Escaping Infrastructure’s Shadow Puppets: Lessons From Equitably Repurposing Public Spaces
Washington has a consensus: American infrastructure is overdue for capital improvements and maintenance. The most fervent debates on this topic have focused on how much funding should be allocated. But the most important discussion, even when it comes to hard infrastructure (e.g., rail, bridges, roads, and sidewalks), should be about how funding should be spent.
Traditionally, federal funds for infrastructure and transportation have been disproportionately allocated to benefit already-prosperous districts, instead of their adjacent, more marginalized neighbors. Failing to apply a rubric for social impact, government funding has appeared to blindly reward professionally-bound grant applications that are amply advocated by well-positioned political champions. By that stale criteria, there is no dispute that infrastructure bears culpability for legacies of segregating communities, spurring blight or displacement, and devastating natural environments. But, deployed thoughtfully, infrastructure improvements have the potential to positively transform the quality of life for entire communities, catalyzing economic opportunities, and making environments more resilient. Thinking critically about the way decision makers at all levels allocate these limited resources -- including, specifically, employing innovative funding criteria to reach places of historic underinvestment -- would help maximize the positive impact of such investments and avoid their historic blunders and devastating outcomes.
A Shift in Federal Grant Award Criteria
Even in the absence of new infrastructure funding, the federal government has begun to allocate the fraction of transportation and infrastructure funds already available to it as impact investments for long-neglected communities. Specifically, this year the United States Department of Transportation (“DOT”) has applied various novel criteria to favor projects poised to make our communities more equitable.
For instance, the DOT recently rebranded its leading transportation infrastructure grant program as the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (“RAISE”) Discretionary Grant. The program, previously known by the acronyms “BUILD” and “TIGER”, has awarded over $8.935 billion in grant funding to projects across all fifty states, since 2009, on such vague selection criteria as “a project’s contribution to improving efficiency of the movement of goods.” According to the published Notice of Funding Opportunity, applicants who submitted their proposals by the July 12, 2021 deadline for fiscal year 2021 now face new selection criteria. The DOT is now prioritizing projects that “result in good-paying jobs, improve safety, apply transformative technology, and explicitly address climate change and racial equity.” Likewise, through the last round of awards in its other prominent grant program, Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (“INFRA”), the DOT has already applied similar “equity” criteria in funding $889 million in projects this year alone.
Still, RAISE and INFRA are but a small percentage of the national infrastructure and transportation budgets. And most federal agencies, including DOT, have little to say about the manner in which the majority of dollars they send to state and local agencies are spent once awards are made. Nonetheless, project leaders at every level should incorporate equitable considerations into their infrastructure improvements.
New Industry Practices in Planning for Equity
The shift in government award criteria is consistent with advances in the urban planning field. Only two years ago, the largest urban planning association in the United States, the American Planning Association (the “APA”), promulgated its first ever Policy Guide specifically tailored with actionable policy recommendations for “equitable” urban planning. Through this “Planning for Equity Policy Guide,” the APA offers an approach to planning that challenges practices and actions that “disproportionately impact and stymie the progress of certain segments of the population.” The policy guide applies an equity lens for planners involved in addressing such topics as mobility, transportation, and public space. While the guide itself is relatively new to the field, developers, planners, and funders are already beginning to use such tools to exercise the great power they have always had to shape a more “just and fair” society “in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential.” Indeed, that is the APA’s very definition of “planning for equity.”
Remedying Prior Infrastructure Investment Follies
As the current government creatively leverages limited resources to uplift our most challenged communities, as Congress works through a pathway forward on various infrastructure-related legislation, and as the APA advances its professional planning toolkit, over 150 projects have been actively revitalizing underutilized infrastructure in cities across the country by remedying the negative externalities of past planning undertaken without an equity lens. See, e.g., “Strategies and Tactics for Early-Phase Infrastructure Reuse Projects,” Vol. 1 (2019). These projects are transforming neglected industrial spaces, including abandoned railways or highways and polluted riverfronts or waterways -- which have too often accelerated blight and contributed to inequality -- into new hybrid forms of reactivated public spaces that uplift neighborhoods. The projects also reconnect neighborhoods that were, in many cases, divided by railways and major roadways by constructing safe multi-modal connections to mass transit, multi-use trails, and greenspace. In short, these projects seek to remedy the follies of prior infrastructure investments.
Leading the way in this effort are projects like The Underline in Miami, the Atlanta BeltLine, the Waterloo Greenway in Austin, the Buffalo Bayou and Bayou Greenways in Houston, the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, the Detroit Riverfront, the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C., and the Philadelphia Rail Park. Learning lessons from prior forays into industrial space reuse that have struggled to curb eco-gentrification, these groups coalesced to share best practices in making positive community impacts -- especially with regard to equity. Through public-private partnerships, projects like these are reinvesting millions of dollars into their local communities and creating thousands of jobs. For instance, one of the Atlanta BeltLine’s principal project goals is to develop nearly six thousand units of affordable and workforce housing. Likewise, the 11th Street Bridge Park has developed its own equitable development plan focused on inclusive investments in long-segregated communities. However counterintuitive these enterprises sound like for park and trail spaces, these efforts are emblematic of the broader impact infrastructure reuse projects can have. These project leaders have learned first-hand that they can build more equitable and inclusive communities by both implementing safe connectivity for neighborhoods and increasing access to more active environments around underutilized infrastructure, which is well-established to increase residents’ physical and mental health.
