99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-51- The Arsenal of Exclusion

Episode Date: April 3, 2012

“Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart” – Daniel D’Oca, Urban Planner, Interboro Partners. Cities are great. They have movement, activity and diversity. But go to any city and it’s pretty clear, a place … Continue reading →

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Arm rest on benches, blood relative organs, blockbusting, bouncer, cotosac. I think cities are great. There's movement and activity and diversity, but go to any city and it's pretty clear a place can be diverse without really being integrated. Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart. That's Daniel Diocca.

My name is Daniel Diocca, and I am an urban planner. I have a company in New York called Interboro Partners. Over the last few years, Daniel and his two colleagues at Interboro Partners. Interboro Partners is myself, Georgian, Theodore, and Tobias Armbors. And the three of us, working on this project for a number of years called the Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion. This arsenal is a catalog of stuff inside a city.

What we call weapons. Concierge, Expulsive Zoning, Fire Hydrant, Food Truck Ordnance. That architects, planners, policy makers, developers, etc. use to either bring people together or keep people apart or open the city or close the city or increase access to space or restrict people's access to space and a number of ways to spin it. Historic preservation, home-motors association. Weapons ranging from no loitering signs to big things like housing vouchers and exclusionary zoning and all that kind of stuff. Today we're only going to focus on the arsenal of exclusion, the weapons that keep people apart. Weapons in the arsenal of exclusion.

In the city of Baltimore, a place Daniel Dioca truly loves. I taught at Maryland Institute College of Art for six years. So I have a strong connection with Baltimore. It's still a city that I love and admire very much. It's a wonderful place. But it's a city that has been honing its arsenal of exclusion for decades. Baltimore was once to the invisible wall building industry, what Detroit was to the automotive industry,

an innovative workshop where creative minds work to think up and vent, test out and ultimately export methods of exclusion. Our producer and resident, Baltimorean Sam Greenspan, went to look at some of Charm City's exclusive offerings. So, before we're the best way to get there is... Oh, sorry. So, what, you tell us, tell us, why don't you say what? Where we're gonna go and what we're doing and what we're gonna go.

How are we gonna get there? Give me a second. Sure. Dan Dioka and I are driving north of Greenmount Avenue in East Baltimore. I kind of think of Greenmount North of 33rd, all the way up to Cold Spring as a kind of museum of exclusion. So as you're driving north on Greenmount Avenue, north of 33rd Street, it's clear that Greenmount Avenue is a dividing line between rich and poor and black and white, but what's not immediately obvious is why. Just to give you a sense, as we drive north on Greenmount to our right, on the east side is waverly.

Waverly is lower income and around 80% African-American. 16% of a bachelor's degree, a median income is $40,000. And on the other side, on the west side to our left is Okenshron, then Gilford, well to the north of that, a really affluent area buffered by a middle income area, only about 7% African-American. 75% have a bachelor's degree and the median income is $75,000. In Daniel Diocos' view, it's not the wide green mount avenue that keeps these neighborhoods apart. It's actually the small and subtle and invisible, yet totally intentional things that keep these

neighborhoods separate. Demographically, the divide is very strict and severe. You can just see all these physical measures that are deployed to keep people from getting from one side to the other. Just crossing green mount on foot is annoying. Two crosswalks in that 1.25 mile stretch. But what's more interesting is when we talk about the grid. Gremount is where the grid ends.

The grid is there and wavily on the east side. Notice that on the right, there's the grid, right? There's 37th Street, 38th Street. We can make a right into wavily, no problem. But on our left, there's no grid, right? It stops. You'll notice we're heading north now. If we try to make a right into Waverly, no problem. But on our left there's no grid, right? It stops. You'll notice we're heading north now. If we try to make a left, we're gonna be confronted with dead-end streets, ballards. Where's the ballard? It's there like these security poles that you kind of stick in the ground. Oh, here's a wall, right? There's this long row of

middle-income houses on the west side of the street. They're kind of a buffer against the really wealthy gilford stuff that's just behind. Almost all of the roads dead houses on the west side of the street. They're kind of a buffer against the really wealthy Gilford stuff that's just behind. Almost all of the roads dead end at the houses, and the few streets that do go through are mostly one-way streets coming the opposite direction out onto Greenmount. There's no way for us to get left into Okentrav or Gilford. There has to be some way to get into the neighborhood.

