From today's Philadelphia Inquirer. All praise to Fair Share Housing Center!
Gov. Christie's 90-day suspension of New Jersey's affordable-housing regulations has been lifted temporarily under a stay granted by the Appellate Division of Superior Court.
Judge Stephen Skillman yesterday granted a motion by the Fair Share Housing Center to stay the section of a Feb. 9 executive order that banned the Council on Affordable Housing from enforcing its rules for 90 days while a five-member task force develops recommendations on state policies for providing affordable housing.
The court will make a final decision after hearing oral arguments March 16.
Within hours of Christie's order, the center filed an appeal claiming a violation of separation of powers that went far beyond the governor's limited role in COAH, which was created by the Fair Housing Act in 1985 to enforce Supreme Court rulings that towns have a constitutional obligation to provide low- and moderate-income housing.
Legal papers filed by the center called Christie's move "a sweeping assertion of executive power" that "sets a dangerous precedent for the entire operation of state government."
"I think this is a recognition that what Gov. Christie has been trying to do in governing by executive order is out of the norm with past governors, both Democrats and Republicans, in New Jersey and is not consistent with our constitution and our laws," said Adam Gordon, an attorney for the Cherry Hill-based Fair Share Housing Center.
The governor's office did not return a message seeking comment yesterday.
Sharing the view of many local officials, Christie's executive order called state affordable-housing procedures "excessively complex and unworkable, resulting in delays, inefficiencies, litigation, and unreasonable costs to municipalities and the private sector without appreciable progress being made for our citizens."
COAH calculates the "fair share" of housing each town must provide. Municipalities that file plans with the council for how they will meet those requirements are protected from lawsuits by developers to force higher-density building.
The stay does not affect the task force, created under the executive order to assess the effects of New Jersey's affordable-housing regulations and their degree of success in meeting obligations under the Supreme Court rulings of 1975 and 1983, known as the Mount Laurel decisions.
Bill Dressel, executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities, expressed surprise at the stay.
His organization is awaiting a decision on a legal challenge it filed on behalf of many towns to the latest round of COAH rules in 2008, and Dressel said the league's attorneys were not told they could have filed a response to the Fair Share Housing Center filing.
"We think it was very reasonable for a newly elected governor to be able to do a review of what has transpired in the legislative area, to take a fresh look at the regulations and to . . . take 90 days, as he referred to it, a time-out, and come up with a plan of action on how to address the problems with COAH," Dressel said.
The court denied other motions by the Fair Share Housing Center, including a request for an appointment of a special master to oversee COAH's operations and "ensure that there are not attempts to surreptitiously accomplish what the executive order aims illegally to do."
COAH, for its part, shares Christie's view: the council's board voted, 5-2, in support of Christie's executive order on Tuesday.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
NY Times Editorial on NY Housing Discrimination Case
Westchester’s Word
NY Times - 2/17/10
Six months ago, New York’s Westchester County agreed to spend slightly more than $50 million in the next seven years to build at least 750 units of affordable housing — more than 600 of them in towns and villages where the black population is 3 percent or less and the Hispanic population is less than 7 percent.
It signed the deal to settle a federal lawsuit accusing it of violating the False Claims Act — that is, of taking tens of millions of federal dollars for affordable housing and other projects while falsely certifying that it was doing all that it must to promote integrated housing. It signed only after a federal judge declared that Westchester had ”utterly failed” to meet its obligations.
Last week, the monitor overseeing the settlement rejected the county’s affordable-housing plan, saying it was deficient on details, accountability and enforcement. Instead of specifying what the county would do to meet certain desegregation bench marks, Westchester had simply restated the bench marks. The plan didn’t specify where and how the money would be spent. It had no “concrete time frame” for finding and buying properties to develop and was “unnecessarily vague on the whole.”
Worst of all, the plan did not explain how or even whether it would overcome not-in-my-backyard resistance and compel cooperation by municipalities that have used exclusionary zoning laws and other devices for years to keep out lower-income people and minorities. The monitor also said the plan needed “real enforcement mechanisms” — “a clear strategy for how the county will employ carrots and sticks to encourage compliance by municipal governments.” We await the county’s response, which should be to fix the plan and then seriously and swiftly put it into action.
When one thinks about segregation, Westchester isn’t the first place that comes to mind. But the poor and minority residents desperately looking for an affordable place to live know the bitter truth. It is past time for Westchester’s leaders to do what they’ve promised.
NY Times - 2/17/10
Six months ago, New York’s Westchester County agreed to spend slightly more than $50 million in the next seven years to build at least 750 units of affordable housing — more than 600 of them in towns and villages where the black population is 3 percent or less and the Hispanic population is less than 7 percent.
It signed the deal to settle a federal lawsuit accusing it of violating the False Claims Act — that is, of taking tens of millions of federal dollars for affordable housing and other projects while falsely certifying that it was doing all that it must to promote integrated housing. It signed only after a federal judge declared that Westchester had ”utterly failed” to meet its obligations.
Last week, the monitor overseeing the settlement rejected the county’s affordable-housing plan, saying it was deficient on details, accountability and enforcement. Instead of specifying what the county would do to meet certain desegregation bench marks, Westchester had simply restated the bench marks. The plan didn’t specify where and how the money would be spent. It had no “concrete time frame” for finding and buying properties to develop and was “unnecessarily vague on the whole.”
Worst of all, the plan did not explain how or even whether it would overcome not-in-my-backyard resistance and compel cooperation by municipalities that have used exclusionary zoning laws and other devices for years to keep out lower-income people and minorities. The monitor also said the plan needed “real enforcement mechanisms” — “a clear strategy for how the county will employ carrots and sticks to encourage compliance by municipal governments.” We await the county’s response, which should be to fix the plan and then seriously and swiftly put it into action.
When one thinks about segregation, Westchester isn’t the first place that comes to mind. But the poor and minority residents desperately looking for an affordable place to live know the bitter truth. It is past time for Westchester’s leaders to do what they’ve promised.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
UN Releases Report on Housing Rights Violations in the U.S.
The United Nations has released the final report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing’s U.S. mission , making both broad and specific findings and recommendations about housing rights violations in the U.S.
The UN Special Rapporteur, Raquel Rolnik, visited six cities in the U.S. from October 23-November 8, 2009 in her mission, co-coordinated by National Law Center on Homeless Rights and Poverty, the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative, and local partners including
New York, NY – Rob Robinson, Picture the Homeless
Wilkes Barre, PA – Frank Sindaco, Northeast Pennsylvania Organizing Center
Chicago, IL - JR Fleming, Coalition to Protect Public Housing
New Orleans, LA – Sam Jackson, Mayday New Orleans
Pine Ridge, SD – Bill Means, Oglala Tribal Community
Los Angeles, CA – Becky Dennison, Los Angeles Community Action Network
Washington, DC – Debra Frazier, Family and Friends of Arthur Capers and Carrollsburg and Eric Sheptock
After an extremely participatory visit , many of the concerns homeless and low-income communities across the country expressed to her are included in the report.
The Rapporteur’s report recommends, among other things:
Increasing resources for public and affordable housing;
The Protecting Tenants At Foreclosure Act should be extended beyond its 2012 sunset;
Vacant properties should be made available to housing organizations for the provision of affordable housing;
Constructive alternatives to the criminalization of homelessness should be developed, and where adequate shelter is not available, homeless persons should be allowed to shelter themselves in public areas;
The HUD definition of homelessness should be expanded to include those living doubled up with others due to economic hardship.
Congress should pass H.Res. 582 and devote increased resources to the Family Unification Voucher Program.
The Rapporteur will present her report to the UN Human Rights Council on March 5th in Geneva, Switzerland.
Next steps for advocates should include 1) publicizing the report, 2) demanding and action plan from legislators and HUD for implementing the report’s recommendations, and 3) using the report recommendations and findings in local advocacy.
The UN Special Rapporteur, Raquel Rolnik, visited six cities in the U.S. from October 23-November 8, 2009 in her mission, co-coordinated by National Law Center on Homeless Rights and Poverty, the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative, and local partners including
New York, NY – Rob Robinson, Picture the Homeless
Wilkes Barre, PA – Frank Sindaco, Northeast Pennsylvania Organizing Center
Chicago, IL - JR Fleming, Coalition to Protect Public Housing
New Orleans, LA – Sam Jackson, Mayday New Orleans
Pine Ridge, SD – Bill Means, Oglala Tribal Community
Los Angeles, CA – Becky Dennison, Los Angeles Community Action Network
Washington, DC – Debra Frazier, Family and Friends of Arthur Capers and Carrollsburg and Eric Sheptock
After an extremely participatory visit
The Rapporteur’s report recommends, among other things:
Increasing resources for public and affordable housing;
The Protecting Tenants At Foreclosure Act should be extended beyond its 2012 sunset;
Vacant properties should be made available to housing organizations for the provision of affordable housing;
Constructive alternatives to the criminalization of homelessness should be developed, and where adequate shelter is not available, homeless persons should be allowed to shelter themselves in public areas;
The HUD definition of homelessness should be expanded to include those living doubled up with others due to economic hardship.
