E-newsletter 7.1: Race, Equity and Economic Growth

Welcome to the first installment of the Race Equity Project’s e-newsletter for 2012: Race, Equity, and Economic Growth.

The advancement of race equity is often described and discussed as a legal or moral imperative. In this issue, we explore equity in terms of economics, specifically, its potential as an economic driver and stabilizer. In the first article, PolicyLink presents its recently launched framework for thinking about equity and America’s and California’s economic future: Equity is the Superior Growth Model. In the second article, we are treated to an excerpt from Chris Benner’s and Manuel Pastor’s new book, Just Growth: Inclusion and Prosperity in the New Economy, in which the authors determine, based on an analysis of 192 metropolitan regions in the U.S. that strategies and measures that reduce social, geographic, and other disparities actually correlate with broad economic success. Finally, in the third article, we look at how one metropolitan planning agency–the Mid-America Regional Council based in Kansas City, Missouri–is striving to achieve equity in all aspects of its planning with the goal of achieving a sustainable, just and economically vibrant future.

California Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model–By Sarah Treuhaft and Angela Glover Blackwell of PolicyLink and Manuel Pastor of the University of Southern California

Just Growth and the Future of the Next Economy–By Chris Benner of the University of California at Davis and Manuel Pastor of the University of Southern California

Regional Planning in the Heartland: Mid-America Regional Council Works Toward a Sustainable and Equitable Future–By Mona Tawatao featuring David Warm and Dean Katerndahl of the Mid-America Regional Council

Recent posts:

• Bias and the death penalty
• Public Comment on US EPA’s Model Civil Rights Program Open until February 17, 2012
• Study shows majority of states fail to teach the civil rights movement
• Health care equality, it’s more than law
• Digital divide draws lines by color, class, geography
• Latinos disproportionately harmed by air pollution

California Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model

By Sarah Treuhaft, Angela Glover Blackwell, and Manuel Pastor

Written to frame the conversation among 2,300 equity advocates and practitioners at the fourth national PolicyLink Equity Summit 2011 in Detroit, our paper America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model presents a new framework for thinking about equity and America’s economic future. In it, we argue that as the nation witnesses new extremes of inequality alongside the emergence of a new people-of-color majority, equity has become more than a matter of social justice or morality and is now an economic imperative. We suggest some policy directions for building an equitable economy and call for broad-based social movement to advance this agenda.

The summary of the paper below incorporates relevant data on California’s demographic shifts alongside the national statistics. The complete version of the paper can be found at www.policylink.org/EquityIsSuperiorGrowthModel.

America Needs A New Growth Model

The nation’s current economic model is broken. Over the past several decades, economic growth has slowed, racial and income inequality has spiked, and the middle class has withered. America needs a new strategy to bring about robust growth that is widely shared by all who live within its borders.

The new growth model must embrace the nation’s changing demographics, and make the investments needed to allow the next generation to reach its full potential. The U.S. is undergoing a major demographic transformation in which the racial and ethnic groups that have been most excluded are now becoming a larger portion of the population. By 2042, the majority of the population will be people of color. Continue reading. . .

Just Growth and the Future of the Next Economy

By Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor

(An adapted and updated excerpt from the introduction to Just Growth: Inclusion and Prosperity in the New Economy, a new book released in early January 2012 from Routledge Press. See justgrowth.org for more details. )

The financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the lingering Great Recession that resulted have raised some profound questions about the nature of our very economic system. Some have suggested that the meltdown was an inevitable consequence of deregulation and have called for firmer control over the creation and implementation of new financial instruments. Others have pinned the blame on an unsustainable run-up in housing prices and argued that the Federal Reserve should slow future bubbles in asset prices. Still others have pointed to excess consumer demand, particularly in the U.S., and argued that we need to lift our savings rate to a higher and healthier level.

We agree on the need for regulation, protection against asset run-ups, and the need for a more future-oriented approach to savings and investment. However, we would suggest that another element at play in the crisis also deserves attention: income inequality. After all, what emerged in the years before the crisis was a nearly unprecedented – well, except before that other Great Depression – rise in the gap between the rich and the poor. With some so wealthy that they shifted to increasingly speculative investments to place their excess funds and others so strapped that they borrowed to prop up their falling household incomes, the financial trap was set. It could have been better regulated, to be sure, but the fundamental problem was not the market but the distribution that the market confronted. Continue reading. . .

Regional Planning in the Heartland: Mid-America Regional Council Works Toward a Sustainable and Equitable Future

By Mona Tawatao

Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), the council of governments metropolitan planning organization (MPO) serving the greater Kansas City, Missouri region, is recognized as an innovator in equitable and sustainable planning among regional planning bodies around the country. In this December 22, 2011 interview with Mona Tawatao, MARC Executive Director David Warm and Government Innovations Forum Director Dean Katerndahl discuss MARC’s vision and planning work toward achieving equity, sustainability and economic growth in the region.

Can you describe the geography and demographics of the area MARC serves?

