Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Franklin has a hiring freeze in effect; now Franklin has no director of city development

FranklinNow.com reports that Franklin's director of city development, Doug Wheaton, has resigned "to attend graduate school at Harvard University."

The story notes: "In the three years that he has worked for the city, he has overseen 41 commercial developments, including the Fountains of Franklin and Shoppes at Wyndham Village."

As I have noted here often: Franklin's director of city development is scored on the mere NUMBER of developments that occur on his or her watch, not the QUALITY of those developments. I was correct. This is why the quality-based plan staff should not report to a position that derives kudos from simple quantity.

Despite many attempts at a meeting, I have never had so much as a conversation with Mr. Wheaton; he invariably would have the city plan staff run interference for him.

Good luck to him, nonetheless, in his new endeavor.

Marquette Interchange to open early. In other news, Marquette Interchange will soon be declared too small to handle Milwaukee traffic.

Who needs sensible and attractive mass transit options when you can move one-person-per-car through asphalt spaghetti?

Furthermore, no one rides trains and light rail. Oops - I guess they do.

I imagine this dialogue in the near future somewhere in the United States.

"I'm think of moving to ... Milwaukee."

"Really? Why?"

"Dude, they have that fantastic INTERCHANGE!"

"But you don't have a car, and gas is $5.75 a gallon."

"Dude, c'mon - the Marquette freakin' Interchange! Who-hoo!"

Via Smart Growth America:

WAR and OIL: Now the truth is bubbling up

Part THREE of today's OIL trifecta.

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil.

Bill Moyers

If you've read Greg Palast's brilliant ARMED MADHOUSE (handy ordering box below), none of what Bill Moyers lays out in this video is a surprise to you. The good news is, the truth is bubbling up to the mainstream; Bill Moyers is generally the pathfinder for the Katie Courics of the media world. 

Greg Palast could find no voice in the American mainstream press; "journalism" is not widely spoken here. He had to get his support and funding from the BBC. And Palast got it right. I have yet to meet the movement conservative who can confront any of the issues raised by Palast in his book and Moyers in his commentary below. The most I can get is, "You just hate George Bush."

When they eventually prosecute Cheney and Bush, can we hope that the vanguard of the right wing echo chamber (Limbaugh, Hannity, et.al.) is brought up on charges as co-conspirators? 

Watch the little local wanna-bes (you know who you are) scurry when that happens. They would rather go to war than invest - - - and I mean invest heavily - - in transportation, infrastructure, and energy alternatives that would make such a war unnecessary. 

Spend about nine minutes with Bill Moyers and the hard truth. (Transcription)

 

Oil Prices: Reality still hasn't descended upon mainstream media

Milwaukee isn't the only region in denial when it comes to the upcoming crisis. A confused nation waits for Dr. Phil to tell them how to feel:

All this reality content is beginning to penetrate the collective consciousness in the US, but the result is mostly panic or paralyzed disbelief rather than any set of intelligent responses. For example, I got a call from one of Katie Couric's producers at CBS news on Friday. Somehow, they had noticed that oil prices were becoming a problem in America. They called me for a comment. The scary part was they were clearly treating the issue as a "lifestyle" story. Did I think more suburbanites would move downtown? And would that be a good thing...?  They have no %$#ing clue how broadly and deeply these dynamics will affect the life of this nation, or even our ability to remain a nation. Also, by the way, this demonstrates how the nightly network news has become the equivalent of the old "women's pages" of the daily newspapers.

James Howard Kunstler, Cluster$%$ Nation

"The dismal failure of Milwaukee’s civic leaders to bring the region’s public transit infrastructure up to 21st-century standards is more than just another run-of-the-mill breakdown in leadership."

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Professor Marc. V. Levine gets it right in his op-ed from this Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Meanwhile, we have in County Executive Scott Walker a living example of willful obstinacy that is slowly and oh-so-surely killing Milwaukee and the surrounding region. This blind obstructionist is planning to proudly veto an advisory referendum on a (much-needed) 1-cent increase in the county sales tax! 

Read that again: Scott Walker is vetoing a vote in which the people decide - - in a nonbinding vote - -  whether it's worth a tax hike to fix the broken county.

He doesn't want to know how the citizens of his broken county feel about the current state of transit, parks, and other infrastructure?

Who does this sort of thing? A politician who is plotting a run for governor and who fears the likes of Mark Belling, that's who. Scott Walker is looking out for Scott Walker.

Once again, self-interest reigns, and Milwaukee's reputation as a non-starter that cowers under the clumsy brickbats of conservative radio talkers - - a cartoon-character breed that squeals in desperate search of attention and ratings and without regard to any larger truth - -  spreads across the nation as surely as this poorly formed, run-on sentence spreads across your screen.

It's time to ignore the talk-radio narcissists and pandering politicians and do what needs to be done. And if a County Executive fears an advisory vote by the people that may hinder his political future, his time is up.

Dim light at the end of the tunnel

The region needs higher wattage ideas for transit

By MARC V. LEVINE

The dismal failure of Milwaukee’s civic leaders to bring the region’s public transit infrastructure up to 21st-century standards is more than just another run-of-the-mill breakdown in leadership.

