Carolina Planning Journal

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Tag: Equity (Page 1 of 3)

In Defense of Lake Merritt’s Paid Parking Plan

October 10, 2023 /

By Ryan Ford

It is time to realize our parks are not free and Oakland residents already pay for them in one form or another. Lake Merritt is no exception. In 2020, the city spent $25,000 week of taxpayer money to maintain Lake Merritt (Devries 2021). It turns out littering has a cost and residents are already picking up the tab. Understandably, there was strong public resistance to installing paid parking along the eastern side of Lake Merritt. No one likes paying for what used to be free. Even though 70% of respondents disapproved of the policy, it is the best compromise for Oakland.

With the current cost of maintaining Lake Merritt at over $1 million annually, the potential value of existing free parking spaces along the lake is too high an opportunity cost. Under the new policy, parking prices will match demand. Weekends will be more expensive to park than weekdays. In the first year, projected revenue from the meters will provide nearly $1.5 million. Paying for parking is an apparent cost for drivers, but the cost of free parking is more nuanced and important to spell out.

Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, has been railing against the high cost of free parking for decades. Essentially, Shoup points out, cities are arbitrarily giving away valuable real estate in the form of parking with traffic and congestion as a return on investment (Steiner 2013). Since we live in a car-dominated society, Oakland residents see free parking as a mobility right rather than wasted opportunity. Opposition to paid parking is understandable, but the revenue is necessary to use the already scarce parking in a more effective manner.

Intersection adjacent to Lake Merritt, Source: Creative Commons

The Lake Merritt Parking Management plan will change transportation behavior through the framework of Travel Demand Management (TDM). TDM is a set of policies designed to expand the functionality of existing transportation infrastructure rather than relying on increasing the supply of infrastructure to meet changing needs of the community. Multiple commercial centers surrounding Lake Merritt draw large amounts of travel, so it is incredibly ineffective to have a single car carrying a single person occupy a spot for hours on end. For residents wary of the new parking policy, they only need look across the bay at San Francisco for a success story.

In 2017, San Francisco used federal funding to pilot SFpark. The program proved the efficacy of the same variable demand-based parking Oakland recently implemented. In some cases, the cost of parking decreased, and more importantly, parking availability increased (SFMTA). San Francisco is not known for its affordability, so the results are encouraging.

I recommend that Oakland take additional measures for protection against gentrification. For low-income residents, there should be a permitting process to guarantee a discounted parking cost. Additionally, residents with existing parking permits local to Lake Merritt should receive free-parking one weekend per month during the first year of the policy.

Despite the practicality of the policy, not everyone is happy with the results. A comment from a months-long community engagement campaign reads: “To put meters around the lakeshore side of the lake would be a direct act against working class people like myself who would be unable to continue to enjoy our beautiful lake if it meant paying every time that I wanted to walk or hang out there.” (Attachment B: Lake Merritt Parking Management Plan May 17, 2022) This resident has a right to be concerned. A prohibitively high cost for parking limits access to the lake and parking priced too low also limits access by not encouraging enough turnover. Market-based pricing is critical to reach enough turnover so one or two spots are open for each block.

Parking alongside Lake Merritt, Source: Creative Commons

So, it is important to reiterate the new parking policy will increase access to Lake Merritt in the long-term rather than be a barrier. It is also worth noting that there is already an extensive network of paid parking surrounding the lake. Driving is not the only option. Lake Merritt is transit-rich with bus and train stops connecting the park to surrounding neighborhoods. And even walking is an option.  

I do think residents are right to hold Oakland accountable. There city needs to be transparent about how it spends revenue from the new parking meters. Oakland should create an easily accessible digital dashboard to show how each dollar is spent. The dashboard would also show the cost of maintenance for Lake Merritt and hopefully dissuade residents from littering. Making spending data public will create a sense of trust in the community. Even though this parking policy is the best compromise for Oakland, there is an inherent cost of political good will for moving ahead with a publicly unpopular policy.  

At the end of the day, the maintenance costs of Lake Merritt alone justify the new parking policy. Though the benefits will be indirect, residents will also appreciate less time spent circling the block looking for a spot. Instead, they can pull up and enjoy Lake Merritt.

 Works Cited

Joe DeVries. Agenda Report: Lake Merritt Working Group. City of Oakland Memorandum. Mar 11, 2021. 

Oakland Department of Transportation. Attachment B: Lake Merritt Parking Management Plan May 17, 2022. p. 9.

Ruth L. Steiner (2013) A Review of “The High Cost of Free Parking, Updated Edition”, Journal of the American Planning Association, 79:2, 174-175, DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2013.772038

SFMTA. SFpark Pilot Project Evaluation Summary. Project Evaluation, June 2014, p. 11.

Ryan Ford is a Master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill. He is interested in the intersection of urban design and transportation, specifically around active mobility. Outside of classes, you can find Ryan playing tennis or catching a movie at Varsity Theater.

Edited by Kathryn Cunningham

Featured image courtesy of Creative Commons

How Raleigh Should Earn the “E” in their ETOD 

September 12, 2023 /

By Amy Grace Watkins

What is Transit-Oriented Development?

In urban planning, what does TOD stand for? It depends on who you ask! It could be Transit-Oriented Development, Design, or Displacement. In the 1990s, Peter Calthrope popularized the term as Transit-Oriented Development and the planning framework quickly spread across the world. The goal of TOD is to invest in transit centers to increase transit access, reduce the need for cars, and spur economic growth by bringing development to the area.

In Raleigh, the planning team has recently added to the mix of TOD definitions by adding an “E” to make ETOD or Equitable Transit-Oriented Development. Their policies and plans aim to combat the possible gentrification and displacement that has been associated with TOD projects in other cities (Chapple & Loukaitou-Sideris 2022). But based on Raleigh’s Equitable Transit-Oriented Guidebook, I argue that Raleigh has not yet earned the E of ETOD due to their weak policies around affordable housing and unclear public engagement efforts. 

To create TOD that is not just for the wealthy and well-connected, Raleigh put forth a “policy toolkit” in the ETOD Guidebook. The main policy with teeth in this guidebook is zoning for TOD Overlay Districts to build upon current Transit-Overlay Districts. Updated into the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) in October of 2021 by Raleigh’s City Council, TOD Districts are the “core zoning mechanism to achieve goals addressed in this plan” (City of Raleigh 2022). These districts will encourage development by offering bonuses for increased density, mixed-use, and affordable housing. This also means that money will quickly rush into these TOD Overlay Districts to capture these development opportunities. As they are, the policies may not be enough to combat the risk of gentrification and displacement in rapidly developing areas. 

