We welcome Rebecca Walker, who is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban and Regional Planning at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Her research considers the intersection of housing, equity, and the environment in American cities.
We’re talking about her paper “Making the City of Lakes: whiteness, nature, and urban development in Minneapolis,” published in the Annals of the American Association of Geography with co-authors Hannah Ramer, Kate Derickson, and Bonnie Keeler in 2023.
Follow Rebecca Walker on Twitter @RebHWalker
Mapping Prejudice Project: https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/about-us/project
Merchandise: https://densecitypod.myshopify.com/
Artwork: https://www.etsy.com/shop/EmilyHIllustrations?ref=search_shop_redirect
Music: Ryan Kinnear, Reid Cai, and Becca Mayers
Dense City Podcast: https://www.rebeccamayers.com/dense-city-podcast.html
Transcript
[00:00:00] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful Seward, Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R Buck. I have been enjoying the Dense City Podcast, where host Rebecca Mayers interviews researchers about academic papers they have published about urban design concepts. I recently listened to an episode featuring Rebecca Walker at the U of M, who wrote a paper called “Making the City of Lakes: whiteness, nature, and urban development in Minneapolis.” Let me hand you over to them now.
[00:00:46] Rebecca Mayers: Welcome to the Dense City Podcast, where we chat with academics about their research on cities. I’m your host, Becca Mayers. On today’s episode, we welcome Rebecca Walker, who is a PhD candidate in urban and regional planning at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Her research considers the interaction of housing, equity, and the environment in American cities.
We’re talking about her paper, Making the City of Lakes: Whiteness, Nature and Urban Development in Minneapolis. This paper was recently published in the Annals of the American Association of Geography with her co-authors Hannah Raymer, Kate Derickson, and Bonnie Keller in 2023. The paper was premised on the reality that Minneapolis has the twin distinctions of having one of the most highly rated park systems in the US and some of the most pronounced racial disparities in wealth and home ownership.
In this paper, the authors argued that this coupling of the urban nature and racial inequality was intentionally produced by the city’s real estate industry and local government. Please welcome Rebecca Walker to Dent City. Hi, Rebecca. How are you?
[00:02:18] Rebecca Walker: I’m doing great. I’m so excited to be on the podcast.
[00:02:21] Rebecca Mayers: Awesome. I’m really looking forward to delving into some of your research, and I just wanted to know from the top of our discussion, what brought you to research this intersection between urban nature and issues of racial inequality?
[00:02:39] Rebecca Walker: A confluence of a lot of things. I, so we, I’m part of a research team and we were interested in understanding, sort of looking at environmental injustice from the perspective of how is sort of like privilege and racial exclusion coupled with the production of like pristine environment.
So that was sort of this question that we– we’re thinking about as a group, and then we were partnering with the mapping prejudice team. So I was already just sort of like noodling around in the data and being like, these patterns are weird. And so that was happening and, and then the summer of 2020 happened, um, and suddenly I.
You know, in, in general there was like a, a real, like public attention and focus on racial inequality and like what produced it in Minneapolis. Um, but, but the parks became a real site of struggle because as sort of part of the uprising on housed people were being displaced again and again. Um, and the parks became this site of refuge.
But there is this huge struggle over like, who has access to the park? Like who gets to be there? Um. So understanding like the history of the park system is part of this history of racial exclusion in the city became like really important for some of the organizing work I was involved with. Um, and so that that really motivated the set.
The analysis was how can we look into the history of the park board and hold them to account in this particular moment of inequality and sort of racial pain in the city.
[00:04:03] Rebecca Mayers: Definitely. I was interested in having you on to discuss this article because it does give us some insight into the historical policies like racial covenants that have influenced both these social and environmental landscapes of cities.
Um, and it also helps us understand how things like racism have permeated these landscapes over time. Uh, and also gives us some ways to incorporate these lessons into our future planning and thinking about cities. So on that note, um, let’s go back to Minneapolis on July 5th, 1911, which is a date of significance that you pinpointed at the beginning of your article.
Walk me through what happened on this day.
