8 March 2021

 
The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing crises have laid bare how our current political economy is set up to reinforce, rather than combat, racial, gender, economic, and spatial inequality. In response, the intersectional racial and social justice organizing that has grown out of COVD-19 and the Movement for Black Lives has brought national attention to the need to conceptualize, build, and implement new solutions toward a regenerative economy within a green and equitable recovery frame.

However, loudening calls to advance social and racial justice have yet to be answered with commitments to structural change in Western New York. In just the past few weeks, a public agency in Hamburg greenlit nearly $7 million in tax incentives for Amazon to bring a few dozen low-wage jobs to the region. And a probe by New York State revealed ongoing practices of redlining, noting that racial and spatial disparities in mortgage lending in Buffalo constitute a “substantial [unsolved] societal problem.”

Lack of progress toward structural change is not necessarily due to state and local government inaction. Public agencies at both levels are actively engaged in meeting urgent COVID-related needs and reforming inequitable policies and practices. Unfortunately, an equitable, sustainable society cannot come from simple adjustments to unfair and discriminatory institutions. The path to a better world is one that collectively and continuously re-makes the systems from which inequitable institutions emerge. Transformative change requires a shift from focusing on events, like locally unwanted development projects, to understanding and democratically redesigning the structures that produce those events. Such change is the work not of reformers tweaking current institutions; but of re-formers collectively (re-)imagining and (re-)forming new ones.

One re-formative change that can begin answering the growing calls for social, racial, gender, and economic justice in Buffalo is a rights-based charter. To date, around 200 local governments across twelve states have passed rights-based ordinances or adopted rights-based charters or charter amendments. These tools leverage municipal home rule powers to institutionalize environmental rights, worker rights, rights of nature, and democratic rights into local government practices. Everywhere they are used, they aim to advance community powers of self-determination and community control over land use, planning, and development.

Codifying these rights and powers into Buffalo’s charter can be a giant step toward a more inclusive and democratic economy and society – and doing so is in reach. By state law, any of the Mayor, Council, or a citizen-driven ballot initiative can create a Charter Revision Commission in the here-and-now. Once seated, that Commission can begin widespread public education and outreach, collaborating with community stakeholders, in open and inclusive forums, to draft a rights-based charter.

If we are serious about “building back better” from COVID-19 through just, sustainable, equitable development and planning, then we ought to weave that commitment into the very fabric of our governing documents.

To read our full proposal for Chartering an Inclusive, Sustainable, Democratic City, read the December 2020 edition of High Road Policy.

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Russell Weaver, PhD, is Research Director at the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab. Jason Knight, PhD, AICP, is Associate Professor in the SUNY Buffalo State Geography and Planning Department.