The Kresge Foundation and the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) recently co-hosted the Roundtable on Centering Community in Infrastructure Implementation in Detroit, Michigan. This two-day convening centered on the imperative to center the voice and vision of community in the implementation of President Biden’s Investing in America-funded projects, especially those at the intersection of infrastructure, health equity and environmental justice.
The Roundtable was attended by senior officials from USDOT and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), along with officials from the Michigan Infrastructure Office, Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), the city of Detroit and community leaders from southwest and downtown Detroit.
The Roundtable played four major roles to inform community-centered implementation of infrastructure projects, both in Detroit and nationwide:
- To amplify the voices and priorities of community residents and leaders to inform how infrastructure projects can be implemented with the principles of racial equity, health equity and environmental justice at the forefront.
- To collectively problem-solve priorities identified by community and co-create solutions that require innovative, creative thinking across both the public and private sectors, and across all levels of government.
- To identify how the place-based resources and power of the federal government – across multiple agencies – can be streamlined, address longstanding community priorities, and solve for challenges faced in implementation by state and local partners.
- To examine how Detroit can be emblematic for cities across the U.S. that are seeking to address interwoven issues of infrastructure, health and environment, sharing lessons to inform how other communities might solve a similar set of issues.
Grounded in equity
The first day of the two-day convening focused on the intersection of freight transportation, health equity and environmental justice in southwest Detroit, a focus of USDOT’s Thriving Communities Program (TCP). The Roundtable built on over a decade of organizing by community leaders who have advocated about issues of truck traffic causing significant air pollution, damage to roads and homes, and road safety issues on residential streets in southwest Detroit.
These neighborhoods have some of the highest rates of child asthma in the state. USDOT is supporting an emerging cross-sector coalition catalyzed by the city of Detroit’s participation in TCP to address this myriad of challenges. Roundtable participants toured southwest Detroit, enabling partners to see the opportunities, challenges and cumulative impacts of industrial uses, trucking and freight, and expanding transportation demands of a busy international land border in the context of the neighborhoods in which it sits.
The second day was focused on other major federally-funded infrastructure projects in the greater downtown Detroit core, including the I-375 reconnecting community project, which hold the power to transform and repair neighborhoods from past harms. The Roundtable was an opportunity to further acknowledge how infrastructure contributed to the loss of the civic and cultural vitality in many neighborhoods, especially those in communities of color in cities across the U.S. It provided space to discuss how cross-sector solutions might seek to repair those harms and reimagine the future trajectory of the city’s greater transformation through a series of major infrastructure projects in close proximity.
Community leaders heard from Christopher Coes, acting undersecretary for policy at USDOT; Mariia Zimmerman, principal deputy assistant secretary for policy at USDOT; and Karim Marshall, senior advisor for environmental justice at the EPA, about how place-based federal resources must be grounded in equitable, community-centered manners that not only address the physical needs for infrastructure, but the human needs of residents, addressing the fundamentally intersecting issues of health and environment, and how infrastructure can both improve – but also be detrimental to – health and well-being. They also heard from Rip Rapson, president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, who reiterated the importance of a strong nonprofit sector in working alongside government to develop and implement infrastructure projects, in order to ensure the voices of residents can continue to be central to those projects.
Participants from the city of Detroit shared ongoing efforts to engage public and private sector partners in a number of projects that range from trucking, port modernization, housing mitigation and framework plans to address the multifaceted impacts of these infrastructure systems on quality of life. Similarly, MDOT and the Michigan Infrastructure Office provided updates on I-375 implementation, including how the I-375 project has evolved in response to community feedback, and the opportunities to explore how project delivery and community outreach can be further enhanced through partnership and coordination across project teams working on federal, state and locally funded projects.
Identifying solutions, making commitments
The Roundtable provided an opportunity for participants to identify and co-develop solutions bringing the full power of the federal government in identifying financial, regulatory and enforcement tools that could be tapped to address community-identified needs and overcome obstacles and gaps in the translation of federal policy to local delivery. Most importantly, it was an opportunity to listen and engage with community leaders as authentic partners and peers – asking thoughtful questions to deeply understand their context, their needs and their vision, and to understand the partnerships being forged at the local level to work across siloes and jurisdictions toward common goals.
Moving forward, Kresge and USDOT, along with state and local government partners, commit to:
- Creating additional cross-sectoral spaces for problem-solving, building on the unique opportunity from the convening to bring together all layers of government alongside nonprofit and community partners. This includes potential opportunities to expand this effort to other cities, and/or to deepen engagement in Detroit to continue to problem-solve issues identified during the Roundtable.
- Working with state and local partners to take action towards addressing the identified local challenges, including opportunities to mitigate challenges through flexibility in federal funding or engaging with agencies further to clarify how regulatory guidance can solve key implementation issues.
- Learning from local implementation partners across state and municipal jurisdictions where there may be opportunities for continued policy innovation, communication and advocacy to achieve shared goals that push against long-standing norms and bureaucratic processes and navigate the overlapping political cycles across each level of government.
- Continuing to leverage the convening and accountability power of government, ensuring that issues of health equity and environmental justice are not siloed from implementation of infrastructure projects, and holding our state and local governments accountable where appropriate to address those key issues as projects are executed.
- Partnering to strengthen the trust in government. We heard from our local partners and community leaders that government must repair and rebuild trust. We also heard that government can provide a source of hope for community members to see in practical ways how their vision can become reality. There is an opportunity to find avenues to reduce the friction between the way transportation systems and implementation processes have operated in the past that worked against many shared goals, towards improving the impact of major projects and making it easier for staff to find success in transforming government across levels in service of the communities they support.
- Exploring a larger platform for communications and storytelling that builds beyond the for-profit media ecosystem, getting beyond reductive headlines that focus on conflict and points of tension, to uplift solutions-oriented stories that conveys the depth and complexity of this work of systems transformation in a way that is accessible and relevant to the public.
The Detroit Roundtable provides a blueprint for similar partnerships throughout the country. Historic levels of federal infrastructure investment create powerful opportunities for other place-based organizations to work alongside federal partners to convene and create spaces for authentic engagement and collective problem-solving, where community and government across all levels can join together in search of lasting solutions that ensure infrastructure can be a catalyst for racial equity, health and environmental justice.
Monica Williams is a board member of the Society of Professional Journalists and has worked as an editor at The Wall Street Journal, The Detroit News, The Boston Globe, National Geographic, Bridge Michigan and BridgeDetroit.