There’s so much happening today in the world’s cities—from climate change to a massive shortage of affordable housing—that the job of the city planner has become a furiously busy one, requiring a singular talent for multitasking and managing the needs of increasingly divided constituencies.

Planners have traditionally labored largely behind the scenes, but are emerging into a more visible role as they explain their work and try to keep the peace, said author Josh Stephens on the latest episode of the Land Matters podcast. Stephens interviewed 23 big-city planners for a new book, Planners Across America.

“Planning directors have huge influence over these cities . . . but they’re not necessarily well known. They are not on the level of a mayor or a city council person who are obviously elected officials, and by definition in the public spotlight; they’re not necessarily like a police chief who is always doing press conferences,” he said. “I think one thing that is very clear in these interviews is how earnest planning directors are about mediating, about figuring out what different stakeholders need and want, and are willing to tolerate.”

Acknowledging the distrust that has grown particularly in communities of color, over urban renewal, highways through urban neighborhoods, and exclusionary zoning, Stephens said planners realize the importance of “listening to people, especially people who have historically been left out of the planning conversation.”

At the same time, planners must confront established residents fighting growth, in what is presented as a virtuous grassroots rebellion but is actually the manifestation of NIMBYism, standing for “not in my backyard.”

“Many communities are empowered, and some of that power is unevenly distributed to the extent that some communities have louder voices, and some communities will invoke people like Jane Jacobs in ways that are not necessarily beneficial for the city as a whole, or might even be disingenuous,” Stephens said.

As he spoke with planners, Stephens found widespread acceptance of the idea that most cities need a massive infusion of new housing supply including multifamily housing—and even high-end housing—to help bring prices down as a matter of basic economics. That’s been the aim of several statewide mandates requiring local governments to modify zoning.

“We do need to add luxury housing in high-cost places to accommodate the people who can afford it. I think ideally, that frees up space, and frees up capital and opportunity, and sometimes public funds to then also build deed-restricted affordable housing, and hopefully maintain a supply of naturally occurring affordable housing,” he said.

“You look at where the prices are highest, and that’s where you need to add housing. You need to add it at every level. There’s an argument that there’s no such thing as trickle-down housing. I don’t buy that. I live in Los Angeles, and there’s more than enough money to go around. If you don’t build luxury housing, that doesn’t mean that wealthy and high-income people are not going to move to LA. They’re simply going to move into whatever the next best housing is. That pushes people down, and eventually some people are left with no place to live.”

However, he said, there will be more post-pandemic movement, from hot-market cities to legacy cities, for example, suggesting the contours of a national housing market. “People have moved from LA to Phoenix, from San Francisco to Boise or Reno or Vegas, and there are other equivalents around the country. I think it’s going to be really interesting in the next decade to see how this filters out,” he said.

Josh Stephens is contributing editor of the California Planning & Development Report and previously edited The Planning Report and the Metro Investment Report, monthly publications covering, respectively, land use and infrastructure in Southern California. Planners Across America was published by Planetizen Press in 2022.

City and regional planning has been a major focus of the Lincoln Institute for many decades, from the annual gathering of 30-plus professionals in the Big City Planning Directors Institute, held in partnership with the American Planning Association and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, to the more recent promotion of exploratory scenario planning.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Further Reading

Five Ways Urban Planners Are Addressing a Legacy of Inequity (Land Lines)

Seven Need-to-Know Trends for Planners in 2023 (Land Lines/APA)

A Day in the Life of the City Planner (Princeton Review)

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Josh Stephens. Credit: Rich Schmitt Photography/Westside Urban Forum.

Sometimes community trauma is born of natural disasters or other unexpected events. But in America’s cities, much of the pain of the past century arose from carefully planned decisions that were meticulously mapped out in advance.

New highways that splintered or destroyed Black and brown neighborhoods. Racist zoning rules that intentionally blocked people of color from homeownership. A tendency to see even thriving Black and immigrant neighborhoods as “blighted,” and in need of wrecking-ball revitalization. With these and other actions, the urban planning profession contributed to the systemic racism and segregation that plague our cities. But today’s planners are trying to atone for that legacy.

