It's not too late for North Carolina community groups to becomes Questionnaire Assistance Centers or Be Counted sites. SCSJ will be coordinating with the State Census Liaison. Email your group's name and contact information to anita@scsj.org or call (919) 323-3380 ASAP if you or groups you know in NC want to become a QAC or Be Counted site.
This interactive map provides amazing detail of data on why specific areas throughout the entire United States are "hard to count." The map not only pinpoints census tracts throughout the entire United States that the Census Bureau considers difficult to enumerate, it also displays the detailed demographic and housing characteristics that the Census Bureau believes will create challenges to achieving an accurate count in certain communities.
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund is said to be producing a tutorial to help people use the map. Check out their census website (which has many other terrific resources) to find the tutorial when it becomes available.
We would like to encourage you to email the creators at cunymapping@gc.cuny.edu and ask to add your group in the Local Resources tab which pops up when clicking on a certain tract. For instance, SCSJ has asked the creators to add our website for census tracts in Durham, NC.
We’re pleased to announce that Becky Jaffe has just joined the Southern Coalition as a fellow focusing on the heirs’ property problem. Heirs’ property refers to property that has passed down through successive generations of family members who have died without a will. As the property passes to each new generation, more and more people come to own the property in increasingly small, fractional interests. This ownership structure is a huge cause of black land loss in the South. Families often lose their land through bankruptcy proceedings, tax sales, foreclosure, and partition sales. Becky will work with staff attorney Chris Brook, using a combination of mediation, consensus-building, and legal skills, to help families with heirs’ property protect their land.
Becky graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School. In the fall of 2009, she served as a lecturer for the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Before attending law school, she served in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan, where she worked with rural Uzbek villagers to help them improve health conditions in their community. She received her B.A. from Yale University. Becky first worked with the Southern Coalition in the spring of 2009 as a clinical student from the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (http://www.law.harvard.edu/academics/clinical/hnmcp/web/index.html). The clinical project involved helping the Pitt family resolve internal differences and formulate a plan for protecting their land. (
To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks.
Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw from this office, are dressed in their everyday summer attire, T-shirts and shorts. But when they begin pulling maps off printers, Parnell and Joyner step decidedly out of the last century. "Our daughter tells people we work for the CIA, because what we do is so hard to describe," Parnell says, only half-joking.
Joyner displays a series of maps showing the Coal Run neighborhood, a handful of streets located just outside the city limits of Zanesville in central Ohio. The first map provides a simple baseline, showing the city water plant and the boundary between the city and Coal Run, a part of Muskingum County. The second map adds water lines, which serve only the northern half of Coal Run. Successive maps add the residences in Coal Run, note which residences have water and which don't, and break down their occupancy by race.
The last map puts all the data together, and the picture suddenly comes into sharp focus: Almost all the white households in Coal Run have water service, while all but a few black homes do not.
The institute's maps played a vital role in a federal jury's decision last year to award the excluded Coal Run residents almost $11 million in damages from the city of Zanesville and Muskingum County. The supporting evidence was strong on its own: African-American residents without water had made repeated requests over a period of almost 50 years to remedy the inequity, to no avail. Instead, they had to haul water from the plant or pump it from wells contaminated with sulphur and oil from old mining operations. In the interim, Zanesville had extended its water lines on numerous occasions to new, predominantly white developments that were farther away from the water plant than Coal Run.
But the maps provided something that the narrative and statistics lacked, says civil rights attorney Reed Colfax, who represented the Coal Run residents. "We could articulate the case in words," Colfax says. "But when you'd put up the maps, they'd stop listening to you and look at them [as if to] say, 'Is this really possible?'"
The Cedar Grove Institute has been using maps to exhibit patterns of municipal discrimination against low-income and minority communities for almost a decade. The patterns, rooted in the days when residential discrimination was supported by law, have been reinforced under the cover of such contemporary land-use mechanisms as annexation, zoning and extra-territorial controls.
To produce the maps, the institute employs geographic information systems technology, a computer-based tool for organizing, analyzing and displaying data in a spatial or geographic context. While the maps seem simple, producing them is anything but. Data must be collected from a host of sources, including government databases, door-to-door surveys and Global Positioning System devices. The data is digitized, analyzed, converted to images and layered together in various combinations.
Once the exclusive province of government, industry and academia, GIS technology has evolved rapidly since the 1980s, paralleling exponential gains in computer power and capacity. Affordable, user-friendly GIS software, online-mapping systems and the explosion of government data available on the Web have combined to speed the spread of GIS into the public arena.
This democratization of GIS has spurred new thinking about its potential application at the grassroots, rather than institutional, level. University of North Carolina School of Law Dean Jack Boger has worked with the institute on some of its municipal discrimination cases and concluded that the phenomenon of exclusion knows few geographic boundaries. "This is a problem of nationwide scope," Boger says. "The evidence is, in effect, irrefutable."
The exclusion of poor and minority communities from municipal services is but one social ill that GIS mapping can illustrate and help alleviate. Today, an increasing number of academics, attorneys, nonprofits and community groups are using maps to identify social problems, devise solutions and leverage change. GIS is being deployed to combat discrimination and inequities in education, health care access, housing, employment opportunities, transportation and law enforcement. "You're not up to date in social justice advocacy if you don't know how to use GIS maps," says Anita Earls, director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, N.C.
Still, GIS is in its relative infancy as a popular science, and public awareness of its attributes and capacity is relatively low. Although most people have been exposed on the Internet to such GIS-based products as Google Maps, few can identify the technology behind them. Sarah Elwood, a geography professor at the University of Washington who has spread the GIS gospel to community groups, often encounters a baseline ignorance of the concept. "You say 'GIS' and people say, 'Oh, yeah, I have one of those in my car,'" Elwood says.
The dots on the GIS-awareness map may be sparse, but those who have experienced the transformative power of GIS mapping have no doubt that the technology will eventually become firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. "People are jaded with statistics, and even more jaded with pie charts and graphs," says Keith Ernst, research director at the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, which has used maps to identify patterns of predatory lending in low-income communities. "But if you put the information on a map, people are more willing to hear what you say. We're visual creatures, and seeing is believing."
Allan Parnell recalls the day he first grasped the sweeping potential of GIS-based advocacy. Parnell was giving a talk at the University of North Carolina law school about the institute's first municipal discrimination case, which involved his hometown of Mebane, N.C. As in Zanesville, residents of largely minority neighborhoods outside Mebane's boundaries lacked water, sewer and other basic town services, despite decades of requests for relief.
