You’d think I would have known better. After all, I’ve been writing about growth since before they called it Smart Growth, and I’m still writing about it now that it’s “resiliency,” or “sustainable growth” or whatever the next term is. I can’t count how many times I’ve explained that when you decide where you want urban growth to go, you must also decide where you don’t want it to go.

That’s why last week’s regional planning exercise was an eye-opener. I learned – or rather, learned again – some key lessons:

• Real life doesn’t always work the way you think it should.
• The general public doesn’t think nearly as much about these issues as we like to assume they do.

The exercise was RealityCheck2050, part of a multi-year, regional planning project called CONNECT Our Future that’s looking at the 14-county, two-state Charlotte region. RealityCheck, organized by the Charlotte chapter of the Urban Land Institute, hosted 400 people – among them some 30 elected officials.

We started by listening to speakers, including Ed McMahon of the Urban Land Institute (a Citistates associate), whose inspiring talk included this line – one I’ve heard so often I groaned: “Trying to cure congestion by building more lanes is like trying to cure obesity by lengthening your belt.”

Yet many in the audience laughed. People Tweeted it to their followers. Lesson No. 1: Sometimes city planner types forget other people are not immersed in this subject.

Then we began a game-like exercise at tables fitted out with Legos and a giant regional map. We were told that by 2050 the region of 2.4 million is expected to grow by 1.8 million and add 863,000 jobs. Each table had to stack hundreds of red and yellow Legos where we thought jobs and housing should go. We could mark out new transit lines with orange yarn, new highways with purple, and green spaces with green yarn.

The planning game used red and yellow Legos for new homes and jobs. But we forgot about green space until late in the game. Photo: Mary Newsom

Others at my table were a construction company official, a human services worker, a local school system employee, an elected official who owns land near a proposed but controversial highway, and a planner working in municipal government, but not in planning.

As instructed, we agreed on our shared vision for growth: Concentrate new development where infrastructure already exists. Cluster development near transit lines. Protect water quality. Protect farms and open spaces.

Then we began rapidly and somewhat haphazardly placing Legos and yarn. I stacked jobs and housing in downtown Charlotte. Across the table, the elected official began putting housing and jobs in the now-rural area near his property. The human services worker and school employee, standing near him, started following his lead. Next thing you know a rural farming area was coated with low-density housing and scattered jobs.

I don’t think they were deliberately ignoring our goal to protect farmland. I think they were unsure of what to do – the instruction booklet was hard to follow – and were copying the guy next to them – something most of us do in similar situations.

Around this time the planner at our table had to leave. The table moderators, two more planners, kept quiet and let us work. I began moving the Legos plopped in rural areas over to existing towns and along existing transportation corridors.

It took a while to place hundreds of Legos around the region. Only then did we look at our work and say, “Now, what about green space?”

We tried to draw in parks and farm areas with green yarn but kept accidentally knocking down the Lego towers. (It didn’t help that there was a wrinkle on our map, creating a sort of earthquake fault line for stacked Legos.)

We also didn’t add any new transit lines until near the end. That, too, involved clumsily knocking down Legos.

It occurred to me that our experience was a lot like real life.

Unless you first decide where not to grow, trying to retrofit a built-out area with parks and natural areas is difficult, clumsy and expensive. That’s true, too, with a transit line.

I knew those things. But building – at least, playing with Legos – is more fun than tediously laying out yarn. In our table’s zeal to play developer, we neglected basic planning. And my table mates had not stopped to think that putting houses and jobs in the countryside did not support what they said they valued: protecting rural areas and water, and clustering development near infrastructure.

By not understanding the effect of the development, they inadvertently undercut their larger goals.

Which is exactly how so many metro regions, including this one, end up being built out. People don’t stop to plan because, well, it’s less fun than building. And most of us, including developers, tend to copy what others do, because that’s what we’re used to seeing.

It’s easy for those of us who do pay attention to planning and growth to forget that most people in most places don’t.

Which means it’s easy for us to forget that although we’ve heard the same messages over and over and over until we’re sick of it, other people are only then starting to hear them: If you want to preserve open spaces you have to decide, from the start, where you won’t grow. If you want to cluster development where services already exist, you can’t allow development where services don’t exist (also known as “Growth Follows the Pipe”). And yes, curing congestion by building more lanes is like trying to cure obesity by getting a longer belt. That last slogan, at least, is likely to get a good chuckle from the audience.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

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.

