 series presentation. Our speaker today is Professor Willow Longamon, Associate Professor at the Urban Studies and Planning Department and Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland College Park. My name is Carolyn Swope. I'm a PhD student here in Columbia's Urban Planning Program, and I will be moderating the session. I will just start with a few brief technical and logistical announcements and then turn to introducing our speaker. During the talk, I'd like to remind audience members on Zoom to please mute their microphones. We will be recording today's lecture, so anyone in the audience who wishes to not be recorded should turn off their video input. Audience and everyone 15, if you happen to also be connected on Zoom, please be mindful to mute your sound as well. The chat box should be used only for discussion regarding the session. If you have technical questions that apply only to you, please message me or my co-host, Rangini and Helena privately. We encourage all of you to type your questions into the chat box during the presentation. After the presentation, we will have time for Q&A. We'll start Q&A around 2 or 2.15 pm, so we have time for your questions. I will be coordinating the Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion, so if you have already had a chance to ask a question, please allow others to do so before asking another one. To ask questions, participants can use the raise your hand feature and we'll call on you to unmute and ask your question directly, or you may also type your questions into the chat box and I can read them out. For the audience and everyone 14, you can just raise your hand and I will call on you to ask your question directly. So with that, I'm delighted to introduce today's speaker. Willa Langamam, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland College Park. Her scholarship focuses on how urban and suburban policies and plans contribute to and can address social inequality, particularly in neighborhoods undergoing rapid racial and economic change. She has written extensively on suburban policy, racial segregation, immigration, gentrification, redevelopment policies, and neighborhood opportunity. Her research has appeared in various journals such as the Journal of Urban Affairs and Journal Planning Education and Research, books, and popular media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, NPR, New Republic, Bloomberg City Lab, and Al Jazeera. She is the author of Trespassers, Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia, as well as a forthcoming book on redevelopment politics and equitable development organizing in the Washington DC suburbs. Dr. Langamam is also a non-resident fellow at the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institutions Governance Studies Program. For talk today and is entitled, Somos de Langley Park, the fight for fair redevelopment along Maryland's Purple Line. So Professor, if you're ready, I will turn things over to you now. Wonderful. Thank you, Caroline. And thank you to the students for inviting me. It is a particular honor to be invited by students and especially students who I know Columbia have been forging such important battles over labor rights on campus. This talk was supposed to take place a little sooner than it was, but I am happy that to stand in solidarity with the students in their ongoing fight. So kudos to you and it is an honor and a pleasure to be here. My talk today is going to focus on a larger project that Caroline just described that I've been working on looking at the intersection around suburbanization of poverty and redevelopment in the DC suburbs and really trying to displace many of our discourses about gentrification that really focus on center city environments outside of that context to ask why it matters that gentrification is also happening in our suburbs and how communities and organizers respond to those new challenges that we're seeing. So that is the context for my presentation and I look forward to hopefully a robust discussion at the end with students about this work. So I'll go ahead and share screen here. So here we go. So again, the type talk for the presentation is Summer State Langley Park. Langley Park is the community that I've been working in for several years as part of this book project and it is also the site of a new light rail line known as the Purple Line. But the context for this work and the larger book project of which is a part is thinking about the intersection of some important trends that we're seeing. Once commonly thought to be the sole province of white middle class and elites, for the past couple of decades we've seen that many suburbs of major metropolitan areas have become home to the majority of racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and people living in poverty. And this is a profound departure from the kind of central city white flight that shaped the 20th century metropolis. And now we're seeing that young professionals and aging baby boomers have been moving back into urban neighborhoods at unprecedented levels that are displacing many of the human manufactured and racialized poverty that was concentrated within them. And then meanwhile we're seeing that racial and economic diverse suburbs have experienced these huge population booms and gains that are even larger than in central cities and predominantly white suburbs. So here what I'm showing you is a map of the Washington DC area which is roughly this triangle area that you see here. And you see that in 1980 this is a look at race by, I'm sorry, poverty, families living in poverty by race. And you see that in 1980 it is concentrated inside the borders of Washington DC but by 2010 it is much more dispersed and diverse in terms of who is making up those families living in poverty and where they live. And the community that we're going to be talking about today known as Langley Park and the larger international corridor is located here. It is predominantly a Latinx community just outside of the borders of Washington DC. But what we've also seen is that suburban is rising tide of social and economic diversity has been met by a rapid transformation of its built environment. While the late 20th century was characterized by low density development that had developed large swaths of land into single family homes and strip malls and parking lots, the new mantra for good suburban development calls for more walkable, dense mixed-juice communities especially near transit. So in practice these principles have led to new trends in smart growth, new urbanism, transit oriented development and suburban retrofitting that's really reshaping the spatial landscape of suburbia. So suburbia's urban rise has been lauded by many urbanists that have long derided the economic efficiency, aesthetic pleasing aesthetics of suburbia and its environmentally and socially destructive forms of development. But what we know is actually that there's been dense development in suburbs for a long time and that suburbs are becoming more dense as they become more urban-like. So here I have a map of density by census tract in the Washington DC region and what it shows you is that if we're just trying to classify urban typologies by density it's really hard to categorize what is urban and suburban strictly along municipal lines and so the dark blue would what we be classically called as an urban density versus the light blue which is a suburban density and many of the actually all three of my