In the book “Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Dividends?,” planning academics Karen Chapple and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris (2022) find that there is a strong correlation between gentrification and TODs in the Bay Area. The root cause of gentrification and displacement, however, is notoriously difficult to define because of the many factors involved from individual choice to state-level politics. In short, Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris find that upscaling and upzoning areas often results in the displacement of vulnerable communities, which can be accelerated by transit system construction (2022, 8). In order to protect vulnerable communities, Chapple and Loukaitou suggest that density bonuses for affordable housing should be required in TODs, and most importantly, vulnerable communities should be consulted through public engagement about the location of TODs (2022, 272). By doing so, the authors believe that done correctly, TODs can be an answer to the increasing housing crisis in California. A crisis that the Triangle region also knows well.  

Raleigh’s ETOD

The good news is that Raleigh’s Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (ETOD) does take density bonuses seriously and aims policies at building more affordable units in the TOD Overlay Districts. Density bonuses encourage developers to include affordable housing by allowing them to build larger buildings. The affordable units, however, have a short lifespan. The plan states, “Within the program, affordability terms would be set at 50% AMI for 30 years based on the City of Raleigh’s desire to provide long-term affordable housing options in the corridors” (City of Raleigh 2020, 89).

In this context, AMI stands for Area Median Income, which describes the midpoint of the income distribution in a given area. In a rapidly growing area like Raleigh, the 30-year time span is far from “long-term affordability” and seems to guarantee unaffordability in 30 years or delayed displacement at best. In order to make these TOD Overlay Districts a success for all residents regardless of income, the ETOD program needs a more robust plan for affordable housing in these areas that guarantees opportunities for low- and middle-income residents for years to come. At a minimum, ETOD should increase the terms to 50 years in order to allow for more housing to be built and for low-income individuals and families to stay in their community.

According to HUD, the typical household stays in assisted housing six years, four years for families with children, and nine years for elderly residents (McClure 2017). This means that Raleigh has the potential to double the amount of low-income residents housed by increasing the term by 20 years. With the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, a federal affordable housing program established under 26 U.S.C. §42, affordable units are required for 30 years at a minimum (2022). In order to show Raleigh’s commitment to sustainable affordability downtown, the policy around TOD Overlay Districts should be updated to go beyond the federal minimum to offer 50 years of affordability.  

Public Engagement Needs

Beyond policies for affordability, the City of Raleigh needs to prioritize extensive and equitable public engagement. The plan cites public engagement as a part of the process but fails to provide numbers or detailed descriptions about the type of engagement events, the number of people engaged, or the demographics of these events around the ETOD program. As Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris mentioned in their work, this is a very important aspect of equitable transit planning.

The lack of public engagement makes it appear that this plan is following a similar path to the failed light-rail project just a few years before. In fact, the TOD Overlay Districts were originally created for the light rail project (City of Raleigh 2022). One of the main marks against the light-rail project in the Triangle is that it would have served middle- and high-income riders and was more focused on attracting new ridership rather than improving service for current riders. If the City of Raleigh does not prioritize the residents currently living in these areas and using the existing bus system, the TOD Overlay Districts may hurt the very people Raleigh is trying to assist in adding the ‘E’ to TOD. In order to promote equitable public engagement, Raleigh should engage the public in each part of the process from the location of these districts to the design.

In a study on TOD in the Netherlands, Pojani and Stead emphasize the importance of seeing TOD as Transit-Oriented Design, which focuses more on the design around the node or transit center (Pojani & Stead 2015). Allowing the public to participate in the design stage of planning will allow current residents to influence the placemaking of these rapidly growing and changing areas. By engaging current residents and riders in early planning stages and designing charettes further along in the process, the City of Raleigh will better engage the public they hope to help by encouraging equitable development.  

Earning the E in ETOD

Equitable Transit Oriented Development is an exciting opportunity for the City of Raleigh, but it is also important to make sure it is done well. In order to earn the E in ETOD, the City of Raleigh needs to reconsider the parameters of its TOD Overlay Districts to achieve the equitable outcome they desire from the “twist” on Transit-Oriented Development. By offering a 50-year term instead of 30 years for affordable units and engaging the public throughout the transit planning process, the City of Raleigh could better achieve these equitable outcomes. 

Works Cited 

Chapple, K., & Loukaitou-Sideris, A. (2019). Transit-oriented displacement or community dividends? : Understanding the effects of smarter growth on communities. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11300.001.0001 

City of Raleigh. (July 2020). “The Equitable Transit-Oriented Development Guidebook.” https://cityofraleigh0drupal.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/drupal-prod/COR22/EDATGuidebook.pdf 

City of Raleigh. (December 2022). “What is a Transit-Overlay District?” https://raleighnc.gov/planning/what-transit-overlay-district 

McClure, K. (2017). Length of stay in assisted housing. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research. 

Pojani, D., & Stead, D. (2015). Transit-oriented design in the Netherlands. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 35(2), 131-144. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X15573263 

26 U.S. Code § 42. (2022). Low-income housing credit. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2021-title26/USCODE-2021-title26-subtitleA-chap1-subchapA-partIV-subpartD-sec42 

About the Author:  Amy Grace is a second-year master’s student in the City and Regional Planning program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH, she specializes in transportation and studies how multimodal solutions can transform transportation networks. On the weekend, you will likely find her at her local Home Goods, walking on the Tobacco Trail with her dog, Josie, or trying a new restaurant in the Triangle with her husband, Graham.

Edited by Kimmy Hansen

Featured image courtesy of City of Raleigh, NC

What prevents older LGBTQ+ adults from aging in place? An interview with Marisa Turesky, Urban Planning Ph.D. Candidate  

February 21, 2023 /

By Candela Cerpa

The importance of home and community can shift with stages in life and major events, as the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted for many of us. Aging can be one of those stages, as people’s needs and wants change. In 2021, the AARP’s Home and Community Preferences Survey showed that 77% of adults aged 50 and older want to “remain in their homes for the long term.” This desire to “age in place” has been consistent for more than a decade.

To learn more about this body of research, we spoke with Marisa Turesky, a Ph.D. candidate in USC Price School’s Urban Planning and Development program. Her dissertation Locating Lesbian Lives shares the process of aging back into the closet through 29 oral histories. Turesky recently won the ACSP’s award for “Best Student Work on Diversity, Social Justice, and the Role of Women in Planning” [read the paper here]. You can connect with Marisa Turesky on LinkedIn, Twitter, or at turesky@usc.edu.

Community-based and led research and interviews

As a new LA resident, Turesky wanted to learn about the local lesbian community. At the Mazer Lesbian Archives, she discovered stories and personal histories of lesbians having to go back into the closet as they aged. Ever since “I have been trying to understand why this ‘traumatic phenomenon’ was happening.” This became “how might housing, communities, and neighborhoods contribute to [older lesbian adults’] comfort and safety?” As the Archives “was mostly run by older lesbian volunteers who shared the community history,” the space became a community space.