Dean Katerndahl: MARC serves two million people in Kansas and Missouri in a region that encompasses the Kansas City, Missouri metropolitan area; nine counties (4 in Kansas and 5 in Missouri ) and 120 cities and towns. We have a 25 percent minority population. Approximately half of that population is African-American, eight to ten percent is Hispanic and about five percent is Asian. The metropolitan center of the region has a higher minority population.

David Warm: We have an interesting dynamic in the metro area. There are more poor white people overall in the MARC region, yet only 20 percent of the white poor live in the areas that are exclusively poor urban core as opposed to 75 percent of the African-American poor, so there is a marked concentration of race-based poverty, especially in the urban core.

What is MARC’s vision for helping to make the region that it serves more equitable and sustainable for its residents?

Warm: MARC’S vision statement is: Greater Kansas City is a sustainable region that increases the vitality of our society, economy, and environment for current residents and future generations.

This statement is the culmination of a fairly intensive vetting and policy development process. I think it articulates a vision of sustainability that is fundamentally rooted in our region’s economic progress, environmental health and social equity. This triple bottom line philosophy is something MARC articulates regularly and endeavors to apply consciously to everything we do. Continue reading. . .

Bias and the death penalty

The bias and discrimination that exists in our society is rampant in our criminal justice system. So says Michelle Alexander in her newly released book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The book details how today it is legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was previously legal to discriminate against African Americans. It argues that incarceration has become the newest form of racial control.

As a part of the criminal justice system, death penalty sentencing is also biased. While there are persistent difficulties with finding data related to bias, partly due to the nature of bias and insufficient data collection, there are studies and cases that point to the nearly arbitrary nature of sentencing.

One relevant study, “The Impact of Legally Inappropriate Factors on Death Sentencing for California Homicides, 1990-1999″ (46 Santa Clara L. Rev. (2005)), is a state-wide study on the role of race, ethnicity and geography in death sentencing in California. The authors, Glenn Pierce and Michael Radelet, reviewed all homicides that occurred in California from 1990-99, using records from the FBI and Vital Statistics. They conclude that the race and ethnicity of the victim and the location of the crime play a critical role in determining who will be sentenced to death.

Key findings of the study include:

• While 27.6% of murder victims are white, 80% of executions in California have been for those convicted of killing whites.
• Those who murder whites are over three times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill African-Americans and over four times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill Latinos.
• Death sentence rates vary substantially from county to county in California and this variation cannot be explained simply based on homicide rates. A person convicted of 1st degree murder in a predominantly white, rural county is more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death than a person convicted of a similar crime in a diverse, urban county.

This year, anti-death penalty groups in California will attempt to abolish the death penalty in part due to the erratic nature of death sentencing. The Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act, or SAFE California Act, would abolish the death penalty, causing prisoners currently sentenced to death to have their sentences commuted to life without the possibility of parole. These prisoners and future prisoners sentenced to life without parole would be required to work and make restitution to the Victims’ Services fund. In addition, the SAFE California Act would create a SAFE California Fund to fund police departments, sheriffs and district attorney offices, in order to increase the rate at which homicide and rape cases may be solved. Organizers must collect 504,000 valid voter signatures by the March 18th deadline to qualify the initiative for the election.

Public Comment on US EPA’s Model Civil Rights Program Open until February 17, 2012

In April 2011, U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, whose blog you can follow here, formed a Civil Rights Executive Committee to review an independent report, authored by the firm, Deloitte Consulting, LLP, and provide recommendations for strengthening EPA’s civil rights program.  The Deloitte Report identified, among others, the following shortcomings in the EPA’s administration of its Title VI external discrimination complaints and compliance program:

1. “Due to this complexity, the Title VI program has struggled to develop a consistent framework to analyze complaints [of discrimination], resulting in a lengthy and time-consuming effort to evaluate the complaints and once accepted, to adequately investigate the cases.”  See, Deloitte Report, at pg. 25.
2. “EPA has not been able to develop a repeatable complaint resolution process and framework” such that the “[Office of Civil Rights] lacks finalized operational documents to govern the program’s internal functions, or to communicate meaningful guidance to external stakeholders.”  See, Deloitte Report, at pg. 25.
3. EPA’s Office of Civil Rights “program staff’s competencies are inconsistent and/or misaligned with the highly technical nature of complex Title VI complaints investigations.”  See, Deloitte Report, at pg. 26.

The recommendations in the Deloitte Report prompted EPA to draft its own Recommendations for Developing a Model Civil Rights Program at the Environmental Protection Agency.  EPA’s proposed recommendations for improving it’s Title VI complaint and compliance program can be found at pp. 12-13 of the draft recommendations.  The Model Civil Rights Program is Attachment 2 to the draft recommendations.  Those recommendations are now available for public review and comment.

Environmental Justice advocates have, for the first time in a long time, an opportunity to contribute to a meaningful internal review and restructuring of the way in which U.S. EPA administers its non-discrimination programs and enforces non-discrimination laws.  Your comments may be sent to Administrator Jackson at jackson.lisap@epa.gov and are due by February 17, 2012.  Let your voice be heard!