The time has always been right to address discrimination in housing. But since the release of the 2018 Brookings report, The devaluation of assets in Black neighborhoods—which showed homes in Black-majority neighborhoods are priced on average $48,000 less than comparable homes in white-majority neighborhoods—research, social activism, and legislative action have spurred a reckoning. The real estate industry has had to reckon with common practices that extract wealth from families simply for living in Black neighborhoods.

Lower home prices in Black neighborhoods reflect how much we value their residents. The problem of housing devaluation requires input from a wide range of actors across multiple sectors, including the people closest to the problem; but they have less resources and power to engage with dominant people who influence policy. Consequently, we must financially incentivize and empower local leaders, firms, and nonprofits to work alongside well-resourced institutions to find a new generation of solutions.

To empower local stakeholders and combat housing devaluation, the Brookings Institution is joining forces with the social entrepreneurship organization Ashoka to provide opportunities and financial incentives of up to $100,000 for people who are proximate to the problem so that additional seats can be pulled up to the decisionmaking table. This collaborative challenge, Valuing Homes in Black Communities, begins this week.

What do we mean by devaluation?

After carefully attending to social conditions like education, crime and walkability, our research found that homes in Black-majority neighborhoods across the country are priced, on average, approximately 23% or $48,000 less than similar homes in similar social conditions in mostly white areas, where the share of the Black population are less than a percent. In some specific metropolitan areas, the price difference is even more pronounced. For instance, in the Lynchburg, Va. metropolitan area, we see an -81% difference between average home prices in Black-majority and white neighborhoods. In the Rochester, N.Y. metro area, there is a -65% difference. In the metro area with the largest Black population, Detroit, Mich., there is a -37% disparity.

For the millions of residents who live in Black-majority neighborhoods, this devaluation means less money for critical municipal services like public schools and policing. Less equity in a home translates into less cash for ever-increasing college tuition, thus leading to more student loan debt. And lower value on our homes also means less capital to start a business. Our research finds that the $156 billion in lost revenue could have started 4.4 million businesses, based on the average amount of capital Black people use to start their firms.

Since the release of this report, there have been congressional hearings, additional studies and news reports corroborating our conclusion that racial bias significantly influences home values. The Biden Administration has acknowledged Brookings’s devaluation research in various memoranda, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced an interagency task force on appraisals. This came right before the government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac released a study showing systemic racial bias among appraisers. The acknowledgement of this issue by the highest levels of government is appreciated and encouraging. But we believe that solutions must come from people who experience and combat discrimination on the daily basis.

Correcting home values must go beyond appraisal regulation

After our devaluation report was released, people’s attention immediately shifted to the appraisal industry. Appraisers are the professionals who explicitly assess value. So, it is understandable why the industry garnered scrutiny. In 2019, one of this blog’s authors testified in Congress along with representatives from the Appraisal Institute and the Appraisal Foundation, two organizations that help certify and regulate appraisal professionals. When Rep. Al Green of Texas asked the panel to raise our hand if we believe “discrimination plays a role in the devaluation of property in neighborhoods that are predominated with minorities,” I was the only one who raised a hand.

If you have a structural innovation that fully values homes in Black communities, please join the Ashoka-Brookings collaborative challenge to win up to $100,000 to help solve for housing devaluation.

Since then, numerous news stories have surfaced that show the intrinsic value of whiteness expressed in biased appraisals. In 2020, the New York Times reported on the Jacksonville, Fla. couple, Abena (who is Black) and Alex (who is white) Horton, who had their home appraised. They believed that the appraisal was too low. So, they got a second appraisal. However, during this second round, the couple staged the appraisal appointment so that Alex was present instead of Abena, while the couple had purposefully removed all signs of Abena and their biracial son. The second appraisal yielded a 40% higher value than the first appraisal.

In 2020 in Indianapolis, amid the pandemic, Carlette Duffy sensed that appraisals on her home in the Black-majority Flanner House Homes neighborhood, west of downtown Indianapolis, had come in too low. After removing pictures, books and clothing—or scrubbing the Blackness from her home—and getting a white stand-in, her appraisal came in $134,000 higher. Numerous other stories have been published in places throughout the nation showing racial bias in appraisals.

While appraisals are certainly involved in lower home values, they are not the only actors influencing price. Lenders, real estate agent behavior, elected officials and public policies, biased labor markets as well other predatory housing practices also contribute to the problem of devaluation. Consequently, we need a suite of innovations based on people who are intimate with the issue.

The Ashoka-Brookings Challenge

We believe that no one understands the issue of housing devaluation better than the advocacy groups, firms and institutions who have been working to remove the everyday policies and practices that extract wealth and opportunity from residents, throttling their growth. We also believe that devaluation reflects discrimination throughout housing markets. Consequently, we are interested in innovations that address low appraisals, mortgage rates and insurance costs.

In addition, the country needs structural innovations that enable development without displacement; make it possible for people of all incomes to live and work in the same place; and push back against the increasing prevalence of financial landlords and the widespread use of eviction proceedings that accompany it.

If you have a structural innovation that fully values homes in Black communities and/or are connected to a community of innovators, please join the Ashoka-Brookings collaborative challenge to solve for housing devaluation. Participate in the opportunity to win funding of up to $100,000 to help drive change forward.

Participants can submit applications from now until January 13th on the Valuing Homes in Black Communities competition website. We are looking for applications from innovators who are advancing policy-based and market-based change on the local, regional and/or national scale. Participants will have a chance to win funding of up to $100,000. Participants who submit their application by December 2nd may also qualify for additional funding of up to $15,000 along with guaranteed advancement to the semifinalist round.

Past and present exclusionary policies and practices like redlining, racial housing covenants, single family zoning ordinances, and neighborhood level price-comparison approaches to valuation impact today’s home values. Correcting housing markets will require initiatives that encourage inclusion rather than exclusion and seek restoration of the value extracted by racism. The Ashoka-Brookings Collaborative Innovation Challenge on devaluation does just that.

      

While there is much discussion about the future of big city populations, the 2020 Census shows that, when looking at the 2010-2020 decade, many major cities grew faster than the previous decade and most registered increased racial diversity. And as is the case for the nation as a whole, their youth population becomes far more racially diverse.

