Citiwire.net

Archive: Column of the Week

Race and Our Metropolitan Future

Manuel Pastor / Jul 01 2010

For Release Sunday, July 4, 2010
Citiwire.net

America is changing: we have a black president, increasing diversity in the ranks of the nation’s CEOs, and a new generation seemingly at ease with racial and other differences. And a lot more change is in the works: by 2042, the county will be majority-minority, by 2023 the majority of those under the age of 18 will be youth of color, and this year or next will the first (but not the last) in which the majority of births in the U.S. will be to black, Latino and Asian parents.

It’s enough to make pundits wax about a new “post-racial” era in which race and ethnicity are less salient as social and political categories. But despite what is surely a startling shift in attitudes (Tea Party undertones notwithstanding), the income gap between African Americans and Latinos on the one hand and whites on the other has remained stable since the mid-1970s, even as the recent wave of foreclosures has shattered the wealth of those homeowners, disproportionately of color, who came late to the housing boom.

So why, then, the “post-racial” appeal? Part of it, of course, stems from the hope that some of America’s thorniest problems — the residues of slavery, Jim Crow, and racially restrictive immigration laws — will just go away. Part of it is that race is difficult to talk about: whites with the best intentions worry that they will say the wrong thing while people of color resent it when they are seen through the sole prism of their skin and not their full identities.
Read More »

Also posted in Manuel Pastor | Comments (2)

Urban Ills: No American Monopoly

Mary Newsom / Jun 26 2010

For Release Sunday, June 27, 2010
Citiwire.net

ATHENS — Each city is a unique blend of history, culture and architecture. But put three dozen urban planners and scholars from around the globe into one room and you discover that their concerns sound astoundingly similar.

In June I spent three days in Athens with a group of former International Urban Fellows from Johns Hopkins University, holding their annual conference this year in the Greek capital city of almost 4 million. I asked those in attendance — most from Britain and Europe, but others from Mexico, India and Turkey — to pinpoint the biggest problem their city faces.

Despite major differences in history, urban form, customs and governance between their cities and U.S. metros, their answers might easily have come from planners in Atlanta, Cleveland, Charlotte or Chicago.

In the U.S., with our primitive rapid transit, our expensive — and expansive — large-lot suburban neighborhoods and our rapacious appetite for oil-based energy, we’re apt to imagine that other countries’ cities have found more effective solutions to problems that bedevil our urban areas. Europe is like a gigantic, well-planned Portland (though with better French fries), we think, while the U.S. is more like sprawling Phoenix.

Also posted in Mary Newsom | Comments (2)

Time for New Charters: The Regional Future of Local Government

Bill Dodge / Jun 19 2010

For Release Sunday, June 20, 2010
Citiwire.net

Local governments have strengthened their capacities multifold during my professional life. I recall vividly working with some that once keep financial records by hand, depended on snail mail for communications, and only responded to their neighbors under court order. Conversely, I have seen local governments earn the respect, and accompanying tax dollars, to provide state-of-the-art roads and sewers, public safety and recreation programs, and even bus service and affordable housing.

Yet in spite of this increased competency, individual local governments have been losing the ability to address many of their toughest challenges — the ones that cut across jurisdictional boundaries — at an increasing pace since the turn of the century. If there has ever been a time for innovation in local government, it is now.

Crosscutting challenges are not new. Some were predetermined by our natural environment. For example, local governments realized that taking drinking water out upstream and dumping waste water downstream only worked for the jurisdiction at the headwaters. Everyone else was going to drink someone else’s pollution. The same was discovered when the jurisdictions drawing on a common aquifer exceeded its ability to replenish itself and had to keep digging deeper wells. Neighboring local governments realized that they needed to negotiate watershed plans to assure adequate and potable drinking water. Ditto for airshed plans to breathe clean air.

