History and Theory of Urban and Regional Planning, in the School of Architecture + Planning at UTSA
Questions
Research Question: “Can the Lawrence Plan 2040 in implementing affordable housing practices, be considered equitable and an advocate to its racial and aging subpopulations?”
The mention of affordable housing in the Lawrence 2040 Plan can be found in two sections: a) Growth & Development – Residential, and b) Lawrence Neighborhoods & Housing. Two secondary questions arise from this:
• How does the City of Lawrence plan to implement affordable housing policies and practices with Plan 2040?
• In terms of advocacy planning, what recent actions has the City of Lawrence acted in ways of being an advocate for aging and racial populations?
Affordable housing is of interest to me because it specifies a group of residents of a city that cannot afford market-rate housing. This focus on a specific subpopulation in a city can fall under the broad banner of advocacy planning. The theme of advocacy planning is to focus planning efforts on special groups of people that have historically not been adequately represented (Brooks, 2002a). In this case, racial groups, and aging residents in Lawrence. The concept of equity planning is whereby advocacy planners use their capabilities and influence to implement new policies to allocate resources (Brooks, 2002a).
Methods
In order to answer the research question, I first began with reviewing the plan itself. Followed by a review of public information found in the media and City Commission meetings. I specifically looked at local news reports, interviews, meeting minutes of the Lawrence City Commission, and previous reports from the City prior to the 2040 Plan. These sources were valuable in providing an internal and external understanding of how the Plan is guiding action currently, and what was guiding the plan previously. I searched on the website, news.google.com using the phrases “lawrence” , “kansas”, and “affordable housing” in the search bar. It returned several news articles of over the past year of news regarding affordable housing in the city. Lastly, I reviewed U.S. Housing and Urban Development’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) map tool. The AFFH map tool shows public-housing, section 8 vouchers, and housing projects in cities across the US. When mapped for Lawrence, this tool was used to show the areas where the city’s racial demographics cluster in parallel with public housing options.
The methods used to examine the Lawrence 2040 Plan were:
• Review of the Lawrence 2040 Plan, identifying sections for ‘affordable housing’
• Comparison of the Lawrence 2040 Plan and current news regarding affordable housing
• Review of the completed housing-related projects completed by the City.
• Comparison of the AFFH tool and current Lawrence 2040 Plan
Findings
The City of Lawrence implements affordable housing in various ways. It starts with an acknowledgement and understanding of the current situation regarding affordable housing. There are several things that highlight the City of Lawrence engaged with affordable housing, that backs up this implementation. The two subpopulations identified in the research question, race and age, are a current topic of discussion in the city’s local news and comprehensive plan.
When comparing the goals of the Lawrence 2040 Plan with current planning theories like advocacy and racial planning, the comprehensive plan is equitable and an advocate for racial, and aging populations in Lawrence. The Lawrence 2040 Plan discusses affordable housing in two areas: Growth & Development, and Lawrence Neighborhoods & Housing (City of Lawrence, 2019). Under Growth & Development, housing is discussed under the subtitle, Residential, under Goal 7.2: “Intersperse affordable housing throughout Lawrence,” (City of Lawrence, 2019). This comes on the heels of an article from 2016, that discusses the clustering of low-income housing in East Lawrence (Wentling, 2016). Wentling (2016) writes that housing organizations were mapping and advocating for a dispersal of affordable housing units or acceptance of voucher programs across the city. At the time, low-income housing was concentrated in east Lawrence which is not an equitable practice as it bars those residents from living in other neighborhoods in the city. Looking the the AFFH map for Lawrence, it shows the location of public housing and voucher 8 sectional housing with the distribution by census tract of racial demographics. Considering a high cluster of public housing in the East part of town, it is also the area with higher number of Blacks and Latinos in the same area. This is something, I believe the city is actively attempting to remediate.
Advocacy planners can engage with their community in ways that increase the viability of a plan, or future plan though a feedback strategy. Brooks (2002b) discusses the action strategy of the Feedback Strategy. This is particularly where planners look at various sources to acquire alternatives “…to do, recommend, or incorporate into a particular plan,” (Brooks, 2002b). This folds into advocacy planning because planners can also decide whom to include in their planning processes. Brooks (2002b) lists five typologies of sources of alternatives used by planners. What I have come across in my research for this memo is that the Lawrence 2040 Plan, while it did reach out to the public, it leaned into special interest groups for advising alternatives.
Brooks (2002b) discusses planners receiving input from special interest groups with regarding to the Feedback strategy. As previously indicated, the City Commission has been great at implementing this practice particularly with hearing feedback from AHAB. Most recently, a new development has been happening regarding housing that the City Commission will hear about soon. In October 2022, the Human Relations Commission (HRC) of Lawrence, reviewed their recommendations to approach city commission about banning the source of income language that landlords require (Clark, 2022). The HRC found that there is currently discrimination against renters that use housing vouchers or assistance (Clark, 2022). Clark (2022) reports that the HRC developed a 450-page research document to backup their efforts and to present to the Lawrence City Commission. I have no doubts that the current city commission will keenly listen to the HRC, as they have with other special interest groups.
The leaning into special interest groups can possibly be linked to a reformation of the planning body and process in Lawrence. While the city has historically been more progressive than surrounding towns and the Kansas state, it has practiced racial planning. This notion of racial planning is, what Williams (2020) calls, “the most historically dominant planning tradition…leaving its effects to be communicated as a series of nearly discrete and anomalous planning events”. The racial planning that is found in Lawrence primarily deals with East Lawrence, which was an area where various racial groups settled and were essentially cut-off due to the railroad and being in a floodplain. The city has grown increasingly westward and had systematically failed to develop East Lawrence over the years. This has resulted in a large disparity of racially segregated groups of people in East Lawrence, and a clustering of affordable housing units in the area.