case study communities for the larger book project are located in these dense suburban cores that are becoming even more dense with many of the trends that I just described. Many suburban redevelopment proponents have however by and large elided the questions about the social consequences of these trends. What we've seen is that historic patterns of black and brown suburban settlement and unprecedented recent migrations particularly of those living in poverty has raised concerns about the changes in suburbia's built environment. Well presumably some of these marginalized groups might benefit from more compact suburban neighborhoods they also often rightfully fear the impacts of large-scale redevelopment projects that to many urban planners and policymakers we may see as needed investments in underdeveloped neighborhoods they're often experienced by affected communities as a recipe for displacement that spurs heated backlash and debate. Here I'm showing you some maps of what might be called gentrification maps these are people who take various indicators of gentrification and communities and try to map those communities that are gentrified that are eligible eligible to gentrify and who's being affected by those. The first map is from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition that in 2010 found Washington DC to be the most gentrified community in the United States and it's showing that while most of the those communities that were being impacted were in the Center City core those areas that had the highest rates of black poverty in the 1980 map that I showed you we also have many communities outside of the Washington DC core that have gentrified or eligible to gentrify. I'm not going to get into a measuring debate right now but if you take different measurements of gentrification you get different results the map on the left I'm sorry the right is showing the map that one of my students did using a different methodology and just still showing that we're seeing that there are a number of gentrified communities outside of the DC core. So the right to suburbia this larger book project is investigating the battles that have been waged primarily by black and latinx communities in the Washington DC suburbs over the uneven costs and benefits of redevelopment. So in three case study neighborhoods that have recently are currently undergoing a suburban renaissance it asks how those most likely to bear the weight of suburbia's transformation to its good urban form have tried to balance the scales how have the processes and products of suburban redevelopment disadvantaged already disadvantaged groups and how have these groups mobilized to assert a more equitable stake in the and place in their suburban futures. So the three case study communities that I work in are located in Silver Spring just outside of the DC and Northwest border an inner ring suburb that was one of the early sites of redevelopment and where some of the questions about equitable redevelopment first came to the fore in the Maryland suburbs. My second community is the wheat community of Wheaton Maryland where some of the policies that were adapted in Silver Spring and that were fairly ineffective in helping small businesses to remain in place became a much more effective tool that organizers use to help many of the businesses in this community remain and then my final case study that I'm going to talk about today is in the international corridor where many of the groups that came together in Silver Spring and Wheaton are still fighting for more equitable redevelopment along the international corridor as a new light rail line is currently being built in that community. The larger point of this project is to illustrate how this new urban renewal does not fit very tightly within our urban bounds. Similar processes are also work in suburbs that are producing and reproducing patterns of uneven racialized development. The new suburban renewal has not been simply adding a prefix onto an old concept but the new cast of characters and spatial dynamics of play suburbia has reshaped urban redevelopment processes and politics. So I'm arguing that suburbia's brand or unique brand of redevelopment has added to rather than alleviated many black and Latinx communities challenges in claiming their right to remain in suburbia and I talk about the kind of challenges that are unique to suburbia's spatial form and social and political construction. So it's consolidated and privatized land uses that have made redevelopment projects especially disruptive. It's political fragmentation and increasing segregation and the scale of the redevelopment that's tending to isolate communities and render the struggles of one community invisible or unconnected to the other. I talk about the institutional struggles of suburbs that often lack the high capacity established nonprofits and advocacy organizations that many cities have that can effectively engage residents in sustained redevelopment battles and how organizing coalition building is further challenged by suburbia's changing composition. Compared to their urban counterparts, gentrifying suburbs tend to have more diverse residents dispersed across larger areas where you have black and Latinx residents and particularly immigrants that have lacked a long-term presence and established organizing platforms. They hold less political power and representation than that has which has been built over decades of struggle in central cities and when redevelopment arrives many residents in these neighborhoods that were originally designed to exclude them face a real uphill battle and trying to build the politics and policies that they need to stay in place. They often confront a dearth of effective anti-displacement policies and a lack of political will and the financial capital needed to create them. But just as marginalized groups have always done in American cities, they are fighting back in suburbs and so part of my work is to document how equitable development organizing has effectively taken place in suburbs in one of the most rapidly gentrifying metropolitan regions in the United States. It tells the tale of these grassroots activists, community groups, and political leaders who are mobilizing for the right of residents and small businesses to remain and benefit from new development in their communities and shows how they have brought this needed visibility to processes of suburban gentrification and built vital institutional capacities, coalitions, political wills, and tools to combat their most damaging effects. And the struggles of these communities demonstrate that the processes of that though processes of uneven metropolitan development may shift their focus, they rarely go away, at least without a good fight. And here I'm showing the picture of Ferguson just to remind us how important and effective suburban organizing can be. Ferguson was one of the first times I think we really saw at a large scale suburban the struggles of black communities in suburbs so prominent at the national stage but also the work of organizers at that national scale really taking place and really centered on some of the conditions that were important to the Ferguson community and how things like policing had been used to help to increase the tax base of this struggling suburban community that had experienced white light over decades as black communities began to move in. So now let's talk about Langley Park and the international corridor, which is the