Is the Obama administration’s urban policy ready for prime time?

In Philadelphia July 23, it looked that way. White House Urban Affairs Director Adolfo Carrion led an impressive entourage of federal officials–two Cabinet officers included–to visit a rarity: a shining new inner-city supermarket.

Then, with local officials and activists, the federal officials held a town hall meeting celebrating the idea of strategic government public intervention to bring fresh and healthy foods to the “food deserts” of low-income city neighborhoods (and some small towns).

Every major national grocery chain, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter told the gathering, had been offered the West Philadelphia Parkside site. Not one had accepted.

It’s a familiar story across America. Big supermarket chains, leery of higher security costs and focused on more affluent buyers, increasingly redline such areas. Local residents are left reliant on fast-food and convenience stores that sell mostly high-sugar, high-fat processed foods. The result: communities exposed to seriously higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

On top of that, notes the national nonprofit PolicyLink, communities lose the benefits that come with a full grocery store, including creation of steady jobs at decent wages and the sparking of complementary retail stores and services nearby.

So how did Jeffrey Brown, a fourth-generation grocer with 10 other stores around Philadelphia, “crack the code” to open a $14.5 million, 69,700-square foot market, offering fresh and regionally grown produce, and providing 130 union jobs in the struggling Parkside neighborhood?

The answer: the boost of a $1 million grant and $7 million in federal New Market Tax Credits for invesors, arranged through the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative.

The state program idea was Philadelphia-born. First, a local nonprofit, the Food Trust, documented the nexus between the lack of supermarkets and high rates of disease. Then a city council task force suggested a financing program for grocery stores. Jeremy Nowak’s Philadelphia-based but nationally-recognized Reinvestment Fund for poor neighborhoods helped devise the specifics. State Rep. Dwight Evans of Philadelphia successfully championed the idea in Harrisburg.

Since 2004, the state has allocated $30 million to the effort. But the Reinvestment Fund, tapping bank investments plus federal New Market Tax Credits, has amplified the total to $120 million, financing 69 projects statewide including 23 in Philadelphia (and half in rural towns). Programs based on the Pennsylvania model have now been proposed in New York, California, New Jersey and Ohio.

So it’s small wonder the Obama crew would pick Philadelphia as #1 stop in its planned nationwide road show (soon to include Denver, Kansas City and other locales). It’s all based, says Carrion, on the president’s Chicago-born conviction that communities, not Washington, create the best solutions. “We’re shopping around,” Carrion told me, “for good ideas to bring back to the public policy discussion” –figuring out how the federal government can help, whether in transportation, education, health care, economic development or healthy foods.

What’s important about the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Initiative, Carrion added, is not its specifics but “the model, the integration, the partnering of the public and private sector.”

But what also bubbled up in the Philadelphia gathering was local leaders’ sheer elation that after years of official Washington disinterest, there’s now active Washington outreach and focus on tough problems communities face.

For fresh food availability, that could either lead to a direct federal grant program, or perhaps even more constructive, federal “matches” to get more states to deal creatively with the nutrition challenges of their low-income communities.

If there was a shortcoming of the Philadelphia event, it was a missing metropolitan factor–few specific examples of regional fresh food supply chains and the role of such extraordinarily fertile food-producing counties such as nearby Lancaster.

But the audience responded enthusiastically to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack saying “It’s important to give farmers a market that’s not 1,500 miles away, not through a series of middle men, but a direct relationship that allows consumers to know precisely where their food is coming from.”

Or Commerce Secretary Gary Locke: “I want to go back and advertise to (my department in Washington) how to support initiatives like this rather than just industrial parks and manufacturing.”

Or Housing and Urban Development Deputy Secretary Ron Sims: “We can predict the illnesses people have, the morbidity rate anywhere in the U.S., by zip code. The country has to stop those disparities so that every child, every parent can be healthy.”

At the end of the day, Carrion said, he and Sims were “out of our suits into our jeans and t-shirts, digging our fingers into the ground” at a working urban farm in North Philadelphia that sells to local restaurants–its workforce “mostly black and brown kids” and “reentry program” ex-offenders.

If that doesn’t mark official Washington’s return to the grassroots, what could?

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.

