urban Archives - We Are Not Divided

Erskine Murphy, who is 70 years old and walks with a cane, shuffled into the crosswalk traversing San Pablo Avenue at Myrtle Street on Oakland’s west side. He was on his way to the Community Foods Market to pick up groceries. A half-dozen bright orange markers lined the road near the crosswalk, flanked on either side by two turquoise signs that read “Go Slow. It’s Essential.”

The setup is an acknowledgment that this stretch of San Pablo Avenue, a four-lane divided roadway, is a threat to pedestrians like Murphy — perhaps even more so since Covid-19. With less traffic on the roads, speeding has surged. Murphy, who is Black, is already more likely than other pedestrians to be struck and killed by a car. Now, with bus service reduced, he is walking more than usual, often along West Oakland’s “high-injury corridors,” which include just two percent of the city’s streets but over one-third of its pedestrian collisions. The corner of Myrtle and San Pablo is on one of them.

But Murphy’s walks recently got a bit safer. This stretch of San Pablo Avenue has become one of 15 sites around Oakland designated an “essential place” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Oakland launched the Essential Places initiative in May to reduce the threat to pedestrians in these high-injury corridors, many of them located in low-income communities of color. The initiative consists of an assortment of cones, barricades and signage strategically placed to slow or divert traffic. While Murphy, who has been hit by a car once and sustained minor injuries, recognizes that a few markers aren’t going to solve the problem — he still sees reckless drivers on the road — he’s happy the barricades are there. “It helps safety-wise,” he says.

Feedback from residents suggests that the program is well liked, but it wasn’t always. An earlier version that focused primarily on expanding recreational space revealed a blindspot in the city’s planning — one that it is now correcting. At a time when urban planners are increasingly being called out for white elitism, Oakland is feeling its way, clumsily at times, down a different, more equitable path.

Essential Places is an offshoot of Oakland’s “Slow Streets” program, which closed a handful of streets to through traffic so that people could bike or jog while safely social distancing. Surveys administered by the city showed that the program was popular, but there was a problem. Two thirds of survey respondents were white and 40 percent had annual household incomes of $150,000 or more. In Oakland, white residents comprise 24 percent of the population and the median household income is $76,000.

“We got the feedback from the survey and said, ‘Wow, this isn’t representative,” says Warren Logan, policy director for mobility and interagency relations and the chief architect of Essential Places. Pressed by advocates, he doubled down on efforts to get feedback from residents in marginalized neighborhoods, especially in East Oakland, where more than three quarters of residents are Black or Latino and more than half of households are low-income. Residents in these neighborhoods, many of whom are essential workers, have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19.

Logan’s team started holding weekly, hour-long meetings with community members, who, as it turned out, felt very differently than most of the people who had responded to the survey.

“We’re not asking for that,” says John Jones III of the slow streets program. Jones is a longtime resident of East Oakland and director of political engagement for Just Cities, an organization that advocates for more equitable urban planning and policymaking. “No one is jogging or riding their bikes in these streets.” He and other advocates pushed the city to change course.

“One of the key areas of feedback, particularly for many residents in East Oakland, was that we had missed the mark,” says Logan. “They understood why slow streets might be helpful for people working at home who are more affluent or don’t necessarily have the same traffic challenges that they might have. But the residents there felt like the city should—if they’re going to focus on anything in East Oakland—be focused on helping people get to their essential places, whether that’s health clinics, to schools that were distributing food, to grocery stores.

The disconnect revealed a stark reality: For many marginalized communities, engaging with cities on urban policy is akin to screaming into a void. “City governments, historically and today, are really bad at planning with people,” says Margaretta Lin, executive director of Just Cities.

City officials often seek feedback from Brown and Black residents as a formality or a box to check, but rarely act on it, perpetuating a deep mistrust in government that goes back to before the Jim Crow era. From federal redlining to race-based real estate covenants, the history of urban planning is fraught with racist and classist policies that have served to disenfranchise communities of color. Essential Places is an example of what can emerge when government confronts that history head on.

