Neal Peirce / Jun 19 2010
For Release Sunday, June 20, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
America’s most diverse ZIP code, the Census Bureau reports, is 98118– the Rainier Valley neighborhood, five miles south of downtown Seattle.
And for good reason. 98118′s mixed population of immigrants from across the globe includes speakers of 59 languages– Chinese to Somali, Spanish to Vietnamese, Tagalog to Khmer. Yet close to a third of the population is African-American, an influx that started in the 1950s, and another third white, including remnants of the Irish and Italian immigrants of the early 1900s.
In the 1980s and early ’90s, 98118 was troubled by dilapidated buildings, drug dealing and prostitution– not a neighborhood you’d feel comfortable strolling after dark. But the recent immigrant waves have brought entrepreneurial juice including new restaurants and shops, upgraded real estate, and new urban flavor.
There’s public art on the streets, wafting smells of many cuisines, colorful varieties of dress. Rainier Valley “has the best selection of foods, music and culture that I think you can find in any neighborhood,” plus a very high “level of tolerance,” a local State Farm Insurance agent told the Northwest Asian Weekly.
Plus, 98118 has a strong group of community organizations. And it’s regionally connected with a stop on the new Sound Transit light rail line that runs from the Sea-Tac Airport to downtown.
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Neal Peirce / Jun 11 2010
For Release Sunday, June 13, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — Can we really slim down the next generation of Americans, help our school children shed the extra pounds that could spell lifetimes with high prospects of type 2 diabetes or heart problems?
Michelle Obama is trying hard to reach parents with her “Let’s Move” campaign. Scientific evidence is being mustered. The link to America’s military preparedness is being made. As Sen. Mark Udall (Colo.) wrote recently to the First Lady, nearly a third of 17-to-24 year olds are unfit for military service due to their weight or lack of fitness.
But the national effort shouldn’t obscure individual cities’ efforts. And a surprise leader is the Nation’s Capital. The District of Columbia last month approved some of America’s strictest rules, aiming to curb the overweight and obese conditions that plague no less than 43 percent of its public school children — one of the nation’s highest rates.
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Neal Peirce / Jun 05 2010
For Release Sunday, June 06, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — Is the Obama administration’s “livability” initiative just a way for intrusive federal bureaucrats to choke off Americans’ prized “automobility” — four wheels to commute from ever-distant suburbs, or just to pick up a quart of milk?
That’s the way some commentators would have it. Disregarding the administration’s clear language about respecting local character and values, they pounced on words of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood — that livability is “being able to take your kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, drop by the grocery or post office, go out to dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in a park, all without having to get in your car.”
LaHood, a former Republican member of Congress known for his moderate views, got labeled “the Secretary of Behavior Modification” by columnist George Will. Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) worried publicly about “federal decision-makers in Washington (telling) communities how they should grow.”
And transportation analyst Ken Orski recently concluded that “the administration’s desire to impose its own vision of how Americans should live and travel represents a misguided and in the end futile gesture.”
Whoa!
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Neal Peirce / May 29 2010
For Release Sunday, May 30, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Atlanta — “Sodom and Gomorrah,” Biblical cities destroyed by God for the sins of their inhabitants, is a term the rural politicos used to apply to villify Atlanta. At county barbecues, they’d rail against the alleged debauchery of Georgia’s lead city.
Habits persist: Even today, the state of Georgia does little for the city that put it on the world economic map. The story’s not totally unique: there’s perennial suspicion, especially in rural and small town areas, of America’s top cities and metropolitan regions — even as these “citistates” become the engines of creative activity that drive entire statewide and U.S. economies.
But in Georgia, the ice has started to melt. With strong bipartisan support from a conservative Republican governor and a liberal Democratic mayor, and with a determined chamber of commerce president leading the campaign, the Georgia Legislature has finally agreed to let the Atlanta region — and in the process others around the state — to vote on whether they want to add a penny sales tax for transportation improvements.
For the Atlanta region, this is close to a make-or-break move. With its spectacular economic growth of recent decades, the area has been convulsed by world-class traffic gridlock. The region’s roadway and anemic public transportation systems lag so seriously that Metropolitan Atlanta is becoming three or four “truncated” labor markets, very difficult to commute in or among. The situation threats to trigger some corporate move-outs and represents a red flag for potential new employers.
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Neal Peirce / May 29 2010
For Release Sunday, April 18, 2010 (Reprinted May 30)
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Supermarkets surrounded by acres of asphalt. Push-wagons heavily loaded with groceries wheeled out, the haul stashed in car trunks. Always a drive — often several miles — to get food.
We perfected the buy-and-drive model from the post-World War II expansion onward. But is it necessarily the future?
No, asserts my Seattle friend and urban design planner, Mark Hinshaw. He sees a dramatically transformed role for supermarkets. They’ll actually become the anchors of new and walkable neighborhoods, he predicts in a Planning magazine article co-authored with markets analyst Brian Vanneman.
