JACKSON, Miss. — Farish Street has an all-too-familiar story. 

Once a booming Black-owned entertainment and business district that drew Black customers from all over Mississippi, it struggled after segregation ended. Today, it suffers from the same blight and infrastructure issues as many other Jackson neighborhoods — and far too many once-segregated communities across the country.

I decided to visit Farish Street to get the perspective of small business owners on the state’s tax cut policies for an investigation published this week about a wave of such cuts pushed by conservative groups. Several told me that the state’s income and corporate tax cuts rarely benefit the Black business owners there. 

“The tax cuts are for big businesses and the rich,” said Eric Collins, owner of Herbal Blessings, a health food store and vegan cafe. “As for the support our small businesses get from the state? It’s very little.”

Marshall’s Music and Bookstore, owned by Maati Jone Primm, is located a few doors down. Primm’s grandmother, an activist who came to Jackson from nearby Utica, started the bookstore 85 years ago. 

“This used to be a hotspot,” Primm said. “The elders will tell you that on a Saturday, Black people used to come from all over Mississippi to come to Farish Street. You used to have to walk sideways.”

Primm connects the way the state Legislature handles taxes to a longstanding practice in the state to oppress Black Mississippians. Its tax structure – and the new reforms – benefit the state’s wealthiest, who are mostly white. And the majority-white state Legislature has long starved majority-Black Jackson of tax revenue.  

She sees taxes as one tool in a box filled with policies enacted by the mostly white Legislature, including voter restrictions, limited access to medical care and underfunded public schools, that make it difficult for Black residents to thrive. 

“I feel like they are attacking us,” Primm said. “It’s plantation politics. It’s absolutely awful. You have all these different attacks. It’s almost death by a thousand cuts.” 

Part of that punishment, she said, is starving Jackson of tax revenue.

It’s not a new allegation. The NAACP and nine Jackson residents filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year alleging that state decisions about Jackson’s access to tax revenue have reduced or blocked funds needed to maintain the city’s water supply, ultimately resulting in long-running problems accessing clean water. City residents suffered through a days-long outage last summer.

“It’s the culture of Mississippi that says they must oppress Black people,” Primm said. “They don’t want to share power, and they really don’t want to share resources.” 

Mississippi enacted a substantial income tax cut in 2022 that moved the state to a single tax bracket, regardless of how much you make. These “flat” taxes sound equitable, in that everyone is paying the same percentage of their income in taxes. But the rest of a state’s taxes don’t work that way, sales taxes especially, and the main way governments can avoid leaning most heavily on lower-income people is with income-tax rates that increase as earnings do. 

Mississippi’s tax structure already took a larger share of income from its poor and middle-income residents than its richest, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The newest change will worsen that inequity. According to the group’s analysis, the state’s highest-income residents would receive an estimated $31,400 in tax cuts on average each year, while the lowest would get average savings of $20.

The state will likely see a $419 million reduction in revenue every year on average from the income tax cut, according to the University Research Center, a division of Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning that studies state and local policies.

Primm is most concerned about what that could mean for Mississippi’s public education system, already underfunded and underperforming, especially in places with larger lower-income Black communities. 

Her great-grandmother, who was enslaved, created a school. A visit to Primm’s bookstore makes her passion for education clear. As I waited to speak with Primm, she was helping provide books for a local church group. She’s stocked her store with countless books on Black culture and history, from Maya Angelou poems to soul food cookbooks to nonfiction on medical discrimination and books detailing the history of how African slavery in the U.S. began. Primm has adorned its walls with pictures of freedom fighters; Black people who have been murdered throughout the country’s history, including Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin; and modern cultural icons, like Morgan Freeman and Oprah Winfrey.

Underfunding education is a form of disenfranchisement in itself, Primm said. 

“The largely white power brokers want to maintain the status quo and in order to do that, they need to disenfranchise us,” Primm said. “What they count on is the people to be silent for all of this and suffer in silence. I’m not going to do that.”

The post In a historic Black business district, ‘death by a thousand cuts’ appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

In the past year, the Supreme Court has made several decisions that have radically reshaped essential rights for Americans spanning from abortion access to gun rights to the separation of church and state. 

The higher court rulings have prompted an array of analyses of how some of these decisions will disproportionately impact some already marginalized groups – like how gutting affirmative action could sharply decrease Black and Latino student enrollment in colleges and overturning abortion rights will especially hurt Black women. A recent article published in the American University Law Review urges readers to also focus on how these decisions, and others pending before the Supreme Court, could affect another marginalized group: people with disabilities. 

The article, “The Disability Docket” — co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professors Jasmine Harris and Karen Tani as well as Shira Wakschlag, senior director of legal advocacy and general counsel of The Arc of the United States — applies a “disability lens” to the Supreme Court’s 2021 and 2022 terms to show how these decisions could have far-reaching implications for marginalized communities. 

And it goes deep into how decisions that aren’t specifically considered disability cases, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, may disproportionately impact people with disabilities. 

But it also delves into how some cases that focus more on disability rights — and are pending before the court — may have broader civil rights impact. One case is Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer for which the court will review the “tester” standing to challenge a hotel’s failure to provide accessibility information on its website, even if the tester never intended to stay at the hotel. Testers act as investigators, where someone voluntarily will put themselves in a situation to experience discrimination for the purpose of a legal challenge. The outcome of that case can have broader impacts on the use of testers in other civil rights cases, like fair housing.

The authors also explore the historical context behind the legal decisions regarding the rights of people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. These decisions, they say, have always been intertwined. The authors also provide advice to litigators and advocates who may find themselves arguing disability cases before this Supreme Court.  

The Center for Public Integrity spoke with two of the papers’ authors, Harris and Tani, to learn more about their findings and why it is important to apply this “disability lens” to the country’s current legal landscape.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: Why was it important to undergo this study of how decisions made by this Supreme Court would impact people with disabilities in particular?

Harris: Disability is an often forgotten piece of the court’s docket and often neglected in terms of how it operates, and that’s reflective of how disability is in society as well. We have differential treatments for people with disabilities, and sometimes that’s warranted, and at other times it’s not. … At all corners of both society and law, you have this sense that disability is different and ought to be treated differently. 

Tani: Disability cases do really important work for the law. Their reach is broader than disability. But my sense is – and I think the sense of other people – is that those decisions tend to get kind of under-appreciated or not recognized at the time. And so the actual significance, the legal significance of those decisions has gone under appreciated.

I think part of the impetus for wanting to do this kind of Supreme Court roundup with the disability throughline was just to say, historically, there’s a pattern here of these cases actually being in some sense much more significant and far reaching, but because they’re labeled like a disability case, they’re not kind of as hot button. They’re not as sexy. They’re considered sort of in that silo. And so the idea, I think was to kind of like, carry that insight forward and see how cases more recent cases might fit that pattern.

