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powell discusses systemic racism in UB talk

Re-post from UB Sustainability – News

 

By LAUREN NEWKIRK MAYNARD; Published February 10, 2017

“We must start asking what our final goals are. What are the intended outcomes? Then we can put systems in place that can do different things for different people with a common goal in mind.”
john a. powell, director
Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society

 

The biggest problem of the 21st century, according to civil rights expert john a. powell, is the problem of “othering,” or focusing on our differences as individual deficits instead of collective strengths.

Othering comes in many forms, powell told a UB audience, but by far the most destructive in American society is systemic racism.

On Wednesday night, powell gave a highly anticipated lecture — part of his weeklong residency at the School of Architecture and Planning as the 2016-17 Clarkson Chair in Urban and Regional Planning — that packed the fourth floor of Hayes Hall. With a gentle voice and sparkling humor, he discussed the problem of systemic racism through slides full of harrowing statistics, showing how human nature works against us, and how each society has its own way of “othering” and discriminating against people it doesn’t understand.

john a. powell delivers a lecture at Hayes Hall to a large audience

john a. powell spoke at UB as part of his weeklong residency as the 2016-17 Clarkson Chair in Urban and Regional Planning. Photos: Douglas Levere

Research shows that our brains are naturally wired to connect to others, but also to instantly — and unconsciously — separate and categorize other people. powell explained how implicit vs. explicit bias works, or how our unconscious minds are far faster and more powerful than our slower, more deliberative consciousness.

The outcomes of our unconscious biases are alarming but instructive, powell said. Americans across all demographic lines say they don’t consider themselves racist, or sexist, or xenophobic. Yet in study after study, our subconscious minds say otherwise, he said, pointing to, for example, systemic, deeply ingrained racism that is driving social norms, from the content on our television shows, to who the police choose to arrest and who our political leaders determine are legal, law-abiding citizens.

powell then turned to the biases with which we design our built environments, including our homes, schools, churches, doctor’s offices, supermarkets, bus stations and other public and private spaces. He said the feelings these spaces create go hand-in-hand with how we perceive ourselves and others, including those of other races, ethnicities and nationalities. And our country, powell said, has done a lousy job of creating physical and social structures that bring us together to promote good health and well-being for all citizens.

He gave two examples: You walk out the door and get on a bike to get some exercise, and see trees and smell fresh air. Or you venture outside and encounter three lanes of traffic whizzing by and garbage on the street. Your fear for your safety prevents you from walking around the block. The world we’d all prefer is obvious, he said, but still out of reach for a majority of Americans.

powell, who does not capitalize his name, directs the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and has spent his career in law and African-American studies writing and speaking on a complex array of connected issues, including structural barriers to opportunity; racial justice and regionalism; concentrated poverty and urban sprawl; fair housing; affirmative action; and spirituality and social justice, among others. He also has served as a consultant to other countries who, like the U.S., are grappling with sudden changes in society and technology.

“Rapid change has created a great deal of churn,” he told the UB audience, noting how the demographic shift from white majority to non-white majority is fully underway. “We’re reconstituting who we are.”

john a. powell speaks with Will and Nan Clarkson after the lecture

john a. powell (right) talks with Will and Nan Clarkson, who support the Clarkson Chair program that brings distinguished scholars and professionals to UB for lectures and seminars.

As the face of America changes, he said, this creates understandable anxiety for all races. That anxiety, combined with uneven distribution of resources like education, quality housing, food and health care, results in adverse effects on vulnerable populations, including refugees, minorities, women, children, the elderly and the disabled. Inequalities in what powell calls “opportunity structures” — illustrated by census reports and death records — show how our implicit (unconscious) biases against the “other” can also damage our living environments and the social fabric, no matter what our income and race.

The solutions, powell noted, are as complex as the problems, but they’re worth tackling. The good news, he said, is that we can literally build our way to racial and social equity. We can better adapt to rapid changes and promote more just societies by bridging differences with empathy and compassionate leadership. “We need to talk and listen to each other,” he said.

