Abstract
Some see the regional equity perspective as placing undue emphasis on intersectoral cooperation and the complementarity between growth and equity. Is regional equity a departure from an Advocacy Planning paradigm in which values are central, justice is key, and decision making is contentious? We try to reconcile the perspectives and use case studies of Fresno and San Antonio to explore when conflict yields new alliances and when it produces stalemate. We conclude with lessons for advocacy planners operating at the regional scale in which the lack of government and need for governance necessitate new skills of collaboration, (principled) conflict, and community building.
Introduction
In recent years, a strand within planning has emphasized the potential compatibility between what is famously known as the three E’s: economy, equity, and the environment. While acknowledging the tensions that may exist, planners are also admonished to seek unusual partners, including city–suburb coalitions and business–community alliances, in pursuit of a new common good (Campbell 1996; Katz and Bradley 2013; Orfield 2002). Contributing to the sense that there may be sweet spots of mutual interest has been a growing body of literature, particularly at the regional or metropolitan scale, suggesting that attention to social equity is not only consistent with but perhaps contributes to more rapid and more sustained growth (Benner and Pastor 2015a; Eberts, Erickcek, and Kleinhenz 2006; Pastor and Benner 2008).
The emphasis on potential complementarities have led some to worry that equity issues will be subsumed in a pro-growth (and business-dominated) agenda and will therefore be likely to be set aside as afterthoughts by more powerful and more traditional regional actors (Bollens 2003). Associated with this is a concern that the focus on the equity-economy complementarity tends to celebrate intersectoral collaborations rather than the social advocacy that is key to moving social policy forward (Lester and Reckhow 2013). Particularly after our last book, Just Growth, in which we examined metropolitan areas where inclusion, prosperity, and civic conversations were coming together, we have been singled out as contributing to this sense that the interwoven destinies once stressed by Henry Cisneros might be enough to win the regional equity day (Benner and Pastor 2012; Cisneros 1993; Lester and Reckhow 2013).
Does that mean that the regional equity perspective we and others have embraced precludes the sort of advocacy planning stressed by Paul Davidoff (1965) in his seminal article, “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning”? This has always seemed to us to be an odd question, given the origins of the regional equity perspective in advocacy organizations (Bernstein 1997), the frequent focus on the important and indeed inspirational role of social movements in shaping the regional equity framework in the United States (Pastor, Benner, and Matsuoka 2009), and the continued deployment of regional equity as a concept in service of inclusion (Treuhaft, Blackwell, and Pastor 2011). At the same time, we must acknowledge a certain validity in the criticism of our approach: our willingness to explore the equity–growth relationship, to emphasize the potential positive role of civic business groups, and to stress how new regional conversations can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes have certainly made a “Pollyanna” characterization of our work plausible.
In this article, we argue that advocacy planning indeed can play a critically important role in building regional equity, but that to be effective, it requires both advocacy and collaboration, but within a broader sense of shared regional destiny. We argue that the different (regional) scale of action suggests the importance of an expanded range of knowledge and skills, moving beyond the relatively well-understood terrain of neighborhood and city planning within existing political institutions, to a broader range of issues (e.g., workforce development, cluster-based economic development, climate change mitigation) in a more complex interjurisdictional arena of regional development. This suggests a simultaneous move from a focus on government structures to an emphasis on complex, informal, and intersectoral dynamics of regional governance; while skirmishes in existing formal and more adversarial policy contexts are key and help to move the needle on equity (Lester and Reckhow 2013), the messy arena of governance paves the way for a more deliberative democracy that can lead to important new understandings among diverse constituencies (Bohman and Rehg 1997; Young 2000). Finally, we emphasize the importance of a particular type of political leadership—those particular individuals who are able to maintain credibility in their own constituency while simultaneously building bridges to other constituencies, and using this commitment to both people and place to engage in “principled conflict” in a way that helps build a sense of common destiny among constituencies with competing interests and values.
To flesh out this argument about conflict, collaboration, and community building at the regional scale, we look at the experiences of two metropolitan areas: Fresno, California, and San Antonio, Texas. Both are part of a larger study we are completing and these regions were initially selected for contrasting substantive outcomes—San Antonio has a record of improvements in income levels and distribution (relative to other metros in its broader Census region) while Fresno has a decidedly opposite set of results. But researching and spending time in both locales revealed that, while there are some key variations, they started from somewhat similar political economies in the early 1970s: an Anglo elite determined to check the power of a growing Hispanic population, simmering social movement organizations that were getting primed to facilitate that power shift, and an economy that needed to be reorganized to generate progress (in Fresno, by diversifying away from agriculture; in San Antonio, by adjusting to a sizeable military cutback; and in both places, by forging a development model not based on cheap labor). The period that followed was especially fractious, especially in San Antonio (which was the anchor location for a vibrant Alinsky-style organizing group) but also in the Fresno area in the San Joaquin Valley (given the key role of the United Farm Workers in the Valley, which also owes allegiance to Alinsky-trained organizers).
Yet a visit to both locations today suggests very different experiences of conflict and collaboration. In San Antonio, a majority of voters in 2012 passed a tax that will steer additional resources to pre-K education for the least advantaged kids—with the support not only of a progressive mayor and community groups but also the Chamber of Commerce. By contrast, in Fresno, the Chamber of Commerce and local Building Industry Association leaders were strong and vocal opponents to a modest but important effort in 2012 to develop a general plan that would attempt to revitalize downtown, promote denser development, and reverse the long-term sprawl that has contributed to inequality in the region. In San Antonio, the chatter is all about how well different sectors collaborate (enough to get rewarded a Promise Neighborhood, a Choice Neighborhood, a Promise Zone, and a Sustainable Communities Initiative from the federal government). In Fresno, environmental justice advocates in the region have all but given up on collaborative policy solutions to addressing the region’s worst-in-the-nation air pollution, seeing adversarial lawsuits as the only meaningful pathway forward.