Congress should pass H.Res. 582 and devote increased resources to the Family Unification Voucher Program.
The Rapporteur will present her report to the UN Human Rights Council on March 5th in Geneva, Switzerland.
Next steps for advocates should include 1) publicizing the report, 2) demanding and action plan from legislators and HUD for implementing the report’s recommendations, and 3) using the report recommendations and findings in local advocacy.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Napa needs affordable housing...
From the Napa Valley Register, 1/3/10.
____________________________________________
Providing places for workers to live
Thousands of people who work in Napa County have to drive here each day from other counties. These are the workers who pick the grapes, the dishwashers and waiters in our restaurants, the store clerks, the office workers, construction workers, truck drivers, house cleaners, auto mechanics and many others. They live in Vallejo, Clearlake and other places where housing is more affordable and commute many miles back and forth each day.
The economy of Napa County depends on these workers. Our local governments have approved dozens of expensive new hotels, wineries, restaurants and other businesses in recent years but have done nothing to make housing available for all the people who work in these businesses. Wineries provide some bunkhouses where farmworkers can sleep, but the workers have to leave their families behind. That's a big hardship for the farmworkers and for their families. It's also not fair to the other counties that have to provide schools and public services for the families of workers in Napa County. And anyone concerned about the environment should ask why thousands of cars are driving all those miles back and forth to work each day. More than 20,000 cars commute into the county each day to work. That's a lot of greenhouse gas.
The economy of Napa County depends on these workers. Our local governments have approved dozens of expensive new hotels, wineries, restaurants and other businesses in recent years but have done nothing to make housing available for all the people who work in these businesses. Wineries provide some bunkhouses where farmworkers can sleep, but the workers have to leave their families behind. That's a big hardship for the farmworkers and for their families. It's also not fair to the other counties that have to provide schools and public services for the families of workers in Napa County. And anyone concerned about the environment should ask why thousands of cars are driving all those miles back and forth to work each day. More than 20,000 cars commute into the county each day to work. That's a lot of greenhouse gas.
Many of the workers who are driving long distances to work in Napa's vineyards, hotels and restaurants are Latino. Our group, Latinos Unidos de Napa, has been trying for years to get more affordable housing built in Napa County. The county promised us in 2004 that they would provide sites for affordable housing, but most of the sites they designated were not allowed to have water service, so no housing could be built there except for million-dollar mansions. Not a single unit of affordable housing has been built in the unincorporated areas of the county in many years, and very few affordable units have been built in the cities.
The lack of affordable housing discriminates against Latinos and the thousands of other lower-income families who would like to live in Napa County but can't afford to do so. Latinos Unidos has filed lawsuits to try to stop this discrimination. Persons working in Napa should be able to live here, also. We harvest the grapes, clean the hotel rooms, prepare the gourmet restaurant meals and contribute in so many other ways to the economy of this county. We shouldn't be forced to live somewhere else because there's no affordable housing allowed here. Housing choices should be available to all persons working in the county — whatever their income or their race. We hope the courts and elected officials in the county will agree.
The lack of affordable housing discriminates against Latinos and the thousands of other lower-income families who would like to live in Napa County but can't afford to do so. Latinos Unidos has filed lawsuits to try to stop this discrimination. Persons working in Napa should be able to live here, also. We harvest the grapes, clean the hotel rooms, prepare the gourmet restaurant meals and contribute in so many other ways to the economy of this county. We shouldn't be forced to live somewhere else because there's no affordable housing allowed here. Housing choices should be available to all persons working in the county — whatever their income or their race. We hope the courts and elected officials in the county will agree.
This letter is written on behalf of Luis Vera, Ignacio Garcia, Oscar Caceres and others.
(Olvera lives in Napa.)
(Olvera lives in Napa.)
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The Revolution Will Be Mapped
By: Bob Burtman Miller-McCune Journal 12/28/2009
To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks.
Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw from this office, are dressed in their everyday summer attire, T-shirts and shorts. But when they begin pulling maps off printers, Parnell and Joyner step decidedly out of the last century. "Our daughter tells people we work for the CIA, because what we do is so hard to describe," Parnell says, only half-joking.
Joyner displays a series of maps showing the Coal Run neighborhood, a handful of streets located just outside the city limits of Zanesville in central Ohio. The first map provides a simple baseline, showing the city water plant and the boundary between the city and Coal Run, a part of Muskingum County. The second map adds water lines, which serve only the northern half of Coal Run. Successive maps add the residences in Coal Run, note which residences have water and which don't, and break down their occupancy by race.
The last map puts all the data together, and the picture suddenly comes into sharp focus: Almost all the white households in Coal Run have water service, while all but a few black homes do not.
The institute's maps played a vital role in a federal jury's decision last year to award the excluded Coal Run residents almost $11 million in damages from the city of Zanesville and Muskingum County. The supporting evidence was strong on its own: African-American residents without water had made repeated requests over a period of almost 50 years to remedy the inequity, to no avail. Instead, they had to haul water from the plant or pump it from wells contaminated with sulphur and oil from old mining operations. In the interim, Zanesville had extended its water lines on numerous occasions to new, predominantly white developments that were farther away from the water plant than Coal Run.
But the maps provided something that the narrative and statistics lacked, says civil rights attorney Reed Colfax, who represented the Coal Run residents. "We could articulate the case in words," Colfax says. "But when you'd put up the maps, they'd stop listening to you and look at them [as if to] say, 'Is this really possible?'"
The Cedar Grove Institute has been using maps to exhibit patterns of municipal discrimination against low-income and minority communities for almost a decade. The patterns, rooted in the days when residential discrimination was supported by law, have been reinforced under the cover of such contemporary land-use mechanisms as annexation, zoning and extra-territorial controls.
To produce the maps, the institute employs geographic information systems technology, a computer-based tool for organizing, analyzing and displaying data in a spatial or geographic context. While the maps seem simple, producing them is anything but. Data must be collected from a host of sources, including government databases, door-to-door surveys and Global Positioning System devices. The data is digitized, analyzed, converted to images and layered together in various combinations.
Once the exclusive province of government, industry and academia, GIS technology has evolved rapidly since the 1980s, paralleling exponential gains in computer power and capacity. Affordable, user-friendly GIS software, online-mapping systems and the explosion of government data available on the Web have combined to speed the spread of GIS into the public arena.
This democratization of GIS has spurred new thinking about its potential application at the grassroots, rather than institutional, level. University of North Carolina School of Law Dean Jack Boger has worked with the institute on some of its municipal discrimination cases and concluded that the phenomenon of exclusion knows few geographic boundaries. "This is a problem of nationwide scope," Boger says. "The evidence is, in effect, irrefutable."
The exclusion of poor and minority communities from municipal services is but one social ill that GIS mapping can illustrate and help alleviate. Today, an increasing number of academics, attorneys, nonprofits and community groups are using maps to identify social problems, devise solutions and leverage change. GIS is being deployed to combat discrimination and inequities in education, health care access, housing, employment opportunities, transportation and law enforcement. "You're not up to date in social justice advocacy if you don't know how to use GIS maps," says Anita Earls, director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, N.C.
Still, GIS is in its relative infancy as a popular science, and public awareness of its attributes and capacity is relatively low. Although most people have been exposed on the Internet to such GIS-based products as Google Maps, few can identify the technology behind them. Sarah Elwood, a geography professor at the University of Washington who has spread the GIS gospel to community groups, often encounters a baseline ignorance of the concept. "You say 'GIS' and people say, 'Oh, yeah, I have one of those in my car,'" Elwood says.
The dots on the GIS-awareness map may be sparse, but those who have experienced the transformative power of GIS mapping have no doubt that the technology will eventually become firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. "People are jaded with statistics, and even more jaded with pie charts and graphs," says Keith Ernst, research director at the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, which has used maps to identify patterns of predatory lending in low-income communities. "But if you put the information on a map, people are more willing to hear what you say. We're visual creatures, and seeing is believing."