Harris: Look, more than 61 million adults in the United States – that’s just adults – have one or more disabilities. And that’s before COVID. We haven’t had the post-COVID numbers with long haulers included in there. Disability is more pervasive than we think, and so if we see disability as touching many more things, places and people than it already does then applying a disability lens becomes even more important. 

Q:   What are some examples of “non-disability” cases heard by this Supreme Court that impact people with disabilities?

Tani: There are these big cases where they’re going to affect people with disabilities, and that effect has just not been part of the conversation. So I think our insights with both — Dobbs and West Virginia vs. the EPA — is to say, look this has a really particular and potentially severe impact on certain people with disabilities. And let’s kind of surface that as well. 

For the West Virginia vs. the EPA case, we drew on some great evidence, by other folks, about the way that people with disabilities are just disproportionately impacted by climate disasters and other disasters for various reasons, some of which have to do with underlying vulnerability and economic precarity. 

Harris: For people with disabilities, abortion has always been part of healthcare. It’s always been something that’s been talked about, not only from an individual body standpoint that [pregnancy will result in the body] taking on more stressors that create or exacerbate disabilities, but also in terms of reproductive options and choices more broadly. It’s also for people with disabilities who want to become parents, and the kind of struggle that has been around that, and that dates back to eugenics.

With respect to Dobbs, you have situations where it’s already really hard for people with disabilities to travel right independently. Now they have to cross state lines in order to get abortion care that makes it disproportionately difficult.

And so that kind of insight in terms of thinking about the ways in which these cases have compounded effects, when you think about intersectionality, it’s going to affect poor disabled Black and Brown women. That’s who’s going to be disproportionately affected and harmed the most. You have to look at Mississippi, where the rates of disability are incredibly high. The rates of poverty are high, and it’s Black and Brown people in those situations, and when you see all of that together it gives you a different picture of what the discrimination looks like and how it’s operating.

Q: Why is it important for everyone interested in civil rights to be paying attention to the outcome of some disability cases pending before the court?

Tani: Like it or not, the statutes are sort of tethered together. Your lawmakers have basically patterned one after the other, such that, you know, they’re kind of traveling together in the law. So you really do have to pay attention. 

Harris: There’s a sense in which the lack of publicity was a good thing at one point, because the disability rights movement started heavily based on white men. And it was really veterans who had connections with Congress. So there was a way in which that allowed the foundation of the law to push through very quickly in ways that the public didn’t get a chance to understand what this law was going to do and what disability discrimination looked like. 

When something goes wrong in the Supreme Court, the popular retort is, well, you’ve got Congress, so you can go to Congress, and you can vote and your vote matters. I think this is a particularly difficult issue for people with disabilities, because voting and voting rights and access to the vote has been so constrained over time and continues to be [constrained].

How will people with disabilities be able to actually have their voices heard and remedy the harm that comes out of this court?

Tani: I mean, one last thing that I’ll say is that there are disability civil rights cases with the potential to have vast implications for other civil rights laws. The Acheson case is about tester standing and testers are important, not just in the [Americans with Disabilities Act] context, but also the race and fair housing context. It’s an obvious example of where there could be spillover to other contexts. 

Q: What is some of the advice you have for attorneys and advocates bringing disability cases before this Supreme Court?

Tani: Strategy is really important before this court because they could make bad laws. We tried to call attention to some times when you’ll be asked a bad question for the court to decide and you just have to mobilize to change public opinion.

If this case is really going to be that bad, how can we get it off the docket anticipating what the court might do?

The post ‘Disability is an often forgotten piece of the court’s docket’ appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

A city’s infant mortality rate indicates the general health of a population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

That is especially the case in Philadelphia, which has the highest infant mortality and poverty rates among the nation’s 10 most populous cities. In their first year, Black infants die at more than triple the rate of white babies. 

Throughout the U.S. in 2020, the leading causes of infant mortality included low birth weight and preterm birth. A guaranteed basic income for expectant parents can address those problems and even result in improved early childhood development, studies have shown. 

So Philadelphia is doing just that: offering expectant parents unrestricted cash payments to improve birth outcomes and reduce racial disparities. 

Beginning in 2024, the Philly Joy Bank will provide 250 pregnant Philadelphians with $1,000 a month in no-strings-attached cash throughout their pregnancy and for one year postpartum. Expectant parents who earn less than $100,000 annually and live in one of the city’s three neighborhoods with the highest percentages of low birth weight — majority Black neighborhoods — will be eligible for the program run by the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. 

The Philly Joy Bank has received over $3.5 million in philanthropic funding from Spring Point Partners, the William Penn Foundation and the Barra Foundation. The program is also accepting donations. The city plans to fund an additional $750,000 in program administration.

Developed in partnership between the city’s Department of Public Health and the Philadelphia Community Action Network — a coalition focused on reducing infant mortality — the pilot program resulted from hours of conversations with local community members, as well as literature reviews of similar programs in Manitoba, Canada and San Francisco. 

“We heard from Philadelphians not only that a program like this was sorely needed here, but that the amount of the monthly guaranteed income needed to be tied to a meaningful line item in a family’s monthly budget, such as housing or childcare,” said Stacey Kallem, Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s director of maternal, child, and family health division. 

The $1,000 monthly benefit is based on the costs of local housing and childcare. Doula support, financial coaching and maternal and child home visits were also requested during community focus group sessions. 

The rise of basic income

Guaranteed basic income experiments have increased in recent years as people search for solutions to growing income inequality that threatens wellbeing. Nearly 50 active guaranteed income programs exist throughout the U.S., according to Stanford Basic Income Lab, which conducts research and holds conversations on basic income. Those programs address a range of issues, including poverty and housing insecurity. 

Data from more than 7,500 participants in basic income pilots throughout the nation show the greatest spending on retail sales and services at 40%, followed by food and groceries at 28%, according to Guaranteed Income Pilots Dashboard. Participants say the cash has allowed them to pay for medical bills, student loans, professional development, diapers and extra food on the table, among other expenses. 

Critics of a general basic income argue that recipients will lose motivation to work. But years of research show that unrestricted cash helps people cover basic needs and can increase employment. A recent study on a basic income program in Stockton, California, revealed that $500 a month over 24 months resulted in improved mental health. 

Philadelphia already tested the waters through several free cash programs in recent years, including a one-time $500 payment for formerly incarcerated people and a monthly payment averaging $890 to 300 low-income people on the public housing waitlist. Kallem said the Philly Joy Bank has full support from the city of Philadelphia.

Community input

A Black mother of two, Lydia Seymour, helped develop the pilot program by sharing her lived experience, facilitating workgroups and fundraising. 

The Philadelphia Community Action Network introduced her to other moms who provided tips and resources while she was unemployed and pregnant with her second child in 2020. Eventually, the coalition paid her $25 an hour to share insight from her motherhood journey. The additional income covered some basic needs during her pregnancy, said Seymour, who now works as a coordinator for the coalition.  

