Is the film industry snookering America’s taxpayers?

We’re accustomed to state governments putting up big capital for footloose auto factories, biotech firms, even airplane assembly plants.

But what are we to make of tax credits and other state-financed breaks to such big-time production companies as Disney, Time Warner and Sony and their film-making subcontractors? With most state budgets now mired in deep red ink, does this make any sense?

Louisiana, which had been attracting some filmmaking for decades, decided in 2002 to ramp up modest incentives in a really serious way, passing a bundle of subsidies for film production in the state.

The strategy paid off quickly, attracting such production firms as Disney and such stars as Dustin Hoffman.

Louisiana’s move did more. It triggered, as researcher William Luther reported for the Tax Foundation, “an explosion of movie production credits nationwide” as dozens of states tried by one way or another to outbid Louisiana. By 2009, 44 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico were into the game.

Michigan, reeling under cataclysmic job losses and massive budget shortfalls, has played hard to trump the field, laying out $125 million in 2008, $223 million in 2009. Its investment, pushed hard by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, has snagged such big-time films as Gran Torino (starring Clint Eastwood) and Up In the Air (starring George Clooney). Eastwood has predicted Michigan “will be the new film capital of the world.”

The hope — pushed by television commercials featuring Granholm and actor Jeff Daniels — is that the rich and famous will flock to Michigan, and that filmmaking will become a magic elixir for the state’s economy and image. One wonders if such towns as Lansing and Detroit have that potential. The Tax Foundation’s wry conclusion: “The probability of such a transformation actually occurring is extremely small, but the dreams of Tinsel Town can die hard for citizens and statesmen.”

The incentives, as they’ve developed in copy-cat fashion across the country, typically start with exempting filmmaking production purchases from sales taxes, or lodging taxes for crew members in hotels. They continue with such freebies as no-free locations and waiving police traffic control costs as film sites. South Carolina even offers 20 percent cash rebates for wages paid local actors and stunt performers.

Next come actual state grants to filmmakers for significant shares of their local expenditures. And then the biggest and potentially most serious — tax credits that remove a portion of the companies’ income taxes due the state.

Twenty-eight states now offer the tax credits, many so generous, the Tax Foundation reports, that their value often exceeds the movie company’s tax liability in a state. But they’re structured to be transferable. Brokers are able (for a 25 to 30 percent cut) to sell them to companies who have nothing to do with movies or entertainment. The firms can then apply the credits like coupons on their tax returns.

So is the state really gaining much? State Rep. Steve D’Amico calculated Massachusetts was spending $89,000 a job through the tax credits. Citing the competition from other states, D’Amico told Governing Magazine: “These jobs will only persist as long as we continue to offer the credit. We’re renting them. But once you start handing out money, it’s really hard to step away.”

Various estimates show overall return to states embarrassingly low — 19 cents on the dollar in South Carolina, 16 cents in Massachusetts, 8 cents in Connecticut, 28 cents in Rhode Island.

The criticisms — and actual scandals in handling the subsidies in Iowa and Louisiana — have at least tapped the brakes of the subsidy train, reports Phil Mattera of “Good Jobs First.” Iowa and Kansas have suspended their programs while Wisconsin and Connecticut have cut back sharply.

But Louisiana — notwithstanding the revelation its film commissioner had accepted bribes from a film producer — actually boosted its tax credit and made it permanent. Alabama, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah have recently upped their subsidies. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger favors tax credits to lure back film production that’s crept away from Hollywood.

Politicians prize, predictably, photo-ops with glamorous movie or TV stars. But do film subsidies — except in established centers like Los Angeles — actually spur meaningful economic growth? Do they improve productivity, train significant new workforces, develop new technologies — especially when a non-ending chain of public subsidies is required to keep them in state or in town?

The raw bottom line is this: Subsidy-induced film activity may have glitz and surface appeal. But nationally, it’s a washout — film production lured from one place to another is classic “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” At the end of the day the country’s no less prosperous. The net economic impact is simply to enrich the filmmakers at the expense of state taxpayers. Even a Cecil B. DeMille would blush.

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.

Does it always take adversity to get an American region to “get its act together” in planning future growth?

The Puget Sound area anchored by Seattle suggests “no.” Geology and modern economics have blessed the region in astounding ways. There’s the natural legacy of glistening snow-capped mountain peaks and lush Douglas fir beside sparking watersides. Economically, the region’s had such world-renowned economic treasures as Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon.com, excellent ports and vibrant international trade.

