Asheville, NC Equity in Capital Construction

The Challenge

In many U.S. cities, historically marginalized communities have often been neglected by capital spending projects, including investments in street and sidewalk repair. These disparities can negatively impact community members' home values, wellbeing, and safety. As part of the City's wider effort to achieve greater equity in capital investments, Asheville set out to address disparaties in sidewalk maintenance that harmed historically marginalized communities. 

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The Innovation

With support from the GPL, the City of Asheville developed a comprehensive framework for directing investments in sidewalk construction. Using available data related to equity (including demographics and socio-economic status), connectivity and safety (including public transit ridership and numbers of car accidents) and the built environment (including access to recreation and schools), the City established a new plan for allocating annual sidewalk construction investments.

 

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The Results

The City has begun building sidewalks in historically neglected communities and will continue using the new prioritization framework for directing future investments in sidewalk construction and maintenance. By creating a comprehensive model for incorporating equity into capital investment decisions, the City can further invest in overlooked communities and provide them with more and higher-quality public infrastructure, including well-paved streets, parks and recreation centers, and public transportation. 

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The Challenge:

In many cities across the country, decisions like which streets to pave or which sidewalks to repair are made based on factors such as volume of traffic or number of complaints. Unfortunately, this type of approach can disadvantage communities that are less likely to make complaints or aren’t regarded as high-traffic destinations. In Asheville, as in many U.S. cities, redlining (exclusionary real estate practices) and urban renewal pushed minority communities outside of central areas. Regions of the city that have previously been neglected by capital spending projects (including street and sidewalk repair) are largely low-income communities of color. Sidewalks are important for economic opportunity (increasing property values and links to transportation), well-being (connecting individuals to community resources or parks), and safety (preventing pedestrian-involved accidents). As part of the City’s wider effort to improve the equity of capital investments, Asheville set out to address sidewalk disparities in historically-neglected communities.

The Innovation:

In Asheville, allocating resources to repair, upgrade, or install sidewalks had previously been based on factors such as safety and proximity to community destinations. However, using these factors alone can effectively deprioritize marginalized neighborhoods because of lower traffic counts and fewer existing community destinations. With support from the GPL, the City aimed to intentionally incorporate economic and racial equity as selection criteria for capital projects. Specifically, the City:

Created a new prioritization framework for sidewalk construction that elevates equity

With up to $200,000 to spend annually on sidewalk projects, the Neighborhood Sidewalks team wanted to determine the best way to allocate funding effectively and equitably. A cross-agency team of City staff, with support from the GPL, identified three major components for making decisions on which sidewalk projects to prioritize for investment:

  1. Equity: refers to projects in areas that have been historically marginalized or disinvested in, or to neighborhoods with a high proportion of low-income and/or people of color.

  2. Connectivity and safety: refers to the degree of connection between the area and other forms of transportation (connectivity), and the number of pedestrian-involved crashes or accidents (safety).  

  3. Built environment: refers to factors like community density, level of previous community investment, and proximity to community destinations like school and parks.

Criteria considered for prioritizing sidewalk construction

Prioritization of Sidewalk Construction Projects

To build a prioritization tool based on these three components, project partners considered many potential measurement criteria (see figure below). Ultimately, they decided to use two criteria for each component: equity is measured by the percent of residents identified as BIPOC and the percent of residents living below the poverty line; connectivity and safety are measured by the level of connection to an existing pedestrian network and the area’s crash count; and, the built environment is measured by an area’s zoning score and community destination score.

The Results:

Although it is still early after the launch of the sidewalk prioritization framework, Asheville has seen promising results. In particular, the project has:

Directed funding for sidewalk construction to historically marginalized neighborhoods, in an effort to improve safety, connectivity, and economic opportunity outcomes. The City has begun to improve and build sidewalks in low-income communities of color, and will continue this pattern of investment using the new prioritization framework. Improved sidewalks can help increase neighborhood mobility by better connecting residents to community resources and other transportation methods, and can reduce the number of pedestrian accidents. High-quality sidewalks can also improve property values for neighborhoods, and encourage other forms of community investment. This investment in sidewalk construction represents an important piece of the City’s broader strategy to improve equitable outcomes through capital construction projects.

Created a simple framework for incorporating equity in deciding how to allocate funding for capital projects, which can be applied more broadly across the City. For the first time, the City of Asheville has explicitly included equity in deciding how to allocate funding for capital projects. The prioritization framework developed for the sidewalks project has inspired other departments to integrate equity considerations more strongly into their decision-making about community investments, such as where to install public WIFI and where to set up remote learning centers for students during the pandemic. By creating a simple model for incorporating equity into capital project prioritization, project partners hope that over time historically marginalized neighborhoods in Asheville will have more and higher-quality public infrastructure such as well-paved streets, well-maintained sidewalks, parks and recreation centers, and public transportation.