Then there’s what powell calls “targeted universalism,” which uses strategies tailored for specific groups to reach universal goals. This is an intentional inversion of traditional strategies, like universal health care, which, he said, promote a silver-bullet approach to addressing the needs of an increasingly diverse population.

“We must start asking what our final goals are. What are the intended outcomes? Then we can put systems in place that can do different things for different people with a common goal in mind,” powell said. In other words, targeted universalism doesn’t force people to change, but builds a world that supports humanity’s differences, he said. At institutions like UB, or our central government, diversity can point to collective strength, he added, helping de-escalate the country’s current obsession with shaming and exploiting “the other.”

powell’s urban planning residency leaves the School of Architecture and Planning, and the university, with a new set of tools for creating positive change. The Haas Institute has established a websitepromoting the philosophy and tactics of targeted universalism. The organizing committee for his UB visit also has curated a list of more than 100 books, journal articles and multimedia resources available in the UB Libraries that explore topics of race, space, place and opportunity.

Buffalo Becomes First City to Bid Minimum Parking Goodbye

Re-post from The City Lab

Buffalo Becomes First City to Bid Minimum Parking Goodbye

The city is overhauling its archaic zoning regulations, but does the move help its citizens as much as it helps developers?

Linda Poon

Jay Galvin/Flickr

In overhauling its zoning code for the first time since 1953, Buffalo, New York, has become the first major city to completely remove outdated minimum parking requirements. (Other cities have done so, too, but only in certain districts or neighborhoods.) That means developers there will no longer be required to build a certain number of parking spaces for commercial and residential projects, regardless of whether there are mass transit options nearby or if the tenants even need them.

Now, according to The Buffalo News, projects above 5,000 square feet will require parking analysis that factors in alternative transportation options in the area. It’s all part of a six-year-long initiative called the Buffalo Green Code, or the the Unified Development Ordinance, which the city council unanimously passed last week and Mayor Byron W. Brown signed into law Wednesday. It rewrote the zoning and land-use regulations to make them simpler and easier to understand. The new code also follows a relatively new concept called form-based zoning, which emphasizes the relationship between public space and buildings.

“Conventional zoning doesn’t begin with what we want this city to look like in terms of the ‘public realm,’“ says Robert Steuteville, editor of the Places Journal at the Congress for the New Urbanism. “What is it like for a human to walk around in a public space, and what kind of buildings do you want around you that would then define that space?”

Buffalo, like many U.S. cities, historically followed those conventional zoning codes from as early as the 1920s, which put heavy emphasis on making room for cars—hence the minimum parking requirements. “The automobile population really soared in the 1920s and early ‘30s, and curb parking was free. Very quickly all the on-street parking became very scarce, so you can see that any picture of an old city taken in the 1930s shows all the sidewalks completely lined with cars,” says Donald Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA and the author of the 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking. “Planners thought the solution would be to require new buildings to have ‘enough’ to satisfy the demand. It seemed like quite a miracle; it didn’t cost the city anything and it hid the cost of parking.”

A map from the New Millennium Group of parking in downtown Buffalo. (The.urbanophile/Flickr)

Once considered one of the largest metropolises in the U.S., with some 573,000 residents at its peak in the 1950s, Buffalo’s population headed toward a dramatic downward spiral (the latest count by the Census Bureau puts the current population at a little under 259,000.)  By the 1950s, when Buffalo implemented zoning codes that included minimum parking requirements, the city was undergoing major urban revitalization efforts that emphasized easy car access for suburbanites.

“It was fascinating to look at maps that they showed how much of downtown Buffalo was devoted to parking,” says Shoup, who was a visiting professor at the University of Buffalo in 2010. “People have done this for a number of cities, coloring in all the parking lots red and it turns out most of [downtown] Buffalo was red.”

But as the years passed, the codes would prove to hurt more than it helped. Following a suburban model of development, the city allowed stores to be built on huge lots without pedestrian access, rather of promoting walkable neighborhoods. And sidewalk dining at neighborhood restaurants, for example, was technically illegal without a zoning variance. And with the parking requirement, Shoup argues, everyone—including those who can’t afford a car—end up paying for parking.