Yet there’s been a dark underside to the region’s exuberant growth — to 4.7 million people — over the last decades. I vividly recall a 1989 helicopter ride marked by spectacular views of Mount Rainier, a rainbow at Snoqualmie Falls and picturesque villages. But I could also see bulldozed “progress” — a plethora of scarred hilltops, deep cuts into the magnificent evergreen tapestry.

Over the past 30 years, more than 2 million acres of Cascade-range forest and farm land has given way to sprawling development. In 1990 the state of Washington did pass a growth management act that restrained some helter-skelter expansion. But development has fragmented open spaces, including wildlife habitat and corridors. With rapid expansion of the urban footprint, added paving has intensified flooding and erosion. There’s concern that climate change will bring warmer winters with less snow pack, leading to summertime drought, water shortages and increased forest fire danger.

Responding to the dangers, a “Cascade Agenda” was launched in 2005 — a 100-year conservation and preservation plan for 1.3 million acres of the Puget Sound region’s most prized waters, mountains and communities. Some 225,000 private acres have already been conserved under the plan, which is rooted in an imaginative transfer of development rights.

But there’s concern that 700,000 acres of working farmland is being converted to 10- and even 80-acre residential lots, translating to some 18,000 housing units over time. So there’s a new community discussion with city managers, focused on where new development should be channeled, says Gene Duvernot, Cascade Land Conservancy president. The draft legislation would give the Puget Sound Regional Council authority to apportion the 18,000 housing units across the cities, granting them tax increment authority so that new development goes “up” in the existing towns rather than “spread” across the landscape.

But the process isn’t “anti-development,” Duvernoy insists, because developers, in the process, can still have a “product” — just producing it in towns and cities rather than in the form of outward sprawl. “Great communities, great landscape, a sustainable environment — they can only work in tandem,” he insists. “Built right, attractive, affordable city neighborhoods will be our best hope.”

Regional leaders are now using the language of “ecodistricts” –chains of communities that feature not just low-impact development techniques and a range of housing types and costs but also frequent public transit, high efficiency district energy systems, and community space. The initiatives are all part of a package it’s hoped will show distinctive region-wide collaboration and innovation, qualifying the area for support under the federal government’s new Sustainable Communities grant program.

It seems the Cascade Land Conservancy’s agenda is never complete. A top example– restoring neglected parks to their former glory. Seattle and four neighboring communities have joined a “Green Cities” program for massive, city-wide park and open space restoration. Some 10,000 volunteers are involved. “It may be decades before we are all done. But it’s a far better investment in a city’s quality of life to restore a weed-choked park than purchase new land,” notes Duvernoy.

And now, to match the Cascade Agenda, the Conservancy has organized an Olympic Agenda to cover Puget Sound’s western neighbor — the entire Olympic Peninsula, which offers some of North America’s most dramatic scenery, ranging from glacier-rich Mount Olympus to thick canopies of rain forest. Yet the collapse of the timber industry has hit hard, while farming and fishing aren’t providing the jobs they once did. Unemployment is high.

Meanwhile, the peninsula is under economic pressure to fragment and convert private lands for private real estate development, raising dangers for both its rough-and-ready rural character and its pristine shorelines and estuaries. Proposed remedies have emerged in county-by-county dialogues that the Conservancy has organized. They range from rounding up capital to replace worn-out bridges and water systems to “green” infrastructure in the form of community-based forests and well-maintained trails to undergird both community life and tourism.

The extension of regional dialogue from the Everett-Seattle/Bellevue-Tacoma axis to the neighboring Olympic Peninsula, from urban to rural, from income-rich to economically struggling territory, isn’t totally unique in the U.S. But it’s rare, and it represents the kind of imaginative citistate-wide approaches that the times demand. Hard to quantify in the short-term, the benefits of thinking, planning, strategizing together, jointly exploring innovations and promising steps for the future, could in time be dramatic. More American regions should be emulating the model.

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.

Close to 40 years after Richard Nixon sparked America’s “war on drugs,” California voters this November get to vote on the war’s biggest challenge ever.

It’s a ballot initiative making it legal for any Californian 21 or older to grow or use marijuana. If passed, there will be no more requirement to prove medical need (today’s law in California and 12 other states). Cannabis would be subject to taxes, potentially yielding billions of dollars in state, county and city levies.

California will be voting in the wake of Gallup polling that shows nationwide support for legalizing marijuana up to 44 percent, an eight-point jump since 2005. Support is higher in California: recent polls show the legalization initiative leading by margins of 56 to 42 percent and 49 percent to 41 percent.

But that doesn’t assure passage: historically, a modest poll lead for an initiative can melt away, especially as opponents wage fierce negative campaigns close to election day. Stiff opposition to the marijuana measure is likely from California’s “prison-industrial-complex” including police chiefs, prosecutors and prison guards.