The “fit” could hardly be better for a region with an industrial heritage, a big reserve of unemployed or under-employed blue-collar workers, a related polymer industry focused in Akron, and significant scientific expertise (especially in its universities) to develop the shale for new, chemical-based processes as well as fuel.

But environmental concerns are real. The technology digs wells thousands of feet deep, but then branches out underground with horizontal drilling, with processes requiring millions of gallons of highly pressurized water. Faulty well casings or surface spills raise concerns of risks to ground and drinking water.

The industry also brings heavy truck traffic through towns, requires land clearance for several wells on each “pad,” and without scrupulous oversight can mean the potential of release of methane gas – a powerful CO2 emitter.

Aware of the ferocious opposition that fracking has generated in New York and Pennsylvania, the Ohio-based operators seem to be taking precautionary measures. Most supported the state’s shale development control rules – hailed by some as the nation’s toughest – passed last year. Critics also praise Kasich, a conservative Republican, for deciding to hire several hundred environmental regulators to track the new activity and for pressing (despite opposition) for a state severance tax on shale production.

Now there’s apparently broad support in Ohio for the remarkable new agreement between drilling interests and environmentalists, embodied in 15 model standards for safe fracking production. Developed through two years of negotiations, the accord ranges from limits on methane emissions to careful rules on wastewater disposal and seismic testing before drilling can commence. It will be enforced by a new, Pittsburgh-based Center for Sustainable Shell Development.

The agreement is not universally popular. The Sierra Club has harshly attacked the Environmental Defense Fund, a major player in forging the agreement, for its supporting role. But there’s little doubt about the integrity of the pact’s oversight board, including such figures as Christie Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor and Environmental Protection Agency chief.

Realistically, the real question in America today may not be whether to use shale extraction but how. In just six years, natural gas has grown from less than 1 percent to 23 percent of U.S. energy supplies, notes John Banks of the Brookings Institution. Natural gas prices have hit historic lows, speeding retirement of coal power plants. U.S. fracking, Citigroup reports, could make U.S. petroleum output rival Saudi Arabia and Russia within a decade.

The good news, says Edward “Ned” Hill, dean of Cleveland State’s College of Urban Affairs, is that the low cost of natural gas “is pushing coal out of the marketplace.” Coal is the most toxic of fuels, and its defenders, says Hill, talk about coal gasification, but “that doesn’t make any sense if you have gas!”

What about renewables such as wind and solar power? Gas advocates agree they’re on their way – but still far more expensive. Near-term, they argue, natural gas – and the fracking used to free it from the earth – is our future.

Meantime, Cleveland State experts have been dispatched as far as Poland, the Ukraine and Colombia to coach other world regions on the “hows” of safe, community-sensitive shale development.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com. (c) 2013, The Washington Post Writers Group

Hardly a Driver
Is Now Alive
Who Passed On Hills
At 75
Burma-Shave

For Release Sunday, June 9, 2013
© 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

Once upon a time, advertising in America was fun. As a boy, I didn’t want to miss the Burma Shave jingles – one line per sign in a quick roadside series – as my father took me on my first drive across America.

Today it’s different. Massive, glaring, digital billboards, commandeering attention as they flash new messages every few seconds, are proliferating across most states.

Around 2005, the first appeared. By 2008, there were 1,800. Last year there were 3,600, and this year the figure is likely to be close to 5,000. The industry (some 250 independent contractors) is licking its chops. It reports the cost of new boards is dropping rapidly, the “dynamic new content” allegedly outperforms television, radio and newspaper ads, and there’s “an increasingly favorable regulatory environment” – states and cities agreeing to the signs.

Unless, of course, regulations strike back. That’s precisely what Scenic America, a nonprofit public interest group, is trying to force. It has sued in federal court to force the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) to clamp down, to reverse its 2007 ruling that permitted the garish signs as long as they don’t flash new images more frequently than every four seconds.

The FHA, says Scenic America, invented the four-second rule out of thin air without hearings or regular procedures. Specifically, it says the new rules violate the Highway Beautification Act of 1965. That law, written in the pre-digital age, sought to limit signs and displays on federal highways by requiring federal agreements with the states to codify rules. The accord which emerged typically prohibited “signs which contain, include, or are illuminated by any flashing, intermittent, or moving light … except those giving public service information such as time, date, temperature (or) weather.”