It also didn’t help that parking requirements many cities across the U.S. were rarely grounded in factual research, says Steuteville. In fact, Shoup’s book notes they amounted to little more than a “collective hunch” of how many spots a building needs, and often these numbers are exaggerated. Local officials often copied what other cities were doing without understanding the reasoning first.

Then there was the issue of historical preservation. “The parking requirement prevented the preservation of some wonderful buildings that were just left to decay and even torn down,” Shoup says. “In more neighborhood commercial areas, if anybody wanted to convert an old building into a restaurant, which has a high parking requirement, the only way they could do it would be by tearing down one of the buildings on either side to provide the parking.”

While Buffalo may be the first to implement a citywide removal, both Shoup and Steuteville say the move is only part of a larger, national movement that’s already ongoing. It would be hard-pressed to find an urban planner who would argue that parking hasn’t done harm to a city, according to Shoup. A 2015 crowdsourced map by the nonprofit Strong Towns shows that dozens of cities—mostly small ones—across the U.S. have either removed parking requirements in certain areas (green pins), lowered them for certain building uses (blue pins), or are currently discussing the move (orange pins).

When asked about the potential of removing parking minimums, Shoup points to a particular case in 1999 Los Angeles. The financial district of L.A. is filled with 19th century offices that, at the time, were mostly vacant above the ground floor. They couldn’t be restored as housing because the rule then was that each unit needed at least two parking spaces. “A planner in 1999 came up with the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance saying that any historical buildings can be converted into housing without requiring any new parking. People thought this would be a disaster,” he says. “But the ordinance was passed, and within eight years, 57 historical office buildings were fully restored into housing and they created a terrific buzz downtown.”

Yet despite the success of the L.A.’s Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, some critics say it didn’t benefit the poor. Instead, they argue, it helped spur gentrification and homelessness in the city’s downtown area, turning it into what Los Angeles Magazine editor Ed Leibowitz called a “hipster paradise.” Developers built artsy lofts to attract the wealthy while providing very little—if any—affordable housing units for low-income families.

Now critics of the Green Code worry the same could happen to Buffalo as the city’s push for urban revival increases rent prices. While form-based zoning promotes density and development, which are economical for cities like Buffalo, “it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the types of development taking place are going to allow for either the retention or increase in affordable units,” says Robert Silverman, a urban planning professor who studies inequality in inner-city housing markets at the University of Buffalo.

He predicts that Buffalo may end up following the path of Miami and Denver—the only two other cities to adopt form-based code, and are facing affordable housing crises. “Even though Buffalo is losing population, its Green Code really focuses on dense development in a much smaller footprint, and having less density in older neighborhood outside of it,” Silverman says. “So it essentially creates more demand in a smaller area for development to take place, which has an upward pressure on the cost of commercial and retail property and also on housing.”

The intention for fair housing may be there, but until it’s spelled out in Buffalo’s code, it hinges on political support.

Prior to one of the last public meetings to pass the new ordinance in December (the city’s had some 230), residents held a rally urging the council to write inclusionary zoning into the code. That would require that a percentage of units in new market-rate residential developments be affordable for low- and moderate-income residents. In the end, though, the Green Code passed without such a provision. Although, the city has said that it’s in the midst of conducting a roughly year-long affordable housing study that started in May, and plans to pass an ordinance some time this year.

The council also assures that the Green Code allows for more public input for new development, though Silverman warns that could also give NIMBY and historic preservation activists more opportunities to publicly resist proposals to, say, increase building heights in historic areas—to the detriment of fair housing advocates. Plus, the intention for fair housing may be there, but until it’s spelled out in Buffalo’s code, it hinges on political support. “If a new mayor came into the power who is less amenable to those types of policy,” Silverman says, “without the mandate written into the code, all those kind of goals can go away very quickly.”

Overall, Silverman agrees with Shoup and Steuteville that the Green Code, with its removal of minimum parking requirements, is a step in the right direction. Steuteville even thinks Buffalo’s move, if successful, can embolden other cities to push for form-based codes. “As the city turns itself around with the help of this code,” he says, “it could be a model for cities from Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit to Milwaukee, Erie, or Rochester—all these cities that have been declining.”

