Equity impacts
EJ communities are often less connected or live further from employment, making it more challenging to commute to work or run daily tasks without a car. They also face many barriers to adopting a less car-dependent lifestyle that needs community input and empowerment to help address. Concerns must be noted that improvements to public spaces, transit, sidewalks, and bike lanes could lead to increased housing prices.
Recommendations
- Target improvements in EJ communities, which often face greater barriers to adopting a car-free lifestyle, limiting their access to the economic benefits of a car-free lifestyle.
- Ensure necessary land-use improvements are prioritized in EJ communities so they may benefit first from the changes to implementing the strategy.
- Collaborate with and consider the feedback of community members for a more participatory strategy implementation.
- Consider additional areas of improvement in the context of land use and development like environmentally adaptive green spaces and roadways, rain gardens in parks, green roofs on newly constructed buildings, high efficiency heating and cooling, community water features, etc.
- Consider building more free, safe, and public third spaces in new and existing housing developments to enhance mixed-use neighborhood design and community resilience.
- Create a plan for getting unhoused people into safe, sustainable, long-term housing, and expand services for them.
- Any community improvements and investments in EJ communities should be complemented with housing stability and tenant supports and protections.
- Land use policies should be co-developed with the community to mitigate negative consequences and improve community wellbeing.
Partly reflected in the final plan. HL-4-7 focuses public-space activation on Priority Equity Geographies.