Meanwhile, the town had annexed and provided services over the years to a hodgepodge of overwhelmingly white, affluent satellite developments that were farther away from the town center than the minority neighborhoods. This pattern of annexation and exclusion, dubbed "municipal underbounding" by University of Tennessee geography professor Charles Aiken, created virtual islands of poverty and neglect within the town.
After the presentation, a group of black students approached Parnell with similar stories of their own. "They told me, 'This is happening in my grandmother's town,'" he says. "That was the light-bulb moment: This isn't just one case; it's a pattern."
A geographer by training with advanced degrees in sociology and demographics, Parnell had used GIS in health-related studies for the National Academy of Sciences and other agencies beginning in the late 1980s. He and his wife, Ann Joyner, formed a company in 1999 that specialized in GIS-based health research. But Parnell, a self-described "conflict-avoiding academic," had had little opportunity or inclination to agitate on behalf of the disadvantaged.
One day in 2001, Parnell took a call from a community organizer in Mebane who was trying to stave off a highway bypass that would run through the heart of his neighborhood. Would Parnell assist him with a grant application? He met with the organizer, who detailed Mebane's methods of using town boundaries to disenfranchise the neighborhood while controlling its destiny through the use of extra-territorial jurisdiction, an area adjacent to city limits over which municipalities can exert some influence. "I just sat there with my jaw on the floor for three hours," Parnell says.
Parnell and Joyner agreed to create a visual and statistical profile of the town using standard GIS methodology. The first task was to gather the mountain of data that would be relevant. A former journalist and real estate developer, Joyner knew where to find comprehensive land-use and infrastructure information. Mebane's public works department provided the locations of water and sewer lines. From the planning department they obtained historical annexation documents. Federal census data broke out racial and economic variables at the block level. They reviewed city council meeting minutes for evidence of action and inaction on service and annexation requests.
Using stock GIS software, Parnell and Joyner digitized the mass of data in compatible formats — a major undertaking in itself — and analyzed it. To produce the maps, they enlisted Bucknell University GIS expert Ben Marsh, a former graduate school classmate of Parnell's. The three published a case study of Mebane in 2003 and shared it with Jack Boger, then-deputy director at the UNC Center for Civil Rights. "What was immediately apparent was how clear the relationship was between the exclusion of services and the racial makeup of the community," Boger says.
Inspired by the Mebane study and law school experience, Parnell and Joyner formed the nonprofit Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities and in 2004 won a foundation grant to map communities throughout North Carolina. They found patterns of exclusion similar to those identified in Mebane across the state.
The institute's maps of Moore County, home to some of the nation's most prestigious and affluent golfing communities, were among their most dramatic examples of underbounding. The maps show the boundaries of three county municipalities, Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen, a tortured maze of red lines that zigzag in all directions, creating angular amoebas.
A batch of dark brown blotches stand prominently outside the limits of all three towns, though they are hemmed in or virtually surrounded by the three towns. The blotches represent communities with overwhelmingly African-American populations and names — Lost City, Monroe Town and Jackson Hamlet — that evoke images of the Jim Crow era.
The maps also show the distribution of sewer lines in the county, which either stop at town borders or go through them but provide no hookups beyond, so the communities outside the town limits have no sewer service. Annexations over the years have swallowed acreage all around the three towns but carefully avoided the minority neighborhoods.
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Parnell and Joyner add a sobering narrative to the maps that magnifies the extent of the exclusion of the communities outside town limits: Septic systems have routinely failed, spilling raw sewage next to homes. Residents lack the garbage service enjoyed by people who live in town and must instead pay for a costly private hauler or burn their trash at home. In the Midway community, neighbors watch garbage trucks cut through their main street to serve the citizens of Aberdeen, who live to either side. Police protection is provided by the county sheriff's department, which must travel as much as 15 miles to respond to emergencies — even though municipal police stations are much closer, in some cases just blocks away.
The maps became an integral part of a successful campaign to eliminate the most odious aspects of exclusion in Moore County, and not just in terms of educating decision-makers. For the community groups involved in the campaign, the maps offered a kind of external validation that their narrative alone could not provide. "For me, they were a verification of what I've always known," says Maurice Holland, president of the Midway Community Association and a lifelong resident of the neighborhood.
Since then, the institute has extended its reach beyond state lines. Presentations at conferences and workshops have connected the institute with attorneys working on municipal discrimination cases in California, Virginia, New York, Florida and Texas. While some of the cases center on underbounding, others address additional ways by which municipalities discriminate. In the Florida case, Guatemalan residents in the city of Lake Worth demonstrated that selective code enforcement resulted in the targeting of Latinos for eviction. An analysis of redevelopment efforts in Portsmouth, Va., showed that white residents and developers were the primary beneficiaries of the city's largesse, while black communities were systematically wiped from the landscape to make way for land uses that generated more tax revenue.
And in Dallas, African-American and Latino residents in the inaptly named community of Cadillac Heights sued the city for using zoning regulations to segregate them in an industrial sector — a pattern that traced back to the 1940s, before the influx of Latinos to the city, when land records denoted minority residential areas with the letter "N." Living next to industrial facilities had predictable consequences for residents: chronic health problems, a dearth of public services and permanently depressed property values.
In each instance, GIS maps have proven instrumental in either making the case that discrimination had occurred or influencing the outcome of a government decision about the discrimination. The city of Dallas, for example, settled with the residents and agreed to relocate them to more hospitable environs. Attorney Mike Daniel, who represented the plaintiffs, credits the maps with tipping the balance. This was the second suit brought by residents for the same cause, he notes, but the first one had ended with a nominal settlement that did not remedy the problem. "The history of the two cases was the same," Daniel says. "The only difference was Cedar Grove's work."
Most of the Cedar Grove Institute's recent GIS work has been for attorneys in support of municipal discrimination lawsuits, but the law offers few remedies in such cases. Provisions in the federal Civil Rights, Fair Housing and Voting Rights acts prohibit discrimination based on race and other factors, but local circumstances don't often fit neatly into one of those provisions, and proving that the law was violated is no simple endeavor. Moreover, to win in court, plaintiffs must prove that the discrimination was intentional.
Only a handful of states offer similar protections against discrimination. Further constricting the playing field is a counterintuitive reality: Local government practices that result in exclusion and inequity are, for the most part, legal. Annexation laws, for example, usually permit municipalities to make annexation decisions based on economic considerations. If an annexation provides a net economic benefit, the city can move forward; if the costs of providing services to the annexed territory exceed new tax revenues, the city is free to say no.
