Equitable Urban Greening

In the late 1980s, Anne Whiston Spirn launched an “action research project” to explore how small landscape interventions could help restore nature and rebuild community in low-income neighborhoods in West Philadelphia. The project was meant to last four years. Nearly four decades later, the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) is still going strong—and it has yielded a harvest of both hope and hindsight.

In Mill Creek and other Philadelphia neighborhoods, local students, residents, landscape architects, and others worked together to create strategic pockets of ecological design—converting abandoned lots into community gardens and flood-absorbing green spaces, for example—and then tied those projects into the curriculum in local schools. This community-led approach earned national attention. Closer to home, it helped inspire Philadelphia’s Green City, Clean Waters plan, through which the city has installed green infrastructure like tree trenches, rain gardens, and stormwater bumpouts on over 3,000 acres of publicly and privately owned land citywide, reducing annual stormwater runoff into local waterways by three billion gallons.

In historically underserved communities, where residents shoulder a disproportionate burden of climate risks and pollution, adding green space would seem a natural step toward addressing long-standing inequities. But something else happened as the West Philadelphia Landscape Project gained momentum. In the mid-2010s, housing prices in neighborhoods like Mill Creek began to rise—and so did interest from institutional investors, who tend to raise rents more aggressively than noninvestor landlords, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. All that greening, it seemed, was making the area more desirable to investors—and more expensive to live in.

Green space doesn’t just filter and cool the surrounding air, absorb stormwater, and improve physical and mental health. It’s  also proven to increase nearby property values.

That can be good for homeowners whose neighborhoods have been denied investment over the years, which has systematically happened to communities of color. But while rising home values benefit property owners, they can put displacement pressure on renters. About half of the households in cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Seattle rent their homes, while nearly two-thirds rent in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.

“It was shocking to me … how quickly the disinvestment, vacancies, and abandoned buildings were replaced by speculation and development,” says Spirn, who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania when she started the project in West Philadelphia and now teaches at MIT. “Right now, the communities that I’ve worked in, like Mill Creek, are under siege by speculators and developers.”

Greening Without Displacement

In a study of 28 North American and European cities that made major investments in green spaces or climate adaptation between 1990 and 2016, urban greening was either a leading or contributing factor in citywide gentrification in 17 places. In Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, and other cities, greening was just one factor contributing to gentrification. In places like Atlanta, Copenhagen, and Montreal, urban greening was seen as the primary driver of gentrification.

Home values within a half-mile of Atlanta’s Beltline greenway, for example—a 22-mile loop of trails and parks connecting 45 Atlanta neighborhoods—increased 18 to 27 percent more than those of properties elsewhere in the city between 2011 and 2015.

“Until urban greening is so pervasive that there’s no price differential for its presence, we’re going to have to confront the fact that it’s an amenity that people respond to by bidding up prices,” says Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Large-scale parks and greenways are most associated with gentrification, says James Connolly, assistant professor of planning at the University of British Columbia and coauthor of the green gentrification study and a working paper commissioned by the Lincoln Institute. “That is a highly visible amenity, and like any other highly visible amenity—like a new transit station, or a new high-profile development,” he says, “any of those things would change real estate markets around the area, and greening is no different.”

Large projects like parks and greenways aren’t the only urban greening efforts that can drive gentrification. Investors and developers pay attention to municipal investment. And even smaller interventions like rain gardens and street trees can be interpreted as signs of a cultural or economic shift.

“These smaller green infrastructure interventions, some of them are just tiny rain gardens or curbside greening types of things,” Connolly says—so it’s not that real estate markets are reacting to a major new amenity that’s changing the community dynamic. But taken collectively, “these many different interventions can start to produce a kind of a shift in perception,” Connolly adds. “In Philadelphia, for example, we can see evidence of this, where those really small-scale interventions, when you aggregate them, are highly correlated with shifts in racial dynamics and shifts in gentrification in the city.”

All of this means that residents of historically marginalized communities may develop a justified skepticism toward new green projects, even when the interventions are intended to improve a neighborhood or better protect it from climate risks such as flooding or extreme heat.

In the decade and a half after Schuylkill River Park opened in South Philadelphia, median home prices rose 1,120 percent, neighborhood residency shifted from majority Black to majority white, and local cultural institutions such as the New Light Beulah Baptist Church found it necessary to shutter or relocate, writes Sterling Johnson, a PhD candidate at Temple University, and Kimberley Thomas, associate professor of geography at Temple. “The language may have changed since the early 20th century, but environmental stewardship still looks like colonization to many low-income Black people.”

And in Detroit, roughly a quarter of residents refused to accept free street trees in front of their homes—not because they didn’t understand the benefits of tree canopy, but due to lingering distrust of the city, according to a study by Christine Carmichael, then at the University of Vermont.

If cities don’t acknowledge and seriously address the potential for displacement caused by green interventions, Connolly says, “then what we end up with is a really diminished political support for urban greening, because we end up with a lot of people that just sort of see it as, ‘That’s not for me, so why would I support it?’”

