Liveblog
Correspondents Duncan Black (Eschaton), Brentin Mock (The American Prospect), Reihan Salam (The Atlantic), Ryan Avent (Grist), Harry Moroz and John Petro (Drum Major Institute) and Diana Lind (Next American City) bring you live updates from the A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Transforming America’s Housing Policy conference.
Conference presented by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
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A Concierge for Mayors | Feb 12th at 6:00pm
I disagree. Bruce Katz said that the WHOUP would be a failure if it were merely a “concierge for mayors.” As I said in my previous post, we need the voices of mayors to be heard more loudly in the White House. From housing to transportation to environment, cities are on the forefront of policy change.
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“Promise” of Obama | Feb 12th at 5:36pm
Bruce Katz says that, “the promise of Obama is an activist, knowledgeable, grounded White House able to see the connections between the dots.”
I think its unfair, if not inaccurate, to label that as a promise. That’s an tremendous burden to put on Obama, and files in with the many messianic traits that have been bestowed on the new president. Obama has sold us on hope, but not promises. Promises lead to disappointment.
But to suggest that Obama could deliver a promise of a White House that is activist, knowledgeable and grounded is a bit much, especially with Obama’s pledge to bipartisanship. There are more than a few Republicans running around the White House and Congress who are activist only in as far as they are obstructionists to no logic, who have a hostility to knowledge and are too gassed on ideology to be grounded.
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Preaching to the Choir | Feb 12th at 5:26pm
Right now Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution is preaching to the choir. He’s talking about how the new White House Office of Urban Policy (WHOUP) can reshape the conversation around our metropolitan regions. Federal agencies need to work together to address the interrelated issues of housing, transportation, poverty, economic development, and environment. Mr. Katz is talking about how WHOUP should be responsible for breaking down the silos of federal agencies.
What I want to hear is how we will give metro regions more power and more voice around the policy decisions that the federal government makes. The stimulus debate made clear to me that the vast majority of our members of Congress are not acting with the best interest of cities in mind. Cities continue to create innovative policies that address the issues facing not just our metropolitan regions, but the country as a whole. On MayorTV, a project of the Drum Major Institute, you can hear mayors talk about how the federal government continues to neglect the needs of our metro regions.
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Yes We Do | Feb 12th at 4:21pm
Panelist Richard Baron just said that we don’t have a national housing policy. This isn’t true! We may not have a coherent or comprehensive policy, but the federal government has had and continues to have a massive impact on housing in this country.
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Office of Urban Policy, Please, Do DOT Over | Feb 12th at 4:20pm
Bruce Katz vice president at the Brookings Institution, and current advisor for the nascent Office of Urban Policy, has broken rank with his male speaker predecessors by taking stage with no tie. There’s little other than rolling up one’s sleeves that says you are serious about housing like delivering an address tie-less and top button dis-attached. Not being sarcastic. Was really hoping that there would be an announcement tonight for the appointee for Office of Urban Policy, and I was thinking Katz would be that surprise, but I’m holding my breath. Katz immediately went into the roles that the Urban Policy office would fulfill, the third of which he said wasn’t to tell HUD or Department of Transportation how to do their jobs. Well, maybe not HUD, especially with Donovan at the helm. I kinda trust his judgment on how HUD should work. As for Department of Transportation ... not so much. I’m actually hoping that the Office of Urban Policy will tell DOT how to do its job, and start by showing them why mass transit is a moral and economic imperative.
Correction: I originally listed Solis as possible HUD head, when I had labor on the mind. I’ve made the change, but for the record, I’m equally trustful with Donovan at HUD’s helm. But still am less so with DOT, especially with LaHood at the helm.
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Regional Tax-Base Sharing | Feb 12th at 4:14pm
One of the main points from this panel is that wealthier families move to the suburbs in order for their children to attend better schools. This creates a situation in which the tax base for inner-city schools is decreased. School performance then suffers. The New Rules Project proposes a policy solution in the form of Tax-Base Sharing.
Under tax-base sharing, all of the municipalities within a metropolitan area agree to share tax proceeds from new development. This eliminates interregional competition; facilitates other planning goals such as preserving open space or maintaining a vibrant downtown; encourages suburbs and central cities to cooperate on regional economic development goals; and leads to a more equitable distribution of tax burdens and public services.
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A Good Line | Feb 12th at 4:12pm
I just want to paraphrase Warren Simmons here:
Neighborhood schools are valuable in neighborhoods with valuable assets.
School quality and neighborhood quality are tightly linked, and households generally buy themselves into the best neighborhood they can afford, then turn around and try to prevent anyone poorer than they from moving in after them. So long as one buys one’s way into good schools by buying one’s way into good neighborhoods, it will be very difficult to address the problems at the heart of our public school systems.
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Neighborhoods and Student Achievement | Feb 12th at 3:48pm
The panelists are talking about the difficulty of retaining high-quality students, teachers, and faculty in schools located in predominantly low-income neighborhoods. The idea of neighborhoods as a sorting mechanism for student achievement is troubling. Families with more resources are able to locate to areas that have better school districts whereas lower-income families are “trapped” in their school districts. Would inclusionary zoning policies help alleviate these problems? These policies require that new developments include affordable housing units along with market rate units.
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Segregation, Segregation, Segregation? | Feb 12th at 3:45pm
Thank you Richard Rothstein from the Economic Policy Institute. You just woke up the conference by dispelling the notion that mobility is the key for improving schools and housing. He disagreed with the notion that people move to the suburbs for good schools — rather the good schools are a byproduct of wealthy white people moving there. That white people move to the suburbs to be surrounded by other white people and away from black people. Generalizations to be sure, but there is something to this stereotype. Rothstein contends that until we better fight segregation, and the systems that lead to it, we’ll keep having the same conversations about education and housing fifty years from now.
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Diana is Right | Feb 12th at 3:40pm
There hasn’t been too much discussion of housing in this session, so I’ll throw out something. Cities with unaffordable housing stocks tend to have a bimodal income distribution—you’ve got the rich and the poor. Middle class households largely decamp for the suburbs. And what one finds is good public schools in suburbs, good private schools in cities, and bad public schools (for the most part, certainly there are some counterexamples) in cities. Part of the solution to fixing urban school systems is to rebuild the urban constituency for good schools—that is, middle class families that are in the central city by choice, and which have the ability to provide the tax revenues and time to support a thriving school system.
There is a chicken and egg problem involved, of course, in that middle class families will be reluctant to move into urban neighborhoods, affordable or not, if the schools aren’t any good. But the other side of the coin is that well-crafted urban school reforms will fail to help retain and attract middle-class households if the housing stock remains unaffordable. Which suggests that part of the solution to urban education problems is an increase in the supply of quality urban housing, and an increase in the provision of amenities that middle class families like (which also happen to be ones that poor households like, but lack the political influence to obtain). This means quality green space, safe neighborhoods, mixed-use neighborhoods such that needed retail is close at hand, attractive streetscapes, and so on. And of course, it wouldn’t hurt to devote more public infrastructure resources to dense areas, rather than to exurban highways.
This has to be a large-scale and national effort, however, because local improvements in urban schools will make local areas more attractive—and more expensive. But a national commitment to healthier, affordable cities with more balanced income distributions could drastically improve the nation’s urban school systems, benefiting low-income households in the process.