And the time and expense of a legal case — often measured in years and millions — are prohibitive for the communities most likely to be the object of discrimination.
Because of these hurdles, some advocacy groups with a GIS focus deploy their maps in the service of less adversarial strategies. The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University engages in "opportunity mapping," which begins with the assumption that opportunities for high-quality housing, employment, education, health care and other key indicators should be distributed equally throughout a given metropolitan area. Kirwan maps identify disparities in the distribution of opportunities, which in turn provides direction for policymakers to correct those disparities.
In a similar vein, the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project takes a solution-oriented approach with its mapping initiative, the Healthy City Project. An interactive, online compendium of demographic, economic and health data for Los Angeles County, Healthy City also pinpoints the location of services for referral purposes and lets users create maps to identify concerns in their own neighborhoods. Developed in collaboration with an innovative GIS lab at UCLA, the Healthy City platform is so advanced that stakeholders often consult with project staff to inform policy debates and decisions.
Healthy City was hired by the city to produce maps in conjunction with an initiative to shift the approach to gang violence from enforcement and suppression to prevention. Healthy City produced maps that showed gang hot spots as well as services available to young people; the maps helped the city target areas where services were in shortest supply for additional investment. "We don't only want to show problems," says John Kim, who has directed Healthy City since its inception in 2002. "We want to show ways to solve those problems."
Historians cite ancient cave paintings of migratory game routes as a primitive geographic information system, the superimposition of data on a geographic image. An English physician mapped the location of London residents sickened by cholera during an outbreak in 1857, which he analyzed to identify the source of the disease. Advancements in photographic processes in the early 20th century enabled the creation of translucent images of geographically ordered demographic data that could be layered atop a map, a technique pioneered by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression.
Though these antecedents arguably combine geography and information into a kind of system, GIS is most commonly associated with sophisticated computer hardware and software, its origins dating back to the days of mainframes and punch cards. In 1962, the Canadian government unveiled the Canada Geographic Information System, a prototype that mapped select land-use variables throughout the country for planning purposes.
Private vendors began to sell off-the-shelf GIS software in the 1980s; a decade later, further refinements in those packages combined with a steady drop in hardware prices made GIS available to anyone with sufficient technical background and skill. The runway was clear for takeoff.
Commercial users were among the first to take advantage. Market researchers mapped demographic data on household income, population density and the location of competitors to choose optimal sites for retail expansion. Engineering firms mapped roads and infrastructure to streamline their projects.
Federal, state and local government agencies also found GIS an invaluable way to increase efficiencies. The time spent on planning, permitting and conducting environmental or health assessments could be cut to a sliver with accurate databases and maps. Law enforcement agencies mapped crime incidence; few government operations, in fact, did not benefit from a GIS application. One of the largest single repositories of government data, the U.S. Census, has likely launched more GIS maps than any other single data source.
Much of that government data has now been posted to the Web. For advocates using GIS, the flood of data has been a boon. Parnell says the Cedar Grove Institute would never have emerged from the conceptual phase without the ability to obtain government data. "We realized that there's a critical mass of data out there," he says. "Five years earlier, we couldn't have done it."
Not all local governments appreciate the rise of GIS-driven advocacy, especially when their own data is used as a hammer against them, and they have begun to restrict public access. Some have pulled data off the Web in the alleged interest of national security; others charge exorbitant fees to produce it or deliver jumbled masses of data that are difficult to manage or decipher.
Mebane, the Cedar Grove Institute's first case study of municipal discrimination, passed an Infrastructure Information Security Policy shortly after the study was published; the policy limited infrastructure data access to qualified engineering firms and town agencies. The city of Modesto, Calif., locked in a legal underbounding battle, pulled its infrastructure data off the Internet after the lawsuit was filed, citing national security grounds. "There's no conceivable national security interest in where the traffic lights are in Modesto," scoffs Ben Marsh, the institute's chief mapmaker. A recent appellate ruling in California rejected a similar national-security rationale, as well as a copyright argument by Santa Clara County, but whether that opinion stands as precedent remains to be seen.
Though restrictions on access to government data could prove troublesome, advocacy groups that use GIS have already been finding data sources outside of government. In particular, data collected by community residents have become an effective supplement to the "official story," as University of Washington professor Sarah Elwood calls government data.
Elwood has used GIS not only to map problems but to build the capacity of underserved and disadvantaged communities to advocate on their own behalf. Simple walking surveys that catalogue infrastructural deficiencies — potholes in sidewalks, missing stop signs, burned-out streetlights — fill gaps in the public record that mask actual conditions on the ground. With locally produced data, Elwood says, "You can tell a very detailed and very current, compelling story about neighborhood needs."
One of the few brakes slowing the GIS freight train, at least from an advocacy perspective, is the shortage of people who understand it well. "Obviously, there is a much greater demand for GIS than there are practitioners," says attorney Eric Schultheis, who coordinates The Race Equity Project for Legal Services of Northern California and counts himself among the GIS crowd. "You could probably count the number of people who are actually doing this work on both hands."
But given the leaps that GIS technology and applications have taken in the political and legal advocacy sectors, it's hard to imagine the GIS trend reversing. By January of next year, Healthy City plans to cover the entire state of California, and Kim says he's received expansion requests from other cities. Healthy City uses free, open-source GIS software that can be customized as needed. The ready supply of cheap hardware and software can only hasten the arrival of the day when GIS mapping is as universal as photo or music editing.
"The technology will soon become ubiquitous," Kim says simply.
The resume of the first female bishop in the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Rev. Vashti Murphy McKenzie, could serve as a sermon.
McKenzie will speak at the 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. services Dec. 20 at Williams Memorial CME Church, 3400 Triangle Lake Road, High Point.
As a pastor in Baltimore, McKenzie oversaw the purchase of a building on a drug-infested corner that created a $1.8 million economic development center that houses a senior adult day care, a Head Start and other businesses.
McKenzie’s first assignment after her 2000 elevation to bishop was as presiding prelate in eight southern African countries.
There, she established a program to build group homes for children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic.
McKenzie, who holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in divinity, is the author of several books, including “Journey to the Well.”
As president of the Council of Bishops , she is the highest- ranking woman in the predominantly Black Methodist denomination.
She is also the national chaplain for the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority .
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First Lutheran Church has launched Meals at the Manger, a statewide campaign encouraging churches to collect food for the needy on Christmas Eve.
Last year’s service at First Lutheran drew 1,072 people bearing 1,500 pounds of food — food that otherwise might not have been collected, according to Frank Moore , First Lutheran’s director of community ministries .