Yet, Silverman says, “there is still work to be done.”

Buffalo’s New Zoning Code Promotes Density, But Is It for Everyone?

Buffalo’s New Zoning Code Promotes Density, But Is It for Everyone?

The Buffalo skyline is seen beyond construction work in October 2015. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

Re-Post From Next City

 

Buffalo, New York’s new citywide, form-based zoning code has every buzzword an urbanist could hope for: Signed into law by Mayor Byron Brown on Tuesday, the Green Code promotes walkability, density, mixed-use development and complete streets redesigns. It preserves the character of the city’s historic neighborhoods, while calling for diversity and affordability. It even eliminates mandatory parking minimums, making Buffalo the first major city in the U.S. to do so. It’s the city’s first comprehensive zoning update since 1953.

“Every word that an urbanist would want to see in this plan is there except equity,” says Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the University of Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies. A shrinking city, Buffalo has lost 55 percent of its population over the past 85 years and has continued to see more modest population declines over the past decade. As a result, says Taylor, “there’s a tremendous amount of unevenness in the development of the central city itself.”

Taylor thinks the Green Code, in focusing on promoting development while preserving historic character, does little to address that unevenness. Brendan Mehaffy, executive director of Buffalo’s Office of Strategic Planning, says while the word “equity” itself might be missing from the plan, the Green Code nonetheless foregrounds the needs of low-income residents and neighborhoods by allowing for more public input in public projects, promoting active transportation and more. The Green Code actually represents an overhaul of many of the city’s policies and standards, from a land use plan to a unified development ordinance to a simplification of the city’s many urban renewal programs into a single one that will facilitate selling and rehabbing vacant and abandoned properties. Next up is a housing opportunity strategy that will modify how the city finances affordable housing and may include a provision on inclusionary zoning.

Part of what makes the Green Code stand out is the use of a form-based code. In contrast with traditional zoning regulation, form-based codes aim to create more harmonious relationships between different parts of the urban fabric. Instead of trying to separate uses like residential and light industrial, form-based codes focus on regulating the look, feel and function of urban space as a whole — requiring commercial spaces to have ground-level windows, setting standards for building heights and setbacks, etc. — policies that also promote more human-scale, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Buffalo is only the third city, after Miami and Denver, to adopt a citywide form-based code. Many cities apply them exclusively to downtown areas or other mixed-use districts.

Mehaffy says the new code was necessitated in part by a desire to drive growth to areas that can support it and in part by residents’ discomfort with new construction that didn’t fit the city’s historic character. According to Mehaffy, developers of new buildings often found themselves saying, “We did comply with the rules under the old zoning code but created a product that the neighborhood could not embrace and did not support, and that created neighborhood conflict.”

So the city held over 242 public meetings over six years to develop the Green Code. Mehaffy says in that process “Buffalo, only better” became a rallying cry for some of the 6,000 residents who attended meetings. When people said they loved their neighborhoods, the city responded by trying to measure what they loved and preserve it in the code.

The elimination of parking minimums, of course, elicited the most feverish response in urbanist circles this week. The Green Code does away with minimum requirements for parking spots in new projects, replacing the formulaic approach with a transportation demand management process that also takes into account whether a project is situated on transit lines, bike paths and other modes of transportation.

“There was massive support for the elimination of parking minimums. The conversation really focused around doing it responsibly,” says Mehaffy. That meant ensuring developers don’t just push the responsibility to build more parking onto the city and taxpayers. For future projects, the planning board will take into account the parking situation before determining whether developers need to build spots and how many.

Mary Madden, a board member of the Form-Based Codes Institute and a principle at D.C.- and Pennsylvania-based urban design firm Ferrell Madden, says she often encourages her client cities to do away with or reduce parking minimums, but most don’t embrace the concept as easily as Buffalo has. The unified development ordinance also gets into the nitty-gritty of building design for different neighborhood types. Madden says form-based codes often promote more sustainable design because they encourage small-lot buildings that can be adapted for different uses in the future, rather than highly specialized construction like big-box stores. The Green Code also streamlines development standards in a bid to attract more investment to areas already primed with infrastructure, strives to identify a walkable corridor in every neighborhood, creates clearer language around solar panels, and legalizes urban farming, which was previously not allowed.

