Equity,Opportunity,Community Engagement,and the Regional Planning Process: Data and Mapping in Five U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Abstract

Government agencies and nonprofit organizations have increasingly used spatial data to create equity and opportunity atlases or maps. This paper investigates how such maps have been integrated into planning processes, and if they have been useful in catalyzing engagement on equity issues. We employ a multiple case study approach to assess efforts in five U.S. regions: Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Portland, and Seattle. Our findings show that equity and opportunity mapping have stimulated new conversations, local actions, and regional plans, but many regions are still struggling to adopt policies that could meaningfully shift their landscapes of equity and opportunity.

Introduction

The concepts of equity and opportunity have increasingly become part of the American metropolitan planning landscape. Under the administration of President Barack Obama, efforts to advance equity and access to opportunity planning were promulgated through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) mandate and its Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant (SCRPG) program. In many regions throughout the country, equity planning initiatives have also originated from community-based efforts.

Whether driven by federal policy or grassroots activism, planning initiatives to advance more equitable policy outcomes and resource distributions have increasingly made use of publicly available geospatial data. Communities throughout the United States have created what are commonly known as opportunity maps or equity atlases. Equity atlases are databases, often including maps, of demographic, socioeconomic, public health, environmental, and other indicators of metropolitan equity. Similarly, opportunity maps display composite indices that illustrate where educational, employment, housing, and other opportunities are located throughout a metropolitan area. These efforts have often been informed by communities, and their products—whether an online map or database—have been used to push for policies to address the uneven access to opportunities facing disadvantaged groups. For equity and advocacy planners who have long argued for the need to address issues of equity and opportunity at the regional scale, such trends are promising (Orfield 1997; powell 1999).

Several decades of research on neighborhood effects and regionalism suggest that communities’ access to data and community-based planning can result in better outcomes for disadvantaged populations. A wide body of research from the 1980s through the 2000s demonstrated the negative effects of concentrated poverty neighborhoods on residents and the failure of public policy to transform conditions within these neighborhoods (Ellen and Turner 1997; Galster and Sharkey 2017). Research has also long shown that while the causes and effects of economic, social, and environmental challenges are not contained within municipal jurisdictions (Pastor, Lester, and Scoggins 2009), solving these challenges is complicated by fractured municipal governance (Orfield 1997; Rusk 1999). Drawing on the work of George Galster and Sean Killen (1995), scholars have increasingly given attention to landscapes of “metropolitan opportunity,” or the markets, institutions, and systems in metropolitan areas that affect people’s health, incomes, social networks, economic mobility, and other aspects of well-being in the short and long run. Many have argued for a more equitable distribution of, and access to, opportunity across metropolitan areas such that residents’ life chances are not inequitably limited or advanced by the neighborhoods in which they reside (Dawkins, 2017).

In this paper, we investigate how efforts to map and measure spatial equity and opportunity have been incorporated into regional planning processes, used to engage communities, and shape public policy. How are equity and opportunity maps constructed? How have residents and other stakeholders been engaged in creating and interpreting data and maps? And to what extent have opportunity and equity mapping processes shifted conversations and advocacy around equity issues and guided local or regional planning or policy changes? We analyze these questions through case studies of five metropolitan areas that have made use of opportunity and equity maps in recent years: Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Portland, and Seattle.

We find that equity and opportunity maps have helped communities to better visualize multiple social, economic, and other disparities across metropolitan regions. While broad community engagement in the mapping process has not been the norm, in many regions, stakeholder engagement has resulted in broader community buy-in to the process, varying perspectives on the stories that maps tell about communities and regions, and data that are more readily used and accessible to community-based organizations. But while these data and mapping tools have been engaged in more regional equity conversations and advocacy efforts, the barriers to equitable regional planning are long-standing and robust, leading to few substantive policy changes.

Our findings underscore that opportunity maps and equity atlases are potentially useful tools that community-based groups, planners, and policy makers can employ to push a more equitable distribution of resources and access to resources across their regions. But without broad engagement in mapping and plan creation, sustained grassroots advocacy, and collective political will, regional equity and opportunity maps rarely contribute to the planning and policy changes needed to achieve these goals. Furthermore, without clear goals and conversations about their conflicts and trade-offs, resource-intensive efforts to produce the maps can detract from existing community development efforts.

We begin with a review of scholarship on regional equity planning and opportunity and equity mapping to show the connections between these separate but linked trends. We then present our research methods and provide an overview of the case studies and their equity or opportunity mapping efforts. Next, we compare mapping processes, community and stakeholder engagement, and policy outcomes across the cases. We conclude with reflections about the effective use of equity and opportunity data and mapping to push for spatial equity at both local and regional levels.