Why the contrast and what does this mean for regional equity, metropolitan coalition building, and advocacy planning? We argue that key stakeholders in San Antonio have been able to find ways to collaborate in the midst of conflict over competing interests and values, while in Fresno, the inability of stakeholders to turn conflict into a productive force has resulted in a sense of entrenched division and discouragement. This suggests the importance, at least within the regional equity field, for advocacy planners (and other advocates) to also pay attention to processes of collaboration. We suggest the need for a more integrated and multi-dimensional advocacy approach that incorporates what we call “principled conflict”—in which opposing ideas are raised and advocacy is central, but stakeholders develop a sense of a common regional destiny through what we alliteratively refer to as the three R’s: a recognition of shared Roots in the region, a desire to stay in Relationship, even with opposing interests, and a commitment to Reason over ideology in developing solutions.
In what follows, we first review Davidoff’s concept of advocacy planning, and the implications for both regional equity and the diversity and dynamism of regional knowledge networks. Contrasting Davidoff’s ideas with those in the school of “communicative rationality,” we draw a parallel with the debates in regional equity about conflict versus collaboration and suggest the potential for a useful synthesis. We then turn to our case studies, emphasizing the evolution of conflict in the case of San Antonio and the stasis of struggle in Fresno. While there are structural factors that play an important role, we stress key differences in organizing, the presence (or lack thereof) of key individuals who became transcendent and transformational figures, and certain key features of each region’s civic life. We conclude with the implications for planners of these patterns of conflict, collaboration, and community building, suggesting that planners can help by promoting principled conflict and collaboration, insuring that equity stays on the agenda, being aware of the interplay with social forces and social movement actors, and not choosing between confrontation and collaboration but rather embracing the activities associated with both traditional advocacy planning and cross-constituency collaborative dialogue.
Advocacy Planning, Collaboration, Diverse Epistemic Communities
The right course of action is always a matter of choice, never of fact.
Paul Davidoff’s famous article on advocacy and pluralism in planning was centered on two central points. First, was an argument against the model of “rational planning” that dominated the profession at the time, which attempted to reduce the role of values in shaping planning choices. In contrast, Davidoff argued, planning action cannot be prescribed from a position of value neutrality, since prescriptions are always based on desired objectives. Thus, he argued, values held by planners should not only be made clear and explicit, but planners should be advocates for what they deem proper.
Davidoff’s second central point related to the politics of the planning process, which he argued discouraged full democratic participation in city governance. It did this in part by focusing on the development of unified general plans. City development, he argued, should be the result of plural planning, with differing ideas competing in the public sphere for acceptance, rather than a single city planning department developing a unified vision through technical processes designed to determine the “best” alternatives. Instead, he argued, better outcomes would emerge if interest groups outside government advocated for alternative plans. In the process, he also fundamentally recast the role of the planner from technical expert to an advocate for specific substantive solutions. Davidoff was a proponent of this perspective not only as a researcher, but in all his professional capacities, including serving on the governing board of the American Institute of Planners, where he was successful in amending its code of ethics to state that:
A planner shall seek to expand choice and opportunity for all persons, recognizing a special responsibility to plan for the needs of disadvantaged groups and persons, and shall urge the alteration of policies, institutions, and decisions which militate against such objectives. (Checkoway 1994)
One of the most important planners to follow Davidoff’s admonitions—to the point of quoting this passage in his recounting of his years as a city planner in Cleveland—was Norman Krumholz (Krumholz 1982, 165–66). He came to work in Cleveland after the election of Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a city exceeding five hundred thousand in its population, and he was explicit about paying attention to issues of social disadvantage and social justice. While Krumholz notes that many of the issues on which he worked sometimes required achieving broad consensus, the focus of his work was on identifying and clarifying the often opposing interests of different constituencies, and keeping the consequences of inequitable decisions directly in front of local decision makers’ minds (Krumholz 1990; Kindle location 726). He and an activist planning staff tackled transit inequality, subsidies to downtown developers, and other questions that would be familiar to today’s socially minded planning students and practitioners.
Of course, Davidoff’s vision and the actions of Krumholz and other advocacy planners emerged in the context of the tremendous social protest and political turbulence of his time. While Davidoff did not refer to the pioneering organizer Saul Alinsky in his article, advocacy planning is often seen as being closely associated with Alinsky’s strong emphasis on community organizing and social action. After all, even the most equity-oriented bureaucrats cannot just act on their own, and so there needs to be outside pressure to shift planning practices, a force that can be provided by allied advocates (or alternatively business and other interests as in the case of growth regimes; see Logan and Molotch 1987; Molotch 1976). In his own seminal article, Krumholz notes the need for equity-oriented planning professionals to go beyond planning commissioners and engage other important actors if anything is to be accomplished in terms of change (Krumholz 1982, 174).
Of course, another perspective suggests that the planner’s job is mainly to help build consensus in the planning process, through a combination of developing professional advice and analysis for elected officials and the public, and mediating between conflicting interests to develop shared goals and priorities. One strong thread in this view, which has emerged subsequent to Davidoff’s work, has the perspective of planning as “communicative action” or “communicative rationality,” which emphasizes that the process by which information is produced is critically important in ensuring its understanding and use by institutions:
Information produced according to the conventional model, by presumably neutral experts who work outside and apart from the political and bureaucratic process through which policy gets made, does not become embedded in the institutions or the players’ understandings. It will become what we have called “intellectual capital” or shared knowledge, only if there is plenty of talk about the meaning of the information, its accuracy, and its implications. Information does not influence unless it represents a socially constructed and shared understanding created in the community of policy actors. If, however, the meaning does emerge through such a social process, the information changes the actors and their actions, often without their applying it expressly to a specific decision. (Innes 1998, p. 56)
This communicative approach suggests a more collaborative and less conflictual process in which knowledge is developed, shared, and used to inform more “rational” decisions, or as Fainstein describes this approach, “the planner’s primary function is to listen to people’s stories and assist in forging a consensus among differing viewpoints” (Fainstein 2000, 454). Judith Innes, for example, seems to suggest a harmonious process in which continued conversations lead to consensus about the importance of what could be competing interests; this is certainly the tone of her review of a series of regional planning collaboratives that emerged in California in the 1990s (Innes and Rongerude 2005). John Forester pays more attention to issues of power in this communication process, including a systemic analysis of the various dimensions of misinformation that occur in planning processes (e.g., intentional, unintentional, structural) and ways that progressive planners might work on behalf of particular stakeholders or particular values to overcome this misinformation (Forester 1982, 1989). His emphasis, however, is still on processes of “mediated negotiation” that emphasize collaborative information-sharing processes, and he emphasizes a collaborative process for addressing power differentials. This stands in contrast to Davidoff’s vision of a more messy, tense, and combative process.