“It really was updating how we saw ourselves as a city,” says Mehaffy. “We are updating to reflect current values.”

But Taylor worries that the Green Code skirts elements of the city’s past, and in particular the race- and class-related patterns of investment that have shaped what’s there now. Within the different types of neighborhoods identified by the code, the new zoning regulations are uniform, but investment has not historically been even across wealthier and lower-income neighborhoods, says Taylor. “The Green Code is a good code, it’s a good tool. It has all of the right elements that are involved in it,” he says. “The problem with the code is not with the code. The problem is with the strategies that have been connected to the code, and it will recreate the unjust city.”

As Madden cautions, “if you have no market […] a form-based code is not going to give you a market.”

Taylor characterizes the development concerns highlighted by Mehaffy above as worries of what he calls the “latte class,” the largely white, upwardly mobile urbanites living in the city’s flourishing neighborhoods being targeted for development. It’s a different story in the eastern parts of the city, where Buffalo’s black residents are concentrated and vacant lots and abandoned buildings still reign. (Part of the Green Code creates a new system for addressing the city’s surplus of vacant and abandoned property.) Taylor believes the Green Code is a step in the right direction, that with some tweaking it can help usher in a more just city, but that it’s built on the same assumptions and set of values that have contributed to the unequal development that exists today.

“On the surface the Green Code celebrates [inclusivity and affordability], but at the same time it has a form of development operating within the context of a commodity-based housing and commercial development strategy that creates exclusiveness,” he says. “And it creates a kind of latte cultural imperialism that freezes out other forms of culture.”

Mehaffy says inclusivity is crucial to the Green Code, and that the housing opportunity strategy to come will more explicitly tackle the financial aspects of affordable housing — determining whether inclusionary zoning is the best tool for Buffalo, and finding ways to use state and local funds to create sustainable, inclusive, mixed-income neighborhoods.

Reservations and all, Taylor says, “There’s a growing mass of us that know how to use [the Green Code] to build a truly vibrant and prosperous and just city and that’s our agenda for the 21st century and the upcoming year. I think that’s a positive, positive step, because 10 years ago we didn’t have that knowledge, that information and that insight, but today we do.”

 

UB’s Taylor says Cubans inside island nation are likely mourning Castro’s death

Re-post from Wbfo News

Listen.

Cuban exiles now living in Miami are cheering news of the death of Fidel Castro at the age of 90. But a University at Buffalo professor who spent significant time in Cuba doing research says there is likely a much different reaction to Castro’s death inside Cuba.

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor released a book in 2009 that explored Cuban neighborhoods. Taylor says Castro was held in high regard.

Taylor said Castro allowed neighborhoods to shape everyday life and culture, despite scarce resources, and that helped sustain his power at a time when other communist regimes collapsed.

His book, “Inside El Barrio: A Bottom-Up View of Neighborhood Life in Castro’s Cuba” (Kumarian Press, 2009), charted the legacy of the last 15 years of Fidel Castro’s rule through the lens of Cuban household life.

WBFO’s Mark Scott reached Taylor Saturday to learn more about his research, Castro’s legacy and the future of Cuba.

Looking forward, looking back

Re-Post From UB The School of Architecture and Planning – Latest News

 

There could be no better setting than the bright, day-lit spaces of the new Hayes Hall – its walls covered with the latest work of our faculty and students – for graduates across five decades, friends in the community and professions, and current faculty, staff and students to come together in celebration of the work we do.

A series of events lined the program in honor of the legacy of the ‘School of Architecture and Environmental Design,’ formed our of the tumult of the late 1960s to approach design through systems thinking and in relationship to broad societal dynamics.

Throughout the two-day event, as much as we mingled and reminisced, we projected on questions of persistent relevance to education and practice in architecture and planning. With the diverse gathering of our school community a telling indicator of this potential, we considered what’s possible if we work together – across academia and practice and with new energy and focus – to bring our professions to bear on the pressing problems of our time, from climate change and social justice to the problems of our prevailing metropolitan structure.