From Regional Equity Planning to Opportunity Mapping: A Review of the Literature

Recent advancements in regional equity and opportunity mapping are grounded in decades of scholarship, advocacy, and planning that has extended from the local to the federal level. Equity planning has its modern roots in the work of early advocacy planners who aimed to influence public opinion, mobilize underrepresented communities, and advance plans, programs, and policies that redistributed municipal resources to economically and socially marginalized groups (Metzger 1996). In the 1960s and 1970s, equity planning was promulgated in several U.S. cities under the leadership of progressive or populist mayors. The best-known example was in Cleveland, where in 1967, the newly elected Mayor Carl Stokes, the city’s first Black mayor, hired Norman Krumholz as Planning Director. Influenced by scholars such as Paul Davidoff (1965) and Herbert Gans (1968), Krumholz advised Cleveland planners to play a more political role in redistributing public resources to the city’s most disadvantaged groups.

In the 1980s and 1990s, policies promoting urban decentralization steered state and federal planning and resources away from equity planning in increasingly fragmented and segregated metropolitan areas (Chapple and Goetz 2011; O’Connor 2008). A new branch of equity planning, however, emerged with a distinctly regional focus. David Rusk (1995), Myron Orfield (1997), john powell (1999), and other scholars argued that spatial inequalities produced by economic and institutional processes at the regional level had negative consequences for disadvantaged communities and entire regions. They emphasized the region as an important focus for equity planning and the need to measure and map regional equity to inform policy. By the early 2000s, equity planning had found its way into various regions, with the growing adoption of policies around tax base sharing, fair-share housing requirements, transit system funding, and other issues that had a focus on regional sustainability and resilience (Brookings Institution, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program 2007).

During the same period, consensus had begun to emerge among some urban scholars, planners, and policy makers that economic mobility for the poor could be best, or perhaps only, be improved by the dispersal of concentrated urban poverty (Imbroscio 2012). Advocates for poverty dispersal increasingly supported policies that moved disadvantaged residents, particularly those dependent on federal housing subsidies, into “high opportunity neighborhoods,” often defined as those with less racially segregated, higher income suburban neighborhoods. Dispersal advocates helped to shift federal and local housing policy, with prominent new initiatives, including the Gautreaux program, Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration, and HOPE VI. In the Gautreaux program, which operated from 1976 to 1998, 7,100 families voluntarily relocated from distressed public housing developments in Chicago to middle-income suburbs that were at least 70 percent white (Goetz and Chapple 2010). While evidence of the program’s success was mixed and subject to selectivity bias, the U.S. Congress drew upon the lessons from the Gautreaux program to design the MTO demonstration program. Between 1992 and 1999 in five cities across the country, MTO moved thousands of families out of neighborhoods with 40 percent or higher poverty rates into neighborhoods with poverty rates less than 10 percent (Kling 2008). The widespread adoption of HOPE VI policies that began in 1992 operated at a larger scale than MTO. It fundamentally re-orientated federal redevelopment dollars for distressed housing projects toward the demolition of old units and construction of mixed-income housing in its place, with the goal of deconcentrating poverty in public housing complexes (Popkin et al. 2004).

Opportunity mapping emerged as a tool to help policy makers and planners identify neighborhoods of opportunity that could help to support the goal of deconcentrating urban poverty (Imbroscio 2012). john powell, who served as Director of the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State from 2003 to 2012, first introduced “opportunity maps” in a fair housing lawsuit in Baltimore, Thompson v. HUD (powell 2005). The maps illustrated that project-based housing and voucher recipients were disproportionately located in the region’s lowest opportunity areas, as defined by Kirwan, based on metrics of economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and neighborhood health (powell 2005). These maps were influential in the final settlement that increased the provision of public housing and established a regional housing voucher mobility program, among other things. Such opportunity maps offered a more nuanced geographic identification of “opportunity” areas, beyond simple measures like poverty rates and minority shares of the population used in the Gautreaux and MTO programs.

Advocates of place-based community and economic development plans and policies have long challenged the “dispersal consensus” upon which such maps and policies rely (Imbroscio 2012). They point out that the evidence upon which such policies rely has been mixed and inconclusive. Further policy efforts that focus on combatting poverty in place may offer a more effective means of increasing disadvantaged residents’ economic mobility and access to opportunities (Goetz and Chapple 2010). Equity and opportunity maps, by contrasting opportunity-rich areas against opportunity-poor areas, can falsely misdirect policy attention, providing evidence for dispersal policies despite the drawbacks of such measures.

Despite such long-standing debates, opportunity mapping and regional equity atlases gained increasing national attention in the late 2000s under the presidency of Barack Obama. The Partnership for Sustainable Communities—a first-term Obama administration collaboration between HUD, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Transportation—set the foundations for the federal government’s extended role. The Partnership’s SCRPG program was the most substantial federal support for metropolitan planning since the 1990s and the first major federal program explicitly aimed at advancing social equity, inclusion, and access to opportunity through metropolitan and multijurisdictional cross-sector planning (Knaap and Lewis 2011). SCRPGs encouraged coordination of transportation, environmental, housing and land use planning, and improving outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities and the poor (Zapata and Bates 2016). In 2010 and 2011, hundreds of millions in grants were given to metropolitan areas around the United States. SCRPG recipients were required to engage communities in planning processes (Krumholz 2015). Nonprofit organizations that could effectively engage with diverse groups traditionally underrepresented in planning processes were required to be a part of recipient consortiums.