Adverse birth outcomes hit close to home for Seymour, since her daughter was born at an extremely low birth weight — 1 pound, 8 ounces — in 2017. If the guaranteed income program was around at that time, she said it would have made a significant difference for her first pregnancy. 

“Across the board in any ethnic background or racial group, finances are seen as a stress and a source of need,” Seymour said. “So having an extra $1,000 during pregnancy would have helped to put food on the table.”

The Philly Joy Bank was also inspired by Manitoba’s Healthy Baby Prenatal Benefit program, which launched in 2001 to improve health outcomes during pregnancy. Recipients of the government-run program receive up to $81.41 (about $60 USD) a month throughout their second and third trimester, depending on their income. Additionally, expectant parents receive access to prenatal care and referrals to a support system where they can, among other things, learn about baby development, connect with other expectant parents, get breastfeeding support or ask questions about pregnancy. To be eligible for the program, expectant parents must have a household income under $32,000 and reside in Manitoba.

From 2001 to 2016, the Manitoba program provided over $27 million in total to around 63,000 women, according to the latest government report. In 2016, over 30% of the beneficiaries lived in First Nations communities. 

The unrestricted cash had measurable impacts. Among those: reducing the risk of low birth weights by 21% and preterm births by 17.5%, 2016 research showed. 

Study author Marni Brownell, a University of Manitoba professor in community health sciences and senior research scientist at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, evaluated the prenatal benefit for children born from 2003 through 2011 and followed them through kindergarten over several studies. In one paper, she found that the benefit led to increased vaccination, as well as improved cognitive and language development among First Nations children.   

For jurisdictions that want to implement a similar program, Brownell recommends free prenatal care and efforts to reduce barriers to that service, including a lack of childcare and transportation, as well as distrust of the healthcare system. 

In Philadelphia, the pilot program’s recruitment and enrollment process is still underway. The Department of Public Health anticipates holding community events and outreach in childcare centers and prenatal care sites. Philly Joy Bank will be considered for renewal if it improves financial security, as well as maternal and child health outcomes, said Kallem, adding that the city is currently selecting an external evaluator to measure the program’s impact. 

In Brownell’s eyes, the research on Manitoba’s program provides a key message: “Women know best what they need to improve their prenatal health.”

The post How guaranteed basic income can reduce infant mortality appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Places with higher fees for filing eviction cases have lower eviction rates — even when other factors are considered, new research from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University shows.

The research, published in the journal Housing Policy Debate in May, showed higher filing fees motivate landlords to work with tenants rather than turning to the legal process. 

The effect is largest in majority-Black neighborhoods, according to the research. Landlords and property owners disproportionately threaten Black and Latino(a) renters — particularly women — with eviction, according to previous Eviction Lab research.

In Issaquena County, Mississippi, which is 60% Black, it costs landlords $64 to begin the eviction process. There, the eviction filing rate was 25% in 2018. 

In areas like these, the research shows, raising filing fees could reduce eviction rates to the same degree as increasing tenants’ incomes by tens of thousands of dollars.

Compare that to 400 miles east, in Lee County, Alabama, where landlords pay $350 to start an eviction case — the highest fee in the nation. Lee County is 23% Black and had a filing rate of 2.3% in 2018.

Henry Gomory, a research assistant on the project and co-author of the paper, was surprised at how strong the correlation was between higher filing fees and lower eviction rates when he first analyzed the data. He and a team of other Eviction Lab researchers, including Evicted author Matthew Desmond, wanted to control for other factors. 

The cost of filing an eviction in different states and counties across the U.S. varies considerably, from $15 in Washington, D.C., to $350 in Lee County. In 32 states, the cost to start an eviction case is the same statewide. In the remaining 18 states, fees fluctuate from county to county. 

The reason for the variation? 

“There’s very little rhyme or reason for them being what they are,” Gomory said. 

In Illinois, for example, the fee begins with an amount based on population, Gomory said. From there, money gets added on for different projects the government is trying to fund, like digitizing law libraries or graveside memorial projects. 

A 2016 report from the Statutory Court Fee Task Force in Illinois called it “a Byzantine system… a complex web of filing fees, fines, surcharges, and other costs… wildly inconsistent from county to county.”

The variation was useful for the Eviction Lab researchers because it allowed them to compare high- and low-fee areas that were otherwise similar. Even when controlling for other factors — demographics, wealth, political context — researchers were able to estimate the effect of higher filing fees on three key measures of eviction prevalence:

1. The eviction filing rate, or how often landlords file cases;
2. The serial eviction rate, or how often they file repeated cases against the same tenant at the same address;
3. The eviction judgment rate, or how often judgments are handed down against tenants.

In all three of these outcomes, the research showed making evictions more expensive for landlords had a strong effect on driving down evictions in majority-Black communities compared to majority-white communities. This was true even after differences in socioeconomic status, rents and other factors that differ between white and Black neighborhoods.

This reflects the racial bias present in landlords’ eviction practices. Landlords in segregated Black areas are more likely to use an extractive and high-eviction management style, Gomory and Desmond concluded in previous Eviction Lab research. 

The new research presents an opportunity for policymakers to improve housing stability long-term, Gomory and his co-authors said. 

Gomory said raising filing fees must also come with eviction diversion programs, as well as those that try to prevent landlords from conducting evictions illegally. Landlords evict unlawfully — also referred to as “self-help” evictions — using measures like taking off doors, or disconnecting necessary services such as water and electricity. 

A 2021 Urban Institute report found 47 eviction diversion programs across the U.S., with the majority created in response to the pandemic. Such programs provide education and counseling to tenants, and often help tenants navigate difficult conversations with their landlord.

Richmond, Virginia, has an eviction diversion program within Housing Opportunities Made Equal, an organization founded 52 years ago that became known for successfully challenging redlining in court years later.

In Richmond, where one third of renters had evictions filed against them in 2018, it costs $42 to begin the eviction process. 

HOME plans to advocate for a longer “stay or quit” period when Virginia’s legislative session opens in January, said Michelle Jones, HOME’s director of housing stability. A 14-day “stay or quit” period, or the length of time between when a landlord delivers an eviction notice and when the landlord files a case in court, can make all the difference for some tenants compared to a seven-day period.

“It allows people to get another paycheck,” Jones said.

She agrees with Gomory that this policy change, or a filing fee policy change, or any other policy change on its own won’t solve the issues of eviction and housing instability. It’s a problem best addressed by an all-hands-on-deck approach: Cooperation from landlords and tenants, coordination between government agencies and service providers, and different programs for any kind of assistance that tenants may need. 

“I do feel as though you need them all working together,” Jones said.

The post Renters less likely to be kicked out where eviction filing fees are higher appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Dr. Thomas Fisher’s memoir, “The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER,” offers a firsthand critique of the country’s unequal healthcare system.

The Chicago South Side native has been an emergency room doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center for two decades. Thomas’ vivid account of the early days of Covid-19 is haunting. Caring for his community then was terrifying, he writes, “standing near unmasked COVID patients feels like being in the room with someone holding a gun.”   