This analysis of America’s 50 largest cities, home to more than 50 million residents, demonstrates that for most, racial and ethnic diversity will be their signature demographic trait, with persons identifying as Latino or Hispanic, Asian American, or two or more races accounting for most of their growth as “white flight” and “Black flight” have occurred more modestly than in recent decades.

A decade-wide uptick in big city growth

Big city growth over the past several decades has been shaped by economic booms and busts. The 1990s saw high growth in many large cities bolstered by strong immigration and economic forces, only to decline in the 2000-2010 decade as their populations dispersed to the suburbs and smaller-sized places due to heated housing and job markets elsewhere. Of the nation’s 50 largest cities, 37 grew more slowly in the early 2000s than in the 1990s, including nine of the 10 with populations exceeding 1 million. As a group, these 50 cities grew about half much in the 2000-2010 decade (5.6%) than they did in the 1990s (10.9%).

The new 2020 census numbers reveal a return to large city growth in the 2010s decade.  Eight of the 10 million-plus cities bested their early 2000s growth, including New York, which registered a 7.7% gain, and led by Phoenix and Houston, at rates of 11.2% and 9.8% respectively.

Among all 50 big cities, 32 grew more rapidly than in the 2000-2010 decade (download Table A).¹ The highest growth rates were among cities in the South and West, led by Texas cities, Fort Worth and Austin, at 24% and 22%, followed by Seattle, Charlotte, and Denver. Atlanta showed the largest cross-decade growth gain—from 0.8% in 2000-2010 to 18.7% in 2010-2020. Only four of these big cities—Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Memphis—registered losses for the decade.

It is important to remember that some of these big city gains were front-loaded in the early 2010s due to the arrival of young movers, especially millennials, in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 Great Recession; a period when suburban and small city housing and employment opportunities were less available. As the decade wore on, big city growth faded in many areas as the economy revived elsewhere, even before the start of the 2020 COVID pandemic.

But over the decade, the 2010s were good for big cities, increasing the sizes of almost all of them. A major reason why this occurred is due to the contributions of nonwhite racial and ethnic groups who continue to find cities attractive destinations.

Big cities became even more diverse

The results of the 2020 census made plain that nonwhite racial and ethnic groups—especially people identifying as Latino or Hispanic, Asian American, or with two or more races—accounted for most of the national growth in the past decade. This was also case for a majority of big cities which, as a group, became even more racially diverse over the 2010-2020 decade.

This can be seen by comparing the national race-ethnic profile with that of the aggregated 50 city population over the past three censuses.  Much more than the U.S. population, the nation’s big city population included a higher representation of nonwhite racial groups already in 2000. For a good part of the 20th century, white and Black residents constituted the largest populations of U.S. cities; yet this changed as Latino or Hispanic populations became much more prominent. This is increasingly the case with the Asian American population as well.

In 2000, the white population represented over half of residents in 25 of these 50 cities; this fell to 17 cities in 2010 and 14 cities in 2020. Newly designated minority-white cities since 2010 are Jacksonville, Fla., Tulsa, Okla., and Oklahoma City. Yet even the “whitest” big cities in 2020, Portland, Ore., Colorado Springs, Colo., and Omaha, Neb. were less than 70% white (download Table B).

Among the 36 big cities where the white population is less than half of the population, Latinos or Hispanics constitute the largest race-ethnic population in 12, with greatest shares in El Paso, Texas Miami, and San Antonio, where more than six in 10 residents identify as Latino or Hispanic. Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas, each with large Latino or Hispanic populations, are included among these 12.

Black residents outnumber any other race or ethnic group in seven cities, led by Detroit where more than three quarters of all residents identify as Black. Other cities where Black residents comprise the largest share of the population include Memphis, Tenn. Baltimore, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia.

In the remaining 17 of these 36 “minority white” cities, white residents represented the biggest racial group though still comprising less than half of the population. For example, in Chicago white residents comprise 31.4% of the population, higher than any other race or ethnic group, but only slightly higher than residents identifying as Latino or Hispanic (29.8%) or Black (28.7%) Likewise in other cities, including New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Boston, white residents comprise less than half of the population but a greater share than any other racial or ethnic group.

In most of these cities, the white share of the population has continued to decline—among 45 of the 50 cities between 2000 and 2010, and among 44 between 2010 and 2020 (download table B). For example, in the city of Las Vegas white residents comprised 58% of city residents in 2000. This fell to 48% in 2010 and to 40% in 2020. Other cities which showed similarly large declines in white population shares are Tulsa, Okla., Indianapolis, Columbus, Ohio, and Jacksonville, Fla. However, over this same period, a few big cities showed small increases in the white population shares, including Washington D.C., Atlanta, Oakland, Calif., and Denver.

’New minority’ gains vs. white and Black flight

The increased diversity shown for most big cities is the consequence of race-ethnic shifts heavily impacted by movement into and out of these cities of different groups as well as natural demographic growth (the increase of births over deaths).² Some of this involves the growth of what I have termed “new minorities”—Latinos or Hispanics, Asian Americans, and persons identifying with two or more racial groups”—whose growth rates nationally have dwarfed those of other groups in recent decades, due in part to the rise of immigration from Latin America and Asia.

Yet big city populations have also been affected by changes in other racial and ethnic groups, especially white and Black. There has been a longstanding “white flight” to suburbs since at least the 1950s in many American cities and more recently a “Black flight” trend that became most prominent in the 2010-2020 decade.

Recent changes in the race-ethnic makeup of America’s big cities have been impacted by each of these components but especially “new minorities.”  Over the 2010-2020 decade, the aggregated 50 city populations gained 1.5 million from persons identifying as Latino or Hispanic, 1.1 million from Asian Americans, and nearly 1 million from those identifying as two or more races. This stands in contrast with a small overall gain in the aggregated white population and modest decline for Black residents.