During the Great Migration, the arrival of Black Americans in northern and western cities sparked an exodus of white families to the suburbs, nudged along by highway construction and discriminatory whites-only housing subsidies. “What it left were cities with large concentrations of poor people, largely Blacks and eventually immigrants coming into the United States,” says Malo Hutson, associate professor of urban planning at Columbia University and director of the school’s urban community and health equity lab.

What followed was a long period of disinvestment, made worse by the decimation of manufacturing jobs. As white families began returning to cities starting in the 1990s — what Hutson calls the “rediscovery of cities” — capital came with them, but it flowed into the kinds of investments that invited gentrification: things like bike lanes, dog parks, smart technologies and e-scooter programs that benefit affluent communities but don’t always serve the most immediate needs of poor ones.

When urban planners try to engage communities that have been hurt by government in the past, all of this accumulated trauma comes to bear. “They have every single right not to trust anything you say,” says Logan.

To understand the concerns of struggling communities in Oakland, Logan, who is Black, had to recognize the lingering weight of that history. “If so many people have such an irascible response to something as simple as an A-frame barricade at the beginning of an intersection, that tells me there’s a lot of deeper trauma that you’ve got to work through. So, let’s go there and be courageous enough to say, ‘I’m sorry. Tell me more. Yes, that was messed up. Tell me why.’”

Crushed by negative news?

For some residents in East Oakland, the bright orange signage used by the city to demarcate slow streets sites was an unwelcome reminder of another city-led project: construction of a bus rapid transit system that has been underway since 2012, creating traffic problems and reducing foot traffic for local businesses. Street closures may also require the presence of police, which can be traumatic for already overpoliced communities of color, especially in light of recent police killings of unarmed Black people.

“It doesn’t matter how great a program is. None of that matters if people feel like it’s not for them.”

Because these kinds of concerns aren’t always obvious, especially when the context is a street with a few barricades on it, uncovering them requires deeper engagement than administering an online survey. But engaging face to face, says Logan, can mean first having to bear the brunt of a lot of frustration. “I think that a lot of planners, especially probably white planners, are uncomfortable with getting yelled at by people of color,” he said.

That can pose a barrier to the kind of community engagement that many experts believe is necessary for urban planning to be inclusive and equitable, especially given that 85 percent of urban planners are white, but more than half of urban counties in the country are majority nonwhite.

There are few better examples of the impact of that lack of representation than cities’ efforts to establish bike lanes, a topic that has, for better or worse, come to epitomize bougie, white-centric urban policy, despite the fact that minorities are the fastest growing group of bicycle riders nationwide and are more likely to be hit by a car while riding. “The Great Bikelash” has dominated urban planning discourse and pitted (falsely, some would say) the goal of building more sustainable cities against the goal of creating more equitable ones.

At first blush, the issues seem straightforward. In Washington D.C., a group of Black faith leaders opposed bike lanes that would have reduced available parking around churches. In other distressed communities, residents were wary of biking because of the risk of traffic fatalities.

But a lot of the opposition from historically marginalized groups also had to do with process — how decisions about bike lanes were made and who was making them (bicycle advocates, like urban planners, are predominantly white).

“In urban planning, we’ll talk a good game,” says Hutson. “People say, ‘Oh, well, yeah, we do equitable planning and this and that. But at the end of the day, it’s how do you implement these things? Who is at the table? Who have you reached out to? Which voices are heard and which voices are not heard? That’s what I see as being the huge challenge.”

In many cities, the push to establish bike lanes occurred in tandem with rapid gentrification and displacement. Oakland introduced its first protected bike lane in 2014 in one of the city’s fastest gentrifying neighborhoods. Between 2000 and 2010, 34,000 African Americans were displaced from the city, a 24 percent decline. The frenzy to put in bike lanes, often justified on the basis of making streets safer for (mostly white) bicyclists, was particularly galling to many people of color because pedestrian safety in their own communities has gone largely unaddressed for decades. “It doesn’t matter how great a program is,” said Jones. “None of that matters if people feel like it’s not for them.”