While the SCRPG program provided robust support for regional equity planning, some communities that did not receive grants conducted their own equity planning efforts. Locally based initiatives to map equity and opportunity sometimes consulted with national nonprofits such as the Kirwan Institute and PolicyLink. In other cases, community-based organizations gathered and analyzed data and created maps. Thus, in the early years of the twenty-first century, data-driven regional equity planning efforts were underway in many regions across the country.

Most studies of these efforts have focused on SCRPG processes and the relationships built among diverse stakeholders. In an investigation of SCRPGs in California, Frick et al. (2015) found that the grants sometimes deepened existing divisions and created new planning silos. In a review of all SCRPG projects, Zapata and Bates (2015, 2016) found that while the grants provided a venue for policy makers and activists to signal shared commitments to regional equity, their goals were often different and capacity to act was often lacking. Arias, Draper-Zivetz, and Martin (2017) found that although the grants were successful in breaking down planning silos and advancing equity conversations, activists in three SCRPG grantee regions viewed regional equity planning efforts skeptically and struggled to arrive at a shared definition of equity. In Northeast Ohio, Hexter and Kaufman (2017) found that a failure to achieve buy-in from political and business leaders limited the intergovernmental cooperation needed to advance a regional equity agenda, a finding matched by Nicholas et al. (2019).

Only a limited number of studies have looked at the impact of regional equity planning efforts outside of SCRPG processes and as they relate to planning and policy outcomes. There has also been little evaluation of the extent to which community engagement mattered to its outcomes, effectiveness, and perceived value. Furthermore, while the use of opportunity and equity data in planning processes can presumably help to push regional equity agendas forward, few studies have accounted for their successes and failures in doing so. This study begins to fill these gaps by analyzing how communities were engaged in producing opportunity and equity maps and their utility in helping to adopt planning and policy in major U.S. metropolitan areas.

Method

In this article, we investigate five metropolitan areas—Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Portland, and Seattle—all of which have made extensive use of opportunity or equity mapping data in regional planning. Our selected case study regions are all large and growing metropolitan regions, ranging in population from approximately 2.4 million in Portland to 5.7 million in Atlanta. Our regions are also geographically diverse, including areas in the Midwest, South, Mountain West, and Pacific Northwest. Finally, and most importantly, the cases represent a range of processes and outcomes around key areas of interest—data collection and mapping, community engagement, and policy making.

Our initial research showed that each of the case study regions faced unique challenges and adopted different processes that highlight their unique approaches to regional equity planning. Denver, Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis heavily invested in transportation designed to improve regional accessibility. Seattle, Portland, and Denver struggled with the effects of a strong housing market and related affordability crisis. Atlanta, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Denver had burgeoning immigrant communities that gave rise to new challenges in the provision of public services. All regions had strong networks of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including an array of community-based and regional organizations working on community development, housing, transit, and other equity issues as well as local and national foundations.

In each region, we conducted semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in equity planning processes. Our interviews included twenty-nine individuals across the regions, including five to seven in each region. Participants were selected via a snowball sample that began with key informants identified by a review of secondary documents, such as regional reports and plans. These interviewees then referred us to other stakeholders. In each region, we sought to interview the lead organization responsible for creating the equity and opportunity maps, conducting community or stakeholder engagement, and implementing key aspects of the plan. In most regions, this involved discussions with leaders from the metropolitan planning organization (MPO) or regional council of governments (COG); local planning agencies; NGOs, and nonprofit and advocacy organizations; and academic or research institutes, or private consultants. We also spoke with researchers from the Kirwan Institute, an interdisciplinary research center at the Ohio State University, who have consulted on opportunity mapping projects throughout the country, including with SCRPG recipients.

The interviews included questions about participants’ roles, the opportunity or equity mapping process, community and stakeholder engagement, plan implementation and effectiveness, and lessons for other communities. Interviews were conducted over the phone and lasted approximately one hour. They were recorded, transcribed, and coded in Dedoose, a qualitative analysis software package, to locate connected themes among interviewees on mapping, engagement, and plan outcomes. We also analyzed key documents produced during the planning processes, including opportunity and equity maps, reports on community engagement, regional plans, and evaluations of plans and policy outcomes.

Case Study Background

Our case study regions differed in a number of respects, including the impetus for the planning effort, composition of the organization that led the effort, engagement process, and final products. A key difference was the origin of their planning efforts. Three of the metropolitan areas—Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Seattle—were recipients of SCRPGs that required the acquisition of opportunity and equity data. Portland and Atlanta did not receive SCRPGs. Instead, community-based nonprofits and other advocates guided equity planning efforts. In SCRPG recipient regions, as required by HUD, MPOs led efforts to organize consortia of NGOs and government agencies to construct the plans.