Turesky interviewed some of these older lesbian adults about “their attachments to places in the past, in the present, and into the future.” Given her focus on community engagement, she structured her interviews to let the participant set the agenda. “They would draft a list of the places that were important to them in the past and into the future, and then they would walk us through it,” she said. “Instead of me asking them ‘Is home important to you? Why?’ or ‘Is the park not important?’ or ‘Do you go to the bars?’ I followed their lead.” This approach helped Turesky avoid assuming “what the participants are ‘supposed’ to notice.” This enabled them to “share their priorities, even if they are not familiar with the terms” used in the academic planning literature.

Community spaces are crucial but endangered

Turesky focuses on the relationship between loneliness and aging in place. Parts of the literature see social isolation and loneliness as interchangeable experiences. Her research shows social isolation as “an objective measure of how many ties one has” and loneliness as “the subjective experience of whether [those ties] meet intimacy expectations.” This is reflective of the fact that when one lacks community, densely populated areas are not guaranteed to assuage the feeling.

Loneliness is something everyone experiences, but older adults are more prone to it because social spaces are not built for them. “Urban spaces generally are designed for younger people,” particularly when considering LGBTQ+ spaces. Gay bars, some of the only gay spaces, are disappearing across the U.S. Even when available, “older adults often feel socially excluded in spaces so dark, noisy, and often inaccessible to disabled people.” These problems multiply for marginalized identities like race, ethnicity, economic factors, and disability. It is clearer why older LGBTQ+ adults particularly value the safety and comfort found in their homes. Turesky’s research adds a gender-focused and queer lens to the literature on aging in urban spaces.


ACSP 2022 Presentation

Intersectional research

Turesky noticed the literature gap on “the different purposes and meanings” that people give to their housing. This variability “depends on [their] contexts and identities.” She relates intricacies to social isolation, loneliness, and fear of losing community connections. Turesky sees housing affordability and accessibility as a key way to support older lesbian adults and other LGBTQ+ adults to age in place. The goal should be that people can not only find houses but also stay in them. “By homes,” she expands, “I do not mean only the shelter; home is about community development, care, our related facets of urban life, and linking people with the services, resources, and places that they want to be in and stay at.” The planning field often assumes that people will just get up and move when spaces stop serving them without any harm. Turesky hopes hers and the broader research will highlight how some people want to age in that same broader home and community that they had when they were younger.

“By homes,” she expands, “I do not mean only the shelter; home is about community development, care, our related facets of urban life, and linking people with the services, resources, and places that they want to be in and stay at.”

For LGBTQ+ folks, it can be harder to build trusting relationships given the disproportionate rates of violence they face. “It has been really hard [for some participants] to imagine moving” from developing relationships with neighbors and friends, with people you can rely on to look out for you, “to paying someone to [care for you].”

An exciting example local to the Triangle

Turesky closed our interview with a high note for housing for older LGBTQ+ adults. She noted some upcoming research on separate queer housing spaces, and the Triangle area is home to one such place. Village Hearth Cohousing, found in North Durham, is an LGBT-focused community for people over the age of 55. “For some participants, co-housing comes up every time her group of older lesbian friends gets together.” Co-housing provides a community space and affordable, inclusive, and safe housing options. Safety in housing is often front of mind for LGBTQ+ people, who face unequal rates of wealth inequality and violence. “When they were younger, they wanted their own space,” Turesky reflects, “but now that they are older, they are more afraid of being alone, running out of affordable care in the coming years, especially if they do not have a partner to help support them.” These spaces, while not exclusive to LGBTQ+ adults, center inclusive needs. This allows them to age together without diminishing this important part of their identity, particularly if they are in relationships where they want to express affection freely. “Some residents have expressed feeling safe enough to hold their partner’s hand or give them a kiss hello and goodbye in these quasi-public spaces!” Turesky shares.

Researchers and activists like Turesky mark a brighter future for planning for older LGBTQ+ people. “Urban planners should think about ways to mitigate barriers to these creative approaches and alternatives to market-rate housing,” Turesky concludes. To improve conditions, we must recognize that senior housing spaces are “often entrenched in anti-Black racism, homophobia, and misogyny.” Planners should continue to build and support spaces for all ages, abilities, and sexualities by exploring creative housing options, accessible community building, and beyond.

Candela is a first-year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is interested in fair disaster planning, particularly around floods. Born and raised in Uruguay, she received her B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from the University of Maryland, College Park. Outside of work and school, she enjoys cooking, listening to audiobooks, and organizing around social issues.

Edited by Jo Kwon

Featured Image: Elderly Woman. Photo Credit: Flickr.

Wrestling with Equity: Dr. Jamaal Green Returns to DCRP

February 7, 2023 /

By Lance Gloss, Editor-in-Chief

Many research projects in urban planning address status quo conditions in government. Jamaal Green, Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, breathes new life into this format by focusing on the critical questions of who wins, and who loses, when governments choose business-as-usual.

Dr. Green returned to his alma mater of Carolina Planning to deliver a well-attended address, sponsored by CPJ and Angles, DCRP DEI, and DCRP’s Planning in Practice Speaker Series. He engaged the crowd with a tale of two projects he took on while working at the State of Oregon’s Office of Reporting, Research, Analytics and Implementation (ORRAI) in the Department of Human Services (DHS). A vibrant discussion ensued.

DHS’ Family Reunification Decision Support Tool

The first case dealt with a forward-thinking effort to revise DHS’ Family Reunification Decision Support Tool. DHS staff use this tool to make life-altering decisions about whether children enter state-supervised care or return to their families. Dr. Green and his colleagues recognized that the algorithm behind the Decision Support Tool was more likely to misclassify risk for Black and indigenous kids than for their white counterparts.

To address this disparity, ORRAI developed a “fairness correction score” to manage racial bias. This novel approach used a standardized method for error rate balancing. This adjusted the algorithmic result to ensure that misclassification risk was equal across racial groups, thereby eliminating the structural disparity and changing the lives of many children. The adjustment was recently phased out due to concerns over newer, similar adjustments in California and Pennsylvania that received negative attention. However, Dr. Green cites innovation as a serious step toward fairer governance.

Cannabis Dispensaries in Oregon and Washington

In the second case, Dr. Green shared findings on the spatial distribution of legal and gray market cannabis dispensaries in Oregon and Washington. By mapping these dispensaries and testing their prevalence against demographic indicators, Dr. Green showed that higher poverty, higher unemployment, and higher numbers of people of color correlated with cannabis sales locations.

This problem is multi-faceted in ways that suggest to Dr. Green a need to liberalize zoning regulations that pertain to cannabis sales. The confounding variable, he noted, was likely to be zoning. Because wealthier and whiter neighborhoods tend to have less commercial zoning, they end up with fewer dispensaries. This resulted in an unequal distribution of the social costs of cannabis sales.