In rolling out slow streets, Oakland appeared to be repeating the same mistakes as bike lane proponents. “East Oakland has the most dangerous streets in Oakland,” says Lin. “What East Oakland really needs are safe streets, not slow streets.”

Instead of being asked to weigh in on a program that had already been introduced, Lin said the city should have started with a different question. “It should have been, ‘What do you need in your community to survive this pandemic?’” She wants the city to implement a long-term health and safety plan that includes the installation of traffic lights and other infrastructure at dangerous intersections.

Logan says he hears the feedback and is listening. “We want to make sure we’re working with them through the process,” he says (emphasis Logan’s). But he also warns against what he says is a tendency for cities to give up too easily on programs when communities react negatively. “You also can’t just say, ‘I heard the first thing a Black person told me, I’m going to take that as gospel and run away when I get yelled at.’ That’s also not doing the work.”

At least one community leader from East Oakland told Logan, essentially, pick up your barricades and leave. But Logan said he kept pressing. “I said to her, ‘I’m going to repeat back to you what I just heard so that we can be really clear about what you’re telling me to do. You said you don’t like this program. So, if I were to take your point, I’m going to ask all of my staff to pick up every single barricade in the entire neighborhood and leave all of the barricades in [more affluent] North Oakland. What do you think that might look like if I were to go through with that?’ And she was like, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t say get rid of the program.’”

That extra prodding revealed the community leader’s real concern, which was that the barricades weren’t doing enough to stop people from driving dangerously. A better solution, she told Logan, would be to fully close short segments of streets to through traffic during certain times. “What came across initially as, ‘We don’t like slow streets’ transformed into, ‘Hey, this program isn’t strong enough to accomplish the thing that you say you’re trying to accomplish,’” Logan recalls.

In May, a month after the initial rollout of the slow streets program, Oakland introduced Essential Places, with a new goal of helping pedestrians in low-income areas move around safely. His team is now working with community representatives to understand how to strengthen barricades (people have been driving over or moving the markers the city is currently using). It is also exploring a public art project in which East Oakland artists create barriers that are less reminiscent of a construction zone, which he expects will kick off by the end of the month.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the pivot from slow streets to essential places in distressed neighborhoods, in direct response to the community’s feedback, has been generally well received. According to Department of Transportation data, there have been no collisions at designated Essential Places sites, even though all are part of the city’s high injury network where most collisions occur.

While there is still a long way to go, the city doesn’t believe it could have gotten that result if it had, as residents had initially demanded, simply packed up its barricades and left. “There are two different types of tendencies,” says Logan. “The first tendency is to not even ask Black and brown communities what impact you’re having on them in the first place. The second is… transactional engagement: We heard negative feedback, so we’re just going to quit. We’re not even going to try and ask, ‘What would make it an improvement? You just said you don’t like it, so I’m going to stop.’ I say that that’s not real equity.”

For Jones in East Oakland, the fact that the city was willing to redesign the program in response to the community’s feedback is a step in the right direction.

“Anytime people are willing to say, ‘Look, we could have done this better,’ and when there’s an opportunity to do that they act on it, that’s a success.”

This article was funded in part by the Solutions Journalism Network.

As soon as he heard the news, Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation’s Chief Paul Prosper’s heart began to race. A school bus, a grade school and a sign in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, the remote county on the east coast of Canada encircling Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation’s reserve, had been tagged with anti-Black and Indigenous racist slurs. Prosper’s heartbeat was anticipating terse interactions with parents, the school board and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, not to mention the students. “You’re sort of walking into a hornet’s nest, you know, you’re bound to get stung,” he says.

But looking back now at the 2018 incident, a different detail stands out to him: a text message from Owen McCarron, warden of the County of Antigonish, who wrote: “I heard what has happened. This is completely unacceptable, it doesn’t reflect the attitudes of the vast majority of people and I’m here to support in any way I can,” Prosper recounts.