Allan Parnell recalls the day he first grasped the sweeping potential of GIS-based advocacy. Parnell was giving a talk at the University of North Carolina law school about the institute's first municipal discrimination case, which involved his hometown of Mebane, N.C. As in Zanesville, residents of largely minority neighborhoods outside Mebane's boundaries lacked water, sewer and other basic town services, despite decades of requests for relief.
Meanwhile, the town had annexed and provided services over the years to a hodgepodge of overwhelmingly white, affluent satellite developments that were farther away from the town center than the minority neighborhoods. This pattern of annexation and exclusion, dubbed "municipal underbounding" by University of Tennessee geography professor Charles Aiken, created virtual islands of poverty and neglect within the town.
After the presentation, a group of black students approached Parnell with similar stories of their own. "They told me, 'This is happening in my grandmother's town,'" he says. "That was the light-bulb moment: This isn't just one case; it's a pattern."
A geographer by training with advanced degrees in sociology and demographics, Parnell had used GIS in health-related studies for the National Academy of Sciences and other agencies beginning in the late 1980s. He and his wife, Ann Joyner, formed a company in 1999 that specialized in GIS-based health research. But Parnell, a self-described "conflict-avoiding academic," had had little opportunity or inclination to agitate on behalf of the disadvantaged.
One day in 2001, Parnell took a call from a community organizer in Mebane who was trying to stave off a highway bypass that would run through the heart of his neighborhood. Would Parnell assist him with a grant application? He met with the organizer, who detailed Mebane's methods of using town boundaries to disenfranchise the neighborhood while controlling its destiny through the use of extra-territorial jurisdiction, an area adjacent to city limits over which municipalities can exert some influence. "I just sat there with my jaw on the floor for three hours," Parnell says.
Parnell and Joyner agreed to create a visual and statistical profile of the town using standard GIS methodology. The first task was to gather the mountain of data that would be relevant. A former journalist and real estate developer, Joyner knew where to find comprehensive land-use and infrastructure information. Mebane's public works department provided the locations of water and sewer lines. From the planning department they obtained historical annexation documents. Federal census data broke out racial and economic variables at the block level. They reviewed city council meeting minutes for evidence of action and inaction on service and annexation requests.
Using stock GIS software, Parnell and Joyner digitized the mass of data in compatible formats — a major undertaking in itself — and analyzed it. To produce the maps, they enlisted Bucknell University GIS expert Ben Marsh, a former graduate school classmate of Parnell's. The three published a case study of Mebane in 2003 and shared it with Jack Boger, then-deputy director at the UNC Center for Civil Rights. "What was immediately apparent was how clear the relationship was between the exclusion of services and the racial makeup of the community," Boger says.
Inspired by the Mebane study and law school experience, Parnell and Joyner formed the nonprofit Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities and in 2004 won a foundation grant to map communities throughout North Carolina. They found patterns of exclusion similar to those identified in Mebane across the state.
The institute's maps of Moore County, home to some of the nation's most prestigious and affluent golfing communities, were among their most dramatic examples of underbounding. The maps show the boundaries of three county municipalities, Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen, a tortured maze of red lines that zigzag in all directions, creating angular amoebas.
A batch of dark brown blotches stand prominently outside the limits of all three towns, though they are hemmed in or virtually surrounded by the three towns. The blotches represent communities with overwhelmingly African-American populations and names — Lost City, Monroe Town and Jackson Hamlet — that evoke images of the Jim Crow era.
The maps also show the distribution of sewer lines in the county, which either stop at town borders or go through them but provide no hookups beyond, so the communities outside the town limits have no sewer service. Annexations over the years have swallowed acreage all around the three towns but carefully avoided the minority neighborhoods.
Parnell and Joyner add a sobering narrative to the maps that magnifies the extent of the exclusion of the communities outside town limits: Septic systems have routinely failed, spilling raw sewage next to homes. Residents lack the garbage service enjoyed by people who live in town and must instead pay for a costly private hauler or burn their trash at home. In the Midway community, neighbors watch garbage trucks cut through their main street to serve the citizens of Aberdeen, who live to either side. Police protection is provided by the county sheriff's department, which must travel as much as 15 miles to respond to emergencies — even though municipal police stations are much closer, in some cases just blocks away.
The maps became an integral part of a successful campaign to eliminate the most odious aspects of exclusion in Moore County, and not just in terms of educating decision-makers. For the community groups involved in the campaign, the maps offered a kind of external validation that their narrative alone could not provide. "For me, they were a verification of what I've always known," says Maurice Holland, president of the Midway Community Association and a lifelong resident of the neighborhood.
Since then, the institute has extended its reach beyond state lines. Presentations at conferences and workshops have connected the institute with attorneys working on municipal discrimination cases in California, Virginia, New York, Florida and Texas. While some of the cases center on underbounding, others address additional ways by which municipalities discriminate. In the Florida case, Guatemalan residents in the city of Lake Worth demonstrated that selective code enforcement resulted in the targeting of Latinos for eviction. An analysis of redevelopment efforts in Portsmouth, Va., showed that white residents and developers were the primary beneficiaries of the city's largesse, while black communities were systematically wiped from the landscape to make way for land uses that generated more tax revenue.
And in Dallas, African-American and Latino residents in the inaptly named community of Cadillac Heights sued the city for using zoning regulations to segregate them in an industrial sector — a pattern that traced back to the 1940s, before the influx of Latinos to the city, when land records denoted minority residential areas with the letter "N." Living next to industrial facilities had predictable consequences for residents: chronic health problems, a dearth of public services and permanently depressed property values.
In each instance, GIS maps have proven instrumental in either making the case that discrimination had occurred or influencing the outcome of a government decision about the discrimination. The city of Dallas, for example, settled with the residents and agreed to relocate them to more hospitable environs. Attorney Mike Daniel, who represented the plaintiffs, credits the maps with tipping the balance. This was the second suit brought by residents for the same cause, he notes, but the first one had ended with a nominal settlement that did not remedy the problem. "The history of the two cases was the same," Daniel says. "The only difference was Cedar Grove's work."
Most of the Cedar Grove Institute's recent GIS work has been for attorneys in support of municipal discrimination lawsuits, but the law offers few remedies in such cases. Provisions in the federal Civil Rights, Fair Housing and Voting Rights acts prohibit discrimination based on race and other factors, but local circumstances don't often fit neatly into one of those provisions, and proving that the law was violated is no simple endeavor. Moreover, to win in court, plaintiffs must prove that the discrimination was intentional.
Only a handful of states offer similar protections against discrimination. Further constricting the playing field is a counterintuitive reality: Local government practices that result in exclusion and inequity are, for the most part, legal. Annexation laws, for example, usually permit municipalities to make annexation decisions based on economic considerations. If an annexation provides a net economic benefit, the city can move forward; if the costs of providing services to the annexed territory exceed new tax revenues, the city is free to say no.
And the time and expense of a legal case — often measured in years and millions — are prohibitive for the communities most likely to be the object of discrimination.
Because of these hurdles, some advocacy groups with a GIS focus deploy their maps in the service of less adversarial strategies. The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University engages in "opportunity mapping," which begins with the assumption that opportunities for high-quality housing, employment, education, health care and other key indicators should be distributed equally throughout a given metropolitan area. Kirwan maps identify disparities in the distribution of opportunities, which in turn provides direction for policymakers to correct those disparities.
In a similar vein, the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project takes a solution-oriented approach with its mapping initiative, the Healthy City Project. An interactive, online compendium of demographic, economic and health data for Los Angeles County, Healthy City also pinpoints the location of services for referral purposes and lets users create maps to identify concerns in their own neighborhoods. Developed in collaboration with an innovative GIS lab at UCLA, the Healthy City platform is so advanced that stakeholders often consult with project staff to inform policy debates and decisions.
Healthy City was hired by the city to produce maps in conjunction with an initiative to shift the approach to gang violence from enforcement and suppression to prevention. Healthy City produced maps that showed gang hot spots as well as services available to young people; the maps helped the city target areas where services were in shortest supply for additional investment. "We don't only want to show problems," says John Kim, who has directed Healthy City since its inception in 2002. "We want to show ways to solve those problems."
Historians cite ancient cave paintings of migratory game routes as a primitive geographic information system, the superimposition of data on a geographic image. An English physician mapped the location of London residents sickened by cholera during an outbreak in 1857, which he analyzed to identify the source of the disease. Advancements in photographic processes in the early 20th century enabled the creation of translucent images of geographically ordered demographic data that could be layered atop a map, a technique pioneered by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression.