With four-second bright electronic imagery, Scenic America claims, digital signs are indeed “flashing,” “intermittent” and “moving.”

Beyond that, it says the FHA has brushed past the safety issues – drivers distracted by the brightly lit, constantly changing mega-signboards. It cites an array of studies – by the Swedish government, researchers in Israel, the Dutch highway authority and Norwegian analysts. All suggest the flashing billboards draw viewers’ attention for longer periods of time than standard signs and may in fact trigger more crashes.

Indeed, it’s fair to ask: How can the FHA have opened the door to these diverting digital eye-catchers without making its own scientific tests – as Israel and Sweden have (deciding in each case to ban the signs)?

There have been no nationwide U.S. surveys to gauge Americans’ opinion of the digital boards. But there’s little question that in communities where citizens have a strong voice, opposition is high. And it’s especially vociferous when the signs invade populated areas, flashing through peoples’ bedroom windows.

Local governments, however, find themselves under big pressure to give in. And the pressure is from two sides: the billboard lobby – seeing dollars dance before its eyes at every advance – and from local politicians in search of municipal revenue (and sometimes in search of campaign contributions).

In cash-strapped Chicago, for example, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is seeking state permission to erect 34 double-sided digital billboards, up to 100 feet high, on city property. In exchange, the city will get $155 million in payments over 20 years. Five companies bid for the billboard agreement. The winner, the Chicago Tribune reports, was a firm that coincidentally contributed $10,000 to Emanuel’s mayoral campaign.

Sometimes, Scenic America notes, billboard interests come to a city and ask for new digital boards in exchange for taking down a few traditional boards – notwithstanding citizens’ often fervid objections.

In other cases, a billboard firm just erects a digital sign – calculating that neither citizen groups nor the city government will have the cash, or the gumption, to launch expensive legal action to stop the incursion.

The billboard firms’ strongest argument may be that they’re willing to post flood, tornado, traffic hazard or other warnings on their fast digital signs. But aren’t such warnings fundamentally the responsibilities of state and local governments? Must drivers be watching private advertising billboards to catch critical emergency information?

Getting legal restrictions on highway billboards has never been easy. President Lyndon Johnson, in a recorded 1968 phone conversation with then-U.S. Rep. (and future Speaker) Jim Wright, let loose on the issue with his legendary bluntness. Legislation to strengthen the Highway Beautification Act, he asserted, was being blocked by “this damned billboard industry” – “selfish, eager hogs that won’t even let folks sit down and reason with them.”

Yet it was Johnson’s wife, the soft-spoken Lady Bird Johnson, who embodied the spirit of the Highway Beautification Act. She famously championed Americans’ right to have flower-lined highways of beauty, “not long alleys of advertisements urging you to buy this or that.”

Against powerful, well-healed adversaries, Scenic America and its local allies carry on the fight.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com. (c) 2013, The Washington Post Writers Group

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch envisioned bicycles as vehicles for the future, and in 1980 created experimental bike lanes on Sixth and Seventh avenues in Manhattan where riders were protected from traffic by asphalt barriers. Some people immediately roared their disapproval and within a few weeks the bike lanes were gone.

Twenty-seven years later New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan saw the growing ranks of bicyclists on the streets as a key component of 21st-century transportation and began building protected bike lanes in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

These “green lanes” were an immediate hit with the public, but a noisy reaction came from a small group of well-connected people. A New York magazine cover declared the situation a “Bikelash.”

Pressure grew for Bloomberg to sack Sadik-Khan and rip out the green lanes. Anthony Weiner, then a member of Congress from Queens and mayoral hopeful, told Bloomberg he would spend his first year as mayor attending “a bunch of ribbon cuttings tearing out your [expletive] bike lanes.” Bicyclists everywhere braced for a setback, which would once again slow progress toward safer streets in New York and around the continent.

Two years later, Sadik-Khan is still commissioner, Weiner has had well-publicized Twitter problems, and bike lanes continue appearing across the city, including 11.3 new miles of green lanes last year alone. Two-thirds of New Yorkers call bike lanes a good idea in the most recent New York Times poll, compared to only 27 percent who oppose them.

