que escuche sus podcasts. Además, ya que queremos llegar a la mayor cantidad de personas posible, puede descargar el guión de este y los capítulos siguientes en la página web www.estacionciudad.org y compartirlo con quienes tengan alguna dificultad auditiva.
Jimena Ledgard es narradora, directora creativa y guionista para el podcast Estación Ciudad.
Sofía García es productora general, directora de contenidos urbanos y guionista para el podcast Estación Ciudad.
Fotografía: Juana Laynes sonríe en su cuarto durante la grabación de este capítulo. Crédito: Jerry Ccanto
The Consortium for Scenario Planning, a program of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, invites proposals for original research on and tools related to the application of scenario planning to advance climate mitigation and adaptation strategies in communities.
The extent and nature of climate change are tremendously uncertain. Decision makers must anticipate and prepare for the impacts of climate change, which may include changes to housing and livable land, health, transportation, and natural resources. Impacts will be far-reaching, but with varying localized effects. The Lincoln Institute’s goal with this work is to use land policy to reduce the most catastrophic effects of climate change and help cities adapt to the impacts that remain avoidable. As a structured approach for participatory and evidence-driven decision making, scenario planning can help cities and regions prepare and plan for this uncertain future. Scenario planning also considers factors such as demographics, housing, transportation, water and air quality, technology, and equity that affect a community’s ability to manage climate change impacts while still achieving its long-term goals.
This article is reprinted with permission from CityLab, where it originally appeared.
It is an audacious vision for high-speed rail in the Northeast: new tunnels out of New York City and under the Long Island Sound, routing trains up through Hartford, Providence and Boston. With electric locomotives that top 200 miles per hour, travel time between New York and Boston would be slashed to 100 minutes—two hours quicker than current Acela service, the fastest train that Amtrak now runs. Construction would consume 20 years and require building the largest underwater tunnel in North America. The price tag: $105 billion.
Conceived more than a decade ago and launched as a private initiative in 2017, the North Atlantic Rail project looks a lot like the high-speed rail networks that other parts of the world, such as Japan and France, have had for decades. Its backers hope it’s the kind of U.S. megaproject that the federal government is finally ready to pursue.
While politicians on both sides of the aisle have long urged action on America’s aging infrastructure, the administration of President Joe Biden has emphasized important new criteria—that shovel-ready projects also have to be “shovel worthy,” fulfilling equity, environmental justice and climate resilience goals. That means less emphasis on highways and more for projects deemed sustainable in the long term, like rail transit.
The president known as “Amtrak Joe,” who campaigned on a promise to invest up to $2 trillion on 21st-century infrastructure and “spark the second great railroad revolution,” has long been convinced of the virtues of rail. As vice president, Biden was aboard the federal government’s last major effort to bring faster trains to the U.S., a 2009 strategic plan that was a feature of the Obama administration’s stimulus plan. His new transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, appears similarly enthusiastic: He recently proclaimed that “I want the U.S. to be leading the world when it comes to access to high-speed rail.”
And so the jockeying has begun among backers of a range of rail projects to demonstrate just how worthy they are. Supporters of the Gateway Program under the Hudson River—a $30 billion plan to repair and upgrade a critical rail link to New York City that was derailed during the Trump administration—expect that this long-planned project will reemerge as a priority. High-speed rail projects in Texas, California, Las Vegas, Cascadia and Florida are also in the mix, and more will surely emerge. But backers of North Atlantic Rail are preparing to make the case that their megaproject “checks all the boxes for a multi-benefit recovery strategy,” according to Scott Wolf, executive director of Grow Smart Rhode Island, another NAR partner.
The pitch is that NAR would benefit not only New York City and Boston, but the places in between—the left-behind, post-industrial legacy cities scattered across New England. Faster, climate-friendly intercity rail could transform cities such as Hartford, for example, into more attractive options for post-Covid Boston- or New York-based office workers required to be at headquarters less often. The same is true for the ancillary improvements that are part of the envisioned NAR network: The project’s third and final phase would add or upgrade passenger service to smaller cities in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, turning much of New England into one giant, rail-based commuter shed.
“It would unlock economic opportunity and spur growth for dozens of mid-sized cities throughout New England, connecting the entire region in one integrated market for ideas, labor and innovation,” said Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who co-chairs the North Atlantic Rail initiative. “And it would be a meaningful piece of a serious climate agenda.”