“That was sort of a moment for me. That indicated to me that somebody actually cared for us,” Prosper, who has since moved on from his role as Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation’s Chief to become a Regional Chief for the Assembly of First Nations, says. Later, some members of the County of Antigonish council stood behind him at a school-wide debrief of the events.

These are small gestures, but what they represent is revolutionary. Across Canada, hundreds of municipalities like Antigonish sit right next to First Nations communities with very little communication, let alone collaboration. While the Canadian government now touts a “nation-to-nation” relationship with Indigenous Peoples, at the local level reconciliation is more of an afterthought. Municipalities often treat reserves as “blank spaces” as they develop around them and on the Nations’ traditional territories. For this and many other historical reasons, Indigenous communities like Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation report that racial divides are ever-present.

Antigonish County and Paqtnkek Joint Council — An Antigonish County and Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation joint council, part of a program designed to help longtime neighbors act like neighbors. Credit: County of Antigonish

But the united front that Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation and the county of Antigonish presented that day did not come easily. For the past five years, they have benefitted from a unique country-wide program designed to help longtime neighbors like them become neighbors. The First Nation–Municipal Community Economic Development Initiative, known as CEDI, empowers municipal and First Nation leaders and their staff to, for once, sit down and talk as equals.

CEDI is a partnership between the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers, known as Cando, which represents Indigenous communities in support of economic growth. Since 2013, 15 pairs — out of hundreds of requests — have taken part in the program that is in principle about joint economic development, but in reality more decolonization bootcamp.

CEDI was born out of a tragically common juxtaposition in Canada. Municipalities across the country were investing millions in municipal water infrastructure. Meanwhile, according to an OECD report, it is estimated that “half of the water systems on First Nations reserves pose a medium or high health risk to their users.”

“How could it be that the municipality has perfectly clean piped water, and across the street, if it’s a reserve, they could be living with a boil-water advisory? Where’s the breakdown?” Josh Regnier, a facilitator for the program, reflected on the program’s origins.

For Cando, the motivation to develop CEDI was pragmatic: over the years, funding for First Nations infrastructure and development from the federal government has eroded, generating an incentive to combine efforts regionally toward economic prosperity. “That, though, is easier said than done,” says Cando’s executive director Ray Wanuch.

Though it seems obvious that immediate neighbors should pool resources to share in water treatment plants or firefighting, it’s not that simple. In Canada, municipalities are products of the provinces, while First Nations have a direct relationship with the federal government. Although chiefs, mayors and councillors may share the same grocery stores, they have no obligation to work together.

The jurisdictional barriers, however, create a false sense of separation. The elephant in the room is that municipalities like the County of Antigonish across Canada have taken over Indigenous land. As Prosper points out, in the early 18th century Indigenous nations signed peace and friendship treaties with Great Britain to respectfully coexist. But in the centuries that followed, Indigenous Peoples were increasingly faced with racist policies aimed at eradicating their identities and taking their land. In many communities, the relics of this violence — such as the residential schools where children were forcibly assimilated — still stand in neighboring towns.

“Some of our communities have had very bad history and relationships with their surrounding municipal neighbors,” says Wanuch.

That’s why the CEDI program doesn’t kick off talking logistics or finances — it starts with history.

Credit: County of Antigonish

“There's an understanding that we are connected, that our success will only further success in the area surrounding us.”

In one of the key early exercises, each community’s council and staff, along with Indigenous elders, are asked to outline their own understanding of the region’s history through sticky notes on the wall. Regnier describes one regional partnership where the municipalities outlined a laundry list of infrastructure: town hall, school, fire hall. The First Nations, at their turn, outlined a much longer timeline of teachings, cultural history, and relationships and wars with other Nations. At the end of their timeline came a turning point, a nation-to-nation treaty signed with colonial governments, followed by a tight succession of painful events: the Indian Act defined Indigenous rights and identities, residential schools removed youth from their parents, the last fluent language-speaker passed. They were deeply offended that the treaty responsible for the existence of the municipalities, and the many examples of First Nation resiliency, were ignored.

