“You Could Have Did Us Better Than This”: Reparative Housing Policies and the Struggle to Right Harms to Black Communities

Authors

Amie Thurber, Portland State UniversityFollow
Lisa Bates, Portland State UniversityFollow
Susan Halverson, Portland State UniversityFollow
Keisha Muia, Portland State University

Published In

Journal of Community Practice

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-20-2024

Subjects

Reparations for historical injustices, Neighborhoods, Community development, Social justice, Equity

Abstract

This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature related to reparative planning, with an emphasis on housing policy. After exploring the state of theorizing related to reparative planning, this paper describes its three central dimensions: public recognition, material redistribution, and social/spatial transformation. The authors use these dimensions to evaluate a housing policy designed to repair harms to Black residents in Portland, Oregon. This in-depth analysis draws on survey, interview, and focus group data to explore the degree to which residents’ experiences of the policy reflect these three dimensions. The paper concludes with implications for other municipalities considering reparative housing policies, namely the need to explicitly name the harm(s) the policy is designed to repair, for robust accountability measures to guide policy implementation and for holistic community development strategies that attend to multiple dimensions of racial reparation.

Keywords: Reparations; neighborhoods; preference policies; planning; community development

Rights

© 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Locate the Document

https://doi.org/10.1080/10705422.2024.2431527

DOI

10.1080/10705422.2024.2431527

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42772

Citation Details

Thurber, A., Bates, L.K., Halverson, S. & Muia, K. (2024). "You could have did us better than this": Reparative housing policies and the struggle to right harms to Black communities. Journal of Community Practice, 1-20.