Though these antecedents arguably combine geography and information into a kind of system, GIS is most commonly associated with sophisticated computer hardware and software, its origins dating back to the days of mainframes and punch cards. In 1962, the Canadian government unveiled the Canada Geographic Information System, a prototype that mapped select land-use variables throughout the country for planning purposes.
Private vendors began to sell off-the-shelf GIS software in the 1980s; a decade later, further refinements in those packages combined with a steady drop in hardware prices made GIS available to anyone with sufficient technical background and skill. The runway was clear for takeoff.
Commercial users were among the first to take advantage. Market researchers mapped demographic data on household income, population density and the location of competitors to choose optimal sites for retail expansion. Engineering firms mapped roads and infrastructure to streamline their projects.
Federal, state and local government agencies also found GIS an invaluable way to increase efficiencies. The time spent on planning, permitting and conducting environmental or health assessments could be cut to a sliver with accurate databases and maps. Law enforcement agencies mapped crime incidence; few government operations, in fact, did not benefit from a GIS application. One of the largest single repositories of government data, the U.S. Census, has likely launched more GIS maps than any other single data source.
Much of that government data has now been posted to the Web. For advocates using GIS, the flood of data has been a boon. Parnell says the Cedar Grove Institute would never have emerged from the conceptual phase without the ability to obtain government data. "We realized that there's a critical mass of data out there," he says. "Five years earlier, we couldn't have done it."
Not all local governments appreciate the rise of GIS-driven advocacy, especially when their own data is used as a hammer against them, and they have begun to restrict public access. Some have pulled data off the Web in the alleged interest of national security; others charge exorbitant fees to produce it or deliver jumbled masses of data that are difficult to manage or decipher.
Mebane, the Cedar Grove Institute's first case study of municipal discrimination, passed an Infrastructure Information Security Policy shortly after the study was published; the policy limited infrastructure data access to qualified engineering firms and town agencies. The city of Modesto, Calif., locked in a legal underbounding battle, pulled its infrastructure data off the Internet after the lawsuit was filed, citing national security grounds. "There's no conceivable national security interest in where the traffic lights are in Modesto," scoffs Ben Marsh, the institute's chief mapmaker. A recent appellate ruling in California rejected a similar national-security rationale, as well as a copyright argument by Santa Clara County, but whether that opinion stands as precedent remains to be seen.
Though restrictions on access to government data could prove troublesome, advocacy groups that use GIS have already been finding data sources outside of government. In particular, data collected by community residents have become an effective supplement to the "official story," as University of Washington professor Sarah Elwood calls government data.
Elwood has used GIS not only to map problems but to build the capacity of underserved and disadvantaged communities to advocate on their own behalf. Simple walking surveys that catalogue infrastructural deficiencies — potholes in sidewalks, missing stop signs, burned-out streetlights — fill gaps in the public record that mask actual conditions on the ground. With locally produced data, Elwood says, "You can tell a very detailed and very current, compelling story about neighborhood needs."
One of the few brakes slowing the GIS freight train, at least from an advocacy perspective, is the shortage of people who understand it well. "Obviously, there is a much greater demand for GIS than there are practitioners," says attorney Eric Schultheis, who coordinates The Race Equity Project for Legal Services of Northern California and counts himself among the GIS crowd. "You could probably count the number of people who are actually doing this work on both hands."
But given the leaps that GIS technology and applications have taken in the political and legal advocacy sectors, it's hard to imagine the GIS trend reversing. By January of next year, Healthy City plans to cover the entire state of California, and Kim says he's received expansion requests from other cities. Healthy City uses free, open-source GIS software that can be customized as needed. The ready supply of cheap hardware and software can only hasten the arrival of the day when GIS mapping is as universal as photo or music editing.
"The technology will soon become ubiquitous," Kim says simply.
To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks.
Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw from this office, are dressed in their everyday summer attire, T-shirts and shorts. But when they begin pulling maps off printers, Parnell and Joyner step decidedly out of the last century. "Our daughter tells people we work for the CIA, because what we do is so hard to describe," Parnell says, only half-joking.
Joyner displays a series of maps showing the Coal Run neighborhood, a handful of streets located just outside the city limits of Zanesville in central Ohio. The first map provides a simple baseline, showing the city water plant and the boundary between the city and Coal Run, a part of Muskingum County. The second map adds water lines, which serve only the northern half of Coal Run. Successive maps add the residences in Coal Run, note which residences have water and which don't, and break down their occupancy by race.
The last map puts all the data together, and the picture suddenly comes into sharp focus: Almost all the white households in Coal Run have water service, while all but a few black homes do not.
The institute's maps played a vital role in a federal jury's decision last year to award the excluded Coal Run residents almost $11 million in damages from the city of Zanesville and Muskingum County. The supporting evidence was strong on its own: African-American residents without water had made repeated requests over a period of almost 50 years to remedy the inequity, to no avail. Instead, they had to haul water from the plant or pump it from wells contaminated with sulphur and oil from old mining operations. In the interim, Zanesville had extended its water lines on numerous occasions to new, predominantly white developments that were farther away from the water plant than Coal Run.
But the maps provided something that the narrative and statistics lacked, says civil rights attorney Reed Colfax, who represented the Coal Run residents. "We could articulate the case in words," Colfax says. "But when you'd put up the maps, they'd stop listening to you and look at them [as if to] say, 'Is this really possible?'"
The Cedar Grove Institute has been using maps to exhibit patterns of municipal discrimination against low-income and minority communities for almost a decade. The patterns, rooted in the days when residential discrimination was supported by law, have been reinforced under the cover of such contemporary land-use mechanisms as annexation, zoning and extra-territorial controls.
To produce the maps, the institute employs geographic information systems technology, a computer-based tool for organizing, analyzing and displaying data in a spatial or geographic context. While the maps seem simple, producing them is anything but. Data must be collected from a host of sources, including government databases, door-to-door surveys and Global Positioning System devices. The data is digitized, analyzed, converted to images and layered together in various combinations.
Once the exclusive province of government, industry and academia, GIS technology has evolved rapidly since the 1980s, paralleling exponential gains in computer power and capacity. Affordable, user-friendly GIS software, online-mapping systems and the explosion of government data available on the Web have combined to speed the spread of GIS into the public arena.
This democratization of GIS has spurred new thinking about its potential application at the grassroots, rather than institutional, level. University of North Carolina School of Law Dean Jack Boger has worked with the institute on some of its municipal discrimination cases and concluded that the phenomenon of exclusion knows few geographic boundaries. "This is a problem of nationwide scope," Boger says. "The evidence is, in effect, irrefutable."
The exclusion of poor and minority communities from municipal services is but one social ill that GIS mapping can illustrate and help alleviate. Today, an increasing number of academics, attorneys, nonprofits and community groups are using maps to identify social problems, devise solutions and leverage change. GIS is being deployed to combat discrimination and inequities in education, health care access, housing, employment opportunities, transportation and law enforcement. "You're not up to date in social justice advocacy if you don't know how to use GIS maps," says Anita Earls, director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, N.C.
Still, GIS is in its relative infancy as a popular science, and public awareness of its attributes and capacity is relatively low. Although most people have been exposed on the Internet to such GIS-based products as Google Maps, few can identify the technology behind them. Sarah Elwood, a geography professor at the University of Washington who has spread the GIS gospel to community groups, often encounters a baseline ignorance of the concept. "You say 'GIS' and people say, 'Oh, yeah, I have one of those in my car,'" Elwood says.
The dots on the GIS-awareness map may be sparse, but those who have experienced the transformative power of GIS mapping have no doubt that the technology will eventually become firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. "People are jaded with statistics, and even more jaded with pie charts and graphs," says Keith Ernst, research director at the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, which has used maps to identify patterns of predatory lending in low-income communities. "But if you put the information on a map, people are more willing to hear what you say. We're visual creatures, and seeing is believing."
Allan Parnell recalls the day he first grasped the sweeping potential of GIS-based advocacy. Parnell was giving a talk at the University of North Carolina law school about the institute's first municipal discrimination case, which involved his hometown of Mebane, N.C. As in Zanesville, residents of largely minority neighborhoods outside Mebane's boundaries lacked water, sewer and other basic town services, despite decades of requests for relief.
Meanwhile, the town had annexed and provided services over the years to a hodgepodge of overwhelmingly white, affluent satellite developments that were farther away from the town center than the minority neighborhoods. This pattern of annexation and exclusion, dubbed "municipal underbounding" by University of Tennessee geography professor Charles Aiken, created virtual islands of poverty and neglect within the town.
After the presentation, a group of black students approached Parnell with similar stories of their own. "They told me, 'This is happening in my grandmother's town,'" he says. "That was the light-bulb moment: This isn't just one case; it's a pattern."