Dozens of urban planners around the country have signed a Commitment to Change statement that grew out of conversations at the 2020 Big City Planning Directors Institute, an annual conference organized by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that brings together top planners from America’s 30 largest cities. “After the murder of George Floyd, it really crystallized that, as people who impact people’s lives, invisibly and visibly, planners needed to be on the right side of history,” says Eleanor Sharpe, Philadelphia’s deputy director of planning and zoning —particularly given “the fraught history of our profession.”

The resulting pledge, crafted by staffers from several cities and hosted by the City of Philadelphia, has two parts. “One is to acknowledge the harm that our profession caused, and is still causing,” Sharpe says. In Philadelphia, for example, highway construction bulldozed or bifurcated neighborhoods of color like Chinatown and Nicetown, and redlining—whereby lenders and others systematically denied mortgages based on race—left lasting scars by blocking access to a key source of intergenerational wealth. “Most analysis of where social issues mushroom in our city, when mapped, align with redlining maps of years past,” Sharpe says. “Redlining still has a stranglehold on our city decades later.”

The second part of the statement focuses on the future, committing the signatories to investments in housing, open spaces, transportation, environmental justice, and public services, among other actions, “with the goal of creating inclusive, equitable communities.” The pledge also prioritizes preserving and strengthening the culture, businesses, and institutions of communities of color, and preventing displacement caused by new investments.

While the public pledge has honed planners’ focus on racial equity, cities everywhere are still struggling to provide equal access to opportunity, and any progress in dismantling entrenched systems of inequality is often slow and incremental. The seeds of today’s systemic racism and inequities were sown decades ago, says Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute, “and the tools that planners have in their toolboxes also take decades . . . it’s not a profession with a lot of quick fixes.” But just as the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now, so it is with planning a more just future. In that spirit, here are some of the ways urban planners are working to restore trust, right historical wrongs, and advance racial equity in their cities.

Zoning for Equity

With the nation’s housing crisis falling hardest on low-income people and communities of color—who are more likely to experience homelessness due to the shortage of affordable housing—American Planning Association President Angela D. Brooks says reforms that lead to more housing are crucial to improving equity, in part because any conversation about equity rings hollow to someone with no place to live. “It’s something we could easily solve and fix, and the first step is really resolving to create more units of all tiers of housing, so people have a decent, safe, affordable place to live,” Brooks says.

That’s one reason Emily Liu, director of Louisville Metro Planning and Design Services, has been focused on updating the city’s zoning rules.

In 2020, Liu and a team of volunteer planners and community members came up with 46 ways they could improve equity in their city; six of the policies stood out as “things we could move on quickly,” Liu says. Among them was allowing Louisville homeowners to build in-law apartments, or accessory dwelling units (ADUs), by right.

Some of those initial efforts received little or no opposition—like allowing urban agriculture on any lot—but loosening restrictions on ADUs did generate some pushback. Organizations like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, and United Way helped produce educational materials and op-eds to counter some of the misinformation that circulated in the community, Liu says, helping to get the change passed. “This was definitely something we couldn’t do by ourselves. There was a lot of support from outside organizations and citizens.”

A federal lending map from the 1930s (left) identified the predominantly white east side of Louisville, marked in blue and green, as the most desirable place to invest. In 2017, a health outcomes map produced by the city illustrated the impact of decades of disinvestment, revealing that life expectancy on the west side, where most residents are Black, was up to 12 years shorter than on the  east side. Planners are working to improve equity in the city through zoning changes. Credit: City of Louisville.

Previously, adding an ADU had required securing a conditional use permit; now, accessory units are allowed by right in Louisville, as long as they meet some basic standards, and can be rented out if the owner lives on site. “The great majority of them are approved in office by our staff, and it only takes a day or two, it’s very easy,” Liu says, noting that the city saw a tenfold increase in ADU applications in the first year after the zoning change went into effect.

Liu also managed to get front setback requirements reduced from 25 or 30 feet down to 15 feet, freeing up more space for potential ADUs. And she pushed for a small but meaningful change that will allow for duplexes on lots smaller than 5,000 square feet if they’re zoned for multifamily use. A mere 6 percent of the city is zoned for multifamily homes, Liu says, and among those lots were “10,000 parcels where, in the past, you were zoned multifamily, but you were not allowed to build even a duplex” because the lot didn’t meet the minimum size requirement.