‘Yes, and’ Policymaking

The tension between urban greening intended to improve quality of life and the economic displacement that often follows is an issue that demands “Yes, and” planning and policymaking. “You can’t have residential security at the expense of environmental security, and you can’t have environmental security at the expense of residential security,” Connolly says. “These two things cannot be traded off against one another—we need both.” He also notes that urban greening doesn’t always lead to displacement; in almost half of the cities studied, greening had little to no gentrification impact.

A city can use any number of specific policy tools to help mitigate displacement when greening a neighborhood; indeed, the remedies are similar regardless of what’s causing the displacement pressure, but they must be applied in tandem with (or even before) green interventions.

Community land trusts, for example, can help residents take an ownership stake in their neighborhood and ensure permanent housing affordability. Rent stabilization measures can keep rent hikes in check, so tenants aren’t priced out of their community. “Opportunity to purchase” laws, such as those in Washington, DC, allow tenants or cities first dibs on purchasing a home if a landlord decides to sell. Inclusionary zoning, affordable housing requirements, developer fees, and other tools can all help ease displacement pressure, too.

“It’s not one thing, it’s a package of tools,” says Isabelle Anguelovski, research professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and head of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ), who coauthored the gentrification study and working paper with Connolly.

“It’s something that is both tax-driven and incentives-driven,” she continues. “Vancouver has a tax on empty housing. Some states, like Washington, have rent control at the broader state level. Portland, Oregon, has something called a ‘Right to Return’ policy, which is for residents who were gentrified out in past decades or displaced by urban renewal in the 1960s.”

Other taxes and developer fees can be used for public housing construction, rental subsidies, or supporting small local retailers who might otherwise be priced out of their longtime community. “At the local level, if taxes are earmarked very clearly the right way, cities can use those funds to buy vacant lots or derelict buildings and transform them into social and public housing.”

Incentives, meanwhile, can take the form of density bonuses, which permit developers to build taller structures than would otherwise be allowed in exchange for setting aside more units for income-restricted housing—say, 30 percent of the building. “Oftentimes, municipalities don’t manage to get more than 10 or 15 percent,” Anguelovski says. “But growing cities that are attractive to developers have the ball in their court. So they should not be afraid of pushing developers, because those are cities that have an array of assets that people want.”

Community-Led Greening, with Collaborative Intention

None of these displacement interventions are particularly mysterious or difficult to implement, Cotter says. But doing it well requires collaboration among agencies that might not normally work together: “It’s not the urban forester’s job to think about rent stabilization.”

That’s why Connolly and Anguelovski, who presented research for a forthcoming Policy Focus Report at a Lincoln Institute workshop in June, say it’s essential for cities to take a coordinated, cross-sectoral approach to greening. Even if the parks department or water commission is taking the lead on a particular green intervention, Connolly explains, the effort should involve other key city departments as well, so that “green infrastructure is going in with a plan for housing and transportation infrastructure integrated into the plan.”

Barcelona showed this approach is possible, if not perfect, under the mayorship of Ada Colau, Connolly says. “From the mayor’s office down, they mandated that a lot of their agencies start to have more of this transversal conversation about how the existing resource planning gets integrated with other dimensions of the government and other city operations,” Connolly says.

“Try, to the extent possible, to avoid putting these two things in conflict, to avoid having your greening agency create things that make the housing affordability measures more difficult to achieve,” he says. “Just have those conversations together—which doesn’t mean don’t do housing affordably, and doesn’t mean don’t do greening—it means do them in close conversation with one another, as well as bringing in things like social supports and transit infrastructure and things like that … I’m not saying that’s a simple thing. But Barcelona did make some nice movements in this direction.”

Another bigger, almost philosophical shift that Connolly thinks cities should make is moving away from an “opportunistic” approach to greening, in which cities with specific climate or environmental targets jump at any chance they get to add green interventions to advance those goals. If there’s an opportunity to plant some trees or put in a park somewhere, they reflexively do it, Connolly explains. “But those opportunities are created for certain reasons, usually associated with development. So if you have a solely opportunistic approach to greening, then you’re always going to be linking greening to these development cycles and therein lies a challenge.” Instead, he recommends taking a more intentional, big-picture approach. “Even if there’s not an opportunity for greening, how can we ourselves create one?”

Spirn, of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, who has spent much of the past five years working with her students on strategies to prevent displacement related to urban greening, agrees: “It’s really important to start thinking about how you help people stay in their homes before you start building new green infrastructure projects,” she concludes. And whatever strategy a city employs to do that needs to be resident-focused, she adds. “Green infrastructure needs to be about more than just greening. It needs to be about people.”

Some worry that this approach—greening with more intention, and with more input and agency from empowered community residents—can’t keep pace with the urgency of the climate crisis. “There’s a concern that being equitable, respecting self-determination, will slow us down in a dangerous way—and I get that, but I also reject that assumption,” Cotter says. “It’s an equity imperative for us to tackle climate change as quickly as possible, because the people who are going to suffer most are the populations that always get marginalized, the same people whose self-determination and agency has been undermined by systems of structural racism.”

If communities can lead decision-making in the face of climate change, Cotter continues, “I don’t think they’d be slower. I think they’d be clear-eyed about what needs to happen, do it faster, and come up with solutions that actually reflect local conditions and local needs.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A residential street in West Philadelphia. Credit: City of Philadelphia.