A modernized rail network would benefit business travelers making the Boston-New York trip, “but also low-income minority workers in Chelsea and Lynn, or along the Fairmont corridor in Dorchester, or folks in rural Rhode Island,” said Jarred Johnson, from the Boston-based advocacy group TransitMatters. The project could include Brownfields remediation and other clean-up efforts, new stations with bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure to improve access, affordable housing near the stations, and requirements that operators offer low-income fares, he said.
NAR is also seen as a climate resilience measure, its backers say: Stretches of the current Northeast Corridor route will face chronic flooding from rising oceans in the coming years, according to a 2017 study. Building an inland alternative to the shoreline tracks would provide much-needed redundancy.
And yet, the sticker shock remains. Even among other U.S. high-speed rail projects, the $105 billion cost estimate for NAR stands out. The Texas high-speed rail network from Dallas to Houston, a public-private partnership using the same technology as the Shinkansen trains in Japan, is estimated to be $20 billion. The Cascadia project in the Pacific Northwest, which would link Portland, Seattle and Vancouver with high-speed trains, could cost up to $42 billion. Estimated costs for California’s embattled L.A.-to-S.F. bullet train—the lone U.S. high-speed rail project that is under construction—have risen to $80 billion, but the service is a long way from reaching either city.
Part of the reason North Atlantic Rail is estimated to cost $105 billion is the engineering feats that will have to be accomplished in a densely developed area: a new tunnel from Pennsylvania Station under the East River, more tunneling and cut-and-cover construction through Queens and Long Island, and then a 16-mile tunnel bored beneath the Long Island Sound. The project makes use of existing rights-of-way from the New Haven area to Hartford, but then requires yet another tunnel under Hartford, new tracks through environmentally sensitive areas in eastern Connecticut, and still another tunnel—the North-South Rail Link—under the “Big Dig” in Boston, to connect to modernized tracks heading to Boston’s northern suburbs, New Hampshire and Maine. Other branches of the new network will require track modifications, straightening and electrification.
“People shiver and roll their eyes when we talk about the Long Island Sound tunnel, but around the world there are a hundred of these kinds of projects over the last 20 years or so, using tunnel-boring technology,” says Robert D. Yaro, president emeritus of the Regional Plan Association and a member of the NAR steering committee. “We fill potholes,” says Yaro, who first worked on the North Atlantic Rail proposal 10 years ago in a studio at the University of Pennsylvania. “The rest of the world is building tunnels.”
Like the U.K.’s HS2, NAR faces no shortage of skeptics—and not only the usual critics of high-speed rail who decry the per-mile cost as absurdly exorbitant. Last week, Democratic U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told CBS/AP the project was both potentially environmentally damaging and very likely lowballed, even with its fulsome 12-figure sum.
Such dissent notwithstanding, the NAR coalition is banking on support from lawmakers and business leaders in the New York-New England megaregion, a $3 trillion economy that represents 14 percent of overall U.S. GDP, on par with California, and 11 percent of the U.S. population.
Yaro, coauthor of Megaregions and America’s Future, a Lincoln Institute title forthcoming in January 2022, argues that NAR’s costs aren’t out of line with the economic returns the rail network will deliver throughout downstate New York and New England, both through construction jobs and increased economic activity. Comparing this moment to the New Deal of the 1930s, he also points out that even building out all three phrases of the network is a mere 5% of Biden’s $2 trillion commitment. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do big things.”
Bronin, the Hartford mayor, has a similarly sweeping pitch. “In this country, which built the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system, we’ve forgotten what it means to think big and be bold when it comes to infrastructure investment,” he said. “Projects like this might have seemed futuristic or pie-in-the-sky 30 years ago, but at this point, dozens of industrialized nations have completed projects as ambitious if not more ambitious than this.”
It’s an open question whether that argument—making major infrastructure investments for future economic growth and competitiveness—will be convincing enough to overcome concerns about spending, especially after the extensive federal outlays to respond to the pandemic. In some quarters there will be little appetite for spending so much on the Northeast. The weeks and months ahead will reveal just how much inclination there is to go this big.
Anthony Flint is senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute and a contributing editor to Land Lines.