[00:04:58] Rebecca Walker: So July 5th, 1911 was the culmination of this week long celebration called the Minneapolis Civic Celebration. And this was an event that was organized by the leading city politicians and businessmen at the time, um, who were really aiming to promote Minneapolis as one of the most prosperous and progressive cities in the United States.
Um, and, and so Minneapolis wasn’t a very old city at this time. Minneapolis was founded on land that was stolen from the Dakota people in 1867. Um, and so by this moment in 1911, it was, it was sort of a moment of rebranding for the city where the city elites really wanted to transform the image of Minneapolis from one of a frontier outpost.
Uh, to one of, of Minneapolis is one of the nation’s leading cities. And so sort of this settler colonial imagery was really front and center. And this celebration, um, including a historical pageant that, that aimed to sort of rewrite Minnesota’s history. Uh, so changing it from the sort of bloody history of indigenous dispossession to a story in which the native people welcomed white settlers.
Uh, and the white settlers transformed Minnesota’s ecosystems into productive industries like mining and forestry. Um, and so building on these themes of transformation and sort of beautifying the landscape, that was the language of the day. Um, one of the most anticipated events of the civic celebration, the finale, was what was called the Linking of the Lakes Day, and so linking of the lakes was on July 5th, 1911.
Um. On this day, the park board, uh, so the city’s park agency, um, opened up a new canal that connected two of the city’s largest lakes. And so, um, Minneapolis is is known as the City of Lakes. Uh, we have many large, beautiful lakes in the city. Um, and so two of these lakes, they were previously really marshy. They were considered swamps. Um, and the park board had undertaken this campaign to sort of dredge these lakes, remove the wild rice that was growing there, which is an indigenous food staple, um, and to transform the shoreline and turn these lakes into beautiful, really desirable park spaces. Um, and the culmination of this, uh, sort of transformation of Minneapolis’s landscape, uh, was the construction of this new canal connecting two of the city’s lakes.
Thousands of people gathered around the Lakeshore to watch the opening of this new canal in the first boats pass from one lake into the other.
[00:07:42] Rebecca Mayers: I see. So Linking of the Lakes Day was this rebranding effort where the colonial view of a beautification strategy was imposed, um, on this indigenous land.
[00:07:56] Rebecca Walker: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so the planning for Linking of the Laked Day, uh, was headed up by this real estate developer and this guy was named Edmund Walton. Um, and he was really invested in planning this huge celebration and sort of drumming up a lot of public attention about, uh, this new sort of park space around the lakes.
Um, because he, he owned land next to the lakes and he, he wanted people to be interested in the lakes and want to buy property there. Um, and so in addition to, to planning this celebration, Walton at the same time was introducing this new tool for transforming Minneapolis’s landscape, uh, called racial covenants.
Um, and these were used to, uh, exclude, um, people of color from purchasing homes and parts of the city, uh, and to really sort of imbue the city’s landscape
with the logic of white supremacy.
[00:08:52] Rebecca Mayers: In these covenants, walk us through what the difference between a racial covenant and what redlining is, because we talk about redlining in research and in popular media a lot. Um. But is it different than a covenant? Yeah. Walk us through some of that.
[00:09:09] Rebecca Walker: Yeah, that’s a really good question, and I think there’s often a lot of confusing about what exactly we mean by redlining. So redlining specifically refers to a discriminatory practice, um, where people of color were denied access to mortgages, to loans, or to other financial services. Um. If they were trying to purchase a home in particular neighborhoods, uh, and this was because of their race or ethnicity. Um, and so this, this particularly targeted Black people in the U.S. Um, but, but also, uh, many people of color, um, racial covenants. I. Our work a little bit differently. These were legal clauses that were inserted into property deed. So when you buy a home, you get a property deed. Uh, and this was a clause that, that stated that this home can never be sold to a person who isn’t considered white. So, um, no one who isn’t considered white can ever own or occupy this land. Racial covenants actually predate redlining. So the first uses of racial covenants in the US are in the late 1800s
uh, and by the early 1900s they started becoming really widespread in US cities. Um, and then in Minneapolis. Edmund Walton introduced the first racial covenant in 1910. So just a few months before the civic celebration actually. Uh, and by the 1930s, covenants had become incredibly widespread in the Minneapolis real estate market, and the majority of new developments in Minneapolis after 1930 until covenants were made illegal, actually contained racial covenants.