Still, the California stage is set by the state’s early approval of medical marijuana and the Obama administration’s key decision last year to reverse earlier policy to shut down marijuana dispensaries even when countenanced under states’ laws.

Voters will likely debate social impacts of legalization versus potential state and local tax gains. But waiting in the wings is a deep moral issue: how marijuana prohibition laws were written in part to subjugate minority populations.

Last week the California State Conference of the NAACP issued an “unconditional endorsement” of the legalization initiative. Alice Huffman, the group’s president, attacked the current marijuana laws as a de facto way to criminalize young black men.

She cited a Drug Policy Alliance report showing that while total marijuana arrests in California spiraled from 20,000 in 1990 to 60,000 in 2008, arrests for “youth of color” rose four times faster. Federal surveys have consistently shown that young whites are more likely to use marijuana than young blacks. But in every one of California’s largest 25 urban counties, arrests of African-Americans for possessing marijuana exceed those for whites. In Los Angeles County, blacks are 10 percent of the population but account for 30 percent of marijuana arrests.

“It is time for them to stop using my community to fill the prisons,” Huffman said.

And it’s not just a California phenomenon. New York City’s marijuana arrests are also racially skewed, reports Harry G. Levine, Queens College sociologist. Arrests for small amounts of marijuana in New York City have skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, he reports, with blacks (20 percent of the city’s population) constituting 52 percent of arrests, and Latinos (27 percent of the population) 31 percent of arrests.

For the cops, this is good business, notes Levine: “Narcotics and patrol police, their supervisors and top commanders” benefit from arrests that “are comparatively safe, allow officers and their supervisors to accrue overtime pay, and produce arrest numbers that show productivity.”

But for youth — nearly all handcuffed, put into the back of a police car or van, taken to a local station to be photographed and fingerprinted, and most often held one or more nights in jail — it’s a traumatic experience. Often they can escape longer incarceration by pleading guilty — but then have a felony conviction likely to haunt them for life.

Yet New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, asked in his first campaign if he’d ever used marijuana, replied: “You bet I did. And I enjoyed it.” One in three Americans, and two recent presidents, have also tried the weed.

Small wonder. Marijuana has been used by humans for some 10,000 years. President Nixon’s hand-picked commission on marijuana found its “health impacts are minimal” and “the ‘gateway’ drug theory has no basis.” Yet Nixon, as part of his cultural war on black militants, hippies and campus revolutionaries, made marijuana a chief target.

He wasn’t the first. As Mexican workers brought marijuana across the border in the early 20th century, local prosecutors and editors publicly decried the “loco weed.” One critic associated marijuana (called “marihuana” at the time) — not only with Mexicans but “Negroes, prostitutes, pimps, and a criminal class of whites.” States began outlawing the drug, one Texas senator asserting “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff is what makes them crazy.”

In the ’30s Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, spearheaded the campaign to make marijuana possession a federal crime because (in his words) of “its effect on the degenerate races” — not only Hispanics but blacks whom he suggested were deluded by “reefer” to “think they’re as good as white men.”

Ironically, current polling shows Hispanics the only California ethnic voter group leaning against the fall initiative. A refresher on the odious history of marijuana prohibition ought to be enough to shift that.

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.

Profoundly immoral — and fiscal folly, to boot.

That’s how the United States’ continuing “war on drugs” and its horrendous impact on our neighbor Mexico deserves to be seen.

Why?

First, it’s our appetite for official forbidden drugs — marijuana, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine — that’s driving the chaos on our southern border and deep into Mexico. President Felipe Calderon expected — but has clearly failed — to crack the vicious drug rings through police and military power. But he’s dead right on one score:

“The origin of our violence problem begins with the fact that Mexico is located next to the country that has the highest levels of drug consumption in the world. It is as if our neighbor were the biggest drug addict in the world.”

The conclusion is simple: if the United States were to decriminalize drugs, end the criminal prohibition on growing or selling them, prices would plummet.

This means that the massive profits the Mexican druglords reap — their “take” on an estimated $15 billion a year cross-border trade — would literally evaporate.

That, in turn, would put an end to most of the barbaric drug-driven crimes — shootings, kidnappings, beheadings — and that are currently being committed by the Mexican gangs as they struggle with each other, and with sometimes-complicit police, for bigger slices of the market.

Annual drug-related killings in Mexico total 22,000 since 2007, according to a leaked Mexican government report. At the scale of deaths reported since January, the total could top 13,000 just this year. Late in June the remains of 64 people, some decapitated, were discovered in a 50-story former mining pit near the tourist town of Taxco. From the wounds, it appeared many were alive when they were thrown down the shaft.

