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Problem, research strategy, and findings African American/Black and Hispanic/Latin/o/a/x practitioners are underrepresented in the planning profession. In this study we examine these practitioners’ experience with the climate for diversity in their workplaces. Drawing from a survey of 3,005 APA members, we show that African American/Black and Hispanic/Latin/o/a/x practitioners experience significantly higher rates of bias and discrimination than other groups. Interviews with 24 African American/Black and Hispanic/Latin/o/a/x planners across the United States reinforce the narrative that these racial and ethnic groups working in the planning field continue to face racism, discrimination, and microaggressions in the workplace, which affects the impact of their work in planning practice. Takeaway for practice Given the potential negative consequences of the lack of diversity and inclusion at work along with the presence of discrimination/microaggressions, our study shows that it is necessary not only to increase diversity in the workplace but also to create inclusive work environments. Practicing planners concluded that cross-cultural communication and antiracist training can help planners to plan with ethnically and racially diverse communities and practice inclusivity, both in the workplace among their colleagues and in communities of difference. But trainings will not be enough; for substantial change to occur, major shifts are needed in the profession as a whole, including in APA and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP).

Massive unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic could result in an eviction crisis in US cities. Here we model the effect of evictions on SARS-CoV-2 epidemics, simulating viral transmission within and among households in a theoretical metropolitan area. We recreate a range of urban epidemic trajectories and project the course of the epidemic under two counterfactual scenarios, one in which a strict moratorium on evictions is in place and enforced, and another in which evictions are allowed to resume at baseline or increased rates. We find, across scenarios, that evictions lead to significant increases in infections. Applying our model to Philadelphia using locally-specific parameters shows that the increase is especially profound in models that consider realistically heterogenous cities in which both evictions and contacts occur more frequently in poorer neighborhoods. Our results provide a basis to assess eviction moratoria and show that policies to stem evictions are a warranted and important component of COVID-19 control., Massive unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic could result in an eviction crisis in US cities. Here, the authors model the effect of evictions on SARS-CoV-2 epidemics, simulating viral transmission within and among households in a theoretical and applied urban settings.

Three-rung molecular ladder

In recent years, dynamic covalent chemistry (DCC) has seen the synthesis of increasingly complex cyclooligomers, polymers, and diverse compound libraries. The reversible formation of covalent bonds characteristic of DCC reactions favors thermodynamic product distributions for simple unitopic reactions; however, kinetic effects are increasingly influential in reactions of multitopic precursors. In this review, we explore the interplay between thermodynamic and kinetic considerations when planning a DCC synthesis. Computational models, typically based on reaction thermodynamics, have aided in predicting DCC reaction outcomes with moderate success. A clear direction for the field is to develop more robust computational tools informed by thermodynamic and kinetic driving forces that can predict product distributions in DCC reactions.

Many planning practitioners, faculty, and students have worked to address diversity and inclusion. However, only a few studies have examined specifically the ways in which African American and Lati...

Scholars define emerging gateway metropolitan areas in the United States as regions in which immigrant communities settled after the 1990s. Historically, immigrant and minority neighborhoods are characterized by exclusion from conventional sources of financial capital––factors which compound risks associated with residential instability and foreclosure. Yet, these new gateways may offer protection from foreclosure due to the relative affordability of housing and concentration of racial and ethnic and class advantages. We examine whether foreclosure risk is mediated through spatial processes, race, nativity, and class. We find that race and nativity play a major role in mediating risk across immigrant gateways. Neighborhoods with higher levels of Asian concentration presented lower risk, regardless of nativity and income. In contrast, Latino foreclosure risk varied by nativity, income, and gateway. Emerging gateways are also associated with higher foreclosure risk. Our findings inform resurgent ethnicity theory and how middle–class immigrant neighborhoods offer improved socioeconomic outcomes without relying on White areas as a standard for immigrant integration.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) serves more than 26 million U.S. tax filers every year. The EITC is distributed annually at tax time; however, past research suggests that lump-sum disbursements leave households with a lack of funds to deal with financial emergencies throughout the year. Drawing upon the data from a pilot program conducted in 2014–2015 in Chicago, this study analyzes how advanced periodic payments help mitigate financial instability for EITC recipients. Interview participants relate that advanced periodic payments result in a reduction in perceived stress, lower levels of debt, fewer unpaid bills, and the ability to engage youth in extracurricular activities. The findings provide a unique perspective on the ways in which low-income households cope with financial instability and stress and suggest that payment frequency options can play a small but important role in the way in which the EITC operates as a support mechanism.