This year, the church is asking congregations across the state to ask members to take at least one canned good or food item per person to Christmas Eve services.
First Lutheran also is encouraging churches to set up manger scenes in their yards or elsewhere with large boxes to hold the Christmas Eve donations.
Each church can donate the goods to the food bank or soup kitchen of its choice after the holiday.
A suggestion: Have children or youth of the church do the artwork for the outdoor or indoor manger scene.
“ This is a simple yet powerful way to feed the hungry and personify the hope that defines Christmas,” Moore said.
Need help getting started? Contact Moore at 292-9125 , Ext. 102, or frank@firstlutheran.com.
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FaithAction International House is offering a personal appeal to church leaders and congregations to get involved in the U.S. Census Bureau count.
“So many decisions are made based on the U.S. Census count,” FaithAction executive director Mark Sills explained in the nonprofit’s newsletter. “Virtually all federal grants are allocated on the basis of census data. The decision about where to build roads, schools, hospitals, child-care centers and many other structures important to your people — all based on census data.”
FaithAction, which got a $3,000 grant through the Southern Coalition for Social Justice to help explain the census to immigrants, is also trying to get the word out to faith groups.
In the last census, North Carolina might have lost millions in funding because of an undercount, according to the U.S. Census Monitoring Board.
The Census Bureau can provide your congregation packets of information that has been designed especially for faith-based organization partners.
Questions? Contact Kathryn Murphy at 327-8531 or kathryn.m.murphy@census.gov .
Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com
The federal government said it was revamping its deportation agreements with local sheriffs to focus on ridding the country of dangerous felons. But some North Carolina sheriffs who signed the agreements have not been asked to change their practices.
Lawyers and advocates say the controversial program, which allows sheriff's departments to help identify illegal immigrants and begin deportation proceedings, is operating virtually unchanged - resulting in the deportation of people charged with offenses as minor as disorderly conduct and driving without a license.
A month after the new agreements took effect, Wake County is still putting into deportation proceedings more illegal immigrants who were arrested on misdemeanor charges than those detained in felony cases.
Wake Sheriff Donnie Harrison confirmed that his department has not changed the way it implements the program.
"We do the same thing if you're charged for murder or if you're charged with no operator's license," said Harrison, one of seven North Carolina sheriffs who have the program. "Nothing has changed for us."
Officials with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced in July that they would ask all participating law enforcement agencies to sign new agreements, which they said would bring the program in line with its original goal of removing drug offenders and violent criminals from the country. Departments were required to sign the new agreements by mid-October.
The revamp came after Joe Arpaio, sheriff in Maricopa County, Ariz., drew national scrutiny by using the program to round up illegal immigrants and imprison them in tents in the desert.
Most North Carolina sheriffs use a different model of the program, in which they check the immigration status of those brought into jails for other crimes, but their programs have also drawn accusations of racial profiling. The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina says the program encourages law officers to jail immigrants on minor crimes for the purpose of checking their immigration status.
ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said last week that the new agreements discourage profiling by requiring that local agencies see through all criminal charges against illegal immigrants before they are deported. In the past, many minor charges were dropped and the inmates handed over to immigration authorities.
She also said the agreements "clearly articulated ICE's priorities: identifying and removing criminal aliens who pose a threat to public safety or a danger to the community."
New intent, old methods
The agreement, however, does not lay out new practices for sheriffs. All foreign-born people who come through participating jails - the vast majority of whom are accused of misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes - continue to have their immigration status checked and, if they are here illegally, to be processed for deportation.
Harrison signed the new agreement Oct. 16. His statistics show that the number of immigrants put into deportation proceedings has not declined since it went into effect.
In October, 150 inmates were processed for immigration violations, and 84 percent of their crimes were misdemeanors. So far this month, 82 illegal immigrants have been processed, and 60 percent of the charges against them were misdemeanors.
Harrison said he continues to check the status of all foreign-born inmates; he would consider it discriminatory to "pick and choose" inmates to screen based on the seriousness of their alleged crimes.
Harrison said checks sometimes reveal that immigrants arrested for minor charges are wanted for more serious crimes or have previous deportation orders. "ICE hasn't said anything to us about changing anything," Harrison said.
Randy Jones, spokesman for Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration and one of the state's first sheriffs to join the program, also said he has not changed the way he does immigration checks.
"We're doing it just like we've always done it," Jones said.
Jones and Harrison said it's the federal government's responsibility to decide which immigrants are deported.
'Really petty'
Marty Rosenbluth, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham who provides free services to immigrants, said he has represented people deported after such crimes as playing loud music and missing a child's truancy hearing. A few months ago, two teenage girls ended up in deportation proceedings after being involved in a fistfight at Wakefield High School.
Since the new agreements took effect, Rosenbluth said, he continues to field five to 10 calls a day, the majority from people picked up by local immigration programs.
"It's mostly driving and minor misdemeanors in every county," he said. "Most of the cases we're seeing continue to be really petty."
Rebecca Headen, an attorney with the Raleigh office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new agreement does little to address concerns that the program allows officers to target immigrants for minor crimes.
"It's more of an aspirational suggestion," Headen said.
One North Carolina sheriff, Earl "Moose" Butler of Cumberland County, declined to sign the new agreement and dropped out of the program.
Debbie Tanna, a public information officer for the Cumberland Sheriff's Office, said the program used county resources to help deport mostly minor criminals while largely failing to turn up dangerous felons or immigrants wanted for crimes in other states.
"The sheriff did not like the way the program was working," Tanna said. "He said it was more of a headache than a working tool."
“It’s the worst problem you never heard of,” David Dietrich, co-chair of the ABA Property Preservation Task Force, recently told the ABA Journal. “These cases can be thoroughly messy and complex because you are talking about multiple heirs with multiple, and sometimes conflicting, interests.”
The little known problem in question is heirs’ property, which is most prevalent amongst black families in the South. Heirs’ property is land owned by numerous family members who received it as an inheritance from an ancestor who has died without a will. Once the land is passed along in this manner the heirs hold the property together as tenants in common, wherein each owner holds an undivided interest with the right to use and possess the property. If land continues to pass in this manner through multiple generations it can result in dozens of family members having a small interest in this land. Such fractional ownership can lead to many problems. Often times, family members with a small interest in the land will not even know they are a part owner. On other occasions family members have moved away from their ancestral land and do not have the time for or interest in the upkeep of the land. In those instances an indifferent owner might sell their interest in the land, often times to someone outside of the family or to a developer.