Importantly, this was only the start of a conversation. Over the next three years, we will mark a series of three 50th anniversaries: the founding of our school by the State University of New York (1967), the hiring of the school’s first dean and faculty (1968), and the convening of its first class of students (1969). Such milestones in the history of our school are certainly causes for celebration and recollection.

More than anything, however, we’ll be looking forward with you, our colleagues, former students, partners in the community and professions, to mobilize a new agenda for the School of Architecture and Planning. What are the problems we face as a region, nation and planet in which architecture, planning and allied professions have an important role to play? How can new alignments across the school and its public audiences – from alumni and practitioners to community stakeholders – drive change around these issues? What questions – and which constituents and partners – are missing from this conversation?

The Subtle Phrases Hillary Clinton Uses to Sway Black Voters

Re-post from The New York Times


Hillary Clinton during the first presidential debate at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, N.Y., on Monday. Damon Winter/The New York Times

When political candidates speak, they are often addressing several audiences at once, and their words can have different meanings for each. When Hillary Clinton talked about race during her debate Monday night against Donald J. Trump, she delivered a subtle and powerful message to black voters, speaking to them not only in the substance of what she said, but in her carefully chosen language.

Mrs. Clinton has been viewed with skepticism by some black activists since the 1990s, when she called for harsh penalties for teenage gang members, whom she termed “super-predators.” But throughout the 90-minute forum Monday night, she showed her determination to persuade large numbers of black voters to support her in November by adopting the lexicon that has been embraced by a new generation of young black activists and liberal whites.

Mrs. Clinton’s expressions set off a range of reactions, from relief to delight, to accusations of cynical political maneuvering. But there was near universal agreement that her use of the language of the racial justice movement signaled a significant moment for both the candidate and the cause. Here is a look at what Mrs. Clinton said and what it meant to certain viewers.

‘Systemic Racism’

“We’ve got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.”

A central demand of Black Lives Matter activists has been the recognition of the role that systems — such as the funding of schools through property taxes — play in fostering racial inequality.

Mrs. Clinton’s use of the term systemic racism in response to a question on how to heal the country’s racial divide immediately drew praise across social media.

“Did Hillary just use the words #SystemicRacism,” Rachel Gilchrist, a black Harvard student, posted on Twitter. “She knows. Oh my God, she knows. Maybe there is hope for this country.”

“Presidential candidate that says the words #systemicracism,” Vangie Castro, a program manager at the Diversity Council in Minnesota, said on Twitter. “She’s listening.”

But not everyone was convinced that the simple use of the phrase represented a sufficient shift in Mrs. Clinton’s mind-set.

“She used the phrase, but I don’t believe she understood it,” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo. He added that Mrs. Clinton had not offered a “comprehensive urban strategy,” nor had she discussed “a continuation of Obama’s urban strategies.”

‘Implicit Bias’

“I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other. And therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way?”

In recent years, the national conversation about race has shifted from the need to combat deliberate discrimination toward a focus on the role that unconscious bias plays in everyday life, including the split-second decisions that police officers make to shoot black people who later are proved to have posed no threat. Mrs. Clinton’s comments about broadening the conversation beyond the police earned a flurry of praise from activists and academics.

“As soon as she said implicit bias is a problem for everybody, not just police, I cheered to myself,” said Rinku Sen, executive director of Race Forward, who had spent that morning training the staff of a foundation in Boston on the subject.

“Congrats to the racial justice movement,” she posted during the debate. “We got implicit bias onto the presidential agenda!! Go, us!”

Kate A. Ratliff, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, who is also executive director of Project Implicit, a nonprofit organization of scientific researchers who have developed a test to measure implicit bias, said she was “happy and a little bit surprised” to hear Mrs. Clinton use the term.

“Most people want to be egalitarian, but they hold these below-the-surface biases that they are not even aware of,” said Ms. Ratliff, who says that millions of Americans take her organization’s bias test each year online. “A big chunk of Americans — and not only people of color — want our leadership to talk about race, and to talk about policing and the criminal justice system and the role that race plays in those institutions.”

