Why the wrong side of the tracks is usually the east side of cities Stephen DeBerry
I came to talk about first principles
and communities that I love –
especially East Palo Alto, California,
which is full of amazing people.
It’s also a community
that’s oddly separated
by the 101 freeway
that runs through Silicon Valley.
On the west side of the freeway
in Palo Alto are the “haves,”
on just about any dimension
you can think of:
education, income, access to water.
On the east side of the freeway
are the “have-nots.”
And even if you don’t know East Palo Alto,
you might know the story
of eastside disparity,
whether it’s the separation
of the railroad tracks in East Pittsburgh
or the Grosse Pointe Gate in East Detroit
or East St. Louis,
East Oakland, East Philly.
Why is it that communities on the social,
economic and environmental margin
tend to be on the east sides of places?
Turns out,
it’s the wind.
If you look at the Earth
from the North Pole,
you’d see that it rotates
counterclockwise.
The impact of this
is that the winds in the northern
and the southern hemispheres
blow in the same direction
as the rotation of the Earth –
to the east.
A way to think about this is:
imagine you’re sitting around a campfire.
You’ve got to seat 10 people,
you’ve got to keep everyone warm.
The question is: Who sits with
the smoky wind blowing in their face?
And the answer is:
people with less power.
This campfire dynamic
is what’s playing out in cities,
not just in the US,
but all around the world:
East London; the east side
of Paris is this way;
East Jerusalem.
Even down the street from
where we’re sitting right now,
the marginalized community
is East Vancouver.
I’m not the only one to notice this.
I nerded on this hard, for years.
And I finally found a group
of economic historians in the UK
who modeled industrial-era
smokestack dispersion.
And they came to the same
conclusion mathematically
that I’d come to as an anthropologist,
which is: wind and pollution are driving
marginalized communities to the east.
The dominant logic of the industrial era
is about disparity.
It’s about haves and have-nots,
and that’s become part of our culture.
That’s why you know exactly
what I’m talking about
if I tell you someone’s
from the “wrong side of the tracks.”
That phrase comes from the direction
that wind would blow dirty train smoke –
to the east, usually.
I’m not saying every single community
in the east is on the margin,
or every community
on the margin is in the east,
but I’m trying to make a bigger point
about disparity by design.
So if you find yourself
talking about any cardinal direction
of a freeway, a river, some train tracks,
you’re talking about
an eastside community.
Now, the wind is obviously
a natural phenomenon.
But the human design decisions
that we make to separate ourselves
is not natural.
Consider the fact that every
eastside community in the United States
was built during the era
of legal segregation.
We clearly weren’t even trying to design
for the benefit of everyone,
so we ended up dealing
with issues like redlining.
This is where the government
literally created maps
to tell bankers where they shouldn’t lend.
These are some of those actual maps.
And you’ll notice how
the red tends to be clustered
on the east sides of these cities.
Those financial design decisions
became a self-fulfilling prophecy:
no loans turned
into low property tax base
and that bled into worse schools
and a less well-prepared workforce,
and – lo and behold – lower incomes.
It means that you
can’t qualify for a loan.
Just a vicious downward spiral.
And that’s just the case with lending.
We’ve made similarly sinister design
decisions on any number of issues,
from water infrastructure
to where we decide to place
grocery stores versus liquor stores,
or even for whom and how
we design and fund technology products.
Collectively, this list of harms
is the artifact of our more
primitive selves.
I don’t think this is how
we’d want to be remembered,
but this is basically
what we’ve been doing
to eastside communities
for the last century.
The good news is,
it doesn’t have to be this way.
We got ourselves into
this eastside dilemma
through bad design,
and so we can get out of it
with good design.
And I believe the first principle
of good design is actually really simple:
we have to start with the commitment
to design for the benefit of everyone.
So, remember the campfire metaphor.
If we want to benefit everyone,
maybe we just sit in a horseshoe,
so nobody gets the smoke in their face.
I’ve got to make a note
to the gentrifiers,
because the point
of this image is not to say
you get to roll into eastside communities
and just move people out of the way,
because you don’t.
(Applause)
But the point is,
if you start with this first principle
of benefiting everyone,
then elegant solutions may become
more obvious than you assume.
What are the elegant solutions
to close this gap
between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto
in Silicon Valley?
I’ve got to like the odds
of starting with EPA [East Palo Alto].
It’s in the middle of Silicon Valley,
the epicenter of innovation
and wealth creation.
If we can solve this problem anywhere,
it ought to be here.
And if we can solve the problems for EPA,
we could apply those solutions
to other eastside communities.
If you think about it, it’s actually
a massive investment opportunity
and an opportunity to drive
policy change and philanthropy.
But at the core, it’s this
fundamental design principle,
this choice of whether we’re going
to decide to take care of everyone.
And it’s a choice we can make, loved ones.
We’ve got the capital.
We’ve got technology on our side,
and it keeps getting better.
We’ve got some of the best entrepreneurs
in the world in this building
and in these communities right now.
But the fundamental question is:
What are we designing for?
More haves and have-nots? More disparity?
Or parity,
the choice to come together.
Because the reality is,
this is not the industrial era.
We don’t live in the era
of legal segregation.
So the punchline is,
there is no wrong side of the tracks.
And all I’m saying is,
we should design our economy
and our communities with that in mind.
Thank you.
(Applause)