Based on our discussion about the definition and examples of urban resilience, what does resilience look like in your particular project or project community? In Monday’s class, we talked about resilience as the ability of a system to handle a shock or disruption. We touched on both the emotional ability and the physical capacity of a community to recover to an equal or higher level of wellbeing than it had had before a given disturbance. The discussion on Monday primarily dealt with disaster resilience through social capital, such as leaning on a sister village program to provide accomodation for people displaced by an eruption or relying on a social media network to provide physical and moral support. Similarly, our work with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is showing us the importance of social connections and natural disaster preparedness, although we are also learning about many other kinds of resilience that are involved in fighting for equitable, sustainable housing. In the sphere of housing equity work, resilience looks like connectivity and collective leverage. AEMP is connecting people together so they can fight their evictions. This angle is consistent with the hypothesis proposed on Monday that social capital increases one’s power to respond to a situation. In addition, from an ecological perspective, ecosystems with more actors, distribution of function, and redundancy in function are often more resilient to disruptions; correspondingly, human ecosystems with more collaborators and distributed power are better able to bounce back from stressors, and less burden is placed on a few particular actors. An example of this collective leverage can be found in the speculation chapter of the Atlas. One of the written pieces describes the process by which community land trusts were used to buy up Pigeon Palace, a six-unit property from which residents would have otherwise been evicted. Together, the residents, with help from the San Francisco Community Land Trust, were better equipped with the money and voice necessary to successfully dismantle the threat of eviction, preserve the cultural continuity of Pigeon Palace, and maintain their homes and livelihoods. However, it is also important to wrestle with the relationship between resistance and resilience. AEMP frames their work as helping residents resist eviction and injustice, which is not necessarily the same as being resilient in the face of evictions. AEMP’s framework of resistance focuses on fighting individual people, actions, and laws, while our current understanding of resilience incorporates a broader context of setting oneself or one’s community up to better address the possibility or reality of injustices and evictions. However, there is a lot of overlap between resilience and resistance in terms of a community’s access to resources. A resilient community with adequate money, health(care), and leverage to effectively advance its interests will be more effective in its efforts of resistance. Likewise, the same social capital that encourages resilience, as in the case of neighborhood recovery after Hurricane Katrina, can also precipitate collective action that helps keep a neighborhood together. What types of issues would fall under “resilience” and why is resilience needed in these areas? Creating a system that is able to withstand disruptions is a major goal of the AEMP, and multiple issues brought into focus by the project illustrate the challenges that need to be overcome before attaining a resilient system. One of the main avenues of encouraging resilience in our project is building social capital in the communities affected by the housing crisis. By creating more tightly knit communities, disruptions like evictions are more likely to be resisted. As discussed previously, building resilience can be a stepping stone to resistance, and having stronger communities is a sure way to achieve both of these. Another issue that falls under resilience is cultural continuity. Evictions certainly prevent a community from maintaining its cultural identity, and our project’s goal of preventing evictions will hopefully address this issue that is connected to resilience. Cultural continuity is intertwined with social capital, where a community will have a better capacity to conduct collective action as a result of resources and organizations built up over time. This could come in the form of public spaces used by the community for political action, or building a legacy of legal representation that acts as a safeguard for individuals being displaced. In any case, evictions threaten cultural continuity, and they make communities less resilient as a result. Public health is also vital to any discussion of resilience because the health of individuals will necessarily shape the health of communities. When people are displaced, they often lose access to resources they had relied on in the past to live a healthy life. An example brought to light by the AEMP is the inability of those with HIV/AIDS to receive proper medical treatment after being displaced to a community with less familiar resources or to a community that lacks them altogether. This also connects to the concept of cultural continuity, which ultimately encouraged the provision of HIV/AIDS treatment in those original communities. Another example from the AEMP involves communities that lack toxic waste disposal services, which have been forcibly moved by the government to avoid public health issues. In this case, the government did not seriously consider the relationship between public health and resilience. Otherwise, the creation of toxic waste disposal services would have been a clear solution. Related to this example of government action is the creation of a stable political climate that promotes well-being in the community it serves. Elected officials generally have a high rate of turnover, and it would follow that extreme changes in elected officials (and as a result, the political climate) can be considered a disruption to the system. Therefore, communities that can manage to maintain a stable political climate will be less likely to experience a disruption. Having a resilient community also means having infrastructure in place that prevents disruption. One example of this is infrastructure built in response to climate change. With respect to disaster preparedness, are low-income and at-risk communities resilient to earthquake damage and relocation? Do coastal communities have infrastructure to prevent massive displacement? It is also important to consider infrastructure as a means for connectivity. Having widespread and affordable public transportation options can help mitigate the effects of displaced communities that have to commute far distances. When discussing resilience, the built form of a community is an inseparable issue that needs to be included. One final issue related to resilience is economic diversity. Ensuring that a community can be financially stable over time is closely related with the displacement of low-income workers that form the pillars of any economy. By ensuring a diverse workforce and market economy within a community, the ability of that community to withstand economic shocks is greatly enhanced. If you