07 Cultivate Anti-Racist Visions for Affordable & Just Neighborhoods

Design Justice demands we cease the commodification of housing and neighborhood development and instead center community visioning that creates functional and sustaining spaces and builds reparative generational wealth.

Neighborhood development and housing production have historically prioritized the segregation and wealth accumulation of white homeowners and white communities. Government policies, predatory lending practices and the actions of individual developers and homeowners have exploited Black, Brown, Indigenous and Asian communities by actively redirecting resources like high quality schools, parks and access to jobs to white communities while simultaneously concentrating environmental harms like highways and heavy industry in these communities. Wealth extraction, under-investment and lack of services have slowed homeownership attainment and other forms of wealth building and left Black, Brown, Indigenous & Asian neighborhoods vulnerable to gentrification and displacement.

Public housing subsidies today are most often calculated based on the median income of the metropolitan region. This methodology compares Black, Brown, Indigenous & Asian neighborhoods to surrounding white communities without acknowledging centuries of disinvestment and often leads to ‘affordable housing’ that is still unattainable. We must cease to use area median income (AMI) to determine ‘affordability’ and instead distribute public resources in a way that repairs the historic extraction of generational wealth from disenfranchised communities.

As designers we have agency to direct policy and the distribution of resources from the scale of the city to the individual building. We must hold cities, institutions and developers accountable to create equitable development that invests in the long term community sustainability. We must cease our participation in projects that displace or gentrify historically marginalized communities. Instead, we must engage Black, Brown, Indigenous & Asian communities to co-create just housing and neighborhood development models.