Unfortunately, in North Carolina once a non-heir has an interest in the property, the family often loses the ability to use the land as they see fit. Our state’s laws permit any party with an interest in the land, regardless of how small, to file a partition action. If the petitioner can prove that a physical partition of the land would harm its economic value, then he or she can force the land to be sold at auction, regardless of the size of his or her interest and regardless of the wishes of the actual heirs. Not only can a partition auction lead to land selling for less than its market value, but also, even with it being available for less than its market value, the land may remain too expensive for cashpoor families to successfully bid on. These partitions have contributed to a stunning loss of black land in the South over the past century. According to the Land Loss Prevention Project, of the 15 million acres of land African Americans acquired after Emancipation, only about 2 million acres remain owned by their descendants. In Alabama, where this problem has been thoroughly researched, the number of black-operated farms dropped from 46,032 in 1954 to 1,381 in 1992. Both of these rates of decrease far outstrip the loss of white land ownership over the same time period.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is active on multiple levels in the effort to stem the tide of heirs’ property land loss. During the course of the 2009 legislative session, we worked with Representative Angela Bryant to make North Carolina partition legislation more equitable. Though we did not realize all of our goals, we did improve procedural fairness in partition sales by, among other things, increasing the time for respondents to respond to a petition for partition, assigning representatives to protect the interests of unknown or un-locatable heirs, and underlining the availability of mediation in partition actions. In addition, our organization represents families responding to partition actions filed by developers pro bono to ensure they receive the best deal possible out of this tough circumstance.
However, our preference is to get involved helping families manage their heirs’ property before a partition action is filed. This permits families to be proactive and take the long view about how to best use their land for their benefit. It is also a role in which facilitation and mediation skills are imperative to overcome the challenges unique to heirs’ property
cases.
After identifying all heirs to the property in question, the first, unique challenge often becomes apparent: this will be a family introduction as well as a family mediation. In one of the cases currently handled by SCSJ there are more than 60 family members with an interest in the heirs’ property, meaning many family members and tenants in common have never met before, let alone resolved potentially contentious issues. Even in situations with fewer heirs to the land there are still many relatives who must be re-introduced after, for example, last seeing a cousin more than 30 years ago at a family reunion. In these situations, the facilitation must work to foster trust between these distant relations so that they move forward, hopefully reaching consensus in regards to managing their land. The attorney facilitating must also be cognizant of the divisions between family members still living on or near the heirs’ property and those with limited or no connections to the land, aiming to address and then transcend disagreements about whether “outof-towners” voices should count as much as those still “living at home.” Only when such trust has been established and obstacles overcome can progress be made.
Another challenge to heirs’ property facilitation is something much less unique: sometimes family don’t get along. As anyone who has ever attended a holiday celebration can attest, just because you have the same blood in your veins does not mean you are necessarily going to like someone, much less agree with him or her on something so personal as how to manage your family’s ancestral lands. Along the same lines, there are often factions within families that do not see eye to eye on issues, including, but not limited to, the heirs’ property. The facilitator must help the family navigate this minefield to reach a consensus that all family members and family groups can accept. Again, the first step in this process is identifying these conflicts and, if possible, some of the reasons underlying said conflicts. Having done so, the facilitator will not only be prepared for points of conflict along predictable battle lines, but also can formulate a strategy for de-fusing these conflicts. Often times, allowing family members to air these unrelated grievances before steering the family back to the larger and different issues at stake is a wise start. If discussions digress it is often helpful
to have a family member who is respected by all parties as a neutral arbiter serve as an ally in your efforts to get the conversation back on track. And, yes, sometimes just taking a break to let everyone clear their head and come back fresh is the best medicine. Regardless of the approach, and as Thanksgiving dinner has likely taught us all, these conflicts must be handled effectively to realize familial goals.
Finally, heirs’ property facilitations are challenging because in such family settings there are always differing levels of legal sophistication. Often such families will include an attorney, business person, or farmer who has some familiarity with how the legal system generally and property law specifically operates. On other occasions most of the family members around the table at a facilitation will have a high school diploma or less and very limited interaction with and understanding of legal processes. In both instances one of the highest priorities is de-mystifying the legal process for family members. It is also essential that the facilitator drill down, not just accepting reluctant nods as true understanding of confusing legal concepts. Perhaps most importantly, the facilitator must lay out the various options family members could pursue and encourage robust dialogue about these alternatives. Without dialogue the facilitator could unwittingly dominate the discussion and make decisions on behalf of deferential, overwhelmed family members that are contrary to the family’s wishes and adverse to their long-term goals. The key is reaching out to family members to make sure their questions are solicited and answered, and then striking a balance between serving as a needed source for legal information while not driving the discussion to reach a conclusion preferred by the facilitator, but not necessarily the family.
“The worst problem you never heard of ” is a problem that alternative dispute resolution can play a large role in addressing. Though legislative reforms are necessary and some contentious partition actions are inevitable, many of the challenges associated with heirs’ property can be met by attorneys pro-actively utilizing alternative dispute resolution techniques. Properly employed, these techniques bring together distant family members, smooth out familial acrimony, explain complicated legal options, and allow for ancestral land to remain in and to provide benefits to families.
The most effective way to prevent land loss by owners of heirs' property is by providing the vital legal services that owners lack before their land is threatened by partition sales. SCSJ is excited to work with families that own heirs' properties to draft wills, develop partnership agreements, and negotiate creative solutions to ensure stable ownership of their property.
SCSJ represents the heirs of Daniel and Francis Pitt, who owned over 150 acres in Wilson and Edgecombe County, North Carolina, in their efforts to maintain and utilize this familial land. Representing the children and grandchildren of Mr. and Mrs. Pitt, SCSJ conducted a title-search, confirming the family members with an interest in the land and met with the family to identify legal means of realizing their goals. Ultimately, the family chose to form a Limited Liability Corporation, establishing rules for the management of the land as well as safeguards to ensure the land remained in family hands. SCSJ drafted the LLC operating agreement and is also exploring various means of maximizing the land’s financial capacity with the family.
Speaking of the challenges they face, LLC manager Felton Wooten notes his family “lost one farm in a judicial proceeding in the early 1960s and our family wanted to be certain nothing could happen like that again.” However, “there were very strong differences in our family that we could not resolve, leading me to believe that a repeat of the 1960s incident could happen.” But, with the assistance of SCSJ, the family was able to reach consensus to hold the land in an LLC, “something so important for the survival of our family interests and which would not have happened without the help extended to our family.”
