Curing Urbanitis – the Metropolitan Disease

Americans have a love-hate relationship with big cities. They love the vibrancy, diversity, the sophisticated shops and restaurants, the preserved neighborhoods and the museums and shiny towers that justify and state their importance. They dislike, but put up with, high costs, traffic, crime, rudeness, long commutes, too few taxis, erratic transit and many annoying inconveniences. What too few people seem to realize is the connection between the problems of the inner city and the suburbs that ring the outskirts. The challenges of urban sprawl in outlying areas--like dangerous neighborhoods in the center city, and severe declines in jobs within reach of working people or inner city public schools--are rarely shared and never undertaken on a truly regional basis. Only in the fields of highway planning, limited public transportation systems, air and water pollution and regional utilities is there any semblance of joint responsibility for these critical, regional problems.

Buy on Amazon

Among the many reasons for this lack of cooperation are suburban complacency, the natural tendency to retain local powers, fiscal selfishness, and state legislatures that are typically antipathetic to minority dominated older cities. Federal leadership in urban affairs has largely disappeared as the United States Department of Housing and Urban affairs (HUD), created in 1965, concentrates on low-income housing, guaranteeing sprawl-producing home loans and totally ignoring the rapidly growing metropolitan regions where over 80% of American live.

Urbanitis is a name given to a variety of major common problems being experienced by almost all of the top 50 metro areas in America. Although each metro area is different, it is amazing how they are all suffering to one degree or another. These conclusions have been backed up by computer searches and informal surveys of people willing to own up about their hometowns. Although many expressed strong loyalty with their metro areas, all were willing to admit the area's problems.

The seven most obvious problems are:

1. Uncontrolled urban sprawl eating up the countryside by the development of massive new subdivisions, shopping centers, freestanding chain stores, schools and widened highways;

2. The festering of inner city neighborhoods occupied by the poor, who are lacking the skills, education, and family structure necessary to escape their poverty.

3. Traffic congestion during peak hours causing stress, high travel costs and long commutes on freeways which were originally designed for high-speed trucking but are now slammed with single-rider automobiles.

4. Air pollution is becoming a serious problem in regions where a combination of car fumes, industrial waste, heavy machinery and incinerators make smog a health threat, especially to children and the elderly.

5. The lack of permanent housing affordable to younger middle class workers especially teachers, public safety officers, office workers is a nation-wide problem with few obvious solutions in sight.

6. Overcrowded, underfunded schools. The backbone of the American dream is a functioning, high quality public school system, and our cities aren't providing quality education.

7. Metropolitan cooperation is mandated by the Federal government only for highways and transit, air and water quality and for sanitary sewer systems. However, the most important human services, early education, health care, child and disabled person welfare, family counseling and job training are administered through governmental and non-profit channels in highly segmented and often uncoordinated programs.

The fact is that most of these conditions are going to get much worse unless there is a change in the paradigm about the common future of growing metro areas. For example, one can imagine that combustion engines will fade out in the next decades. But, as China and India start to export good cars priced at cost $12,000-$15,000, the number of automobiles could double to further strangle our already built-out highway system.

Policies and Incentives

These problems can only be addressed by a long-term combination of new Federal and State policies and a money-based incentive system to overcome the typical egocentric attitudes of both center city and suburban officials and citizens.

Neither the federal, state nor municipal agencies can create or manage a complex community development assistance program. Government cultures are largely regulatory, cautious and fraught with concerns about job longevity and retirement. Bold, innovative projects require risk-taking, imagination and a 24/7 attitude about reaching goals and meeting deadlines.

To persuade local governmental officials to become creative and positively cooperative in undertaking regional solutions to the problems of Urbanitis will require a broad scale incentive-based grants program. Because local leaders are unlikely to volunteer to cooperate across borders, a financial incentive plan to benefit their jurisdictions – consistent with the regional goals – will have to be invented. Every community has financial needs which could be met by this incentive-based concept.

A New Mechanism

I propose that Congress charter a nationwide non-profit corporation, in the public interest, to be the forceful catalyst in both administering the incentive grants to existing local governments and undertaking the planning and building of new metropolitan areas.

In order to give the new entity leverage with the budgeting functions of the Administration and the spending powers of Congress, the new non-profit will be able to float its own revenue bonds. Those indentures will be backed partially by a Federal guarantee and the net proceeds of the community development activities in building eight to ten new metropolitan cities of at least 500,000 population each. The details on how to achieve this dramatic goal are covered in Curing Urbanitis.

The proposed National Partnership for MetroCities would utilize its funds to match Congressional appropriations on a one-to-two basis; that is, it would match each $2 of regular Federal funds with $1 of its own financial resources. This, conceptually, would both give the new corporation the freedom to be creative in its grants program and give Congress an incentive to help it on its way.

No doubt this innovative methodology will be caught up in a myriad of politics but this approach to turning the metropolitan ship around is the only approach likely to succeed. Money talks!

Eventually, when the policies are in place, many subsidy programs affecting local governments, and they are many, could well be tied into the incentive-based grants program. Dealing with Congressional processes will be a challenging task.

On how to cure the seven components of Urbanitis, the following brief insights will point out directions and necessary reforms to make the solutions possible:

1. Urban Sprawl will only be halted after a regional entity representing all the citizens of the metro area has the legal and financial powers to prevent development in certain areas and to pay for development rights or other financial arrangements. This method will only come about when Federal leadership and State powers give regions the capacity to accomplish such goals. See the Portland, OR experience.

2. Dangerous Neighborhoods cannot be solved by the center city itself but will require regional leadership and resources to provide massive personal, family and organizational counseling, recruiting, job training, financial support, educational innovations, unified services and a generation of consistent efforts to assist people to become useful and productive citizens and move up and out of the neighborhood.See the Harlem Childrens' Zone on the web.

3. Traffic Congestion is caused by one-person cars, auto and oil lobbies, subsidized parking, low gas taxes, political opposition to rapid transit, Federal and State failures to assist metro areas and the lack of regional leadership. It is always the other fellow's fault.

4. Air Pollution can only be remedied by the removal of polluters, that is, too many cars, trucks and busses with combustion engines, industrial plants, forest fires and airborne dust. No city or suburb can solve this without Federal and State participation, again, without regional leadership.

5. Affordable Housing in terms of allowing middle income people to live reasonably close to workplaces will only come about when a non-profit Metropolitan Community Development Entity is given the task and the financing to buy, build, redevelop homes and apartments for that target population. Utilizing the concept of a large-scale Community Land Trust may be the answer.

6. One of the mysteries of American life is the consistent willingness to shortchange public education at all levels. The movement toward private schools and ultra-rich universities is exacerbating the trend. Our failure to pay professional teachers a professional wage, to rely on stingy State legislatures to finance schools and to totally turn our metropolitan backs on nearly criminal conditions in many inner city schools systems is undermining the foundations of the American Dream, not to mention our competitive global abilities.

7. Our failure to recognize the absolute inability of cities and suburbs to solve what are clearly regional problems is because no one blows the whistle. Take a deep breath and blow!!