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For Release Sunday, June 16, 2013
© 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

Can a state do “fracking” right?

Can it use the new shale gas drilling technology to deliver thousands of jobs, revive depressed industrial zones, spark new high-tech industries, feed state coffers – and still not mess up its countryside, imperil water supplies and possibly release dangerous amounts of methane gases?

It’s a big order, and environmental concerns remain real. But a strong cross-section of Ohio’s leadership – political (Gov. John Kasich), business investors and respected think tanks like Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs – see smart exploitation of shale reserves as key to a strong, opportunity-rich future.

By historic and geographic accident, the action is focused on northeast Ohio, anchored in Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown and Canton. This was an early center of U.S. steel and birthplace of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. in the 1880s. But the economic action shifted south and west, and the area has been in or near recession since the 1950s – forever yearning for a new break.

Could shale be the answer? Just maybe. Massive reserves of so-called Utica shale – a source not just of natural gas but also liquid petroleum products that can be feedstuffs for specialized fuels and chemical manufacturing – have been discovered in this area (including a swath running east and southeast to the Pennsylvania and West Virginia borders).

The claims are stupendous. Though actual start-up on wells in Ohio has been slow, the soon-to-come statewide impact could easily reach $10 billion a year, plus $500 million in tax revenue, with oil and gas field development creating 65,000 jobs with average income over $50,000 a year, according to a Cleveland State study released last year by energy expert Andrew Thomas and colleagues.
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For Release Sunday, June 2, 2013
© 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

Luis Ubiñas knows what poverty is all about. Today he’s president of the Ford Foundation. But he grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in New York City’s fire- and demolition-ravaged South Bronx, in the midst of some of the most dangerous streets in America. He was raised by a mother who made $50 a week.

Help, though, was on the way, sparked by President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” and programs like community development corporations (CDCs) that were seeded and grown with early foundation support. Today the revived South Bronx pulses with activism and provides a range of services to families still caught in poverty.

Now Ubiñas leads an expanded foundation mission: fighting the poverty that’s spreading rapidly out beyond city boundaries, infecting suburbs in metro regions across the United States. A tipping point was reached in the last decade, as poverty expanded an astounding 53 percent in suburbs, compared to 23 percent in cities. By 2010, exacerbated by the Great Recession, the number of suburbanites living in poverty exceeded the total in cities by 2.6 million.

That startling development and the mega-trends behind it are examined in a new Brookings Institution book, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, co-authored by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube. The book, Ford-supported, was released May 20, along with a detailed website, confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org.

One reason for the rise in poverty was the slowdown in suburban-based manufacturing and construction industries, costing jobs and decimating many workers’ income. Another was the rise of housing costs in resurgent central cities, pushing low-income families into suburbs.
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For Release Sunday, May 19, 2013
© 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

WASHINGTON – Is there a shadow of a chance that bipartisan, middle-ground common sense could be applied to solve pressing issues of America’s housing future?

A housing commission formed by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center has a plan, formed over 16 months of debate and released in March. The center will now “take it on the road” for intensive discussions across the country.

The need is indisputable. Precious little has been done to revamp America’s housing finance policy in the 4 1/2 years since rampant speculation and malleable regulations triggered the Great Recession.

The Treasury Department did take over the failing housing-finance giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But few think that’s a good long-term solution. For the most part, the $10 trillion U.S. mortgage market has been left to float unguided.

It’s a dangerous course, writ in multibillions. With federal resources short, the country owes itself a robust debate about the exorbitant costs (now close to $100 billion yearly) of the home mortgage tax deduction. Concurrently, it needs to figure out how the United States meets the housing needs of a fast-aging population and does far more to assure affordable shelter for imperiled low-income and minority Americans.

The Bipartisan Policy Center assembled impressive leadership for its housing commission – on the Democratic side, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell; on the Republican side, former senator and HUD Secretary Mel Martinez of Florida and former Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond of Missouri.
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For Release Sunday, May 5, 2013
© 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

What will our cities look like by mid-century as America’s population expands a projected 36 percent, to some 440 million?

Will they be more livable, green, vibrant? Can we do away with our tons of city-based industrial wastelands and remake our low-grade strip commercial roads into attractive boulevards?

One vision is that the distinction between city and rural will fade as suburbs become more urban, densely occupied and town-like. And we’ll see robust expansion of such phenomena as “micro flats” near city workplaces.

That’s a vision of my Seattle planner friend Mark Hinshaw, who surprised me in 1985 by predicting that Bellevue, a quintessential post-World War II suburban growth town across Lake Washington from Seattle, could become a true urban place on its own. I picked up on his idea – the possibility that Bellevue, alias “car city,” all strip-commercial, no sidewalks and “potentially terminal boredom,” might turn itself into a Class A center with high-rise buildings, plazas, parks, cafes.

Today Bellevue is precisely that. Across the country, growing numbers of close-in suburbs are undergoing that same transformation from dullsville to walkable and inviting places.
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For Release Sunday, April 21, 2013
© 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

Legal limbo – that’s where New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban on sales of extra-large soda drinks remains, shelved by a judge’s order. And state legislators in Mississippi believe they’ve scored political points with a law barring local governments from restricting the size of soft drinks. No matter that Mississippi is already America’s most overweight state.

Nonetheless, high calorie foods and their twin peril in high fat food are not issues likely to just fade away. Evidence is fast growing that such foods generate not just obesity but significantly higher rates of diabetes and other illnesses.

Looking forward, the impact of unhealthy foods is likely to ricochet alarmingly, escalating local public health and pension costs, making military and police forces less fit and, most alarming of all, adding huge fiscal burdens on such programs as Medicaid and Medicare.

And this is not just in the United States. The problem is now global and rapidly worsening. That was the message that Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the The World Is Fat, brought to a recent University of Pennsylvania “Feeding Cities” conference at the school’s Institute for Urban Research.

Across the globe, Popkin reported, more than 2 billion people are now overweight – the result of 30-plus years of “major shifts in how we eat and drink.” Building on humans’ natural inclination to like sweets, sugary beverage intake is “spiraling around the world.” Fatty foods consumption has risen sharply, with a rising share of peoples’ calorie intake coming from fried foods.
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