These aggregate patterns reflect different gains for individual cities (download Table C). The biggest contribution to 2010-2020 gains in the vast majority of cities (29) came from the Latino or Hispanic population. This includes cities with long-standing Latino or Hispanic populations such as Houston, San Antonio, and Phoenix, as well as cities where the Latino or Hispanic population is not dominant (e.g. Philadelphia, Memphis, Tenn., Baltimore, Milwaukee) but increasingly dependent on Latino or Hispanic populations for growth or stasis.

In seven cities, New York, Chicago, San Jose, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston, Asian American residents contributed the most of all race-ethnic groups to 2010-2020 gains. And in four, most notably Los Angeles, the two-or-more-race population was the biggest contributor.

Unlike the above-mentioned groups, which contributed to at least some growth in most big cities, contributions of white and Black residents were more uneven. White populations gained in only 28 of the 50 cities and contributed more than any other group in just eight: Denver, Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas, Atlanta, Raleigh, N.C., Omaha, Neb., and Minneapolis. And while the Black population grew in 27 cities, it was the biggest contributor in just two, Columbus, Ohio an Arlington, Texas. In the rest, including those with substantial Black populations, other racial and ethnic groups made bigger contributions.

The new census numbers reveal modest changes in the long-standing “white flight” and more recent “Black flight” phenomena. While 22 cities showed white population losses in 2010-2020, this is fewer than those in the previous two decades (34 cities in 2000-2010 and 30 in 1990-2000). And overall, fewer cities showed large white losses than in earlier decades (download Table D). For example, in the 1990s, six cities lost more than 100,000 white residents, led by New York (-361,000) and Los Angeles (-200,000). In contrast, the cities that lost the most whites in 2010-2020 were Indianapolis (-36,000) and San Jose (-35,000).

As discussed earlier, Black city population losses were more widespread in the 2000-2010 decade than in the 1990s—as the number of Black-loss cities rose from 13 to 20 and added up to an overall 50-city Black population loss. While 23 cities lost Black populations in the most recent decade, the magnitude of this loss declined for the 50 cities as well as several individual cities (download Table D). For example, in the cities with the largest Black losses in 2010-2020, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif. lost considerably fewer Black residents in 2010-2020. Still a few more cities have joined the “Black flight” list.

Child populations are the most diverse

The 2020 census results made clear that racial and ethnic diversity is more pronounced for the nation’s youth than the adult population. For the first time, more than half of the child (under age 18) population identifies with a nonwhite group.

Most big cities have already achieved youthful diversity, but this has become more pronounced with the new census numbers. As a group, the youth population of the aggregated 50 cities were already decidedly “minority white” in 2000 with just 29% identifying as white alone. This became reduced to 25% in 2020 such that the combined Latino or Hispanic, Asian American and two or more race population rose to more than half of the youth population.  Although the adult population of these cities also became diverse it is important to understand the sharp diversity differences between adults and children, as observed in selected large cities shown in Figure 3.

When looking at the individual cities, only two of the 50, Colorado Springs, Colo. and Portland, Ore., had white majority youth populations in 2020, down from 7 in 2010 and 13 in 2000 (download Table E). Cities with white shares of their youth population below 15% were Detroit, El Paso, Texas, Memphis, Tenn., Milwaukee, Long Beach, Calif., Fresno, Calif., Miami, San Antonio, and Houston. Latinos or Hispanics represented the largest youth race or ethnic group in 25 cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Boston. Black youth were the most populous youth race or ethnic group in 10 cities, including Atlanta, Baltimore, and Philadelphia; and in one city, San Francisco, Asian Americans are the largest of all racial and ethnic groups among youth.

Not all city youth population became “less white” over the course of the 2010-2020 decade. Small increases among white child shares were observed in 16 cities led by Washington D.C., Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, and Oakland. White child shares in these cities continue to remain small and the modest changes are due either to notable white population gains over the 2010-2020 decade or a decline in other racial groups.

Big cities as a model of the nation’s future demography

For much of recent history, big cities have led the nation in reflecting increased racial and ethnic diversity. For many decades, a large number of cities had primarily white and Black populations—a phenomenon accentuated by racial housing discrimination which has historically prevented city Black residents from moving to the suburbs. Now, the impact of white and Black city flight is being eclipsed by the growth of Latino or Hispanic and Asian American populations as well as those identifying with two more races. These groups have helped contribute to city gains in the last decade and could provide a roadmap to the ways the nation’s population will change in the years ahead. One aspect of these shifts that is especially noteworthy is the pronounced racial diversity of these cities’ youth populations. It means that urban schools and other institutions that serve families with children will be on the forefront of understanding the needs of the next generation of multicultural Americans.

      

The “Rebirth of 1800 St. Bernard” took place last year on a chilly December day by New Orleans standards. Attendees wore protective masks and socially distanced—a difficult feat with at least 100 people present. That day represented more than a groundbreaking for residents of New Orleans’ Seventh Ward; it promised the revival of a community anchor in the majority-Black neighborhood that had been decimated by Hurricane Katrina more than 15 years prior.

At the center of this rebirth was the Vaucresson Sausage Company: a small business on St. Bernard Avenue founded by a Black family in New Orleans 120 years ago. Vaucresson Sausage had been a long-standing community anchor in the Seventh Ward, but flooding caused by levee failures following Hurricane Katrina transformed the building from a lively commercial space to a derelict and blighted property. For the past 15 years, Vance Vaucresson, the third-generation owner of the business, had struggled to find funding and partners willing to assist in the redevelopment of the building—a challenge that many Black business owners face nationwide. As the years multiplied, the Seventh Ward lost more of its Black-owned businesses and began to experience the displacement of long-time residents.

It is with these challenges that the mission of the Crescent City Community Land Trust (CCCLT) intersects with Vance Vaucresson’s business goals and the Seventh Ward community. We saw the redevelopment of the sausage factory as not just about brick and mortar redevelopment, but as a pathway to restore Black businesses, stimulate economic development, reinvigorate culture, and provide permanently affordable housing.

Not your typical community land trust

CCCLT focuses on projects that promote racial equity, pro-active community stewardship, and permanently affordable commercial and rental spaces. We were founded in 2011 as a direct response to the city’s housing crisis: Katrina and the levee failures had almost overnight damaged or destroyed 70% of the city’s housing stock. More than five years later, there was little improvement—with housing prices skyrocketing and more and more families, especially Black families, becoming cost-burdened.