China: 1.3 billion people, 60-plus cities with more than 1 million people, three with over 10 million. Yet we really don’t have a grip on what’s happening in China’s cities, or the competitive dimensions of Chinese national urban policy. The question’s especially timing right now as we shape our first-in-decades national urban policy, including the avowed focus on metropolitan areas that President Obama, chief White House urban affairs officers Adolfo Carrion and Derek Douglas and other top officials underscored at a White House Urban Policy Roundtable last week.

A few authors have focused on Chinese cities. Tom Campanella’s brilliant The Concrete Dragon, China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means to the World (2008) takes us to places one wouldn’t have imagined two decades ago. He tells us of the South China Mall that at 7 million square feet is bigger than the Pentagon. About Grand Epoch City, a 540 acre hotel, conference center, Buddhist Temple just outside of Beijing. And China’s 25,480 miles of national trunk highways–a project that has built more than 15,000 miles of interstate-like roads in just four years, including phenomenal engineering feats to increase vehicular mobility in cities–yet at great expense to the neighborhoods.

Views of last year’s Olympics let us see Beijing transformed. The historic core of Shanghai has seen 400 20-story-and-higher skyscrapers built since 1990. News accounts of civil unrest focus suddenly on Urumqi, a city of a million on the country’s western edge. Yet an I.M. Pei-designed museum in Suchow is emblematic of the culture–and investment wealth–of oversees Chinese “coming home.” Workers’ demonstrations in the Pearl River Delta cities of Shenzen and Dongguan remind us of China’s role in globalization. And the opening of the giant hydroelectric dam at Three Gorges evokes a vision of nearby Chongqing, one of China’s four autonomous municipalities, which I visited this month, a two and a half hour plane flight from Beijing.

Let’s pause at Chongqing for a moment because it represents urban policy at work in a smaller (by Chinese standards) city. With a population of 5 million in its core and about 30 million within its bounds, located at the confluence of the Yangzi and Jailing Rivers, it reminds us it was China’s national capital for a few years after the Japanese invaded in the 1930s. Chiang Kai Chek, Mao, and many other luminaries fled to its green hills. Today, it’s the commercial center for central China, specializing in manufacturing (iron, steel, motorcycles), shipbuilding, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and tobacco production. And it’s preparing for even more growth in its government-sponsored satellite city for 700,000 located on the other side of a mountain that their traffic engineers just pierced with a four-lane highway.

So what’s happening in this new urban place? Some of the usual things–modern space for offices and plants, housing, shopping centers and the like. But here is the key item: 11 universities will have campuses here. Two or three “science cities” will be built adjacent to the academic areas. Chonqing University has opened a new 3,000-acre campus (built, incidentally, in a year); it will have 50,000 students, many destined for advanced study in the city.

We know about the great economic disparities among and within China’s rural and urban populations. But China and its municipalities are clearly on target with their focus on knowledge production, building critical infrastructure, and developing industries to help the country grow its competitive edge.

So where are we in the United States with regard to urban policy?

In a nation overwhelmingly metropolitan in its population and economic foundations, we need the kind of focus that Brookings Institution Vice President Bruce Katz articulated at the White House’s recent Urban Policy Roundtable–the four interrelated challenges of advancing innovation, human capital, infrastructure, and quality of place. Taken seriously, it’s a formula that could leverage our cities far into the future. The White House Office of Urban Affairs is trying to define how it moves federal initiatives in that direction. At the roundtable, Secretaries Shaun Donovan (HUD), Ray LaHood (Transportation), Hilda Solis (Labor), and other high-ranking federal officials including Karen Mills (SBA), Lisa Jackson (EPA), Xavier Briggs (OMB) all pledged to support the inter-agency task force now being formed to direct federal mandates and funding towards collaborative, urban-focused policy.

But it won’t be easy: entrenched forces favor status-quo arrangements. Examples: the devastating evidence that federal stimulus funds for transportation infrastructure projects, apportioned out by state governments, are seriously shortchanging cities. And the reversals of states’ funding to education–California, for example, has just announced an $800 million cut in its support for its ten universities.

With China at our back, its national and local government investing seriously for an urban future, our margin of error is eroding rapidly.

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.