Fisher’s gripping account of the day-to-day triage in the ER is frustrating. He writes, “doctors like me are often pushed into unbearable struggles with moral and ethical dilemmas that flow from administrative and financial realities that demand concessions in our values.”

The frustration is personal. In his book, Fisher wrote about an experience that deeply influenced him: Fisher was 9 years old when Ben Wilson, the best high school basketball player in the country, was shot. Wilson was taken to a hospital where he waited hours for surgery. The experience stayed with Dr. Fisher because he grew up close to Wilson with a similar background – professional parents and “sheltered from the streets,” and it became the first time Dr. Fisher was touched by violence. 

Years later, Fisher wonders whether Wilson would have survived if he had been taken to a better resourced hospital a few blocks away. “My calling is to take care of people like Benji…folks struck by healthcare emergencies in the same community that pushed and shaped me.”

Fisher invites the reader to sit with his reality and what it can tell us about the healthcare system.

“The emergency department is a place where we see this unvarnished truth,” he writes. “Healthcare workers like my colleagues and me care for those whose bodies reveal America’s broken promises.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What does the emergency room teach us about the country’s healthcare system? 

What’s interesting about the emergency department is that you see the entire cross section of society. It’s the only place in the American healthcare system that’s required to care for everybody, regardless of their ability to pay. The emergency department is a place where you get the best perspective of our bodies. What I’ve learned in 20 years of taking care of sick people is that everyday people come to me sick and injured, not because of anything in particular except that they were just simply trying to live, and the patterns that reveals helps me understand the truth about society and each of our place in it.

The other thing it has taught me is that it is very easy for us as providers – nurses, pharmacists, doctors – to not only become calloused to what we’re seeing, but if we then pause and step back and take a more clear look, it helps to reveal that our patients are trapped not only by a society that hurts and injuries them, but then when they come and get care. They’re again trapped by these same systems, and [we] as providers are trapped right alongside them, trying to do the things that we’ve been trying to do, but unable to do so, based on barriers, many of which I described in the book.

Q. You write about a defining moment in your career in February 2009. You faced an incredibly difficult ethical dilemma as hospital leaders shared a plan that “made it clear that poor neighborhood people are undesirable patients.” The plan called to shutter ICU beds and other beds to make room for special patients or “patients of distinction.” Can you tell us about that experience and why it was so defining?

It was my first job and not only did I have student loans, but I had a world full of optimism. It was soon after “Unequal Treatment” had been published, which was the Institute of Medicines’ document on health Inequities and in the early 2000s they’d already had 30 years of documentation. They had a nice taxonomy that described how these inequities were produced largely where we live, learn, work and play, but also amplified by access. There was a growth in diversity in the trainees so in my naive junior faculty head, it was like, we’ll roll up our sleeves and start to fix this pretty quickly. 

Then the housing crash happened that took the economy with it. People lost jobs and their insurance and all of a sudden the job that we had to do, taking care of sick people and getting them the resources that they need became even harder.Things like getting people outpatient follow-up for specialty care or an inpatient bed after being admitted were restricted because health systems responded to fewer people with insurance by restricting the resources available.  These are systems, right? Hospitals, clinics, doctors, nurses want to get paid for the services that they provide in a society where healthcare is so expensive that few can pay for it, except for the most wealthy. Most people pay with insurance, either public, Medicare and Medicaid, or private, linked to employment. There are financial incentives to guide all of this. I remember very clearly hearing slogans like: “no margin, no mission.” It’s used to justify trying to make sure that you have enough resources available. It’s really rational except when you realize the mission is people’s bodies.

Q. What are your policy recommendations?

I think it’s important to say that many of the challenges that I think we face require a vast reorganization of society — something that’s intergenerational and requires persistence.

We need a level of leadership that looks a little bit different. So, for example coming down the pipe are incredible, transformative inventions, cures for cancer, therapeutics for sickle cell anemia, solutions for blindness and the challenge will be, each of these innovations will worsen inequality unless we turn our focus away from market based consumption and that’s going to require a generation of leaders who harnessed the creativity, moral clarity and courage to ensure that we prioritize people over profits.

The post Memoir: The ER reveals “unvarnished truth” of broken system appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Two U.S. agencies are urging school districts “to confront the issue of race discrimination in student discipline,” releasing a report highlighting federal investigations that found evidence of bias in school policing over the past decade.

“Discrimination in student discipline forecloses opportunities for students, pushing them out of the classroom and diverting them from a path to success in school and beyond,” the departments of education and justice wrote in a joint letter. “Significant disparities by race — beginning as early as preschool — have persisted in the application of student discipline in schools.”

Center for Public Integrity investigations have shown that federal enforcement merely scratches the surface of widespread concerns with law enforcement presence on campus.

And a closer look at the data reveals that problems seemingly persist even after federal investigations.

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the U.S. Department of Justice found evidence to support complaints that Wicomico County Public Schools discriminated against Black and Latino students and students with disabilities. The Justice Department investigation concluded that staff over-relied on school resource officers to address routine classroom management issues. Black students and students with disabilities were overrepresented in the incidents. Black and Latino students, meanwhile, received “harsher” consequences than white students but were not misbehaving in more serious ways, according to the Justice Department.

The school district, while not admitting violations, signed a settlement agreement in early 2017 that it would address these issues.

The following school year, Black students were referred to law enforcement at three times the rate of their white peers, Public Integrity’s analysis shows. Law enforcement referral rates for students with disabilities remained disproportionately high.

Under the agreement, the Justice Department required the district to submit semi-annual reports to the agency until the end of the 2019 school year, demonstrating its efforts to comply with the agreement.

A Justice Department spokesman said the agency closely monitors compliance with settlement agreements.

“The Department’s settlements also provide for enforcement if school districts do not comply with their obligations under the agreement or federal law,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Public Integrity.

The agency did not say if action was taken in the Wicomico County schools case. The district declined an interview request.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found evidence to support complaints that the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, California, discriminated against Latino students in discipline incidents. School resource officers in the district ticketed Latino students at more than twice the rate of white students during the 2013-14 school year, often for minor infractions that officers had the discretion not to cite, the investigation found.

The district did not respond to requests for comment. Like Wicomico County, it had entered into a settlement in which it did not admit violations but agreed to make changes.

As part of the settlement, the East Side Union High School District agreed that Office for Civil Rights staff could interview staff and students and request additional reports and data to ensure compliance. The settlement also required the district to appoint a committee to review student discipline data by race twice annually during the 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years.

During that first year, Latino students in that school system were nearly five times as likely to be referred to by law enforcement as white students, the Public Integrity analysis showed. 

The Education Department did not respond to questions about how it monitors districts after settlements are signed.