Black people developed the community land trust (CLT) model more than 50 years ago as a way to preserve and expand land holdings through collective ownership. Today there are at least 277 CLTs in the United States. Here’s how CLTs work for single family homes:

• The CLT owns and develops the land and the trust is made up of community members.
• A CLT purchaser buys the structure, and leases the land (at CCCLT, the lease is normally for 99 years).
• Because the sales price is based on the structure and not the property, it is much more affordable than market-rate homes in the same area.
• This allows for the family to build equity in the structure (i.e. generational wealth) and for the community to preserve affordability because when the home is resold, it’s done under a formula that splits the anticipated increase in property values to both the owner and the community as represented by the land trust.

Unlike the typical CLT, CCCLT recognizes the need not only for more affordable homeownership—but for subsidized apartments, incubator-like commercial spaces, community stewardship, and housing advocacy. For instance, our first major project was the co-development of the historic Pythian building in downtown New Orleans—which had been a mecca for Black-owned businesses, entertainment, and culture in the early part of the 20th century. We worked with co-developers to revitalize the building—which had fallen into disrepair—into 69 apartments, including 25 affordable workforce rate apartments. Unlike many affordable apartment projects that use tax credits and go back to market rate once their compliance time frame has passed, these 25 apartments are permanently affordable.

While the majority of CLTs are focused on single family housing, our equitable commercial developments give start-up entrepreneurs affordable leases, allowing the community to help preserve small family-owned businesses like Vaucresson. A recent Brookings report detailed the broad promise of commercial community ownership models, citing their ability to support the growth of local businesses and distribute wealth intergenerationally.

The importance of stewardship

For all the potential benefits, the redevelopment and co-ownership of brick and mortar buildings is inadequate without proactive community stewardship: intentional efforts to empower residents with information and tools to grow intergenerational wealth through higher incomes, asset appreciation, and entrepreneurship.

We recently completed the region’s first single-family CLT home community in the Lower Ninth (L9) Ward—where 90% percent of our buyers are Black, many are native to the neighborhood pre-Hurricane Katrina, and many are first-time homebuyers. The community stewardship with our future L9 buyers began long before these CLT homes were sold. Working with our partners, Home by Hand, Neighborhood Development Foundation, Capital One, HOPE Credit Union, and HomeBank, we trained prospective homebuyers on the CLT model of affordability, provided a 12-hour homebuying workshop, and direct counseling to improve credit issues. Research indicates that this third-party support and training can help residents withstand economic shock and retain homeownership.

Stewardship is also at the heart of the 1800 St. Bernard project. Vaucresson Sausage had been a robust small business before Hurricane Katrina, but when the family tried to access capital and assistance to redevelop their property in the wake of devastation, they were shut out along with many other Black businesses in the post-Katrina world. The Vaucresson’s do not need CCCLT’s help to run their sausage making business, but what we bring to the table is pre-development capital; relationships with funders, financiers, and the local real estate community; knowledge of real estate development; and help in growing their brand—with the ultimate end goal of growing intergenerational wealth. Now, Vance Vaucresson has that same knowledge, and as his partner, CCCLT will be there in the long term. Because of this partnership, 1800 St. Bernard will open in early 2022— featuring Vaucresson Café Creole and two permanently affordable apartments.

The Community Land Trust 2.0

This idea of the “CLT 2.0”—including a focus on renters and commercial spaces, not just single family homes—is gaining popularity throughout the nation. Black communities and other marginalized groups are evolving CLTs and expanding community ownership in real estate to fight structural racism and produce opportunities for wealth generation. CCCLT is proud to be part of the new movement.

You cannot pass a good time in New Orleans without serving good food—even during a pandemic. There should be no surprise about what we served at the “Rebirth of 1800 of St. Bernard”: Vaucresson hot sausage po-boys and their Creole jambalaya—the best New Orleans has to offer. But as good as our city’s cuisine is, CCCLT wants New Orleans to be known for more than just food and good times. We want to be known for how our city solves its affordable housing crisis, how we assist emerging, often under-resourced entrepreneurs of color, and how we help families and those entrepreneurs move toward generational solutions and generational wealth.

      

While local governments, developers, and communities usually lead placemaking efforts, the state of Michigan stands out for its embrace of place-based policy as a key economic development strategy. The state’s motivation is clear—after globalization and technological change undermined the state’s core economic strengths, and the Great Recession sent the economy into a tailspin, the state needed a new set of community investment tools to accelerate its transition to the new, knowledge-based economy.

The results are promising: A recent Dynamo Metrics’ report on the Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s Community Development Incentives (CDI) programs found that its placemaking and place-based investments produced improvements in neighborhoods and commercial corridors by increasing occupancy rates and property values by $659 million in residential and $3.2 billion in commercial buildings from 2008 to 2019.

Although these results are encouraging—particularly in a state managing such a dramatic economic transition—evaluating the impact of placemaking by measuring property values and occupancy rates is insufficient. As Hanna Love and Cailean Kok pointed out, these traditional measures alone do not adequately capture the comprehensive effects of place-based investments, particularly for underserved community members. Higher property values may benefit some property owners and boost revenue streams for state and local governments, but they could disadvantage renters and local business tenants by limiting accessibility and affordability.

To achieve the broader range of positive impact possible with place-based investments, policymakers at all levels should take an integrated approach to transformative placemaking, which enables them to design their strategies and evaluate their results more holistically.

A new report, “State resilience and recovery: Strategies to reduce inequality and promote prosperity by creating better places,” from the Bass Center argues that states can advance transformative placemaking strategies to improve the lives and livelihoods of their residents, providing examples of successful state-level efforts. By exercising their full range of powers, states can dramatically affect the economic, physical, social, and civic conditions in places by granting new authorities, making investments, enabling collaboration, and modelling their own behavior.

Here are a few highlights of how Michigan is using state policy to transform its places. These examples show how other states can leverage their own assets to catalyze revitalization by finding creative ways to finance projects and engage diverse stakeholders.