Those are just a few examples of how small but crucial zoning changes can begin to address inequity. In February, APA released its Equity in Zoning Policy Guide, a user-friendly resource that lays out dozens more specific recommendations to help dismantle systemic inequities through three different aspects of zoning: the rules themselves, the people involved in drafting them, and how they’re applied and enforced.

“It really focuses on the ways that bias and historic patterns of segregation are reinforced through zoning,” Brooks says. “But it also offers specific ways to change drafting and public engagement, mapping, and even the enforcement of zoning regulations to dismantle barriers and expand opportunity.”

Other cities, such as Minneapolis, Portland, and Arlington, Virginia—and even some states, like California, Oregon, and Maine—have managed to pass more sweeping upzoning measures that allow for ADUs or small multifamily homes on almost any residential lot. Atlanta and Denver, among others, are also in the process of making major zoning reforms.

Liu’s department is now working to engage and educate the community around missing middle housing—conducting walking tours, for example, through Louisville’s oldest neighborhoods, to show residents how duplexes and triplexes were once abundant in the city before being zoned nearly out of existence after World War II. “The goal is to see where we can allow this by right,” she says, noting that such smaller, denser homes “are naturally occurring affordable housing.”

‘Relentless’ Outreach

Planning departments are also getting more active in expanding their reach beyond the older, wealthy, white male homeowners who tend to dominate public input sessions—and making a concerted push to connect with residents who have been missing from the conversation.

“A big part of it is going to where people are,” says Washington, DC, Planning Director Anita Cozart—and being “relentless” about it. That means attending community festivals, block parties, and youth group meetings to seek input on any specific plans in the works, or to simply let people know how to engage with the department. “If we have a meeting and somebody says, ‘I didn’t know this process was happening, where’s the outreach been?’” she says, “we’re calling that person up, and asking them about their networks,” and the best way to connect with them.

Representatives of the DC Office of Planning set up shop at a street festival in 2022, part of an effort to expand their reach and engage with more community members. Credit: DC Office of Planning.

For more than a decade, Philadelphia has offered a Citizens Planning Institute, which teaches residents about the city planning process and how they can be a part of it—“and at some point, take that knowledge back to their neighborhood, and leverage it in some way that’s useful to their community,” Sharpe says.

The program has become so popular, staff can’t keep up with demand. There are currently two cohorts a year—a spring and fall session with 30-plus people in each—but upwards of 200 people typically apply.

“We’re setting up citizens for success, we’re pulling the veil down,” Sharpe says, “so people can understand what’s going on, and how things happen in government.” The program’s 700-plus alumni live all over the city and can help improve communication at neighborhood meetings. “They can act as our translators,” she says. “There’s a trust factor there that doesn’t necessarily exist” between residents and planning officials.

Recent alumni of Philadelphia’s Citizens Planning Institute gather in 2022. The program has taught more than 700 residents about the city planning process and how they can participate in it. Credit: Citizens Planning Institute.

Renters, meanwhile, who are more likely than homeowners to be people of color and have lower average incomes, have long been ignored in zoning or development discussions. So in Louisville, when a project involves a public meeting, the city now requires applicants to notify nearby renters, not just abutting homeowners. “Their landlord may live in California, but they’re the ones who live here, who will be impacted by proposed development,” Liu says.

As a renter herself, Brooks favors such efforts and says cities should pursue other channels of communication as well. “In the age of social media, there are so many ways we can get notice out to people that it is irresponsible, and just inexcusable, not to be utilizing more creative ways,” she says. “Even if I owned my home and you sent me a letter, there’s a high probability I won’t see that until long after your meeting.”

Evaluating Everything Through an Equity Lens

Several big cities, including New York and Washington, now require change-of-use or other development applications to include some form of racial equity impact report. Such an assessment injects a measure of accountability into the process that has too often been missing, based on a simple question: Will the proposed change make progress toward advancing racial equity, or will it worsen existing inequities?

Assessing the potential racial equity impacts of new development or zoning changes as part of the official planning process is a simple but important step, Grogan says. “Making sure that you think about the equity impacts of every project is a practice that doesn’t necessarily cost anything, and can add a lot of value to the day-to-day planning work,” she says.

