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That was the framing question posed by Nexus Community Partners Executive Director Repa Mekha to more than 250 people who attended a public forum on Anchoring Equity to Achieve Sustainable Regional Development Outcomes last week. The forum, held at the Humphrey Institute, was sponsored by the Metropolitan Council, the Northwest Area Foundation and the three members of the Corridors of Opportunity Community Engagement Team: Nexus, the Minnesota Center for Neighborhood Organizing and the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability. As these groups consider potential impact of upcoming transitway development in the Twin Cities, they organized the forum to pose a series of questions: Do we need to trade economic growth for equity? Can we advance both at the same time? What if pursuing equity - in addition to being the right thing to do ‐‐ is actually the superior economic growth model?

The latter was the hypothesis offered by PolicyLink CEO Angela Glover Blackwell, a national expert on equitable policy development. PolicyLink's recent paper published in partnership with the Center for American Progress posits that the tradeoff between equity and economic prosperity is a false choice. Studies have shown that when a greater share of income is directed to the middle class, overall prosperity in the U.S. has increased. A study by renowned University of Southern California Professor Manuel Pastor also indicated that greater equality within metropolitan regions correlates with stronger regional growth.

So what does that mean for the Twin Cities region, which is expecting billions of dollars of public investment to develop a regional transitways system over the next 20 years? According to the speakers at last week's event, the Twin Cities region will be better off as a result of that investment if and only if equity is built into the decision‐making process at the outset of all transitway planning, rather than as an afterthought.

That's particularly important, according to University of St Thomas Prof. Nekima Levy‐Pounds, because of our region's serious racial disparities. Levy‐Pounds presented a series of data that painted a vivid picture of Minnesota's stark racial disparities in income, health, employment and other indicators. She told the crowd she once spoke to a young man in North Minneapolis who told her it was easier for him to walk down the street and buy a gun than to buy a piece of fresh fruit.

As Blackwell took the stage, she momentarily silenced the crowd by asking, "Are you embarrassed? Because I was listening to all that data and as an outsider, I was embarrassed for you."

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