Equity through opportunity: Tacoma’s equity mapping tool helps inform decision-making

Tacoma’s comprehensive mapping approach to “operationalizing equity.”

Under the title of “Realizing Equity in Tacoma,” the description of the city of Tacoma’s new data-driven equity tool pulls no punches. The goal, it says, is to “transform into an antiracist city and reverse the inequities caused by the negative impacts of racist policies, practices, and zoning.” The tool works in tandem with Tacoma’s Equity and Empowerment Framework (adopted in 2014) and the city’s Tacoma 2025 strategic plan—a community vision designed with the input of over 2,400 Tacoma residents—to intentionally build equity into every aspect of the city’s work.

The overarching goals of the project are to identify racial disparities, increase transparency and accountability, and support data-driven decision-making at all levels.

According to the website, “[This tool allows us to] see where your projects, policies, programs, or services can have the largest impact on addressing inequity and where investment can provide the biggest improvement in factors that impact life outcomes. The City of Tacoma uses the Equity Index to identify, track, and close disparities, and to prioritize investments based on where and who has access to opportunity—for example, opportunity to safely walk to school, opportunity to earn a living-wage job, opportunity to access healthy food, and opportunity to have safe and health [sic] environmental interactions.”

The equity mapping tool is an interactive map that grades equity in the city on a scale from “very high” to “very low.”

Tacoma worked with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity to develop the calculations, based on 32 indicators within five determinant areas—including accessibility, economy, education, livability, and environmental health. These indicators were then aggregated and rolled up to assign a grade at the census block level on a map of the city.

Tacoma’s website points out that the Equity Index includes data for race and ethnicity, foreign populations, languages, and top countries of immigration, in addition to the map showing where people of color live. Nonetheless, some have questioned why race isn’t explicitly used as an indicator. The city’s response speaks to the maturity of thinking around Tacoma’s development of this tool:

“We don’t include race as an indicator because race is not the cause of low opportunity. Racism, especially systemic racism like redlining, racist covenants, and racist policies, have intentionally excluded people of color from opportunity. Racism is real and the data shows us that areas with higher opportunity have fewer residents of color and more white people than areas of low opportunity, which have more residents of color and fewer white people.”

Instead, they provide information on a host of different indicators:

The planners stress that despite the comprehensive nature of the mapping tool, it still has limitations, and they advise against assumptions. “For example, areas that show up as high opportunities should not be regarded as not needing any investment, as a deeper dive...may show they have great natural amenities but lack employment opportunities.”

The tool can be used to help plan anything from levels of investment to community engagement, and the city recommends that anyone using it fully engage with the data to gain more depth of understanding. To do that, they recommend that the tool be “paired with a deeper analysis which can include community voice, specific data, analysis of other factors and impacts.” Nonetheless, the tool is both comprehensive and science-driven, reducing the need for individual project managers and decision-makers to collect, analyze, and compare a wide array of potential, partial, and unaligned information options.

According to the web page, Tacoma’s Equity Index has been used for:

• Housing: Incentivizing the building of affordable housing in high opportunity areas and incentivizing development in moderate and low opportunity areas.
• Infrastructure: Prioritizing the installation and placement of streetlights based on equity score combined with crime data, sidewalk information, and current lighting conditions.
• Funding: Providing an additional scoring component to assess where and whom to award grants.
• Historical preservation: Using as a factor in decision-making to increase historical preservation projects across the city.
• Event planning: Informing community engagement efforts by learning more about neighborhoods and communities—for example, transit access, household internet access, and household vehicle access— to learn how to best accommodate a community for a city event.
• Language access: Increasing language access and understand demographic information. For example, Tacoma Waste Management used the Equity Index to learn more about communities where they saw the most contaminated recycling. They learned that those areas have a high foreign population and a high number of households who speak limited English. They launched a pilot project to translate information and materials into languages that matched the community and to design community engagement efforts that were culturally relevant, which resulted in a significant drop in recycling contamination.

This equity mapping tool represents a significant leadership investment in a resource that other cities can replicate to begin addressing inequities that have long plagued our collective systems.

Source: This article was written using information and data available on Tacoma’s website.