focus of this talk. So by 2022, a 16 mile, 3.3 billion dollar project will become one of the region's first suburban light rail lines. And in doing so it's going to connect some of Maryland's highest income neighborhoods to some of its most impoverished. This new connection raises many new possibilities for historically disinvested Maryland suburbs. This circumferential connection will connect to its existing metro lines. It's providing a critical east-west connection that doesn't currently can exist in the metro system. And so unlike many kind of transit lines that work in kind of the hub and spokes model that's designed to bring suburban commuters into the downtown, the purple line is really recognizing America's new suburban reality in which many people, black, brown and white communities, live and work in suburbs. So it's creating that critical connection. But in doing so, the line cuts a diverse transect across our region highlighting the vast inequalities that we have amongst our suburbs. So here in this picture, I show you where the purple line is going to go. Here is the purple line at its most western point, which is connecting in the community of the Fez de Chevy Chase in Montgomery County. This is roughly the county line through which it cuts. And these are all suburban parts of the Washington DC region. And so what you see here is that the line starts in one of the wealthiest communities in our region with a median household income of 141,000 with a relatively low population density but a large number of jobs and a small percentage of people that use public transit and a relatively small non-white population. And as the purple line continues east, the population density increases, the number of jobs decreases, the median household get lower, the number of people that rely on public transit gets higher, and the non-white population goes up. And all this kind of peaks at the international corridor, where you have the highest population density, the lowest number of jobs, the lowest median income along the line, and the highest percentage of people that rely on public transit and the highest non-white population. So for Langley Park in the larger international quarter, Langley Park sits on the Prince George's County side, the international quarter cuts across the county line. This new transit could be present a huge opportunity to better connect to new jobs in the area more efficiently, connect to new opportunities in employment, education, and otherwise, increase public transportation for a community that really lacks public transportation or efficient public transportation right now, but is extremely reliant on that public transportation. And so for that reason, many people in the purple line corridor coalition have been positive about the prospects of the purple line, but they've also been very concerned about the prospects of what the building out of the purple line may do. Langley Park has a history as a white working class neighborhood starting in the post-war era, but and even after that as an African-American neighborhood in the 1970s and 80s. But for the past several decades, it has served as a popular arrival center for diverse immigrants from Central and South America, the Caribbean Asia and Africa. Today, it's predominantly a Latinx immigrant community and one of the most densely populated communities in Maryland. And this is part of what creates the vulnerability of the neighborhood to the impacts of the purple line. Of the neighborhoods, roughly 21,000 residents, about two thirds are foreign-born. About 82% are Latinx, the overwhelming majority of which are recent arrivals from Central America, largely Guatemala and El Salvador. Among non-Hispanics over half are African-American, including a relatively large West African immigrant population. And the neighborhood has one of the largest concentrations of undocumented Latinx immigrants in Prince George's County in some say the state. With residents that are largely migrating for economic opportunity, the neighborhood is disproportionately young and male. As you'll see in some of these statistics, we're comparing Langley Park to the larger Prince George's County. The house sales average about four people, which is over one point higher than the county or the state, and often have many related and unrelated individuals that crowd into its many garden-style apartments in order to make the rent. Residents struggle with many of the typical challenges of low-income immigrant communities, low levels of education, and English language proficiency. Few adults that have high school diplomas or equivalents. The adults often work in low-wage, low-skilled positions outside of the formal labor market. Many hold intermittent, part-time, or seasonal jobs with few benefits, and often work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Many are employed in construction as day laborers and with others commonly working in retail, health care, food services, and waste management. Following the recession, those employed in construction and related sectors had difficulty finding jobs, and the unemployment rate was nearly double that of the state. Poverty rates are high and household incomes are low, with nearly half of households earning below the DC metropolitan median, which is relatively high across the United States, and about roughly one in six residents living below the poverty line. And I will say that many of these numbers in terms of income likely inflate the neighborhood's picture of economic well-being by failing to account for its high undocumented population and households that are comprised of several unrelated adults. Compounding these neighborhood vulnerabilities is a lack quality affordable housing, with about four and five households running one of the neighborhoods roughly 5,200 housing units and over half paying more than 30% of their income on rent, which is, as many of you know, a common indicator of affordability. But despite these challenges, Langley Park is a very strong and connected community. As in many low-income immigrant neighborhoods, residents hold strong social capital and rely on each other for everyday forms of support and assistance, carpooling and child care. Their tight social networks help to sustain the neighborhood's strong sense of community and the viability of its many small businesses, many of which are family run, immigrant owned, and local serving. But the purple line is poised to radically reshape Langley Park and the larger international corridor. Nearly all of Langley Park's housing and small businesses are located within a half a mile of the neighborhood's two proposed stops, which you can see on this map here. This land use map shows the areas in red, which are the low density commercial areas, and the areas in around, which are the medium density existing garden style apartments. And the red line shows you the current sector plan boundary of the neighborhood, which is also the census designated native place boundary for Langley Park. So the sector plan, which was adopted in 2009, calls for transit oriented development to create future hubs of activity around the purple line stations and a higher density mixed use and pedestrian friendly environment. And of course the concerns of Langley Park residents and business owner is displacement. The new transit lines often raise land values, trigger rental increases, taxes and insurance rates, stimulate tenure conversions and lead to a loss of subsidized housing. Rising