Equity

 Sundays I think of the Galilean, not from religious fervor, but because I was trained to do so as a youth and things stick. Lately, I’ve been concerned, since I don’t have to worry constantly about paying bills, with the theoretical aspects of urban planning. Now what would He (with a capital “h”) have to say about urban planning? I don’t know.

He did say, we are told, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” According to another source, he just said, "Blessed are the poor." I sort of like the first since I've know some pretty rich people who were awfully poor in spirit, even people who have buildings named after them.

This hit home to me a number of years ago while working on a project involving a working-class neighborhood in decline. I had attended a workshop by the then current “guru of planning” who had assured the crowd that the type planning pioneered by him and his wife would cure everything from ugly neighborhoods to socio-economic inequity to the “low-down blues.” He was an engaging speaker, much in demand, and charismatic. He enthralled the crowd with his speech and all the slides, pictures, and pronouncements.

I was still hyped when an activist introduced me to a woman who lived in the neighborhood in question. She was talkative. That encouraged me. I just had to ask her about interaction with her neighbors. (The guru had assured us that was a sign of the righteousness of his planning model).

She turned stone cold when I asked. “Mr.,” she said, “I’m a single-mother of two boys whose father ran off with another woman and doesn’t provide a penny for support. I hold down two jobs so I can feed them and provide a place to live. When I’m at my second job, I lock my boys in the house so they don’t get killed by stray bullets. I don’t know who my neighbors are and, quite frankly, don’t care.”

Since then, I’ve not been so sure that streetscapes, bike paths, and inspired urban design are the answers to what our cities face.

Crime

Yesterday, an old friend asked me a question:

“Most every city has a poor(er) area, with higher crime rates and all that accompanies. Given your expertise, what can cities do to uplift those areas? Or are even the best efforts doomed to fail because there will always be a poor(er) area with higher crime rates, etc.? I wondered whether "low-income" housing would help the area but then questioned whether higher-income development would result in forcing the truly low-income folks elsewhere”

My answer: You have asked question that has confounded the experts for years. As you know, that's never stopped me from trying.

First: ghettos are ghettos, no matter how many pretty bows we place on them or what many fancy names we use for them. A gated-community ghetto can still be damaging to society when it dooms interaction among socio-economic groups. Second, even at the highest levels of government, we cannot escape the cognitive failure of confusing correlation with causation, for example, some high-density areas are correlated with crime, so high densities must create crime. Well, we have a condo in the highest-density spot in Little Rock and the most common crime there is dumping over-sized loads into the garbage chute.

The question is much too complicated for a sound-bite. Maybe I'll post some ideas in the future. In my opinion, the systemic bigotry that has erupted like some 1950s subterranean monster accounts for much of it, maybe most of it. I can’t believe the epidemic of hatred and racism unleashed by America’s electing an African-American president … twice.

On the other hand, and I can't say this publicly, but drug use and the failure of some ethnic groups to self-police is retarding progress. On the other, other hand, forced busing led droves of generally law-abiding citizens to flee to sundown cities, facilitated by the decision of the Arkansas Highway Construction Department to facilitate the flight by building more and better commuter lanes. In addition, there’s

·       Income inequality

·       White-flight

·       The attack on public schools by the ultra-rich

·       Military spending instead of people spending

·       Emphasis by cities on growing population instead of growing their people

·       The almost sexual obsession with guns and violence by many Americans

Oh hell, don't get me started. Stay tuned.

As an aside, we had a late Christmas lunch with some Hispanic friends in the Lonoke area yesterday and heard a harrowing story from two (both long-term residents and model citizens) of how a police officer harassed them in one's front year for GTWWH (going to work while Hispanic. I'm having a hard time being optimistic these days.

One of the men was someone whom we helped gain a college education. We could have ignored him. Problem was, he was extremely intelligent and verging on bitterness. I kept thinking of the Bob Dylan line, "Yonder stands your orphan with his gun." Does the libertarian Nirvana of complete selfishness outweigh the cost of all those prisons?

Politically-inspired hatred of one another ain’t helping a bit. Old friend, you just had to pull my chain, didn’t you?