A geographer by training with advanced degrees in sociology and demographics, Parnell had used GIS in health-related studies for the National Academy of Sciences and other agencies beginning in the late 1980s. He and his wife, Ann Joyner, formed a company in 1999 that specialized in GIS-based health research. But Parnell, a self-described "conflict-avoiding academic," had had little opportunity or inclination to agitate on behalf of the disadvantaged.
One day in 2001, Parnell took a call from a community organizer in Mebane who was trying to stave off a highway bypass that would run through the heart of his neighborhood. Would Parnell assist him with a grant application? He met with the organizer, who detailed Mebane's methods of using town boundaries to disenfranchise the neighborhood while controlling its destiny through the use of extra-territorial jurisdiction, an area adjacent to city limits over which municipalities can exert some influence. "I just sat there with my jaw on the floor for three hours," Parnell says.
Parnell and Joyner agreed to create a visual and statistical profile of the town using standard GIS methodology. The first task was to gather the mountain of data that would be relevant. A former journalist and real estate developer, Joyner knew where to find comprehensive land-use and infrastructure information. Mebane's public works department provided the locations of water and sewer lines. From the planning department they obtained historical annexation documents. Federal census data broke out racial and economic variables at the block level. They reviewed city council meeting minutes for evidence of action and inaction on service and annexation requests.
Using stock GIS software, Parnell and Joyner digitized the mass of data in compatible formats — a major undertaking in itself — and analyzed it. To produce the maps, they enlisted Bucknell University GIS expert Ben Marsh, a former graduate school classmate of Parnell's. The three published a case study of Mebane in 2003 and shared it with Jack Boger, then-deputy director at the UNC Center for Civil Rights. "What was immediately apparent was how clear the relationship was between the exclusion of services and the racial makeup of the community," Boger says.
Inspired by the Mebane study and law school experience, Parnell and Joyner formed the nonprofit Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities and in 2004 won a foundation grant to map communities throughout North Carolina. They found patterns of exclusion similar to those identified in Mebane across the state.
The institute's maps of Moore County, home to some of the nation's most prestigious and affluent golfing communities, were among their most dramatic examples of underbounding. The maps show the boundaries of three county municipalities, Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen, a tortured maze of red lines that zigzag in all directions, creating angular amoebas.
A batch of dark brown blotches stand prominently outside the limits of all three towns, though they are hemmed in or virtually surrounded by the three towns. The blotches represent communities with overwhelmingly African-American populations and names — Lost City, Monroe Town and Jackson Hamlet — that evoke images of the Jim Crow era.
The maps also show the distribution of sewer lines in the county, which either stop at town borders or go through them but provide no hookups beyond, so the communities outside the town limits have no sewer service. Annexations over the years have swallowed acreage all around the three towns but carefully avoided the minority neighborhoods.
Parnell and Joyner add a sobering narrative to the maps that magnifies the extent of the exclusion of the communities outside town limits: Septic systems have routinely failed, spilling raw sewage next to homes. Residents lack the garbage service enjoyed by people who live in town and must instead pay for a costly private hauler or burn their trash at home. In the Midway community, neighbors watch garbage trucks cut through their main street to serve the citizens of Aberdeen, who live to either side. Police protection is provided by the county sheriff's department, which must travel as much as 15 miles to respond to emergencies — even though municipal police stations are much closer, in some cases just blocks away.
The maps became an integral part of a successful campaign to eliminate the most odious aspects of exclusion in Moore County, and not just in terms of educating decision-makers. For the community groups involved in the campaign, the maps offered a kind of external validation that their narrative alone could not provide. "For me, they were a verification of what I've always known," says Maurice Holland, president of the Midway Community Association and a lifelong resident of the neighborhood.
Since then, the institute has extended its reach beyond state lines. Presentations at conferences and workshops have connected the institute with attorneys working on municipal discrimination cases in California, Virginia, New York, Florida and Texas. While some of the cases center on underbounding, others address additional ways by which municipalities discriminate. In the Florida case, Guatemalan residents in the city of Lake Worth demonstrated that selective code enforcement resulted in the targeting of Latinos for eviction. An analysis of redevelopment efforts in Portsmouth, Va., showed that white residents and developers were the primary beneficiaries of the city's largesse, while black communities were systematically wiped from the landscape to make way for land uses that generated more tax revenue.
And in Dallas, African-American and Latino residents in the inaptly named community of Cadillac Heights sued the city for using zoning regulations to segregate them in an industrial sector — a pattern that traced back to the 1940s, before the influx of Latinos to the city, when land records denoted minority residential areas with the letter "N." Living next to industrial facilities had predictable consequences for residents: chronic health problems, a dearth of public services and permanently depressed property values.
In each instance, GIS maps have proven instrumental in either making the case that discrimination had occurred or influencing the outcome of a government decision about the discrimination. The city of Dallas, for example, settled with the residents and agreed to relocate them to more hospitable environs. Attorney Mike Daniel, who represented the plaintiffs, credits the maps with tipping the balance. This was the second suit brought by residents for the same cause, he notes, but the first one had ended with a nominal settlement that did not remedy the problem. "The history of the two cases was the same," Daniel says. "The only difference was Cedar Grove's work."
Most of the Cedar Grove Institute's recent GIS work has been for attorneys in support of municipal discrimination lawsuits, but the law offers few remedies in such cases. Provisions in the federal Civil Rights, Fair Housing and Voting Rights acts prohibit discrimination based on race and other factors, but local circumstances don't often fit neatly into one of those provisions, and proving that the law was violated is no simple endeavor. Moreover, to win in court, plaintiffs must prove that the discrimination was intentional.
Only a handful of states offer similar protections against discrimination. Further constricting the playing field is a counterintuitive reality: Local government practices that result in exclusion and inequity are, for the most part, legal. Annexation laws, for example, usually permit municipalities to make annexation decisions based on economic considerations. If an annexation provides a net economic benefit, the city can move forward; if the costs of providing services to the annexed territory exceed new tax revenues, the city is free to say no.
And the time and expense of a legal case — often measured in years and millions — are prohibitive for the communities most likely to be the object of discrimination.
Because of these hurdles, some advocacy groups with a GIS focus deploy their maps in the service of less adversarial strategies. The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University engages in "opportunity mapping," which begins with the assumption that opportunities for high-quality housing, employment, education, health care and other key indicators should be distributed equally throughout a given metropolitan area. Kirwan maps identify disparities in the distribution of opportunities, which in turn provides direction for policymakers to correct those disparities.
In a similar vein, the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project takes a solution-oriented approach with its mapping initiative, the Healthy City Project. An interactive, online compendium of demographic, economic and health data for Los Angeles County, Healthy City also pinpoints the location of services for referral purposes and lets users create maps to identify concerns in their own neighborhoods. Developed in collaboration with an innovative GIS lab at UCLA, the Healthy City platform is so advanced that stakeholders often consult with project staff to inform policy debates and decisions.
Healthy City was hired by the city to produce maps in conjunction with an initiative to shift the approach to gang violence from enforcement and suppression to prevention. Healthy City produced maps that showed gang hot spots as well as services available to young people; the maps helped the city target areas where services were in shortest supply for additional investment. "We don't only want to show problems," says John Kim, who has directed Healthy City since its inception in 2002. "We want to show ways to solve those problems."
Historians cite ancient cave paintings of migratory game routes as a primitive geographic information system, the superimposition of data on a geographic image. An English physician mapped the location of London residents sickened by cholera during an outbreak in 1857, which he analyzed to identify the source of the disease. Advancements in photographic processes in the early 20th century enabled the creation of translucent images of geographically ordered demographic data that could be layered atop a map, a technique pioneered by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression.
Though these antecedents arguably combine geography and information into a kind of system, GIS is most commonly associated with sophisticated computer hardware and software, its origins dating back to the days of mainframes and punch cards. In 1962, the Canadian government unveiled the Canada Geographic Information System, a prototype that mapped select land-use variables throughout the country for planning purposes.
Private vendors began to sell off-the-shelf GIS software in the 1980s; a decade later, further refinements in those packages combined with a steady drop in hardware prices made GIS available to anyone with sufficient technical background and skill. The runway was clear for takeoff.
Commercial users were among the first to take advantage. Market researchers mapped demographic data on household income, population density and the location of competitors to choose optimal sites for retail expansion. Engineering firms mapped roads and infrastructure to streamline their projects.