land values could also raise commercial rents impacting the viability of many of these local small businesses, many of which already operate on slim margins. With the loss of businesses and residents, neighborhood advocates fear that Langley Park's strong sense of community and its cultural identity can be lost. But of course, as I discussed before, the reaction while residents and activists are really concerned about these losses, they're also overall have been pretty positive about what the purple line could bring to Langley Park. It promises to bridge this important transportation gap and improve access to opportunities and services across the region. This new light fixed rail line could create opportunities for those who don't own a vehicle, which is about one in four adults in Langley Park. It could help to increase the bicycle and pedestrian amenities in Langley Park. Many people without a car can regularly be seen walking around the neighborhood, many of the small businesses are biking as a form of community. But of course, they can only have these amenities if they are able to stay in the neighborhood. And so many activists have been fighting for this right. In 2009, the Maryland transit authority identified the potential path for the purple line to include Langley Park and the international corridor and began holding meetings in the neighborhood and across the region about the new line. In some of these early meetings, the residents from the higher income west side communities like the Fez De Chavey Chase came out regularly and in large numbers to those meetings. And in contrast, Langley Park residents and those throughout much of Prince George's County who stood to bear the brunt of the project's negative impacts were largely absent. So advocacy groups began to step in to fill the void. So after several meetings, CASA, which is the largest immigrant rights group in the mid Atlantic region that has their headquarters in Langley Park, became very concerned about the project's potential impacts. And in 2011, they began organizing residents and other small business, small businesses and grassroots organizations under the banner of a new organization known as the Fair Development Coalition. And you can see their banner here on the photo on the left. This grassroots group is comprised of advocacy organizations from community labor faith based groups, educational groups that are all concerned with the impacts of the purple line on the international corridor. They aim to ensure that the residents were able to benefit and were not disparately harmed by the purple line and believed that the line could be the foundation of a comprehensive community development agenda, but only if the impacts of the line were addressed so that existing residents and small businesses were able to remain. FDC received a boost in 2013 when the Purple Line Corridor Coalition was created. The Purple Line Corridor Coalition, their banner is here on the right photo. This is a address tops group made up of county and state government leaders, developers, civic organizations, foundations, businesses, and universities focused on ensuring active and equitable planning and policymaking across the whole of the purple line. This is led by the University of Maryland's National Smart Growth Research and Education Center, where I serve as director of community development. So these two groups, the FDC and the PLCC, have worked to address some of the key planning and political challenges of equitable development across the purple line and specifically in Langley Park in the larger international corridor. They've tried to confront the host of conditions and challenges that create and create an equitable development agenda for the neighborhood, but their successes and their challenges highlight some of both the promising pathways and likely stumbling blocks for many suburban equitable development movements. One of their largest victories was the 2017 signing of a community development agreement with leaders from both counties and many cities, towns, and nonprofit organizations along the corridor. So that is the picture on the left as you see the University of Maryland president as well as the county executives from both Montgomery and Prince George's County at the signing event for that pathways to opportunity document, which is an agreement to several principles along the line, including affordable housing preservation and production, supporting small businesses, connecting local workers to job and creating healthy and vibrant communities. And so while this is a key document to ensuring more equitable development along the line, it also came at the expense of a key loss of the coalitions. So on the left hand side you see then Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, who was running for the, he was running for Maryland governor at the time against Larry Hogan, and he was a key supporter of the what was then known as the Purple Line Community Compact. This would have been a community benefits agreement, a legally binding agreement that was supported by the then governor, government O'Malley. This was a key document that both the Fair Development Coalition and the Purple Line Corridor Coalition have been pressing for a long time that would have held both counties to legally binding agreement and state agencies to illegally binding agreement that would have really put some legs into some of the goals of what is now the Purple Line Corridor Compact known as the Purple Line Corridor Community Benefits Agreement. I'm sorry. But unfortunately the politics at the time did not allow for that. The governor that was elected was a Republican who touted new roads as a solution to the state's transportation challenges. And one of his first acts was to cancel funding for another light rail line in Baltimore known as the Red Line and to reduce the state funding for the Purple Line. And so the negotiations over this legally binding agreement came to an abrupt fold and the state pulled their support for the agreement and many of its terms out altogether. And this just symbolized many of the kinds of challenges that were ahead for these coalitions and the kind of work that they were doing. And now I want to turn to some of the challenges that I think still are ahead for these coalitions as they continue to work on an equitable development agenda for the line that really underscores some of those challenges that I prefaced at the beginning about our suburban conditions and how that challenges many of our ideas about what equitable development means and how we can work to achieve it. So one, the International Corridor spans two counties, Montgomery and Prince George's County. But for many Langley Park residents, their sense of communities straddles also straddles this invisible dividing line between two counties and parts of the city of Tacoma Park. The neighborhood's location at this intersection of multiple jurisdictions complicates the challenges of defining what equitable development looks like and the county and county official and advocates ability and willingness to work together towards those goals. Both counties have their own planning and zoning authorities and operate and while they operate under this common banner of the Maryland National Capital Planning Commission that's supposed to coordinate park and land use planning between the counties, that's often a complicated challenge. The city of Tacoma Park in which part of Langley Park lies also has its