Well, there is, but on Gilford's east east side you really have to go out of your way to find a street that will let you in. So now we're in gilford finally. And then once you're inside you'll notice two things. The houses are super nice and the roads are super weird. The roads are windy and they feel disproportionately small next to these houses giant lawns and you need a permit to park here. Another interesting one is residential parking permits.

Residential parking permit. In case you're wondering, you do not need a permit to park in the less affluent, wavrally neighborhood. But back to Gelford. The weirdest thing about these roads is that it's hard to know what direction you're going. And could you tell if we're east, north, west or south, right? It's really hard to tell, right? I would imagine we're going. And could you tell if we're East North, West or South North? It's really hard to tell, right? I would imagine we're going South.

I think we're actually going East. So this is Greenmount Avenue. Since we're outsiders and we don't know our way around Gilford, we were shunted out of the neighborhood on a one-way street back out onto Greenmount Avenue. So this is one of the one-way streets heading out of the neighborhood. Oh my gosh. So we really

got out back to Remount and I thought we were going through it. These physical barriers and the arsenal of exclusion, grids and one-way streets are not that big a deal. They're not that hard to overcome, but their placement has meaning. This really matter that you can't make a left turn into Gilford would this be a more equitable city if we could make that left turn? Probably not, right? I mean, it's more of a symbolic thing, right? It's this place where this demographic divide is just rendered very physically in space.

But it's worth noting that other weapons in the arsenal of exclusion that once existed here in Gilford are now illegal, like restrictive housing covenants. Basically, there were housing ordinances that said black people can't live here. Restrictive housing covenants. Diocuses that this neighborhood actually pioneered the use of segregationist covenants, housing deeds that restricted occupancy to only white people. This

wasn't illegal until 1968. You can point at these gridless streets as being an emblem of the racial segregation that still exists in Baltimore. With good cause. When it's interesting to speculate what the neighborhood would be like, if these exclusionary measures weren't in place. Had this neighborhood been built on a grid, upper-middle-class white people living here, probably would have fled to the suburbs in the 70s, 80s, right? Given that there are rich white people still living here within the city limits paying city taxes, is it worse than just having all the rich white people living out in the county? Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question.

And the trick is to try to develop neighborhood change, and that's not a zero-sum game, where one party loses and another party gains. And that is in a borough partners next project, creating development solutions that are not zero-sum games. But it all starts with labeling and categorizing the weapons and the arsenal of exclusion and inclusion, so we can figure out how to create cities that are more open to everybody. Here's a little in-note. Most of the weapons in the arsenal of exclusion create barriers that are hard to see because

they are subtle and non-descript, except when they're not. Here's the Baltimore City County Line. Dan Yoka took samples to the former side of Hollander Ridge. It was a lower-income housing project, but way out on the City County Line. It has since been torn down, but one artifact of the project remains. The Rosel community up there, Lobby, to build this eight-foot-tall spiked, rot-iron fence around the perimeter of Hollander Ridge, I'd a separated from their community, which then was predominantly white suburban community.

It's like a gated community created from the outside. You know, it's a really strange and unfortunate thing. It's funny that the spikes are actually pointing the other direction. So I guess you could go over but you couldn't get back. Right. 99% in visible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars with help from Scott Goldberg. We are a project of KALW 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. 99% Invisible is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange making public radio more

public at PRX.org. Support for 99% Invisible is provided in part by tiny letter. Email for people with something to say. My boy Carver always said something to say. What do you have to say, Carver? Every year, the volcano is formed, and we love every year. Shh, it's going to get a lot of fun.

But it's not that close to us, so it doesn't kill us. It only kills the people who's definitely really close to it. Just tell the people who close it. Stay away, get out of your house. So they don't get killed by the car, walk in. Now that's a reason to send a newsletter. Maybe even a follow-up phone call. Tiny Letter, the simplest way to send an email newsletter.

Tinyletter.com. You can find the show and to send an email newsletter. tinyletter.com. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars. You can always catch up with us and look at more weapons in the arsenal of exclusion at 99%invisible.org. You