Portland: Portland Regional Equity Atlas 2.0

Portland was the first U.S. metropolitan area to create an equity atlas that attracted national attention (PolicyLink 2014). In 2007, the Coalition for a Livable Future (CLF), which comprised more than 100 organizations and hundreds of individuals, mapped resources and opportunities across the region to show “the extent to which the benefits and burdens of growth are shared equitably by different demographic groups and neighborhoods” (CLF 2012). After the success of the initial atlas in shaping public discourse and policy decisions, the atlas was expanded, redesigned, and published as an online mapping tool in 2012, known as Equity Atlas 2.0. Portland Metro (the regional MPO) and Portland State University worked in partnership with CLF to build the Atlas 2.0.

The main product of the effort was the online atlas, which was a publicly accessible mapping tool comprised of a range of equity indicators. Photos and videos of “equity stories” showed how the region’s disparities affected diverse communities. The site also featured white papers and other publications that used the data and maps to analyze issues such as regional educational disparities.

CLF’s process included robust community participation, including focus groups convened to provide input on what data to include in the atlas, and an advisory committee to develop the final list of indicators. After this initial stakeholder input, CLF took the atlas on a roadshow to organizations representing various interests, including neighborhood organizations, and housing and transportation advocates. They also worked with community groups to collect the equity stories.

Atlanta: The Metro Atlanta Equity Atlas (MAEA)

Portland’s equity atlas inspired similar efforts elsewhere, including Atlanta. In the early 2010s, the Partnership for Southern Equity (PSE), an equity-focused, capacity-building nonprofit, learned of Portland’s atlas and began to create their own. PSE was the lead organization for a regional coalition, which included the Atlanta Regional Commission (the MPO), Emory University, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and other nonprofit organizations focused on housing, public health, and immigration. The MAEA was released in 2013 as a website with more than 200 maps covering the twenty-eight-county region. The maps focused on eight categories of community well-being—demographics, economic development, education, environment, health, housing, public safety, and transportation. The MAEA included a report analyzing the region’s disparities.

PSE worked with communities to promote the atlas. At the end of the mapping process, staff presented the atlas to organizations representing various interest groups across the region. They hosted also community conversations in the four biggest counties about the data in the atlas to see if the maps correlated with residents’ perceptions. PSE did not incorporate community feedback gathered at these conversations by adding, removing, or providing different tabulations or presentations of data in the atlas.

Denver: The Denver Regional Equity Atlas

Mapping efforts in Denver began around the same time as Atlanta. In 2011, Reconnecting America, a national nonprofit that advises cities and leaders on community development, and the Piton Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to improving the lives of Colorado’s low-income children and families, created the Denver Regional Equity Atlas. These organizations led a nonprofit collaborative known as Mile High Connects, whose goal was to ensure a new regional transit system benefited all communities, but particularly the most disadvantaged. Its members included local and national foundations, regional housing advocacy groups, and transit advocates.

Published in 2012, Denver’s initial equity atlas was a 100-page report that included analyses and maps about residents’ demographics and access to housing, jobs, economic development, education, and health care. Around the same time, the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) led a consortium of more than eighty organizations in a successful SCRPG grant application. In partnership with Mile High Connects, SCRPG funds helped transition the original atlas into an interactive online atlas. Mile High Connects remained the project lead with DRCOG as a key partner. The atlas figured prominently in the final SCRPG report, which focused on leveraging affordable housing and transit access in new transit system investments.

The SCRPG process guided Denver’s community engagement efforts, as HUD required grantees to allocate at least 10 percent of funds toward engagement, and to engage groups historically underrepresented in planning processes. As in Atlanta, there was no engagement during the data-collection process. DRCOG and Mile High Connects acquired and analyzed the data. During the atlas’s creation and after its launch, they hosted workshops and trainings to teach community groups how to use the atlas.

Minneapolis–St. Paul: Choice, Place, and Opportunity

Unlike Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul’s opportunity mapping process began with the receipt of an SCRPG grant. The Minneapolis–St. Paul Metropolitan Council led the grant application and the “Corridors of Opportunity,” a consortium of advocacy groups, government leaders, foundations, and academics that administered the grant. SCRPG funds supported community engagement, transit corridor planning and development strategies, demonstration projects, technical support, and research. Their focus was on “accelerating the build of the region’s transit system while promoting adjacent development that advances economic vitality and benefits people of all incomes and backgrounds” (Metropolitan Council 2014a, 5).

Equity data informed the Fair Housing Equity Assessment, a report required of all SCRPG recipients. The report analyzed data on housing, access to schools, jobs, neighborhood crime and safety, and demographics as well as “racially concentrated areas of poverty” ¹ and “opportunity clusters.” ² The consortium also produced several plans and reports focused on increasing equity and opportunity in the region, particularly by leveraging existing and new transit investments.