Why the shift? Americans’ high personal consumption levels were starting to wind down even before the Great Recession. Households have shrunk in size and the population is aging, with more taste for close-by shops and facilities. Many young people are eschewing the scattered suburban pattern in favor of denser urban living. Buying a house on the urban fringe, once seen as a ticket to wealth-building, now looks to be a big risk. Walking for health and weight loss has begun, for many Americans, to outshine the sedentary lifestyle of using an auto for every conceivable errand. And many people are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint.
But are those shifts big enough to let neighborhood-based supermarkets compete with and maybe outpace the drive-only suburban locations? You’ll wonder, as I did.
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Neal Peirce / May 21 2010
For Release Sunday, May 23, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas are home to 66 percent of Americans, and they’re adding people almost twice as fast as the rest of the country. Our lead corporations and most highly skilled workforces are focused in them. Metros are clearly key to the country’s fate in this fiercely competitive global century.
But can individual metropolitan regions “get their act together” to educate their growing immigrant populations and expanding ranks of the poor — their workforce of the future? As their “baby boomers” turn 65 by the millions, how can they be supported in totally auto-dependent suburbs? If metro sprawl recommences with economic recovery, what happens to America’s need to cut carbon emissions and wean itself from foreign oil?
Those are among key issues raised in the Brookings Institution’s new report — “State of Metropolitan America – On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation.”
Metro-wide cohesion has never been easy: our regions have developed as a broken patchwork of dozens, sometimes hundreds of individual municipalities and even more school districts. We rarely agree to big-scale mergers.
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Neal Peirce / May 14 2010
For Release Sunday, May 16, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Are charter schools still the best hope for students from America’s low-income urban families?
Some charters do fail and are terminated — victims of poor management or inability to raise students’ achievement scores.
But two powerful experiments — one in Boston, the other in the San Francisco Bay Area — suggest the power of well-run charters to break through barriers and dramatically increase the potential fopr inner-city children to succeed.
Critics have said test scores in charter schools aren’t materially better than regular public schools. Even when charter school scores are better, the critics dismiss the findings by suggesting the charters have an advantage because they’re skimming off students from committed families already more engaged in their education.
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Neal Peirce / May 06 2010
For Release Sunday, May 12, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
CHICAGO — Could international law be used to curb the torrent of U.S.-made pistols, rifles and assault weapons now fueling the bloody Mexican drug wars and being trafficked globally?
The idea surfaced among 100 mayors and other municipal officials from around the world gathered here for a two-day Richard J. Daley Global Cities Forum (named after the current Mayor Richard M. Daley’s legendary father).
The message he’d heard from the international mayors, Daley said after the meetings, was “We’re tired of your guns, America. … Why do you ship them to our countries? They’re not meant for hunting, but to kill people. Why are you doing this to Africa, South America, the rest of the world?”
The “extremely violent” Mexican drug gangs, Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard Casaubon reported, are getting 85 percent of their weaponry from transfers across the U.S. border. (The method’s simple — the gangs simply recruit straw buyers who can flash a U.S. driver’s license at a gun shop, walk out with scores of firearms, many of them assault weapons, and then transport the lethal cargo into Mexico).
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Neal Peirce / Apr 30 2010
For Release Sunday, May 2, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — What’s happening to America’s low-income neighborhoods in the face of the Great Recession? What can be done to protect them?
Late in April many of the big guns of the nation’s community development movement met in Washington to hear about a brand new institute designed to stimulate thinking and action on full panoplies of services for troubled neighborhoods.
The challenges, right now, are immense. Lost jobs, stunning declines in family incomes, evictions and business failures have hit poor areas nationwide. Troubled families churn in and out of the hard-hit neighborhoods. Street gangs, plus a proliferation of firearms, strike terror in many inner-city neighborhoods.
But the misery isn’t focusing in inner cities alone. It’s “gone metro” in a big way, as poverty afflicts more and more suburbs. Between 2000 and 2008, reported Amy Liu of the Brookings Institution, suburbs of America’s largest 100 metro regions saw their populations living under the poverty line grow five times faster than the rise in center city neighborhoods. Overall, joblessness in this recession is up equally in cities and suburbs.
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Neal Peirce / Apr 22 2010
For Release Sunday, April 25, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
NEW YORK — What are the latest innovations — especially high tech “apps” — to make today’s cities succeed?
A host are being applied or waiting in the wings. They include new forms of electronic measurement to track and channel traffic, monitor potential crime sites, check on water quality, gauge the energy use in “smart grids,” and much more.
Will the new “apps” change the way cities look in a decade or two? Not on the surface, Wired Magazine senior editor Nicholas Thompson suggested at the eminent Regional Plan Association’s yearly assembly here last week, attended by 700 civic and business leaders from the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metro area.
But the technologies have the potential, Thompson and others said, to improve dramatically the convenience and safety of cities, plus cutting their costs.
Some already have good track records — for example electronic monitoring for location, time and frequency of criminal incidents. Pioneered in New York City, often combined with community policing, the geographic positioning is already undergirding improved law enforcement in cities nationwide.
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