So how are we supposedly moral, righteous Americans reacting? Mostly with indifference, as if it’s “someone else’s” problem. Even the supposedly progressive Obama administration, while saying it wants a shift from interdiction to prevention and treatment of drug abuse, won’t make the connection between our drug prohibition laws and the mass killings in Mexico. Rather, it’s funneling more cash to the Mexican police and armed forces, money to support a bloody, unwinnable war.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, interviewed by the Associated Press on a trip to Mexico City, was asked why the U.S. pursues its clearly-failed, decades-long war on drugs. Her reply:

“This is worth fighting for because drug addiction is about fighting for somebody’s life, a young child’s life, a teenager’s life, their ability to be a successful and productive adult.”

But does U.S. drug prohibition accomplish that, when our teenagers report it’s easier to get a marijuana joint (because it’s unlicensed) than a six-pack of beer (its sale to minors government-enforced)?

Let’s assume drugs were decriminalized in the United States. And let’s acknowledge some added addiction occurred (even though the predicted rise in use is not reported in countries such as Portugal, the Netherlands and Switzerland, where decriminalization has been introduced).

Even if more Americans would have to battle with addictions, we need to ask: Are American lives so precious, so superior, that Mexicans can or should be obliged to suffer tens of thousands of deaths because we’re too timid to lift our legal prohibition on drugs? Is this kind of behavior, belief in our moral immunity, what our chest-thumping Fourth of July celebrations are all about?

And then there’s the fiscal folly point. For Mexicans, the continued drug horrors darken any prospects for an economically successful nation — one that’s an effective trade partner with the United States, and able to provide strong incomes for its families so that fewer feel compelled to immigrate north across the border.

And for the the U.S. economy there are big stakes too. We could save tens of billions of dollars — at a time when the federal and practically all state and local budgets have moved into deep deficit territory — by moving rapidly to terminate our war on drugs.

There’s strong parallel to the Great Depression time of the early 1930s. Repeal of the Prohibition Act, which outlawed liquor from 1920 to 1933, not only quashed the Al Capone-style crime rings but created tens of thousands of new legal jobs.

A parallel move today would also stop the epidemic of drug arrests that have driven our prison populations — and costs to taxpayers — to world-record levels.

A 2008 survey by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found legalizing drugs would save $44 billion yearly in government prohibition enforcement for arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations. State and local governments could enjoy $30 billion of the savings. And government taxes on drugs, by Miron’s estimates, would yield taxes of $33 billion — even if the rates were set no higher than current alcohol and tobacco levies.

Morals and fiscal common sense both dictate that we end our drug prohibition. And not some decades from now, but quickly.

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.

BALTIMORE — Forced “displacement,” “removal,” “resettlement” of peoples. Can it be made less painful?

The Annie E. Casey Foundation is working on a cure in the East Baltimore neighborhood beside the already huge and growing Johns Hopkins Medical Center, Maryland’s largest single employer.

There’s no doubt that forcing the breakup of neighborhoods is a global problem, whether triggered by civil wars, floods, fires, or just to clear prime city real estate for Olympic and World Cup-like events.

Yet for humans, displacement from their known settings may be exceedingly painful — a process Jane Jacobs highlighted in her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Research psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove more recently underscored the point in her book, “Root Shock,” likening the psychological impact of forced removal from a familiar neighborhood to a plant being jerked from its native soil.

But holding neighborhoods static isn’t practical — they’re always in some flux, and spaces often do need to be found to accommodate job-creating industries, university expansions or creation of new parks.

The question is: Can we Americans be more sensitive than we were after World War II, when we countenanced “urban renewal” practices that forced inner-city residents — mostly black — to abandon their poor but socially cohesive neighborhoods? The prime public excuse back then was to “eradicate blight.”

But the uses of the lost neighborhood land often told a different tale: flashy public projects, real estate opportunities for private developers, and clearance for massive freeways plowing through low-income and minority areas.

Notwithstanding the redevelopment around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, much of its inner city was a poster child for deindustrialization (loss of port, shipmaking, steelworking jobs). It experienced race riots in the 1960s, massive middle class exodus, waves of drugs, crime, property “flippers” and slumlords.

The Casey Foundation was initially skeptical when Baltimore’s then-Mayor (now Maryland Gov.) Martin O’Malley asked it to help out with a $1-billion-plus plan to acquire and demolish hundreds of homes in the Middle East neighborhood immediately north of the Johns Hopkins campus, with the goal of creating an 88-acre community for life sciences research facilities, retail development and market-rate housing.

