Tag Archives: diversity

New Municipal Engagement Tool for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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There is no doubt that this is an extraordinary and, for many, devastating moment in our history. It is a time of great loss but also of rapid rebuilding of our social support structures. To help mitigate the short-term economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and create strategies for long-term business and community recovery, Governor Phil Scott created the Economic Mitigation and Recovery Task Force. The task force includes leaders across Vermont from credits unions, power companies, job creators, and community leaders.

Art by HeART & Home participant, Holly Hauser

One of the tools to emerge from the Economic Mitigation and Recovery Task Force is this Tool for Municipal Engagement for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. As part of the task force’s work brainstorming and compiling resources for community recovery, this tool was created for municipalities and local leaders to help increase the vibrancy of their communities by creating a culture of inclusion. At the Fair Housing Project, we know that inclusivity and diversity in housing is critical to those efforts.

It is clear that health disparities and economic struggles have hit groups who have been historically marginalized the hardest, which is as true during the COVID-19 pandemic as it has been with preceding national emergencies. This new tool calls on municipalities and local leaders to first acknowledge the privilege that comes from being a part of the dominant culture, and to recognize that if no action is taken in the way outlined in this tool, policies will continue to benefit those in a dominant position.

The Fair Housing Project of CVOEO goes a step further to remind our readers that historically our Federal Government has gone so far as to enact policies to intentionally benefit white families and individuals, such as participating in red lining practices and by excluding people of color from the benefits of the GI Bill. Housing discrimination predates these policies, and though the Fair Housing Act was created to mitigate these discriminatory practices, housing discrimination continues to be a major issue across the country with the rollback of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule and the recent proposed rollbacks to protections for transgendered people experiencing homelessness.

In Vermont, the fair housing protections have been expanded to include seven additional protected classes, so in addition to it being illegal to deny housing based on race, color, country of national origin, religion, family status, sex and disability, it is also illegal to deny housing for gender identity, age, sexual orientation, marital status, receipt of public assistance, abuse sexual assault or stalking, and denial housing development based on the income of the prospective residents. The Tool for Municipal Engagement for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion calls on local leaders and municipalities to host conversations on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI), and guides readers to model resources across Vermont.

The tool also calls for municipalities to:

  • Ensure accessibility for people of varying abilities by designating a group to receive and address accommodation inquiries and complaints.
  • Invite new people to participate in municipal meetings in more accessible ways.
    • One of the ways to break down barriers to having an impact in municipal government for people from more marginalized or stressed communities is by doing outreach in a more equitable way. Front Porch Forum and working with mutual aid groups that have already organized are a few of the recommended ways to reach a broader range of people.
  • Consider ways to support economic development of Minority- and Women-owned Business Enterprises (MWBEs)
  • Evaluate opportunity for small-scale housing and business in local zoning. From the perspective of the CVOEO Fair Housing Project, starting a Housing Committee (with an emphasis on Fair Housing, of course) is a great way to meet this goal from the housing entry point. The video below includes more information on why a Housing Committee is critical in this moment, and you can find the Housing Ready Toolkit here
  • Create a Diversity and Equity Commission and support schools in curriculum development.
  • Translate materials into other languages, with the most common languages outside of English in Vermont being: French, Nepali, Somali, Swahili, Burmese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish.
    • Language access was a major gap in our state’s Covid response, but some grassroots organizers like Iceberg Consulting took matters in their own hands and were able to translate important materials for non-English speaking communities.
  • And lastly, to better understand which communities are being served and represented in municipal government, break down data on the programs the municipality administers by race, disability status, and other demographics.

Jobs and affordable housing, Part 1

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“Workforce housing” has become a popular term among housing advocates. Its definition varies, but for our purposes, it simply means affordable housing that’s fairly close to the workplaces of lower-and middle-income people.

Now, the ideal is that all the people who make a town’s economy run — the cashiers and the teachers, the home health-care aides and the police officers, the waitresses and the accountants, the secretaries and the tradespeople, from carpenters and plumbers to electricians — should all be able to live in town, if they want. That’s a form of population diversity — in skill sets, in housing options — that the Fair Housing Project wants to encourage: affordable housing for people of mixed incomes near their work sites.

winooski

Well then, one might well wonder how the job locations and the affordable housing units in Vermont match up … or don’t, town by town.

There’s no easy way to get at this, but here’s a proxy approach:

Look at municipalities that are employment centers and see how many units of subsidized housing they have.

Of course, “subsidized housing” typically refers to housing for people earning up to 80 percent of the median income, so it’s not the same as housing that accommodates a wide-ranging workforce of middle and above average incomes. But at least we can get an idea of which employment centers are more or less accommodating of lower-paid workers — the cashiers and personal care aides, for example, the two occupations with the most numerous openings in Vermont, according to the Department of Labor. We’ll assume that full-time cashiers and personal care aides qualify for subsidized housing. (Cashiers’ median hourly wage in Vermont last year was $9.73; personal care aides’, $10.99. By contrast, Vermont’s “housing wage” — the hourly rate needed to afford an average apartment without paying more than 30 percent of income– was $19.36.)

As for “employment centers” there were more than 80 Vermont municipalities that offered 500 jobs or more in 2014, according to Department of Labor statistics.

Of those, more than 30 had 2,000 jobs or more. Arbitrarily, we’ll call those the “major employment centers.”

To find out how many subsidized housing units each municipality has, we simply go to the Directory of Affordable Housing on the Housing Data website , pull up all the site-specific units for each town, and add them up.

With these two figures for each municipality — number of jobs and number of subsidized (affordable) housing units — we can derive a seat-of-the-pants workforce housing index: How many subsidized units for each 100 jobs. The higher the index, the more “workforce housing” that community provides.

Well, it turns out that all but one of Vermont’s major employment centers have a workforce housing index under 10 – that is, they each have fewer than 10 affordable housing units for every 100 workers.

The exception is Winooski, where the index is a whopping 24. (The city occupies a mere square mile, much of which is included in the aerial photo above.) Winooski had 2,799 jobs in 2014 and 687 subsidized housing units — the friendliest affordability ratio in Vermont by far.

Which major employment centers in Vermont had the fewest subsidized units? Stay tuned.