Heir's Property Workshop Set for Oct. 10
BY FLORENCE GILKESON: SENIOR WRITER
A free workshop for heirs' property owners will be held at 10 a.m. Oct. 10 at the Senior Enrichment Center under sponsorship of the Moore County Department of Planning and Community Development.
Heirs' property is land owned by two or more people who have inherited rather than purchased their shares of the property. The problem surfaces most often in cases where people have inherited property but cannot locate the deeds for the traditional transfer of ownership.
Tim Emmert, community development planner, cites the example of a situation in which federal housing monies cannot be easily applied to heirs' properties without lengthy, sometimes fruitless, searches to track down family members and secure signatures on appropriate documents.
He has seen this problem in cases where a property owner is eligible for rehabilitation assistance for a house but cannot prove legal ownership. Without proof of ownership, funds allocated through a Community Development Block Grant cannot be used to rehabilitate the house.
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At the workshop, attorneys from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the Land Loss Prevention Project will review the risks of owning heirs' property and some ways for property owners to protect their land. Those attending will be invited to ask questions about property ownership, wills and other related matters.
Reservations for the workshop are not required, but the sponsors ask that interested persons call the Planning Department at 947-5010 prior to the workshop. There are no plans to serve refreshments, but advance notice will help the department to complete arrangements for the workshop to begin at 10 a.m. and end by noon.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) promotes justice by empowering minority and low income communities to defend and advance their political, social and economic rights. SCSJ uses the combined skills of lawyers, social scientists, community organizers and media experts to help under-represented people to develop strategies to achieve their visions for themselves and their communities, incorporating an international human rights perspective and linking their efforts to broader processes of political, legal, social and economic change in the South.
The Land Loss Prevention Project was founded in 1982 by the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers to curtail epidemic losses of land owned by blacks in North Carolina. It was incorporated in 1983.
The organization broadened its mission in 1993 to provide legal support and assistance to all financially distressed and limited resource farmers and landowners in North Carolina.
The Senior Enrichment Center is on U.S. 15-501 about two miles north of the Pinehurst Traffic Circle.
We’re pleased to announce that Becky Jaffe has just joined the Southern Coalition as a fellow focusing on the heirs’ property problem. Heirs’ property refers to property that has passed down through successive generations of family members who have died without a will. As the property passes to each new generation, more and more people come to own the property in increasingly small, fractional interests. This ownership structure is a huge cause of black land loss in the South. Families often lose their land through bankruptcy proceedings, tax sales, foreclosure, and partition sales. Becky will work with staff attorney Chris Brook, using a combination of mediation, consensus-building, and legal skills, to help families with heirs’ property protect their land.
Becky graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School. In the fall of 2009, she served as a lecturer for the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Before attending law school, she served in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan, where she worked with rural Uzbek villagers to help them improve health conditions in their community. She received her B.A. from Yale University. Becky first worked with the Southern Coalition in the spring of 2009 as a clinical student from the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (http://www.law.harvard.edu/academics/clinical/hnmcp/web/index.html). The clinical project involved helping the Pitt family resolve internal differences and formulate a plan for protecting their land. (
To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks.
Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw from this office, are dressed in their everyday summer attire, T-shirts and shorts. But when they begin pulling maps off printers, Parnell and Joyner step decidedly out of the last century. "Our daughter tells people we work for the CIA, because what we do is so hard to describe," Parnell says, only half-joking.
Joyner displays a series of maps showing the Coal Run neighborhood, a handful of streets located just outside the city limits of Zanesville in central Ohio. The first map provides a simple baseline, showing the city water plant and the boundary between the city and Coal Run, a part of Muskingum County. The second map adds water lines, which serve only the northern half of Coal Run. Successive maps add the residences in Coal Run, note which residences have water and which don't, and break down their occupancy by race.
The last map puts all the data together, and the picture suddenly comes into sharp focus: Almost all the white households in Coal Run have water service, while all but a few black homes do not.
The institute's maps played a vital role in a federal jury's decision last year to award the excluded Coal Run residents almost $11 million in damages from the city of Zanesville and Muskingum County. The supporting evidence was strong on its own: African-American residents without water had made repeated requests over a period of almost 50 years to remedy the inequity, to no avail. Instead, they had to haul water from the plant or pump it from wells contaminated with sulphur and oil from old mining operations. In the interim, Zanesville had extended its water lines on numerous occasions to new, predominantly white developments that were farther away from the water plant than Coal Run.
But the maps provided something that the narrative and statistics lacked, says civil rights attorney Reed Colfax, who represented the Coal Run residents. "We could articulate the case in words," Colfax says. "But when you'd put up the maps, they'd stop listening to you and look at them [as if to] say, 'Is this really possible?'"
The Cedar Grove Institute has been using maps to exhibit patterns of municipal discrimination against low-income and minority communities for almost a decade. The patterns, rooted in the days when residential discrimination was supported by law, have been reinforced under the cover of such contemporary land-use mechanisms as annexation, zoning and extra-territorial controls.
To produce the maps, the institute employs geographic information systems technology, a computer-based tool for organizing, analyzing and displaying data in a spatial or geographic context. While the maps seem simple, producing them is anything but. Data must be collected from a host of sources, including government databases, door-to-door surveys and Global Positioning System devices. The data is digitized, analyzed, converted to images and layered together in various combinations.
Once the exclusive province of government, industry and academia, GIS technology has evolved rapidly since the 1980s, paralleling exponential gains in computer power and capacity. Affordable, user-friendly GIS software, online-mapping systems and the explosion of government data available on the Web have combined to speed the spread of GIS into the public arena.
This democratization of GIS has spurred new thinking about its potential application at the grassroots, rather than institutional, level. University of North Carolina School of Law Dean Jack Boger has worked with the institute on some of its municipal discrimination cases and concluded that the phenomenon of exclusion knows few geographic boundaries. "This is a problem of nationwide scope," Boger says. "The evidence is, in effect, irrefutable."
The exclusion of poor and minority communities from municipal services is but one social ill that GIS mapping can illustrate and help alleviate. Today, an increasing number of academics, attorneys, nonprofits and community groups are using maps to identify social problems, devise solutions and leverage change. GIS is being deployed to combat discrimination and inequities in education, health care access, housing, employment opportunities, transportation and law enforcement. "You're not up to date in social justice advocacy if you don't know how to use GIS maps," says Anita Earls, director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, N.C.