own city planning department as well. Langley Park's location in an unincorporated inner ring suburb of Prince George's County also lends itself to a lack of representation and political will. Denny Tavares who represents this area on the county council is the only Latinx county council member. Most of the others are African-American who represent wealthier outside the Beltway communities with more homeowners, less immigrants, and less poverty and she's noted that this the county political makeup and Latin the Latinx communities low rates of political participation has made it particularly difficult for her to get other elected leaders to care about the issues that really affect her constituents. The politics of engagement and representation are further complicated by Langley Park's location within a fragmented and unequal region. The Washington D.C. area is racially and economically diverse but among the most segregated metropolitan areas in the nation. Eastern half of the area includes including large parts of Prince George's County carried the burden of poverty and distress while the western half including much of Montgomery County enjoys the bulk of prosperity jobs amenities and high-valued neighborhoods as we see by looking at that transect of the purple line. And while one of the wealthiest African-American counties in the country Prince George's County has only 60% of the tax base of its neighboring Montgomery County which ranks amongst the wealthiest counties in the nation. And so early on coordination amongst the counties over the future of Langley Park proved pretty difficult. Langley Park has two sector plans one in Montgomery County and one for Prince George's County both named the same plan but with very different goals and very different tools at hand to be able to achieve those goals. For instance Montgomery County is nationally known for having the country's oldest inclusionary zoning program known as the moderately priced dwelling unit while Prince George's County doesn't have an inclusionary zoning program at all. So one of the main roles of FBC and PLCC is to coordinate inter-directional planning and policy making that would not otherwise happen amongst these two very different counties. And I think that was well illustrated in the community development agreement that has been signed and that tries to create common goals around those critical areas for the two counties. Another primary challenge of working along the purple line and I think in many suburban communities is protecting and producing quality affordable housing. But this is challenged by the large number of apartment complexes that are comprised of these market rates or naturally occurring affordable housing units that are typical for many dense inner ring suburbs that were built out during the post war period. About three quarters of the neighborhood's housing stock are rentals that are affordable quote unquote to low to modern income households in our region but actually about half of Langley Park residents cannot afford them and that they pay over 30 percent of their incomes on rent. Langley Park has no public or subsidized housing projects again unique to its suburban condition and only 52 housing vouchers recipients in the neighborhood's primary zip code. Like many other inner ring suburbs its housing conditions have declined rapidly since the end of the post war period where many of these older apartment complexes were built with the median year of construction being 1950. They're dense with an average of 279 units spread across only 13 complexes in the community. The majority of these are owned by a handful of out of state companies or their subsidiaries. There's a lot of several large real estate investment trusts that own many of these units. Many of them have hazardous environmental conditions inside the units that range from asbestos and lead exposure to frequent complaints about mold, bed bugs, rodents and faulty electricity and plumbing. In 2018 Langley Park was home to two of the county's quote unquote distressed properties. It's our multifamily properties with multiple and repeated code violations. In addition to its dangerous living conditions roughly half of Langley Park homes are overcrowded a rate that's five times higher than the county or the state. Residents pack into with many several related and non-related family members and able to in order to be able to afford the rent with occupancy limits sometimes exceeding counting codes and residents who are undocumented unwilling to call county encode enforcement to report the kind of poor conditions that they're facing inside the units. Landlords often take advantage of residents vulnerable legal status to avoid making repairs with frequent complaints about landlord intimidation for calling code enforcement, making maintenance requests or tenant organizing. Langley Park only has one tenant organization amongst 13 complexes and this was one that was recently organized by CASA. They frequently complain about leasing practices that require them to pay for basic repairs and excessive late fees. Meanwhile with the purple line changing their underlying land uses rents have continued to rise without any substantial property improvements as speculation about the purple line has heated up. But while Prince George's County could intervene and provide more protections some of the larger politics over affordability in the region have complicated this and we talked about the lack of tools that Prince George's County has to address affordability as well as the quality of housing. Purple the purple line corridor coalition and FDC has really pushed for on a number of these fronts and made some important interventions in affordability and quality of housing. Some of those include the creating of Prince George's County's first housing trust fund and then pushing to get that fund actually funded and a new tenants opportunity to purchase act which allows tenants to organize and be able to purchase buildings on their own in the county. The coalitions have also been central to new housing code enforcement policies that were just passed in both counties in both Montgomery and Prince George's County. They're actively pushing for a new they've created a new affordable housing plan for both for both counties and has gotten both state and private foundations to help fund some of those goals. So they're making real inroads but they have a lot of challenges ahead. On the small business front the Prince George the purple line really places new many new pressures on small businesses that tend to rent space in strip malls that like many other inner ring suburbs serve as affordable spaces for immigrants and people of color to start new enterprises. But with the purple line many commercial rents are expected to rise in years of construction is disrupting the businesses parking visibility and pedestrian activity. In this process the vibrant culture and economic life and the sense of community that has helped define this neighborhood can be lost. But like many residents many small businesses are already on the edge. Many of these businesses are immigrant owned and family run. They work with limited cash flow. They cluster in industries that have a low cost of entry but are very vulnerable to downturns and produce below average returns. They also compete with a number of liquor stores check cashing facilities and dollar stores that cluster in the neighborhood and advocates say prey on poor people. They tend