Our cover story in this issue questions how much protection zoning laws gave minority and impoverished communities in the South over decades, spotlighting the discrimination hidden behind what can sound like routine and even boring land use changes. Andrew H. Whittemore, in “Racial and Class Bias in Zoning: Rezonings Involving Heavy Commercial and Industrial Land Use in Durham (NC), 1945–2014,” assesses upzonings and downzonings in Durham over seven decades. Upzonings generally permitted heavy industrial and commercial land uses to locate in areas formerly zoned for residential and light industry, allowing dangerous and often polluting industries to locate next to single-family homes, largely in African-American neighborhoods. Downzonings, in contrast, were decisions to change land use away from heavy industrial uses to residential and commercial uses. The cover photo is a current picture of Salem Street, where the city’s largest manufacturer, Armageddon Chemical, was located for decades in the middle of a residential neighborhood of color. (The chemical company made biological products for the U.S. military from 1970 until 1985; the site is now a junkyard, just a hundred yards from the house on the cover.) Whittemore finds overall there were significantly more upzonings in African-American and low-income neighborhoods than in White neighborhoods, and more downzonings in White neighborhoods, until the mid-1980s, when the environmental justice movement took hold and African Americans began to achieve political power in the city. Whittemore concludes that planners have an ethical obligation not only to address current racial, ethnic, or class disparities in zoning practices but to correct past inequities created by zoning. JAPA has published remarkably few articles on zoning; this article reminds students, scholars, and practitioners alike of the remarkable power, for good or ill, of this common land use instrument.
Do stronger plans lead to better outcomes? And what role does the state play in local plan outcomes? Hee-Jung Jun assesses the impact of the affordable housing components of local comprehensive plans in two large metropolitan areas in very different states: Detroit (MI) and Atlanta (GA). In “The Link Between Local Comprehensive Plans and Housing Affordability: A Comparative Study of the Atlanta and Detroit Metropolitan Areas,” the author evaluates the strength and impact of local comprehensive plans on the percentage of cost-burdened low-income households in the region (i.e., the share of low-income households that spends more than 30% of their income on housing). She finds that the affordable housing components of local comprehensive plans are stronger in Atlanta than in Detroit and that the strength of these plans was related to a decrease in the share of cost-burdened households in the region, her measure of the impact of the affordable housing plans. She also finds that the role of the state in the local comprehensive plan process matters: Georgia does not mandate local comprehensive planning, but it does provide meaningful incentives and financial support for these activities, whereas Michigan does not. Jun concludes that planners should promote local comprehensive planning with more of a focus on multiple affordable housing programs and policies while advocating for greater state support for local comprehensive planning efforts.
Gian-Claudia Sciara, in “Metropolitan Transportation Planning: Lessons From the Past, Institutions for the Future,” reports on her meta-analysis of the history of regional transportation planning over the past 100 years, focusing on the 400 U.S. metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which are a mystery to many planners yet oversee billions of dollars in regional transportation projects. The current challenges that MPOs face are rooted in their legislative and political history, but Sciara also argues their experiences show that these organizations can change to respond to their problems moving forward. MPOs often lack a meaningful budget, have little to do with the actual implementation of transportation projects, must negotiate between often competitive local agencies, have little to do with the land use decisions that support their sustainability goals, and do not provide a regional decision-making forum in which all relevant stakeholders participate. Sciara suggests, however, that looking backward we can see a large number of meaningful changes in the role and influence of these regional organizations over time that indicate that MPOs can create and support meaningful regional transportation improvements. She suggests that planners should work to make MPO boards more representative of a wider group of stakeholders, generate their own budgets, and have more control over local transportation funds.
There are two review essays in this issue, a relatively new feature of the journal. Review articles provide our readers with a comprehensive synthesis of a large body of scholarly and professional research on key planning topics. Both of the review essays in this issue share two common themes: First, that disadvantaged populations may not benefit as much as those who are more advantaged—or at all—from widely promoted planning approaches and policies; and second, that some of those policies encourage gentrification (or the fear of gentrification) in minority and low-income communities.
Megan Horst, Nathan McClintock, and Lesli Hoey synthesize and assess interdisciplinary research on urban agriculture and its link with food justice. In “The Intersection of Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature,” the authors describe the causes of food injustice; the many claims made for the ability of urban agriculture to address these issues; and the ways in which individual cities and planners have sought to support and encourage urban agriculture, particularly the cultivation of food for neighborhood consumption. Horst et al. note that much published on the topic is “celebratory” but find that disadvantaged communities and populations may not benefit from many urban agricultural programs, in part because such efforts are often led by Whites and insensitive to the cultural and other needs of minority and low-income communities. Successful urban agricultural programs can also be the leading edge of gentrification and community displacement. A particularly intractable issue is the lack of permanent access to agricultural land by racial and ethnic minorities. The authors describe the efforts of a number of cities, particularly Seattle (WA), to ensure that their urban agricultural efforts do meet the needs of disadvantaged communities and suggest concrete ways in which planners can structure their urban agricultural activities to make a genuine contribution to food justice.
In the other review essay Arlie Adkins, Carrie Makarewicz, Michele Scanze, Maia Ingram, and Gretchen Luhr evaluate the limited literature on the impact of the built environment on walking and physical activity among disadvantaged populations. In “Contextualizing Walkability: Do Relationships Between Built Environments and Walking Vary by Socioeconomic Context?” the authors find the expected relationship: People walked more in walkable neighborhoods, but the effect was substantially greater for advantaged populations than for low-income and other disadvantaged communities. Disadvantaged groups walked more in unsupportive neighborhoods, or those where the built environment was not conducive to physical activity, and walked less in supportive neighborhoods. The authors suggest that a variety of environmental factors, including fear of crime and lack of social support, may reduce the willingness of disadvantaged populations to walk or engage in physical activity. The authors are also concerned that improving disadvantaged neighborhoods to make them more walkable may not significantly increase the physical activity in which the residents engage but may increase the odds of gentrification and community displacement. The authors suggest that planners must recognize these disparate impacts, ensure that they define walkability to address social and physical barriers in the environment, partner with a range of community agencies, and carefully evaluate the impact and outcomes of built environment interventions in neighborhoods that differ socioeconomically.
Karen S. Christensen provides the latest entry in the Perspective series, in which senior academics and planners close to or at retirement reflect on the changes they have seen in planning theory, practice, or scholarship over the years they have been active in the profession. Dr. Christensen looks back over a career as a theorist, academic, and practitioner and suggests the ways in which theory has both strengthened and challenged her professional and pedagogic activities.