How does advocacy planning, and this debate about the combative versus collaborative role of planners, relate to “regional equity”? With roots in earlier research on spatial mismatch and inequality (Kain 1968; Wilson 1987), regional equity gained prominence as a concept in both practice and theory in the mid-1990s; initially labeled “community-based regionalism” (Bernstein 1997), it was based on an argument that metropolitan space had been segregated by race and class and that this has negative impacts on opportunity for less advantaged populations (Powell 1999; Rusk 1995). However, the regional equity perspective was generally optimistic that regional coalitions could be formed to overcome those spatial and racial divisions, including the ability to build cross-jurisdictional collaborations and political alliances (Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2001; Orfield 1997). Analysts and advocates alike often suggested that working with unusual partners, including those business and civic leaders interested in what was labeled the “new regionalism,” might offer up new sorts of openings to effect change (Pastor, Benner, and Matsuoka 2009; Wheeler 2002). Indeed, one quantitative analysis found that regional equity efforts were often reactive, coming into being to respond to new regional business collaboratives (Pastor, Lester, and Scoggins 2009).
Chasing the regionalist opening (whether prompted by a business-led agenda or even an environmentalist effort such as “Smart Growth”) has its opportunistic value—finally, progressives and others concerned with social justice were getting to a debate just as it was starting. But there are also clear downside risks to joining someone else’s party when an agenda may already be set and power relations may be lopsided: equity concerns can get submerged, and lifting them up sharply and crisply can require the sharp elbows of community organizing (Lester and Reckhow 2013). Indeed, Swanstrom and Banks argue that conflict can be as important as collaboration in achieving regional equity goals, and that community-based organizations that effectively balance conflict and collaboration can have significant success in regional policy arenas (Swanstrom and Banks 2009). Often, such success is achieved through small incremental wins, with community organizations working both inside and outside formal planning channels to push for their interests (McAndrews and Marcus 2014), and using state and federal points of leverage to achieve regional goals (Clark and Christopherson 2009; Lowe 2014).
Of course, achieving a balance of conflict and cooperation in planning is not limited to regional approaches. Hutchinson and Loukaitou-Sideris (2001), for example, provide an interesting analysis of the Pico Union neighborhood of Los Angeles, where they argue that a more asset-based consensus-building approach to community development had certain limitations that would have been overcome had issues been addressed in a more confrontational, Alinsky-ist style. An asset-based, consensus approach to community development, in contrast, avoids Alinksy’s focus on mobilizing anger about things lacking in the community, and instead focuses on assets to build from and creating alliances with more powerful partners to address local challenges. In the Alinsky model, the responsibility of outside organizers is to work with residents to choose the issues, get a critical mass of residents to buy in, and organize people to demand from power brokers greater resources to address the issue. Hutchinson and Loukaitou-Sideris conclude that the “real question may be not which model is better, but rather which is necessary for what end” (Hutchinson and Loukaitou-Sideris 2001, 308).
The balance of collaboration, conflict, and community building is of particular concern for regional equity efforts given that they are relatively new—and that there are a wide range of regionalisms for which equity is indeed a secondary concern (Henton, Melville, and Walesh 1997, 2003). Typically conflict and collaboration are considered as opposite ends of a spectrum, with regional collaborative efforts seen as trying to overcome conflict much in the way that collaborative institutions are generally conceptualized as aiming to build consensus and encourage cooperative rather than conflictual behavior (Lubell 2004; Weber 1998). Yet classic works of sociology have argued that in fact conflict can be part of the dynamic that draws people together in social organizations and group affiliation (Simmel 1955). And conflict can be an important learning opportunity, with education research long having argued that teachers who avoid and suppress certain types of conflict in their classrooms lose valuable opportunities for students to develop creative insights and improve cognitive development (Johnson and Johnson 1979).
So when does conflict contribute to regional collaboration and when does it get in the way? In our book Just Growth, we suggested that the development of “diverse epistemic communities” (essentially diverse knowledge sharing networks) seemed to be an important component of regions that had successfully achieved what are often seen as conflicting goals of both rapid economic growth and improved social equity (Benner and Pastor 2012). In that work, we found that such knowledge-sharing networks could emerge through a variety of different processes (such as through a particularly influential leadership program, an especially comprehensive metropolitan planning organization, or informal but sustained networks), but that what they shared in common was the sharing of data and perspectives among diverse groups, as well as more sustained interactions that made it easier to incorporate multiple interests into planning.
We admit that our first pass at the concept made it sound a lot more like communicative rationality than advocacy planning, though we’d like to think still with an emphasis on power differentials in line with Forester’s analysis. What we failed to stress there—and what we correct here—is that such processes are not conflict-free. Indeed, given power imbalances, the concerns of the disadvantaged will often surface only if they fight, often in confrontational ways, such as through protests, marches, and boycotts. On the other hand, conflict without end or with the end of simply vanquishing one’s opponent is also not productive—and so there also needs to be processes in which the repeated interactions of differing actors eventually result in some shift in tone, power, and policy. This requires some sophisticated skills on the part of advocates as well as civic leaders, including the ability to adjust midstream from conflict to collaboration as is necessary.
In this article, we look at two regions that have been divergent in both their outcomes and their processes: San Antonio and Fresno. As noted in the introduction, the former has been able to achieve better outcomes than the latter in terms of both growth and equity but just as remarkable is the way in which collaboration has become a social norm in San Antonio while conflict is the daily norm in Fresno. Understanding how one case evolved in one direction and the other in the other—particularly given similar social tensions at the outset of the period we consider—could have special lessons for regional equity planners interested in systematic efforts to productively reconcile different interests even as they stress the need to make progress on inclusion as well as prosperity.