New York City’s Department of City Planning partnered with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to create an interactive Equitable Data Development Tool that maps out neighborhood-level displacement risk and disaggregated data on race, economic security, housing market pressures, health outcomes, and other key indicators. Applicants submitting a newly required racial equity report as part of their land-use review must cite relevant data from the tool and include a narrative statement that explains how their project and its neighborhood context “relate to the city’s commitment to affirmatively furthering fair housing and promoting equitable access to opportunity.”

New York City’s Department of Planning and Department of Housing Preservation and Development created an interactive tool that maps displacement risk and provides disaggregated data on key indicators. Credit: NYC Department of Planning.

In Philadelphia, where Mayor Jim Kenney tasked all city departments with creating racial equity action plans, Sharpe says the city is trying to incorporate equity analysis into the capital programs budget cycle, asking agencies that receive capital funds to explain how each dollar will contribute to or dismantle systemic racism. “We’re trying to very much embed it in the culture and the philosophy of how work is approached,” she says, noting that it’s still a work in progress.

And in Washington, DC, planners use disaggregated data to assess “the benefits and burdens that might come from a change in zoning,” Cozart says, including the potential for displacement. The District’s neighborhood-level small area plans now feature a similar “Equity in Place” analysis, which can yield different priorities in different neighborhoods. In the wealthy, majority white neighborhood of Chevy Chase, for example, the small area plan seeks to add dedicated affordable housing and remedy the area’s long history of discriminatory land use. In Congress Heights, a predominantly Black neighborhood experiencing increased redevelopment, the focus is on anti-displacement and community resilience measures.

“We ask sets of questions, but it’s a different demographic so you end up with different recommendations, different thrusts of the planning effort, even if you’re doing the same things, like disaggregating the data by race, and engaging the folks who have been marginalized from the process,” Cozart says.

A resident leaves a comment at a Racial Equity Action Plan feedback session in Washington, DC. Credit: DC Office of Planning.

Asking Why

When San Diego Planning Director Heidi Vonblum was working on the Build Better SD initiative—an effort to support equitable, sustainable development citywide that was adopted by the city council in 2022—she interrogated longstanding policies in search of a valid reason for their existence. She and her staff would ask why something was done the way it was, and why that was, and why that was, and so on, until they reached a root cause. Spoiler: The origin stories of some policies more closely resembled a greedy villain’s backstory than that of a superhero.

“Sometimes it was a good idea at the time, sometimes it made sense based on information that planners had available to them,” Vonblum says. “And sometimes it was really wrong, and there’s just no need to continue that.”

That philosophy helped Vonblum’s department make a series of changes, approved by the city council in stages over the last two years.

It began with rewriting the almost 70-year-old Parks Master Plan, and challenging traditional community engagement methods that were resulting in public feedback along the lines of, “We love it, don’t change it, everything’s fine,” Vonblum says. “What was interesting about that Phase One input is that everything’s not fine.”

So in addition to seeking input from underrepresented voices, Vonblum and a handful of staff members drove around San Diego during the pandemic and documented the starkly contrasting conditions of the city’s recreational spaces in a StoryMap called One City, Two Realities, to better educate neighborhood groups and other stakeholders. “Parts of our city have glowing, gleaming, beautiful parks, and then we have other parts of our city that have far more people—and more children and seniors, who tend to use parks the most—that have a park, but it’s got nothing to do, or it has broken playground equipment, and that’s not okay.”

During the pandemic, planners from San Diego documented the disparities among the city’s parks. The city is implementing policy changes intended to distribute infrastructure investments more equitably. Credit: City of San Diego Planning Department.

A key aspect of Build Better SD was changing the city’s system of collecting and spending neighborhood-specific development impact fees. These one-time fees, which developers pay to defray the cost of municipal infrastructure and services associated with the new development, varied drastically across the city, and had to be spent in the neighborhood they were raised. Per-unit impact fees were up to 50 times higher in wealthy districts, discouraging denser growth in well-off areas while simultaneously concentrating reinvestment in those same places. The city has now shifted to a citywide fee structure, where impact fees are the same across every neighborhood and infrastructure investments can be prioritized for areas with the greatest need.

