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The Pandemic Has Pushed Aside City Planning Rules. But to Whose Benefit?

As bike lanes and cafes sprout on streets, marginalized residents wonder when their priorities will get attention.

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When Oakland conducted a survey on street closures, a disproportionate percentage of responses came from white residents.Credit...Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

One month into the coronavirus crisis this spring, Oakland, Calif., began to restrict car traffic on some streets — ultimately on 21 miles of them — to create outdoor space for residents who suddenly had nowhere else to go.

Other cities have also responded with remarkably rapid transformations of urban space that had seemed impossible before the pandemic. Boston announced new bike routes. Seattle converted on-street parking to loading zones for restaurant pickup. Los Angeles and New York expedited permits for outdoor dining on streets and sidewalks. Connecticut lifted rules requiring businesses to have a minimum number of parking spaces. And some of these changes are likely to be permanent.

The moves have been cheered by residents eager to use the new amenities and thankful for how fast they have appeared. Turns out, cities can move quickly.

But the speed itself — and the changes that cities have prioritized — has also left residents that have long been sidelined in city planning feeling neglected again. Poorer residents weren’t going to restaurants much anyway. Many children didn’t feel safe from violence in public spaces before the pandemic.

And in some Black neighborhoods, people have been deeply worried about their streets — but not necessarily whether they can dine on them. “What this moment shows us is that those decisions have never had much to do with true civic engagement,” said Destiny Thomas, an anthropologist-planner who has criticized the lack of community participation in “pop-up” pandemic infrastructure in her native Oakland and elsewhere. “That knee-jerk reaction exposes the power structure, the decision-making autonomy, and the centering of certain people’s comfort and freedoms over others.”

It’s not just that cities have been fast to make the changes wealthy white residents value, or that they have allowed cafes on top of streets before fixing drainage under them in poor neighborhoods, say Ms. Thomas and other people of color who are planners. It’s that the process itself has seldom been designed to include marginalized residents, many of whom don’t feel safe on city streets from police violence or community surveillance.

The neighborhoods where these residents live also frequently lack better infrastructure, or were pushed into flood plains, because planners neglected them years ago, too. Stripe a bike lane over that damage now, Ms. Thomas said, and that can signal that officials don’t intend to repair what’s underneath.

Questions about who has a say in shaping cities, and what that process should look like, are not new. But the shock of the coronavirus crisis, which cleared public spaces to be a kind of blank canvas, and the calls to treat those spaces with racial equity in mind could force cities to reconsider their answers.

Today, visions of urban life reinvented for the future are colliding with unaddressed inequalities from the past. And the urgency of a public health threat is pushing against demands for the long work of inclusion.

“There are a lot of urgent problems, and government needs to treat them as urgent, because that’s the only way we’ll solve them,” Ryan Russo, the director of Oakland’s Department of Transportation, said of the city’s Slow Streets program.

When it was announced, Oakland residents had been in lockdown for a month, and sidewalks and a popular downtown park were growing crowded.

Mr. Russo acknowledges that the city should have communicated more with the public early on. Since the program’s start, Oakland has been running an online survey of how residents use and view Slow Streets, with the results updated online. In a further bid for transparency, the city has published the demographics of respondents to the survey, alongside the demographics of the city.

As of last week, 67 percent of people who had taken the survey were white, versus 24 percent citywide. And 40 percent of the survey takers reported a household income of more than $150,000 a year, which is twice the actual share of Oakland residents who earn that much.

“It would be very easy for us to just say, ‘We did a survey and 75 percent of Oaklanders say they support Slow Streets,’” Mr. Russo said. “When you see the fact that it’s disproportionately folks who are higher-income who really enjoy it, and people who are white who are saying that, that’s a very important thing for government to be listening to.”

Those survey response rates echo research on public meetings about development, conducted by the political scientists Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick and Maxwell Palmer. The people who show up for such meetings, thus shaping what kind of housing is built, tend to be older, whiter, higher-income and homeowners.

Those are the people with more time for public meetings, the flexibility to show up on a weeknight, and motivation to do so. They also wield the most power when they speak, with their homeowner’s concerns about property values at stake, or with their credentials as engineers, architects or lawyers who have read the zoning code.

“Participation processes are broken in two different ways,” said Professor Einstein, who teaches at Boston University. “They’re weaponized by privileged white people. And then when less privileged communities do try to use them, they’re not as effective as a tool for them.”

Jeremy Levine, a sociologist who spent several years following community meetings in poorer neighborhoods of Boston, found that those meetings often served to give officials and developers the power to say “the community” is on board.

“More meetings, better-attended meetings or differently designed meetings will not alleviate these fundamental challenges,” said Mr. Levine, a professor at the University of Michigan.

This is the reality as cities consider what it would mean to have more community input: In city planning, participatory democracy has largely increased inequality, not lessened it.

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A sidewalk restaurant in New York, one of the cities making it easier to offer outdoor dining.Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

“It is inherently unequal,” said Anika Singh Lemar, a clinical professor at Yale Law School and a lawyer who represents developers of lower-income housing and fair housing advocates. “The question is how do you design the process to push back on those inequalities. Saying we can just have a public meeting and that will take care of inequality is like saying, ‘I can just put a $500,000 house on the market, and anybody can bid on it.’”

Ms. Thomas, the anthropologist-planner, who leads a team of strategists called the Thrivance Group, says traditional public meetings aren’t her idea of engagement anyway. Instead, she suggests cities could fund community health clinics or food banks already serving these neighborhoods to engage residents on what they need from the city at the same time. City departments could also put community residents on staff to do this work. Ms. Lemar proposes using elementary schools to reach families who would never attend public meetings.

Such ideas imply that cities owe some residents and neighborhoods far more effort than they do others.

“We need to either reduce the power that the white high-income areas have, increase the power that communities of color and low-income communities have, or do both,” said Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy at U.C.L.A.

He fears that is incredibly hard in practice. But Mr. Russo says Oakland has been trying. In updating a plan for the city’s bike infrastructure last year, the city worked with community organizations in neighborhoods that have warily viewed bike lanes as harbingers of gentrification. The city didn’t make that effort everywhere, Mr. Russo added. And identifying which communities to prioritize, he said, wasn’t hard.

“You look at Oakland’s redlining map,” he said, “and you look at where poverty is concentrated, where high asthma rates are concentrated, where we have people hit by cars, where we have traffic collisions.”

They are all the same places.

Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Upshot from the Washington bureau. She's particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they’re all connected. She joined The Times in 2016 from The Washington Post. More about Emily Badger

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Urban Space Makeovers, But for Whose Benefit?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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