Jennifer Rangel recently launched a nonprofit, RAYO Planning, with the mission of helping neighbors advocate for what they need.

Photography by Kathy Tran.

Jennifer Rangel felt like an outsider growing up in Oak Cliff because her family didn’t have a car, and their housing was often insecure.

Sign up for our newsletter!

* indicates required

She knows there are still kids in our neighborhood who feel like “a shadow” the way she did, and that’s what keeps her motivated to fight for inclusivity in urban planning. Rangel recently launched a nonprofit, RAYO Planning, with partners Evelyn Mayo and Victoria Ferrell-Ortiz.

They have a mission of helping communities understand planning concepts like zoning and land use, and they aim to teach neighbors to use their power against potentially harmful policies and to advocate for what they need.

Rangel was the 2012 valedictorian of Molina High School because she treated her grades like a paycheck. She told herself that the higher her grades were, the more money she could earn in the future so that her parents wouldn’t have to work.

She rode the bus before dawn so that she could use the internet at school to apply for grants and scholarships, and she stayed late to do homework.

“I learned a lot, and I observed a lot,” she says. “We would take the DART from Westmoreland Station all the way to Garland. I could see how different my neighborhood was from others, but I never questioned it because I didn’t understand that zoning and land use were at play.”

As a sophomore at Texas A&M University, one of Rangel’s professors said, “It sounds like you want to be an urban planner.”

She said, “What’s an urban planner?”

“I realized that all of these things that I had been noticing for years were part of this urban planning,” she says.

The profession requires a master’s degree, which Rangel obtained from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018. Her thesis used Oak Cliff as a case study for a geographical examination of Latino urbanism.

She interviewed business owners and residents, and the thesis makes recommendations for engaging with Latino communities.

Here are some highlights:

— Create Spanish and English materials about the agency/department and their intentions. These outreach efforts should be considered ongoing and can become an outlet for the community to speak up. Familiarity is key for trust and authentic conversations.

— Develop community events to create bridges within and among the community. Grant community members the agency to participate in the creation of these events. These events should have a diverse audience.

— Surveys can be online, but in person communication with business owners informing them why their opinion is important can motivate them to participate.

— Online communication should be available in English and Spanish. Renderings and photos should reflect the community. 

Rangel says some of the recommendations she made in her 2018 thesis are coming into play with RAYO. For example, it states: “Teach others what urban planning is and how it influences their neighborhood. Sometimes people do not participate because they simply are not aware how.”

“Urban planning and zoning are very technical, but the essence is not,” she says. “The essence is that it’s about people’s lives.”

Rangel is the planning and community outreach director for the Inclusive Communities Project. She has a full-time job, but she wanted to launch RAYO now because of plans to grow it into a national presence. They also want to educate city planners everywhere on how to engage with Latinos, including the fact that “Latinos” represents an incredibly diverse population.

She bristles at the popular urban planning term “highest-and-best use” because “highest and best use for who?” she says. “It decenters the essence of people. Why are we talking about ‘uses,’ when in reality, it should be for the people?”

Urban planning has been used in the past to create harm in communities. The most striking example in Dallas is Shingle Mountain, the recently removed environmental hazard in a neighborhood where heavy industrial zoning is allowed next to residential neighborhoods. With RAYO, the objective is to use the same tools to undo those wrongs.

Everyone can be an urban planner, she says. It’s just a matter of understanding the lingo and the process.

Her master’s thesis mentions “ganas,” the Spanish word for perseverance. When she struggled growing up, her mother always told her to use her ganas, and that’s what Rangel wants for urban Latino communities like Oak Cliff.

She says urban planning can take an emotional toll because she sees how people struggle, and she understands what it’s like.

“As long as I’m on this planet, I’m going to keep fighting the good fight,” she says. “I’m not the first one, but I’m going to grab the baton and keep running that marathon.”

Rangel says she hated telling her mother, Maria, that she had to wait two more years after college for her master’s degree, but now Rangel supports her so that she doesn’t have to work anymore.

Rangel’s father, Hector, died of COVID-19 at the end of 2020.

“My dad told me: ‘This is your city. This belongs to you. Feel proud of it,’” she says. “I want people to feel that way too. That they truly belong here and they’re not outsiders and they don’t belong in the shadows.”