The rational design of 3D structures (MOFs, COFs, etc.) is presently limited by our understanding of how the molecular constituents assemble. The common approach of using reversible interactions (c...

Hyperlocal relationships are internet-enabled interactions in a common locale. They are opening new frontiers for geographically based, community-oriented, and civically engaged action. However, the influences of virtual interactions over procedural aspects of sustainability projects are not fully theorized. To fill this gap, we examine whether anticipating the use of social media re-shapes how the community voice method (CVM) intervenes in deliberative spaces associated with waterway sustainability in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA). CVM is a video-based participatory research approach designed to foster inclusive and community-focused planning. Like most visual methods, it originated before the wide availability of interactive web 2.0 technologies. Our working hypothesis is that the intention to engage the public through online fora creates a new group of stakeholders who are poorly understood. As a result of analyzing field notes, audio-visual recordings of participants, and other documents, we find that anticipating the use of social media shapes all aspects of participation, including: awareness of context, group dynamics, interventions, outcomes of concern. Concern for the opinions and perspectives of hyperlocal participants re-shapes recommendations about how to align research projects with community needs and planning deliberation. Social media is an important outlet for the work, but changed the placement of video products in relation to waterway sustainability plans, especially with respect to environmental justice. We conclude by proposing a framework for hyperlocal sustainability research that appropriately emphasizes justice.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that about 80 million persons have been forcibly displaced within or outside of their country’s borders. As humanitarian organizations and host communities operate under increasing constraints, there is a growing need to identify targeting mechanisms that support a more coordinated humanitarian-development approach to the mobilization and distribution of resources. This study uses vulnerability assessment data collected by the UNHCR, WFP, and UNICEF from Syrian refugees in Lebanon, a country that hosts an estimated 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria and the highest per capita proportion of refugees in the world. The data are used to construct a multidimensional livelihood index (MLI) to identify refugee households who are currently poor. The MLI is then used to assess households’ vulnerability to future poverty using a standard approach for cross-sectional data. Specifically, a 3-stage Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) model is estimated to predict which households are expected to “fall into” or “out of” multidimensional poverty in the future. Our findings support the view that poverty is a dynamic phenomenon and not a static condition. The analysis allows us to identify more clearly which households and geographical locations are more vulnerable to experiencing prolonged poverty. This study is among the first to adapt the multidimensional poverty framework to the context of protracted forced displacement. It does this using a forward-looking approach to identify who, where, and how to target humanitarian assistance and development interventions more optimally, to prevent rather than simply alleviate immediate poverty.

Funding: We thank the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1052875, for supporting the workshop series ‘Socio-Spatial Ecology of the Bed Bug and its Control'. 1. Bed bugs have re-established themselves as a common household pest in the United States and pose significant public health and economic concerns, particularly in urban areas. 2. Documenting the scale of the bed bug resurgence and identifying the underlying predictors of the spatial patterns of their incidence is challenging, largely because available data come from biased self-reporting through local government code enforcement. 3. Here, we make use of a novel source of systematically collected data from periodic inspections of multifamily housing units in Chicago to investigate neighbourhood drivers of bed bug infestation prevalence in Chicago. 4. Bed bug infestations are strongly associated with income, eviction rates and crowding at the neighbourhood level. 5. That bed bug prevalence is higher in lower-income neighbourhoods with higher levels of household crowding and eviction notices provides unique empirical evidence of the disproportionate allocation of public health burdens upon neighbourhoods facing multiple dimensions of disadvantage. Publisher PDF

American universities are becoming globalized in curriculum and enrollment and benefit from international students who contribute to diversity. As the share of international students in planning programs has risen, little is known about their experiences beyond recruitment and how experiences as a “minoritized” group compare to domestic students of color. We report findings from interviews with graduate students in U.S. planning programs and compare international student experiences and perceptions with domestic students of color. We recommend ways that programs can improve international student retention and support the diversity of experiences that these students bring to U.S. planning programs.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) addresses the economic needs of low-income families, but its annual distribution in one lump-sum limits recipients’ ability to handle financial emergencies that arise throughout the year. We examine the relationship between an advanced periodic payment of the EITC and recipients’ wellbeing. We compare the perceived financial stress of recipients receiving a traditional lump-sum payment to a group that received four advanced payments spread throughout the year. Periodic payment recipients experienced significantly lower levels of perceived financial stress. This relationship was partly mediated by less need to borrow money, lower levels of food insecurity, and fewer unpaid bills. Therefore, periodic payments may enhance the positive association between the EITC and the financial wellbeing of families.