From this groundwork, deeper conversations sprang up, like the question of who should have a voice in development decisions. With help from independent mediators and regular meetings over three years, the municipalities now include First Nations in development planning. “We should have been doing that all along,” said one participating mayor. “Better late than never.”

Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities has never been more vital.

Across the United States and Canada together, there are more than 1,200 federally recognized Indigenous communities. Urban centers are growing and sprawling closer to Indigenous reserves, 80 percent of which are less than 500 hectares in size (roughly 2.5 percent the size of Portland), limiting independent infrastructure. Meanwhile, challenges from homelessness to wildfires eschew borders and demand a regional response.

The relationship between Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation and the County of Antigonish shows what incremental steps toward reconciliation can accomplish.

In the 1960s, a section of the Trans-Canada Highway connecting Halifax and Cape Breton severed Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation’s reserve lands in two. And while they were guaranteed access in the early negotiations, the Nation was locked out from 200 hectares (500 acres) of its reserve lands. McCarron said it was an “eye-opener” to learn of this deep wound in early meetings. Despite being effectively landlocked, his Mi’kmaq neighbors were “resilient in their resolve to someday get access to that highway,” McCarron says.

Now they have. With a multimillion-dollar highway expansion in 2019 came “an opportunity to right a historic wrong,” says Prosper. Through negotiations with all levels of government, and support from CEDI, the Nation was able to recover access to its land with a highway interchange complete with a fuel depot, travel center and cardlock.

In 2018, Prosper and McCarron signed a friendship accord in ceremony that acknowledges the Mi’kmaq territory on which they all live, and commits to regular joint council meetings. Now, they’re working towards a joint solar energy farm that will employ members of both communities. “There’s an understanding that we are connected, that our success will only further success in the area surrounding us,” says Prosper, adding there’s “a genuine feeling of congratulations” from the wider community. From his own conversations with the non-Indigenous community, McCarron agrees: “Attitudes are changing.”

Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation and Antigonish aren’t the only communities making progress.

In Thunder Bay, where more than a third of Canada’s reported anti-Indigenous hate crimes took place in 2015, Fort William First Nation and the City of Thunder Bay found their own shared area of economic interest. The First Nation had a large piece of contaminated lands they couldn’t use. The city, on the other hand, had run out of land for industrial clients. So they came together, pitched the idea of an industrial park to funders and were able to secure the money needed to bring it to market.

Fort William First Nation and the City of Thunder Bay came together to pitch the idea of an industrial park to funders. Credit: John Mason

Elsewhere, First Nations and municipalities from British Columbia to the Northwest Territories and the Atlantic are working together to build transit infrastructure, establish joint tourism initiatives and improve emergency management.

And though they have every reason to turn inward in face of Covid-19, these relationships are proving their strength. The pandemic has revealed the lack of relationship between many municipalities and First Nations across Canada, as towns reopened without consulting their First Nation neighbors, many of which still have travel restrictions. In contrast, Antigonish and Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation released a joint statement in response to the pandemic in March, while in April, a regional district and First Nation in British Columbia built a joint economic recovery task force through video conference. In Manitoba, partners overcame a deep historical trauma to lobby governments and investors to reverse the closure of a local factory that would have eliminated roughly 250 jobs. As CEDI prepares to welcome another cohort in 2021, program managers say its primary funder, the federal government, is looking to adapt the model toward recovery from the pandemic.

Marissa Lawrence, senior program officer for CEDI, says the nine partnerships finishing the program have embraced video conferencing, but there’s no doubt Covid-19 presents challenges. “My personal opinion is that you can’t replace relationship-building face-to-face,” says Lawrence, noting that their current partners had spent one year together before the pandemic hit.

As this crisis has us turning back to local economies, Lawrence says, these relationships are proving their worth. A resolve to come back to the table in the face of disruption may be harder to measure — but it’s an important marker of success.

Chief Prosper has a similar measure: “If it appears to be uncomfortable, and you seem almost out of your place, then I think that’s a certain indicator that you’re doing something groundbreaking.”