Mayors Leading the Push for Reparations Programs
A new coalition of 11 U.S. mayors has announced an initiative to establish pilot reparations programs aimed at reducing the racial wealth gap. The group calls itself Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity (MORE), and includes the mayors of such cities as Kansas City, St. Louis, Denver, and Los Angeles. Although the details are still sketchy, the group has announced three major commitments, according to an article from KCUR:
To support a bill in Congress that would establish a commission to study and develop reparation proposals across the country.
To form advisory committees of members of local, Black-led organizations to formally advise the mayors on a local approach to reparations.
In coordination with these committees, to lead development and implementation of pilot reparations programs targeted at a cohort of Black residents.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. Image via Flickr.
In 2020, we at Strong Towns published an outline of what such a local pilot program might look like, using Kansas City, Missouri, as a case study. That article, “The Local Case for Reparations” by Charles Marohn, quantifies the massive gap in private investment across neighborhoods that is the legacy of redlining in Kansas City, a devastating policy which divided the city into “have” and “have-not” regions on lines almost perfectly corresponding to the city’s racial divide. It then sketches a program of direct investment in redlined communities that would begin to repair that gap.
Crucially, this program would involve tools that the city already has at its disposal: no waiting on federal legislation or funding. And not only would it offer some redress to the victims of redlining in Kansas City, but it would also make simple financial sense for the city. It is a path to strengthen and stabilize those redlined neighborhoods still mired in poverty, bringing much-needed revitalizing investment.
The KCUR article on the mayors’ proposal references our work on this topic. We’re humbled and pleased to see it influencing the conversation in Kansas City, and we’re glad to see mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City in this new initiative.
Redlining: Local Harm, Local Remedy
For that matter, we’re glad to see mayors in general leading on this issue. The mayor’s office is exactly where this kind of initiative should be coming from. The local level is the right place to have many of the most difficult conversations that we face as a society: with people who are literally our neighbors, whose lives are visible and real to us. Too often, in the age of social media and 24-7 news, it’s not where they happen.
Redlining, which is one of the primary causes of the Black-white racial wealth gap, should have particular local salience because its effects are still so visible in the physical fabric of our communities. It's hard to overstate the damage that redlining has done. The practice by lenders of refusing to issue home loans in neighborhoods deemed “hazardous” investments became official U.S. federal policy in the 1930s, through the mortgage insurance standards adopted by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). “Hazardous,” as laid out in bold red on infamous maps that gave birth to the term “redlining” itself, was a category which included almost every predominantly Black neighborhood, as well as other minority communities. The result was that a huge share of Black Americans and others who lived in redlined neighborhoods were denied opportunities to buy houses, sell houses, make improvements to their property, or leave behind generational wealth.
An example of redlining in Philadelphia. Image via Flickr.
It’s worth noting that there are still huge disparities today in the places where banks will readily issue loans—overwhelmingly in wealthier and whiter neighborhoods—and where they won’t. Here is one recent study to that effect from Chicago. Many argue these practices are tantamount to a continuation of redlining, although the explicitly racial loan criteria of the FHA were abolished by the 1960s.
The scars of this practice are still fresh. Millions of Americans alive today are the direct victims of redlining, and millions more are their children and grandchildren who began life at an economic disadvantage in part because of these policies. Every major American city has neighborhoods that are mired in poverty, vacancy, and blight, the product not of bloodless market forces but of decades of, literally, forced disinvestment.
The remedy to forced disinvestment—choking whole neighborhoods nearly to death by closing off the spigot of capital—must be deliberate, direct investment. KCUR quotes both Mayor Lucas of Kansas City and Mayor Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento in underlining this point: reparations for redlining means investing in the specific neighborhoods that were harmed.
Marohn, in “The Local Case for Reparations,” emphasizes the need to get this investment right: the inflow of capital must remain in the neighborhood, and be allowed to accrue to the communities that were already established there, not provide a windfall for outside developers or speculators. Any program must be carefully designed to achieve this, and that is all the more reason for these efforts to be locally initiated and tailored, not a blunt instrument passed by an act of Congress.
The advantage to initiating this process locally, instead of merely pushing for federal legislation (although the MORE coalition is also doing the latter), is not just the ability to get the details right. It’s also that there is a unique alignment of interests at the local level: investing in its disinvested neighborhoods is the single best thing a city can do for its own financial future, even if a desire for equity or to redress past wrongs were not a driving force.
And we have the tools to start today. Many of them—tax abatement, renovation grants and loans, zoning changes, and the strategic use of publicly-owned property—are already used by cities without a second thought to incentivize private development by much larger, corporate actors. Now it’s a matter of repurposing some of those tools to give a fair shake to people and communities who have been shut out of the benefits of economic development for decades.
None of this will be easy, uncomplicated, or uncontroversial. But we’re glad to see conversations starting.
There is still so much work to be done in righting harmful policies of the past, but together we can make a difference. Strong Towns advocates are helping to shape these conversations across North America, and if you want to be a part of the movement, then consider becoming a member today.
A 2020 study revealed that areas around streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. are more segregated and poorer than the United States average. Now, data shows property values in these areas are affected, as well.