Photograph: Amtrak Northeast Regional. Credit: Kevin Micalizzi/Flickr.
Even before the COVID-19 crisis, many of America’s postindustrial cities, also known as legacy cities, struggled with economic stagnation, poverty, and deep inequality. Yet, some of these cities were on a path to a brighter future, thanks to proven strategies for equitable regeneration.
The future of legacy cities is the topic of this recorded discussion with George W. “Mac” McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and Chantel M. Rush, managing director of the Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Program, moderated by Dan Moulthrop, CEO of the City Club of Cleveland.
The discussion is the first in a series of virtual events cohosted by the Lincoln Institute and the City Club of Cleveland this year. Join the Lincoln Institute’s legacy cities mailing list to receive notifications of future events, or email info@legacycities.org to suggest topics.
A Legacy of Innovation: How Leaders in Cleveland Reimagined and Rebuilt Their City After Decades of Decline
By Anna Clark, January 12, 2021
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Cleveland reached for the sky. It took years of sweat and more excavated dirt than the Panama Canal, but when Terminal Tower celebrated its grand opening in 1930, it became an instant icon of Beaux Arts elegance in a soaring city. While initial plans for the project had called for a 14-story building atop an interurban rail station, that vision was scrapped by the project’s developers in favor of a more ambitious concept: 52 stories of sandstone and steel in the heart of Public Square. That made Terminal Tower the second-tallest building in the world.
As a hub, Terminal Tower connected Cleveland to that world: every train headed in or out of the city traveled through the station. So did a lot of people. The interior was a bustling palace of lobbies, shops, and brass-railed stairways. On the day of its debut, the facade glittered with spotlights, beginning a tradition of artful lighting still frequently used today.
Nearly a century later, it’s not hard to see what made Clevelanders inclined to mark their skyline. With its location on Lake Erie, proximity to Canada and the Erie Canal, and access to a network of railroads and highways linking it to Pittsburgh, Akron, Detroit, and other boomtowns, Cleveland was an ideal location for shipping and industry. Around the time of Terminal Tower’s construction, the local economy was built of cars, steel, electric equipment, and machine tools, as well as consumer goods: coffeemakers, greeting cards, paint, and much more. The streetlight was invented here, and the city earned international fame for the innovative Cleveland Clinic research hospital, founded in 1921, and the Cleveland Orchestra, which released music with Columbia Records. Well-regarded art and natural history museums, jazz clubs, and vaudeville thrived in Cleveland, as did the Play House, the first professional regional theater in the United States, and Karamu House, the country’s oldest Black theater company, which premiered works by Clevelander Langston Hughes.
During the first half of the 20th century, the city drew hundreds of thousands of newcomers, including a surge of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe in the early decades and, in the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of Black migrants from the South. To promote continued growth, the local electric company coined a slogan in 1944: “The Best Location in the Nation.” The population continued booming until it peaked at 914,000 residents in 1950, making Cleveland the seventh-largest city in the country.
That “Best Location” catchphrase stuck around for decades, but the people didn’t. As the century wore on, the dazzling successes of the first 50 years gave way to staggering losses—of population, of industry, of jobs, and of prestige. Before long, Cleveland had another nickname, one far less flattering. Years of chronic disinvestment in the city, coupled with a rise in pollution and crime, inspired the unhappy moniker “Mistake on the Lake.”
Over the years, Cleveland became “the butt of an awful lot of jokes,” said Anthony Coyne, a native of the city who is a lawyer, former chair of its planning commission, and a board member of the Lincoln Institute. “We took a lot of hits on the chin from late-night hosts.” But Coyne said those jabs belie what is very much alive in Cleveland: “We’re really trying to embrace a quality-of-life agenda,” he said, pointing to a diversity of employers in health care, banking, higher education, and manufacturing, as well as revitalized public spaces serving both locals and visitors, including Public Square. “That’s kind of exciting to see [these spaces] refreshed after being dormant for many years.”
Strong leadership and tactical urbanism are transforming the relationship between this city and its residents. While much work remains, significant investments in an ambitious waterfront revival, affordable housing, and multimodal transit are positioning Cleveland for a new era.