But Casey reasoned that with its mission of supporting children and poor families, it might prevent great harm by participating. It agreed if — but only if — the city and Johns Hopkins would make a primary objective of improving lives for the neighborhood’s families. They did, East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) was then formed.

The challenge was formidable: this was Baltimore’s second poorest neighborhood, suffering serious physical decay, housing abandonment and high crime rates. Yet with 35 percent homeownership, it had a resident core with commitment to place.

Consulting with residents about relocation, EBDI first encountered strong anger. But in well over 300 community meetings the tenor changed, especially as relocation counselors and family advocates were assigned to work for months with each of the 630 families to be moved, before, during, and up to three years after relocation.

Plus, millions of Casey dollars were invested in the neighborhood, including a new public community school with charter-like autonomy and funding, encouraging development of a community grocery store, new parks and open space, job training and some 1,000 new job placements, child care, credit counseling and health care.

The EBDI partners also responded to residents’ legitimate fears of a environmental health nightmare from the lead, asbestos and rat droppings that would be released in the atmosphere by a wrecking ball. A new safety protocol was developed — and embraced by Baltimore for regular future use.

Net result: Notwithstanding the more than 630 families moved, there’s not been a single law suit, and post-relocation surveys of residents moved show 8.5 satisfaction on a 1 (worst) to 10 (best) scale.

And a solid mixed-income neighborhood — ranging from low to higher income, literally the first of post-World War II Baltimore — is taking shape, complemented by a life sciences buildings, graduate student housing, a new state public health lab, a prospective commuter rail station, and more.

So it’s small wonder that Casey has announced it is now championing nationally its approach of “Responsible Redevelopment” — to build reconstructed neighborhoods based on robust resident engagement and technical assistance to help neighborhood leaders negotiate effectively with developers and city officials.

A key element of the new approach: “responsible relocation,” so that when residents are obliged to move out, they receive help finding quality replacement housing, legal and social services, job assistance, and “the right to return” to their revitalized community through purchase or rental of new or rehabbed affordable housing.

Is this Baltimore-born approach unique? Yes, suggests author Roberta Brandes Gratz, a staunch defender of city neighborhoods and an expert on Jane Jacobs and her legacy: “There’s never before been an honest relocation effort where there was actual one-on-one dealings with the people being displaced. This sounds like a real breaking of the mold.”

Editor’s Note: Roberta Brandes Gratz, quoted in the column, is a Citistates Group Associate and author of the newly-published book, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (Nation Books).

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.

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.

In short, it will likely shine as one of America’s “Dynamic Neighborhoods” — a new way to analyze urban neighborhoods recently developed by Robert Weissbourd and his colleagues of the Chicago-based RW Ventures firm for Living Cities (a foundation-corporate-government alliance focused on boosting and financing development in challenged urban areas nationwide).

It’s a big (though frequent) mistake, says Weissbourd, to think of neighborhoods as static places, with a set character to defend at all costs. Even some well-intentioned community development groups make that error, he suggests, constantly working to expand local affordable housing and social services when the growing poverty in America isn’t in cities at all — it’s now in suburbs.

The secret to strong neighborhoods, Weissbourd argues, is positive mobility — understanding that neighborhoods are in constant motion, turning over with people and businesses coming and going. “Neighborhoods need to attract the residents, the businesses, the investments they want — or they’re dying,” he insists.

Played right, he argues, a neighborhood’s locations will become ever-greater assets in a less suburban-focused era that puts top value on diversity, density, proximity to downtowns, on active idea exchange and on a full range of urban services including expanded public transit.

But how do neighborhoods figure out how they tap their regional economies, position themselves best? The “Dynamic Neighborhoods” project created a “taxonomy” of neighborhood types, analyzed over the 1986-2006 time span, in four cities — Seattle, Chicago, Cleveland and Dallas. Neighborhoods were classified as “Truly Disadvantaged” to “Stable Low Income” to “Ports of Entry” (like Rainier Valley) and from there up the urban food chain to “Close, Cool and Convenient” and “Fortune 100.”

By analyzing clusters of like neighborhoods, ranging from young singles’ to retirement-oriented areas, the analysis shows not just trends but different priorities on every issue from homeownership and housing prices to physical safety, workforce development to proximity to supermarkets and transit. The idea is that smarter and profit-tapping decisions can then be made by neighborhood groups, city halls or businesses, based on the system’s fine-grained, over-time analysis.

For isolated neighborhoods, for example, the best investments might be workforce training and better transit connections. For “ports of entry,” ESL (English as a Second Language) and work training centers. For retirement communities the top focus might well be on crime protection and having retailing and other necessary services within walking distance.