Federal, state and local government agencies also found GIS an invaluable way to increase efficiencies. The time spent on planning, permitting and conducting environmental or health assessments could be cut to a sliver with accurate databases and maps. Law enforcement agencies mapped crime incidence; few government operations, in fact, did not benefit from a GIS application. One of the largest single repositories of government data, the U.S. Census, has likely launched more GIS maps than any other single data source.
Much of that government data has now been posted to the Web. For advocates using GIS, the flood of data has been a boon. Parnell says the Cedar Grove Institute would never have emerged from the conceptual phase without the ability to obtain government data. "We realized that there's a critical mass of data out there," he says. "Five years earlier, we couldn't have done it."
Not all local governments appreciate the rise of GIS-driven advocacy, especially when their own data is used as a hammer against them, and they have begun to restrict public access. Some have pulled data off the Web in the alleged interest of national security; others charge exorbitant fees to produce it or deliver jumbled masses of data that are difficult to manage or decipher.
Mebane, the Cedar Grove Institute's first case study of municipal discrimination, passed an Infrastructure Information Security Policy shortly after the study was published; the policy limited infrastructure data access to qualified engineering firms and town agencies. The city of Modesto, Calif., locked in a legal underbounding battle, pulled its infrastructure data off the Internet after the lawsuit was filed, citing national security grounds. "There's no conceivable national security interest in where the traffic lights are in Modesto," scoffs Ben Marsh, the institute's chief mapmaker. A recent appellate ruling in California rejected a similar national-security rationale, as well as a copyright argument by Santa Clara County, but whether that opinion stands as precedent remains to be seen.
Though restrictions on access to government data could prove troublesome, advocacy groups that use GIS have already been finding data sources outside of government. In particular, data collected by community residents have become an effective supplement to the "official story," as University of Washington professor Sarah Elwood calls government data.
Elwood has used GIS not only to map problems but to build the capacity of underserved and disadvantaged communities to advocate on their own behalf. Simple walking surveys that catalogue infrastructural deficiencies — potholes in sidewalks, missing stop signs, burned-out streetlights — fill gaps in the public record that mask actual conditions on the ground. With locally produced data, Elwood says, "You can tell a very detailed and very current, compelling story about neighborhood needs."
One of the few brakes slowing the GIS freight train, at least from an advocacy perspective, is the shortage of people who understand it well. "Obviously, there is a much greater demand for GIS than there are practitioners," says attorney Eric Schultheis, who coordinates The Race Equity Project for Legal Services of Northern California and counts himself among the GIS crowd. "You could probably count the number of people who are actually doing this work on both hands."
But given the leaps that GIS technology and applications have taken in the political and legal advocacy sectors, it's hard to imagine the GIS trend reversing. By January of next year, Healthy City plans to cover the entire state of California, and Kim says he's received expansion requests from other cities. Healthy City uses free, open-source GIS software that can be customized as needed. The ready supply of cheap hardware and software can only hasten the arrival of the day when GIS mapping is as universal as photo or music editing.
"The technology will soon become ubiquitous," Kim says simply.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Disabled Woman Fights To Keep Therapy Dog
fyi...
SAN FRANCISCO—A woman suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome is suing to keep her therapy dog under Fair Housing and disability laws as she fights eviction from her mobile home park residence of 19 years.
Represented by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), Bay Area Legal Aid and solo attorney David Grabill, Concord’s Theresa Huerta has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the owners of Willow Pass Mobile Home Park who are attempting to evict her after 19 years of residence because her canine companion Manny’s breed is not approved by the mobile home park.
According to her doctors at Contra Costa County Health Services, 52-year-old Huerta suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other health impairments qualifying her as “disabled” as a result of being violently assaulted in 2007, and they assert that Manny’s companionship provides important treatment for her illnesses, removing stress and comforting her.
After recently reporting to governmental agencies certain conditions in the park which appeared to violate health and safety regulations, Huerta received a letter from the Willow Pass managers telling her she either had to get rid of Manny or be subject to eviction.
Huerta adopted Manny in January 2009, taking him into her home and nursing him back to health after he’d been abandoned by his owner and hit by a car, suffering serious injuries. His parentage is unknown, though the defendants claim he appears to be a mix that includes one of the several breeds colloquially referred to as a “pit bull.”
Manny has a very friendly disposition, is obedient to commands, and has never exhibited aggressive behavior towards people or other animals, the Animal Legal Defense Fund spokespeople say. Most importantly, Manny is critical in relieving the effects of Huerta’s health impairments, allowing her to feel safe in her home and qualifying him as a “reasonable accommodation” for her disability. Huerta had owned another mixed breed dog who looked like Manny for 10 years prior to adopting Manny, and many other residents of the mobile home park own dogs of a range of breeds, including ones appearing to be “pit bulls.”
Huerta worked over 13 years as a bilingual instructor for the Oakland and Mount Diablo School Districts, but has been unable to work since her attack, and she will likely become homeless if she is evicted from her Willow Park home of 19 years. “Both Federal and California state fair housing and civil rights laws provide that Ms. Huerta should be allowed the ‘reasonable accommodation’ of her beloved companion Manny, who is providing her with crucial therapeutic value and helping her live with a sense of security, something she was so unfairly robbed of on the day she was assaulted,” says ALDF attorney Bruce Wagman, lead counsel in Huerta’s case.
“Our laws guarantee that disabled Americans must be protected from housing discrimination, and health care providers confirm that the support of a beloved animal companion like Manny can make the crucial difference in allowing disabled persons like Ms. Huerta to move forward with dignity.”
For more information, see www.aldf.org 11-12-09
If you have questions, contact news@northcountrygazette.org
SAN FRANCISCO—A woman suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome is suing to keep her therapy dog under Fair Housing and disability laws as she fights eviction from her mobile home park residence of 19 years.
Represented by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), Bay Area Legal Aid and solo attorney David Grabill, Concord’s Theresa Huerta has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the owners of Willow Pass Mobile Home Park who are attempting to evict her after 19 years of residence because her canine companion Manny’s breed is not approved by the mobile home park.
According to her doctors at Contra Costa County Health Services, 52-year-old Huerta suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other health impairments qualifying her as “disabled” as a result of being violently assaulted in 2007, and they assert that Manny’s companionship provides important treatment for her illnesses, removing stress and comforting her.
After recently reporting to governmental agencies certain conditions in the park which appeared to violate health and safety regulations, Huerta received a letter from the Willow Pass managers telling her she either had to get rid of Manny or be subject to eviction.
Huerta adopted Manny in January 2009, taking him into her home and nursing him back to health after he’d been abandoned by his owner and hit by a car, suffering serious injuries. His parentage is unknown, though the defendants claim he appears to be a mix that includes one of the several breeds colloquially referred to as a “pit bull.”
Manny has a very friendly disposition, is obedient to commands, and has never exhibited aggressive behavior towards people or other animals, the Animal Legal Defense Fund spokespeople say. Most importantly, Manny is critical in relieving the effects of Huerta’s health impairments, allowing her to feel safe in her home and qualifying him as a “reasonable accommodation” for her disability. Huerta had owned another mixed breed dog who looked like Manny for 10 years prior to adopting Manny, and many other residents of the mobile home park own dogs of a range of breeds, including ones appearing to be “pit bulls.”
Huerta worked over 13 years as a bilingual instructor for the Oakland and Mount Diablo School Districts, but has been unable to work since her attack, and she will likely become homeless if she is evicted from her Willow Park home of 19 years. “Both Federal and California state fair housing and civil rights laws provide that Ms. Huerta should be allowed the ‘reasonable accommodation’ of her beloved companion Manny, who is providing her with crucial therapeutic value and helping her live with a sense of security, something she was so unfairly robbed of on the day she was assaulted,” says ALDF attorney Bruce Wagman, lead counsel in Huerta’s case.
“Our laws guarantee that disabled Americans must be protected from housing discrimination, and health care providers confirm that the support of a beloved animal companion like Manny can make the crucial difference in allowing disabled persons like Ms. Huerta to move forward with dignity.”
For more information, see www.aldf.org 11-12-09
If you have questions, contact news@northcountrygazette.org
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
'Humanure' Victory: Green Toilet Wins Austin City Approval
Composting commode is first to gain official stamp.
by Asher Price 11/9/2009 Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
It took more than four years of negotiations and construction, but this month an Austin Water Utility inspector gave final clearance to a glorified outhouse that is on the vanguard of down-and-dirty environmentalism.
Known as a composting toilet, the East Austin commode relies on the alchemy wrought by bacteria to transform human waste into a rich trove of soil. Specialists in so-called humanure have hailed the approval of the toilet as a watershed moment for common-sense environmentalism.