Also posted in Bill Dodge | Comments (4)

Thank You for Listening, Mr. Donovan

Peter Katz / Jun 11 2010

For Release Sunday, June 13, 2010
Citiwire.net

That’s what I would have said to Shaun Donovan, Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development had I been able to reach the podium before he was whisked into a waiting car for a tour of Atlanta-area public housing sites. Donovan had just addressed the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)’s annual gathering this May. CNU has been working tirelessly for the past two decades to find a new and better approach to community development in America.

Simply stated, CNU seeks to build strong, economically competitive regions woven from a fabric of walkable neighborhoods and districts, that offer beautiful, affordable places to live, work, learn and play. What CNU members dislike is the single-use development pattern known as suburban sprawl– the pattern prevalent in most places built over the past 50-60 years.

Apparently, Donovan dislikes sprawl too. He thanked CNU members for their part in changing “the way we think about our communities” and offered his critique of the suburban-edge housing boom that hindsight now tells us was a fool’s paradise:

Also posted in Peter Katz | Comments (1)

New Metro Formula: Helping Those Who Help Themselves

Mark Muro and Rob Puentes / Jun 05 2010

For Release Sunday, June 06, 2010
Citiwire.net

The federal transportation finance system is broken and will be short on cash for the for a long time.

Some regions—like the growing Phoenix, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, and Denver metropolitan areas—have meanwhile achieved transformation viability through unusual self-help (although they still face massive challenges).

Is there a deal to be done? Perhaps there is.

Check out, for example, the intriguing concept for a new federal-metro partnership in transportation finance being shopped around by the Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) in Arizona.

Challenged by needs yet pessimistic about the likelihood of new federal funding, MAG would have the federal government and large metropolitan areas work a trade in which Washington would provide new incentives in the form of increased and direct funding to metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and new flexibilities in exchange for those regions’ continued contribution of substantial regional funding to the creation of the national transportation system. Along those lines, what MAG calls a “new partnership” between Washington and its most creative regions might enable new progress in addressing the nation’s gargantuan transportation challenges.

Also posted in Mark Muro | Comments (4)

Supermarkets as Neighborhood Centers: Vision For a More Walkable America

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.

Also posted in Neal Peirce, Neal Peirce column | Comments (17)

Infrastructure: Pay Now Or Pay A Lot More Later

Edward T. McMahon / May 21 2010

For Release Sunday, May 23, 2010
Citiwire.net

America has an infrastructure problem: crowded highways, leaking pipes, collapsing bridges, and aging transit systems. Lots of people have been talking about the infrastructure problem, although given the deep and ongoing state and federal budget crisis we haven’t really done much about it.

Sure the Obama administration recently directed $8.5 billion to high speed rail and billions more for “shovel ready” projects in the stimulus bill, but considering that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates that the nation faces a $2.2 trillion infrastructure backlog, this is just a drop in the bucket.

Infrastructure will lay the foundation for America’s future prosperity but our elected leaders have failed to level with the American people about how the country is falling behind our global competitors or explaining the true costs of making required upgrades and building new systems.” Leveling with the American people” is just one of the key recommendations of Infrastructure 2010: Investment Imperative, the fourth in a series of annual reports produced by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst and Young on U.S. and global infrastructure trends.

Mass transit is just one area where the rhetoric doesn’t meet the reality. While the U.S. has provided “seed funding” for high speed rail in a few important travel corridors, China has leaped far ahead of the US and other countries, including Japan and France and is now the world leader in high speed rail. After years of investment in new highways, China is now investing billions in a cutting edge network of train and subways designed to boost exports and revolutionize the flow of people and goods. By 2012, China will have over 5,000 miles of high speed rail and is currently building 60 new subway lines in more than 20 cities. Next year when a new Shanghai to Beijing high speed line opens (a year ahead of schedule) the journey between China’s two most important cities will be reduced to just 4 hours for a 600 mile trip.

Also posted in Edward T. McMahon | Comments (1)

Rx For Attracting Companies: Tailored Strategies Essential

Sam Newberg / May 14 2010

For Release Sunday, May 16, 2010
Citiwire.net

The slogan – “Keep Austin Weird,” launched by Austin’s Independent Business Alliance — has caught on as a way to celebrate the Texas capital’s artistic, “hip” side. Indeed, in today’s “flat” world, any appeal to the so-called “creative” classes gets lots of attention.