As in Denver, the SCRPG process guided engagement efforts. Led by Nexus Community Partners, Alliance for Metropolitan Stability, and Minnesota Center for Neighborhood Organizing, its community engagement team were a coalition of community-based organizations charged with dispersing SCRPG funding to other organizations to conduct outreach.

Seattle: Equity, Opportunity, and Sustainability

Seattle’s equity planning efforts followed a similar process to that of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Led by the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC), the MPO, the region was awarded an SCRPG in 2011. PSRC then brought together a coalition known as “Growing Transit Communities,” which consisted of local jurisdictions, government agencies, housing developers and financiers, and environmental and equity advocacy organizations. The coalition mapped opportunity-rich communities, who lived there, and identified the concerns of those opportunity-poor neighborhoods. PSRC contracted the Kirwan Institute to gather and analyze data and produce the opportunity maps, which were published in an online interactive database.

Seattle’s opportunity maps illustrated regional disparities and formed the basis of strategies for producing new affordable housing and protecting existing affordable housing, particularly in light of anticipated future transit investments. The main product of Seattle’s SCRPG process were regional equity, opportunity, and transportation plans.

As in Denver and Minneapolis–St. Paul, the SCRPG process guided community engagement efforts. PSRC hired a full-time equity manager and funded community-based organizations to engage residents and other stakeholders in the planning process for the regional light rail system. PSRC and the Kirwan Institute also engaged community stakeholders to review preliminary data on neighborhood measures and provide input on draft plans.

Comparisons of Mapping and Engagement Processes and Outcomes

Building Equity and Opportunity Databases and Maps

Different regions faced various challenges and achieved varying outcomes in creating and publishing maps. Common challenges included data literacy, curation, and fatigue as well as limitations in data availability, accuracy, and scale. Common successes included the creation of tools that enabled NGOs, government agencies, and communities to effectively to show regional inequities.

The process of developing equity and opportunity maps was relatively similar across the metropolitan areas. After an initial push from nonprofit or federal funds, an organization was usually charged with gathering secondary opportunity and equity data. These organizations ranged from local universities (e.g., Portland State) and community-based nonprofits (e.g., the PSE) to contractors (e.g., the Kirwan Institute) and regional MPOs or COGs (e.g., the PSRC). All had staff with digital mapping expertise.

The data acquired often included socioeconomic and demographic data from the U.S. Census and public health, safety, transportation, and environmental data from other state or local sources. Regional boundaries generally followed U.S. Census Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) that aligned with MPO and COG boundaries. Data were typically collected at the smallest possible scale that allowed for consistent geographic measurement across variables, usually the census tract.

Some metropolitan areas were challenged by the scale of available data. A former PSE staffer in Atlanta noted that they had troubles accessing neighborhood-level public health and education data from the federal and state government. “There’s a much richer story that we could be telling if we have better access to data, especially in health, [and] education too,” she noted (Anonymous, phone interview, September 18, 2017).

Regions encountered other data issues, including the quantity and quality of data. In some places, data were voluminous, in others important indicators were unavailable. In Portland, for example, one interviewee who helped to create the atlas, noted that neighborhood-level data on well-paying jobs and family incomes was “not adequate to really get to the heart of the equity questions” (Anonymous, phone interview, April 21, 2017).

“Indicator fatigue” was also a common issue. In Portland, the project’s lead consultant noted that the large amount of data had to be trimmed down to a priority list, but that stakeholders could not agree on priority variables (Anonymous, phone interview, April 11, 2017). In Denver, one of the equity map architects noted the difficulties that its large amount of data presented for users. The voluminous data sometimes caused users to lose attention in the atlas and was generally difficult for them to sort through (Anonymous, phone interview, June 27, 2017).

Interviewees also noted that equity databases that include many variables are hard to maintain and keep up-to-date. Several interviewees spoke of the challenges of “stale” or outdated data. “By the time we had mapped [the indicators],” explained one data expert in Portland, “the data started to be stale very quickly” (Anonymous, phone interview, April 11, 2017). When the data were outdated, it was difficult to use it to tell meaningful stories, and it was unrealistic to invest staff time in updating continually outdated information (Anonymous, phone interview, April 11, 2017).

A related concern was the staff time and money required to keep maps updated. Interviewees noted that the construction of equity atlases involved significant technical investments and staff time. One regional MPO representative in Atlanta reflected, “we have a beautiful tool caught in amber, because the resources were not there [to update it] . . . [or] even to keep a skeletal staff thinking about it” (Anonymous, phone interview, April 28, 2017).

Perspectives on the usefulness of equity maps and data differed, but were generally positive. Many agreed that maps helped to tell stories about regional disparities and appreciated having access to the data. However, several interviewees, particularly community-based and advocacy organizations, highlighted the need for simpler, more straightforward maps of indicators, such as poverty, rents, and public transportation. Even for larger regional organizations and governments, the simplest maps were often the most useful. In Portland, a regional MPO representative noted their investment in a high-end platform could have been better spent. “We had all these bells and whistles that we thought people would be utilizing, but they never did,” he noted. “What we found is that the individuals that were really needing the tool were just there to make very simple, simple things” (Anonymous, phone interview, April 25, 2017).