SmartZones

Through its SmartZones program, the state of Michigan authorizes local governments to create tax increment financing districts and a local development finance agency and provides specialized funding to promote the creation of high-tech clusters. The state also encourages collaboration between multiple localities and entities by giving priority consideration to plans that involve public, private, and non-profit partners including universities.

Michigan currently supports 20 SmartZones as connected, innovative economic ecosystems that are leveraging and empowering local assets, including local institutions, entrepreneurs, and residents. For instance, companies assisted by Ann Arbor Spark, a non-profit intermediary in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti SmartZone, created 5,900 jobs and received $926.7 million in new investment between 2014 and 2019.

While nurturing an innovative economic ecosystem is a primary goal of the SmartZones program, the following two programs focus on redeveloping community places located in traditional downtowns and commercial districts.

Redevelopment Ready Communities

The Redevelopment Ready Communities program builds the capacity of communities to make them more competitive and ready for development. In addition to financial support, the state of Michigan conducts an assessment and provides training in current best practices in economic development. In their best practices the state clearly sets expectations and promotes a more inclusive, sustainable vision for communities. For example,  best practices include:

• The downtown or corridor plan includes mixed-use and pedestrian-oriented development elements.
• The ordinance allows mixed-use buildings by-right in designated areas of concentrated development.
• The plan identifies key stakeholders, including those not normally at the visioning table.

Moreover, the state recently updated the structure and best practices of the program based on the inputs it received from communities and partners. This can serve as a model for behavior, encouraging local governments and partners to engage more with their community and partners and consider their feedback throughout the decisionmaking process.

Public Spaces Community Places

Even though the Dynamo Metrics evaluation of the Public Spaces Community Places program focused on the program’s traditional economic value, the program actually provides an excellent example of a transformative place-based strategy.

In 2014, Michigan launched a creative crowd-granting program with private partner Patronicity to revitalize or create public spaces based on the understanding that a quality place is a critical component of retaining local talent and attracting investment. Under the program, the state provides matching grant funds to communities for eligible projects that can raise additional resources by crowdfunding. This financing mechanism not only enables community members and local organizations to be more engaged in placemaking process but also fosters community pride as they become more invested.

In addition, the state requires applicant communities at least to engage in the Redevelopment Ready Communities program. By doing so, the state can ensure that community efforts are aligned with the community’s needs and goals and that they can maintain momentum for revitalizing their places.

Through these intersecting programs, the state of Michigan helps communities struggling with economic transition and disinvestment to improve their economies and built environments, create community vitality, and strengthen their capacity to design and implement placemaking strategies.

Other states should take a page from Michigan’s playbook, seizing this potentially historic moment: Last month, the House Budget Committee advanced the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act, describing the legislation as “the transformative investments at the scale necessary to meet the needs of the American people.” To genuinely transform their communities, rather than simply channeling these funds through status quo frameworks and programs, states should learn from each other and invest in place-based policies like those showcased in the Bass Center report. They are proven models for making communities more prosperous, vibrant, connected to opportunity, and resilient to the challenges yet to come.

      

More than half of the world’s children are growing up in cities. By 2030, up to 60 percent of the world’s urban population will be under 18 years old. Yet, children and families are often invisible to urban planners, developers, and architects when creating city-wide policies that impact transportation, air and noise pollution, and health and well-being. “The truth is that the vast majority of urban planning decisions and projects take no account of their potential impact on children and make no effort to seek children’s views…All too often, this is down to a simple lack of respect for children’s rights or abilities,” writes Tim Gill in his recent book “Urban Playground.”

A critical component of child-friendly urban planning is prioritizing opportunities for learning and healthy development both in and out of school. This is especially important for children living in communities challenged by decades of discrimination and disinvestment. Deep inequalities plague the education systems in many countries, and the COVID-19 pandemic has widened existing educational equity in worrisome ways. In the U.S., persistent economic disparities among families lead to large differences in educational outcomes. Research shows that as early as age 3, children from lower-income households lag behind their more affluent peers in language and spatial skills.

To address both of these needs, cities around the world are beginning to invest in Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL)—installations and programming that promote children and families’ learning through play in the public realm. The climate for building on this momentum could not be more favorable, or the timing more urgent. In the wake of COVID-19, growing numbers of leaders understand the need to rethink neighborhood investments to enhance health, well-being, and economic opportunity—and to reexamine old views on how and where children develop the competencies and skills needed to thrive—and ask how to build on a community’s fund of knowledge to reduce inequities through culturally-informed spaces. In the U.S., these leaders have a once-in-a-generation chance to channel American Rescue Plan funds for innovations in child development and learning—while making cities more vibrant and inclusive.

As the PLL movement continues to grow, we need more expansive ways to measure its impacts, and to use that information both to improve PLL installations and to garner greater investment in them.

We know from existing installations that PLL is effective at enhancing STEM and literacy skills and increasing child-caregiver interaction in ways that build social and mental capitol. But as the PLL movement continues to grow, we need more expansive ways to measure its impacts, and to use that information both to improve PLL installations and to garner greater investment in them. This brief presents the first iteration of a new metrics framework city-level policymakers, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropies can use to help assess the positive effects of PLL on learning outcomes, as well as its potential to enhance social interaction and public life in revitalized spaces.

A new approach to child-friendly urban design: Playful Learning Landscapes

PLL is an emerging, interdisciplinary area of study and practice that reimagines the potential of cities as supportive ecosystems for children and families by marrying urban design and placemaking with the science of learning. The Brookings Institution, in collaboration with Temple University and the Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network (PLLAN), is building an interdisciplinary community of practice and responding to the growing interest of stakeholders and decisionmakers around the world to generate evidence and guidance for scaling the PLL approach.

PLL uses human-centered co-design to create learning opportunities in bus stops, parks, and supermarkets and other everyday places—transforming them into enriching, social spaces for children, families, and communities. What makes PLL unique is the critical element of playful learning—a spectrum of child-directed play methods that include free play (no direct adult involvement), guided play (supported by adults toward a learning goal), and games (rule-based activities with learning goals) informed by the latest findings in developmental science. Guided play—the focus of interactions in PLL—allows children to maintain agency during their play with the guidance of an adult to provide structure and focus the activity around a learning goal (e.g., a well-curated exhibit in a children’s museum).

