Executive Director's column

Juliet Ellis

The Spring 2008 issue of Race, Poverty, and the Environment—Who Owns Our Cities—is particularly close to my heart. While not a professionally trained planner, I am a planning enthusiast and see land use and planning processes as important levers for change. Too often land use and planning are seen as irrelevant exercises designed for participation by the elite. But this should not be the case. It is time for low-income communities of color to take back their communities, one plan at a time.
Urban centers, made up mostly of low-income communities of color, have been subject to systematic and far-reaching disinvestment for decades. The result is reflected in the community’s housing stock, employment rates, school quality, infrastructure, transportation systems, crime rates, open space, and amenities.

For more than a decade, Urban Habitat has used community-based education in the service of justice for communities of color and low-income residents of the San Francisco Bay area. Since its founding in 1989, a central element of Urban Habitat’s mission has been creating an understanding of the regional forces that determine disinvestment in infrastructure, education, transportation, housing, employment and healthcare access.

Heading into 2007, Urban Habitat is poised to take on some of the challenges of a regional economy that is ever more starkly divided into the haves and the have-nots, and where communities of color continue to bear the burdens of growth, without receiving the benefits. Urban Habitat’s expanding work on equitable development and quality jobs are keystones in building a new approach to regional development, so that good jobs, clean air and water, and accessible public transportation are available to all our communities.

A central challenge for the environmental justice movement, and for advocates of equitable development, is to move beyond the criticism into solutions. The toll of destruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast cries out for positive, pro-active transformation.Earlier this year, the City of Richmond, California, in collaboration with Urban Habitat, crafted a resolution to formally establish Richmond’s commitment to green economic development.

Fifty years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, transportation equity is still a crucial issue for communities of color across the country. While legal segregation of public transportation is a thing of the past, one only has to step onto any urban bus system to see that racial inequality is alive and well in the United States. The passing of Rosa Parks, a pioneer of transportation justice, reminds us of the distance we have traveled, and is a fitting occasion for a rededication to undertaking the hard journey toward justice.