were to meet a resilience planner from the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), how should these regional organizations prioritize and fund resilience initiatives in your project’s community? What would be your recommendations for the ABAG/MTC resilience division to address, in regards to your project? A resilience planner from ABAG or MTC should, first, be forward thinking enough to anticipate changes in neighborhood conditions before people are displaced or find the city they reside in lacking in housing, transport, basic services as well as cultural and social resources. Through the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, ABAG planners have made it clear how much housing cities should build for each income group. Nonetheless, given how cities have largely ignored RHNA, planners need to be more aggressive and penalize poorly performing cities more strongly or provide stronger incentives for affordable housing. Additionally, RHNA recommendations have only recently come into place and largely as a reaction to the Tech Boom 2.0. Planners should have anticipated gentrification, because resilience is impossible if the community you are trying to build resilience in is being broken up and displaced. As far as preventing such damaging displacement goes, ABAG could play a role in encouraging cities to adopt more rent control measures and expedite affordable housing development to allow for displaced communities to stay close to their homes and reduce “root shock”. The MTC, could play an important role in building resilience to try to mitigate impacts of displacement. The development of new transport rail initiatives that increase connectivity in the Bay and reduce transport times could do a lot to help people commute to work and reconnect with old community friends. For example, Facebook’s recent negotiations with San Mateo County Transit Community to restore the old Dumbarton Bridge and provide a rail line could do a lot to reduce transit costs for low-income workers and also reduce health impacts from drive-through traffic in East Palo Alto. Additionally, making existing public transport cheaper would also help to reduce transportation cost burdens for displaced families that often are forced to move further from work. Ultimately, housing initiatives should be paired with transportation initiatives especially to reduce the overall proportion of income low-income groups spend on just housing themselves and getting to work. For example, as people need to move out of expensive housing areas, they will need to spend more money to travel to their jobs in order to maintain their livelihoods. Therefore, it is imperative that transportation costs are reasonably affordable. “In 2005, low-income and working class families in the Bay Area spent 66 percent of household income on housing and transportation” (Plan Bay Area). ABAG/MTC could help to address this by reducing toll prices, or by encouraging SFMTA to reduce the cost of BART. This is particularly important because a large percentage of Bay Area commuters are low-income. ABAG/MTA could also work to ensure that they build an appropriate amount of housing units near their newest transportation projects so that the gentrification and displacement caused by increased property values near their transportation projects is offset by a greater supply of housing. Another way that ABAG/MTC would improve Bay Area resilience would be to help create physical gathering spaces for marginalized communities to connect and share ideas. AEMP is currently working on this in the digital sphere by connecting individuals who have been evicted with other individuals in order to create a regional resistance movement. However, there is also value in physical spaces for people to gather, especially those that may not have access to digital resources. For example, in Bayview (a neighborhood of San Francisco that has historically been home to SF’s Black community), the growing Asian community has found that there are few cultural resources for them. In response, the AsianWeek Foundation created the Florence Fang Asian Community Garden, which is an urban farm run primarily by elderly Chinese residents. The garden grows culturally-relevant crops, but also creates a space for Chinese residents to connect with one another and share resources. It is also a space for traditional arts, as well as a venue for food pantry donations. The community members involved have now begun to negotiate with CalTrain to buy the land that they are operating on, and thus creating a permanent space for their community. [Pictured above: two women tending to garden beds at the Florence Fang Asian Community Garden]
We would also argue that ABAG and MTC look into several of the policies that AEMP has been actively supporting to protect renters from evictions (both no-fault evictions and those due to dramatically increased rental costs). For example, AEMP is encouraging that all California cities have rent control laws because they allow for diversity and stability within communities. Currently, only 19 of the 482 California cities have rent control laws, meaning that a majority of Californians are at risk of unfairly increased rent prices. While this does not necessarily protect new low-income renters, rent control does allow for existing renters to stay in one place for a longer amount of time and contribute more fully to their surrounding communities. AEMP is also supporting “Just Cause for All,” a campaign to repeal the Ellis Act. The Ellis Act allows California landlords to evict renters in order to leave the rental market, although this is often used to change rental units into condominiums. As a result of the Ellis Act, AEMP argues that more “no-fault” evictions are occurring in the Bay Area, because landlords are able to sell their land to high-paying developers instead of maintaining relationships with low- and middle-income tenants. Finally, AEMP also urges for the Costa-Hawkins act, which limits community’s abilities to enact stronger renter protections, to be repealed. AEMP argues that repealing the Costa-Hawkins act, by voting YES on Prop 10 this November, will increase stability in the rental market and reduce the prevalence of evictions. Currently, over $25 million has gone to support Prop 10, with 91% of this funding coming from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Because access to HIV/AIDS treatment facilities and resources decreases as people are forced out of urban centers, and because the low-income people who are being evicted are more likely to have HIV/AIDS, Prop 10 can be viewed as a public health protection. However, on the other side, $75 million has been used for campaigns to oppose Prop 10. A majority of this funding is coming from realtors, such as the California Association of Realtors, who have more money to use to spread their message than individual renters. We would hope that the ABAG/MTC resilience divisions would help financially support campaigns for the above initiatives, or release public statements in support of these initiatives, in order to prevent further evictions and therefore increase the resilience of a community Comments are closed.
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