Chart of the Week: #FairHousingThanksObama

To add equity data to the national dialogue about growth and prosperity, every week the National Equity Atlas team posts a new chart from the Equity Atlas related to current events and issues.

Today from 2pm to 3pm, the National Fair Housing Alliance is sending President Obama “thank you” messages over Twitter for his unprecedented support of fair housing. Specifically, NFHA is using the tag #FairHousingThanksObama to highlight his accomplishments such as being the first presidential administration to use disparate impact to enforce the Fair Housing Act and for urging the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to finalize the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH).

This week’s chart highlights why the AFFH rule, currently under threat, is needed to help cities, counties, regions, states, and housing authorities expand housing choices, connect residents to employment, transportation, quality education, and healthy food and foster inclusive communities free of discrimination. As the chart below shows, the Black population in the New Orleans region is significantly more likely to live in high poverty neighborhoods —  nearly eight times more likely than Whites.  Such high-poverty neighborhoods are often lacking access to assets which enhance opportunity.  The AFFH rule helps jurisdictions identify barriers to opportunity by measuring neighborhoods’ proximity — or lack thereof — to high-performing schools, public transit, local labor markets, healthy environments and other key community assets.

 

chart-2014-percent-living-in-high-poverty

 

Last year, the City of New Orleans and the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) became one of the first of 20 jurisdictions to submit a joint Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) plan to HUD. The plan's development was guided by equity, as defined by PolicyLink: "just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential." To learn more about the New Orleans effort, which included unprecedented coordination between local institutions, residents, housing, transportation, and health advocates, and community organizations, read this article from America’s Tomorrow.

To see rates of neighborhood poverty in your community and how your community ranks among the largest 150 metro areas, visit the National Equity Atlas, type in your metro area, and share the charts using #equitydata.

Chart of the Week: Location Matters For Health

To add equity data to the national dialogue about growth and prosperity, every week the National Equity Atlas team posts a new chart from the Equity Atlas related to current events and issues.

There is growing consensus among public health researchers and officials that what happens in your neighborhood matters more for your health than what happens in your doctor’s office. “In many ways, your zip code is more important than your genetic code when it comes to health,” said Jay Butler, Alaska’s chief medical officer and director of public health, in a recent Washington Post article. Just a few days ago, the California Endowment launched an online tool underscoring this claim: California residents can type in their home address and see how their life expectancy varies from those in other neighborhoods.

This week’s chart highlights some of these inequities by comparing the disparate health outcomes in two neighboring regions in Florida: Orlando and Deltona. As the chart below shows, both adult asthma and adult diabetes rates are significantly higher in the Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach region than in the Orlando region for both people of color and Whites—though they are especially higher for people of color. People of color in the Deltona region are twice as likely as Whites to have asthma and nearly twice as likely as Whites to have diabetes.

Healthy neighborhoods provide residents with access to parks, healthy food, clean air, safe streets, and health care and social services. Due in part to racial residential segregation, many of the neighborhoods where people of color live lack these health-promoting ingredients, and these groups are more likely to suffer from obesity, asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic diseases. Policies that promote healthy communities for all include requiring health impact assessments as part of the planning process and creating dedicated funding streams like the Healthy Food Financing Initiative to support grocery stores and other fresh food markets in low-income underserved communities.

To see adult asthma and diabetes rates in your community and how your community ranks among the largest 150 metro areas, visit the National Equity Atlas, type in your metro area, and share the chart on social media using #equitydata.

Chart of the Week: Getting Infrastructure Right in Baltimore

To add equity data to the national dialogue about growth and prosperity, every week the National Equity Atlas team posts a new chart from the Equity Atlas related to current events and issues.

In the latest issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, PolicyLink CEO Angela Glover Blackwell makes the case for the #CurbCutEffect—the idea that policies and programs designed to benefit marginalized groups often end up benefiting society as a whole. Equitable public transportation investments, for example, that connect underserved residents to employment and regional economic opportunities can generate benefits that extend beyond individual residents. Better transportation options for those who have been historically disconnected from the region means employers have better access to labor. It also means lower turnover and greater retention, which decrease costs for businesses. And as employment increases, so does taxable income.