Some changes were unpopular at first, and took a couple of tries to get through the city council. But they have laid the groundwork for other equity-driven initiatives. “Progress can be slow and painful, but we’ve made so much progress just in the last couple of years,” Vonblum says. “We went from having very difficult and controversial conversations to like, boom, boom, boom—actions are happening right now,” she adds. “We’re now focusing on increasing access to our coastal resources and increasing connections between communities through a citywide trails master plan,” as well as developing a master plan for a new regional park in an underserved neighborhood whose requests for green space were left on the back burner for 20 years.

As planners, Vonblum says, “we need to take an opportunity to say, ‘Okay, why do we plan for parks this way? Why do we collect development impact fees this way? Why did we prioritize infrastructure investments this way?’ Until we do that, we’re not going to be able to make any forward progress to advance equity, to advance anti-racist zoning policies, and to invest equitably in our communities.”

Building the Planner Pipeline

At the most recent Big City Planning Directors Institute convening in October, Liu shared how inspired she felt by the number of other women and people of color in the room—including Sharpe and Cozart—which marked a big change from Liu’s first such conference 10 years earlier, she recalled.

But despite that encouraging shift in representation at the top, the profession is still largely white. With an eye on building a profession that better reflects the population it serves, Sharpe and other planners take every opportunity to promote planning to young people of color.

“Our staff is always eager and volunteering in high schools and middle schools, because a lot of planners heard about this later in life, and we want to say, ‘Hey, here’s a legitimate profession that you can do, especially if you want to help your neighborhood out,’” she says. “It’s feeding the pipeline, so that hopefully in 10 years, the more people hear about it, then the pipeline is not just producing mostly white people.”

Cozart and her team conduct similar efforts around Washington. “We’ve been visiting with high school students to just talk about planning and to engage them in mapping, to engage them in analyzing data that planners use, and to really think about design—the design of communities and what spaces are going to be welcoming for you,” she says.

After all, Cozart adds, given the 10- and 20-year timelines of neighborhood and comprehensive plans, those high schoolers may be the ones turning today’s recommendations into tomorrow’s more equitable urban reality.

A youth workshop in Congress Heights held by the DC Office of Planning. The event introduced participants to urban planning and gave them a chance to share their dreams for the neighborhood. Credit: DC Office of Planning.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Members and supporters of the NAACP picket against housing discrimination in Detroit in 1963. Credit: Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

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Aftab Pureval, elected in 2021, is making history as Cincinnati’s first Asian American mayor. He was raised in Southwest Ohio, the son of first-generation Americans, and worked at a toy store when he was in middle school. After graduating from the Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati Law School, Pureval held several positions including as counsel at Procter & Gamble before entering public service. He served as Hamilton County Clerk of Courts from 2016 to 2021, and was the first Democrat to hold that office in over 100 years. Pureval resides in the north Cincinnati neighborhood of Clifton with his wife and their two sons and, as has become evident during his time in office, is a big-time Cincinnati Bengals fan. He spoke with Senior Fellow Anthony Flint earlier this year for the Land Matters podcast

Anthony Flint: You’ve attracted a lot of attention for what some have called a “heroic undertaking” to preserve the city’s single-family housing stock and keep it out of the hands of outside investors. Briefly, walk us through what was accomplished in coordination with the Port of Cincinnati.

Aftab Pureval: Just to provide a little more context, Cincinnati is a legacy city. We have a proud, long tradition of being the final destination from the Underground Railroad. We were the doorstep to freedom for so many slaves who were escaping that horrific experience. We have a lot of historic neighborhoods, a lot of historic buildings, and we have a lot of aging infrastructure and aging single-family homes, which—paired with the fact that we are an incredibly affordable city in the national context—makes us a prime target for institutional investors.

Unfortunately, Cincinnati is on national list after national list about the rate of increase for our rents. It’s primarily being driven by these out-of-town investors—who have no interest, frankly, in the well-being of Cincinnati or their tenants—buying up cheap single-family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, but overnight doubling or tripling the rents, which is pricing out a lot of our communities, particularly our vulnerable, impoverished communities.