Dr. Green said that dispensaries should be allowed to locate in more zones and under fewer restrictions to lessen the exposure differential. This would allow dispensaries to locate where their markets are; as there is evidence that marijuana use does not correspond with income or race—unlike the location of dispensaries—liberalizing the regulations should be enough to reduce the disparity. The question is whether the wealthy and the white also bear the social costs of cannabis sales.

The brilliance of Dr. Green’s lecture came in his comparison of the cases. On close examination, these two remedies for racial disparities are structural opposites. In the DHS case, an algorithm functions in a biased manner and must be normalized to reduce this bias. In the cannabis dispensary case, overregulation in the absence of a market failure causes biased outcomes. The remedy in that case was liberalization, not a targeted tightening of rules. In this way, the cases serve as a critical lesson for planners interested in fairness and equity. Similar goals cannot always be achieved with similar tools. Recognizing the details and the mechanisms at hand must precede intervention, lest a misguided move worsens the problem.

As Measured Against…

The professor also pointed to another subtext that spans both cases. In researching these topics, he found what many of us in the planning profession encounter: the use of whiteness as what Dr. Green called the “ur-reference.” That is, studies of this kind tend to measure problems for people of color relative to a normative baseline associated with conditions for white people. This results in the recurrent “non-white” category.

In these cases, Dr. Green urged a different view, in which whiteness is seen as the intervention on the landscape. The DHS algorithm may have been structurally biased to promote the safety of white children when the true norm is miscalculated risk. Dispensary zoning may have been crafted (intentionally or not) to protect white neighborhoods when the true norm is market-driven location choices. While by no means a definitive treatise on racial reference points, Dr. Green left the many students and faculty in attendance with a provocative reframing. This degree of innovative thinking certainly explains his rapid rise to prominence since graduating from DCRP. We are grateful to the professor for sharing his time and expertise.

Lance is a second-generation urban planner with a passion for economic development strategies that center natural resource conservation and community uplift. He served as Managing Editor of the Urban Journal at Brown University, Section Editor at the College Hill Independent, and Senior Planner for the City of Grand Junction. Hailing from sunny Colorado, he earned his BA in Urban Studies at Brown and will earn his Master in City and Regional Planning at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2023. Outside of work, he can be found on his bicycle, in the woods, or on the rugby pitch.

Edited by Jo Kwon

Featured Image by Jo Kwon

Subscriptions for Volume 47: Planning for Healthy Cities (2022)

October 18, 2022 /

Carolina Planning Journal (CPJ), the oldest student-run planning journal in the country, is excited to announce the imminent release of Volume 47: Planning for Healthy Cities. This issue features articles and book reviews from a wide range of planning students, practitioners, and scholars; see the editor’s note below for brief summaries of some of the topics covered.
 
We would love to be able to send you a print copy of this year’s journal. To order your own copy(ies), complete this brief subscription form and send us a payment via Venmo, Zelle, or cash or check; additional payment details are provided on the subscription form.

Subscription rates are as follow:

  • DCRP Student: $10
  • DCRP Alumnus, Staff, or Faculty: $15
  • General Subscriber: $20

Questions? Don’t hesitate to email us.

Editor’s Note

Read Volume 47: Planning for Healthy Cities here.

Winston Churchill was once quoted as saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” We as planners have a responsibility to look to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting challenges, as an opportunity to learn and better frame how our work can bolster health. Volume 47 of the Carolina Planning Journal is titled “Planning for Healthy Cities.” The title itself is aspiration, as the concept that planners alone can ensure healthy communities is fantasy. Planners must collaborate with, listen to, and learn from multitudes of individuals from varying fields. Health is not tied to just the physical space of the city; it spreads beyond tangible infrastructure and extends deep into the roots of a community.

By 2050 it is projected that 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. The weight of this and other projections have prompted many influential organizations such as the European Union, World Health Organization, and American Planning Association to examine the pivotal role planners play in improving and protecting the public’s health for generations to come.

To explore the many definitions and concepts of a planner’s role in promoting health, we asked students, professionals, and researchers alike to explore the nexus of planning and health. The resulting articles provide an array of interpretations and important perspectives on how planning is intertwined with health.

Decades of research have shown a connection between adverse outcomes from childhood lead exposure and its ties to racial and class inequalities. Elijah Gullett (UNC ’22) contributes to this body of work by examining a case study of 31 counties in North Carolina. Importantly, the topic of healthy cities extends beyond symptoms identified by a medical practitioner and includes how social anchors can influence a community’s economic health. Marielle Saunders (MCRP ’22) and Eve Lettau (MCRP ’22) examine the link between health outcomes and economic development strategies. Their article leverages three case studies to explore strategies that shift the economic development paradigm from pure growth to quality development and community wellbeing.

During COVID-19 there was a constant struggle to effectively and clearly communicate evolving scientific information. Rebecca Kemper, PhD, Frederic Bertley, PhD, and Joseph Wisne consider the struggles cities have had converting successive, highly technical medical research findings into protective health advisories. Their work seeks to provide planners with an understanding of how to use cultural institutions as a public health resource and communicative resource. Developing tools and frameworks that can assist planners to best address varying issues is an important field of research.

Emily Gvino (MCRP ’21) and Julia Maron (MCRP ’22) look at how local planners and municipalities, primarily in urban communities, can best address extreme heat within the lens of equitable resilience. The reframing of how planners can address climate resilience provides many parallels to how planners may address other community issues. Michelle Nance and Emily Scott-Cruz identify ways public health intersects with transportation planning and provide recommendations to North Carolina transportation planners, policymakers, and advocates. Their article offers advice for how to improve health outcomes through changing transportation planning practices, policy making, and prioritization.

Building on the importance of developing safe transportation system policies, Daniel Capparella, Ashleigh Glasscock, and Jessica Hill (DCRP ’09) use Nashville, TN, to develop a non-motorized risk index. Their system-level tool can be used to proactively identify areas with unsafe non-motorized conditions and motivate other transportation planners to reimagine how they classify risk. Vision Zero, a global movement to end trafficrelated fatalities, takes a systemic approach to road safety. While Vision Zero plans have grown in popularity across the country, they are implemented to varying degrees. Seth LaJeunesse, Becky Naumann, Elyse Keefe, and Kelly R. Evenson examined 31 United States Vision Zero plans published through mid-2019 to explore the degree to which local and regional transportation safety plans intended to eliminate serious and fatal road injury (Vision Zero) integrated land use plans, planners, and ordinances.

This year’s cover photo comes from Josephine Justin (DCRP Master’s student). She explores the relationship physical spaces have with health, offering New York City as an example. “Two years ago, New York confirmed its first COVID-19 case and the City shut down its schools, restaurants, and businesses. As the world went into a state of lockdown, NYC emerged as an early epicenter of the pandemic. NYC’s skyline features in the cover photo. The city was bustling with residents and tourists when this picture was taken in March of 2021, but the legacy of the pandemic lives on as we mourn those we lost.