Embracing the Waterfront
The Cuyahoga River is notorious for catching fire in 1969, but in that era, it was hardly uncommon for waterways to burst into flames. The United States had no enforceable water regulations, and rivers were frequently treated as open sewers. In this case, the blaze ignited when a spark from a passing train landed on a floating oil slick. Time magazine published a story about the fire alongside a jaw-dropping photo—but that image was from an earlier conflagration. The Cuyahoga had burned 13 times.
This time, the burning waterway catalyzed a nationwide movement for change. Cleveland’s mayor, Carl Stokes—who had made history two years earlier as the first Black mayor elected to lead a major U.S. city and who subsequently convinced voters to pass a $100 million bond for sewer upgrades—took reporters on a “pollution tour” the day after the fire. Stokes talked to the press about the effects of pollution on residents, and about how cities had few tools to address the issue, particularly when waterways crossed several jurisdictions. He also testified to Congress about the need for federal regulation: “We have the kind of air and water pollution problems in these cities that are every bit as dangerous to the health and safety of our citizens as any intercontinental ballistic missile that’s so dramatically poised 5,000 miles from our country.”
The fire and the conditions that led to it inspired a radically new approach to urban waterways, leading to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the passage of the Clean Water Act two years later. In Ohio, local leaders also developed the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD), a multijurisdictional management system that helped address industrial discharge and improved wastewater treatment.
Cleveland carries a heavy burden for its historical association with pollution, not only in the Cuyahoga, but in Lake Erie too. As the shallowest of the five Great Lakes, it is often the first to reveal the dangers of runoff from farming, sewage, and industry, including toxic algae blooms. Parts of the lake have been declared “dead.” At one point in the late 1960s the city installed weighted curtains in the lake in an attempt to create pockets of water clean enough for swimming. Dr. Seuss took a swipe at the situation in the original edition of his 1971 book The Lorax; he wrote of humming fish “in search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.”
Like Cleveland’s signature river, Lake Erie benefited from national and local policy changes, including the Clean Water Act and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, a deal struck between the United States and Canada in 1972. By 1985, the water quality had improved so much that two graduate students asked Dr. Seuss to revise The Lorax. The author agreed, replying, “I should no longer be saying bad things about a body of water that is now, due to great civic and scientific effort, the home of happy smiling fish” (Egan 2017).
Parks and beaches on the Lake Erie waterfront have been cleaned up after years of neglect, becoming a destination for Cleveland residents. Credit: Pgiam/iStock.
About 20 years ago, Lincoln Institute Chair and Chief Investment Officer Kathryn Lincoln worked with the Cleveland Foundation to make a film about the city for the Lincoln Institute documentary series Making Sense of Place, which was recently updated (LILP 2020). Interviewers asked community stakeholders what they saw as Cleveland’s crown jewel, said Lincoln, who spent eight years of her childhood in Cleveland and serves on the board of Cleveland-based Lincoln Electric. “We could see the lake from where we were sitting,” Lincoln recalled. People pointed to the city’s orchestra, or its neighborhoods, or its ethnic diversity, but “not a single person said Lake Erie.”
Lincoln attributes the oversight to the way the lakefront has been separated from the downtown by train tracks, highways, and other barriers, including storm defenses like concrete, rocks, and steel. “You can’t just leave the Key Bank office tower and walk along the lakefront,” she said, referring to the city’s tallest building, which claimed that title from Terminal Tower in 1991. “At least, you can’t do it easily.”
Cleveland and the Origins of the Lincoln Institute
Cleveland is a city of special interest to the Lincoln Institute: it is where the inventor and philanthropist John C. Lincoln founded the Lincoln Electric Company in 1895. The company celebrated its 125th year in 2020, and Cleveland is still home to about 3,000 of its 11,000 employees. “We have 58 factories in 18 countries around the world, and Cleveland is by far the innovation hub,” said Amanda Butler, the company’s vice president of investor relations and communications. “We’ve been investing multimillions of dollars annually, and will continue to do so, to maintain Cleveland as the most innovative hub in our industry worldwide.” The city is also where John Lincoln encountered the work of the writer and economist Henry George, whose ideas about land value inspired the creation of the Lincoln Foundation and, ultimately, the Lincoln Institute. George’s work also galvanized Tom Johnson, a fellow inventor who became mayor of Cleveland. Johnson championed public ownership of utilities and expanded parks during his tenure, which lasted from 1901 to 1909. The bronze statue of Johnson in Public Square, the city’s central plaza, shows him holding George’s most famous book, Progress and Poverty.