But are companies really attracted to such culture-public art-music-park focused cities as Portland, Boulder, Minneapolis and Austin for those qualities? Will those attributes actually attract companies?

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” “There is no perfect location. There are always tradeoffs,” says John Boyd, founder of The Boyd Company, a site selection consultancy with over 30 years of experience helping firms make location decisions. Boyd explains that in addition to the bottom line considerations like cost of labor, cost of real estate, and taxes, there is also availability of qualified labor, proximity to transportation, infrastructure, proximity to suppliers – competitors with “quality of life issues.”

Also posted in Sam Newberg | Comments (3)

New Orleans’ Third Crisis: Suburb-Style Hospital Plan

Roberta Brandes Gratz / May 06 2010

For Release Sunday, May 12, 2010
Citiwire.net

NEW ORLEANS – As if this storied city has not been beset enough with disasters, the oil spill is actually its third man-made catastrophe after the levee failures during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Gaining little outside attention is the real second on-going disaster, a thoughtlessly cited, destructively planned hospital complex that promises to cripple New Orleans in many unrecognized ways.

Everyone in the city wants both hospitals it had before the storms – Charity run by LSU and the Veteran’s Hospital. But the city, through a decision-making process that was glaringly non-transparent, has approved a complex requiring the destruction of a tax-paying, historic neighborhood of homes restored with government money. The hospitals will form of a suburban-type campus, away from the already struggling downtown core, in a location that may make regeneration of the historic center close to impossible.

While Charity’s minimally-damaged, perfectly reusable historic downtown facility sits empty, LSU is being given at least twice the land it needs to build a new, car-dependant campus with considerable extra acreage for future profit-making commercial development that will compete with and further erode the fragile business district. Together with the VA Hospital, Charity will share 67 acres built on a platform 22 feet in the air. Streets disconnected from the grid with minimum pedestrian access, this suburban-style campus will be totally car-dependant and isolated from the existing city, which has been showing real healthy signs of regeneration.

Also posted in Roberta Brandes Gratz | Comments (7)

Peril, Promise, and a Watery Future For the World’s Coastal Cities

Anthony Flint / Apr 30 2010

For Release Sunday, May 2, 2010
Citiwire.net

NEW ORLEANS – Even with aggressive action on climate change, scientists agree that a global temperature rise of some kind is inevitable, triggering sea level rise, more intense storms, and an array of other chain-reaction disruptions to life as we know it. And in the typically sinister way that the climate cataclysm plays out, these impacts will hit hardest in the places most people live.

More than half of the U.S. population lives in 673 coastal counties. In China, the world’s most populous nation, 60 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people live in coastal provinces. Worldwide, rapid urbanization in coastal and delta mega-cities includes widespread informal settlement, a recipe for disaster for the most vulnerable populations.

The good news is that planners are paying attention. Cities, as places of density and transit, can make great strides in mitigation, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But coastal cities must engage in adaptation on a parallel, and in many ways integrated, track. There is no more urgent role for planners in the years ahead than to plan and help implement adaptation to climate change, says Edward Blakely, the former recovery director for New Orleans.

Coastal cities are already well aware – some painfully aware – of the breadth of the problem. Jakarta is confronting annual flooding that strains a colonial-era layout, and Dhaka in Bangladesh has struggled with stronger typhoons. At the Yantgze and Pearl river deltas in the Shanghai and Hong Kong regions, chronic flooding, coastline erosion and wetlands deterioration, storm surges, and punishing storms are wreaking havoc on areas that have been attracting the most intense in-migration and urbanization. Sewer overflow and saltwater intrusion, with impacts on drinking water, public health, and agriculture, are key areas of concern, as well as the vulnerable infrastructure, such as power plants, port and refining facilities, that will be flooded and potentially permanently underwater in the decades ahead.

Also posted in Anthony Flint | Comments (2)