These past two years have shown us the importance of this year’s journal theme, Planning for Healthy Cities. While NYC and the world has been returning to normalcy, the pandemic is far from over as new variants emerge and cities face obstacles in distributing vaccines, tests, and treatments. The virus has exposed social and racial inequities in our cities and how the built environment can affect our health. May we use the lessons we have learned during this pandemic to rebuild our communities to be healthy, sustainable, and resilient.

William Pierce Holloway
Editor-in-Chief

Machine Learning and Planning Research: How Each Can Push the Other’s Frontiers

July 6, 2022 /

By Kshitiz Khanal

Planning and social science research communities are increasingly adopting machine learning techniques in their research. Machine learning (ML) represents a broad range of techniques that uses insights gained from data for prediction and other tasks as opposed to hard-coded rules. Even quantitative planning and social science researchers are still catching up to the (mostly technological) developments in computer science and business applications.

Here I discuss some reasons why planning and other social science domains are lagging behind technological developments in computer science and applications of those developments in businesses, how each domain can help push the boundaries of the other and some possible future actions that emerge from those discussions.

Catching up to the sprawl of techniques

Technological developments are happening at a myriad of frontiers in the field of machine learning, so much so that it’s hard to even for domain specialists to keep up. People pushing these frontiers are mostly working in big technology companies and universities from select regions of the world. 

Compared to the expansion of machine learning science mostly by computer scientists and business applications of those developments by the likes of big technology companies, the use of machine learning in social science domains such as planning research remains low, albeit growing. Following are some factors that hinder the use of machine learning for planning research:

  • Funding: Computer science and AI related domains are some of the best funded research domains. Similarly, companies (not only primarily technology companies) invest in ML/AI resources because of the potential return on investments. Comparatively, research funding in planning and social science domains as well as the capacity of local governments and nonprofits to carry out research is lower. 
  • Skills gap: Planning and social science researchers are not typically trained in machine learning. Although the realization of the utility of machine learning and adoption is increasing, the gap in skills among most planning researchers looking to use machine learning is a challenge.
  • Datasets: There are many well-known benchmark datasets for AI/ML research. Benchmark datasets are popular datasets on which the performance of new machine learning models are tested for standardized comparison with other models. Similarly, businesses generate datasets as part of their operations. There are limited datasets amenable for planning research in comparison. Data generation is a resource-intensive task, and it is not surprising that the amount of datasets available is lower where the allocation of resources is lower.

How ML can help planning research beyond predictions

With the broad variety of techniques available for prediction, causal analysis, data generation, and other tasks, it is more about how not if machine learning is useful in planning research. Let’s look at a few interesting applications.

  • Making sense of non-traditional data sources: Making sense of a lot of data sources that can be useful such as newspaper archives, social media, satellite images, online forums, and listservs can be cumbersome with traditional approaches. Using machine learning techniques such as image segmentation, optical character recognition, natural language processing, etc. can help gain insights from a large volume of data.
  • Causal reasoning: The emerging field of causal machine learning can be used in evaluating policies, creating better programs by targeting heterogeneous effects, and gathering insights from natural experiments that are not practical or possible from traditional social science research designs [1].
  • Creating synthetic datasets: ML models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (algorithms that can generate data such as images and texts strikingly similar to provided examples) can be used to create synthetic data that can help reduce bias in unbalanced datasets[2].
  • Theory building: Machine Learning can also guide theory building in planning and the social sciences. Theory building includes extensively testing the robustness of hypotheses. The suite of machine learning tools and developments in ML based causal reasoning can help guide theory building by uncovering novel and robust patterns in data [3].

How planning research can help ML

The field of AI/ML draws frequent criticism (deservedly) about the associated ethical and social justice issues. Planning research can help push those frontiers of machine learning and some more. Some of them are discussed below.

  • Exploration of potential ethical and social justice issues: The field of planning has forever been concerned with ethics and social justice. Planning scholars can help explore potential ethical and social justice related harms and biases from AI/ML [4].
  • Expanding social applications of machine learning: There is much to be gained by applying machine learning beyond building new machine learning architectures and improving the profitability of technology and other businesses. The techniques can be used in research where insights gained about improving people’s lives through planning are more straightforward.
  • Explaining the explanations of the black box of machine learning: AI/ML practitioners are pushing towards more explainability in terms of how the models came up with their predictions or outputs. Knowledge of social systems for which machine learning was used can help put those outputs in context [5].
  • Moving beyond benchmark datasets: Many machine learning researchers being concerned only with performance on benchmark datasets is a common criticism of machine learning models. Applications to planning problems can help the domain of machine learning move towards goals that are more directly beneficial to humanity.

The way forward

The application of machine learning techniques to planning problems can advance both of these fields. Increased collaboration, increased access to funding, increased institutional support, creation of learning materials, incentives for cross-disciplinary research projects and publications, push for more open data, etc. can help the two domains tango for increased social good.

References

[1] S. Athey and G. W. Imbens, “Machine learning methods for estimating heterogeneous causal effects,” stat, vol. 1050, no. 5, pp. 1–26, 2015.

[2] M. Hittmeir, A. Ekelhart, and R. Mayer, “On the utility of synthetic data: An empirical evaluation on machine learning tasks,” in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, 2019, pp. 1–6.

[3] P. Choudhury, R. Allen, and M. Endres, “Developing theory using machine learning methods,” Available SSRN 3251077, 2018.

[4] A. Hagerty and I. Rubinov, “Global AI ethics: a review of the social impacts and ethical implications of artificial intelligence,” ArXiv Prepr. ArXiv190707892, 2019.[5] U. Bhatt, M. Andrus, A. Weller, and A. Xiang, “Machine learning explainability for external stakeholders,” ArXiv Prepr. ArXiv200705408, 2020.

Kshitiz Khanal is a PhD candidate at the Department of City and Regional Planning. His current research focuses on the application of emerging machine learning techniques in energy planning. He studied engineering and energy planning. Before coming to UNC, he co-founded an open technology advocacy non-profit in Nepal and was involved in energy as well as open data for development research. He enjoys playing and watching football (soccer), calligraphy, and sipping the Himalayan silver tips tea.

Edited by Jo Kwon, Managing Editor

Featured image courtesy of Cyberpunk style AI generated image using text submission “urban planning”

Book Review from the Journal: Urban Legends, Peter L’Official

April 29, 2022 /

In anticipation of Volume 47 of the Carolina Planning Journal coming out next month, this week we are featuring another book review from Volume 46, The White Problem in Planning. Veronica Brown reflects on Peter L’Official’s Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin.