Public Integrity’s analysis of federal data for the 2021 “Criminalizing Kids” investigation found that law enforcement referrals in schools disproportionately affect Black children and, in some states, Native American and Latino children. In 31 states and the District of Columbia, Black students were referred to law enforcement at more than twice the rate of white students, the Public Integrity analysis found.

A referral occurs when a school employee reports a student to any law enforcement agency or officer, including a school police officer, for an incident at school or during a school-related event.

Under federal law, all arrests are referrals, but not all referrals lead to arrests. Citations, tickets and court referrals are also considered referrals to law enforcement.

School districts investigated by the federal government for discriminatory school policing agreed in settlements to make changes correcting the alleged problems, such as mandating anti-bias training for school resource officers and establishing processes where students and parents can file complaints when they suspect they’ve been discriminated against.

The federal report urged districts to examine their internal data to evaluate whether they violate students’ civil rights and cited several cases resolved over the past two school years. The letter to schools emphasized that racial discrimination in student discipline continues to be “a significant concern.”

Last August, the Office for Civil Rights resolved an investigation that found evidence that school police officers in the Victor Valley High School District in southern California disproportionately issued citations to Black students.

After the settlement, the Victor Valley High School District thanked the Office for Civil Rights for “raising important issues and for working with us to find solutions to these systemic problems,” according to a statement provided to the Victorville Daily Press. 

“Even before the conclusion of the OCR analysis,” the statement added, “the district began taking steps to increase equity for our students.”

In the Davis School District in Farmington, Utah, the Justice Department determined in 2021 that Black students faced discrimination in law enforcement referrals. The investigation also found evidence that the district routinely ignored concerns from Asian and Black students and parents about racial disparities in discipline.

“The district takes these findings very seriously,” the Davis School District said in a statement released after the Justice Department settlement. “They do not reflect the values of this community and the expectations of the district. The district pledges to correct these practices.”

Neither district responded to requests for comment for this story.

Some school systems cited in the report, including the Minneapolis Public Schools, decided to remove law enforcement. The districts were among those defunding school police after George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered in Minneapolis by a white police officer in May 2020.

The East Side Union High district also removed police from schools in 2020, canceled its $700,000 contract with local law enforcement and used the funds to hire social workers and expand student mental health services.

But some of those changes have been short-lived. Across the country, districts are reversing those decisions amid concerns about rising violence in and around schools.

In Wicomico County, Maryland, the district has doubled down on the presence of law enforcement. Officials want to add more funding for resource officers for the upcoming school year.

The post Fighting back against racial bias in school policing appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Millions of job seekers may soon have access to closely guarded information about pay. 

Six states recently approved wage transparency laws that require most employers to include pay ranges in job ads. Colorado debuted the policy in 2021 as a strategy to help shrink the persistent gender wage gap. California and Washington enacted similar laws earlier this year, and in September, New York will do the same.

The simple idea of disclosing compensation to job seekers went mainstream in 2023.

The governors of Hawaii and Illinois are expected to sign wage transparency bills lawmakers approved in the spring. In Maine, state senators will soon vote on a similar bill that passed the House in June. Council members in the District of Columbia are debating their own policy change. Most bills exempt small businesses.

Clarity around compensation is particularly crucial for women of color, who are more likely to be underpaid, said Da Hae Kim, state policy senior counsel for the National Women’s Law Center.

“We know that discrimination thrives in the shadows,” said Kim, who has testified in favor of the policy in multiple states. “[Wage transparency] shines a light on it and holds employers accountable for setting fair pay.”

Kim describes the new laws as an obvious solution to a major problem: the gender wage gap is costing women thousands of dollars a year.

Women who work full time earn, on average, 83 cents for every dollar a man earns — a number that has hardly budged since 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The disparity is even larger between women of color and white men.

Researchers have found many reasons to explain the gap. Women face gender discrimination at work, for example, and they are less likely to negotiate pay. 

Equal pay advocates say that forcing companies to be clear about how much they are willing to pay for a position gives women crucial information to negotiate a higher salary than they would get otherwise.

District of Columbia Councilmember Christina Henderson said such a change would help “level the playing field for black and brown residents” in the nation’s capital.

“The district cannot tolerate wage discrimination and it is imperative that this government adjust the mechanisms that hinder women from earning equal pay for equal work,” Henderson said at a recent hearing on the Pay Range Act.

What the research says

Emerging research shows how much the new laws could advance pay equity.

An economist at the University of Zurich found a 3% increase in pay for newly hired workers after Slovakia enacted a pay transparency law in 2018.

A study published this year by Zoe Cullen at Harvard Business School found evidence that wage transparency encourages workers to negotiate higher salaries and increases wage competition among companies.

Economists at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Southern California studied data from Colorado after it became the first U.S. state to enact a pay transparency law in 2021. They found that employers who voluntarily posted salary ranges on job ads before the law went into effect increased salaries, on average, by 3.6% immediately after the policy change. 

A study from researchers at the University of Toronto found an even bigger impact on women in academia. They analyzed pay disclosure laws required for government jobs and found “robust” evidence that they helped reduce the gender pay gap between male and female university faculty by about 30%.

Few business groups push back

States considering pay transparency laws have faced little public opposition from businesses. 

Oregon Business & Industry, representing 1,600 companies in the state, is one of few that has voiced concerns. The group said in March that it opposed a pay transparency bill because it didn’t exempt small businesses and allowed job seekers to sue for damages if an employer breaks the law.

“Foremost, OBI worries a private right of action would open employers to extremely costly lawsuits for simple mistakes,” Derek Sangston, the group’s policy director and counsel, wrote in a statement to lawmakers.

The legislature has not held a vote on the bill yet. 

In the District of Columbia, council members held a hearing earlier this month that drew no opposition.

Abel Amene, a former restaurant worker, asked lawmakers to expand it. He said most restaurant employees in the District won’t benefit from their proposed bill because it exempts businesses with fewer than 25 employees from complying.

He described how lack of pay information created financial hardship for him.

“You would go through an entire process of an interview, securing transportation with the little money you have to go to the place to interview, go through the stress of interviewing, only to find out afterward that the pay is very measly and not going to cover your expenses,” Amene said.

Council members seemed open to making changes to the bill.

Other states that have introduced pay transparency bills this year include West Virginia, Alaska, Georgia, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia.

The post One simple solution to tackle the gender pay gap appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Santiago Mayer moved to Southern California from Mexico City in 2017, around the time President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” was sparking nationwide protests. “I kept wanting to talk about it with people in my classes and with my friends,” Mayer said recently. “And I realized that many people either didn’t know what was happening, or just really didn’t have the tools to talk about it.”

Mayer formed the nonprofit Voters of Tomorrow in 2019 to boost Generation Z engagement in politics and at the polls. It has been a busy four years for the organization since. Gen Z, the generation born after 1996, has dealt with voting during a pandemic, the rise of election denialism and recent efforts in statehouses around the country to make it more difficult for young people, especially college students, to cast a ballot. 