But the “Dynamic Neighborhoods” process taps not just preferences, but statistical evidence of what’s actually worked well and how for like neighborhoods, with the result that significantly smarter, businesslike projections of likely impacts by varied decisions can be made.

It’s an exciting shift. Suddenly, with the new, and now less expensive computer-driven analytic tools, neighborhoods themselves may be positioned to think as strategically as — for example — the big national retail and food chains that cavalierly move facilities in and out of neighborhoods in order to extract the most local wealth.

The Rainier Valley neighborhood didn’t have that degree of systemic analysis at its command. But Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, recognizing the rapid change in the neighborhood, did work with outreach liaisons, planning groups and community organizations to engage 3,000 local citizens in discussions about Rainier Valley’s options and future courses.

Add the cutting edge analytic tools and any neighborhood in America to position itself more smartly to set priorities and gain a place in the sun of its regional economy.

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.

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.

Washington’s school menus will be rewritten to ban trans fats and reduce salt and saturated fats. Strict calorie limits will be set. Diets will include whole grains each day, with varieties of fresh fruits and vegetables. Space for gardens and compost piles will be set aside at school sites, with special emphasis on organic and locally grown foods. Minimum times for physical exercise will be upped to 150 minutes a week in elementary schools and 225 minutes in middle schools.

And in Washington’s public schools with moderate or high concentrations of poor children, the new law requires that breakfast will be served for all children without charge each day so that those kids heading to the cafeteria for free breakfast won’t be stigmatized. Plus, lunch will be free for most children. (An sales tax increase on sodas, ferociously opposed by the industry, will pay the bill.)

The District law also encourages schools to buy organic products from Maryland and Virginia farmers — reflecting a national “farm to school” movement that’s now reached over 2,000 schools in 40 states. The idea: fresh and nutritious food for children, and a consistent, reliable market for local farmers.

What a turnaround that suggests! Pizza, hamburgers, french fries, hot dogs and chicken nuggets — those are the school lunch offerings Americans first think of, according to a national poll just released by the Kellogg Foundation.

Facts underscore the poll findings. A U.S. Department of Agriculture survey shows that means served through virtually all school lunch programs meet the country’s proclaimed nutrition standards for protein and calcium. They do a middling job on calories. Yet less than 30 percent of schools have shaped their menus to keep saturated fats under recommended levels.

And they face a dilemma: fresh foods do cost more. Processed foods — especially corn-laden products — are cheaper because federal farm price support policy has made them a glut on the market, driving down their cost.

A companion barrier: Federal reimbursement rates for school lunches are low, driving schools to serve cheaper processed, high-calorie foods. And many schools count on fees from vending machines — packed with high-calorie items such as sodas, sports drinks, cookies or chips — to pay for extracurricular expenses.

Slowly, schools are evicting the vending machines or requiring they offer healthy products. More are swapping out their deep fryers for salad bars. Increasing numbers are learning it’s a mistake to stick with contracted food service management firms — that they do better with self-operated programs that are specifically tasked with preparing freshly cooked, unprocessed, tasty foods for youngsters.

The National League of Cities reports an array of range of city halls and school districts, among them Savannah (Ga.), Jackson (Tenn.) and Oakland (Calif.), have begun to partner in community-wide wellness programs aimed at the childhood obesity problem.

In Connecticut, the New Haven Food Policy Council sponsored a region-wide “Childhood Obesity Summit.” It’s tapped the experience of Yale’s pace-setting sustainable food efforts for its students, and published an attractive “Primer on Federal, State and Local Policies that Impact School Food.”

It’s true, the obstacles are legion. Harried families often eat out at the high-fat chains, in place of healthier home-cooked meals. The food industry spends $1.6 billion a year advertising its calorie- and fat-laden products to children and adolescents. Scattered subdivision-type neighborhoods mean more kids have to be driven to school, or take school buses, rather than walking or biking. “Screen time” — television, computers, texting on cell-phones — has taken a toll on neighborhood sports.

In May Michelle Obama released the report of the administration’s Childhood Obesity Task Force, including 70 specific steps. The bold goal: to “bend the curve” of today’s child obesity rate — almost 20 percent — back to its 1972 level of 5 percent by 2030.

It’s a tall order. But the growing local moves are a clear signal. And national leadership too– This initiative is so crucial for the nation’s future that, if it succeeds, it might just be the Obama administration’s most important legacy.

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

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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!

There’s no question the word “livability” is wimpish and terribly imprecise (if anyone has a better synonym, please speak up). Yet the intent is as American as apple pie.