Still, GIS is in its relative infancy as a popular science, and public awareness of its attributes and capacity is relatively low. Although most people have been exposed on the Internet to such GIS-based products as Google Maps, few can identify the technology behind them. Sarah Elwood, a geography professor at the University of Washington who has spread the GIS gospel to community groups, often encounters a baseline ignorance of the concept. "You say 'GIS' and people say, 'Oh, yeah, I have one of those in my car,'" Elwood says.
The dots on the GIS-awareness map may be sparse, but those who have experienced the transformative power of GIS mapping have no doubt that the technology will eventually become firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. "People are jaded with statistics, and even more jaded with pie charts and graphs," says Keith Ernst, research director at the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, which has used maps to identify patterns of predatory lending in low-income communities. "But if you put the information on a map, people are more willing to hear what you say. We're visual creatures, and seeing is believing."
Allan Parnell recalls the day he first grasped the sweeping potential of GIS-based advocacy. Parnell was giving a talk at the University of North Carolina law school about the institute's first municipal discrimination case, which involved his hometown of Mebane, N.C. As in Zanesville, residents of largely minority neighborhoods outside Mebane's boundaries lacked water, sewer and other basic town services, despite decades of requests for relief.
Meanwhile, the town had annexed and provided services over the years to a hodgepodge of overwhelmingly white, affluent satellite developments that were farther away from the town center than the minority neighborhoods. This pattern of annexation and exclusion, dubbed "municipal underbounding" by University of Tennessee geography professor Charles Aiken, created virtual islands of poverty and neglect within the town.
After the presentation, a group of black students approached Parnell with similar stories of their own. "They told me, 'This is happening in my grandmother's town,'" he says. "That was the light-bulb moment: This isn't just one case; it's a pattern."
A geographer by training with advanced degrees in sociology and demographics, Parnell had used GIS in health-related studies for the National Academy of Sciences and other agencies beginning in the late 1980s. He and his wife, Ann Joyner, formed a company in 1999 that specialized in GIS-based health research. But Parnell, a self-described "conflict-avoiding academic," had had little opportunity or inclination to agitate on behalf of the disadvantaged.
One day in 2001, Parnell took a call from a community organizer in Mebane who was trying to stave off a highway bypass that would run through the heart of his neighborhood. Would Parnell assist him with a grant application? He met with the organizer, who detailed Mebane's methods of using town boundaries to disenfranchise the neighborhood while controlling its destiny through the use of extra-territorial jurisdiction, an area adjacent to city limits over which municipalities can exert some influence. "I just sat there with my jaw on the floor for three hours," Parnell says.
Parnell and Joyner agreed to create a visual and statistical profile of the town using standard GIS methodology. The first task was to gather the mountain of data that would be relevant. A former journalist and real estate developer, Joyner knew where to find comprehensive land-use and infrastructure information. Mebane's public works department provided the locations of water and sewer lines. From the planning department they obtained historical annexation documents. Federal census data broke out racial and economic variables at the block level. They reviewed city council meeting minutes for evidence of action and inaction on service and annexation requests.
Using stock GIS software, Parnell and Joyner digitized the mass of data in compatible formats — a major undertaking in itself — and analyzed it. To produce the maps, they enlisted Bucknell University GIS expert Ben Marsh, a former graduate school classmate of Parnell's. The three published a case study of Mebane in 2003 and shared it with Jack Boger, then-deputy director at the UNC Center for Civil Rights. "What was immediately apparent was how clear the relationship was between the exclusion of services and the racial makeup of the community," Boger says.
Inspired by the Mebane study and law school experience, Parnell and Joyner formed the nonprofit Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities and in 2004 won a foundation grant to map communities throughout North Carolina. They found patterns of exclusion similar to those identified in Mebane across the state.
The institute's maps of Moore County, home to some of the nation's most prestigious and affluent golfing communities, were among their most dramatic examples of underbounding. The maps show the boundaries of three county municipalities, Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen, a tortured maze of red lines that zigzag in all directions, creating angular amoebas.
A batch of dark brown blotches stand prominently outside the limits of all three towns, though they are hemmed in or virtually surrounded by the three towns. The blotches represent communities with overwhelmingly African-American populations and names — Lost City, Monroe Town and Jackson Hamlet — that evoke images of the Jim Crow era.
The maps also show the distribution of sewer lines in the county, which either stop at town borders or go through them but provide no hookups beyond, so the communities outside the town limits have no sewer service. Annexations over the years have swallowed acreage all around the three towns but carefully avoided the minority neighborhoods.
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Parnell and Joyner add a sobering narrative to the maps that magnifies the extent of the exclusion of the communities outside town limits: Septic systems have routinely failed, spilling raw sewage next to homes. Residents lack the garbage service enjoyed by people who live in town and must instead pay for a costly private hauler or burn their trash at home. In the Midway community, neighbors watch garbage trucks cut through their main street to serve the citizens of Aberdeen, who live to either side. Police protection is provided by the county sheriff's department, which must travel as much as 15 miles to respond to emergencies — even though municipal police stations are much closer, in some cases just blocks away.
The maps became an integral part of a successful campaign to eliminate the most odious aspects of exclusion in Moore County, and not just in terms of educating decision-makers. For the community groups involved in the campaign, the maps offered a kind of external validation that their narrative alone could not provide. "For me, they were a verification of what I've always known," says Maurice Holland, president of the Midway Community Association and a lifelong resident of the neighborhood.
Since then, the institute has extended its reach beyond state lines. Presentations at conferences and workshops have connected the institute with attorneys working on municipal discrimination cases in California, Virginia, New York, Florida and Texas. While some of the cases center on underbounding, others address additional ways by which municipalities discriminate. In the Florida case, Guatemalan residents in the city of Lake Worth demonstrated that selective code enforcement resulted in the targeting of Latinos for eviction. An analysis of redevelopment efforts in Portsmouth, Va., showed that white residents and developers were the primary beneficiaries of the city's largesse, while black communities were systematically wiped from the landscape to make way for land uses that generated more tax revenue.
And in Dallas, African-American and Latino residents in the inaptly named community of Cadillac Heights sued the city for using zoning regulations to segregate them in an industrial sector — a pattern that traced back to the 1940s, before the influx of Latinos to the city, when land records denoted minority residential areas with the letter "N." Living next to industrial facilities had predictable consequences for residents: chronic health problems, a dearth of public services and permanently depressed property values.
In each instance, GIS maps have proven instrumental in either making the case that discrimination had occurred or influencing the outcome of a government decision about the discrimination. The city of Dallas, for example, settled with the residents and agreed to relocate them to more hospitable environs. Attorney Mike Daniel, who represented the plaintiffs, credits the maps with tipping the balance. This was the second suit brought by residents for the same cause, he notes, but the first one had ended with a nominal settlement that did not remedy the problem. "The history of the two cases was the same," Daniel says. "The only difference was Cedar Grove's work."
