Rahm Emanuel and Stephanie Rawlings Blake may have not much in common, but they would clearly agree on one thing: Being the mayor of a large American City is one of the hardest jobs in America. Their paths crossed at the US Conference of Mayors in DC when a protester of the Chicago police killing held a placard in front of Rawlings Blake while she was welcoming the 250 mayors who assembled in DC. Both are intelligent and progressive, yet they both failed when it came to leading a big city because the deck is stacked against them as much as it stacked against minorities and the urban poor.
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| Rawlings Blake and Emmanuel at the US Conference of Mayors winter '16 |
There is a significant surge in interest in cities in general and a surge of people who want to live in central cities followed by businesses who relocate to urban areas, both, in the US and worldwide. But urban policies have not kept up. Most not only were shaped far in the century before last, when cities had become cesspools due to unregulated industrialization, they even deteriorated from Lyndon B Johnson's time and his Great Society model in which cities played a major role.
.. urban policy has been transformed over the years from the comprehensive and “place-oriented” efforts of the Great Society to, more recently, a mix of isolated policies and programs that target acute city-level concerns. (Joshua Sapotichne, “National Urban Policy: Is a New Day Dawning?”)
In 2008 a presidential candidate, Senator and urban community organizer articulated the problem with these words:
And it’s precisely because you’re on the front lines in our communities that you know what happens when Washington fails to do its job. It may be easy for some in Washington to remain out of touch with the consequences of the decisions that are made there – but not you.
You know what happens when Washington puts out economic policies that work for Wall Street but not Main Street – because it’s your towns and cities that get hit when factories close their doors, and workers lose their jobs, and families lose their homes because of an unscrupulous lender. That’s why you need a partner in the White House.
So, yes we need to fight poverty. Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America. That is the new metropolitan reality and we need a new strategy that reflects it.
(Senator Barack Obama in 2008 in a speech to the US Conference of Mayors)
Now, eight years later, after President Obama created the Office of Urban Affairs, created a program called Choice Neighborhoods, and made his departments of transportation, housing and the environment collaborate on what was dubbed the Sustainable Communities Partnership, Obama has to witness cities in crisis. During his last term in office conflict sparks in cities across the country, conflict that ironically even in his presidency is still (or again?) about race. The water crisis in Flint where a city pollutes its own citizens through gross negligence puts the spotlight on how far municipal disinvestment can go even though we presumably live in the age of cities. A comprehensive new urban policy has not emerged.
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| Urban unrest 2015, Baltimore, St Louis, Chicago |
Not only are cities still problems in spite of a widespread yearning for urbanity, the real growth in metropolitan areas still grow far more in the periphery than in the core city. Locally this was demonstrated Baltimore County surpassed Baltimore City in population sometime around the turn of the century and now has a comfortable lead of more than 25%. Almost any region in the country has the same growth pattern even in regions with miracle growth cities such as Fort Worth, Denver, or Austin, places which are growing at rates that old legacy cities like Baltimore can only dream of.
In most of the 70 years after WW II, growth has occurred almost entirely outside cities as the direct result of federal policies that were decidedly anti-urban. In part on purpose and in part unintentionally, those policies sucked the life blood out of cities with their subsidies for suburban homeowners, cheap energy, and an approach to transportation that was relying on only one mode, the car. As a result voters came increasingly from non urban districts, a feedback loop which in turn shaped new anti-urban policies, a pattern in which especially conservative politicians are still trapped.
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| Sprawl |
[...]cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.Such policies have caused many of our urban centers to devolve into generic theme parks and others, like Detroit, to decay into ghost towns. They have also sparked the rise of ecologically unsustainable gated communities and reinforced economic disparities by building walls between racial, ethnic and class groups.Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. (New York Times 2009 article, Reinventing American Cities)
So now the deck stacked so badly against cities, has been reshuffled thanks to demographics: America's two largest cohorts, the millennials and their parent generation, the Baby Boomers are the top two largest age groups around, and both are demanding amenities and a lifestyle that is urban, not suburban. This is encouraging but it certainly doesn't mean that no new urban policy is needed. To the contrary, baby boomers and their echo boom exploring cities as their lifestyle option, raise expectations, and make new urban policies ever more urgent.