“Livability is a shorthand way of saying we’re going to spend $1 to solve $4 worth of challenges,” says District of Columbia planning director Harriet Tregoning. “It’s about getting multiple outcomes that communities want with a single investment. It’s an approach any conservative should love.”

Examples: As combined housing and transportation costs begin to eat up as much as 60 percent of working families’ incomes, livability means encouraging energy-efficient housing at locations close to work sites with public transit options, enhancing Americans’ real incomes.

As the nation’s prospective future oil supplies dwindle in the face of BP-Gulf-type disasters, plus price escalation and/or cutoffs by hostile foreign regimes, livability means tilting government’s regulatory and incentive tools toward more compact, close-in, less petroleum-demanding communities — undergirding national security in the process.

As health costs from escalating obesity threaten a tsunami of diabetes, heart and cancer conditions undermining Americans’ life expectancy, reducing personal incomes and ravaging government budgets, a planning “tilt” encouraging less sedentary time in cars, more exercise and walking, makes huge sense. That’s “livability” too.

As America’s existing infrastructure of roads and waterworks and sewage facilities crumbles, running up a cumulative bill in the trillions, the idea of “fix it first” of existing systems, of restoring older communities, should easily trump public funds going to finance infrastructure for disconnected enclaves of new family homes, office structures and strip malls.
What about those Americans who prefer living in suburban communities they consider safe, with the privacy of their own backyards and, in Orksi’s words, “the freedom, comfort, convenience and flexibility of personal transportation”? Isn’t that what most Americans would consider livability?

The answer is surely “yes” for millions. And it’s likely the suburbia they know and love (pending a cataclysmic energy crisis) will endure for decades to come.

But past needn’t be prelude. The “American century” of cheap energy and road-heavy development costs is over. And we can see the first wave of change in high numbers of today’s most creative American professionals (and youth) opting for the excitement of city life or seeking out more walkable suburban town centers.

As 100 million more Americans join us by 2040 (according to Census projections), we need far more creative, money-saving, energy-conscious, walkable, multi-service communities.

Can — or should — the federal government mandate all local governments make those choices? No. But it can encourage them, rejigger funding and planning incentives for saner choices, publicize new models, hold competitions for best new practices.

In fact, a clear-headed national government owes us no less. Because its job is to protect the national security, set strict environmental safety rules, and encourage our competitiveness on the world economic stage.

If you like weak and ineffectual governance from Washington, just apply the operating rules of the U.S. Minerals Management Service that failed to avert the truly appalling Gulf of Mexico crisis, or the financial regulators who failed to protect us against the excesses that triggered the Great Recession.

A federal finger on the scale in favor of compact, economical, resource-conserving development doesn’t need to be as heavy as safety regulation. Key words in the administration’s initiative are affordability, access, choices, connection, character of place, collaboration — hardly some kind of ruthless dictation. But we do need federal leadership — no apologies — in the tradition of the bold nation-building initiatives of our history, from the canals and first railways to today’s interstate system.
And if this means a reprise of the more compact, “know your neighbor” town and city patterns that served America so well up to World War II, we’ll be well served.

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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.

But the state government, up to now, hasn’t seemed to care — a reflection, it seems of its rural, anti-Atlanta prejudices. And those prejudices are ingrained. Case in point: while state governments nationwide provide some 15 percent of their cities’ operating budgets, for Atlanta the figure is just 2 percent, according to consultant firm Bain & Co. and National League of Cities reports.

The traffic impasse became a cause celebre for the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and its president, Sam Williams. He recounts how “We beat the drum for four years” to get permission for a regional transportation sales tax add-on, enlisting aid of the Georgia State Chamber, top Atlanta corporations, county officials and mayors, plus Chamber allies in such regions as Savannah and Macon.
A pointed message was also telegraphed to would-be candidates for state office: Their position on transportation funding would be a “litmus test” of whether they could expect campaign support from the business community.

Then Williams and his allies claimed a dollars and cents carrot — that the new transportation funding would add, in 10 years, some $8 billion to $9 billion of private sector investment that otherwise couldn’t be expected.

But the Atlanta-versus-the rest of Georgia issue kept thwarting legislative action.

Gov. Sonny Perdue gets credit for suggesting the compromise that finally worked: to allow any one of 12 regions across Georgia to decide on an added transportation tax themselves. A “roundtable” of local mayors and county officials will select potential projects, negotiating with the state transportation department to assure they seem reasonable. Then there’ll be a regional referendum to approve or reject the plan and the 10-year, one-cent sales tax add-on to finance it.

