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Urban Affairs and the White House: An Interview with Adolfo Carrion, Jr. - Part One

12 October 2009 - 5:00am
Adolfo Carrion, Jr.

Planetizen interviews Adolfo Carrion, Jr. He is the first director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, established earlier this year. The office is tasked with devising a national strategy for urban areas and regions. In this first part of a two-part interview, Carrion talks about his vision for the office's role in guiding urban policy from the federal level.

Planetizen Assistant Editor Nate Berg sat down with Carrion in Washington D.C. on October 6 to discuss the federal role in the urban planning of America, the interdepartmental collaboration within the Obama administration, and the relationship between America's urban and rural areas. This interview was conducted at "Open Cities: New Media's Role in Shaping Urban Policy", a conference hosted by Next American City and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The transcript of this discussion is below. The second part of this interview and the rest of the transcript are also available.

Transcript

Planetizen: I think you probably are familiar with the fact that urban planning is a really local process. So what new role do you expect the federal government to play in that process?

Carrion: You know, as I said earlier, our success will be that we encourage local communities to steer their way into the future in smarter ways, that local municipalities understand that they are part of a new complex of regional economies or metropolitan areas, and that they have shared destinies. And so that they need to plan as regions, so that if you're an old industrial city and you're surrounded by new suburbs that come into your city workforce, come for visits to cultural institutions, to hospitals, to universities, to work everyday, that you're interconnected and your destinies are intertwined and that, in fact, because of what has happened to urban America, your problems are increasingly the same.

You have a larger immigrant pool. You have poverty that's extending to suburban communities because some people have relocated to workplaces that exist in the suburbs. You obviously have transportation challenges. You obviously face public safety issues together as a collection of communities. As a region, you operate as an economy. So, if a part of the region is suffering, the entire region is dragged down to some extent.

So we want to encourage communities to plan in a smarter way to achieve those principle objectives of economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability, reducing the footprint impact, and creating more opportunity for more people more of the time.

This new approach recognizes -- and this is what the president said to the mayors and, as a candidate, to the country -- if urban America succeeds, I mean the economic engines of this country succeed, then the entire country will succeed. There is a ripple effect. You know, 80% or better, according to some measures of rural America, are in metropolitan areas and are dependent on the health and wellness of those economies.

So if we strengthen, for instance, a Philadelphia, and that consumer market and that market of folks who will go out to vacation to the country, hiking, biking or buying produce, they're going to connect to the central Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania farming community. They're going to connect to the small supplier of a particular element in the market in the food chain that that urban place is dependent on. And of course, the urban places provide, house the lion's share of our institutions, our anchor institutions.

So I think getting folks to understand that we have a shared destiny, getting folks then to plan based on that shared destiny will strengthen who we are as a country, and I think that's the new orientation.

Planetizen: A lot of American cities are making a lot of different innovations and creating some exciting new projects -- from the road pedestrianization in Manhattan and even some of the innovative things they're doing with stormwater in Portland. But I think, for the most part, these projects kind of happen on a city-by-city scale. In what way do you think the federal government in this new office can encourage or incentivize expansion of these good ideas into other cities?

Carrion: We are now in the process of engaging in what people refer to as the urban tour, but it is the president's National Conversation on the Future of Cities and Metros. The purpose of that is to go and identify and amplify those creative solutions that communities have come up with. City leaders are applying interesting transportation solutions, business development solutions, workforce engagement solutions, environmental and energy solutions that, you're right, they don't get the light of day.

When a city like Kansas City decides to carve out a 150-block area and say we're going to do a smart grid, we're going to green and weatherize. We're going to put a bus rapid transit line through a neighborhood that has very little access to the center of the city by virtue of the absence of mass transit, so we're going to connect this workforce, we're going to train them in the new emerging energy economy. We're going to get a public utility to invest in this process and to invest in the workforce to build capacity for their future workforce, which they are having some difficulty finding engineers and operators and technicians who are able to work in their field, who are prepared to go into the workforce.

What we want to do is take those smart solutions that are happening in communities all across America and scale them up to the programmatic level, take the existing pool of programs that we have and the existing operations of the agencies, and create partnerships so that these solutions can be achieved in communities across the country. Right now you have municipalities patching together transportation money and sometimes spending it in unwise ways because they have a window of time to spend it. You've got part of the decision-making that happens with that transportation money that, going into a metropolitan planning organization that may not have a strong representation of the core city that sustains the region or that should be sustaining the region, so you get more sprawl, less mass transit investment.

So what we want to do is come back to the American city and say give us a smart plan. We will allow you to align your transportation investment with your housing investment so that people are living next to mass transit, so we have walkable communities, so the transportation dollar is not only about highways but more mass transit and a variety of transit solutions that include walking and biking and bicycle parking and paths for pedestrians, walkable communities. We want to tell the local municipality if you want to create connections to an industry and you have a workforce challenge, then that should be part of your plan as well. And so, essentially, to support smart planning.

Planetizen: So we touched a little bit on incentivizing good ideas. But do you think the federal government can disincentivize the bad land use patterns of the past, like the sprawl you mentioned -- especially when it's federal infrastructure like the interstate highway system that really encouraged that, whether that was planned or not?

Carrion: Well, you know, a lot of things happened by default. Sometimes the path of least resistance. Let me just say very clearly that the federal highway system, like the rail system that we created has been and continues to be very important for our economy and for our way of life, and what this initiative does is it builds on that.

The way that we incentivize smart solutions that are efficient, because we're really talking about efficiency and innovation, we know that when you concentrate land uses and you align land use with your government investments, it makes sense. So you're concentrating uses that support each other, that rely on each other. By the very nature of that, you're creating efficiencies of place, environmental efficiencies, market efficiencies, quality of life, you achieve a certain quality of life because people are closer to the places they need to be.

The way that we encourage that is by, for instance in the reauthorization of the transportation bill, saying that we ought to invest in different ways. It shouldn't be 15 cents on the dollar going to mass transit only and 85 cents going to highways. Obviously we need to have a highway system that is good for moving people and products, but we should also be moving people and products in different ways. So the president has made a significant investment early on to encourage high speed rail and get people to get in a rail car and get to another city, another destination in a clean, efficient, comfortable way, by rail. And I think you're going to see more of that kind of action coming from this administration over time. We need congress to be a partner.

One of the challenges we face is the administration puts together what is its value statement, which is the budget. That is the ultimate value statement. We believe these things are important. We want to invest in education, we want to ensure our community colleges are preparing a certain sector for the workforce to get on into the workforce, we want to invest early in childrens education, we want to, for instance, the investment of $500 million into the National Institutes of Health, we want science, research and development to take place in that sector. So we have an opportunity to make the statement, but then we need the support of congress to carry it through.

So part of our work as well is to educate congress about this approach and that regional planning makes sense. And that this is not the national government telling local communities what to do, but that you in Iowa and you in Nebraska and you in Arizona and you in state X, Y, and Z, should be driving the federal investments and we think that the smartest way to do it is in the following way. So it's essentially a good healthy argument, and I think we're going to be better for it as a country.

Look, we've got half our population now in cities and 80-85% are in metro areas, so they're in and out of cities, suburban cities, and old central cities, new cities. That's 85% of the jobs that are there, we know that. And a lot of the domestic product. So our investment strategy has to reflect that and it has to be rooted in some guiding principles about competitiveness, about sustainability, and about opportunity.

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The first part of this discussion and the rest of the transcript are also available.

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The interdisciplinary nature of these challenges justifies a more decisive federal policy that helps metropolitan areas promote energy and location-efficient development.
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