A Tale of Two Regions
In the early 1970s and 1980s, the case for equity-oriented planning and policy in Fresno and San Antonio would have looked quite similar. Both metro areas faced high levels of entrenched poverty and each faced a challenging economic structure, with Fresno deeply dependent on its agricultural sector and San Antonio reliant on a military sector that was soon to shrink dramatically. Beneath the numbers was a similar set of racial dynamics, with a growing share of Latinos in each region beginning to challenge traditional Anglo domination of the region’s political structure, as well as challenging the way in which that population was being left behind in terms of income and quality of life.
Before we elaborate these political economy dimensions in the case studies, it is useful to look at the basic data. 1 As can be seen in Table 1, Fresno underwent a more rapid demographic shift from white to nonwhite between 1970 and 2010; by 2010, the race and ethnic breakdown is remarkably similar, with the difference being that Fresno has a larger Asian population. Another key issue, and one made much of by observers and analysts in San Antonio, is the relatively small share of immigrants in San Antonio compared to Fresno—the share of foreign-born was similar in both locations in 1970 but dramatically higher in Fresno in 2010. Equally significant, in 1970, the share of Latinos born in the United States was 84 percent in Fresno and 88 percent in San Antonio while in 2010 the respective shares were 69 percent and 83 percent, with obvious implications for potential electoral power.
Demographics of Fresno and San Antonio Metros.
Source: U.S. Census, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (Ruggles et al. 2010).
Table 2 illustrates the employment structure for both metros while Table 3 indicates the income outcomes. The most telling differences are Fresno’s reliance on agriculture and San Antonio’s early reliance on the military sector. 2 One can see what was a major challenge that faced San Antonio in this period, namely, the shrinkage of the military sector as the Cold War ended (and even before). Interestingly, San Antonio seems to have adjusted—note the rise in professional service and finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE), higher earning sectors that helped to pick up the slack.
Employment Structure of Fresno and San Antonio Metros.
Source: U.S. Census, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (Ruggles et al. 2010).
Income and Education Measures for Fresno and San Antonio Metros.
Source: U.S. Census, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (Ruggles et al. 2010).
Better evidence of adjustment is in Table 3: Household income (which was only available in the data starting in 1980) fell steadily in Fresno and rose in San Antonio before a dip during the Great Recession. The share of middle-class households (judged by their respective statewide distribution of incomes in 1980) fell in both regions but much less so in San Antonio; the share of those in the bottom quintile went up dramatically in Fresno but not in San Antonio. 3 Poverty data, which are available from 1970, tell a similar story: both Fresno and San Antonio start with a poverty rate of about 20 percent and despite one positive blip in 1980, Fresno ends up with a higher share in poverty in 2010 than San Antonio. 4
In terms of disparity, Fresno shows a steady deterioration in the ratio of Latino to white income while San Antonio shows an initial fall (particularly in the 1980s as the military cutbacks hit the Mexican American middle class), and then a partial recuperation. Finally, while San Antonio may be worried about education now, it has done much better than Fresno at lowering the share of those in the ages 25 to 65 without a high school education and raising the share of those in the same age bracket with a college education.
The basic demographic and employment structure can help to explain some of the income results: having less foreign-born and being less reliant on agriculture certainly gave San Antonio an advantage. But it is also clear that San Antonio faced a much bigger shock as the military sector shrunk, and its ability to mobilize an effective response should be of great interest, particularly because both regions were characterized by significant intergroup conflicts that would normally be seen as impeding collaboration. Part of what might have helped is the relative concentration in one jurisdictional unit: using figures from the 2012 ACS, San Antonio City hosts 77.5 percent of the metro population (in this case, as we’ve constructed it, of Bexar County) while Fresno City hosts 53 percent of the metro population (as we’ve defined it, Fresno County). Having a larger share of the population in one jurisdiction means that it may be easier to move the region by moving the city—certainly there are strong conflicts between city and county in the Fresno area, while in San Antonio the regional relations are more collaborative.
As for political cultures, while there are also important differences that structure the processes we discuss below, both metro areas had tensions that could have (rightly) worked against the sense of a “regional community.” In Fresno, and the broader San Joaquin Valley, a farmworkers movement, a nationwide grape boycott, and a related series of visible strikes made poverty and disempowerment of the Latino population central, highly visible, and bitterly contested issues. Urban Fresno was not left out of the clash, as the Alinsky-linked Community Services Organization had an active branch there, and it was the center of many farmworkers’ gatherings and public actions. San Antonio had a more strongly rooted and growing Chicano middle class, many of whom had integrationist political goals and supported less confrontational tactics (Rosales 2000). But it also had its share of farmworker organizing and Chicano civil rights organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s. And in the 1980s, the area became an anchor for the Alinsky-linked Industrial Areas Foundation and host to a vibrant and well-documented series of clashes between the Anglo elite and disenfranchised communities (M. R. Warren 2001).
San Antonio
Civic leaders in San Antonio today proudly boast of an increasingly multifaceted economy that has been able to move beyond reliance on military spending and now boasts vibrant tourism, medical, energy, manufacturing, and professional services sectors. The relative economic success is often attributed to a spirit of collaboration among government, business, universities, and community groups that has become part of the regional DNA (Benner and Pastor 2015a). That collaboration is also seemingly rooted in the capacity of the economy to deliver for the middle: note from the tables above that while the middle class shrank slightly over the 30-year period we examine, the movement seems to have been into the top quintile rather than the lower 40 % other measures of inequality have shifted for the worse but much less so over the 1990s and 2000s than for the other top 192 metros (Benner and Pastor 2015a). 5
Collaboration and a better sharing of the spoils of economic prosperity—this is a far cry from three decades ago when San Antonio was the site of one of the country’s most lively struggles to challenge stark racism in the allocation of public resources and confront a business elite who seemed committed to marketing the region based on cheap labor. The challenge to racism was remarkably concrete in both its subject and its strategies: working-class Latinos living on the city’s poorer West Side were impacted by torrential rainstorm and inadequate drainage systems that sent water and debris flowing into the streets, ruining homes and impacting public safety, and many West Side schools also lacked heat and proper insulation (Rogers 1990; Rosales 2000). As a result, the first powerful organizing efforts were focused largely on infrastructure as well as on the shift in political power that would be necessary to achieve change.