‘Black Businesses’

“The vibrancy of the black church, the black businesses that employ so many people, the opportunities that so many families are working to provide for their kids. There’s a lot that we should be proud of and we should be supporting and lifting up.”

Two decades ago, efforts to rebuild impoverished inner cities focused on identifying their problems and deficits and then “solving” them by providing whatever was lacking. But that model has been criticized as creating dependency. Over the past 20 years, the focus has shifted to identifying a community’s strengths and building upon them.

At a debate-watching party at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the packed room erupted in applause when Mrs. Clinton pushed back against Mr. Trump’s dismal portrayal of inner cities and mentioned the black-owned businesses that employ and serve black communities.

“People cheered Hillary Clinton as she talked about black communities being hubs of vibrancy. That got a great reaction,” said Derek Dingle, the editor of Black Enterprise magazine, who served as a panelist of a pre-debate discussion at the Apollo. But Mr. Dingle wanted to hear more about how Mrs. Clinton intended to help extend credit and federal contracts to black businesses in struggling cities.

“The greatest challenges facing black-owned businesses is that 96 percent of the roughly two million black-owned businesses are sole proprietorships,” he said. “They are not of the size and scale that could have a greater impact on employment and community development.”

‘Racist’

“He has really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen. … He has a long record of engaging in racist behavior.”

Today, activists, including many in the millennial generation, speak passionately about the importance of calling out racism forcefully and straightforwardly, wherever they see it. They have been so vocal, in fact, that their condemnation of a variety of things — from memos about Halloween costumes to classic books — has generated pushback on college campuses across the country. But Mrs. Clinton’s direct accusation of Mr. Trump still surprised some people who did not expect to hear that kind of language during a presidential debate.

“People often dance around calling something racist,” said Toby Crittenden, executive director of Washington Bus, a civic engagement organization in Seattle. “They just don’t say it, because it’s such a loaded term, especially in politics.”

Mr. Crittenden, who watched the debate from a crowded bar, added: “As soon as it became clear that she was not going to be talking about just ‘Are you right or wrong about birtherism?’ but getting at the underlying reality of what birtherism was about, you could feel the energy in the room shift.”

“Not sure how it is elsewhere, but the only moment when this bar went dead silent with focus was when Clinton opened her statement on racism,” he wrote on Twitter during the debate.

Jason Johnson, political editor at The Root and professor of political science at the School of Global Journalism at Morgan State University in Baltimore, said Mrs. Clinton’s language showed how much she had evolved as a candidate, in reaction to the times.

“What she demonstrated was an incredible dexterity and adroitness that she has learned in the last year when it comes to discussing racial issues,” he said.

“This is not the Hillary Clinton of the 1990s,” he said.

“This is the Hillary Clinton who, like Bernie Sanders” and several other candidates, he added, “got smacked upside the head by the Black Lives Matter movement and realized that you can’t speak to these issues the way you used to.”

JHU Forum on Race in America

Robin Kelley, Dayvon Love, and Salamishah Tillet

Re-Post From John Hopkins University – Hub

“The Next 50 Years: Black Power’s Afterlife and the Struggle for Social Justice”

Sept. 27, 2016
7 p.m.
Shriver Hall

This panel discussion, moderated by Nathan Connolly, associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins, will explore the importance of black knowledge and experience in securing racial and economic justice in American politics and institutions from the 1970s until today. More information

Ticket information

This event is open to the public, but registration is required. Visit the online registration page for more information.

Live stream broadcast

About the JHU Forums on Race in America

In the spring of 2015, turmoil in cities across the country and here in Baltimore sparked important conversations on our campuses about racial inequality and deep divisions that exist in our society. The products of institutionalized racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, separate and unequal schools, and an ever-growing wealth gap between black and white Americans cause pain and frustration for many of our faculty, staff, and students, and the wider Baltimore community. Discordant views about race in our nation fuel passionate debates in our classrooms, department meetings, and public spaces.

In keeping with our commitment to diversity, community service, inclusion, and academic freedom, the Johns Hopkins University presents the JHU Forums on Race in America.

