DISCLOSURE: KEY WEAPON FOR NEIGHBORHOODS
By Neal R. Peirce

Could the clean light of disclosure provide more equity in highway and public transportation spending -- just as it helped stamp out discrimination in home mortgage lending?

A quarter century ago, history's first-ever national-level lobbying by groups speaking for America's inner city and minority neighborhoods took aim at the practice of "redlining" entire neighborhoods by federally-regulated banks.

Result: the Home Mortgage Disclosure and Community Reinvestment Acts -- measures that virtually eradicated redlining through public recording of mortgage-lending and penalties for non-cooperating banks.

Strengthened by Congress in the late 80s and then enforced vigorously by the Clinton administration, the measures are one factor in a sensational 80 percent rise in home loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers between 1993 and 1998.

Overall, 68.8 percent of Americans now own their homes -- the highest figure in history. That heartening news is eclipsed only by concern than blacks and Hispanics, while gaining, still lag fairly significantly.

Some banks grouse about the regulations, and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (Rep.-Texas) has sought to gut the Community Reinvestment Act. Yet the home mortgage industry hasn't suffered from broader lending; indeed, it's prospered.

And now comes a tantalizing prospect -- that disclosure can produce for public transportation spending some of the benefits it's brought to mortgage lending -- ways to follow the trail of the money, identify winners and losers, and level the playing field.

Technically, government-funded transportation projects are public record, but often in such obscure formats that only experts can decipher them. Yet the issues-- a new highway potentially decimating a neighborhood, repair of old urban roads versus new suburban highways, public transit to get people to work -- make huge differences in peoples' lives.

The groundwork for change was laid in the big 1991 federal transportation bill called ISTEA -- the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Act. Instead of blindly funding highways alone, the measure tried to focus on peoples' full mobility needs, on repair as well as new construction, on transit capital spending as well as roads and bridges. ISTEA also devolved decision on individual transportation projects from Washington and state highway departments to so-called metropolitan planning organizations.

Lots of credit for ISTEA went to an alliance of environmental, historic preservation and rails-to-trails groups called the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP), which worked closely with ISTEA's chief author, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

When ISTEA came up for renewal in 1998, the lobby forces also included a brand-new Transportation Equity Network (TEN) that included allies and descendants of the very same groups that fought real estate redlining for years. Led by the Washington-based Center for Community Change, they included such players ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), HART (Hartford Areas Rally Together) and MAC (Metropolitan Alliance of Congregations of Chicago).

"Open the door and let the light flood in!" cries this group. "List every proposed road or project -- We want to see justification, its cost, its status. And we want to see clearly, on a map, where it's at."

TEN's clear intent, with that kind of information, was to demonstrate the kind of imbalances, across the nation, that an affiliate, the Interfaith Federation, discovered in Northwest Indiana.

Despite high poverty levels in the Gary orbit, the Interfaith Federation found that of the $880 million the Northwest Indiana Regional Planning Council plans to invest in transportation in the next 20 years, less than 1 percent was designated for buses critical for mobility of the region's low-income people. The Federation now has hard facts to demand a refocus of transportation dollars to serve all classes and curb the sprawling growth that's exacerbated outward migration of jobs and tax base.

TEN's Washington-focused lobbying paid off. Enacted by Congress in 1998, the new TEA-21 (Transportation Equity Act of the 21st Century) requires each metropolitan planning organization to list and publish, each year, all its projects receiving federal transportation assistance -- $217 billion over six years.

The Transportation Department is writing the disclosure regulations right now. The critical issue, says David Beckwith of the Center for Community Change, is how complete and comprehensible the disclosure is:

"We want a national information clearinghouse-- an information pyramid with metropolitan planning organizations collecting and maintaining basic project information with full accessibility, real transparency to the public. We want to be able to compare data across regions or states. For any project, any citizen should be able to check its justification, location, cost, status. And in this information age, he should be able to locate it on a map, using a GIS (geographic information system) from his own home computer."

TEN and its allies believe that no matter what, disclosing all transportation projects will trigger full and informed debates, curb wasteful sprawl, and most importantly, let poor people and excluded neighborhoods gain a voice where their critical interests are at stake -- but their voice has rarely been heard.