Bed bug outbreaks pose a major challenge in urban environments and cause significant strain on public resources. Few studies have systematically analyzed this insect epidemic or the potential effects of policies to combat bed bugs. Here we use three sources of administrative data to characterize the spatial-temporal trends of bed bug inquiries, complaints, and reports in New York City. Bed bug complaints have significantly decreased (p < 0.01) from 2014–2020, the absolute number of complaints per month dropping by half (875 average complaints per month to 440 average complaints per month); conversely, complaints for other insects including cockroaches and flies did not decrease over the same period. Despite the decrease of bed bug complaints, areas with reported high bed bug infestation tend to remain infested, highlighting the persistence of these pests. There are limitations to the datasets; still the evidence available suggests that interventions employed by New York City residents and lawmakers are stemming the bed bug epidemic and may serve as a model for other large cities.

Residential mobility processes remain largely a black box for housing policy researchers. Whereas neighborhood sociodemographic indicators provide insight into the types of push and pull factors th...

This paper examines residential mobility patterns of households living in low-income neighborhoods, paying close attention to the neighborhood characteristics that influence their mobility. Using several million records of household-level datasets for address change trajectories in the Chicago metropolitan area, this paper explores the relationship among movers and the associated neighborhood-level income differences between origin and destination locations, to interpret which households from low-income neighborhoods can use residential mobility to move up to more neighborhood conditions result in residential mobility outcomes to favorable neighborhood conditions and potentially end the cycle of poverty. This research finds the positive prospects for low-income neighborhood households to move up, while the characteristics (e.g., racial composition) of origin and destination neighborhoods play a significant role in relocation outcomes. In addition, housing mobility programs can have various impacts on households moving from neighborhoods of different income levels. Policymakers should be aware of the diverse needs of households in extremely low-income neighborhoods (less concentrated housing assistance) and in very low-income neighborhoods (public housing) that can help them move out of concentrated poverty and move up to neighborhoods with higher income spectrums.

The conversation regarding right sizing Flint’s (MI) infrastructure between Morckel (2020) and Sadler et al. (this issue) echoes a range of difficult conversations planners and others involved in g...

In this work, we report the stabilization of the reduced states of pyromellitic diimide by charge-balancing the imide radical anions with cationic pyridinium groups attached to the aromatic core. This structural modification is confirmed by single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis. Characterization by (spectro)electrochemical experiments and computations reveal that the addition of cationic groups to an already electron-deficient ring system results in up to +0.57 V shifts in reduction potentials, largely as a consequence of charge screening and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital-lowering effects. This formal charge-balancing approach to stabilizing the reduced states of electron-deficient pyromellitic diimides will facilitate their incorporation into spin-based optoelectronic materials and devices.

Since 2004, Moroccan authorities have promoted the development of new cities to provide affordable housing to low-income residents. A major objective of this policy is to provide a site for the resettlement of slum residents. As policymakers justify poverty alleviation and social inclusion to advance their agenda, residents facing displacement have shown substantial resistance to these resettlement programs. Tamesna, the second new city established under this policy, was mainly established to provide a resettlement site for approximately three thousand households living in informal settlements in the surrounding rural commune of Sidi Yahya Zaer (SYZ). Only two-thirds of the households had resettled in summer 2017, and the resettlement process was delayed as some residents refused to participate. This paper questions the factors that influenced the refusal of many households to participate in the resettlement process that was ostensibly designed to meet their housing needs. Using a combination of ethnography, archive review and interviews with the local population, and housing developers, the paper examines the different circumstances and factors that shape residents' reactions to the resettlement process. We conclude that the residents' demands for inclusion diverge from and transcend the authorities' plans for social housing provision in the new city of Tamesna.