to rely on foot traffic from local clientele who are themselves vulnerable to displacement. As one of the business owners told me if residents go away my business will go bankrupt. As many of these serve the needs of the immigrant populations who live nearby. Businesses also face lending discrimination have limited access to capital and credit compared to their white counterparts. They borrow from friends and family or use personal savings in order to launch and grow their businesses. And they struggle to get any number of professional and technical assistance resources in order to keep their doors open. They don't have the time and oftentimes other employees to be able to attend trainings or apply for a grant and often lack the language skills social networks time and resources in order to do so. Small businesses associations in many areas have helped to fill this gap and advocate for the needs of small businesses but Langley Park does not have one and the surrounding small business owners associations don't include Langley Park businesses. So they still face the the rising rents associated with the purple line like residents and many of the complexes in which they set are similar to the housing conditions in which they're owned by large out-of-state owners and many are locked into predatory triple net leases that require them to make significant capital improvements. Prince George's County again has limited number of resources to protect small businesses and in part this relates to the history of commercial redlining in the area. The county has long claimed that the area has been bypassed by major employers and large chains because of racial bias and instead popular white tablecloth restaurants and entertainment complexes go to the favorite quarters of places like Bethesda Chevy Chase and ignore places like Prince George's County leaving it with an abundance of small low-valued businesses and a lack of major anchors and so Prince George's economic development strategy has really centered on trying to attract those larger businesses that have long avoided Prince George's County. TLCC and FDC has done a lot to bridge some of these gaps and create greater protections for small businesses. They have worked with the state to help to mitigate some of the construction disruption and put in place some of the open for small businesses and some of the other mitigation efforts that have gone on along the line. They've also received a lot of private funding including a five million dollar grant recent grant to provide technical assistance and loans to businesses along the corridor and received a grant from the state in order to the state's federal transit administration in order to create an economic development for the corridor and data and monitoring tools to monitor the closure of small businesses. One of the final challenges I'd like to talk about is building capacity, community capacity for the sustained advocacy that's needed and the process is long as redevelopment. So like business owners, residents themselves struggle with the time and resources to participate in everyday community events let alone a decades long transit planning process. In some neighborhoods the community-based organizations help to fill this gap but in Langley Park many of these organizations struggle with the high demands and limited capacity to temper their advocacy. And while TLCC and FDC have helped to build their capacity even these coalitions have at times struggled to stay afloat and wrestled with some of the hard questions about their role in Langley Park. The fear cast a long shadow over many undocumented residents and their families and when thinking about the purple line a range of other barriers frustrate the efforts of residents to participate including language issues. Many of the small business owners we talked about just lack the time and resources to be able to participate and navigate local bureaucracies. Many families both parents work often multiple jobs and in distant locations. And many of the community-based organizations that represents residents interest focus on providing direct services and have few staff. The neighborhood's lack of organizational capacity is due in part to a legacy of segregation and the results of a lack of poverty-related services funding and organizations and suburbs and policy and foundations that have yet to recognize this new suburban reality. This is something that a number of scholars have talked about in terms of resources for low-income communities and suburbs. And many of the community non-profit service organizations in Langley Park started in the city and have established satellite suburban offices that has tried to move quickly as suburban populations have moved in order to meet reach their needs. But they're struggling to provide services across broad geographical areas and not able to quickly pivot in order to do the kind of advocacy that residents and businesses and Langley Park require. FDC and MPLCC have really bolstered the grassroots and grass-tops engagement. They've met with political leaders, community residents, and business and property owners in public events and to draw up their community development agreement. But they've also helped to spur more grassroots engagement. This picture right here is one of the fair redevelopment coalition events in which CASA sometimes goes around before their meetings and provides shuttle vans to residents to bring them out to planning meetings as many people lack even basic transportation. They've engaged churches which are a major venue for outreach in many suburban communities that otherwise lack community-based organizations in their coalition and in support of their work on the community development agreement. But many suburbs lack such high-capacity organizations like CASA that's able to do this work and have a dearth of regional foundations as well as federal and state funds in order to service the needs of these organizations. So what does this mean for the future of the international corridor? Some of the fair redevelopment and PLCC's ongoing challenges demonstrate how far the international corridor in the larger region have to go in realizing their equitable development goals. While they brought the county leaders across the many jurisdictions to the table, they've struggled to align their policies and priorities. They gain state support for their work and work with county leaders across inner and outer suburbs. While they've improved both county's affordable housing toolkits and put forth bold new housing plans, many remain in the county's, many holes remain in the county's affordable housing funding, tools and capacity, particularly in Prince George's County which is where Langley Park sits. Given inequalities across the region, many political leaders remain unwilling to invest in the coalition's plan while serious gaps remain in philanthropic and nonprofit capacity to fill them. While providing vital technical assistance to vulnerable small businesses, the coalition have yet to gain support for a more comprehensive agenda and resources to protect small businesses. And while increasing community participation in the capacity of local organizations, the coalitions are still struggling with questions about voice agency, internal politics, and funding that threatens their long-term viability and legitimacy. And meanwhile, the purple line is pushing forward. This is a picture that I took on my way to a meeting at CASA where the pipes