[00:10:45] Rebecca Mayers: So that was, um, until when were racial covenants, uh, banned or made illegal?
[00:10:52] Rebecca Walker: Um, it’s a little bit complicated. And 1948, the US Supreme Court said, um, you can’t enforce them, but they were still added to properties and they were still sort of enforced on a local scale. Um, in 1955, the, the Minnesota State Legislature put a ban on racial covenants, but they really weren’t illegal until the, in the US until the Fair Housing Act of 1968. So, honestly, quite recent history.
[00:11:19] Rebecca Mayers: Yeah, very recent. And so the difference is redlining is your denied ownership, uh, into different areas, but the covenant is that you can’t own or even occupy, like you can’t rent a home, doesn’t matter where it is.
[00:11:34] Rebecca Walker: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:35] Rebecca Mayers: Like just no one shall live here.
[00:11:37] Rebecca Walker: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:37] Rebecca Mayers: Declared from on high.
[00:11:39] Rebecca Walker: Mm-hmm. Edmund Walton was responsible for introducing this idea to the Minneapolis real estate market. Um, and, and it became really widespread and we still see the legacy of these effects today. So Minneapolis ranks, uh, 97th and out of the largest US cities, uh, in terms of its gap, um, between its Black residents and its white residents and home ownership.
So about 75% of white residents in Minneapolis own their own home, while only about 25% of Black residents own their own home. Um. We rank 99th out of the 100 largest US cities. So second to last, in terms of our income gap between Black and white residents. So these disparities are really, really stark here.
Um, and they’re also present in the built environment. There’s deep environmental injustice in Minneapolis, and these injustices we saw really come to a boiling point after the murder of George Floyd and sort of the wave of protests and uprising for racial justice that happened, um, in the aftermath.
[00:12:39] Rebecca Mayers: Yeah. So we’ve sort of laid this, this context and this background, and considering the history and outcome of these racist practices, walk us through the purpose of this article then, uh, that you researched. I.
[00:12:55] Rebecca Walker: So we as a research team, we wanted to understand how these outcomes, this deep racial inequality that characterizes Minneapolis, um, and also Minneapolis is really incredible investment in urban nature.
Uh, we’re co-constituted, we’re intertwined. Um, and so we wanted to look at the origins of, of these inequalities, but also minneapolis’s urban nature, um, stretching back more than a century. In doing so, we, we tried to bring to light some of the policies and the planning practices that led, uh, to these, that sort of produced these injustices and continued to reproduce them decade after decade.
Um, I. Also to think about how we might start to undo this. How do we dismantle landscapes of racialized environmental privilege? Um, and to understand more deeply the ways in which urban nature, racial exclusion, and the racial wealth gap, um, have been linked together. Um. So what’s linked them and how do we undo it?
[00:13:58] Rebecca Mayers: Yeah. Very big tasks ahead. So walk us through some of that literature that you use to inform your work.
[00:14:05] Rebecca Walker: So environmental justice scholars and activists have really widely documented the unequal exposure to environmental harms, like toxic air pollution, proximity to toxic sites. Contaminated drinking water that characterizes American cities, um, and disproportionately impacts people of color.
So that’s sort of, we know this about American cities. Um, and in this paper we wanted to extend this and build on this concept that was first articulated by Dr. Laura Pulido, um, and later described by Dr. Lisa Sun-hee Park and Dr. David Pellow called Environmental Privilege to Understand and, and Undo Landscapes of Environmental Injustice.
We need to look not just at, at where these toxic sites, these environmental harms are placed on the landscapes, but also the ways in which access to clean environments, to uncontaminated environments, or proximity to environmental amenities or environmental goods like parks, like nature spaces, um, are really structured by racial exclusion and white supremacy. Um, and, and particularly through the real estate market. I think that, um, that was something that Laura Pulido pointed to and her study that was published in 2000 looking at Los Angeles, and she showed that access to housing and the ways in which white communities have a, have a far greater access to housing choices that, that, that people of color are excluded from. Uh, enables sort of the transformation of these landscapes and the deepening of these landscapes of environmental injustice. Hmm.