Housing instability threatens to impair the United States’ policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic by undermining public health strategies such as social dista

The rational design of 3D structures (MOFs, COFs, etc.) is presently limited by our understanding of how the molecular constituents assemble. The common approach of using reversible interactions (covalent or noncovalent) becomes challenging, especially when the target is made from multivalent building blocks and/or under conditions of slow exchange, as kinetic traps and nonequilibrium product distributions are possible. Modeling the time course of the assembly process is difficult because the reaction networks include many possible pathways and intermediates. Here we show that rule-based kinetic simulations efficiently model dynamic reactions involving multivalent building blocks. We studied "strand escape from an [

Tenant housing choice is the cornerstone of the federal Housing Choice Voucher program. Housing choice should result in more diverse residential location choices for subsidized low-income households; however, these outcomes are not as strong as policymakers and researchers wish. Drawing upon spatial location data for voucher-subsidized households and a review of the existing literature on the Housing Choice Voucher program, this chapter argues for an expanded notion of housing choice that more fully acknowledges the role of landlords and housing authorities in shaping tenant location choices. This chapter also explores ways for policy designers to recognize and capitalize upon these alternate choice structures in posing program reforms.

This paper summarizes findings from a nationwide survey of degreeseeking urban planning students regarding the climate for diversity within their degree programs. This study examines urban planning student experiences in the classroom, with communities, and with professionals as they are trained to become planning practitioners. From May to October 2016, we surveyed 451 students and conducted in-depth interviews with 27 students. Our results show planning students are concerned that ‘the talk that we talk’ does not always match ‘the way that we walk’ – the values that we espouse in the classroom do not always translate into connecting these values to planning practice, particularly when engaging in diverse communities. These accounts reflect a pedagogical gap in planning education, which continues to be an area in need of improvement as the communities served by planners continue to become more diverse. Our findings offer implications and recommendations to reconcile these barriers for urban planning institutions.

Chicago's South Side has long been characterized as a “transit desert” – an area with high transit inaccessibility and insufficient infrastructure to meet residents' needs ( Jiao & Dillivan, 2013 ). Without adequate transit, residents cannot reach employment opportunities or regional amenities – contributing to economic, spatial, and social marginalization. The Chicago Transit Authority's proposed Red Line Extension (RLE) is designed to connect the city's far south side neighborhoods to Chicago's core. Given the scope of the RLE, 175 parcels have been chosen for demolition, meaning that a similar number of households face displacement to make room for the RLE right of way – which may have potentially negative consequences in realizing the subsequent benefits of improved transit access. In this article, we perform an ex-ante analysis of RLE induced displacement. Specifically, we: 1) predict potential location choices that transit displacees are most likely to choose; and 2) analyze these locations in relation to access to transit, amenities, employment, and housing affordability, among others. Within the context of transportation planning, ex-ante analysis is important because it can minimize unintended and negative consequences of transit-induced displacement – like decreased transit access and a loss of potential neighborhood improvements - by predicting potential relocation choices for displacees. Such predicted choices can help planners and decision-makers better understand the trade-offs for directly affected households and thereby allow planners and decision-makers to assist in relocation assistance that maximizes the benefits of the necessarily displaced.

We investigate the role of smart growth in household location choice in the Chicago region, using a discrete choice analysis. In the midst of continued region-wide suburbanization, households tend to move to neighborhoods with rich consumption amenities and high transit access. However, this study does not find evidence that the neighborhood’s physical compactness is a significant location factor. Location preference for compact, mixed-use, and transit-oriented neighborhoods is significantly affected by the life cycle stage and income level, but less influenced by generation and age. Millennial households show strong preference for amenities and transit access only before they marry and have children.

Chronic stress threatens an individual's capacity to maintain psychological and physiological homeostasis, but the molecular processes underlying the biological embedding of these experiences are not well understood. This is particularly true for marginalized groups, presenting a fundamental challenge to decreasing racial, economic, and gender-based health disparities. Physical and social environments influence genome function, including the transcriptional activity of core stress responsive genes. We studied the relationship between social experiences that are associated with systemic inequality (e.g., racial segregation, poverty, and neighborhood violence) and blood cell (leukocytes) gene expression, focusing on the activation of transcription factors (TF) critical to stress response pathways. The study used data from 68 women collected from a convenience sample in 2013 from the Southside of Chicago. Comparing single, low-income Black mothers living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence (self-reported and assessed using administrative police records) to those with low levels of violence we found no significant differences in expression of 51 genes associated with the Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity (CTRA). Using TELiS analysis of promoter TF-binding motif prevalence we found that mothers who self-reported higher levels of neighborhood stress showed greater expression of genes regulated by the glucocorticoid receptor (GR). These findings may reflect increased cortisol output from the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, or increased GR transcriptional sensitivity. Transcript origin analyses identified monocytes and dendritic cells as the primary cellular sources of gene transcripts up-regulated in association with neighborhood stress. The prominence of GR-related transcripts and the absence of sympathetic nervous system-related CTRA transcripts suggest that a subjective perception of elevated chronic neighborhood stress may be associated with an HPA-related defeat-withdrawal phenotype rather than a fight-or-flight phenotype. The defeat-withdrawal phenotype has been previously observed in animal models of severe, overwhelming threat. These results demonstrate the importance of studying biological embedding in diverse environments and communities, specifically marginalized populations such as low-income Black women.