One of the main vehicles for change was Communities Organized for Public Services (COPS), an affiliate of the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation that was formed in 1974. Led by Ernie Cortes, one of the country’s premier community organizers, one of COPS’s earliest campaigns involved working to persuade the City Council to pass a budget proposal that included $100 million investment in infrastructure and increased services in poor, predominantly Latino neighborhoods. Persuasion often took a quite active tone: seeking to apply business pressure on the Council, COPS members halted normal banking activities at the flagship Frost National Bank by exchanging dollars for pennies (and then pennies for dollars) all day long. The simple message: business needs would be disrupted until the basic needs of low-income communities become part of the equation, a tactic more associated with advocacy than with communicative rationality.
It worked: Marquez (Marquez 1990, 360) reports that COPS neighborhoods received $86 million in Community Development Block Grants between 1974 and 1981 and Warren reports that COPS directed more than $1 billion in resources to its neighborhoods over the organization’s first twenty-five years (M. R. Warren 1998, 80). And it was not just city resources at stake: when the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation (EDF) commissioned a study in the 1980s that suggested the city should attract investment by promoting the city’s low wages and unorganized labor force (Marquez 1990), COPS obtained a copy, protested the strategy, and essentially forced the EDF to work with the city on other, more high-road, economic development strategies.
The change in economic approach was facilitated by a shift in political power. Under Federal pressure from the Justice Department, the city of San Antonio council moved from at-large to district elections for city council in 1977. At-large elections had helped the white majority and business elite keep a tight grip on city policy through its promotion of a slate of candidates under the banner of the Good Government League; by way of symbolic representation, the slate always included an African American and Latino, and the latter position was taken by Henry Cisneros in 1975. Cisneros turned out to be an important transitional figure; despite initially having been designated by the business elite, he thrived under the new district system, was elected mayor in 1981, and served until 1989. An early supporter of COPS, Cisneros sought to link pro-growth business interests and the underrepresented Mexican American community; he also sought to build common ground (and a common data framework) by launching Target 90, an early regional visioning and planning exercise which began in 1983 and lasted till 1989. 6
Prodded by COPS and often extended a hand by Cisneros, there was a gradual transformation on the part of business as well. Most emblematic was what occurred for Tom Frost, the CEO of the bank whose activities had been disrupted by COPS members. Sure that he was dealing with a permanent obstructionist force, Frost bought a case of Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals and distributed copies to the power elite in San Antonio to help them be more prepared to deal with their adversaries (M. Warren 2008). Yet, Frost came to appreciate the contributions made by COPS work, and he eventually became chair of a major COPS-initiated workforce development organization called Project QUEST.
Project QUEST (Quality Employment through Skills Training) was prompted into being by the sudden closure of San Antonio’s Levi Strauss factory in 1990, a place that had employed one thousand mostly Latina workers. Begun in 1993, Project QUEST was spearheaded by COPS and an allied organization, Metro Alliance, whose membership included many workers displaced from manufacturing. However, QUEST also brought together employers, the regional Private Industry Council, the governor, and the Texas Employment Commission. Focused on disadvantaged residents, Project QUEST targeted growing occupations with good wages and worked with the community college system to develop degree and certificate programs suited to these occupations; in essence, it sought to shape the wage and occupational structure of the local economy (Racemacher, Bear, and Conway 2001). The results: more than 80 percent of its entrants graduate from the program and 86 percent of those who graduate are placed into higher-paying occupations. 7 In 2012, for example, graduates earned an hourly wage of $19.65. 8
The success of QUEST reshaped perceptions of COPS and the Metro Alliance, and it has also paved a sense that there were opportunities to blend inclusion and prosperity through workforce development. That may be one reason why the 2012 effort to pass a sales tax increase to fund pre-K education in San Antonio’s underserved communities was billed as an investment in preparing a local workforce for the future economy. The successful campaign secured support not just from the school district, the city of San Antonio, and non-profit groups, but also the Chamber of Commerce. To some extent, this reflects the changing demography of business: after a long history of exclusion that led to the formation of a Hispanic Chamber (the first in the United States!), the main Chamber now has its first Latino President and CEO. However, to take a positive position on a tax measure that targets the disadvantaged is quite striking for any business group.
Of course, none of this new collaboration is the nirvana suggested by the framework of communicative rationality. San Antonio business leaders, for example, are proud to have attracted a Toyota manufacturing facility in the mid-2000s, and point out that it was located on the South Side, relatively proximate to lower-income neighborhoods. At the same time, some have criticized the significant tax abatements and fee waivers as well as the relatively secretive nature of the negotiations with the company (Morton 2013). Moreover, the influence of COPS seems less now than in the past—although some respondents suggest that is because some of what COPS fought for has now been built into regional action (the COPS members we met still think there is a long way to go!).
What role have planners played in all this? San Antonio’s city planners are certainly pleased with the revitalization of River Walk and the downtown area, and the Target 90 effort was instrumental in forging new understanding. Now emerging is the SA2020 initiative, a recent regional visioning process that involved strong public participation. The city initially led this initiative, but foundations, business, and non-profits have adopted the principles, and SA 2020 is now a separate nonprofit. The city decided to focus on several areas—education, employment, environment, and health—and to develop a series of indicators to track progress. The city’s planning department is orienting its own redevelopment plans around some of its key goals but the fact that a nonprofit has spun off suggests how governance rather than government is crucial.
However, our purpose here is not to determine what role planners played but rather what lessons planners could learn from the San Antonio experience. The biggest takeaway for planning theory, we think, is that what might look like “communicative rationality” now may have been advocacy planning (or even just plain advocacy) back in its origins. Indeed, you interview younger leaders in San Antonio and they say simply that collaboration is “just how we do things here”—it is now an established social norm. But it wasn’t always the case, and better understandings of current planning dynamics need to focus on historic trajectories to complicate the picture.