Users flush not with water but with a scoop of sawdust from a nearby bucket, saving the drinking-water-quality water used by conventional toilets, not to mention the energy and money required to pump and clean the wastewater.
"It's the ecologically sound thing to do," said David Bailey, 32, an itinerant carpenter and puppeteer who spearheaded the project. "Rather than using purified drinking water for a waste stream, we're using naturally occurring, ambient bacteria to create soil, one of Earth's least renewable resources. You have more water to drink and bathe in, and you end up with topsoil that's every gardener's dream."
The technology, simple as it is, is unlikely to become widespread. City code bars any property within 100 feet of a sewer line from having a composting toilet. There's also the "ick" factor. And despite issuing its first such permit, the city does not sound especially keen on composting commodes.
Austin Water Utility spokesman Kevin Buchman said the composting toilet is "not something! we're endorsing or even recommend. It's an option for people building homes and trying to do what they believe to be environmentally sound."
The state delegates regulatory power for on-site sewage facilities, which include composting toilets, to local authorities, said Terry Clawson, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The permitted outhouse sits about 4 feet off the ground on a 9.8-acre former landfill in the Montopolis neighborhood that belongs to the Rhizome Collective, a group that puts in practice off-the-grid sustainability, or living in ways that require little in the way of nonrenewable sources of energy.
There is no water hookup to the screened-in, cottage-like outhouse, which cost about $3,000 to build and has a small porch in front and a stall with two commodes inside. Only one functions at a time, for about a year; once the vault beneath it, which is matted with straw, is full, the vault and commode will be sealed for a year. Then the contents are usable as compost, Bailey said.
While one commode is sealed, the other will be used.
Mismanaged sewage and bad sanitation have been blamed for outbreaks of a variety of diseases, among them cholera. But heat created by bacteria in the vault destroys pathogens and coliforms, Bailey says, making the soil "totally benign, environmentally speaking."
The airy outhouse sports views of a pasture of cacti and smells mostly of sawdust. A small fan, powered by a solar panel affixed to the outhouse, keeps fumes moving through a PVC exhaust chimney. A hand-sanitizer dispenser sits beside the screen door. In keeping with the sympathies and orientation of the Rhizome Collective, the toilet-side books include "Malcom X Speaks," the Marxist sociological text "Society of the Spectacle" and the prison novel "Iron City."
The permitting and final approval for the outhouse took four years, but "it's a testament to the openness of the city to allow us to build it," said Bailey, who says he has built more than a dozen composting toilets in Texas, the Northeast and overseas.
At least a handful of composting toilets exist in Austin covertly, but Bailey said the Rhizome Collective wanted to win city recognition for the project to persuade officials to broaden the ways residents can cut their water use. On average, toilets use as much as 3 gallons per flush, Buchman said.
As part of the permit application, members of the Rhizome Collective included material from two of the seminal toilet-construction texts, "Lifting the Lid" and the "Humanure Handbook."
"I know of no other cities that officially recognize humanure toilets," said Joseph Jenkins, author of the "Humanure Handbook." "It is little understood by regulatory personnel, and it falls into a gray area - somewhere between what people typically consider 'sanitation' or 'waste treatment' and 'composting.' "
Benefits include the production of a valuable fertilizer, savings in water use, and the prevention of treated effluent, possibly laden with chemicals, from being discharged into waterways, said Lauren Ross, a civil engineer who worked on the project.
"In our current culture, it's not a technology for most people," she said. "But there is a significant part of Austin's community ready to take some radical steps for environmental protection. Composting toilets are no crazier than a lifestyle based on living somewhere in suburbia and commuting 15 miles for a downtown job. That's also not for everyone, but it gets planned for and is accepted as a normal, ordinary way of life."
Flush toilets also contribute to the enormous amounts of energy required to pull water out of the Colorado River, treat it to a drinkable standard, flush it through the sewage system, and treat it again before it can be discharged back into the river. Austin Water Utility uses as much electricity as all other city departments combined, not including Austin Energy, said David Greene, energy and resources engineer with the water utility.
"It's a major energy issue," Greene said.
Copyright 2009 The Austin American-Statesman
by Asher Price 11/9/2009 Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
It took more than four years of negotiations and construction, but this month an Austin Water Utility inspector gave final clearance to a glorified outhouse that is on the vanguard of down-and-dirty environmentalism.
Known as a composting toilet, the East Austin commode relies on the alchemy wrought by bacteria to transform human waste into a rich trove of soil. Specialists in so-called humanure have hailed the approval of the toilet as a watershed moment for common-sense environmentalism.
Users flush not with water but with a scoop of sawdust from a nearby bucket, saving the drinking-water-quality water used by conventional toilets, not to mention the energy and money required to pump and clean the wastewater.
"It's the ecologically sound thing to do," said David Bailey, 32, an itinerant carpenter and puppeteer who spearheaded the project. "Rather than using purified drinking water for a waste stream, we're using naturally occurring, ambient bacteria to create soil, one of Earth's least renewable resources. You have more water to drink and bathe in, and you end up with topsoil that's every gardener's dream."
The technology, simple as it is, is unlikely to become widespread. City code bars any property within 100 feet of a sewer line from having a composting toilet. There's also the "ick" factor. And despite issuing its first such permit, the city does not sound especially keen on composting commodes.
Austin Water Utility spokesman Kevin Buchman said the composting toilet is "not something! we're endorsing or even recommend. It's an option for people building homes and trying to do what they believe to be environmentally sound."
The state delegates regulatory power for on-site sewage facilities, which include composting toilets, to local authorities, said Terry Clawson, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The permitted outhouse sits about 4 feet off the ground on a 9.8-acre former landfill in the Montopolis neighborhood that belongs to the Rhizome Collective, a group that puts in practice off-the-grid sustainability, or living in ways that require little in the way of nonrenewable sources of energy.
There is no water hookup to the screened-in, cottage-like outhouse, which cost about $3,000 to build and has a small porch in front and a stall with two commodes inside. Only one functions at a time, for about a year; once the vault beneath it, which is matted with straw, is full, the vault and commode will be sealed for a year. Then the contents are usable as compost, Bailey said.
While one commode is sealed, the other will be used.
Mismanaged sewage and bad sanitation have been blamed for outbreaks of a variety of diseases, among them cholera. But heat created by bacteria in the vault destroys pathogens and coliforms, Bailey says, making the soil "totally benign, environmentally speaking."
The airy outhouse sports views of a pasture of cacti and smells mostly of sawdust. A small fan, powered by a solar panel affixed to the outhouse, keeps fumes moving through a PVC exhaust chimney. A hand-sanitizer dispenser sits beside the screen door. In keeping with the sympathies and orientation of the Rhizome Collective, the toilet-side books include "Malcom X Speaks," the Marxist sociological text "Society of the Spectacle" and the prison novel "Iron City."
The permitting and final approval for the outhouse took four years, but "it's a testament to the openness of the city to allow us to build it," said Bailey, who says he has built more than a dozen composting toilets in Texas, the Northeast and overseas.
At least a handful of composting toilets exist in Austin covertly, but Bailey said the Rhizome Collective wanted to win city recognition for the project to persuade officials to broaden the ways residents can cut their water use. On average, toilets use as much as 3 gallons per flush, Buchman said.
As part of the permit application, members of the Rhizome Collective included material from two of the seminal toilet-construction texts, "Lifting the Lid" and the "Humanure Handbook."
"I know of no other cities that officially recognize humanure toilets," said Joseph Jenkins, author of the "Humanure Handbook." "It is little understood by regulatory personnel, and it falls into a gray area - somewhere between what people typically consider 'sanitation' or 'waste treatment' and 'composting.' "
Benefits include the production of a valuable fertilizer, savings in water use, and the prevention of treated effluent, possibly laden with chemicals, from being discharged into waterways, said Lauren Ross, a civil engineer who worked on the project.
"In our current culture, it's not a technology for most people," she said. "But there is a significant part of Austin's community ready to take some radical steps for environmental protection. Composting toilets are no crazier than a lifestyle based on living somewhere in suburbia and commuting 15 miles for a downtown job. That's also not for everyone, but it gets planned for and is accepted as a normal, ordinary way of life."
Flush toilets also contribute to the enormous amounts of energy required to pull water out of the Colorado River, treat it to a drinkable standard, flush it through the sewage system, and treat it again before it can be discharged back into the river. Austin Water Utility uses as much electricity as all other city departments combined, not including Austin Energy, said David Greene, energy and resources engineer with the water utility.
"It's a major energy issue," Greene said.
Copyright 2009 The Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Blogs for a change
100 best blogs for those who want to change the world!