Passed in 2001, Brazil’s Estatuto da Cidade (City Statute) requires municipalities to recognize the social value of space in addition to its economic value and has been hailed as a major protection...

Urban renewal has been criticized for its unintended effects on the displacement of residents to housing situations where they are worse off. The literature concerned with housing displacement focuses on after the fact (ex post) analysis of mobility, hence providing only partial insights to prospective outcomes for residents. In this article, we develop a methodology for predicting before the fact (ex ante) spatial location outcomes for residents facing forced displacement. We ask where in the city will displaced residents locate and how do potential new locations compare to the current one? We apply this methodology to an ongoing urban renewal project in Illinois in order to predict spatial relocation patterns. Our findings show that residents facing forced displacement are likely to relocate to low-priced neighborhoods that are on average as bad or worse off in terms of housing adequacy, accessibility to labor, and shopping. These findings not only bear important implications for urban redevelopment policy, but also help to reveal spatially determined costs of moving which are not factored into current redevelopment impact evaluations.

This article examines the Earned Income Tax Credit Periodic Payment Pilot and its effectiveness in reducing food insecurity for low-income households. Low-income families in Chicago who were eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit provided data over four waves of data collection between 2014 and 2015. We utilize longitudinal random effects logit models to test the likelihood of experiencing food insecurity. The sample was composed mostly by women with low educational levels. The intervention significantly decreased the likelihood of experiencing food insecurity over time (T2: β = −0.23, p = .581; T3: β = −0.89, p

This paper summarizes findings from a nationwide survey of degree-seeking urban planning students regarding the climate for diversity within their degree programs. This study examines interactions within the classroom, with faculty, with peers, and with professional planners. From May to October 2016, we surveyed 451 students and conducted in-depth interviews with 25 students. Our results show that while the majority of students report a positive climate for diversity within their programs, many still report occurrences of bias and discrimination, describe the shortcomings of a lack of planning faculty diversity, and perceive persistent challenges around diversity within planning practice.

Rising inequality and the lingering effects of the most recent economic recession continue to engender negative perceptions of access to opportunity in the United States. While prior research has established the importance of geography in understanding opportunity in metropolitan areas, little attention has been given to the spatial distribution of opportunity outside urban areas or its temporal variation. This article builds on existing frameworks for measuring opportunity to calculate a multidimensional opportunity index for counties in the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia for the years 2000 and 2010. We use exploratory spatial data analysis techniques to map and critically examine the geography of opportunity at both time periods across regions and three distinct county typologies with an emphasis on identifying clusters of high and low opportunity. We find that opportunity decreased on average for all counties from 2000 to 2010 as did its standard deviation, consistent with arguments that opportunity in the U.S. has both declined and converged. While the opportunity index remains highest in metropolitan and urban counties, nonmetropolitan and rural areas fared well with respect to the spatial clustering of high opportunity counties. Clusters of high opportunity counties shifted from the Northeast to Midwest regions, while clusters of low opportunity counties in traditional strongholds of persistent poverty like Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and Lower Rio Grande Valley have become more fragmented.

Using results from two national surveys, this article explores differences in what planning skills are deemed most important from the perspectives of planning educators and practitioners. Many core planning skills have endured across all contexts, but we find that communities experiencing population decline exhibit demand for different skills than growing communities. Planning educators value teaching skills more closely aligned with those valued by senior-level planners when compared to skills demanded for entry-level planners. Our discussion examines the implications of these findings for the continued coevolution of planning practice and education.

Microenterprise support programs (MESP) have gained popularity as a modern development policy starting in the 1980s, with an increasing number of countries adopting this strategy to enhance economic growth. However, few studies examine the effectiveness of these programs. This paper will evaluate one of these programs, Centros de Emprendimiento ChileCompra in Chile. This initiative consists of centers that provide training to entrepreneurs in business plan development, financing, and taxation to enable greater participation amongst microenterprises in the public procurement market. Using eight years of panel data on program contracts, we assess the impact of ChileCompra’s microenterprise participation component with regards to the share of the total business and the share of revenues. Initial results indicate that the program resulted in an increased share of contracts going to microenterprises at the national level, but that at the local level that results were uneven. In many cases, contrary to the policy’s goals, the share of microenterprises receiving contracts through ChileCompra declined substantially.