Lakefront access is especially scarce on the city’s East Side, where most residents are Black and lower-income. For more than a century, a coal-burning power plant loomed along the waterfront there, blocking views and access while polluting the air. The plant, built in 1911 by the same company that later coined the “Best Location in the Nation” slogan, was torn down in 2017. That has inspired dreams of creating open space; the boldest imaginings involve relocating a section of Interstate 90 that cuts the lakefront off from 122-acre Gordon Park. Proponents say this concept, which is being studied by Cleveland Metroparks and other partners, would improve livability in nearby neighborhoods and increase the economic potential of vacant parcels.
When Jane Campbell became Cleveland’s mayor in 2002, “the lakefront was not really embraced as the incredible resource it is,” she confirmed. Campbell, who also serves on the board of the Lincoln Institute, said a visit to Chicago’s waterfront and a conversation with that city’s mayor, Richard M. Daley, inspired her administration to make changes at home. In 2004, with Campbell in the mayor’s office and Coyne heading the planning commission, the city adopted a Waterfront District Plan, an ambitious proposal to unify and reinvent its eight-mile lakeside shoreline. The plan, supported by foundation money and fueled by community input, has a price tag of about $1 billion and has proceeded as funding has become available. “I haven’t been mayor in 15 years, and our lakefront plan is still used as a guide,” Campbell said. “That to me is a great accomplishment.”
Changes have included the renovation of several pedestrian tunnels under a lakefront railroad line to ensure safe access to the waterfront. The Ohio Department of Transportation has been slowly converting a freeway known as the West Shoreway into a boulevard, reducing the speed limit to 35 miles per hour and adding landscaping and lakefront access. Other major projects have included a $2.3 million marina at North Coast Harbor and the 88-acre Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve on Dike 14, a former disposal area for sediment dredged from the Cuyahoga. Open space and affordable housing advocates have also raised the question of reinventing Burke Airport, which occupies 450 acres of prime downtown waterfront and saw air traffic decrease 60 percent from 2000 to 2018.
The city has also cleaned up waterfront parks and beaches after years of neglect. In the 1970s, Cleveland ceded management of its park system to the state because it couldn’t keep up with high maintenance costs. (In 1978, Cleveland became the first city since the Great Depression to suffer municipal default.) The state returned 455 acres of city-owned property to local control in 2013, and improvements quickly followed. Lee Chilcote, a journalist whose family has lived in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood for 15 years, said the changes have been dramatic. Before the improvements to nearby Edgewood Park, he said, “We literally told our kids, ‘OK, look at this beautiful view, but don’t play in the sand.’ . . . It was disgusting, because the state didn’t have the time or resources to put into it.” Now the park is a pleasure to visit, Chilcote said. Offshore, rowers and kayakers frequently ply the waters.
Regional improvements that build connectivity across political borders are also in the works, including dam removal and habitat restoration at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which lies along the river between Cleveland and Akron. In the nearby suburb of Euclid, city and county officials partnered on a $30 million lakefront trail made possible by easements granted by private landowners in exchange for help with erosion control. A regional planning agency has allotted $250,000 to study the feasibility of a similar arrangement for a lakefront trail spanning Cuyahoga, Lake, and Lorain counties. In 2020, local leaders debuted a plan for the Cuyahoga River watershed called “Vision for the Valley.” And eight miles offshore from Cleveland, the city where the electric wind turbine was invented in 1888, the Lake Erie Energy Development Company wants to build North America’s first freshwater wind farm.
Expanding Housing Options
Cleveland is home to about 379,000 people today. In the 1950s, residents began flocking to the suburbs, including Shaker Heights, a planned community designed by the team that built Terminal Tower. As a result, the urban core saw many properties become vacant and eventually crumble into disrepair.
That downward spiral continued in the last decades of the 20th century and accelerated during the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2015, banks foreclosed on more than 25 percent of all city parcels. Neighborhoods were hit by a cascade of problems: structural issues, lead contamination, and a plague of speculators buying houses in bulk over the internet. In 2007, the Slavic Village neighborhood, a predominantly Black community, had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation.