Book Review by Veronica Brown

A few televised moments speak to their era so well that they surpass television history and stand in for an entire period in American history. Surely the 1988 World Series, in which the camera panned from Yankee Stadium to a burning building in the South Bronx as Howard Cosell announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning,” is such a moment. Except for the fact that Cosell never said his most famous line. Peter L’Official debunks this story in the introduction to Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, an exploration of how during the late twentieth century, various media constructed a South Bronx that stood in for both the concept of urban decline and for the place itself. When presidents visited the rubble of Charlotte Street, as L’Official writes, they “did not visit the ‘South Bronx’ as much as they did the site of the nation’s shorthand for urban ruin” (129). Through thoughtful analysis of the period’s visual art, books, and movies, L’Official provides a necessary reexamination of the South Bronx’s history that also serves as a compelling argument that places are constructed not only through plans but through their artistic representations.

In the strongest two chapters of the book, L’Official pairs the photographs of Jerome Liebling and Roy Mortenson and the conceptual work of Gordon Matta-Clark with examples of what he terms “municipal art” (14), or work with a function that is bureaucratic as much as aesthetic. This “art, at work” (46) includes the Department of Finance’s project to photograph every lot in New York City from 1983 to 1987 in order to standardize the city’s tax assessment system. In this “administrative mode” (77) of photography, life emerges at the corners of straight-on photos of South Bronx buildings caught in the process of abandonment. Passersby move from one photo to the next as the city photographer progresses down the block. Situating these tax photos within a rich tradition of artists depicting urban ruin, including through conceptual photography, L’Official creates a “dual-purposed ethic of viewership” (76). This mode of looking considers the art-historical canon as well as sociopolitical upheaval in the urban environment. In another inspired pairing, L’Official uses the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and the Occupied Look program, two forms of urban trompe l’oeil, to demonstrate how perception and perspective shaped understandings of the South Bronx. Through Occupied Look, the actual windows of abandoned buildings were covered with panels with painted-on windows. Occupied Look presents itself as an easy subject for derision, but L’Official rejects cynical mockery, instead comparing the initiative to Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts in the Bronx Floors series. L’Official’s deft exploration of these various artistic interventions in Bronx abandonment proves municipal art projects as worthy of analysis and also figures the period’s conceptual artists as key urban theorists of twentieth-century decline.

In later chapters, L’Official turns to popular media depictions of the South Bronx, including books and movies, and continues to home in on well-chosen details. In a particularly gratifying turn, the main character of Abraham Rodriguez’s Spidertown (1993) has a scavenged Occupied Look window mounted on his bedroom wall, literally reversing the direction of the faux portal and co-opting its furtive purpose as he hides his cash behind the panel. The 1981 films Fort Apache, the Bronx and Wolfen each center on Charlotte Street, a block sufficiently metonymic for urban distress that Jimmy Carter staged a photo opportunity there when he visited the borough in 1977. In Fort Apache, the Bronx, both character and setting assume the identity of Charlotte Street. Pam Grier, the ultimate blaxploitation star, plays a sex worker named after the street. The film received significant protests from the local organization Committee Against Fort Apache, which argued that the film was reductive and offensive. Charlotte Street, however, had become a studio backdrop rather than a neighborhood with residents, a transformation made clear through the construction of a new building that appeared to be burnt-out for the production of Wolfen. Although L’Official does not extend his analysis of Charlotte Street to Ed Logue’s zealous development of the corridor into a row of single-family homes in 1987, recently detailed in Lizabeth Cohen’s Saving America’s Cities (2019), the aestheticization of the street through its movie appearances demonstrates why the American aesthetic ideal of the white-picket fence would be all the more appealing as a solution to the borough’s problems.

Full of both rich detail and exciting ideas, Urban Legends is an enjoyable book for any audience interested in the South Bronx, but the book provides a particularly important meeting ground for urban planners and historians of visual culture. As L’Official argues, the South Bronx “has been hard to ‘see’ clearly beneath the layers of myths, stereotype, and urban legend” (245). Urban planners have historically failed to see the Bronx and used its representation to obscure a clear vision of countless Black and Latinx urban neighborhoods across the country. This pattern has fostered rampant exploitation of these neighborhoods, including current gentrification and displacement in the South Bronx. What is perhaps most useful for planners to take from Urban Legends is an understanding of how representations will continue to construct the space. When L’Official asks “What vision of the Bronx will live on” (247), planners should recognize this vision will not only be constituted through their efforts but also through art and popular media.

Buy Urban Legends here.

Find Volume 46 of the Carolina Planning Journal online here.

Veronica Brown is a 2021 graduate of the Master’s of City and Regional Planning program. She received her undergraduate degree from Smith College, where she studied the psychology of contemporary visual culture. Before coming to UNC, Veronica worked in communications at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Facing Forward and Held Back: Mapping the Role of Zoning in a Progressive Small Town’s Housing Crisis

March 11, 2022 / / 0 Comments
By Henry Read

For the better part of a century in the United States, exclusion, restriction, and fastidiousness were core values within the accepted best practices around zoning and development. While national trends seem to slowly be reversing course toward less aggressive regulation of uses and limitations on density, the built, legal, and economic environment in communities across the country strongly reflect this history. Even in places that actively seek to be bastions of progressive culture and policy, the legacy of older philosophies persists. And the most severe and obvious of these reflections is the current crisis of affordability in housing.

As a small town with a consciously welcoming culture adjacent to the state’s flagship university, Carrboro, NC, is emblematic of this wider trend. Despite broad community consensus on the need for affordable housing for all residents, housing prices have risen faster than median incomes for decades and new housing construction has been outpaced by population growth for just as long. Carrboro has not been idle in the face of this problem; many policy initiatives have been attempted to address the scarcity of affordable homes. But due to more significant dynamics within the town and the country, these solutions have consistently come up short either in design or implementation.

In an effort to explore and address this archetypical wicked problem, this project from 2021’s course on Zoning For Equity uses mapping, statistics, legal analysis, and investigative journalism to determine why affordable housing is so difficult to come by in an environment so seemingly amenable to its creation. Through the medium of ArcGIS StoryMap, Feel Free (To Be Cost Burdened) describes the background of Carrboro’s housing crisis, the most notable attempts that have been made to address it, and the trends and policies that continue to negate the impacts of those attempts. The StoryMap then goes beyond analysis by offering a suite of potential solutions, ranging from immediate and practical tweaks to Carrboro’s zoning code to grand reworkings of America’s conception of the relationship between property rights and human rights.

In addition to existing as a static artifact of research, Feel Free (To Be Cost Burdened) has entered the world of planning politics in its own right; Its creators presented it to both the Orange County Board of Health and the Carrboro Affordable Housing Advisory Board in early 2022. Hopefully, this project can be revisited and revised to reflect breakthrough successes in Carrboro’s fight for housing affordability in the near future.

Henry Read is a Master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, with a focus on land use policy. He is fascinated with the minutia of development regulation and doesn’t understand why so many people think zoning is boring. He hopes to work in the public sector after graduation, and would like to be remembered as the guy who got your town to stop requiring bars to have customer parking and start planting native fruit trees in parks.