Using Equity and Opportunity Data to Engage Communities

While gathering and building equity and opportunity atlases and maps, regional leaders often engaged community groups and other stakeholders. The extent and quality of engagement varied substantially across different regions and was pursued for various purposes. In some cases, community groups and residents helped to acquire data, develop databases or maps, and “ground-truth” or validate data. In other cases, community leaders and organizations that would potentially use the maps were trained to use the databases and construct their own maps.

Stakeholders engaged in the process varied, but usually included regional and local government representatives and nonprofit leaders, such as housing developers and advocates, community development corporations, transportation advocacy groups, immigrant rights organizations, and faith-based organizations. In Denver, Seattle, and Minneapolis–St. Paul, SCRPG grantee requirements to engage underrepresented groups helped to guide their outreach efforts.

Significant differences occurred among the case study regions about how, and even whether, stakeholders were engaged in determining what to include in the atlas or maps. Portland went further than other metropolitan areas in developing an inclusive map building process. CLF organized a lengthy process that garner input from their diverse members on the most valuable indicators to include. An advisory committee that included representatives from each of the region’s counties, multiple sectors, and diverse racial and ethnic communities, then developed the final indicator list. While many felt that this led to an inclusive process, not everyone agreed. An architect of the Equity Atlas 2.0 explained,

[T]here are stakeholders who are critical [of] or disappointed in the Equity Atlas, and who feel that their priorities were not reflected in the final product despite our efforts to make the Atlas as responsive to stakeholder input as we could. (Anonymous, personal communication, April 11, 2017)

Interviewees in Portland, Atlanta, and Denver stressed the importance of building and engaging diverse stakeholders to legitimize the map-making process and other outcomes. Partnerships among community-based organizations, academic institutions, and local and regional governments provided a strong foundation for collaboration. Partners brought different skill sets, including technical skills, research expertise, and community knowledge. A planner with the MPO in Portland noted that the inclusion of diverse voices

allows all regional players, communities, jurisdiction staff to . . . feel some sort of reliability in the data that are being presented to them . . . If there is one thing I think we did right, it was that. (Anonymous, phone interview, April 25, 2017)

In Atlanta, an academic consultant echoed the importance of broad stakeholder participation. To construct a legitimate process and shared workload, he noted, “[a] collaborative endeavor that involves the government, the nonprofit sector, the community sector, and universities, is absolutely critical” (Anonymous, phone interview, May 23, 2017).

In some regions, the engagement process highlighted challenges to ways that opportunity maps characterize disadvantaged communities. Many opportunity maps, such as the Kirwan Institute maps in Seattle, characterize neighborhoods on a scale from very low to very high opportunity, based on indicators related to education, economic, housing, transportation, health, and others. Not surprisingly, such measures often characterized higher income neighborhoods as higher opportunity neighborhoods. As argued by various placed-based community development advocates, some stakeholders felt that this suggested that these neighborhoods were better areas for investment than lower income neighborhoods, which were often communities of color. Reflecting broader challenges to the “dispersal consensus,” some objected to such rankings, noting that the maps did not highlight these neighborhoods’ assets and strengths. A Kirwan Institute representative who worked on Seattle’s maps noted, “whenever you would start to show these maps to members or representatives of low-income communities, a lot of times, you have this negative reaction . . . It was always a tough conversation to have” (Anonymous, phone interview, September 25, 2017). According to an academic who advised on the mapping process in Minneapolis–St. Paul, residents understood that the region’s opportunity landscape was shaped by decades of disinvestment, institutional racism, and economics. “Without providing historical context [opportunity mapping] is not really helping the problem,” he noted (Anonymous, phone interview, May 19, 2017).

In Minneapolis–St. Paul, concerns about how low-income communities were characterized led planners to take a different strategy. The Metropolitan Council developed an opportunity analysis in which neighborhoods were placed in one of three colored clusters indicating accessibility to five key place-based opportunities: jobs, high performing schools, safety, environmentally clean neighborhoods, and social services and basic necessities. Green neighborhoods had higher access to jobs and social services, but lower performing schools and higher crime. Yellow neighborhoods had moderate access to services and amenities. Blue clusters had the best schools, lowest crime rates, and low environmental hazards, but low proximity to jobs and social services. This framework highlighted the neighborhoods’ assets and did not rank neighborhoods high to low. As one Metropolitan Council employee noted, it underscored that “different places in our region have different types of opportunity” (Anonymous, phone interview, June 3, 2017). While this required more analysis, the maps were easier for many users to understand and engage with than traditional opportunity maps with more indicators. The new typology, however, also had critics. An academic who served as a consultant noted that the maps still “come very close to the typical kinds of metro maps that you see opportunity in the outlying areas, then all sorts of problems in the core” (Anonymous, phone interview, May 22, 2017).