Scaling playful learning in cities

A growing number of cities around the world—including Philadelphia, Chicago, Santa Ana, CA, London, Mumbai, and others—are embracing PLL to support children’s learning outcomes and promote urban renewal, but efforts to scale and sustain these interventions are nascent. To fully realize the potential benefits of PLL, cities need more than a handful of installations placed sporadically around the landscape. To get to scale, municipalities instead must start infusing playful learning principles and design elements into the mainstream practices of government, businesses, and other organizations.

To this end, last year we outlined the steps city-level decisionmakers and stakeholders must take to create rich playful learning environments. These include fostering better coordination among city agencies to support the integration of playful learning efforts into new and existing programs and projects, streamlining regulatory and other processes to make it easier for nonprofits and other groups to implement PLL installations and activities, and collaborating with national organizations that are supporting local efforts. Scaling also requires engaging with neighborhood residents as equal partners in all phases of a project to ensure that designs meet their needs and preferences and communicating the why and how of playful learning to expand its reach and impact.

Brookings now seeks to address key gaps in cities’ knowledge, networks, and capacity and inform strategies that integrate PLL into mainstream urban planning and placemaking—bringing it to scale.

For city leaders, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropy to put time and resources into expanding PLL, they need hard evidence that it works. This requires a framework that outlines the desired outcomes of PLL and a set of metrics for measuring whether or not those outcomes are achieved.

Measuring Playful Learning Landscapes outcomes

For city leaders, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropy to put time and resources into expanding PLL, they need hard evidence that it works. This requires a framework that outlines the desired outcomes of PLL and a set of metrics for measuring whether or not those outcomes are achieved. As Senior Fellow Jenny Perlman-Robinson wrote in a Brookings report on PLL in Philadelphia, “Without clarity about definitions of success or without clearly defined metrics for measuring outcomes, it will be challenging to motivate and inform change at large scale.” Moreover, more robust evaluation will help communities know if individual PLL sites are working as intended, which will inform improvements to current as well as future sites.

There is now ample evidence that PLL supports several learning goals. For example, existing research shows that PLL promotes the kinds of caregiver-child behaviors and interactions directly related to later progress in social, STEM and literacy skills. Aside from these learning outcomes, we also must build on what we know about the benefits of public space investments to better understand how PLL installations can help improve the public realm, provide new opportunities for social interaction, and contribute to community cohesion (Box 1).

To advance this knowledge, Brookings and its partners have developed a framework and an initial set of indicators from both learning science and placemaking perspectives to define success criteria. Our “Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework” will help evaluate the impact of pilot projects and guide iteration, scaling, and adaptation of PLL to future sites.

Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework

Our work to create a PLL metrics framework began with a landscape analysis to survey existing frameworks and tools around measurement and evaluation of playful learning in cities. To create goals and metrics from the child development perspective, we turned to the rich and growing body of research that demonstrates PLL increases caregivers’ attitudes about the connection between play and learning, promotes the kinds of caregiver-child communication that support relationship building and language learning, and encourages talk about numbers, letters, and spatial relations.

In addition, three placemaking and urban design frameworks inspired and helped shape our approach and selected metrics.

• The Place Diagram (Project for Public Spaces (PPS)): Through their work evaluating public spaces across the world, PPS identified four qualities of successful public spaces: (1) The spaces are accessible; (2) people engage in a range of activities there; (3) the space has a positive image and is comfortable; and (4) it is sociable and welcoming. The framework also prompts the user to ask key questions in assessing each of the qualities. For example, asking “Do sidewalks lead to and from the adjacent areas?” or “Does the space function for people with special needs” to address accessibility.
• KaBOOM! Play Everywhere: Understanding Impact (Gehl): To examine the impact of KaBOOM!’s Play Everywhere initiative—implemented across 50 U.S. cities—Gehl used a multimethod approach including on-site observations, interviews with stakeholders, and intercept and neighborhood surveys to understand who visits the sites, what they do when visiting, and how they feel about the sites. Through this work, Gehl identified four key components of a successful Play Everywhere project: (1) proximity to existing kid “hubs” (where families live and spend time); (2) incorporation of kids’ perspectives into the design and implementation process early and often; (3) prioritization of interactive designs that spark curiosity and imagination; and (4) messaging that it’s okay to play in many different spaces (e.g., at the bus stop or on the sidewalk).
• Measuring the Civic Commons (Reimagining the Civic Commons): Reimagining the Civic Commons designed a measurement system to examine the impact of investments in public spaces and the surrounding communities towards four key goals: civic engagement, socioeconomic mixing, environmental sustainability, and value creation. Within each goal are “signals”—indicators associated with a project’s objectives, and each of those signals has a set of metrics designed to understand changes such as average hourly visitorship of the site, number of trees in civic commons sites, and percent of respondents who say they feel safe in the neighborhood.

While the resources described above were all instrumental in shaping the development of our metrics framework, we adopted the approach of mapping metrics to signals and the signals in turn to goals (inspired by the Measuring the Civic Commons framework) because it allowed us to integrate both the child development and placemaking perspectives of PLL into one framework (Box 2). Our metrics framework has the following five goals:

1. Promote healthy child development and learning: Sparks playful and meaningful experiences that support child-caregiver interactions known to promote cognitive and social-emotional learning and positive development.
2. Support an accessible and welcoming public realm: Offers a physical space that is easy and convenient to access, feels safe and inviting to visitors, and reflects community cultures and values.
3. Foster a vibrant and inclusive social environment: Cultivates an engaging public realm that promotes social interaction among children and adults of all incomes and backgrounds.
4. Nurture civic engagement and strong sense of community: Builds neighborhood pride and community cohesion through the cocreation and ongoing oversight of PLL sites.
5. Strengthen the economic health and resiliency of neighborhoods: Has a positive impact on the surrounding community, including local businesses, property owners, and residents.

Box 2. PLL metrics framework at a glance

Note: The full framework can be found here.