Another of Bloomberg’s and Sadik-Khan’s big ideas to improve New York has hit the streets: the Citi Bike bike sharing system, with 6,000 bikes available at 330 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Tim Blumenthal, president of PeopleForBikes and the sister Green Lane Project, stresses, “Bike issues need to be framed in the context of what they mean to the city, not just what they mean to people who bike. In New York City, for example, more green lanes, better bikeway networks, and the new Citi Bike system will benefit all residents and visitors by reducing traffic, noise and air pollution – making city life a little less frenetic for everyone.”

This all represents good news for cities coast-to-coast. “If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” says Paul Steely White, executive director of the local group Transportation Alternatives, paraphrasing the song, “New York, New York.”

Other communities will no doubt face their own “bikelash,” but New York’s high-profile debate over bike lanes highlighted two key assets of protected lanes:

1. Bike lanes create safer streets for everyone. “It’s the safety stats that carried the day,” notes Ben Fried, editor of Streetsblog, which focuses on transportation in New York City. “They’re pretty indisputable.” Crashes for all road users (drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists) on streets with green lanes drop on average by 40 percent and sometimes as much as 50 percent, according to a memorandum from Deputy New York Mayor Howard Wolfson. Green lanes also lead to significantly fewer bicyclists riding on sidewalks, Fried notes.
2. Bike Lanes are good for business. Businesses on Ninth Avenue, the first major green lane in the city, saw a 49 percent rise in retail sales, compared to 3 percent across Manhattan as a whole, according to research by the New York City Department of Transportation. Another study of consumer patterns, by Portland State University researchers, found shoppers who arrive by bicycle spend 24 percent more at stores per month than those who drive.

New, unfamiliar ideas like green lanes always spark opposition at first. “Push back is inevitable,” Fried explains. “It doesn’t mean the project is flawed. Once it’s built, the constituency for it will grow.”

Complaints about a “war on cars” have echoed around Seattle from a small but persistent chorus opposed to bike lanes. In response, the Cascade Bicycle Club commissioned a poll of Seattle voters (by the independent research firm FM3 using a scientifically rigorous sample of 400 respondents), which found 79 percent view bicyclists favorably, 73 percent want to see more protected green lanes, 59 percent support “replacing roads and some on-street parking” to build green lanes, while only 31 percent believe Seattle is “waging a war on cars.”

A number of news commentators across the country regularly target bikes and bicyclists. After New York Daily News columnist Denis Hamill wrote, “I hate bike lanes … they are steering some people like me to road rage,” a reader responded, “All I hear is an old man yelling, ‘Get Off My Lawn.’”

Increasing numbers of Americans are embracing bicycles to commute, run errands, exercise and have fun. Green lanes and other new bicycle infrastructure being built across the country are encouraging even more people to ride by making the streets safer for bicyclists of all ages and backgrounds.

Jay Walljasper writes, speaks and consults frequently about biking and other ways to improve our communities. His website: www.JayWalljasper.com

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

It’s no secret that mayors and other local leaders around the country are searching for ways to balance municipal and state finances.

Last month, the Government Accountability Office found a widening gap between projected revenues and expenses in the years ahead. While it’s tempting to point fingers at pensions or other easy targets of so-called “wasteful spending” as the only reason for this fiscal problem, city leaders should carefully consider the role that different development strategies play in their budgets and how they can help cure – or ruin – them.

Too often we see cities and towns chasing short-term revenue, mistakenly arguing that sprawling new development on the edge of town represents true economic growth. Yes, new buildings and wide new roads provide a quick hit of cash to a city budget and offer a compelling illusion of prosperity and growth. But over time, the cost of serving such developments often costs more than the tax revenue those developments generate.

Last week, a report I co-authored with Smart Growth America illustrates how walkable, smart growth infill development results in significantly better returns for municipalities compared to car-centric, traditional suburban development. Building Better Budgets: A National Examination of the Fiscal Benefits of Smart Growth Development surveys 17 studies from around the country that compare different development scenarios, including a new study of Nashville-Davidson County, Tenn., commissioned specifically for this report.

The difference in the effect various development types can have on a city’s budget is almost unbelievable. Smart growth strategies can not only save public money on infrastructure and ongoing services, but can significantly increase public revenue. Those factors combined could benefit municipal budgets everywhere. When taken as a national average, the report finds:

• Smart growth development costs at least one third less for upfront
• Infrastructure construction.
• Smart growth development saves taxpayers at least 10 percent on ongoing delivery of services.
• Smart growth development generates 10 times more tax revenue per acre than conventional suburban development.

