Testimony: Advance Racial Equity in City Planning
Samuel Stein
Hearing on Proposed Racial Disparity Report for rezoning process
Before the NYC Council Committee on Land Use
Thank you to the bill sponsors for introducing this important legislation on racial equity in rezonings, and thank you to the Land Use Committee for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Samuel Stein. I am a senior policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), a nonprofit organization that seeks to address the most pressing problems facing low-income New Yorkers, including the city’s combined and continuing crises of housing unaffordability and racial discrimination.
Planning and development dynamics have never been race-neutral in New York City, and certainly are not so today. From the colonial roots of this city to the redlining of neighborhoods, and from “urban renewal” to “planned shrinkage,” City Planning and development actions have disproportionately displaced and disinvested from people of color in this city. And while the social and economic context sections of Environmental Impact Statements, which have been mandated in New York City since the mid-1980s, document some of these dynamics, their warnings too often go unheeded until their effects are already in place.
Racially disparate planning and development activity takes many forms in the contemporary city but are most visible in the way the city channels growth to particular locations: a pattern of downzoning wealthy and predominantly white homeowners communities while upzoning poorer and predominantly Black, Latino and Asian communities, which increases displacement pressures while simultaneously constraining opportunities for mobility. This practice was firmly established – if never stated as policy – under the Bloomberg administration, and it was not undone under the de Blasio administration, which had until recently only advanced one rezoning in a wealthy, white neighborhood – the commercial rezoning of Midtown East, which created no affordable housing. In fact, until Gowanus and SoHo were broached, the neighborhoods rezoned by the de Blasio administration were collectively just 16% white, whereas the city as a whole is 32% white. This pattern was reproduced in developer-initiated upzonings under de Blasio, which, under Mandatory Inclusionary Housing rules, were supposed to produce affordable housing. However, according to a forthcoming CSS study, 89 percent of the apartments approved through developer-initiated MIH rezonings would be unaffordable to the average neighborhood resident without additional subsidies. Even among those projects’ “affordable” units, 75 percent were targeted toward people making more than the neighborhood average. This suggests that the new housing produced would more likely serve white New Yorkers than New Yorkers of color in the communities being rezoned.
The Racial Disparity Report proposed in Intro 1572-A would be an important way to identify disparities before they are written into the zoning map. By forcing the applicant to study and explain the current and historical social context of the development area, as well as the populations likely to be served, unserved and made vulnerable to displacement by the type of development being proposed, this tool would give city planners, community members, elected officials, and advocates an important tool to understand how a proposed land use action would either contribute to or hinder the pursuit of racial equity in our city.
These key words – racial equity – point to an important way the legislation can be improved. Section 6 of Intro 1572-A calls on the applicant to outline the ways any identified disparities or displacement risks might be mitigated in the pursuit of “greater racial and ethnic equity.” This, of course, is the cause that brings us all together today, but it is important to be as specific as possible in that pursuit. While the bill defines several key terms, such as “affordable housing” and “rent burden”, it does not define “racial and ethnic equity.”
This is not a minor point. Not defining racial and ethnic equity opens up the proposed Racial Disparity Report to misuse by those who would draw a false equivalency between gentrification and integration, whereas the intent of the law is to combat gentrification in majority people of color communities and promote integration in majority white areas. If not carefully defined, an applicant might be able to argue that a large-scale, largely luxury development in a predominantly low-income community of color represents a move toward greater racial and ethnic equity because it would facilitate the integration of an area that currently lacks diversity, if diversity is conceptualized as a roughly equal proportion of people from various ethnic and racial backgrounds. Such a case would go against the spirit of this law, but perhaps not its letter.
Take, for example, the 2003 rezoning of Fredrick Douglas Boulevard in Harlem, which upzoned two major corridors while downzoning brownstone blocks. That rezoning has been critiqued for putting African American tenants at risk both along the corridors, where landlords were incentivized to sell their buildings to developers for demolition and reconstruction, and in the mid-blocks, where landlords were incentivized to convert apartments to single-family homes. Between 2000 and 2013, while the overall population in the rezoning area rose 18%, the white population increased 455% as the Black population declined 5% and the Latino population dropped 13%. A cynical interpretation of racial and ethnic equity could spin this as integration, but it would more reasonably be characterized as gentrification.
While there are many ways the bill’s authors could address this problem, one potential solution lies in the landmark 1968 Fair Housing Act. The Fair Housing Act aims to outlaw discrimination in housing, essentially mandating that people should be able to live wherever they want without fear of discrimination based on protected classes (including most prominently race). A similar approach can be applied to the question of “greater racial and ethnic equity” in this legislation: the measure of equity can be the ability to live where one wants, without fear of either displacement or discrimination. The addition of high-income housing in a low-income, predominantly people of color neighborhood – as in the Fredrick Douglas Boulevard case – does not allow one group access to a neighborhood they were previously excluded from, it only adds more options for those who already had entre before. The addition of low-income housing in high-income, predominantly white neighborhoods would, on the other hand, expand the options available to people who have previously been excluded from those areas. This is a crucial distinction, which can be added to the bill in order to prevent it from being misused.
With this addition, we at the Community Service Society believe this important bill can become even more powerful, and can create a crucial tool to advance racial equity in New York City. We urge you to consider including CSS’s recommendations, and to pass Intro 1572-A.