Discussion targets segregation as the source of Buffalo poverty

Re-post from Wbfo News

 

A crowded audience in the Downtown Library last night heard about how segregation continues to restrict spreading economic prosperity to all parts of Buffalo. The town hall meeting served the opening of the 2016  Buffalo Humanities Festival

A large crowd attended Thursday night’s town hall discussion on segregation in the city of Buffalo. The Central Library served as the kickoff to the 2016 Buffalo Humanities Festival. (Credit Mike Desmond/WBFO News)

Some of the discussion focused on how zoning laws and businesses coincide to keep poor people and prosperous people in different neighborhoods. The audience was told that means poor people can’t use their housing to help create wealth for themselves and their children, as other groups can.

“Show me a place where the urban land market is functioning as it functions and I will show you a place that’s segregated,” said Henry Louis Taylor, UB professor of urban and regional planning.

“They’ll either be doing it by race. They will be doing it by class. But it will segregate because just like a hungry dog eats, the land market flips value from low to high,” said Taylor, who believes poor people have to combine and work collaboratively to turn things around. He is calling for a land bank to take over available property, giving control to residents.

While many applauded several speakers, angry tones occasionally emerged.

“I’m tired of sitting on panels, having to discuss the benefits of real estate developers that want to come in and do what they want to do and not bring diversity for their labor force and not do that urgently and not do well what’s right for that community,” said James Giles, president and CEO of Back to Basics Outreach Ministries.

Audience members agreed that a core problem remains the poor performance of Buffalo city schools. Others sympathized with Fruit Belt residents whose quality of life is fast becoming a casualty to the growth of the adjacent Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

Though much of the discussion outlined a troubling reality, Professor Taylor offered a hopeful challenge.

“The battle of the 21st Century will be the battle to develop and regenerate our underdeveloped neighborhoods. So, we have to cast away our illusions and realize that it will take a struggle, a fight, to create the kind of just society that we want.”

Panel 1: Contributions of People of Color to Cities and Planning

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Despite the often-negative images, rhetoric and scholarship that often characterize urban communities of color as chaotic or dangerous, these communities are in fact reflections of histories of survival and adaptation that benefited not only the people within them but also cities and metropolitan areas at large. North American cities and the urban life that fuels them would be far different without the presence of such communities, which have influenced music, food, sports, political leadership, and urban scholarship. Communities of color and their struggles for equality have profoundly affected the field of urban planning and its scholars, particularly in encouraging movement toward social equity and justice, and this has been true since the early twentieth century but most certainly since the 1960s.

Panelists: William Goldsmith, Sigmund Shipp, Conan Smith, and Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.
Moderator: June Manning Thomas

Campers heading into neighborhoods and discussing development

Re-Post From WIVB

 

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BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – Kids from around Buffalo are at a University at Buffalo summer camp where they’re learning about the problems different neighborhoods continue facing.

“We’re learning about neighborhood development,” said Ayana Thomson, a 12-year-old camper. “Like how to improve a neighbor and make it more appealing to everyone else.”

The neighborhoods they’ve selected to look at are on the East Side near Genessee Street, an area not too far from where Thompson lives.

“When I look at my neighborhood, I realize it could be much worse like the other neighborhoods,” said Thompson. “They don’t have a lot of resources or many things to do.”

The campers like the different hands-on activities they do. They’re creating mock-murals and mosaics as well as learning to use photoshop, creating before and after photos showing how they’d like to spruce up streets.

“When I see the other neighborhoods, I see the potential that their neighborhood has,” said Nadia Loggans, another camper.

UB’s Urban Planning Department hosts the camp where teachers and leaders say it is about more than the kids seeing the problems happening around them but also understand why they’re happening.

“They see the issues, they walk by them every day,” says Camden Miller, one of the camp’s teachers. “Getting them to be aware of them is easy. It’s getting them to understand why they’re happening is tougher. Having them go out into the neighborhood and explain what they see and why they feel it is occurring and apply it really gives them some perspective.”

The kids say they’re learning they can change their city and make a difference.

“It takes everybody to improve the neighborhood.”