Engaging Equity and Opportunity Data in Planning and Policy Making

After the equity and opportunity maps and databases were produced, many regions were challenged to figure out how to use them to promote planning and policy changes. In many cases, they were useful in bolstering advocacy around equity issues, such as public health and affordable housing. To a lesser extent, they were engaged in organizational planning, grant-making, and scholarship to make the case for local and regional policy changes and guide decision-making processes. In a limited number of cases, the maps were integrated into regional and municipal planning processes and guided new policies.

Community-based organizations frequently used the equity databases and atlases as advocacy tools. In Portland, a nonprofit working on environmental justice issues used the data to argue for reduced traffic in a neighborhood with a high rate of asthma and particulate concentrations. Another community-based organization used the atlas to argue for stricter licensure of tobacco retailing in areas with high rates of tobacco usage, which were largely low-income communities of color. In Seattle, a nonprofit legal aid organization whose clients were frequently subject to eviction used the data to argue for new affordable housing policies, including inclusionary zoning.

The databases and maps also helped both NGOs and governmental organizations fill important capacity gaps, and simply ease their data-collection and mapping efforts. In Portland and Denver, numerous nonprofits interested in equity issues used the atlas in grant applications. In Atlanta, PSE designed the equity atlas with this goal in mind. Organizations engaged in the process frequently included maps in their grant applications to highlight needs or inequities that they were working to address. In Denver, a transportation coalition employee suggested that the atlas was helpful to municipal governments, particularly those with smaller planning departments, to provide access to data and maps, as some planning or economic development offices have limited resources (Anonymous, phone interview, June 29, 2017).

Few new policy initiatives came directly out of the opportunity or equity maps and data. In Portland, CLF successfully advocated for the City of Portland to redirect a portion of its tax increment financing toward the construction of affordable housing. In Seattle, the PSRC now uses opportunity maps in their ranking criteria for transportation capital projects. The opportunity maps are used by the Washington State Housing Finance Commission to allocate additional “points” in high opportunity to evaluate low-income housing tax credit projects and allocate credits. ³ Such results highlight the limitations of equity and opportunity maps and databases within larger political processes. Staff at Denver’s Mile High Connects explained that while multiple community groups and residents said that the maps were a great tool to help understand problems and potential policy implications, they had little power to facilitate policy adoption, which was a political process (Anonymous, phone interview, June 29, 2017).

Although not discussed by interviewees, several of the case study regions have or are currently developing racial equity planning frameworks related to their equity and opportunity maps. In Seattle, the PSRC will update their maps as part of the region’s VISION 2050 long-range growth strategy with the goal of better addressing social equity issues (PSRC 2019). In Portland and Minneapolis–St. Paul, regional governments have encouraged local governments to use the maps to adopt and institutionalize an equity lens within their work. Portland’s Regional Equity Atlas 2.0 has also been used in efforts to integrate equity frames within planning and decision-making related to regional growth management, regional transportation, and climate change mitigation (Regional Equity Atlas, n.d.). In Minneapolis–St. Paul, the themes from Choice, Place and Opportunity report have been embedded into the framework of the Metropolitan Council’s Thrive MSP 2040 regional plan (Metropolitan Council 2014a).

Conclusion

Over the past several decades, equity planners’ and community advocates’ long-standing calls for regional planning to address the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunity has received a boost from government funding, grassroots advocates, and new mapping technologies and data. Metropolitan regions throughout the United States now have equity atlases and opportunity maps that have the potential to help transform local and regional landscapes of opportunity. But are they effectively being used to do so? And how are communities, particularly those most harmed by unequal spatial opportunity structures, being engaged in planning processes around these goals?

In this article, we have shown that—whether presented as online applications, reports, or maps—equity and opportunity data can inform planners, policy makers, and community organizations and residents about regional challenges and opportunities. Perhaps not surprisingly, the organizations charged with leading opportunity mapping efforts and the MPOs and other organizations engaged in their development often found the tools to be most useful, particularly when the maps supported their organizational priorities and agendas. For these organizations, they offered an accessible means of compiling and analyzing complex, large-scale data across on a wide range of equity-related issues.

However, these organizations also noted a number of limitations and trade-offs that must be considered for equity maps and databases to effectively serve as regional planning tools. Central issues raised across case studies were opportunity maps’ reliability, quality of data, and maintenance. Some indicators are unavailable, particularly at the neighborhood scale, and not updated frequently enough to accurately depict conditions on the ground. Equity and opportunity maps and data offer point-in-time resources that reflect a snapshot of communities, some of which are rapidly changing. This suggests the need for more resources and technology, but the need for better engagement with communities to help to fill the gap and “ground truth” data with the perceptions of residents on the ground.