The housing stock was hurt not only by vacancy, but also by the Forest City’s large base of wood-frame construction. “It’s unlike Boston, or Columbus even, where there’s a lot of masonry construction,” said Coyne. In Cleveland, “homes are historically made of wood,” making them especially vulnerable to deterioration. But a number of efforts, some of which are bearing fruit after decades of concerted effort, are interrupting the cycle of vacancy and disrepair.
As Coyne explained it, city leaders in the early 1990s pursued an aggressive agenda that emphasized the development of more diverse housing options, including townhouses and rental units, as well as lease-purchase programs and down payment assistance for modestly priced homes. In some ways this was a callback to Cleveland’s postwar boom. To accommodate the surge in population in the 1940s, landlords in neighborhoods like Hough and the Near West Side converted mansions to rooming houses, and single-family homes into two- and four-family apartments (Souther 2017). But this time around, investment in housing alternatives was designed to accommodate population loss. By providing scalable options for people with different lifestyle and financial needs, the city hoped to give people more ways to stay.
Then-Mayor Michael White also challenged banks to live up to their mandate to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act, Coyne said. “It sent an important message to reinvest in demographics that were left out of the market,” he noted, referring to the systemic racism that had created unequal housing patterns and opportunities in a city where Black residents make up more than half of the population.
Land Bank Pioneers
When the Great Recession hit, Cuyahoga County responded by creating one of the first land banks in the nation. The Cuyahoga Land Bank acquires property with the goal of returning it to productive use. This can mean patching together contiguous parcels for green space or development, demolishing vacant structures, or working with homeowners and other partners on property rehabilitation and maintenance. Funding for the land bank comes largely from penalties and interest on real estate tax assessments, as well as from grants and sales of city-owned properties.
Cleveland created its own land banking program in 2009 as well, which works in partnership with the county. The Cuyahoga Land Bank might demolish a dilapidated building, for example, and then deliver the title for the lot to the city land bank, which then seeks buyers with plans that will “contribute to the economic, social, and environmental betterment of the city.”
In its first 10 years, the county land bank demolished about 7,000 properties, supported in part by $50 million from Cuyahoga County’s budget. According to a study commissioned by the land bank, each demolition generated nearly $60,000 in value to neighboring properties, for a total increase of $415.3 million (CLB 2019). The study also reported that the land bank spent about $56.3 million to rehab houses, adding an average of $151,105 to the value of each property. Nearly 11,500 distressed properties were returned to the tax rolls. Now, with fewer houses in need of demolition, the land bank has signaled that it will focus more on rehabilitation and stabilization, including home renovation, commercial development, and home-buying assistance programs.
Meanwhile, some neighborhoods are in the midst of a housing and population boom. Home prices rose more than 16 percent between 2015 and 2020 (Chilcote 2020). Downtown has grown from 5,000 residents to 20,000 over the last decade. Millennials are the largest group, according to the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, while empty nesters are the fastest-growing segment. In the next decade, the downtown population is expected to reach 30,000. Neighborhoods near downtown, including Detroit Shoreway and Ohio City, are also in high demand.
“The heart of any city is its downtown, and Cleveland recognized more than three decades ago that it needed to use every tool in the box to rebuild a vibrant, competitive downtown,” said Alison Goebel, executive director of the Greater Ohio Policy Center and coauthor of the Lincoln Institute report Revitalizing America’s Smaller Legacy Cities (Hollingsworth and Goebel 2017). She noted that the city has been particularly successful at securing state and federal historic preservation tax credits.
The boom has become so strong that one legacy program from the White administration, citywide tax abatements, is now controversial. In neighborhoods where house values have spiked, the homeowners, who are disproportionately white, still get a break on property taxes, meaning that the city is effectively subsidizing upscale housing, according to critics.
Meanwhile, neighborhoods with a majority of people of color aren’t seeing meaningful gains in housing or investment. “As in most legacy cities,” Goebel said, “redlining resulted in resource constraints that are racialized.” According to a 2018 report on property devaluation in U.S. metro areas, the average devaluation of houses in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Cleveland is 20 percent. This means that a house valued at $85,000, the median home value in majority Black neighborhoods in Cleveland, should more accurately be valued at $104,000 (Perry, Rothwell, and Harshbarger 2018).