Edited by Jo Kwon

Featured image: Feel Free (To Be Cost Burdened) StoryMap

Book Review from the Journal: Golden Gates, Conor Dougherty

March 3, 2022 /

This week, we are featuring another book review from Volume 46 of the Carolina Planning Journal, The White Problem in Planning. Nora Louise Schwaller reflects on Conor Dougherty’s Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America.

Book Review by Nora Louise Schwaller

There is no state where an individual working a full-time minimum-wage job can afford a one-bedroom housing unit without paying in excess of 30% of their income, the standard benchmark for affordability. While stagnant wage growth has contributed to this issue, an increasing imbalance between supply and demand in the housing market is a major feature of the problem. In Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, Conor Dougherty focuses on the ever-growing housing shortage by sharing stories from those living in the cities of the Bay Area, California. In doing this, Dougherty lends insight into the economics, laws, history, and human experiences behind the rising housing prices and reasons why ‘The Rent is Too Damn High’.

Dougherty is well suited to this task. He is both a Bay Area native and current resident. He works as an economics reporter for the New York Times, focusing on the West Coast, real estate, and wage stagnation. His experience allows him to write with both the sober perspective of a researcher and the insight of someone who has lived in the midst of this evolving crisis. This background gives him credible authority to note that he has never seen it quite so bad.

In San Francisco, the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment is $2,650. Dougherty delves into the history of how we got here with clear-sighted nuance. The real-life characters in his book veer to polarized ends of the debate (e.g., affordable housing advocates who don’t want to see developers make a profit, or local residents who use racist dog-whistle comments to discuss the “horrors” of new housing construction). However, Dougherty balances the risks of displacement and homelessness with the practicalities of having the means to make money in and from a competitive housing market. In doing so, he gives fair consideration to those who often become the local villains of housing scarcity – the techies in their Google Buses, the developers, and suburban natives – by contextualizing them in the biases and incentive structures of local governments that often limit dense construction.

Dougherty anchors his book with Sonja Trauss, the founder of the Yes in My Back Yard (YIMBY) activism movement. The book begins with her first appearance at a public hearing where she spoke in favor of more housing just about anywhere in the Bay Area. She was nearly 30 then, an economics PhD drop-out oscillating between teaching math and working at a local bakery. At this time of her life, she was long on passion but short on concentration – with a list of discarded hobbies that included weight lifting, role playing games, and participating in comedy troupes. Affordable rent advocacy focused her, and before long, she was showing up at any public hearing on residential construction, from affordable mid-rises to high end apartments, asking them to build anything so long as it was more.

Her organization, coined San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (SF BARF), gave a voice to the disparate group of people who were hurt by the non-building of homes that they could have lived in, or that could have at least put downward pressure on rents. This was a marked shift in housing advocacy that expanded the conversation around new construction far beyond local residents and the project developers, the typical stakeholders. Her ‘build everything’ position, habit of inserting herself in local fights, and colorful comments put her at odds with traditional affordable housing non-profits, local residents, city councils, and developers. But her movement was designed to get attention, and she succeeded in attracting local reporters and big time donors.

While Dougherty does an admirable job noting the privilege of the YIMBY movement, which is predominantly white and often funded with tech money, this is not the main focus of the book. Still, he contrasts SF BARF with an impactful chapter covering advocacy by and for low-income service industry employees, who are often at the greatest risk of displacement. This includes an in-depth story centered on an apartment building that was bought and flipped in a majority Hispanic neighborhood. Through this process, Dougherty describes the actions and perspectives of the developers, the residents who suddenly found themselves faced with $1,000+ increases in monthly rent, the residents’ children, and local activists and charities. This chapter is reminiscent of influential reporting from the turn of the 19th century, such as the work captured in How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, or mid-century activism work, such as The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. However, in this ending, the Robert Moseses of the world carry the day.

Dougherty makes clear that the housing shortage, and the displacement, homelessness, and inequity that follows it, calls for a human rights discussion centered on the conscience of the nation. While he discusses solutions such as imposing rent control, reducing building restrictions, changes to the building industry, and increasing multi-family zoning, they do not form the central thesis of the book. Instead, Golden Gates ends on how the housing crisis is, in many ways, about what we are willing to provide for those of us who have the least when it comes at the cost of those with more affluence and power. These moral questions are contrasted with the mismatch of incentives for addressing wide-spanning issues at the local level when the responsibility for the problem is diffused across states, countries, or even the global population. This point is captured by Steve Falk, a city planner for Lafayette, California, who resigned in the face of resident outrage during discussions on increasing density near a BART (light-rail transit) stop: “All cities – even small ones – have a responsibility to address the most significant challenges of our time: climate change, income inequality, and housing affordability” (116).

Golden Gates is on Time’s list of 100 Must-Read Books of 2020, is an Editor’s Choice of the New York Times, and is on Planetizen’s list for Top Urban Planning Books of 2020. These accolades are well deserved. The book is accessible to readers working outside of this subject area, and interesting to those, such as planners, working within it. Even housing scholars will find new insights and unfamiliar stories, while those without such a background will be able to pick it up and find themselves invested in the intricacies of local planning and the friction of the democratic process.

Buy Golden Gates here.

Find Volume 46 of the Carolina Planning Journal online here.

Nora Louise Schwaller is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the Department of City and Regional Planning, and a registered architect in the state of North Carolina. Her research interests focus on migration, climate change adaptation, and equitable recoveries.

Lessons from the Fuel Shortage

June 18, 2021 /
By Pierce Holloway, Editor-in-Chief

Introduction

If you are a driver living in the Southeast, you likely felt the very real impacts of last month’s fuel shortage. The crisis began at 5:30 am on May 7th, when a ransom note from hackers was found on a Colonial Pipeline control room computer. This event halted 2.5 million barrels per day of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel shipments, making it the most disruptive cyberattack ever on U.S. energy infrastructure.[1] Pressing pause on a pipeline which supplies roughly 45% of the East Coast’s fuel resulted in a ripple effect across the southeast, with rampant reports of price gouging and empty gas stations. According to the fuel tracking company GasBuddy, 65% of North Carolina’s gas stations were left without fuel in the wake of the attack. While the hack itself did disrupt the supply of fuel to stations across the region, drivers’ panic-buying caused stations to run empty much faster than expected.

May’s fuel shortage was not without precedent. In the 1970’s the nation experienced two intense periods of fuel shortages. The gas crises of 1973 & 1979 were spurred not by a cyber attack, but by geopolitics, the Iranian Revolution, and OPEC, all issues exacerbated by industry-wide fuel inefficient vehicles.[2] What lessons can we take from this crisis and what implications does it have for our current transportation network?

Lessons Learned

One: The reliance on fossil fuels is not a resilient future for the United States.

Fossil fuels have allowed our country to develop and grow at an unprecedented rate, allowing for significant advances in science and technology. However, the U.S. has reached a point where we must diversify our energy sources for the future of our economy, transportation, and health.