The City is doing a lot of things through litigation, through code enforcement. In fact, we sued two of our largest institutional investors, Vinebrook and the owners of Williamsburg, to let them know that we’re not playing around. If you’re going to exercise predatory behavior in our community, we’re not going to stand for it.

We’ve also done things on the front end to prevent this from happening by partnering with the Port . . . . When several properties went up for sale because an institutional investor put them on the selling block, the Port spent $14.5 million to buy over 190 single-family homes, outbidding 13 other institutional investors.

Over the past year, the Port has been working to bring those properties into compliance, dealing with the various code violations that the investor left behind, pairing these homes once they’re fixed up with qualified buyers, oftentimes folks who are working in poverty or lower middle-class who’ve never owned a home before.

Just this year we’re making three of those 194 available for sale. It’s a huge success across the board . . .  but it’s just one tool that the Port and the City are working on to increase affordability of housing in all of our neighborhoods.

AF: What did you learn from this that might be transferable to other cities? It takes a lot of capital to outbid an institutional investor.

AP: It does require a lot of funds. That’s why we need more flexibility from the federal government and the state government to provide municipalities with the tools to prevent this from happening in the first place. Now once an institutional investor gets their claws into a community, there’s very little that the city can do to hold them accountable.

The better strategy as we’ve seen this time is to, on the front end, buy up properties. A lot of cities have a lot of dollars from the federal government through ARP [American Recovery Plan]. We have used a lot of ARP dollars not just to get money into the hands of people who need it most, which is critically important in this time, but also to partner with other private-public partnerships or the Port to give them the resources necessary to buy up the land and hold it.

That has been part of our strategy with ARP. This is a unique time in cities where they have more flexibility [with] the resources coming from the federal government. I would encourage any mayor, any council, to really think critically about using the funds not just in the short term but also in the long term to address some of these macroeconomic forces.

AF: Cincinnati has become a more popular place to live, and the population has increased slightly after years of decline. Do you consider Cincinnati a pandemic or climate haven? What are the implications of that growth?

AP: What I love about my job as mayor is my focus isn’t necessarily on the next two or four years, but the next 100 years. Right now, we are living through a paradigm shift because of the pandemic. The way we live, work, and play is just completely changing. Remote work is completely altering our economic lifestyle throughout the entire country, but particularly here in the Midwest.

What I am convinced of is because of climate change, because of the rising cost of living on the coast, there will be an inward migration. I don’t know if it’s in the next 50 or 75 years, but it will happen. We’re already seeing large businesses making decisions based on climate change. Just two hours north of Cincinnati, Intel is making a $200 billion investment to create the largest semiconductor plant in the country.

Two of the reasons they chose just north of Cincinnati are access to fresh water, the Ohio River in the south and the Great Lakes in the north, and our region’s climate resiliency. Now, don’t get me wrong: we’re all affected by climate change. We’re not all affected equally—our impoverished and disadvantaged communities are more affected disproportionately than others—but in Ohio and Cincinnati, we’re not seeing the wildfires, the droughts, the hurricanes, the earthquakes, the coastal erosion that we’re seeing in other parts of the country, which makes us a climate-change safe haven not just for business investment but also for people. Cincinnati is partly growing because our economy’s on fire right now, but we’re going to really see, I believe, exponential growth over the next few decades because of these massive factors pushing people into the middle of the country.

The investments that we make right now to help our legacy communities and legacy residents stay in their homes and continue to make Cincinnati an affordable place for them, while also keeping in mind these future residents, is a really challenging topic. While Cincinnati right now is very affordable in the national context, it’s not affordable for all Cincinnati residents because our housing supply has not kept up with population growth and our incomes have not kept up with housing prices.

In order to make sure that the investments in the future and the population growth in the future does not displace our current residents, we’ve got to stabilize our market now and be prepared for that growth.

AF: What are the land use changes and transportation improvements that you’re concentrating on accordingly?

AP: Oftentimes, people ask mayors about their legacy, and the third rail of local politics is zoning. If we’re going to get this right, then we have to have a comprehensive review and reform of our land use policies. When I talk about legacy, that’s what I’m talking about.