because of construction had burst in the street and I was sitting in traffic for about an hour trying to make my meeting. And if you can imagine the struggles that I went through just to get to my meeting, you can imagine the struggles that small businesses are going through with all the disruptions over parking and traffic. I now largely avoid going through Langley Park on my way to the University of Maryland. And this is the kind of things that has been happening in Langley Park since the purple line first broke ground in 2017 and it's not set to be completed until 2023. And the larger question of which this is a part is asking, you know, how do we move towards a right to suburbia, which is the tentative title of my larger book project in which I'm asking what does that mean to have a right to suburbia? This is David Harvey's famous quote capturing the spirit of Henry the Fred to talk about what a right to city really means a right to change ourselves by changing the city that depends on the collective exercise of power to reshape processes of urbanization. But how can communities enact those rights? What is the role of planners in the process and policy makers and what lessons do we have from Langley Park and other case studies for advancing scholarship and practice towards these equitable development goals in the context of suburbia? So I'll end with some thoughts about rethinking gentrification from the outside in what some of those lessons from Langley Park might be. And I offer here a picture from a recent protest in Langley Park around the recent rezoning that's going to allow those TOD plans that I talked about earlier to raise densities in the community. First, I think we have to change the discourse and we have to displace the urban in our discourses about gentrification meant of the scholarly focus and popular discourse of gentrification as if it can only happen in the city really limits our focus in our expanded geography to really be able to address some of the fundamental policy questions and research questions about why and how place matters to the ways in which gentrification takes place. The other is to politicize the suburban retrofit. This question that I introduced at the beginning is largely the idea that much of the discourse about suburban retrofits and even smart growth has really made suburbs the cause of new opportunities for densifying and making more walkable mixed use communities. But we have not necessarily put an equal focus on questions of growing inequalities and what that has meant for different communities. And so changing the rhetoric around there and asking a different set of questions will give us a different set of answers around the disparate consequences for marginalized groups and communities. And part of our job needs to be to show why place matters and how low income black and brown communities in Siberia are facing a range of different challenges in attempting to remain in place and gain a more equitable share of the benefits of redevelopment. So here I've listed a few of those challenges that I hope came through in the presentation about why place matters in terms of its spatial configuration in terms of the community-based organizations and challenges to organizing and in terms of political representation or lack thereof and how suburban fragmentation really challenges that as well. But also how suburbs offer kind of new possibilities for reframing our equitable development organizing strategies and building new possibilities for communities to stay in place. And so the Purple Line Court of Coalition and the work of the Fair Development Coalition I think gives us new tools to think about how we strengthen community capacity, build political will and new policy tools, and bring more visibility to the struggles of low income communities of color in the suburbs. And I'll just end by saying I think that the mantra of organized, organized, organized is always one that we should be paying attention to and I hope this presentation has shown you the effectiveness and also the challenges of doing so in suburbs. Thank you. Hi, thank you for the talk. I was wondering if you're taking any questions. Oh yeah. All right, questions. Sorry, it just took a second for me to get the screen up and running again. But if folks have questions they can go ahead and put them into the chat at this time or if you'd like to raise your hand using the raise your hand function. I can call on folks. So if the person who just asked wants to ask the first question, please feel free. Oh, then my mute got stuck. Sure. Sorry, I think it's still muted. Oh, can you hear me now? Yeah. Oh, perfect. Thank you. I was wondering, you had mentioned there was a point where the Purple Line I think Development Coalition and the FDC they had worked on a document, a legal document that would have helped to protect the communities, but it was shut down by or not able to be enacted because of the state government in charge. I was wondering if, you know, if that document, if that those legal activities were to take place, what kinds of things were they demanding or what restrictions were they putting on developers? Basically, what would have been the outcome if that was something that was able to take place? I think the critical difference between the what was being called the Purple Line Compact at the time versus the Purple Line Community Development Agreement, which is the current document that is the working document for those two coalitions now is simply the mechanism of the legal ties, right? It would have been a legally binding community benefits agreement. So when they establish goals for the preservation of affordable housing units, which the coalitions have done, right now they're simply goals. They don't tie the counties nor the state to actually producing those units. And so the coalitions have similar goals between the two documents. It's just whether or not they're able to tie those to actual, to hold the counties and developers accountable for making those goals into reality. So right now the coalitions do a lot of fundraising, spend a lot of their time fundraising towards the achievement of those goals. They also spend a lot of time trying to work with the county agencies to commit funding towards those goals, but it's all voluntary. And the other agreement would have put a lot more state dollars into the mix and held everybody legally accountable to the votes. I see. Okay, thank you. Joe, I see that you have your hand raised on Zoom. Do you want to unmute and ask your question? Sure. Thanks, Carolyn. And thank you so much, Professor Lungenman, for this talk. This was awesome. I have a question about at the beginning, you showed the two other sites you're looking at in Wheaton and Silver Spring. And I was wondering if, I think you mentioned that the Wheaton case actually has some like positive lessons for Langley Park. And so I was wondering if you could just expand on those other two cases and this sort of earlier wave of metro-oriented TOD and how Purple Line might learn from that and sort of what you're finding in those other two cases. Yeah. So actually, the Langley Park, I think, is the most hopeful chapter in the book. And I put it last in the book because it really is like in terms of time period, the last fight that took place amongst many of these groups. And a lot of them built their capacity along the way by learning the lessons in garnering new tools and each successive equitable development