Of course, the perhaps more important takeaway is for practice: how, in the real world, do you move from the conflicts necessary to get equity on the table (such as the fight around infrastructure) to the implementation necessary to get equity realized (such as Project QUEST)? Part of the magic may be the admonition common to IAF and other organizers: “no permanent allies, no permanent enemies.” When advocacy becomes a zero-sum game in which the goal is the effective elimination of the other, repeated interactions lead to increasing polarization, and mutually beneficial outcomes become harder to realize. The community organizers in San Antonio realized that they need to bend, not break, business—and business leaders and the older Anglo elite realized that a new day was inevitable. The lion thus lay down with the lamb—or at least Tom Frost joined forces with COPS to promote workforce development.
At the same time, advocacy planning remains necessary. The Latino-white income differential may have lessened in San Antonio but gaps still persist. While the imbalance in political power is not as severe as in an earlier era, it nonetheless exists. Lifting up inclusion and organizing for both more voice and better outcomes remain relevant as well as critical. Planners should not be lulled by success or participatory processes (with dynamic wall graphics, GIS simulations, and other excellent planning tools); they need to be vigilant about equity because the issue often falls away.
Finally, there is a harder to quantify lesson in the case around leadership. Frankly, San Antonio was lucky to have a Henry Cisneros—someone who grew up (and still lives) on the West Side, who was initially propelled into office by the Good Government League, and yet who thrived as the demographics changed and COPS increased the social movement wind at his back. He was both a symbolic and actual bridge between multiple communities, helping to persuade business and traditional elites that change was coming even as he also navigated through the various community frustrations about the need for immediate improvements. Few of us can be Henry Cisneros but more advocacy planners might consider giving it a try, that is, acquiring the habits of broadening tables and looking for common ground even as equity remains the guiding light.
Fresno
The features of collaboration, unusual allies, and transformative leadership that we find in the San Antonio case contrast quite starkly with the experience in Fresno over the same time period. Indeed, community organizers in Fresno often refer to the city and the region as “DOA,” the medical term for a patient who is found to be already clinically dead on the arrival of professional medical assistance. But it also has a second meaning: that the reason for Fresno’s broken politics is the overwhelming power of the major economic interests driving the regional economy: developers, oil, and agriculture. The ongoing and seemingly intransigent conflicts between these dominant industrial interests on the one side, and progressive community organizers on the other, captures contemporary dynamics in Fresno in a nutshell. And while there are some signs of a recent possible shift in long-held patterns of unproductive conflict, the last three decades of elite domination and conflict between different interests in the region have left a fragmented society.
Fresno County ranks first in the nation for agricultural production, with annual sales of $6.9 billion in 2011, with a major focus in grapes, almonds, tomatoes, milk, and livestock. Together with neighboring Tulare, Kings, and Kern Counties further south, the Southern San Joaquin Valley accounted for more than 40 percent of California’s total agricultural production of $43.5 billion in 2011 (California Department of Food and Agriculture 2012), up from about a quarter in the 1970s (Bardacke 2012, Kindle location 573). Much of the production occurs on large-scale industrial agriculture enterprises. Land monopoly has characterized the San Joaquin Valley since the late 1800s (Pisani 1991) and the nearly 1,000-square-mile Westlands Water District on the west side of the southern San Joaquin Valley has been described recently as being “dominated by a few pioneer dynastic families” (Carter 2009, 6).
Though agricultural interests are rarely directly represented in politics in the City of Fresno, they fundamentally shape social and political dynamics in the region. The predominantly seasonal employment, responsible for maintaining sub-poverty wages for large numbers of immigrant and undocumented workers, ensures a high level of deep-rooted poverty. In 2008, the western valley’s 20th Congressional District had the distinction of being the poorest Congressional District in the country (Carter 2009, 7), and a study done immediately after Hurricane Katrina found that it was Fresno, not New Orleans, that had the highest levels of concentrated poverty in the nation (Berube 2006; Berube and Katz 2005). 9
To advance a more broad-based economy, the City of Fresno and the surrounding region needs to diversify and support industry clusters that pay higher wages, such as logistics, water technology and related manufacturing technologies, energy, and jobs related to health care. While there have been some sector initiatives along these lines, resulting job growth has been modest at best (Chapple 2005; Montana and Nenide 2008). The region also needs to go beyond developers promoting sprawl, a residential pattern made possible by cheap land but also one that has encouraged racial segregation and social distance. Yet this involves leaning against a long history, including the 1974 update to the City of Fresno’s General Plan, A General Plan Citizens Committee—formed in order to meet the community participation requirement for continued funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for redevelopment—recommended densification strategies, like urban infill, to benefit the existing residents in downtown and South Fresno. The response: the Planning Commission voted to instead adopt a developer-supported alternative channeling growth to the sparsely populated North Fresno (Zuk 2013), and since then land use planning in Fresno has been “largely seen as an elite closed-door activity between developers, staff and elected officials” (Zuk 2013, 102). 10
However, in the early 1970s, few would have predicted that forty years later, the region would still be dominated by a relatively narrow set of economic interests rooted in agriculture and land development. That era witnessed a growing Chicano social movement, originally rooted in the organizing efforts of the Community Service Organization (CSO), that encouraged voter registration and citizenship classes among Mexican Americans. One CSO-trained organizer, Cesar Chavez, went on to form the National Farm Workers Association, which eventually evolved into the United Farm Workers (UFW). He set up initially in Delano (an hour’s drive south of Fresno) in the spring of 1962, but the first convention of what was then called simply the Farm Workers Association (FWA) was held in Fresno in September 1962, about six months after the organizing began (Bardacke 2012; Ganz 2009). While much of the farmworker organizing was in the surrounding smaller farmworker towns, Fresno was an important regional hub and frequent site of NFWA and UFW meetings.
The year 1973 was a particularly important turning point in UFW’s history, and Fresno was at the center of the struggle. With a series of contracts expiring, and growers—including thirty fruit orchards outside Fresno—deciding not to renew contracts with the UFW, the union seemed to be facing coordinated challenge to its strength. Its response was to make the Central Valley ungovernable and to lay the ground for another boycott. Strikes that summer began on July 4, and as the days wore on, strikers started turning to civil disobedience—on July 19 and 20, more than four hundred people were arrested each day. On August 3, at a rally in a Fresno city park, Cesar Chavez appeared at a rally, saying that the UFW would make Fresno another Selma, Alabama, and urging friends across the United States to come to Fresno and take part in mass arrests (Bardacke 2012, Kindle location 9759). Clergy across the state and country responded—in what Father Eugene Boyle of San Francisco later called “the largest group of religious persons ever arrested and jailed in this country.” Polarization, albeit for a good cause, was the order of the day.