[00:15:42] Rebecca Mayers: Hmm. What about, what about different, um, redlining, uh, studies that you used within your article?
[00:15:50] Rebecca Walker: The focus on redlining as the redlining maps have become digitized, has been really important and has allowed urban scholars to sort of turn our attention to the way in which, um, racial exclusion, uh.
Is linked to these, um, to access to urban nature. And so there have been a series of sort of redlining studies where researchers have overlaid, uh, the redlining maps with contemporary environmental variables to show that tree canopy cover, access to green space, exposure to extreme heat, flooding, vulnerability, air pollution, all of these environmental harms and environmental goods are correlated with these redlining maps. Um, so, so we knew that there is this correlation, but we wanted to dig into what are the mechanisms that drive this correlation? And so to do that we wanted to, to look at the history of covenants, um, and to also dig into the archives to try and understand the role of covenants, um, as part of this suite of, of tools and technologies that contributed to urban racial segregation. And dispossession. Um, and to understand sort of how covenants shaped urban geographies, uh, and geographies of environmental injustice. And so to do that, we were able to draw on, um, what, what was the first map, complete map of racial covenants for any metropolitan area in the US . Um, so previously our understanding of racial covenants and their effects has been really limited because.
They’re just, there’s no map of them, right? They were added by individual sellers and buyers to properties. And so to make a map of them, you have to go through every property record in a metropolitan area and see, yes, no, does it have a covenant? And this is a tremendous undertaking. And so the first project to be able to do that successfully was the Mapping Prejudice Project, which is based in Minneapolis. Um, and so we were able to draw on the first map that they produced in this study.
[00:17:46] Rebecca Mayers: So then walk us through some of your methodology and how you went, um, about analyzing that Mapping Prejudice, uh, dataset with all of the other mechanisms that, that you described.
[00:17:59] Rebecca Walker: Yeah. Okay. So I, so Mapping Prejudice had produced this map and it gives us this digitized parcel level so we can see each individual property and see does it have a racial covenant or does it not? And so this allowed us to look at the ways in which racial covenants intersected with different real estate practices, different city planning practices, different park planning practices to shine new light on the co-production and reproduction of geographies, of whiteness, white racial exclusivity, um, and, and urban nature.
And so we have this map and we started with this map of racial covenants. And looking at where and when racial covenants were being added to properties, as well as where and when new parks were being built. And when we started to map these things together, we saw this really close correlation where you see new parks and new covenants showing up at the same place at the same time. And so we wanted to understand what’s driving this pattern, why do they keep showing up at the same time? Um, and so to do that we really dug into, um, to archival research. So we looked at property record transfers. We looked at historical newspaper archives.
We looked through the Minneapolis Park Board’s archives to understand sort of the committee meeting minutes and the letters they were exchanging with real estate developers. Um, and looked at all of this together to understand how the correlation between parks and covenants came to be. Um, and so in this paper we really look at case studies of two particular developments that sort of exemplify what was going on here.
Um, one of those is called the Walton Hills edition, and the second one is called the Nokomis Terrace Edition. Um, and they really show how nature and race and wealth inequality were intentionally coupled. Um. And how these patterns have been so remarkably durable, uh, on the landscape in Minneapolis.
[00:19:56] Rebecca Mayers: Hmm. So then what did, uh, you find from this archival research, let’s dig into a little bit more of that.
[00:20:03] Rebecca Walker: We, what we found is during the 45 years, between 1910 to 1955, when racial covenants were used in Minneapolis, 73% of the new park area that was added to the park system had at least one racial covenant within about a city block of that park. So during this period, there’s this really tight correlation.
Um, and, and when we first looked at it, we sort of hypothesized to ourselves that these disparities were the result of opportunism and privilege. So we guessed that developers would hear that a new park was gonna be built by the park board. Um, and then they would scoop up the land surrounding the new park and then white buyers would be allowed to buy into this neighborhood. Um. And we do see some examples of this kind of opportunistic development happening, but we were actually honestly shocked at how intentional it was that there was this very intentional campaign on the part of real estate developers to collaborate with the Park Board. Um, in order to direct investments in new park spaces into their racially restricted developments.
