It's still a challenge to find and keep minority planners

Theresa Damiani of the Phoenix, Arizona, planning department has had some success in hiring members of minority groups. Of the 45 planners in her department last year, 30 percent were Hispanic, African American, or Asian. "One day is successful, another day is not," Damiani says.

Success is important in Phoenix. In a population of 1.3 million, 34 percent are Hispanic and five percent black or African American, according to the 2000 census. (In the Census Bureau definition, Hispanics can be of any race.)

Damiani has tried a variety of recruiting methods: letters to universities that serve Hispanic students, recruitment at state planning conferences, the National Forum for Black Public Administrators, and Chicanos Por La Casa, a statewide community development corporation. She has run ads in the Arizona Republic, in Planning, on APA's Jobs Online, the Urban Land Institute website, and Planetizen, and she has talked to people in the Greater Phoenix Urban League.

"I tried really anything somebody said might work," says Damiani. Everything from mailing lists to contacts in other places may be a possible link to the ever-elusive planner of color.

Once she finds them, the trick is keeping them. They do not stay for long, Damiani says. "The zoning attorneys are stealing them. We get them trained and then they come in and take them." Better money, better hours, better benefits ‹ Damiani says city planners in Phoenix are going elsewhere to find minority planners.

Phoenix isn't alone. Planning departments across the country are hunting for minority planners, but the pool is small and the competition steep.

In some communities, it is essential to have minority planners on staff, says Chandra Foreman, AICP, a planner for the city of Lakeland, Florida, and a former AICP commissioner. "Our staffs need to be diverse, to have an understanding of the people," she says.

In Fort Worth, Texas, the city planning department has been "reasonably successful" at putting together a staff that reflects the racial composition of the community, says director Fernando Costa, AICP . Fort Worth has 535,000 residents, 30 percent Hispanic and 21 percent black.

The proportion of African Americans in the department is probably greater than in the city as a whole, Costa says, but the reverse is true for Hispanics. "It's been more challenging to recruit qualified Hispanic candidates. It seems as though trained Hispanic planners tend not to be so plentiful in the job market as one might wish," he says.

Of 23 positions in the department, two were vacant at the end of June. Ten were filled by racial or ethnic minorities, according to the last department diversity report. How does Costa find quality candidates who are also people of color?

"We don't have any secrets," he says. "I don't pretend that we do things better than anybody else. We try to recruit broadly, try to be sure the pool of candidates is inclusive of people from varied backgrounds."

According to those in a position to know, there simply are not enough minority planners in the pipeline, so recruiting is starting at younger and younger ages.

Targeting students

Recruiters for planning departments and academic programs alike bemoan the fact that there are not enough African American, Asian, and Hispanic students interested in planning at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Younger age groups must be educated about what planning is and how the profession works, says Chandra Foreman. She herself had no idea: When she finished her undergraduate degree, she wasn't sure what she would do next.

"As I recall, I got off the elevator on the wrong floor and saw different studio projects" for the programs in planning, says Foreman. She went back to her apartment and read more about urban planning, eventually earning a planning degree at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

High schools and colleges may be the best places to begin recruiting, but many students don't realize that planning exists as a career option.

"Planning is a hard sell," says Frederick Steiner, dean of planning and architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. "Fourteen-year-olds wake up in the middle of the night and say, 'I want to be an architect'; 14-year-olds don't wake up in the middle of the night and say, 'I want to be a bureaucrat.'"

But the more visibility planning gets, Steiner says, the better the chance of attracting planners from minority groups for the long term. As planning issues appear in front page headlines, more youngsters will get interested in the profession. "I've seen an upswing of interest from kids in high school ‹ that's across the board, minorities as well," he says.

Steiner believes that obtaining a planning degree can be cost-prohibitive for minority students, and Leonardo Vazquez, AICP, agrees that the education requirements for a planner can be intimidating.

Vazquez, a planning and public policy instructor at Rutgers University, is also principal of Strategy One, a planning, communications, and management firm in Maplewood, New Jersey. The graduate degree requirement makes it difficult for lower income students to enter the profession, he says.

Getting people to stay

Once minority planners take planning jobs, especially in the public sector, it is difficult to keep them. Damiani in Phoenix finds her department poached by other communities and zoning attorneys. Foreman and Vazquez see minority planners becoming frustrated and leaving the profession altogether, although the evidence is anecdotal. There are apparently no statistics on how many minority planners leave the profession. "We do have a problem with retention, I believe, but no hard proof," says Vazquez.

Minority planners can feel trapped by what seem to be contradictory expectations. "People give a lot of lip service to diversity," says Foreman. "It can be really frustrating, sometimes, as a planner of color. A lot of planners feel they are just appeasing 'their communities,'" without having a chance to work with the community at large.

At the same time, she says, "planners have something to offer for all communities, although we can relate to those communities [of color]. It's an advantage for local government to have someone on their staff who can relate."