The high cost and resources of acquiring real-time data and keeping maps up-to-date, however, raises larger questions about the purposes and utility of opportunity maps as well as control of data. While the latest and greatest data may be helpful, maintaining complex platforms often places their management in the hands of technical experts that may not be accountable to communities that these maps are supposed to most help. Furthermore, more up-to-date data are not necessarily helpful in adopting plans and policies. In many regions, disadvantaged communities have not changed dramatically in several decades. While gentrification is reshaping the downtowns of some high-growth metropolitan areas, neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and disadvantage remain persistent in most regions. As interviewees indicated, opportunity maps often serve as educational and advocacy tools to illustrate to policy makers, planners, and funders what many residents and advocates already know about disadvantage within communities. A consideration for many communities and government agencies is thus whether resources might be better spent on organizing, educational campaigns, and other processes that meaningfully involve residents in planning and policy-making discourses. Or as some advocates suggest, simply making investments that increase opportunities within disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Relatedly, while opportunity maps are powerful visual tools, they can be overly specific and difficult to navigate, leading to “indicator fatigue.” Without careful forethought about their intended audience and use, they are often ineffective. Portland showed that more inclusive process that consider diverse stakeholders, potential uses, and relevant data led to their more effective use by community-based groups. Including planners and policy makers in such processes can help to make data more policy-relevant as well. But among the case studies, the most well-curated and inclusive processes were often generated within communities, not led from outside agencies or organizations. Local and regional governments should look for opportunities to support community-driven data and mapping efforts already underway. To meaningfully support community-driven efforts, maps and databases must contain and be easily customized to specific community conditions. The need for local processes, issue-definition, and data are too often overlooked in broad regional planning and data-collection efforts.

A more fundamental challenge about the utility of these maps and database to achieve regional equity goals arose from community advocates who were less involved with the creation of the maps or were attentive to their potentially harmful effects on disadvantaged communities. Reflecting the larger housing and community development debate, they pointed to the tendency of opportunity maps to paint low-income, particularly communities of color, through a deficit-based lens. As residents in Minneapolis–St. Paul and Seattle noted, maps often fail to display a community’s assets. Community development scholars have long argued that deficit-based frames result in the devaluation and disinvestment in already disadvantaged communities, and have instead promoted asset-based approaches to mapping and development (Mathie and Cunningham 2003; Parker 2006). Portland showed that inclusionary processes are key to not only uncovering such issues, but also developing alternative frames that can spur community-led revitalization and investment. However, simply changing the colors or words on a map is insufficient to changing the narratives and processes that lead to disinvestment in marginalized communities. Without clear attention to the purposes and potential harms of these tools, these maps and databases can be used to push forward policies that blindly support the dispersal of poverty, without also addressing the potential harms that they may cause to community development efforts in low-income neighborhoods.

Giving greater voice and agency to local communities in the process of mapping and data-collection efforts can help to mitigate some of these harms. Communities need to have not only access to the data, but also the ability to manipulate indicators, interpret them, and curate their own stories about what opportunity means. New platforms and tools like Portland’s “equity stories” that bring more intersectional, grounded perspectives, and qualitative data to bear represent important new directions. Research on new digital story mapping tools elsewhere have also shown their promise as community development tools (Nicholas et al. 2019).

Efforts to push regional equity planning forward using equity atlases and opportunity maps are beginning to show some positive results. Most common was the use of the maps and databases to help nonprofits and governments push regional or local planning conversations toward equity, build their institutional and community capacity, legitimize the concerns of disadvantaged communities, and educate residents and policy makers. These impacts may or may not alleviate the deep-seated structural inequities shaping uneven regional patterns of growth and decline.

Easy-to-access databases and maps have facilitated their use by MPOs, municipalities, and transit planning agencies suggesting the possibility of greater institutionalization of equity frameworks within regional planning decision-making. However, such institutionalization is unlikely to occur on its own. As observers of SCRPG processes elsewhere have pointed out, without inclusive processes, shared cross-sector goals and definitions, and political buy-in, coalitions often fail to lead to tangible policy outcomes, and can even deepen existing divisions (Frick et al. 2015; Nicholas 2019; Zapata and Bates 2015, 2016). Regional equity databases and maps can expand conversations about equity, but are not substitutes for the hard work of outreach, engagement, consensus building, advocacy, and leadership needed to shift policy on long-standing and structural inequalities at both neighborhood and regional levels.

This story will continue to play out in the coming decades across many U.S. metropolitan areas. Future research should document regional equity planning processes and outcomes across neighborhoods and regions with varying demographic, political, and economic conditions to identify critical levers of change. At the same time, research is needed that takes seriously the ways that such efforts can not only mitigate but also meaningfully support community-driven development goals that support low-income residents’ ability to remain in place. Together, the research can show how ever-more sophisticated opportunity and equity data and tools can better provide disadvantaged communities with platforms to both build opportunities where they reside and break down barriers to accessing opportunities across a broader swath of metropolitan neighborhoods.