And so real estate developers use two strategies to do this. Sometimes they would reach out to the Park Board and offer to pay for the costs of building a new park. They would say, Park Board, if you build a park in my neighborhood. I’ll foot the bill, I’ll cover the costs. Um, and so that was one way that developers enticed the Park Board to put parks in their neighborhoods.
Um, and the second way they would do this was just by directly donating land to the park board for their new park. So they’d purchase a bunch of land for their new development, they’d carve out a chunk of it. They’d say this will be a park. And then they would give that land to the park board and say, here’s a new park, please develop it. Um, and so two of the examples that we dug into in our paper were examples of this, of directly donating land to the Park Board. I’ll dig into one of those examples um that we cover in our paper, and we’ll return to Edmund Walton, the sky that we talked about earlier, and the civic celebration.
Um, who was the first real estate developer to add racial covenants to a property in Minneapolis. Edmund Walton, a year prior to the civic celebration had purchased, uh, attractive land next to one of these lakes, this lake that’s called Lake of the Isles. Um, and he purchased this land that at the time was sort of seen as swampy and had a lot of mosquitoes and it wasn’t a very desirable place to live.
Um, but Edmund Walton sort of had his, his finger on the pulse of the Park Board and knew that the park board had these plans to, to redevelop Lake, Lake of the Isles and to undergo this big dredging campaign, um, to make the lake deeper and remove some of the marshes, um, and really transform this into a, a very desirable park space.
And so Walton bought up this land, um, and this land included this parcel of land that, um, you can see on the historic map. It’s, it’s just like sort of crossed out and labeled as a swamp. Um, but he purchases this land, included this including this swamp land, um, and turns around and says, Park Board, I’m gonna sell you this parcel of land if you will build a new canal connecting Lake of the Isles to one of the other lakes in the city called, um, Cedar Lake.
And so the Park Board takes this deal. They buy this land from Walton and uh, they do this on the promise that they’ll build this new canal and they get to work building the new canal. Um, and in a few years, this canal opens connecting Lake of the Isles to Cedar Lake. So this is actually the second lake canal that the Park Board builds.
And then Walton, uh, at the same time, Walton is adding racial covenants to all of the houses and this development. Hmm. Um, and so he, he publishes a, an advertisement for this development, um, that really highlights the strategy that he’s using as a developer here. So. He includes in the advertisement a map of the property where he highlights its proximity to the Lake of the Isles and to the park space.
And he even draws on the map all of the different street trees. So really pointing to, um, urban nature is a selling feature and this development. Um, and, and then later in the text of the advertisement, he includes the language of the racial restrictions that were on this property, listing out all of the different racial and ethnic groups that weren’t allowed to buy property in the Walton Hills development. Um, so making his strategy of pairing white racial exclusivity and urban nature as, as sort of a marketing strategy, pairing whiteness and greenness, uh, really, really explicit in this advertisement.
[00:25:06] Rebecca Mayers: Which is also in the paper.
[00:25:09] Rebecca Walker: Yep. Yeah. We include that in the paper itself as a figure. Um mm-hmm. So you can, you can see this land that it was a swamp, then it becomes this canal and it’s right there.
Yes. In the advertisement. And so, and so that was sort of like the big finding from our paper is that real estate developers across the city, we find this, this, this happening again and again, numerous examples. Um, we’re using the strategy of pairing greenness and whiteness in order to create sort of high value real estate.
Um, so pairing racial exclusivity, um, and access to environmental privilege. And then sort of we conclude by pointing to how enduring this has been. We, we include these maps of, um, sort of where covenants were historically and in different environmental variables today. And we find that neighborhoods that had racial covenants are today disproportionately white.
They’re still upwards of 80% white, even though covenants have been unenforceable since 1948. And there are also spaces of, of deep environmental privilege. They have more tree canopy cover. They are more resilient against the urban heat island. They have greater park acreage. All of these different environmental variables are still quite closely correlated to what areas had these racial covenants.