Ultimately, the strike failed, but its legacy lingered. The region has continued to experience significant equity organizing around immigrants’ rights and other critical issues, including through a range of Alinsky-influenced faith-based initiatives affiliated with PICO California, 11 as well as other more decentralized peace and justice networks. 12 But the contemporary political, economic, and residential landscapes remain characterized by polarization and inequality. With a small middle class due to the region’s employment structure and continued dependence on agriculture, Latinos have struggled to gain political influence in the city of Fresno, where no Latino has ever been elected Mayor. While district elections have helped ensure that both Latinos and Asians have had some representation on the City Council, the city has a strong mayor structure, and city politics are still largely driven by a relatively well-entrenched white elite and a traditionally conservative chamber of commerce. Local government fragmentation further entrenches inequality, with particularly striking contrasts between Fresno’s wealthy majority-white northeastern neighboring town of Clovis (median household income of $63,983) and Huron City in the heart of the agricultural lands to the west, where median household income is $21,041 and 98.5 percent of the population is Latino. 13
There is even sharper conflict when one might presume there would be reasons for cooperation. For example, Fresno and the broader San Joaquin Valley—surrounded as it is by mountains on three sides—consistently has among the worst air quality in the country, driven both by agriculture-linked particulate matter and the heavy truck (and automobile) traffic moving up and down the valley. Add to this the toxic soup of pesticides, industrial fertilizers, and the emissions from oil and gas fields in the region, and the cumulative environmental impacts in the region have substantial health and welfare impacts (Alexeeff et al. 2012; Huang and London 2012; London, Huang, and Zagofsky 2011). A range of environmental justice groups have emerged over the past two decades in struggles to change these dynamics, and in 2004 more than seventy organizations throughout the broader region came together to form the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition. 14 Despite extensive advocacy and litigation by these groups, the San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District and related agencies have achieved limited success in improving air quality in the region. Activists attribute this to the heavy influence dominant industry in the region have on the Air Pollution Control District’s appointed board. In our interviews, environmental justice activists felt that their most promising path forward at this point is through adversarial lawsuits, rather than collaborative policy development.
There have been signs in recent years of a more collaborative potential emerging in the context of the city’s efforts to develop a more smart growth–oriented general plan, and regional efforts to promote more sustainable growth. In 2012, the City of Fresno passed the broad outlines of a new General Plan that was squarely aimed at reversing its historical pattern of unchecked sprawl. Called “Alternative A,” the plan envisioned concentrating new developments along existing major corridors and in a series of mixed use centers surrounded by higher density housing. The driving force behind this plan within City Hall was advocacy planner Keith Bergthold, a Fresno native who came to work in the city in 2007 after having been a community organizer in the Alinsky tradition, launching three different faith-based community organizing initiatives in the region affiliated with the PICO California network. 15
At an April 5, 2012, meeting involving final consideration of the different scenarios in the general plan, the city council chambers were filled beyond capacity, with more than three hundred fifty people. A diverse group of more than eighty speakers—including Latino children, Hmong grandmothers, neighborhood activists, farmers, pastors, doctors, public health professional, air quality advocates, conservation groups, business reps, developers, League of Women voters, and more—spoke in favor of the plan. 16 Even though the plan was opposed by the chamber of commerce, major local land developers, and the local Building Industry Association, it passed 5–2 in the Council. Also significant was that elements of the farming community in the region came out publicly in support of Alternative A.
Despite these signs of hope, overall the experience in Fresno stands in stark contrast to that of San Antonio. On the “pure” planning side, there remains much to do. The Planning Commission’s decision in the 1970s to ignore citizen input in approving the general plan paved the way (pun intended) for the subsequent three decades of urban sprawl and growing inequality. City planning—literally the rezoning of agricultural land for urban development—was also integrally involved in developer-linked city council scandals in the 1980s. The current efforts are admirable but one wonders whether they are too little, too late.
One reason for pessimism is that conflict in Fresno has remained largely in a zero-sum and antagonistic framework, with business leaders largely sticking to well-trod paths rooted in low-wage, cost-driven strategies and largely unregulated sprawl. Similarly, most equity advocates have seen little reason to move from a more adversarial approach, leaving few opportunities for finding common ground. Fresno also lacks the sort of transformative leadership that is able to both maintain credibility in their own constituency while also building ties with constituencies with conflicting values and interests. There are some key exceptions. Keith Berghold, for example, was able to maintain strong community ties in his old advocacy faith-based organizing networks, while also playing his leading role in the City Planning office, and in 2014 returned to community work by directing a faith-based organizing group called Metro Ministries. His background of twenty years in the business community prior to community organizing work also gave him some credibility in the private sector.
Fresno has also had important Latino political figures who have been able to build some cross-constituency ties. Juan Arambula, the son of immigrant farmworkers, was a prominent Latino member of the Fresno Unified School District Board from 1987 to 1996 and went on to serve on the County Board of Supervisors from 1997 to 2004, before becoming a California State Assemblyman; his ties to the business community have been recognized by being named “Legislator of the Year” by both the California Small Business Association and the California Association for Local Economic Development. Hugo Morales, who came to the United States when he was nine and grew up as a farmworker in Sonoma County, founded Radio Bilingue, the National Latino Public Radio Network, in 1980 based in Fresno. An important figure in promoting social equity for the Latino population, especially farmworkers, he also has been important in the Latino business community, including founding the Central California Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
But none of these figures have been able to build the types of bridges that Henry Cisneros did in San Antonio. As a result, Fresno remains a divided and fragmented region, with a level of conflict and intransigence among actors that led many of our interviewees to suggest that simply overcoming a sense of fatalism was perhaps the most important step in moving the region forward. A communicative approach that sort of talks over or past the real tensions is unlikely to resolve these issues but it is also clear that continuing to fight for fighting’s sake is also not moving the needle in ways that would benefit the lives of the region’s most disadvantaged residents. A new approach to conflict and collaboration needs to be found.