Members of the generation first became eligible to vote in 2015. The first presidential election where a large number of Gen Z voters cast ballots was 2020. 

Amid all that, Mayer, 21, studied at California State University, Long Beach, earning a political science degree this spring. The Center for Public Integrity spoke with Mayer as he was preparing a post-graduation move to Washington, D.C., to continue his work with Voters of Tomorrow.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. In 2020, you were part of an initiative called Prom at the Polls. Can you describe where that concept came from?

Prom at the Polls was really Voters of Tomorrow’s first big initiative. I was Class of 2020. And we missed out on prom, we missed out on graduation. 

We knew that all of our friends had maybe already bought outfits, they were already thinking, “Okay, who am I asking out to prom?” So we really tapped into that energy and that frustration and redirected that energy towards voting. 

It was honestly a lot more successful than we were hoping for. I mean, I’m a big Star Wars fan. So the second I saw Mark Hamill tweet about it, it was like, “Okay, I made it. We’re here.” And we got so much buy-in from so many people, it was really just phenomenal to see videos and photos of people lined up to vote, wearing dresses and wearing suits, and asking each other out, and asking people to go vote with them.

Q. In recent months in 2023, we’ve seen this concerted effort from Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Ohio and Idaho to make it more difficult for young people to vote. 

The conservative election denier Cleta Mitchell recently said, “They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm. So they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.” Why do you think these politicians are so aggressively going after student voters?

Because they’re terrified of us. That’s the simple answer. They are terrified because they know that young people are not buying what they’re selling. We’ve seen it in 2018. We’ve seen it in 2020. We’ve seen it in 2022. 

Young people are turning away from the hate-filled platform that many people on the right have. I don’t think that describing Gen Z as a Democratic generation is accurate. What Gen Z is really looking for is a future that works for them, and a government that works for them, and that protects them. 

And what we have seen from people on the right, especially over the last few years, and with people like Cleta Mitchell, is that they acknowledge what is happening, they know young people are rejecting them. But they refuse to really turn their platform around. And they are much more interested in continuing this wave of hate and harassment against LGBTQ+ rights, of turning back rights that my generation has never lived without, like abortion rights.

[They are] trying to figure out a way to make young people not be able to vote. And we’re seeing that in Ohio, we’re seeing it in Florida. We’re seeing it in Texas, where there’s really a coordinated effort to make voting more complicated and harder for young people.

Q. A lot of the conversation around Gen Z voters is about college students and voting sites near campus. But there are also millions of young people who don’t attend college. What can groups like yours do to help mobilize those people?

The way that Voters of Tomorrow works, it’s really open to everyone. We obviously have concentrations of young people on college campuses, but our outreach is not limited to those college campuses. 

I think everything has to be locally driven. We really work with our local chapters to understand what they’re doing, what young people in their area want to do, and support that. Whether that’s introducing bills in a state legislature, whether that is working and doing voter registration drives in parks or community centers, outside of schools, or whether that’s literally going out to the state capitol and distributing books with voter registration information. 

The goal really is to find the young people wherever they are, meet them there and allow them to become an active part of politics and government.

Q. Do you think that the parties do an effective job of reaching out to and engaging young voters?

We were just talking about how there’s a concentrated effort to stop young people from voting on one side, right. And that’s obviously not all Republicans, there are Republicans who have actually been pretty good about working with young people. But we do see that from that side. 

On the Democratic side, I think there’s been a realization over the past few cycles that young voters are a key part of their constituency, especially as we gear up for ‘24. 

Q. Voters of Tomorrow has several policy areas that you focus on: climate change, economic issues, democracy, others. Do you think that the relatively low turnout among young voters — at least as compared to older voters — reflects that candidates aren’t running on or speaking to the issues that are relevant to Gen Z?

The way we approach the issue is by what we call “the cycle of disengagement.” 

And that means young people may not be super engaged. And thus, politicians don’t feel like they need to speak to them, or represent them. And until politicians stop ignoring us, young people aren’t going to be super engaged. It’s like this self-confirming cycle.

What we’ve seen over the past few elections is both young people realizing that, and actually turning out to make sure that politicians realize that they are an important voting bloc.

Q. Mindy Romero at the University of Southern California recently wrote that even though youth turnout improved in the 2022 midterms, it was still low compared to overall voter turnout. Only 27% of those 18-29 cast ballots. What will it take to get that number up?

It takes more than one cycle, right? We have been building at this.

Cycle by cycle, that number keeps increasing. And if organizations like Voters of Tomorrow continue to invest, if the parties continue to invest, if the candidates recognize the value in young voters, we’re going to continue to see that number rise, because also young people are realizing the power that they have. 

Q. Along with young voters, Latino voters are underrepresented in the electorate. And there’s a lot of overlap there, as Latinos as a group skew pretty young. What can groups like yours do to help engage and mobilize young Latinos?

I think in the past, we’ve had this misconstrued idea that the way to get Latinos is to go out there and talk somewhat decent Spanish, right? I mean, I’m obviously an immigrant, I didn’t grow up in the U.S. and my experience as a Latino in the U.S. is very different from someone who has lived here their entire life. But I really do think that just platitudes, like talking Spanish, isn’t going to cut it. You need to show actual policy-based solutions to problems that a lot of Latinos have.

And I think what we have seen is sort of the compartmentalization of Latinos into “they only care about immigration.” When in reality, Latinos, both young and old, are a very diverse demographic, and treating them as a complex part of the electorate, rather than this group in a box, I think that’s very important. 

Q. What are you paying attention to, as we gear up for a presidential election next year? 

The attacks on young people. We have seen pretty clearly that the far right is engaged in what we call a war on youth, and that encompasses everything from banning books to suppressing our voting rights. So seeing what they are doing on that front and fighting back against it is probably our biggest concern right now.

But we’re also seeing and we’re also tracking really what sort of investments are coming into this space. Historically, the youth space has not been one that is well funded. 

We’re paying attention to the emphasis that the political infrastructure overall places on young people and seeing what the priorities are. Like, are they investing in campus organizers? Are they investing in TikTok influencers? Are they investing in online ads? 

Figuring out what people are doing, I think, is going to be particularly important moving into 2024, just because it is going to be a substantially different election from 2020, without COVID. And the ways that we can organize young people are going to be so much different.

The post A Gen Z voting activist discusses the ‘war on youth’ appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

The ability of millions of Americans to make ends meet hinges on how we measure poverty.

But the “how” may shift after a national panel recommended changes to one of the Census Bureau’s poverty measures.

Designing a fair and accurate measure is no simple matter. It’s also surprisingly political because it drives public policy and government spending, including who gets access to help such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. 

“There’s two main uses for poverty measures,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, executive director of the Center for Law and Social Poverty. “One is determining eligibility for programs or benefits or tax credits. The other is just to paint a portrait of the actual income deprivation that families face throughout the country.”