The newcomers are highly mobile and look for amenities. If a two car garage and a wetbar were desirable amenities for their parents, Millenials are looking for amenities of a different caliber. They want a high walkscore, good restaurants, good access via transit, bike-share and a Zip-Car station nearby, notably all items in the public realm instead of inside the four walls of the home. Of course millennials need jobs and employers will only locate in cities that score high with their potential workforce. Never in history have the interest of people and employers been so intertwined and aligned.
The desired urban features don't come free. Rising municipal cost comes at a time when money transfers from State and Federal coffers have become smaller and smaller. Gone are the days of Johnson's Great Society projects which brought about Dulles Airport, the DC subway, BART in San Francisco and in their wake subways in Baltimore and Atlanta funded with up to 80% federal dollars.
Today, a "New Starts" project fetches maximally 50% of the project cost, less if 50% totals more than $900 million. (For example, the anticipated federal funding level for the $3 billion Baltimore Red Line was capped at $900 million, around 30% of project cost, with the rest to be paid by local and state governments as well as potential private investors.) As Maryland's Republican Governor just demonstrated, when he toppled the fully designed project as "too expensive", States are not necessarily will to pick up the slack.
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| How crime and safety outranked physical development and social welfare (Sapotichne) |
Shrinking cities such as Baltimore are even worse off. The increasing higher expectations for services combine with decreasing tax incomes and increasing cost for dealing with the many urban dysfunctionalities, a perfect storm.
Obama may have aimed for a comprehensive new urban policy but Congress had a different mind. Still, in a less conspicuous way significant amounts of money have been channeled towards cities in a set of seemingly unrelated programs such as the
Most of these funds were one time programs that cities can't rely on, so they have become inventive when it comes to generating funds themselves. I am not talking about red light cameras or impound lot fees, items motorists can never complain about enough. No, cities now have resorted to selling grandmothers silver!
Cities sell public housing under the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program, they sell toll roads and bridges, sometimes their waterworks, almost always their utilities and sometimes their public transport systems. Interestingly, this privatization boom happened in Europe prior to becoming popular in the US so that today cities there have already realized the shortsightedness of selling assets while here the idea is still gaining momentum.
Another famous approach to making up for missing federal and state funds are private-public-partnerships also known as P3s. This approach is only slightly better than outright sale of assets. In P3s it is also the future that is auctioned off in favor of short-term economic advantage. Through P3, the State of Maryland is attempting to build the $2.6 billion Purple Line in the DC suburbs with State cash now even further limited by the Hogan Administration to $168 million, instead of the original $700 million. So private investors are asked to design build, operate and fund a new transit line that the State finds too expensive to budget and pay for itself (even after cost is reduced by between 30-40% by the Federal share). Whether that even works remains to be seen, contract awards for the project are shrouded in secrecy. But let's say it does, the private entity that would be selected would have to shoulder about 60% of the cost, i.e. well north of a billion dollars. Clearly whatever consortium is selected will want a return on their investment in addition to receiving repayment. All experts on the magic P3 agree that there isn't much magic, but many dollars in long-term liabilities for which taxpayers will be on the hook for a long time to come.
The most common way to deal with funding shortfalls is neglect and non-investment. That cities are neglecting their roadways, bridges, and transit systems is more often the rule than the exception, and is also in plain sight. Another type of neglect affects the poor: Many cities have not properly maintained their public housing stock and have a backlog scheduled repairs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The constantly reduced federal support for municipal public housing is especially irksome since it is mostly federal policy that resulted in the massive concentration of poverty inside cities in the first place.
Neglect is even worse on the items voters can't readily see: The pipes and cables under the street. The Flint water emergency is so far the most egregious case of cutting corners in the wrong way, many other cities struggle with similar issues just on a less prominent scale. Baltimore, for example has not lived up to a consent decree with EPA regarding upgrades to its sewer system intended to prevent raw sewage from flowing straight into the Bay. Currently, the cash strapped city is begging for an extension to make repairs to comply with the consent decree. There apparently was no way to get it all done in time even though water bills have been significantly increased.