The federal Housing Choice Voucher Program currently serves as one of the nation's predominant strategies for providing affordable rental housing for low-income households. The program is designed around two goals: first, to uphold the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's mission to provide safe, decent, and affordable housing; and second, to facilitate household residential location choices, with the idea that such choices can leverage other types of nonhousing opportunities for assisted households. While scholarly research has described a range of positive and negative household outcomes associated with the voucher subsidy, less is known about how those outcomes are produced on the ground. This research describes findings from 72 in-depth interviews with Illinois landlords and other voucher program stakeholders regarding their experiences with the program, with the goal of linking landlord practices to tenant outcomes. Findings of this research underscore the substantial influence that lan...

• We compared Earned Income Tax Credit traditional lump sum and periodic payments on depressive symptoms.

Environmental justice and sustainability are compatible lenses, yet action toward equity is often missing from urban sustainability initiatives. This study aims to assess the cohesion of these frameworks in practice. To do this, we parse individuals' theories of change, or how they identify and propose to resolve environmental injustices in the pursuit of sustainability. We posit that these theories of change are comprised of three main components: (1) perceived environmental benefits and burdens; (2) the causal pathways of environmental and social injustice; and (3) visions for positive change. Drawing from 35 stakeholder interviews in Milwaukee (WI, USA) we examine individual and institutional perspectives on environmental and social change and their links to the production of injustice. Our findings reveal that participants do not distinguish between environmental and social injustices. Instead, both social and environmental factors are implicated in injustice. Furthermore, we identify two mental maps for how social and economic change reproduce injustice. These findings suggest the need to reorient how urban injustice is considered and make efforts to acknowledge how a diversity of operational theories of change could either be divisive or could bring environmental justice and sustainability initiatives together.

Over the last decade, the Housing Choice Voucher Program has grown to become the USA's primary strategy for providing safe, decent, and affordable housing. Annually serving more than 2 million low-income households, the program is designed to help low-income households afford private market rental housing. The program also allows for the “portability” of vouchers nationally between housing authority jurisdictions. Both features aim to mitigate the effects of concentrated poverty. Research on the Moving to Opportunity Program and the Gautreaux consent decree have produced data confirming that residential mobility can at times lead to positive opportunities for assisted households. This past research has been conducted on specific programs occurring outside of the general Housing Choice Voucher Program framework and has focused on household-level outcomes, paying little attention to the ways in which program administration may affect outcomes for voucher households. This article aims to understand voucher p...

Watershed planning can lead to policy innovation and action toward environmental protection. However, groups often suffer from low engagement with communities that experience disparate impacts from flooding and water pollution. This can limit the capacity of watershed efforts to dismantle pernicious forms of social inequality. As a result, the benefits of environmental changes often flow to more empowered residents, short-changing the power of watershed-based planning as a tool to transform ecological, economic, and social relationships. The objectives of this paper are to assess whether the worldview of watershed planning actors are sufficiently attuned to local patterns of social vulnerability and whether locally significant patterns of social vulnerability can be adequately differentiated using conventional data sources. Drawing from 35 in-depth interviews with watershed planners and community stakeholders in the Milwaukee River Basin (WI, USA), we identify five unique definitions of social vulnerability. Watershed planners in our sample articulate a narrower range of social vulnerability definitions than other participants. All five definitions emphasize spatial and demographic characteristics consistent with existing ways of measuring social vulnerability. However, existing measures do not adequately differentiate among the spatio-temporal dynamics used to distinguish definitions. In response, we develop two new social vulnerability measures. The combination of interviews and demographic analyses in this study provides an assessment technique that can help watershed planners (a) understand the limits of their own conceptualization of social vulnerability and (b) acknowledge the importance of place-based vulnerabilities that may otherwise be obscured. We conclude by discussing how our methods can be a useful tool for identifying opportunities to disrupt social vulnerability in a watershed by evaluating how issue frames, outreach messages, and engagement tactics. The approach allows watershed planners to shift their own culture in order to consider socially vulnerable populations comprehensively.