Some of the debate boils down to which of the Census Bureau’s two poverty yardsticks is more appropriate for determining who qualifies for government aid: the Official Poverty Measure or the Supplemental Poverty Measure. 

The country’s Official Poverty Measure was developed in the 1960s, based solely on a family’s ability to purchase food. The supplemental, with data first released in 2011, uses a standard of living based on expenditures that include food, clothing, shelter and utilities, compared against a household’s post-tax income, which accounts for government aid and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

It’s rare for the two measures to go in different directions — but recently they have.

The poverty rate under the Official Poverty Measure grew from an estimated 10.5% to 11.6% of the population between 2019 and 2021, the Census Bureau reported last year. In contrast, the rate under the Supplemental Poverty Measure decreased from 11.8% to 7.8%. 

One of the main reasons: stimulus payments from the government to households during the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped raise many households’ incomes temporarily. 

That’s the backdrop to a new National Academy of Sciences panel report, requested by the Census Bureau, that recommends the agency make the Supplemental Poverty Measure its official yardstick and incorporate several updates to it. 

Unlike the Official Poverty Measure, whose methodology has remained largely unchanged since its inception, the Supplemental Poverty Measure was designed to evolve with the changing demands of society. 

The panel was tasked by the Census Bureau to see if the supplemental measure, or SPM,  “was adequately measuring the economic needs of disadvantaged households in the country,” said James Ziliak, professor of economics and director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky, who chaired the panel.

“The SPM has a long and sound conceptual basis but itself is imperfect and should be continuously improved,” said Dutta-Gupta, who was also on the panel. “The hope is to get a more accurate portrait of poverty in the United States.”

Medical care — and specifically health insurance — should be included when considering a basic-needs bundle for a household, the panel found. 

The panel also determined that child care has become a large and rapidly growing portion of families’ out-of-pocket spending.

“Every child needs care, and we’re spending significant resources for households to meet that care,” said Ziliak.

The panel also suggested ways  for the Census Bureau to better capture housing costs, generally the largest component of a household’s spending. 

Perhaps most significantly, the panel felt that this measure should no longer be considered “supplemental” but be elevated to be the “Principal Poverty Measure” and used as the “nation’s headline poverty statistic.” 

That could have big ripple effects. The Official Poverty Measure — or a close variation — is used by nearly two dozen government agencies to determine eligibility for federal programs, according to the panel’s report.

There’s wide recognition that the current official measure’s income thresholds for poverty are far below what families need to sustain themselves. Many agencies try to account for that with their program eligibility limits: The USDA sets the maximum income to qualify for the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program at 185% of the Official Poverty Measure thresholds, for instance.  

“There is a desire to have an absolute measure of poverty,” said Gregory Acs, vice president for income and benefits policy at the Urban Institute, who was not on the panel. That’s what the Official Poverty Measure is meant to do, “but that misses the point. What food a family needs to buy and what constitutes a healthy diet has changed over time — and what you need to participate in society has changed.” 

The panel suggested continuing to use the current Official Poverty Measure — though perhaps renaming it the Basic Poverty Measure or Basic Income Poverty Measure — to maintain data on historical poverty trends and as an alternative yardstick for program eligibility.

The panel’s recommendations sparked some political pushback. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, sent a letter to the Census Bureau that expressed concern over the potential impacts.

The report, Rubio wrote, “recommends a sweeping set of changes that would prevent our government from accurately measuring poverty and would instead advance progressive political priorities. The authors of this report have not only overstepped their commission, but have also broken a sacred trust long defining the relationship between research experts and policymakers.” 

“Poverty measures, in other words, are not purely technical instruments,” he added. “They signal a national consensus about the goals of our economy and system of government.”

In addition to criticizing the panel’s recommendation to elevate the Supplemental Poverty Measure, Rubio disagreed with the suggestions to include other variables in the calculation, like childcare and health insurance. 

A May study from a right-leaning think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, determined that several federal programs — including food assistance — would expand to cover families making more money if the Supplemental Poverty Measure was broadly used to determine program eligibility. That would come with a multi-billion-dollar price tag, the study concluded.

The Official Poverty Measure has long been criticized by experts across the political spectrum, but many say it still serves a purpose.

“For program eligibility at the household level, you want a straightforward measure that’s not hard for people to document or produce lots of paperwork for sources of income,” Dutta-Gupta said. “If you made that measure too complex for program eligibility, then families struggling would have to figure out if they need to get their housing assistance before food assistance and other things that would be highly undesirable.”

Ziliak said it would be a huge administrative undertaking for the federal government to change eligibility rules for so many programs. The Official Poverty Measure also offers historical trends and data going much further back than the supplemental measure. 

“Official poverty gives us a consistent long history,” said Liana Fox, assistant division chief for economic characteristics at the Census Bureau. “SPM allows us to study the impact of government programs on reducing poverty.” 

Others have said that neither of these measures are adequate for determining who is most disadvantaged economically, but have suggested that a consumption-based measure, rather than an income-based measure, would be better.

The debate over the National Academy of Sciences panel’s suggestions shows just how subjective defining poverty is. And it underscores the importance of that definition for households struggling to cover basic costs of living.

“I think it’s important for people to understand how we measure poverty so they understand how public policy and macroeconomic conditions impact poverty,” Dutta-Gupta said. “Large changes [in poverty] are entirely because of the economy or public policy changes. It has shockingly little to do with people’s individual choices.” 

But all of these measures have been facing new challenges over the past decade. Survey responses involved in these data collection efforts are decreasing as people regularly screen phone calls from unknown numbers and answer their doors less — and some communities have long been hard to reach. To address this, the Census Bureau is trying to use other data, including administrative information from programs like Social Security.

“But that data is often terrible at identifying some identities, like race, and don’t perfectly align with the poverty measures,” Dutta-Gupta said of the administrative data. “I would note that in general, the worst data quality is often from people who are struggling the most.”

The Census Bureau’s Fox said that any changes implemented to the Supplemental Poverty Measure would take years to implement. 

An interagency working group will be vetting the report’s recommendations. Once that’s done, there will be a multiyear process for public engagement. 

Fox said the agency’s priority is to be transparent.

Acs thinks it’s important not to lose sight of the people that the poverty rate encompasses as we weigh these changes.

“We measure poverty because there are people who have such limited resources that they cannot make ends meet,” Acs said. “They cannot fully participate in society. They are so resource-deprived that it is a threat to their health and wellbeing.”

The post Why the way we measure poverty matters appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

This story was published as a partnership between the Center for Public Integrity and Fresnoland

When Arlin Benavides Jr. set out to hear residents’ environmental concerns in one of the most marginalized parts of a region facing water scarcity, groundwater contamination, extreme heat and other woes, he wasn’t sure if people would open their doors, much less talk. 

He was aiming to engage with people in Tulare County in California’s Central Valley, a region known as the food basket of the world and a place with extreme poverty. Many of the residents live in remote, isolated farming hamlets.     