Passage of the bill was touch-and-go to the last minute, complicated by issues over funds for MARTA, the Atlanta region’s long-underfunded and troubled rapid rail system.

But a key role was played by Atlanta’s new mayor, Kasim Reed, a diplomatically skilled veteran of 11 years in the legislature. Reed, an African-American, is so respected that he was the first Atlanta mayor to be invited to speak from the well of the State House of Representatives — now Republican controlled.

Reed acknowledges “We were on the brink of failing again” this April. But Williams says Reed’s intercessions — including cell phone calls corralling votes as he walked to the Georgia State Capitol the night of the vote — made a critical difference in passage.

What does the Georgia breakthrough mean for the rest of America?

First, bipartisanship can be developed, “Tea Party”-like nihilism averted, if a governor and legislative leaders work hard to make it happen.

Second, mobilizing a metropolitan business community behind reform makes a major difference. It’s worth noting Williams visited metro cities from Phoenix to Denver to San Diego asking business and political leaders how to make breakthroughs. They invariably face uphill battles against their state governments, he notes.

Third, the idea of staging “roundtables,” not just in the biggest metro but in regions across a state, is extraordinarily promising. It requires clear local discussions on major issues; it obliges citizens to debate — and decide whether to tax themselves. Big metros trying to tax themselves for major needs no longer look like outliers. And regional decision-making becomes a new norm.

That’s a fascinating model for these times, ideal for transportation, maybe fresh water supply systems and other major issues. Thanks Georgia.

Editor’s Note: For further coverage of new Georgia law and its implications, check the Stateline story, Georgia Lawmakers Break Transportation Gridlock, by Daniel C. Vock.

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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.

But Hinshaw’s predictive track record is impressive. He was the first person to tell me, precisely 25 years ago, that post-World War II suburbs such as Bellevue, across Lake Washington from Seattle, could become true urban places on their own. I had fun writing the story– the prospect of Bellevue, the place they used to call “car city,” all strip commercial, no sidewalks and “potentially terminal boredom,” turning itself into a Class A center with high-rise buildings, plazas, parks, cafes.

And in fact the transformation has occurred, not just in Bellevue but in revamped old suburban sites around major cities coast to coast.

Today, Hinshaw asserts, grocery stores are re-emerging “as one of the cornerstones of great places to live.” Many are becoming social spaces, with espresso bars and welcoming seating. “People hang out, read the paper or a book, and meet friends — even when buying groceries isn’t part of the trip.”

In America’s reviving center cities, residents clamor for new grocery stores. We’re about to get one in my neighborhood in Southwest Washington, D.C., with a long-missed coffee shop, and everyone is elated. There was celebration in downtown Houston last year when years of planning culminated in opening of Byrd’s Market & Cafe.

Foodwise, the new market wave offers amenities residents crave — ultra-fresh vegetables and fruits, organic choices, varieties of fresh fish, specialty breads, spices and bottled spirits.
Will lack of parking crimp the growth of city and neighborhood markets? No, argues Hinshaw. A growing number of new markets are offering just a few dozen parking slots, some none at all. The new “niche” is people who carry two bags of groceries out by hand every few days, rather than transporting a dozen or more bags by car twice a month. Buying more frequently also means bringing home the freshest available foods.

The environs do make a difference. A market with an attractive public space outside — some kind of public square — will have an edge. The planners’ “rule of thumb” that people will only walk a quarter-mile isn’t true, Hinshaw contends. Make the walk interesting — no blank walls, no parking lots, but rather a mix of parks and gardens and public space, and interesting stores to glance in — and folks will walk further. Especially for food.

That’s why Hinshaw sees supermarkets as the anchors of “main street”-centered neighborhoods with dimensions of some four to five blocks. A market needs a surrounding population of 8,000 to 10,000 people, or about 4,000 houses, to succeed. The same population base can sustain another 50,000 to 80,000 square feet of shops and services.

One could expect a variety of places people want — perhaps a library, a community health clinic, a community center or town hall. And rather than some pre-planned perfect architectural order, a “messy vitality” of different types of uses and building sizes would seem in order.
The formula wouldn’t work for spread-out subdivisions, but there are thousands of locations across the U.S. where it could.

Such neighborhoods, Hinshaw suggests, wouldn’t necessarily need public transit connections. I doubt this part of his formula: without quality bus, preferably light- or heavy-rail connections, residents would have to revert to significantly high auto usage to reach work sites and other attractions across their region.

Still, Hinshaw’s overarching vision of walkable neighborhoods centered around our most-used facility of all — our food markets — is not just a nostalgic idea. It makes eminent sense for planning the next generation of American neighborhoods, and remaking the ones we have.

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.