Foreman believes that planners as a whole are not prepared for the politics of planning. Many fight the battles for a while, then simply get frustrated and leave the profession, she says. Vazquez notes that many minority planners leave city service to join community development corporations or other organizations where they continue to do planning work, but no longer define themselves as members of the profession.

This affects how others see the profession. If folks in minority communities could see that planners can work for them as well as for "the other side," Vazquez says, "they'd have a more positive view. The growth of community planning would provide a more balanced view of planning for those in the neighborhoods," he adds.

Those who do stay in the profession say the lack of mentoring and networking by other minority members makes it difficult for them to feel that they belong and that they can break out of lower level jobs and move up, Vazquez says.

Informal insight and assistance given through those networks is essential to help anyone progress and learn the ropes, Vazquez says. "It's not racism," he says. "People tend to mentor people like themselves, who think like them, look like them, act like them."

Vazquez adds that the government sector has been far friendlier to planners of color than to other sectors. The problem is that government planners tend to be tracked into certain areas, he says.

"The irony is that in a smaller agency or private firm you can do more things, but may not have the support network," he adds. "You go to a larger place with mentorship or support, but you don't get to do as much and you may get into tracks where you are prevented from learning how to become a leader."

What can be done?

A "minority planning summit" at APA's National Planning Conference last April addressed two questions: Why are so few people of color in the planning profession, and what can be done to change this?

More than 100 people participated in the summit. The session produced piles of notes, says Mitchell Silver, AICP, deputy director for long-range planning in Washington, D.C., and an APA board member at the time. Silver is planning to compile a report on the summit for the board.

Although there was a good turnout, he says it had been hoped that more chapters and nonminority members would participate. "It shouldn't just be us," says Silver. There is talk of holding another summit, to "open the tent" and bring in more opinions and ideas, he adds.

Among the suggestions coming out of the session:

Improve the overall visibility of people of color in the profession, in Planning, and on the APA website.

Recognize historically black colleges that have planning programs, with chapters making greater efforts to reach out to those colleges and to minority planners in general.

Overcome a perceived lack of concern about the minority population and its issues, such as gentrification, redevelopment, and environmental justice.

Create a community development corporation focus to attract people engaged in planning who may not think of themselves as planners.

Address some of the issues minority planners deal with and the solutions developed on a day-to-day basis.

The informal agenda calls for improving pass rates on the AICP examination. Summit participants also want to identify practices that work and those that don't when companies and other organizations hire minority planners.

Mentors can help

One idea was to create more mentor programs. Like Vazquez, Silver says he often hears this suggestion. Yet, he says, attempts to establish a national mentoring program have not been successful.

Silver would like to take what was said at the summit and in surveys to discover the motive behind the request for mentoring: Do members want more mentoring opportunities on the national level, or is it more of a need in local workplaces?

Mentoring is on the APA agenda, and later this year the organization will initiate a web-based mentoring program. Students as well as professionals can take part, says executive director Paul Farmer, AICP.

Farmer also looks ahead to the next three national conferences, in San Francisco, San Antonio, and Philadelphia. In addition to highlighting diversity issues, the conferences will provide opportunities for minority planners to network and "learn from those who are truly role models in our profession," he says.

Vazquez says that there should be an effort by planners to mentor each other on a national level, but in reality, he notes, all mentoring is local. Planners need someone in the office, he says, no matter their ethnicity, to help introduce them to the office culture, to learn which activities are appropriate and which are discouraged.

"Unfortunately, if you are the only planner of color in a place, your mistakes tend to stand out more than those of others," says Vazquez. "What you do reflects on your community and other people like you, and that's a shame."

It's not simply a people-of-color issue, Vazquez says: Prejudices can exist in the workplace when a new planner comes from an unaccredited school, is of a different gender, or is from a different region of the country. Mentors help new planners avoid pitfalls, he says.

Retention and recruitment

APA is implementing new policies to retain more new planning graduates as members, Farmer says. Beginning this year, every student entering an accredited degree program at the graduate or undergraduate level will receive a year's free membership.

"We've had a good retention rate for students who have joined APA, and we believe that we'll keep most of them as members," Farmer says. "Yes, these students have already chosen planning, but we believe that they will have better information as they spread the word about planning as a career with their friends."

APA will also add information to its website to assist college career counselors, who already draw on its resources. Neither effort aimed directly at minority students, but Farmer and others hope that by getting the word out about planning, more students of all ethnicities will choose to enter the field.

Foreman believes that to lure more people, minority or otherwise, into the profession, APA needs to educate everyone about what planning is, how it can affect their neighborhoods, and the positive aspects of the profession.

"APA needs to change the perceptions; we do some great things," Foreman says. "People want to become doctors because they see what good doctors do. Lawyers say they became lawyers because they saw justice being done and they want to make a difference. We want people to go into planning to make a difference."

Sherrie Voss Matthews is a writer and editor based in Springfield, Missouri.