Challenges and next steps

The “Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework” is a key step toward generating data that are critical for scaling by helping to define the desired outcomes of playful learning in public and shared spaces, and importantly, how they are measured. But measuring the impact of public spaces isn’t easy—getting the metrics “right” is likely to be an ongoing effort, and data collection itself is often messy and time intensive. Our framework employs a range of qualitative methods including observation, intercept, and neighborhood surveys, each of which can be difficult to design and employ, especially in communities where trust in local government is low and residents may be wary of interacting with outsiders.

As the PLL movement gains momentum, generating evidence to demonstrate its impact will be key to strengthening the field and shifting mindsets among key stakeholders and city-level decisionmakers to weave playful learning into the fabric of city policies.

In the next phase of work, Brookings—together with its partners—will pilot the PLL metrics framework to explore research questions such as:

• Are changes in caregiver and/or child attitudes and behaviors toward play and learning sustained after the initial exposure to PLL installations? In the future, we will want to measure the possible child development and learning effects that are prompted after visiting a PLL site (for example, at home or in other environments).
• Do multiple PLL installations in the same neighborhood lead to broad-based impacts at various geographic scales? The current framework focuses on outcomes at the individual site level. As more installations are built across cities in the U.S. and globally, we hypothesize that PLL will yield more expansive neighborhood and community outcomes. Data from The Ultimate Block Party—the first PLL pilot—suggest that caregivers’ attitudes about the play-learning connection can be shaped in a community setting. These broader outcomes will be important to measure as a step toward sustainable uptake of PLL approaches.
• What are the most effective methods for collecting data to maximize the quality of feedback? As described in Box 1, engaging community members to collect data can help in increasing response rates and improving the quality of feedback, but collecting survey data at PLL pilot sites will be challenging.

As the PLL movement gains momentum, generating evidence to demonstrate its impact will be key to strengthening the field and shifting mindsets among key stakeholders and city-level decisionmakers to weave playful learning into the fabric of city policies. The PLL metrics framework provides a roadmap to collect data that demonstrates PLL’s tremendous potential to narrow opportunity gaps while creating more livable and playful cities. The framework will continue to evolve as we learn from communities that are testing the expansion and adaptation of PLL on a neighborhood- and/or city-wide level. Rather than an end point, the framework provides a starting point for thinking about PLL’s goals and how to understand—and communicate—if and how sites are achieving them. This important work is just beginning.

      

Veteran Democratic political strategist Stephanie Rawlings-Blake served as the 49th Mayor of Baltimore, MD, the largest independent city in America. She was elected by her peers as the 73rd President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) – the first African American woman to hold the post. A long-time active participant in national politics, Rawlings-Blake held the position of Secretary of the Democratic National Committee from 2013 – February 2017. She currently runs her own consulting firm, SRB & Associates and has worked with national clients including Hudson News, MasterCard, and Airbnb. Stephanie also served as a Political Contributor for ABC News, and commentator on several networks.  

Rawlings-Blake launched her political career when she became the youngest person ever elected to the Baltimore City Council at the age of 25. She won a citywide election to the position of City Council President, serving from 2007 until early 2010, when she became Mayor.  

The hallmarks of Rawlings-Blake’s administration include strong fiscal stewardship, regulatory reform, trusted leadership, smart development, sustainability and enriching programs to improve the lives of residents as well as attract and retain entrepreneurs and national retailers.  

Rawlings-Blake created Baltimore’s first long-range financial plan and implemented a bold set of reforms, taking on some of the biggest and most controversial challenges facing America’s urban centers. The plan put Baltimore on track to reduce homeowner property taxes by more than 20% over a 10-year period. Her package of financial reforms led to the city receiving its highest bond ratings in more than 40 years.  

Recognized as a national leader on sustainability, Rawlings-Blake developed and adopted a number of innovative programs and projects including: The Climate Action Plan, Disaster Preparedness Project and Plan (DP3), Homegrown Baltimore Urban Agriculture Plan, and the Green Pattern Book. The administration also laid the groundwork, and kicked off the Green Network Plan, an initiative aimed at leveraging public and private resources to reclaim and transform vacant and blighted land to create green space. 

Rawlings-Blake has focused on building a diverse group of neighborhoods where young professionals can see their impact on the community. Taking on the challenge of unwanted and aging buildings, she created tax incentives to attract developers to revitalize areas of the city into dynamic mixed-use communities with new residential apartments.  

During Mayor Rawlings Blake’s tenure, Baltimore City experienced a renaissance with billions of dollars in new construction activity. Her targeted tax credit to decrease the office vacancy rate has created thousands of new market-rate apartment units have been developed. As a result, Baltimore is the 4th fastest growing, and 8th largest, millennial population in the U.S. Downtown Baltimore now ranks as the 9th largest residential population with the 12th largest commercial district in the U.S.  

Notably, Under Armour chose to expand its existing world headquarters in Port Covington — one of the nation’s largest urban redevelopment projects. Mayor Rawlings-Blake and her economic development team shepherded through one of the largest Tax Increment Financing deals in the nation as the project will require more than $535 million in infrastructure improvements. In all, Port Covington is expected to add more than $6 billion in new, vertical construction and create tens of thousands of new jobs over the next two decades.  

Rawlings-Blake made history by signing a landmark executive order to protect New Americans from discrimination within Baltimore, as well as increasing access public safety resources and City services for foreign-born residents. She successfully fought for a state-wide ballot initiative known as the “Dream Act”, which provides in-state tuition rates for undocumented immigrant students who attend Maryland high schools.  

Rawlings-Blake worked passionately with state leaders to pass Maryland’s Civil Marriage Protection Act which allows same-sex couples to obtain a civil marriage license. When the law took effect on January 1, 2013, she presided over the first same-sex marriages in Maryland’s history during a midnight ceremony at Baltimore’s City Hall.  

Rawlings-Blake has been honored with numerous awards and accolades. In 2013 she was awarded the First Citizen Award by the Maryland State Senate, a top honor for dedicated and effective participants in the process of making government work for the benefit of all. The Maryland Daily Record selected her as one of “Maryland’s Top 100 Women” in 2007 and again in 2011. The National Congress of Black Women named her a Shirley Chisholm Memorial Award Trailblazer. And the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs named her one of Baltimore’s “Young Women on the Move.”   

