I like circles, don’t ask me why. Maybe I like them because they make me think about how a few inches, feet, or yards can make a world of difference. If you enclose me in a circle, you may destine me for a lifetime (even generations) of disinvestment, lost opportunity, and lost hope. These are the vestiges of redlining, a historic process in which the federal government participated in racially segregated housing beginning in the 1930s by refusing to insure home mortgages in and near Black neighborhoods.
As I prepared to teach a housing law course this summer in Cambridge, England, I thought a lot about circles and in my research, I discovered Danielle Stokes’s recent article, From Redlining to Greenlining. The title of her article harkens to the old lending maps of the 1930s — the few inches on a map between green and red, blocks or miles on the ground, and untold lost opportunities or thwarted dreams for those enclosed in the thin red circle.
A red circle drawn around a neighborhood on a lender’s map signaled high lending risk and therefore an undesirable neighborhood. Place me on the outside of this thin red circle and my economic prospects (and my family’s prospects potentially for generations) are much improved. In fact, on these same color-coded maps, areas in green signified the lowest level of lending risk and were highly recommended for lending. They were also White, racially homogenous neighborhoods.
Stokes’ thesis is that discriminatory land use policies helped to marginalize minority communities and these same land use planning mechanisms can be used to help remediate the effects of historic discrimination. She introduces the concept of “greenlining” for the first time into the land use and environmental context as a descriptor for “a comprehensive planning mechanism that integrates sustainability principles into land use decisions, using development standards and other incentives to ameliorate longstanding injustices.”
Stokes does not seek to reinvent the wheel; nor does she suggest that any one solution can redress the effects of housing discrimination and inequity. What she offers is one strategy that uses existing land use planning mechanisms, not to exclude, but instead to comprehensively integrate sustainability principles into development standards and land use decision-making. And of course, her goal is to ameliorate some of the existing housing injustices that are the results of historic discriminatory land use, environmental, and residential lending policies.
Land use law is housing law and environmental law as well. Although land use planning and control is very local in its workings, its impacts reverberate beyond the local level to the regional, state, and national levels. Stokes has these broad impacts in mind as she articulates a proposal for a holistic approach to redressing environmental and land use injustices, from climate change to economic disinvestment.
Greenlining is malleable and provides a vehicle for coordinating land use regulation and environmental law while simultaneously using equitable principles to prioritize resource allocation and infrastructure investments in communities experiencing the greatest marginalization and harm. In this way, greenlining has the potential to bridge independent policy and regulatory areas and help them function in a more coherent way (e.g. land use planning as locally regulated, environmental law regulated largely by state and federal governments).
Stokes is careful not to overpromise (an increasingly rare attribute). She suggests that greenlining has the potential to provide a sound “structural framework for governing bodies to identify the geographic areas that are eligible for funding and incorporate green initiatives when approving new development.” She describes how greenlining can also be helpful in developing standards and processes that can be leveraged in the comprehensive planning process to address climate change and sustainable land use.
Simultaneously, Stokes cautions that greenlining is not a panacea and is not an appropriate redress for every negative climate impact. Her judiciousness is refreshing, and it is an acknowledgment of the complexity and sophistication of the problems she is tackling.
For the careful reader, Stokes offers greenlining as a conceptual framework for converging land use and environmental law to not only address historic policies and their lingering negative effects but to also move forward with new development in a transformative way. New development is inevitable and even welcomed.
Stokes offers greenlining as a way of achieving development that is more inclusive of all stakeholders and that employs development standards that prioritize sustainability principles and practices. Equity, sustainability, and an opportunity to offer meaningful remedies for historic land use and environmental injustices are the focus of Stokes’ work. She offers greenlining as a foil for the fall-out from redlining.
Moving from red to green is not easy. Stokes seeks to clear a pathway for those seeking a more equitable future.