[thanks to Sabrina for passing this along to us from DC]
Monday, August 24, 2009
Attorney provides downtown Sacramento site for homeless camp
From the Sacramento Bee ( Nice try, but I hear the cops shut the site down yesterday - DG)
By Cynthia Hubert chubert@sacbee.com
Saturday, Aug. 22, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3B
A Sacramento attorney who has championed the rights of homeless people is opening his private property to campers who need a place to sleep at night.
Mark Merin, who for years has challenged the city's and county's treatment of the homeless, is leasing a parcel of land in downtown Sacramento to an association of people seeking to establish a legal "safe ground" campsite. Three advocacy organizations are leading the "safe ground" effort.
Merin would not disclose terms of the lease but said the vacant lot is on C Street between 12th and 14th streets and should accommodate 20 to 30 tents. Campers had already begun to move in Friday.
The arrangement, Merin said, would prevent police from ticketing homeless people for trespassing and from seizing their property. It would not, however, stop officers from enforcing a city ordinance that prohibits camping in non-designated areas for longer than 24 hours.
Merin said he hopes police will look the other way on the camping ordinance, which is not strictly enforced against anyone other than homeless people. If they continue to enforce the ordinance, he said, he will challenge them in court.
Sgt. Norm Leong, a spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department, said officers would "consider taking enforcement action" against campers only if the site was "unsafe or unsanitary" or if neighbors or others complained.
"We would step back and look at it," he said. "We wouldn't feel the need to jump in as soon as someone pitches a tent and break it down."
But Leong questioned why Merin and others would open a campsite on their own even as city and community leaders are working toward establishing a legal campground that would offer the homeless such services as garbage pickup, sanitation and social support.
"Why would you initiate it now, when the mayor is trying to figure out a legal solution?" he asked.
Joan Burke of Loaves & Fishes, which provides a variety of services to homeless people in a complex within walking distance of Merin's property, said Mayor Kevin Johnson's task force is doing potentially groundbreaking work. However, "we can't wait" for the political process to play out, she said.
"The winter is coming, and people have no place to sleep," said Burke, who served on the task force. "The current situation is intolerable."
Merin said he would like to see other private property owners offer vacant land so that several small campsites with basic services could be established, perhaps with the city's blessing.
"We need to take care of those less fortunate than us," said Merin, who lives in the area where the campsite is to be established. "It's as simple as that."
By Cynthia Hubert chubert@sacbee.com
Saturday, Aug. 22, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3B
A Sacramento attorney who has championed the rights of homeless people is opening his private property to campers who need a place to sleep at night.
Mark Merin, who for years has challenged the city's and county's treatment of the homeless, is leasing a parcel of land in downtown Sacramento to an association of people seeking to establish a legal "safe ground" campsite. Three advocacy organizations are leading the "safe ground" effort.
Merin would not disclose terms of the lease but said the vacant lot is on C Street between 12th and 14th streets and should accommodate 20 to 30 tents. Campers had already begun to move in Friday.
The arrangement, Merin said, would prevent police from ticketing homeless people for trespassing and from seizing their property. It would not, however, stop officers from enforcing a city ordinance that prohibits camping in non-designated areas for longer than 24 hours.
Merin said he hopes police will look the other way on the camping ordinance, which is not strictly enforced against anyone other than homeless people. If they continue to enforce the ordinance, he said, he will challenge them in court.
Sgt. Norm Leong, a spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department, said officers would "consider taking enforcement action" against campers only if the site was "unsafe or unsanitary" or if neighbors or others complained.
"We would step back and look at it," he said. "We wouldn't feel the need to jump in as soon as someone pitches a tent and break it down."
But Leong questioned why Merin and others would open a campsite on their own even as city and community leaders are working toward establishing a legal campground that would offer the homeless such services as garbage pickup, sanitation and social support.
"Why would you initiate it now, when the mayor is trying to figure out a legal solution?" he asked.
Joan Burke of Loaves & Fishes, which provides a variety of services to homeless people in a complex within walking distance of Merin's property, said Mayor Kevin Johnson's task force is doing potentially groundbreaking work. However, "we can't wait" for the political process to play out, she said.
"The winter is coming, and people have no place to sleep," said Burke, who served on the task force. "The current situation is intolerable."
Merin said he would like to see other private property owners offer vacant land so that several small campsites with basic services could be established, perhaps with the city's blessing.
"We need to take care of those less fortunate than us," said Merin, who lives in the area where the campsite is to be established. "It's as simple as that."
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Still more on the Westchester County Settlement
[This is an LTE from one of the attorneys in the Westchester County housing discrimination case settlement]
The Court Is Right About Westchester County Housing
Your description of the landmark settlement that emerged from the Anti-Discrimination Center's lawsuit against Westchester County as "the government deciding where it wants people to live" ("Color-Coding the Suburbs," Review & Outlook, Aug. 15) bears no relation to the actual terms of the agreement nor to the history of residential racial segregation in Westchester County.
Westchester is deeply, deeply residentially segregated. A dozen of its municipalities have African-American populations of less than 1%. Nine more municipalities have African-American populations of less than 2%. The principal indices of segregation show, remarkably, that Westchester was more segregated in 2000 than it was in 1950.
One should not be fooled into thinking that it is only poorer African-Americans who are living separately from whites. The most widely used measure of segregation has demonstrated that African-American households earning more than $150,000 per year are more segregated from whites than are African-American households earning less than $50,000 per year.
Recipients of federal community development funds have long been required to identify and act to overcome barriers to fair housing choice. Indeed, recipients can only receive grant funds if they represent that they have done so. From 2000 to 2006, Westchester received more than $50 million by making such representations. Earlier this year, a federal judge granted the Anti-Discrimination Center's motion for partial summary judgment, finding as a matter of law that Westchester had "utterly failed" to meet its affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing obligations, and finding as well that every one of Westchester's representations that it had done so was "false or fraudulent."
The only "social engineering" involved in the case was the evidence of Westchester County having perpetuated segregation by not using its authority to overcome artificial barriers to affordable housing development in its whitest municipalities while at the same time channeling such development into areas of concentrated African-American population.
The settlement is designed to overcome the rigid exclusionary zoning that has prevented both for-profit and not-for-profit developers from constructing the type of context-sensitive affordable housing in Westchester towns and villages that they have built elsewhere in the country. By creating these opportunities in communities where they have been absent, and by making it clear for the first time that people of all races and backgrounds are welcome throughout the county, the settlement both creates real consumer choice and, 41 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, takes an important step toward ending the legacy of "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal."
Craig Gurian, Executive Director
Anti-Discrimination Center
New York
The Court Is Right About Westchester County Housing
Your description of the landmark settlement that emerged from the Anti-Discrimination Center's lawsuit against Westchester County as "the government deciding where it wants people to live" ("Color-Coding the Suburbs," Review & Outlook, Aug. 15) bears no relation to the actual terms of the agreement nor to the history of residential racial segregation in Westchester County.
Westchester is deeply, deeply residentially segregated. A dozen of its municipalities have African-American populations of less than 1%. Nine more municipalities have African-American populations of less than 2%. The principal indices of segregation show, remarkably, that Westchester was more segregated in 2000 than it was in 1950.
One should not be fooled into thinking that it is only poorer African-Americans who are living separately from whites. The most widely used measure of segregation has demonstrated that African-American households earning more than $150,000 per year are more segregated from whites than are African-American households earning less than $50,000 per year.
Recipients of federal community development funds have long been required to identify and act to overcome barriers to fair housing choice. Indeed, recipients can only receive grant funds if they represent that they have done so. From 2000 to 2006, Westchester received more than $50 million by making such representations. Earlier this year, a federal judge granted the Anti-Discrimination Center's motion for partial summary judgment, finding as a matter of law that Westchester had "utterly failed" to meet its affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing obligations, and finding as well that every one of Westchester's representations that it had done so was "false or fraudulent."
The only "social engineering" involved in the case was the evidence of Westchester County having perpetuated segregation by not using its authority to overcome artificial barriers to affordable housing development in its whitest municipalities while at the same time channeling such development into areas of concentrated African-American population.
The settlement is designed to overcome the rigid exclusionary zoning that has prevented both for-profit and not-for-profit developers from constructing the type of context-sensitive affordable housing in Westchester towns and villages that they have built elsewhere in the country. By creating these opportunities in communities where they have been absent, and by making it clear for the first time that people of all races and backgrounds are welcome throughout the county, the settlement both creates real consumer choice and, 41 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, takes an important step toward ending the legacy of "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal."
Craig Gurian, Executive Director
Anti-Discrimination Center
New York
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