Rawlings-Blake earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Oberlin College and her Juris Doctorate from the University of Maryland School of Law. She is a member of the Federal Bar Association and the Maryland State Bar Association. She has served on numerous boards including the National Aquarium; Baltimore Convention and Tourism Board; Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems, Inc.; Living Classrooms Foundation; Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore; and Parks and People Foundation. Rawlings-Blake currently lives in Baltimore. 

      

Dr. Jan Whittington is an Associate Professor of the Department of Urban Design and Planning, the founding Director of the Urban Infrastructure Lab, Associate Faculty at the Tech Policy Lab, at the University of Washington, Seattle, and a former strategic planner and scientist for the international infrastructure developer, Bechtel Corporation. She is a global expert in infrastructure economics, climate-smart capital planning, and city climate finance. For the World Bank’s City Creditworthiness Initiative, Dr. Whittington has worked with municipalities in 30 countries at the intersection of climate change and capital planning. Her publications address climate change through capital investment planning, the evaluation of smart city infrastructure systems, and the efficiency of public-private contractual arrangements for infrastructure. Dr. Whittington’s PhD (2008) is in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was advised by economic Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson. She holds bachelor degrees in Biology and Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1987) and a masters from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (1993). 

      

Christopher Severen is a Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2017 and his B.A. in Economics and in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009.    

Severen studies urban and environmental economics, with particular interests in transportation, land use, and economic development. He has written articles on transportation and land use regulation in California, the causes and effects of automobility during formative years, and climate change valuation. His work has appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics, among other outlets. 

      

Dr. Newsha K. Ajami is the director of Urban Water Policy with Stanford University’s Water in the West program. A leading expert in sustainable water resource management, smart cities, and the water-energy-food nexus, she uses data science principles to study the human and policy dimensions of urban water and hydrologic systems. Dr. Ajami’s research throughout the years has been interdisciplinary and impact focused. 

Dr. Ajami served as a gubernatorial appointee to the Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board for two terms and is currently a mayoral appointee to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. She is a member of National Academies Board on Water Science and Technology. Dr. Ajami also serves on number of state-level and national advisory boards. Before joining Stanford, she worked as a senior research scholar at the Pacific Institute, and served as a Science and Technology fellow at the California State Senate’s Natural Resources and Water Committee where she worked on various water and energy related legislation. 

Dr. Ajami has published many highly cited peer-reviewed articles, co-authored two books, and contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times, San Jose Mercury and the Sacramento Bee. Dr. Ajami received her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the UC, Irvine, an M.S. in Hydrology and Water Resources from the University of Arizona, and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Amir Kabir University of Technology in Tehran. 

      

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September jobs report, released last week, showed a decrease of 0.4 percentage points in the U.S. unemployment rate, from 5.2% in August to 4.8% in September. Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 194,000 in September, compared to a monthly average of 561,000, and the number of unemployed people fell by 710,000.

The number of marginally attached workers increased by 167,000 and the number of discouraged workers increased by 58,000. The uptick in marginally attached and discouraged workers suggests that the official unemployment rate understates how many workers are currently having trouble finding jobs. Given this difficulty, it is not surprising that the labor force participation rate (61.6%) has remained static, with BLS reporting that the rate has “remained within a narrow range of 61.4% to 61.7% since June 2020.” Likewise, the number of workers who are part-time for economic reasons (4.5 million), meaning workers who would like to be full-time but have had their hours cut or who cannot find full-time jobs, remained largely unchanged compared to last month. Finally, the number of people not currently in the labor force but who want a job (6 million) has also remained largely unchanged.

These disappointing jobs numbers further underscore the mistake of ending the expanded UI program. Unlike the predictions made by proponents of that measure, scaling back support for unemployed persons did not lead to a substantial increase in employment. This is because there are simply not enough jobs currently available, whether because of ongoing supply chain disruptions in production, the impact of the Delta variant on consumer demand for services, or various other factors.

Table 1 shows the unemployment rate by race for the three-month period between July and September. The three-month average unemployment rate for Black workers, 8.3%, while significantly higher than the U.S. unemployment rate, did decrease as a result of the decline in unemployment between August and September. Smaller decreases were experienced by workers of other races and ethnicities.

Table 1. Unemployment Rate by Race, July 2021 to September 2021

Table 2 shows the U.S. unemployment rate by race, gender, and age from September 2020 to September 2021. When age and race are factored in, we continue to see that Black teens between the ages of 16 and 19 have the highest unemployment rate over the 13-month period, 17.64%. However, in September the highest unemployment rate, 17.4%, was experienced by Latino or Hispanic teens. The labor force participation rate for this group increased from 31.3% in August to 32% in September.

Table 2. US Unemployment Rate by Race, Gender, and Age, September 2020 to September 2021

On Friday, President Biden touted steady progress, widespread improvement, and increased employment over the first eight months of his presidency. The president pointed out that the unemployment rate for Black workers, in September, was below 8% for the first time in 17 months. However, the unemployment rate for Black workers remains 3.1 percentage points higher than the national average and 1.9 percentage points above its level in February 2020. There is still progress to be made in the economic recovery to return Black workers to their pre-pandemic employment levels. But the goal should not be solely a return to pre-pandemic levels of employment, a level that has historically been higher than the national average. The goal should be to shift labor dynamics and end systemic and structural racism and discrimination that have led to the racial disparities in employment that we see today.

President Biden also discussed increased wages. Real average hourly earnings increased 0.4% between July and August. According to research from the Pew Research Center, despite the severity of the economic shock created by the COVID-19 pandemic, earnings of employed workers overall were largely unaffected in part because lower-wage workers experienced steeper job losses. Research from our colleagues at the Brookings Institution found that “pandemic-induced job losses hit low-wage workers much harder than those earning higher wages,” and, “Low-wage jobs have been the slowest to return.” The president pointed out the decrease in COVID-19 cases toward the end of September and steady progress on the recovery. While the vaccination rate is increasing and hospitalizations are down, more needs to be done to get Americans back to work, end the pandemic, and tackle the racial employment gap.