The findings from the Nashville study are worth singling out. On a per-unit basis, The Gulch, an infill smart growth development in downtown Nashville, not only costs $200 less per unit per year for ongoing services than one in Bradford Hills, a conventional suburban development, but it generated $2,030 more per unit in tax revenue. (Revenue included property tax but also the sales tax likely to be generated by the project’s residents as well as other miscellaneous taxes.)

The difference in net revenue between the two types of development is even more glaring. On a per-acre basis, The Gulch generated $115,720 in net revenue – almost 1,150 times the net revenue generated by Bradford Hills ($100). Those trends are similar on a per-unit basis as well.

A common misconception is that smart growth development is a strategy best suited for big, urban cities. But a closer look shows that a community of any size – suburban, rural, close in or far out – can benefit fiscally from smart growth. Even in small and mid-sized cities, smart growth patterns can have a significant influence on the budget. One case study in Building Better Budgets, from Champaign, Ill., found that a smart growth approach to future expansion in that mid-sized Illinois city could turn a $19 million deficit into a $33 million surplus.

Local governments throughout the United States already face unprecedented challenges in providing high-quality infrastructure and adequate public services to their residents on a tight budget. When it comes to local budgets, how towns decide to develop represents either their greatest burden or their greatest opportunity.

William Fulton is vice president of Smart Growth America and a former mayor of Ventura, Calif.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

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.

An added problem in the South and Southwest has been floods of new immigrants, especially Latinos, into formerly middle-class white suburbs. On the West Coast suburbs like Tukwila, Wash., south of Seattle, have been receiving waves of poor-as-scratch immigrants including Bosnians and Serbs, Somalis and Sudanese, Bhutanese and Nepalese, plus Hispanics.

Metro-wide poverty goes to the very heart of what’s suburbia – namely, a less compact, far more scattered-out population pattern than cities. Ubiñas notes that suburbs are often missing “the qualities that kept many of us from sinking into even deeper, isolated poverty” – adequate public transit, proximity of jobs and housing, nearby libraries, CDCs, community centers and service agencies.

Today’s challenge, he adds, is “to address the immense inequity of having our poorest people live just beyond our sight – not on our subways, not in our parks– just beyond our sight, inaccessible to us as we are inaccessible to them.”

One could step back and say suburban poverty proves the short-sightedness of post-World War II America – building sprawling suburbs instead of compact new towns as every successful world society had since the dawn of history. Plus assuming every household could forever afford automobiles – against today’s reality of hundreds of thousands of poor, isolated, effectively “wheel-less” suburbanites.

Added to that is weak state government support for poor communities. Also, the federal government, while it spends some $82 billion a year on place-based efforts to fight poverty, spreads those efforts among 80-plus programs and 10 different agencies. The critical programs, from Head Start to food stamps, supportive housing to charter schools to tenant-based rental assistance, all have separate rules, regulations and reporting requirements. City governments over time learn how to manage them fairly well, but suburban communities – some competing with their neighbors for new businesses and hostile to the presence of low-income residents at all – are often at a loss.

The Brookings team found three glowing exceptions – relatively well organized efforts to coordinate services for high-poverty communities in the Houston, Chicago and Seattle areas. Perhaps most advanced is Houston’s Neighborhood Centers, which provides some $275 million a year in benefits across the metro region, drawing support from dozens of federal, state and private funding sources.

But how to launch more regional collaboratives? It’s a tough challenge, even though the long-term payoffs – in better services, families prepared to transition to self-sufficiency and children prepared for productive futures – could be dramatic. Community foundations might create structures and incentives. But state government, with their broad legal powers, would be best positioned.

The Brookings authors make a specific suggestion: a “Metropolitan Opportunity Challenge,” some $4 billion a year, created by carving out 5 percent of what Washington now spends on place-based antipoverty efforts. States would be invited to compete for the funds by showing how they would spark reforms to support tailored metro-level strategies and give a lift to families afflicted by poverty.

The idea is ingenious – rather than some bureaucratic fix, getting states to think afresh about their role and capacity, providing incentives to merge compatible programs. And then using the power of competition so that states move to create and support new metro-wide forms of organizations and coalitions. It’s a way to pull towns, cities, agencies and other partners together to face and alleviate growing poverty, that we now know – though few of us ever expected it – is even greater in suburbs than cities.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com. (c) 2013, The Washington Post Writers Group