Infrastructure for Equity
The room was full at SPUR for an evening of storytelling, at turns inspiring and infuriating, about infrastructure and its tendency to reinforce inequality. Concrete thinly veils the racist designs of Bay Area transportation projects from the mid-1900s, which sometimes literally demolished black communities — and not enough has changed. The current housing crisis is doing what all infrastructure problems do: holding up a mirror to our values. If we don’t like what we see, the message of the night was that we have to think hard, get involved, and make ourselves heard.
“People of courage and vision can find ways to create more equitable solutions.” — Pamela Uzzell
Need a model? Welcome to the Neighborhood by Pamela Uzzell gave us the powerful story of Mabel “Mama” Howard, a community organizer who nurtured some of the biggest liberal movements of the 60s. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment is the fact that BART runs underground in South Berkeley. When BART was being planned, taxpayers in this mostly black, lower-income community voted to pay extra for an underground train, but BART started construction above ground anyway. Howard took BART to court, and against all odds, she won. She was determined that no train tracks would divide her city into the “right” and “wrong” sides. But sadly, Mama Howard might not recognize Berkeley today. Her own daughter, artist Mildred Howard, saw her rent increase 50% in one year and had to move away. Some call gentrification by a different name: “resegregation.”
“It’s imperative that folks get involved…The people at the switches now can’t do it alone.” —Joël Ramos
The next three films were about how city infrastructure can harm the most vulnerable communities. In The Maze, filmmaker Serghino Roosblad told the history of the Distribution Structure, AKA the MacArthur Maze, which funnels over 300,000 cars daily to different parts of the Bay Area. Its construction in the mid-1900s demolished a sacred Aloni burial site, and physically displaced and divided a black community in Oakland that had thrived for a century. In Hollamby’s Hill by Joe Gilbert, a voiceover talks about the stigma and neglect that perpetuates inequality, accompanied by black and white images of a crumbling public housing project in London. Bonobo, by Zoel Aeschbacher, tells a fictional story about a public housing building where a broken elevator and a pervasive lack of compassion creates a chain of tragic injustices.
As the lights came up for the panel discussion, the audience’s frustration was palpable. Pamela Uzzell reminded the audience, “People of courage and vision can find ways to create more equitable solutions.” Rachel Brahinsky, program director for Urban and Public Affairs at USF, notes that Black Lives Matter was founded nearby; “The answer is to get involved in one or many of these social movements,” she said. José Campos, manager of planning and design review at the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, said he was glad these conversations are finally acknowledging racism. Panelist Joël Ramos, former regional planning director at TransForm, is now at the SFMTA, joining Campos in trying to create equitable infrastructure from inside the city government. Ramos stressed that “all the low-hanging fruit has been picked away,” and the complex battles that remain are won or lost by the slimmest of margins. “It’s imperative that folks get involved,” he said. “The people at the switches now can’t do it alone.”
Dive into the panel discussion:
Some starting places to learn about the infrastructure shaping SF’s future are Connect SF and TransForm’s white paper Crossing Together — Equity Considerations for a Second Transbay Crossing.
This event took place on November 13, 2018 at SPUR in San Francisco, and was co-presented by Livable City. For more information about SF Urban Film Fest, visit their website.