Hoping to change that, Cleveland Development Advisors (CDA) is launching an initiative that will see nearly $9 million invested over three years in three key neighborhoods: Clark–Fulton, Glenville, and Buckeye–Kinsman, all of which have struggled with disinvestment and concentrated poverty. The program will provide loans to developers at below-market rates to support social-impact projects and attract additional investment. Funding comes from JPMorgan Chase’s annual Partnership for Raising Opportunity in Neighborhoods competition ($5 million) and CDA ($3.75 million). The challenge will be to accomplish the goals of the project while not replicating the gentrification and resulting displacement seen in some other neighborhoods.
Cleveland Development Advisors is investing in three neighborhoods that have struggled with disinvestment and concentrated poverty. This architectural rendering shows affordable housing planned for the Clark–Fulton neighborhood. Credit: RDL Architects.
In the midst of these investment projects, community members have been undertaking land use experiments of their own. Off Kinsman Avenue, residents started a dynamic farm on vacant land bank property, taking advantage of a 2010 zoning change that allowed urban agriculture. The Rid-All Green Partnership has four hoop houses, two greenhouses, and an aquaponics fishery; it provides food, beautifies the community, and offers jobs, educational opportunities, and even a comic book series to teach young people about environmental stewardship. “Community is pretty much the biggest cornerstone of what we do here,” said Tim Lewis, a cofounder of the partnership that created and manages the farm, in an interview for Making Sense of Place (LILP 2020). “Without the community, you don’t have anything to build off of.”
Investing in Transit
Cleveland covers about 80 square miles. Its two biggest employment hubs—the downtown core and University Circle, where the city’s hospitals are clustered—are some four miles apart. The route between those neighborhoods was long served by the Number 6 bus. Offering a slow ride on an aging fleet, the Number 6 “was not an economic development tool, shall we say,” said former mayor Campbell. The city decided to invest in a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, which has made rides quicker and more efficient, and has also stimulated an estimated $9.5 billion of mixed-use development along the corridor.
The project was a long time coming, emerging from a series of community conversations in the 1990s. The city secured its first grant for the project from the federal Department of Transportation while Campbell was in office in the early 2000s, and the program was implemented under Mayor Frank Jackson, now in his fourth term. The resulting HealthLine bus along Euclid Avenue—a main thoroughfare once dubbed “Millionaires’ Row” due to residents including the founders of Standard Oil and Western Union—is now a popular feature of Cleveland’s transit system.
The $200 million system debuted in 2008, financed in part by selling naming rights to the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals for 25 years. The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA) was the first transit authority in the nation to sell such a sponsorship, and it has since made similar deals for regular bus routes now bearing the names of sponsors MetroHealth and Cleveland State. The HealthLine also received funding from city, state, and federal sources and the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency. When the HealthLine was scarcely five years old, one team of researchers described it as having “by far the highest” return on investment of 21 transit corridors studied (Hook, Lotshaw, and Weinstock 2013). The result, according to RTA’s chief operating officer, Floun’say Caver, is that the HealthLine is “a jewel of our city” (Wood 2019).
Students from Cleveland State University at a stop on the HealthLine, a Bus Rapid Transit system that connects their college with other schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods. Credit: Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority.
The 7.1-mile route stretches from downtown to East Cleveland, a predominantly Black inner-ring suburb. Along the route are stops at Cleveland State University, Case Western Reserve University, and Playhouse Square. To the relief of riders, the number of stops has shrunk from 108 on the old Number 6 to 36 today. (Some riders say the line could stand to lose a few more stops, but the agency says it should remain a local service.) The system’s hybrid-electric buses run 24 hours a day on dedicated lanes in the middle of the road and are allowed higher speeds than other vehicles. Bike lanes hug the curb, and cars use the lanes between the bikes and buses. “We all just share the road,” said Deltrece Daniels, an avid bus rider who works at Bike Cleveland.
Despite its successes, the system has faced criticism and legal challenges related to inequitable fare collection and enforcement. For the first several years of operation, passengers purchased fare cards before boarding. They could board at any door and had to provide proof of purchase when spot-checked by transit police. In 2010, the Plain Dealer reported that 85 percent of fare-violation tickets on RTA lines went to Black passengers, who made up 70 percent of ridership at the time; in 2017, a municipal court ruled that the spot-checking was an unconstitutional search. The RTA unsuccessfully appealed the decision.