struggle. So the Silver Spring was really one of the first where you have this massive county-led redevelopment process that really uses eminent domain very strongly, a lot of county dollars going into making redevelopment happening, and just a huge loss of businesses without much protections. But what you also get out of that case is a new organization that's really fighting for a voice for marginalized groups at the table, trying to get them on redevelopment boards, and finally putting some protections in place at the county-wide level for small businesses. But those tools came a little bit too little, too late, and that they weren't really funded appropriately. They weren't getting down to businesses in timely fashion, and a lot was lost in terms of those businesses in Langley Park, I'm sorry, in Silver Spring. In Wheaton, you have the county taking that same policy that was built in Silver Spring to be able to protect small businesses and really putting it in place in a larger fashion to be able to sort of get ahead of the curve. And so you're also not working with a new organization that is being built for the first time, but you have an organization that is actually moving from the city to the suburbs, and taking the capacity of that, they're organizing there to be able to work with small businesses more effectively. And so I think the lesson of those two cases is that you need to start early, you need to have the capacity amongst the nonprofit groups in order to be able to use these tools effectively, and you have to have political representation, because in each of the cases, the person who is forwarding these new policies that are making sure that all the regulations are in place to make sure they get to the people who need them most are the new, the first and the onlys on the county councils and redevelopment boards in these locations. And in Langley Park, you have a lot of those same questions about whether the capacity of the nonprofits are there, but you have a very high capacity nonprofit in Casa de Maryland. You have these questions being asked from the beginning of when the purple line is being built. So there's a little bit more time to build new tools and policies and a little bit more effective advocacy, because you have these major anchor institutions and nonprofits that are building strong coalitions in order to make these tools happen. So while it's an imperfect case, it is probably the most promising of the three cases that I live in. Thank you. Our next question is from Marian who says, thank you for an amazing presentation. I'm from Atlanta where we have our own international corridor. Is there an organizing network for communities facing these kinds of challenges to learn from one another? Is that the small business anti-displacement network? Thank you, Marian, for bringing up my other hat that I hold, which is as director of an organization known as the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network, which is focused on questions of small business displacement and the sort of lack of protections that we have at both the local and especially the national level for small businesses. While we have more protections in gentrifying neighborhoods for residences, and we have tools like inclusionary zoning, tenant opportunity, a purchase, housing, trust funds, things that I talked about in this presentation for residents in many places, we don't have those protections for small businesses. And so part of the work of that organization that is just in its founding stages is to really build out some of those policy tools and lessons from places across the United States that are facing similar kinds of challenges. And one of the things I've seen in suburbs is that because suburbs has such segregated land uses, it's not like these are mixed income, mixed use neighborhoods to begin with. These are transforming traditional or low density downtowns into more mixed use communities. And so small businesses are often the ones who are most disparately impacted, which gave way to that work. But there are national organizations that are focused on issues of residential displacement and that are trying to build new tools. The University of California, Berkeley runs the urban displacement program project, which really focuses on policy tools that are working there to be able to stem residential displacement. Policy link runs a lot of national programs focused on anti-displacement in the residential space. And yes, we are trying to build that out for commercial anti-displacement at the national level as well. We have time for one more question. I have a question actually. I'm curious in terms of residential displacement. If you find that when folks are displaced from these inner suburbs that are gentrifying, if they tend to be displaced more to suburbs that are farther and farther out or if they tend to be displaced to other inner suburbs that are still experiencing disinvestment and aren't gentrifying? That's a great question. It's hard to really track where folks are going, but one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book is because I felt like we had such an uncritical view of the kind of displacement that's happening in cities right now and why it matters as if displacement to the suburbs could be an opportunity for communities where that have not historically been able to move to the suburbs. Well, that might be true, but suburbs also lack some of the vital resources that low-income communities and other marginalized communities need. It lacks the social connections. It lacks the community-based organizations and advocacy organizations. It lacks the policy tools. It lacks the transportation they need. It lacks the vital social networks that they've established in neighborhoods. So in my mind, displacement is never a good thing. And the further and further marginalized communities are moved from the places that they have historically built power and built resources, the harder it is for them to gain a more equitable stake and a more sustainable place in their communities. And so I think it's important that we contextualize the kind of displacement that is happening and look at the resources that are available to communities in those places. And inner ring suburbs have, you know, one of the reasons why communities have been attracted to these communities when they are either pushed or pulled to suburbs, meaning they're displaced from urban neighborhoods or they decide to settle in and them is because they have many of the vital resources that we want already in urban neighborhoods, right? They are more dense. They are more walkable. They are more transit oriented. They are closer to jobs in the inner cities. And the further they're displaced from those resources, the harder it is to access the kind of mobility and opportunity that we want. Thank you. Well, that is all the time that we have for questions. But on behalf of GSAP and the Urban Planning Program in particular, I'd like to thank you again, Dr. Langamon, for your great presentation today. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your work with us. And thanks also to everyone who attended. Moving forward, we will not be holding lips for the next couple weeks because of the Dean's lecture by Theresa Caldera, as well as election day. So make sure to join us on November 9th for our next lips, which will be by GSAP alumna, Elizabeth Marcello, whose talk will be on the fight for transparent public authorities in New York State.