The Miami Case -- Enabling Safe Access to Ethnically Diverse Residents
Miami’s example, The Underline, is a project delivering and activating a 120-acre, world-class linear park and urban trail spanning 10-miles below Miami’s elevated heavy commuter rail (the “Miami Metrorail”) which, among other goals, enables safer access to mass transit for an approximately half-mile impact zone of nearly 300,000 ethnically-diverse working residents, consisting of over a third of households that earn less than $35,000 in yearly income. In addition to serving as an essential transportation solution enhancing access to valuable jobs for those working residents, The Underline also implements community-centered strategies for increasing neighborhood connectivity, universal design accessibility, and equitable growth -- including advocating for and catalyzing workforce and affordable housing development. Moreover, even programming is designed for inclusion, bringing locally underserved communities to The Underline: this includes through providing canvases for emerging artists, facilitating mentorship programs, as well as enabling platforms for school-aged “budding entrepreneurs.”
Adjusting for inflation, the elevated Miami Metrorail -- which broke ground in 1979 -- was a capital investment of well over a billion dollars shared between local and federal transportation funding sources. By contrast, only a de minimisamount was ever spent on its associated right-of-way below and surrounding that elevated rail that now forms the area of The Underline. Miami-Dade County dedicated its limited resources in this blind spot to largely cutting the spotty grass that grew and keeping the rail guideways clear of arbor foliage. The result of this lack of planning and investment around the mass transit infrastructure investment was a blighted space that, for decades, created barriers to access mass transit for the residents for whom that system was designed. Aside from being unsafe and unwelcoming, communities on each side of the guideway were divided. That condition can be seen clearly in photos before construction of The Underline’s first half-mile demonstration project. Mud, trash, unsanctioned graffiti, dangerous environmental toxins, and even syringes littered the underutilized and unsafe space.
Prior condition of space below Metrorail. Photo Courtesy of Friends of The Underline, Inc.
But, after the redesign and redevelopment, the first phase of The Underline optimized for enhanced safety, lowered first-and-last mile barriers to public transportation, attracted neighbors that previously had limited access to recreational green space, and will add over 4,000 native trees in an urban reforestation effort of remarkable scale that will restore natural habitats and mitigate the urban heat island effect. Crucially, and in contradistinction to typical development efforts, the resulting project was inspiringly designed at the grassroots-level through meeting after meeting in collaboration with the local community.
The Brickell Backyard “Gym” at The Underline. Photo by Author.
The “River Room” at The Underline. Photo by Author.
At The Underline, about twenty feet below one of only two heavy rail rapid transit systems in the southeastern United States, and gracing the face of a humble industrial transmission building -- once only a canvas for unsanctioned graffiti -- twenty-four-year-old Miami-born Haitian-American, Edny Jean-Joseph, was commissioned to paint a seventy foot long mural. Rich in symbolism (utilizing a color scheme that pays homage to Miami’s Bahamian rail workers who first labored in the historic space over 100 years ago), and deft in configuration (employing unmistakably Matisse-inspired abstract cut-out forms), the mural recounts a story told by the Greek philosopher, Plato, in his work The Republic known as “The Allegory of the Cave.”
Edny Jean-Joseph’s mural The Allegory. Photo Courtesy of Friends of The Underline, Inc.
In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato describes a place where people are forced to experience one known reality reflected on the wall of a cave by a light, blind to the rest of the world behind them or outside of the cave. Those figures on the wall represent the world we perceive, which is so often animated by incomplete information, false assumptions, biases, and stubborn adherence to prior practices. According to Plato, someone occasionally breaks free and escapes the cave to learn that there is a better truth outside of the distorted cave wall.
Projects like The Underline, as well as many other infrastructure reuse projects around the country, recount the same story by their own experience (and, yes, even their art): when we escape the proverbial “cave” in infrastructure planning, we see uplifted communities that take equitable considerations seriously in their public infrastructure funding. These public spaces are present-day reminders that by eschewing the shadow puppets that have long governed the way we spend on infrastructure, we can finally provide adequate consideration for community impacts that for years have otherwise been left in a blind spot. We emerge from these limits to build beauty where blind spots had long blighted our underserved communities.
About the Author:
Daniel Balmori (Harvard College A.B. ‘11, Harvard Law School J.D. ‘14) is pro bono counsel to Friends of The Underline, Inc. and The Underline Conservancy, Inc., nonprofit organizations delivering, activating, and maintaining a 120-acre, world-class linear park spanning 10-miles below Miami’s Metrorail that will transform regional mobility and celebrate diversity, culture and lifelong learning. Through innovative urban trails and creative programming, they are connecting people to their environment and each other to create a safe, healthy, equitable, and sustainable community. Admitted to practice law in New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida, Daniel is also a litigator at Hogan Lovells US LLP where he represents clients in a variety of industries in legal fora at every level from small claims through the United States Supreme Court. Daniel also previously gained valuable legal experience working in the nation’s most active and cutting-edge public integrity and civil rights enforcement offices including for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Division at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, and the Public Corruption and Special Prosecutions Unit at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.