Most of the Cedar Grove Institute's recent GIS work has been for attorneys in support of municipal discrimination lawsuits, but the law offers few remedies in such cases. Provisions in the federal Civil Rights, Fair Housing and Voting Rights acts prohibit discrimination based on race and other factors, but local circumstances don't often fit neatly into one of those provisions, and proving that the law was violated is no simple endeavor. Moreover, to win in court, plaintiffs must prove that the discrimination was intentional.
Only a handful of states offer similar protections against discrimination. Further constricting the playing field is a counterintuitive reality: Local government practices that result in exclusion and inequity are, for the most part, legal. Annexation laws, for example, usually permit municipalities to make annexation decisions based on economic considerations. If an annexation provides a net economic benefit, the city can move forward; if the costs of providing services to the annexed territory exceed new tax revenues, the city is free to say no.
And the time and expense of a legal case — often measured in years and millions — are prohibitive for the communities most likely to be the object of discrimination.
Because of these hurdles, some advocacy groups with a GIS focus deploy their maps in the service of less adversarial strategies. The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University engages in "opportunity mapping," which begins with the assumption that opportunities for high-quality housing, employment, education, health care and other key indicators should be distributed equally throughout a given metropolitan area. Kirwan maps identify disparities in the distribution of opportunities, which in turn provides direction for policymakers to correct those disparities.
In a similar vein, the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project takes a solution-oriented approach with its mapping initiative, the Healthy City Project. An interactive, online compendium of demographic, economic and health data for Los Angeles County, Healthy City also pinpoints the location of services for referral purposes and lets users create maps to identify concerns in their own neighborhoods. Developed in collaboration with an innovative GIS lab at UCLA, the Healthy City platform is so advanced that stakeholders often consult with project staff to inform policy debates and decisions.
Healthy City was hired by the city to produce maps in conjunction with an initiative to shift the approach to gang violence from enforcement and suppression to prevention. Healthy City produced maps that showed gang hot spots as well as services available to young people; the maps helped the city target areas where services were in shortest supply for additional investment. "We don't only want to show problems," says John Kim, who has directed Healthy City since its inception in 2002. "We want to show ways to solve those problems."
Historians cite ancient cave paintings of migratory game routes as a primitive geographic information system, the superimposition of data on a geographic image. An English physician mapped the location of London residents sickened by cholera during an outbreak in 1857, which he analyzed to identify the source of the disease. Advancements in photographic processes in the early 20th century enabled the creation of translucent images of geographically ordered demographic data that could be layered atop a map, a technique pioneered by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression.
Though these antecedents arguably combine geography and information into a kind of system, GIS is most commonly associated with sophisticated computer hardware and software, its origins dating back to the days of mainframes and punch cards. In 1962, the Canadian government unveiled the Canada Geographic Information System, a prototype that mapped select land-use variables throughout the country for planning purposes.
Private vendors began to sell off-the-shelf GIS software in the 1980s; a decade later, further refinements in those packages combined with a steady drop in hardware prices made GIS available to anyone with sufficient technical background and skill. The runway was clear for takeoff.
Commercial users were among the first to take advantage. Market researchers mapped demographic data on household income, population density and the location of competitors to choose optimal sites for retail expansion. Engineering firms mapped roads and infrastructure to streamline their projects.
Federal, state and local government agencies also found GIS an invaluable way to increase efficiencies. The time spent on planning, permitting and conducting environmental or health assessments could be cut to a sliver with accurate databases and maps. Law enforcement agencies mapped crime incidence; few government operations, in fact, did not benefit from a GIS application. One of the largest single repositories of government data, the U.S. Census, has likely launched more GIS maps than any other single data source.
Much of that government data has now been posted to the Web. For advocates using GIS, the flood of data has been a boon. Parnell says the Cedar Grove Institute would never have emerged from the conceptual phase without the ability to obtain government data. "We realized that there's a critical mass of data out there," he says. "Five years earlier, we couldn't have done it."
Not all local governments appreciate the rise of GIS-driven advocacy, especially when their own data is used as a hammer against them, and they have begun to restrict public access. Some have pulled data off the Web in the alleged interest of national security; others charge exorbitant fees to produce it or deliver jumbled masses of data that are difficult to manage or decipher.
Mebane, the Cedar Grove Institute's first case study of municipal discrimination, passed an Infrastructure Information Security Policy shortly after the study was published; the policy limited infrastructure data access to qualified engineering firms and town agencies. The city of Modesto, Calif., locked in a legal underbounding battle, pulled its infrastructure data off the Internet after the lawsuit was filed, citing national security grounds. "There's no conceivable national security interest in where the traffic lights are in Modesto," scoffs Ben Marsh, the institute's chief mapmaker. A recent appellate ruling in California rejected a similar national-security rationale, as well as a copyright argument by Santa Clara County, but whether that opinion stands as precedent remains to be seen.
Though restrictions on access to government data could prove troublesome, advocacy groups that use GIS have already been finding data sources outside of government. In particular, data collected by community residents have become an effective supplement to the "official story," as University of Washington professor Sarah Elwood calls government data.
Elwood has used GIS not only to map problems but to build the capacity of underserved and disadvantaged communities to advocate on their own behalf. Simple walking surveys that catalogue infrastructural deficiencies — potholes in sidewalks, missing stop signs, burned-out streetlights — fill gaps in the public record that mask actual conditions on the ground. With locally produced data, Elwood says, "You can tell a very detailed and very current, compelling story about neighborhood needs."
One of the few brakes slowing the GIS freight train, at least from an advocacy perspective, is the shortage of people who understand it well. "Obviously, there is a much greater demand for GIS than there are practitioners," says attorney Eric Schultheis, who coordinates The Race Equity Project for Legal Services of Northern California and counts himself among the GIS crowd. "You could probably count the number of people who are actually doing this work on both hands."
But given the leaps that GIS technology and applications have taken in the political and legal advocacy sectors, it's hard to imagine the GIS trend reversing. By January of next year, Healthy City plans to cover the entire state of California, and Kim says he's received expansion requests from other cities. Healthy City uses free, open-source GIS software that can be customized as needed. The ready supply of cheap hardware and software can only hasten the arrival of the day when GIS mapping is as universal as photo or music editing.
"The technology will soon become ubiquitous," Kim says simply.