Some basic maintenance failures border on the spectacular, such as the collapse of the large retaining wall in front of rolling cameras onto the east coast freight life line of CSX, taking half a street and its cars with it. Baltimore was also the place in which rail cars carrying chemicals derailed and caught fire in the Howard Street Tunnel under downtown. That event brought all of downtown to its knees for several days with toxic smoke billowing out of the tunnel portals. Whether the reason was the more than a hundred years old tunnel itself resulting in a shifted track or whether it was a leak from utilities above the tunnel that made the tunnel and track fail remained so unclear that years of legal wrangling brought about a settlement in which both sides admitted certain neglect, the same as in the failed retaining wall case where the settlement was reached comparably quickly, supposedly from the practice that the two sides got from the tunnel incident.
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| 2015 Cities Fiscal Impact Report |
No private company could operate this way and be successful. How politicians who preach lower taxes and less government imagine that US cities can thrive with fewer and fewer resources at their disposal remains a secret. One has to guess that the real intent is to continue the bloodletting, believe like medieval doctors that the healing will come from leaches. In that parallel universe, cities are something that should be overlooked so that farmers, suburbanites and small towns are happy, the places where for decades the majority of voters resided.
In that universe demographic trends that make cities swell from immigrants and millennials and returning baby boomers don't exist. In that parallel universe there also is also no recognition of the risks that weak core cities pose on their metropolitan satellites. There is no memory or new insight that cities can only be neglected at everybody's peril. Without strong cities, no region and country will flourish. As Obama stated correctly in his 2008 speech, cities are the essential building blocks of metro regions, and in those regions, cities are "where it’s at" these days.
It is no accident that federal moneys directed towards cities peaked in the years following the unrest that began in 1964 in Philadelphia and New York and culminated in the widespread riots of 1968. It remains to be seen how last year's unrest will shape this year's policies and budgets. Maryland's Governor has made some tepid advances towards funding some city projects but the rhetoric around those announcements still shows a deep lack of understanding. Like in many States, Maryland's government resides in a small town, is run by a Governor from a rural area and is run in large part by small town rural thinking. With the presidential election in full swing an opportunity to make cities a major topic of the debate. However, there is no indication that cities are on the agenda. Only one presidential candidate, Martin O'Malleywho was once a Baltimore mayor, even used the term in a televised debate.
In spite of all this, in 2016 most cities have recovered from the recession and show a certain fiscal stability. Politically, though, cities remain unstable due to ever growing disparities.
Many mayors, helped by the trend towards cities have become self confident players on the national stage. Many cities have become hotbeds of start-ups and thrive from experimentation and innovation. Even internationally, cities agreed on climate goals long before nations were ready to do so. To some degree cities not only weaned themselves from reliance on federal support, they have become highly flexible leaders in new models of governance, funding techniques, in transportation models and energy conservation. Should the urban influx of residents and business continue, it will help those cities that are able to harness those new resources to flourish. Cities lacking growth and creative leadership will likely continue their spirals of decline.
Many mayors, helped by the trend towards cities have become self confident players on the national stage. Many cities have become hotbeds of start-ups and thrive from experimentation and innovation. Even internationally, cities agreed on climate goals long before nations were ready to do so. To some degree cities not only weaned themselves from reliance on federal support, they have become highly flexible leaders in new models of governance, funding techniques, in transportation models and energy conservation. Should the urban influx of residents and business continue, it will help those cities that are able to harness those new resources to flourish. Cities lacking growth and creative leadership will likely continue their spirals of decline.
Yet cities won't be able to pull themselves from the swamps by simply pulling on their own bootstraps. It is long overdue that states and Congress and the federal administration realize that strong globally competitive regions require urban-centered policies that support investment, innovation and experimentation, adequately fund essential maintenance. Most of all, States and Feds must get rid of the artificial subsidies for gasoline and homeowners and other mechanisms that prop up unsustainable sprawl policies.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
Edited in part by Ben Groff, JD
other articles on this blog:
Is the Titanic Turning? The Re-Urbanization of America
Links:
The Evolution of National Urban Policy, 2010, Woodrow Wilson Center
Jimmy Carter's Urban Policy Message to Congress 1978
New York Times Report on Cities
The Cities Fiscal Conditions Report 2015
Newark Mayor Cory Booker said at an April speech on city government in
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