Riders now pay as they board, which critics say has countered the efficiencies that made the line an improvement in the first place. Like many systems, the RTA doesn’t give change. If you pay $3 for the $2.50 fare, you don’t get your quarters back; that, according to Daniels, “adds up over time and could be $50 over a year. I don’t want to give away money if I don’t have to.”
The HealthLine initially saw highs of about 4 million riders a year, but the COVID-19 pandemic and frustration over fare collection have led to decreases in ridership throughout the system. During the month of June 2020, the overall RTA system had 1.2 million riders, compared to 2.4 million during June 2019. Funds from the RTA’s biggest revenue source, the county sales tax, have dropped too, even as heightened bus sanitation has added to operating expenses. The RTA received more than $111 million in federal aid in the early months of the pandemic, which helped offset the losses, and it has promised no service cuts or fare hikes in 2021. The agency also joined a national effort by transit authorities seeking increased federal relief. According to Angie Schmitt, a Clevelander who recently wrote a book about transit and equity (Schmitt 2020), Cleveland’s transit system suffers from a pattern of underinvestment that could be remedied by a city levy or by financial aid from the state, which focuses most of its transportation spending on roads and highways. “There’s still a good amount of road widening, two- to three-lane conversions in the latest sprawl suburb,” she said.
The divisions among local, state, and federal interests are nothing new. After the Cuyahoga River burned, Mayor Stokes pointed out that a city’s problems don’t begin or end at its borders. Just as strong state and federal action was needed to revive the waterways of Cleveland and other cities across the country, cohesive state and federal leadership can strengthen the revival underway in this city and improve urban infrastructure nationwide. “Tragically, in some ways, cities are left on their own to survive,” said Coyne, the former planning commission chair. “We just don’t have a good urban agenda in Ohio.”
Faced with that reality, Cleveland continues to manufacture its own urban agenda. The transformation of Public Square a few years ago offers an example of what is possible. The $50 million redevelopment of this central gathering place was completed in 2016, led by the firm of James Corner—the designer of New York City’s High Line and a contributor to the Lincoln Institute book Design with Nature Now. The site was enlarged by about 40 acres and transformed into a walkable public mall overlooking Lake Erie, featuring public art, landscaped medians, and 1,500 newly planted trees. Planners eliminated cut-through roads, with the exception of a bus lane through the middle of the square. During the renovations, the city took the opportunity to implement a few infrastructure improvements. The upgrades included the reconstruction of electrical circuits dating to 1948 and the installation of an underground system that collects and reuses stormwater instead of sending it into the lake.
About the Legacy Cities Initiative
In 2020, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy launched the Legacy Cities Initiative to help policy makers, civic leaders, and other stakeholders build on their city’s strengths to create a more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous future. Legacy cities are places like Cleveland that were once drivers of industry and prosperity but have since experienced economic and population losses. In the United States, legacy cities are home to nearly 17 million people and a collective economy worth $430 billion. In recent years, many legacy cities have advanced on a path of revitalization. Now they are being tested by unprecedented health and economic crises, which, together with demonstrations against police violence and increasing calls for addressing systemic racism, have shed light on longstanding inequities.
The initiative includes cutting-edge research and online tools, as well as opportunities for participants to connect with peers in other cities through a national network of governmental, civic, and philanthropic leaders. “Research and ideas are important, but the success of legacy cities depends on people,” said Jessie Grogan, the Lincoln Institute’s associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality. “A big part of our mission will be to bring leaders and civic advocates from legacy cities together so they can learn from one another and achieve even greater impact. No city will have to rebuild alone.”
The Lincoln Institute and the City Club of Cleveland are cohosting a series of virtual events throughout 2021. At the first event, President and CEO George W. McCarthy and Chantel M. Rush, managing director of the Kresge Foundation’s American Cities, discussed the equitable regeneration of legacy cities. Watch the recording.
To learn more about the Legacy Cities Initiative, visit legacycities.org.
Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit and the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (Metropolitan 2018).
Photograph: The Cleveland skyline. Credit: tifonimages/iStock.
LILP (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy). 2020. “Making Sense of Place, Cleveland: Green City.” Video. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. http://msop.lincolninst.edu/city/cleveland.
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