We have, for over a year now, been having meetings with stakeholders to [explore what] a modern Cincinnati looks like. I believe it looks like a dense, diverse neighborhood that’s walkable, with good public transportation and investments in public art. Right now, the City of Cincinnati’s zoning is not encouraging those kinds of neighborhoods. Close to 70 percent of our city is zoned for single-family use exclusively, which is putting an artificial cap on the amount of supply that we can create, which is artificially increasing rents and artificially increasing property taxes, which is causing a lot of our legacy residents, who even own their homes, to be displaced.

If we’re serious about deconcentrating poverty and desegregating our city, then we’ve got to take a look at multifamily unit prohibitions. We’ve got to take a look at parking requirements for both businesses and homes. We’ve got to look at transit-oriented development along our bus rapid transit lines. We’ve got to look at creative opportunities to create more housing like auxiliary dwelling units, but none of this is easy.

It’s not easy because NIMBYism is real, and we’ve got to convince people that I’m not going to put a 20-floor condo building on your residential cul-de-sac . . . . Zoning is very, very difficult because change is very difficult, and people are afraid of what that will turn the city into. That’s why we’ve been doing a year-long worth of community engagement, and I am confident we can make some substantive changes to our zoning code to encourage more affordability, encourage more public transportation, and just be a greener city.

On that note, we have made a commitment that we will only buy city vehicles that are electric vehicles when they become available. We have the largest city-led solar farm in the entire country, which is significantly contributing to our energy consumption.

AF: A little bit of this is back to the future, because the city had streetcars. Do you have the sense that there’s an appreciation for that, that those times actually made the city function better?

AP: The city used to be dense, used to have incredible streetcars, public transportation, and then, unfortunately, cities—not just Cincinnati but across the country—saw a steady decline of population, losing folks to the suburbs. Now people want to come back into the city, but now we have the hard work of undoing what a lot of cities tried to do, which was create suburban neighborhoods within a city to attract those suburban people back, right? It’s a little bit undoing the past while also focusing on what used to exist. When I share this vision with people, they say, “Yes, that’s a no-brainer, of course, I want to do that,” but they don’t want to do it on their street.

AF: What worries you most about this kind of transition, and what do you identify as the major issues facing lower-income and communities of color in Cincinnati?

AP: Displacement. If we cannot be a city that our current residents can afford, they will leave, which hurts everything. If the city is not growing, then a city our size, where we’re located in the country, we are dying, and we are dying quickly. Cities our size have to grow, and in order to grow, not only do we need to recruit talent, but we have to preserve the families and the legacy communities that have been here in the first place.

No city in the country has figured out a way to grow without displacement. The market factors, the economic factors are so profound and so hard to influence, and the City’s resources are so limited, it’s really difficult. Getting back to our institutional investor problem, the City doesn’t have the resources to just go up and buy property and make sure that we’re selling to good-faith owners, right? If we had that power, that market influence, we would do it. Oftentimes, I guess I get frustrated that I don’t have enough resources, enough authority to make a meaningful impact on the macroeconomic forces that are coming into the city. Because if we get our dream, which is more investment, more growth, that comes with negative consequences, and it’s really difficult to manage both.

AF: Finally, back to climate change, the mayor’s website says Cincinnati is well-positioned to be a leader in climate change at home and abroad. What do you think the city has to offer that’s distinctive in terms of climate action?

AP: All of our policy initiatives are looked at through two lenses. The first is racial equity and the second is climate. Everything that we do, whether it’s our urban forestry assessment, looking at a heat map of our city and investing in trees to not just clean the air but also cool our neighborhoods, [or] our investments in biochar. We are one of only seven cities in the entire world that received a huge grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies to continue to innovate in the world of biochar, which is a byproduct of burning wood, which is an incredible carbon magnet that helps with stormwater runoff but also pulls carbon out of the air.

Our parks department, which is one of the best in the country, continues to innovate on that front . . . . Continuing to have some of the best testing and best preservation in the country for our water supply will be important. Ultimately, businesses and people who are looking to the future consider climate change in that future. If you’re looking for a city that is climate-resilient but also making massive investments in climate technology, then Cincinnati is that destination for you.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval. Credit: © Amanda Rossmann – USA TODAY NETWORK.