A Federal Plan for Rust Belt Cities?
It has long been an accepted fact that older industrial cities in the Rust Belt of the Northeast and Midwest are on an irreversible downward trajectory due to de-industrialization and suburbanization. While a handful of the most high-profile cities in the region have rebounded through creative-class strategies, attracting artists may not be a realistic plan for places like Mankato, Minnesota and Hagerstown, Maryland. And there has been no coordinated national strategy to address these cities’ shared concerns.
Enter the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a D.C.- based non-profit, and its two-day Revitalizing Older Cities conference on Capitol Hill, which focused on the role of the federal government in assisting these cities. Of course, this being a bi-partisan conference associated with the Northeast-Midwest Congressional and Senate Coalitions, the audience was subjected to the nonsensical musings of a Republican co-keynote speaker, Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the former mayor of Dayton. “Leverage that story—that quilting of the fabric of your community,” he urged the attendees. Now that’s some practical advice! “Remove blighting influences that can attract other jobs,” he continued. With no more George W. Bush to say the opposite of what he means, I suggest Slate start a “Turnerisms,” to replace its Bushisms.
To be fair, Turner’s Democratic counterpart, Rep. Brian Higgins, who represents much of Buffalo, was prone to preposterous exhortations as well. Riffing on the importance of a city’s “self-confidence,” he claimed that the world’s leading architects took projects in Buffalo in the early 20th century because they were attracted to the city’s attitude, as opposed to, say, the fact that they happened to be offered commissions there.
That said, there were some instructive moments. Higgins, for instance, argued that investment in regional rail would help enliven economies such as Buffalo’s (ergo the need to obtain such funding in the stimulus legislation and the upcoming Surface Transit Reauthorization). But he contended that local mass transit has limited utility, noting that a light rail line in Buffalo “goes from nowhere to nowhere,” and has not lived up to its promise. Instead, he actually argued that the ease of driving, since abandoned cities such as Buffalo do not suffer from traffic congestion, is the competitive advantage they offer. Well, if you don’t care about global warming, that might make sense. But Higgins is a co-sponsor of a bill that, while modest, probably would help Buffalo more than self-confidently proclaiming its ease of driving, the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, which will create a program in HUD to target cities and inner-ring suburbs that have lost population and have large-scale property vacancy, and provide funds to create green spaces and other sustainability projects.
Other speakers laid out a federal agenda for older industrial cities, with some some obviously good suggestions and some trendy, questionable ones. Among the stronger proposals put forth by Jennifer Vey of the Brookings Institution were more money for community colleges and an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC would immediately inject money into responsible hands in disadvantaged communities, so you cannot go wrong there. Community colleges are terrific engines of economic growth and mobility. They can lead to innovative new businesses in their vicinity and create a more educated workforce. Creating an infrastructure bank, as Vey recommends, would permanently support the needed infrastructure spending in inner cities. And, her proposal to create sustainability challenge contracts to help link housing and transportation sounds like a good way to support smart growth and to drive investment towards the denser urban core. Among the more suspect suggestions were creating a nebulous “office of educational entrepreneurship and innovation,” and developing “energy discovery innovation institutes.” Energy and educational innovation are great buzzwords, but I think cities need cash, not more abstract ideas.
A staffer for Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN), the House Transportation Committee chair, defended the unimpressive breakdown of transportation funding in the stimulus, which gave nearly three times as much to roads as mass transit. She argued that the stimulus funding had to go to shovel-ready projects such as repairs, so the opportunities mirror the transit infrastructure we already have. Instead progressives should set their sights on the Transit bill later this year as the opportunity to truly alter the built landscape. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Ben Adler reports on Republican and conservative politics and media for The Nation as a Contributing Writer. He previously covered national politics and policy as a staffer at Newsweek, Politico and the Center for American Progress. Ben also writes regularly about urban and environmental policy, and he was a 2008-2009 urban leaders fellow at Next American City.
The Revolution Will be Locally Funded
Dianne R. Brake in PlanSmart NJ, Trenton, NJ on Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 3:22pm
The Northeast-Midwest Institute’s Conference was a great way to assemble urban advocates and engage them in collective action at the federal level. I hope the funders will support the Institute’s making this an annual affair.
Although this conference was understandably focused on the Economic Stimulus package and what was in it for them, I hope next year we will be able to focus on trend-bending strategies—those that are likely to transform urban areas within regions. At least part of the conference should explore what these transformational strategies would look like. This conference was almost entirely on the backlog of need and how the federal government could generate the money that was needed.
I am not for one minute minimizing the need to fix backlog conditions, or the need for many, many people to make it their daily priority. But in New Jersey, we have found that new money (even old money) is harder and harder to find unless you can engage the tax-payer to believe in your vision for a better future—not just your ability to describe today’s terrible need. I guess by next year’s conference we will see if President Obama can lead the way on that.
Although the Brookings message admonishes cities to “start thinking and acting as a region” they had few strategies to put that into practice. Should we use re-configured MPOs? Should regions be delineated by system (watersheds, commutersheds, economic regions, etc.) or find either new or old administrative structures that could be empowered to do the job (counties, MPOs, or new regional bodies, such as the Delaware River Basis Commission).
The speakers on the Transportation panel were the only speakers who mentioned “connecting the dots,” linking land use and transportation and moving from auto-dependency to a transit-oriented multi-modal system. That was certainly thinking transformational big picture, long-term.
PlanSmart NJ believes that planning, zoning, state and federal agency regulations, and infrastructure investments—the land use decision-making system—is a huge contributor to the plight of older industrial cities in the Northeast-Midwest.
Cities cannot recreate a viable economic base as long as the suburbs are competing for it. In turn, the suburbs will struggle when the rural areas at their fringe begin to suburbanize because they have no viable rural economy to fall back on. All three—cities, suburbs and rural areas must see themselves as a region, a mega-region (to use Brookings language).
Land use practice has created the current “slash and burn” landscape of disinvestment in cities and suburban sprawl. It has supported white flight and the concentration of poverty. It has created exclusionary zoning that has restricted the production of housing that is affordable to most workers, and incentivised builders to cater to a smaller and smaller (affluent) market. This has played some small part in the housing bubble and having to find ways to help people into housing they really couldn’t afford.
Federal and State housing, transportation, fiscal, water infrastructure, and economic development programs and policies must be re-tooled to connect the issues to each other and to bind up cities, suburbs and rural areas into a viable whole. The goal is to make each region more economically prosperous, with all areas sharing the “pie,” more environmentally sustainable (reducing consumption, restoring green infrastructure), while reducing costs and reducing the concentration of poverty and racial segregation. (It has always struck me that we wouldn’t need an environmental justice program if we didn’t have concentrated poverty!).
PlanSmart NJ has been working on this: we have some metrics and some frameworks that may be useful. But we need the help of all the good experience and energy that was in the room at the Capitol. We call on them to think big and long term, finding ways to transform their communities by making them a part—the center —of their regions. We need to find the aspirational targets that will force us to let go of strategies that have not worked to find ones that do.
These problems are certainly big enough to demand the federal government’s attention and charge them to look at all its programs to support a regional approach to jobs, housing, transportation, water and other environmental programs and reducing racial and economic segregation. It doesn’t have to be a federal “land use” policy. Just a bridge to span the gap between where we need as a nation and as mega regions in this global economy, to coordinate the actions of local governments.
Is that too much to ask?