To illustrate the importance of equitable infrastructure investments in the United States, this week’s chart looks at the share of households without a vehicle in Baltimore, Maryland. Nationally, 9 percent of households are without a vehicle, but in Baltimore, that number is 30 percent. White households are the least likely to be carless—just 16 percent of White households do not have a vehicle. Black households, on the other hand, are the most likely to be carless: nearly 39 percent do not have a car.

How far the potential benefits of public transit investments in Baltimore extend depend on how targeted they are and whether decision makers use investments to advance racial equity. A recent article in Citylab highlighted that bike infrastructure in Baltimore appears to be concentrated in Whiter, more affluent neighborhoods, but Bikemore is working to change this by centering equity, safety, and health and tackling the historic disinvestment in Black communities head on. As Blackwell explains, “when the nation targets support where it is needed most—when we create the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully—everyone wins.”

To see how car access varies by race/ethnicity in your city or region, visit the National Equity Atlas, type in your city or region, and share the map for your community using #equitydata. To read “The Curb Cut Effect,” visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Chart of the Week: San Diego’s “YIMBY” Coalition to Take on Housing Fight

To add equity data to the national dialogue about growth and prosperity, every week the National Equity Atlas team posts a new chart from the Equity Atlas related to current events and issues.

In California, 58 percent of renter-occupied households spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent (the second highest rate of housing burden in the country after Florida). In a heated real estate market, advocates across the state are fighting for more affordable housing. In many cities, housing production has not kept up with a growing population, in part because existing residents are often resistant to new housing developments—especially those with affordability restrictions—due to concerns that such developments will change the “character” of their neighborhoods.

But a new coalition of business and environmental groups in San Diego is taking the opposite approach. Housing YOU Matters is San Diego’s first formal organization of “Yimbys”—an acronym for “Yes in My Backyard” that indicates their support for affordable housing solutions. This week’s chart looks at renter housing burden in the city to underscore the affordability issues in San Diego and the communities most impacted.

As the chart below shows, 54 percent of all renter-occupied households in San Diego are rent-burdened. But this number ranges from 49 percent among Asian or Pacific Islander renter households to 63 percent among Latino renter households.

Not all households are similarly impacted by the housing affordability crisis in San Diego and efforts to increase the supply of housing (both market-rate and affordable) ought to address how Black and Latino households, in particular, pay too much for housing. Policies that help to ensure that all households can access safe and affordable housing include adopting strong tenant protections such as “just cause” eviction ordinances, anti-harassment policies, and rent control to prevent displacement of renter households.

To see how renter (and homeowner) housing burden varies in your city, region, or state, visit the National Equity Atlas, type in your community, and share the chart using #equitydata.

National Equity Atlas Update

Dear Equity Atlas Users,

As you know, the Atlas is a living resource, and 2016 was a year of growth and evolution. As we close out the year, we wanted to highlight some of our milestones from the year:

  • To help you use the Atlas data, we began the practice of hosting 30-minute webinars with short demos of new data/features and also started a "Chart of the Week" series linking the data to current events
  • We further disaggregated our data, adding detailed breakdowns of the major racial/ethnic groups by ancestry (to help you bust the model minority myth), as well as more nativity breakdowns
  • Our new school poverty data undergirded a series on educational equity from journalist Ron Brownstein and colleagues at The Atlantic
  • We participated in the inaugural White House Opportunity Project data sprint and added new indicators on air pollution, poverty, and working poverty
  • Most recently, we upgraded our mapping system, making neighborhood-level mapping (and a nifty, custom-created neighborhood filter for visualizing spatial relationships) available for four indicators

 

We’ve been thrilled to see community leaders in Fairfax County, Grand Rapids, Atlanta and elsewhere using Equity Atlas data to drive equitable growth policies, plans, and projects, and are looking forward to working more with you in 2017.

Thank you!

(clockwise from top left): Sheila Xiao, Sarah Treuhaft, Angel Ross, 
Justin Scoggins, Rosamaria Carrillo, Pamela Stephens, Abbie Langston, Alexis Stephens

The National Equity Atlas team at PolicyLink and the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE)

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