  • Economy – Despite our robust gross domestic product (GDP) output, a continually fossil fuel-dependent United States is likely to reach a tipping point and be left behind as other countries lead the way economically.
  • Transportation – Our country’s transportation system is dependent upon single occupancy vehicles. What happens the next time 30% of a region’s workforce cannot acquire gas to get to work? The U.S. needs systems in place to prevent the disparate impacts fuel shortages have on those who cannot afford to live within walking distance to work.
  • Health – The negative health impacts of burning fossil fuels for combustion engines are well-known, with a harmful cocktail of particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, mercury, and more. Exposure to fossil fuels results in detrimental impacts such as lower life expectancy and reduced lung function, and these impacts are not equitably distributed. A 2014 study found that living in majority Hispanic neighborhoods were associated with higher air pollutant exposures, and newer research has revealed that historically redlined areas have significantly higher rates of asthma-related emergency room visits.[3]

Two: Continued reliance on fossil fuels stands to make the United States defense network fragile.

Our government has acknowledged for some time that energy policies are inextricably linked to our national security. The first sentence of the 1981 Energy Policies for Resilience and National Security report summarizes the problem exceedingly well: “The U.S. energy system is highly vulnerable to large-scale failures with catastrophic consequences, and is becoming more so.” Fast forwarding 40 years later, we find ourselves living in a country still extremely susceptible to large-scale failures, perhaps increasingly so due the rise of cyberattacks. Prior to the May Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, the 2020 discovery of the Solarwinds attack impacted the U.S. Department of Energy and revealed the previous worst attack on energy infrastructure in history.[4]

Three: The recent fuel shortage underlines the need for increased prevalence of effective and accessible public transit options.

Public transit can lead not only to more equitable outcomes, but more economic resilience in the face of fuel shortages. As of 2019, 76.3% workers over 16 reported driving alone to work, while only 5.2% utilized public transportation.[5] By decreasing our reliance on single occupancy vehicles, we correspondingly decrease our reliance on fossil fuels. However it is important to note that electric and other alternative fuel vehicles are a not a silver bullet. While an electric car produces fewer carbon emissions than a traditional vehicle, its true carbon emissions depend on the electricity source. As of February 2021, over 60% of the U.S.’s electricity is still sourced from fossil fuels.[6] While renewable electricity generation is rising, vehicles charged at home are not a perfectly green choice. And a single occupancy vehicle, electric or not, is still not as important as focusing on improving public transportation.

Four: Sprawling development patterns have played a crucial role in the rise of single occupancy vehicles.

The fuel shortage demonstrates that sprawling development cannot feasibly ensure long-term resilience for the U.S. A recent report from the Census Bureau reported that the average one-way commute for Americans reached an all-time high of 27.6 minutes in 2019.[7] This, combined with the previously mentioned majority of workers driving alone to work, demonstrates the extremely arduous daily commute American workers engage in. Many American suburbs are also intentionally designed for isolation from a larger societal fabric, stemming from our racist and classist roots. How can suburbanites be expected to efficiently utilize public transit if their own neighborhoods are designed for isolation rather than interwovenness?

Urban sprawl also substantially increases congestion, resulting in commuters spending more and more time in a sea of brake lights.[8] All this time stopping and starting compounds particulate emissions, decreases worker productivity, and results in less time for workers to spend with friends and family.[9]

In recent years there has been a resurgence in younger Americans wanting to live in and moving to the urban core, leading to higher education and income metrics.[10] A shift to living in denser, more interconnected communities seems to be growing across the U.S., but without political support and continued movement away from emissions-producing vehicles, will this trend continue?

Conclusion

U.S. residents need and deserve efficient transit wherever they live, and we cannot become truly sustainable nor equitable while sprawling development continues. Understanding the detrimental impacts of our current structures is the first step to creating and implementing improvements. The Colonial Pipeline disruption highlighted significant issues with our ongoing car-dependence, those which are not only important but also completely possible to address. Examples of effective transit systems and development patterns exist across the world, and the U.S. should learn from others who have successfully found a way to move away from pollutant-emitting fuels. Politics will always be a hurdle, but residents across the country deserve leaders willing to undertake efforts to explain and address the negative health and well-being outcomes  our current transportation and development patterns impose.

[1] Joseph Menn and Stephanie Kelly. 2021. “Colonial Pipeline slowly restarts as Southeast U.S. scrambles for fuel.” Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/top-us-fuel-pipeline-edges-toward-reopening-gasoline-shortages-worsen-2021-05-12/.

[2] The Washington Post. 2021. “Gas shortages and lines in the 1970s wreaked national havoc.” Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/13/gas-shortages-1970s/.

[3] Casey A. Nardone et al. 2020. “Associations between historical residential redlining and current age-adjusted rates of emergency department visits due to asthma across eight cities in California: An ecological study.” The Lancet. Planetary Health, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(19)30241-4.

[4] Dina Temple-Raston. 2021. “A ‘Worst Nightmare’ Cyberattack: The Untold Story Of The SolarWinds Hack.” NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2021/04/16/985439655/a-worst-nightmare-cyberattack-the-untold-story-of-the-solarwinds-hack.

[5] U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. “Five-Year Estimate.”

[6] U.S. Energy Information Administration. 2021. “What is U.S. energy generation by energy source?” Retrieved from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3.

[7] U.S. Census. 2021. “Census Bureau Estimates Show Average One-Way Travel Time to Work Rises to All-Time High.” Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-travel-time-to-work-rises.html.

[8] Bruce Schaller. 2019. “What Urban Sprawl Is Really Doing to Your Commute..” Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-03/when-bad-commutes-make-bad-transportation-policy

[9] Van Ommeren, J. N., & Gutiérrez-i-Puigarnau, E. (2011). Are workers with a long commute less productive? An empirical analysis of absenteeism. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 41(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2010.07.005

[10] Richard Fry. 2020. “Prior to COVID-19, Urban Core Counties in the U.S. Were Gaining Vitality on Key Measures.” Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/07/29/prior-to-covid-19-urban-core-counties-in-the-u-s-were-gaining-vitality-on-key-measures/

Pierce Holloway is a second-year master’s student at the Department of City and Regional Planning with a focus on Climate Change Adaptation. Before coming to Chapel Hill he worked as a geospatial analyst for Urban3, working on visualizing economic productivity of communities and states. Through his coursework he hopes to explore the nexus between adaptation for climate change and community equitability. In his free time, he enjoys long bike rides, trail running, and any excuse to play outside. 

Edited by Emma Vinella-Brusher, Managing Editor

Featured image courtesy of the Tallahassee Democrat

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Carolina Planning, the oldest student-run planning publication in the country, is produced once a year in UNC's Department of City and Regional Planning. Articles selected for the journal are written by academics and practitioners, covering a wide range of topics relevant to today’s planning challenges.

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