[00:26:24] Rebecca Mayers: So it seemed like Edmund Walton had this playbook, so to speak, of, you know, work with the Park Board, buy up land, make it desirable land. Slap a racial covenant on it, advertise it as exclusive and green. Make millions or whichever million would be allotted that day, um, or at that time, and then do it all again. And was this seen in other cities as well? Um, like to this extent?
[00:26:56] Rebecca Walker: Yeah, that’s a really great question. Um, and I think, so in this paper we point to, to evidence that suggests that this, that this really was a national phenomenon. This really was the playbook of the time. Um. And, and so, uh, actually sort of real estate men in Minneapolis . Were some of the, the leaders that helped to found the National Association of Real Estate Boards that then became the National Association of Realtors. I see. Um, so this like. National, nationwide, uh, association of realtors who were exchanging best practices. How do we best make money? Um, and so what was happening in Minneapolis actually became really influential in real estate markets across the nation at this time.
And there was a lot of exchange between cities. So we see this happening in Kansas City with JC Nichols. Um, we’re finding examples of this happening in Milwaukee. And I think one of the next steps for our research program is trying to look at the spread of these ideas. Sort of how we’re folks exchanging ideas and how did this become nationwide?
So we have a couple of different projects that we’re, that are ongoing right now to look at, at the nationwide spread of this intertwining of racial exclusivity and, and seeing urban nature as a selling feature or a way to build value into the property. Um, but you know, at this time, the National Real Estate Board, their code of ethics stated that a realtor should never be instrumental into introducing, um, a person of color into, into a white neighborhood that, that violated their code of ethics.
So this was really built into like. This is how the real estate industry works at the time. Um, and at the same time, there was sort of federal guidance, uh, from the Federal Housing Authority in the thirties. Um. That basically said, uh, that parks and urban nature can be a strategy for creating barriers between sort of white high income neighborhoods and low income neighborhoods or neighborhoods that were home to people of color.
Um, so urban nature was seen as this way to sort of insulate white privilege. Um, and so this really was widespread national policy at the time.
[00:29:11] Rebecca Mayers: I’m thinking about some of the ways that it’s almost still policy. So like what are some of the opportunities for future research on this sort of enduring inequitable access to green space and to, you know, speaking to the environmental justice, like green gentrification is a thing like these, it, it’s kind of taken different forms and different labels, but, um.
Still, it’s, it’s an inequitable access to, to green space and housing. So what’s some of the, the future research that either you or, or you see happening, uh, in this field is, is going on?
[00:29:48] Rebecca Walker: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when we started this project, we, we have community partners that we were working with, um, and, and continue to work with and continue to really shape our research agenda. Um, and our community partners were saying to us, um. We are feeling the pressure of gentrification and we wanna understand this intertwining between real estate and, and urban nature. Like this is important to us. We feel it in our communities right now. Um, and I think a really big takeaway for me from this study is the way in which parks and race and real estate have, have always been really deeply intertwined. For as long as we’ve been making cities in the US these things have been deeply intertwined. Um. And so making an equitable park system involves really undoing a lot of this that’s been baked into the system. Um. And it means not, not just making sure that we’re building new green spaces and neighborhoods that historically have been disinvested –though this is super important. We, we need to be doing this. Um, but it also makes, means making sure that we have the right housing policies in place to, to protect low income communities, to protect communities of color and make sure people are able to stay in place, um, and to not drive green gentrification.
And so one thing that we’re seeing in Minneapolis today, residents and parts of the city that historically were just invested, that have been spaces of environmental injustice, spaces of pollution that have had to endure a lot of sort of the flip, the flip side of the coin of environmental privilege, if we’re concentrating high quality environments and some parts of the city, we’re also concentrating pollution and environmental harm in other parts of the city.
Um, and so those communities are. Have been advocating for decades for environmental cleanup to remove the pollution from their communities and for more access to parks, to urban gardens. Um, access to the Mississippi River, which runs through the city. I. Um, but at the same time, and especially today, more recently, they’re really starting to feel the pressure of rising cost, of living, rising rents, rising property tax burdens, um, and they’re scared.