Conflict, Collaboration, and Community Building
The words “advocacy planning” often summon up the idea of a planner at the barricades, standing with the people against traditional interests, holding steady through rough and tumble politics, lobbying hard to see his or her and allied community members’ fundamental values concretized into public policy and the built environment. Collaboration often conjures up the polar opposite: rational conversation between skilled professionals who politely arrive at consensus decisions that clearly respond to empirical evidence, careful evaluations, and textbook theory. In the real world, planners committed to social equity wind up doing a little bit of both, often seeking to strike a middle ground between the need to push for justice against the realities of who makes investments and fundamental decisions, working to secure technocratic allies as well as forge lasting alliances for more equitable development.
The relationship between collaboration, conflict, and community are particularly challenging in the emerging regional context. The reasons are many but one seems key: because the levers of government at this level are few, governance (or persuasion to do the right thing) counts and this means helping actors find their way to solutions together. Partly because of that, many analysts and advocates pushing for regional equity have tended to stress the complementarity of interests, the need to facilitate common ground, and the possibilities of win–win outcomes. But when what is needed is a fundamental shift in political power to secure a different growth model, an appeal to better regional planning (a la “Smart Growth”) sounds less like useful community-building rhetoric and more like a sell-out of the equity agenda.
Because of this, some have been concerned that the regional equity perspective lacks the precision and fire to make real change happen—it’s not really advocacy planning. However, it is important to remember that the regional equity roots are in advocacy, and concepts that seek to bring others into the equity tent—such as PolicyLink’s suggestion that “equity is the superior growth model” or our own emphasis on the power of diverse and dynamic “epistemic communities” (Benner and Pastor 2012)—are not meant to preclude advocacy but rather to suggest the complicated interplay of conflict, collaboration, and community building that we see in the two case studies we present here.
But conflict can clearly be both constructive and destructive, as our two case studies here have shown. In San Antonio, and other cases of constructive conflict we explore elsewhere (Benner and Pastor 2015b, 2015c), we argue that what is needed is not simply a better balance between conflict and collaboration, but a shift in how groups conflict, with greater efforts to develop and promote what we call “principled conflict.” In using this term, we are not referring to conflicts over principles as others writers have discussed, but rather that conflict includes a commitment to the idea that struggles should be waged with integrity and that it is possible to directly address real conflicts in goals, objectives, and values with opposing actors in a way that also recognizes the need to sustain long-term relationships, despite the parties’ differences.
Regional leaders engaged in what we term principled conflict seem to exhibit what we call the three R’s: Roots, Relationships, and Reason. First, there is a sense of being rooted in the region for the long term, and a recognition that many different constituencies, including adversaries, also have roots in the region. Second, in addressing conflicts, these leaders seem to have a commitment to remaining in relationship, that is, in part linked to that recognition of intertwined roots in the region; the process of repeated interactions helps build, if not trust, at least a greater understanding and respect for others’ viewpoints and interests. Third, in addressing conflicts, there is also a commitment to letting reason rather than ideology guide action, with controversy leading to processes of searching for more information that can lead to solutions, rather than for confirming data mostly useful for entrenching unbudging positions.
Why is developing these broader skills and repertoires important for those interested in equity today? First, over the last fifty years, our urban areas have grown far beyond the boundaries of individual cities, and so pursuing equity at a regional scale, as well as at a local or city scale, is an important imperative (Blackwell and Fox 2004; Orfield 1997; Pastor, Benner, and Matsuoka 2009; Rusk 2001). But different scales have different policy arenas. In Davidoff’s time, most advocacy planning work focused on the terrain of traditional planning departments—housing, land use, neighborhood development, community economic development, urban transit systems, and the like. Advocacy planners working at a regional scale today also work in these areas, but are just as likely to also be engaged in struggles over workforce development initiatives, regional transportation systems and goods movement, cluster-based economic development strategies, and even energy efficiency and climate mitigation policies. This requires the ability to incorporate insights from a wide range of areas of expertise, and to navigate an even broader range of interests.
Second, in the absence of true regional governments, advocacy planners today have to be more comfortable navigating the complex terrain of regional governance. In Davidoff’s notion of advocacy planning, the democratic planning process is best served when advocates bring their positions and values to the public decision-making process in a context where there is clear jurisdictional authority (“the city”). Achieving progress at the regional scale is not simply a matter of convincing a planning commission to adopt a particular policy, or getting a majority of elected officials in city council to pass a policy; more often, it requires mobilizing a wide constituency, and convincing stakeholders to endorse change through a combination of methods, including research and data (to understand), advocacy (to convince), and political pressure (to force). Rather than the interest group, winner-take-all politics of conventional political structures, regional governance resembles more the “deliberate democracy” of conversation and consensus building described by Iris Young (Young 2000). This does not mean the absence of conflict, but it does mean respectful deliberation—“principled conflict”—in the pursuit of a more solid basis for achieving economic and social justice.
This implies the need for a particular type of political leadership—one that is able to both effectively represent particular values and interests, and also able to dialogue with opposing interests and “unusual allies” in the search for common ground and shared destiny. While this might initially sound like “collaborative leadership” (Chrislip and Larson 1994; Henton and Melville 1997; Innes and Rongerude 2005; Kanter 1994), we believe—in line with Davidoff’s original framing and the worries that some express about “regional equity”—that without an advocacy component, regional collaborative processes will yield suboptimal results. The goal is not regional “consensus” for its own sake, particularly if that simply reflects the needs of dominant interests and continues the marginalization of disadvantaged populations. Rather we and others hope that the regional equity frame will help facilitate more justice at the metropolitan level now so central to economic and social life. Another (regional) world is possible but it will require that planners, policy makers, and advocates maintain an old commitment to equity even as they tackle a new scale and strike a new mix of collaboration, conflict, and community building.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Madeline Wander, Mirabai Auer and Justin Scoggins from the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California for their assistance with field research and analysis. We would also like to thank anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to thank the Institute for New Economic Thinking (Grant ID NO. 5409) and the Ford Foundation for their financial support that enabled the research for this article.