The city of Lawrence has been acting through several projects that implements affordable housing. The city plans to implement affordable housing by “[Providing] affordable housing for all segments throughout the community,” (City of Lawrence, 2019). The Plan leans heavily on the advice given to them by the Affordable Housing Advisory Board (AHAB). This form of advocacy planning is encouraging special interest groups like AHAB to advise the planning department and to make recommendations on land-use. Under the same goal, point 6.3 the Plan states to “promote partnerships to advance affordable and safe housing options,” (City of Lawrence, 2019). The City has been greatly successful in this effort. In 2019, the city set a five-year goal to develop 200 new affordable housing units with AHAB (Lawrence, C. o., & Douglas County, 2022). Most recently, the City donated almost five acres of city-owned land to another housing organization, Tenants to Homeowners, to develop 112 new affordable housing units (Masenthin 2022).
The total housing units that the city has successfully funded to develop, is at 233, exceeding the goal number and time-span (Lawrence, C. o., & Douglas County, 2022). The interesting aspect of the most recent land-donation is that the land donated is in west Lawrence. Which is progressing in the goal from the Growth & Development section – to intersperse affordable housing throughout the community. The city-owned-land donation can also be considered an act of co-production, as the city provided its goods (land) to fulfill a client’s needs. This is the beginning of remediating the issues of clustering public affordable housing in one area of town.
The Lawrence 2040 Plan was created through the action of the city by creating an Action Report Plan based on its previous comprehensive plan, Horizon 2020. The Issue Action Report of 2015 was created after a series of public engagements where citizens brought up and responded to the most common issues facing Lawrence’s future (Lawrence & Douglas County, 2015). The report identifies the issue of ‘quality housing for all incomes’, and the city acknowledges the recurrence of this issue brought up by citizens. The detailed action steps that the city was to take in 2015, and actually did incorporate some of the language into the 2040 Plan. Without the input from citizens, the issues of affordable housing would not have been set as a priority in future planning efforts by the city.
Future Scenario
The year is 2200
Increased climate change has drastically altered the scenic rolling hills of Kansas and Lawrence. The state, experiences intense storming and flooding, longer summers and shorter warmer winters, and lower crop yields due to these seasonal changes. For Lawrence specifically, during the wet season, the storming is incredibly overwhelming for the city’s drainage system. Water floods onto streets and into large areas of homes. One of the most affected areas and communities in East Lawrence. East Lawrence is located along the Kaw river, kind of at the bottom of a large hill, with the river stream surrounding east Lawrence on the far east; to the west is the rest of the city of Lawrence located geographically on a hill. The people that lived in east Lawrence were at first migrants and immigrants – that worked on the railroad and lived by the railroad. West Lawrence was developed with streets, and shops and the University of Kansas established itself on the westside – spurring economic growth westward. Over time this separation between east and west Lawrence continued – people of color continually were concentrated in east Lawrence. So too were the city’s affordable housing units. So the city in 2020 had developed a very segregated area of Lawrence that was just for low-income housing and racially (non-White) concentrated. Historically East Lawrence did flood with the flooding of the Kaw River. But when intense storms began to increase, this flooding slowly became a real issue for residents. Not only does East Lawrence experience flooding overflow from the Kaw river, but the runoff from the westside running downhill completely engulfs east Lawrence. In 2196, East Lawrence was wiped out due to a week-long storm – residents in the area had their homes destroyed and flooded. Considering the area being heavily racially concentrated and the concentration of low-income households, this climate event was one of the most disastrous and unequal climate change events
References
Brooks, M. P. (2002a). Decentralized rationality: the planner as political activist. In Planning Theory for Practitioners. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351179454
Brooks, M. P. (2002b). Setting the stage: ideas, feedback, goals- and trial balloons. In Planning Theory for Practitioners. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351179454
City of Lawrence (2019). Plan 2040: A Comprehensive Plan for Unincorporated Douglas County & The City of Lawrence. Lawrence: Lawrence / Douglas County Planning Office. https://assets.lawrenceks.org/pds/planning/plan-2040/Plan-2040.pdf
Clark, M. (2022). Lawrence’s Human Relations Commission pushes to ban housing discrimination based on source of income. Lawrencekstimes.com. https://lawrencekstimes.com/2022/10/27/hrc-source-income-housing/
Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. (2022). Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Data and Mappin Tool - Map 5: Publicly Supported Housing and Race/Ethnicity. Lawrence, KS. https://egis.hud.gov/affht/
Kansas, C. o. (2022). Comprehensive Plan. Retrieved from Lawrenceks: https://lawrenceks.org/pds/comp-plan/
Lawrence, C. o., & Douglas County. (2022). City donates nearly five acres of land for affordable housing. Lawrence: City of Lawrence KS. https://lawrenceks.org/2022/08/08/city-donates-nearly-five-acres-of-land-for-affordable-housing/
Lawrence, C. o., & Douglas County. (2015). Issue Action Report. Lawrence: City of Lawrence KS.https://assets.lawrenceks.org/pds/planning/plan-2040/issue-action-report-final-full.pdf
Masenthin, T. (2022). Tenants to Homeowners to double its affordable housing offerings with west Lawrence development. Lawrencekstimes.com. https://lawrencekstimes.com/2022/08/13/tenants-to-homeowners-west-lawrence-dev/
Wentling, N. (2016). Everywhere and invisible: avoiding a concentration of low-income housing. Ljworld.com https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2016/may/29/avoiding-concentration-poverty- during-lawrences-af/
Williams, R. A. (2020). From Racial to Reparative Planning: Confronting the White Side of Planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X20946416
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