There’s a lot of community concern that as environments get cleaned up, there’s gonna be gentrification and it’s gonna force them outta their neighborhood. But at the same time there’s been this really amazing community activism that’s rejected what is often sort of characterized as this like paradox where you have to either choose to fight for environmental cleanup or um, or just sort of live with a polluted environment so you don’t get displaced.
Um, and they’re really challenging this and they’re sort of arguing for a vision of deeply affordable housing of community, land trust, community control over land, um, rent control in the city, all of these different new tools to build community wealth and, and community ownership over spaces while also pushing for environmental cleanups. So I think this, this sort of radical vision of. Uh, we can have a clean environment and we can have the right policies in place to make sure our communities aren’t displaced.
[00:33:00] Rebecca Mayers: Right? Yeah. I guess it’s an interesting push and pull between this you know, you want a place to be really nice for yourself and your family and your community, and then if you do that, it’s this ongoing pressure of, oh no, we live in a nice neighborhood now. And other people are moving here, or they’re incentivized to move there. And then the fear of displacement is like this increasing, increasing pressure. Have you thought of other ways that this sort of research, um, can have an impact on practice?
[00:33:37] Rebecca Walker: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is just undoing this thinking that comes up in planning that environmental planning or park planning is separate from housing planning. That those are separate spheres, separate conversations. Um. Making sure we’re having those conversations together and thinking about them in a really intertwined way.
Um, it’s, it’s particularly hard in Minneapolis where the Park Board is actually a separate political entity from the city of Minneapolis. And so making those conversations happen together is, is actually really challenging. Um, but in other cities, that’s not the case. Park planning is part of city planning, and these are agencies that work in the same building and can work together to make sure we’re coupling, um, sort of housing policies that protect people and prevent gentrification, uh, with these new park developments. So I talked about community land trust, where there’s community ownership of, of, of parcels of land and they’re building intergenerational wealth together. Um. Rent control is an active fight in the Twin Cities right now and has become really important for thinking about, um, how can we sort of curb the effects of gentrification broadly. Um, but, but there’s also, there have also been conversations about sort of localized rent control, particularly. Um, and neighborhoods that are neighborhoods of environmental injustice concern, who have like this really long legacy of environmental injustice, um, property tax freezes. Just thinking about the ways in which we can sort of reduce the potential burden of.
Um, of rising property values on, um, on these communities to people who, who do own property, um, can, can perhaps see the benefits of increasing city investment in their neighborhood after many, many decades of the city not investing in their neighborhood. And the people who are renting aren’t pushed out and have the ability to continue to be part of their community and to enjoy these new green spaces and to live an environment that doesn’t give their kids asthma after decades of having to live through that environmental injustice. And then another big part of it is making sure that community voices and priorities are really centered in the park planning process. So how can we center these questions of equity at, at every stage of our green space planning?
Um. Especially as this becomes, you know, so important in the face of climate change, where we need our green spaces for community wellbeing, um, for protection against the impacts of climate disaster. But we need to be building climate resilience into our city in a way that centers climate justice and environmental justice. So this, this is the potential to be a moment where we’re really investing in green spaces. Um. How do we do that? Equitably and center community voices and community priorities. Mm-hmm. Um, I think that’s the big question. That’s the next step. Yeah.
[00:36:28] Rebecca Mayers: Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks so much for talking with us today about your research paper and I’m really excited and looking forward to seeing more research, uh, on this topic and maybe we’ll have you back to discuss it.
[00:36:43] Rebecca Walker: Yeah, absolutely. This is a lot of fun and I really appreciate you, uh, asking some great ques great questions and giving me a chance to talk about it. So thanks so much.
[00:36:52] Rebecca Mayers: Awesome, thanks. Bye.
[00:36:54] Rebecca Walker: Bye.
[00:36:59] Rebecca Mayers: That’s it for now, and thank you so much for listening. A big thanks to Rebecca for joining us on this episode. Follow the link in the show notes to read the paper we spoke about today. You can also follow Rebecca on Twitter at RebHWalker. Be sure to share this episode with friends and family and subscribe for updates on future episodes.
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[00:38:22] Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast!
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