In these far-flung communities, Benavides, an AmeriCorps CivicSpark Fellow working for Tulare County’s Resource Management Agency, discovered that residents felt forgotten by their local government officials. When he explained that he was part of the agency’s effort to develop an environmental justice element for the county’s general plan, he was met with suspicion and skepticism. 

“You could see anger rise within them. They would tell me stories of just not having good experiences — most commonly it was the story that they had told previous government agencies what they needed, what were the challenges, and they felt like those changes were not done soon enough,” said Benavides, whose fellowship was part of a CivicSpark program that aims to help local public agencies address community issues such as climate change, water resource management and housing.

What had changed between those experiences and Benavides showing up on their doorsteps: California started requiring local governments to integrate environmental justice principles into their planning processes. 

The first such law in the nation, Senate Bill 1000 calls for municipal leaders to engage communities in a meaningful way while doing land use work, such as updating general plans, which set priorities for development. Ultimately, the 2016 law aims to address environmental inequities caused by land use policies, such as poor air quality in communities of color hemmed in by industrial facilities. But on the ground, addressing entrenched inequities baked into urban planning policies can be tough.     

In a newly released study, two researchers examined those challenges as municipalities across California implemented SB 1000. It’s an analysis they hope can illuminate efforts across the nation as civic leaders seek solutions for communities burdened by pollution — often Black, Latino, Indigenous and low income.

The study’s authors, Michelle E. Zuñiga and Michael Méndez, said the research was inspired by feedback they heard from community and environmental justice organizations who shared their struggles about how SB 1000 was being implemented and what they described as spotty compliance, particularly in communities facing environmental hazards. 

For example: city or county planners who don’t understand institutional and socio-economic barriers facing residents, or planning managers who aren’t supportive of or in some cases are hostile to incorporating environmental justice into their work. 

Some municipalities argue that existing land use regulations and policies benefit everyone equally, and that explicit environmental justice ordinances or provisions in a general plan are unnecessary, said Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine. 

“Time and time again we see how that is not the case, that urban planning has been used as a racist tool kit to enforce existing disparities within and among communities,” he said.

To determine how the law was being implemented in communities with high levels of cumulative environmental health impacts, Zuñiga and Méndez focused their study on cities and counties with census tracts identified by the state’s environmental health screening tool as the most disadvantaged by pollution, such as toxic releases, groundwater threats, traffic fumes and hazardous waste. 

Results, they found, have been mixed. There are positive outcomes, such as the creation of environmental justice advisory committees in Tulare and other counties. But many obstacles remain. The researchers found that some communities experience ineffective community engagement, little support from elected officials, limited discussions of environmental racism and a lack of resources to implement and monitor the measures needed to comply with the law. 

These challenges mean progress toward environmental justice will be slow and uneven, the authors wrote: “Environmental justice will not be fully realized without strong oversight and political leadership, and racial diversification of urban planning institutions.” 

Their research also affirmed the need for the type of guidance that the California Attorney General’s bureau of environmental justice has issued to local governments about the law. The bureau has done this via comment letters that point out shortcomings in local approaches, but it also provides feedback on how to comply with the law. One of those letters to Tulare County, for example, urged officials not to rush through their general plan amendments before fully engaging with disadvantaged communities.

Attorney General Rob Bonta has also intervened in Fresno, saying in 2022 that Fresno County’s draft general plan raised “civil rights and environmental justice concerns” and pressing Fresno city leaders not to approve a rezoning proposal that would add pollution in “some of the most over-burdened and under-invested environmental justice communities in all of California.”

In some cases,  Zuñiga and Méndez discovered a lack of understanding among planners on how to define environmental justice, so they outlined in the paper how environmental justice is measured, observed and defined. 

Last fall when they presented their preliminary findings at the American Planning Association conference, some planners shared that they’ve faced pushback from leaders in politically conservative municipalities, while others described challenges with implementation in areas with historic under-investment, said  Zuñiga, an assistant professor of urban and community planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Increasingly, she’s seen more planners across the country take on the task of addressing environmental injustices through local government plans, even without laws such as SB 1000.  

“This work is very important, not only for California, where there is a policy mandate, but for other planners in other areas of the country that are taking on this charge as well,” she said. “Because of the push of the community organizations prioritizing environmental justice, they also are pushing for environmental justice plans.”

When Benavides first began his fellowship in Tulare County in late 2019, he decided to reach out to Sacramento County, which had already approved an environmental justice element in their general plan. He wanted to know how they involved community organizations in the process. He learned that Sacramento opted to create an environmental justice advisory committee, a process that he knew would also reinforce the requirements of SB 1000.  

But first Benavides set out to conduct outreach to understand the issues — from housing and food justice to public utilities and transportation — that residents faced. Benavides, a resident of the more affluent Marin County near San Francisco, was shocked by what he found. 

“I didn’t really realize that there were people that didn’t have potable water; that the conditions which [farmworker advocate] Cesar Chavez was trying to improve or ameliorate are still existing in Tulare County,” said Benavides, who was particularly struck by the stark disparities in wealth between farm owners and the working class residents living in unincorporated areas of the county. 

The geographical distances between the county seat of Visalia and these small communities were further deepened by a lack of regular visits from county officials. One woman Benavides spoke to was initially angry as she described how, despite repeated efforts to share the problems facing her community, living conditions either don’t improve at all or don’t improve fast enough. “I think that this is also an ongoing cycle where planners go out into a community to really try to understand people, and then, the moment a plan is developed those relationships are not maintained, those stories are not valued,” said Benavides.

He knows that often this happens because planning agencies may lack the bandwidth or resources to maintain these relationships. But that day, as he spoke to this resident, he decided that no explanation could excuse what she had gone through.

So rather than offer an excuse, he apologized. The woman was so overcome with emotion that she started crying. “I felt like as a representative of local government, it was my due diligence to say, ‘I’m sorry for everything that you’ve experienced,’” he said. 

But he also explained that there was something he could do to help in that instance, and that was to invite her to participate in the environmental justice advisory committee that was being formed as part of the general plan process to develop an environmental element. 

“There is something that I can do for you, and that is to guarantee that you have a seat at the table,” Benavides told her.

Ultimately, Tulare County did create an Environmental Justice Advisory Committee in 2020 to advise its Resource Management Agency. Key to that is providing feedback on the county’s draft environmental justice element and ensuring that it improves the quality of life for disadvantaged communities throughout the county.

When Benavides ended his fellowship in 2020 and passed the baton to the next AmeriCorps CivicSpark fellow, he was glad to know the committee would continue the relationship-building work. 

It’s that level of engagement, he said, where residents’ experiences are not only valued but are imprinted in the land-use planning documents, that can transform lives for the better.  

Inviting residents to collaborate on land use and development was a first step, he said. Equally as important for real change, he told residents, is that “we continue building a relationship after that is done.”

The post Planning for environmental justice for all appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.