It is a public policy debacle that threatens the very economic viability of this city and region — and it comes at a time when we already are struggling with stagnant growth, spreading poverty and shockingly high rates of joblessness in the inner city.

Skyrocketing gas prices and awareness of climate change are reshaping the way Americans live, work and play. Mass transit ridership is surging in cities with rail transit systems, as commuters seek alternatives to $4.50-a-gallon gasoline. Suburban and exurban communities, whose growth was predicated on cars and cheap gas, are facing bursting housing bubbles and an uncertain future.

In this new era, the economic winners will be cities and regions that have invested in state-of-the-art mass transit. Unfortunately, few metropolitan areas are less prepared for these changes than Milwaukee.

Unlike in virtually all other large U.S. cities, leaders here have balked for two decades at building any form of regional rail transit.

By contrast, other cities, such as Baltimore, St. Louis and Minneapolis have built light rail systems since the 1990s (and ridership has soared by 15% this year in all three places). In 2004, Denver voters approved a $4.7 billion bond issue, underwritten by a sales tax, for a 119-mile expansion of their system, while Kansas City recently approved financing of a $1 billion, 27-mile light rail line.

Even in conservative, historically anti-tax “red states,” civic leaders and voters have understood the economic imperative of investing in rail transit. Salt Lake City recently raised the sales tax to expand regional rail. Phoenix is building a 20-mile, $1.3 billion light rail line. And in Texas, that bastion of big-government liberalism, Dallas is investing $4 billion to double the size of its regional light rail system to 90 miles.

In an era of expensive gas and pressures to reduce carbon footprints, it takes some magical thinking to believe that Milwaukee can remain economically competitive as one of the nation’s only large cities without such infrastructure.

The intransigence of Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, bolstered by know-nothing talk radio hosts, columnists and bloggers, is obviously the biggest impediment to sensible transit policy.

Fortunately, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett supports rail transit. Unfortunately, he has offered an inadequate plan: a streetcar Downtown Circulator that would run in a three-mile loop around downtown, which is too small and too slow to generate either of the two key economic benefits of rail transit — linking workers to employment hubs in the region or promoting development along rail corridors.

Barrett sees the Circulator as a “starter” investment toward a more elaborate rail system, touting its links to the vastly oversold KRM commuter rail proposal. But it’s likely that the mayor’s trolley to nowhere would draw meager ridership, thus providing more ammunition to the opponents of light rail, foreclosing future investments and leaving us with an underutilized white elephant ringing downtown.

Barrett, properly concerned about fiscal responsibility, notes that “advocates have failed to explain how to fund a more extensive system.”

Yes, public finances are tight everywhere. Yet leaders in places as varied as Denver, Baltimore, Dallas, Minneapolis and Charlotte have financed the construction or expansion of their systems in recent years. Moreover, even in fiscally strapped Milwaukee, we’ve found a way to spend billions in the past decade on a baseball stadium and a convention center, mega-projects that nearly all economists agree contribute precious little to regional economic growth.

Surely, then, given the existential importance of transit for metro Milwaukee, a financially sensible, $1 billion regional fixed-rail plan can be crafted:

• Using the $91.5 million in federal funds already allocated.

• Minimizing capital costs by extensively utilizing existing rail rights of way.

• Creatively deploying such tools as tax incremental financing.

• Selling station-area development rights.

• Receiving infrastructure support from the State of Wisconsin.

• And, yes, implementing a regional sales tax (with rebates to low-income residents) to fund transit improvements and operations.

If Sen. Barack Obama is elected president, more federal funding likely will be available for rail transit. Obama’s campaign platform calls for a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that could provide an infusion of funds to cities like Milwaukee to invest in transit (as well as in other infrastructure vital to economic development).

But the biggest problem is not fiscal but political.

Barrett and his allies should boldly confront the anti-rail demagogues, advocating a comprehensive fixed-rail plan for Milwaukee’s future that would link key hubs (downtown, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the County Grounds and the airport) and stretch from the North Shore suburbs through the central city, perhaps to Brookfield.

The region’s corporate leaders, represented by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and the Greater Milwaukee Committee, supposedly support regional rail transit. If that’s true, they should make it the centerpiece of the Milwaukee 7 initiative, turning it into a more muscular regionalism that could underpin an economic revitalization of the city and region.

Rail is not a panacea for Milwaukee’s economic woes: It will not single-handedly solve the crisis of inner city joblessness, end poverty or create a culture of economic innovation here (although it will help in all of those areas).

But imagine a future of $8-a-gallon gas, in which Milwaukee is one of the few large cities in the United States without rail transit.

Businesses increasingly will locate in transit-friendly regions that offer the efficient and economical flow of people, goods and services. A Milwaukee without rail transit runs the risk of becoming economically obsolete, a city whose leaders failed to invest in its economic future.

Investing in rail is not like flipping a switch; the lead time is substantial. We already are way behind other cities, and our economic viability is slipping away.

The time for action is now.

Marc V. Levine is a professor of history, economic development and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The Decline of the Exurban Lifestyle: Still not convinced?

Though this blog is more concerned with improving present suburban communities than it is in seeing them wiped out, a story in today's New York Times paints a pretty dismal picture for those suburbs that are even more far-flung - - the so-called "exurbs"; collections of subdivisions that are utterly and completely dependent upon automobiles for their very existence.

Sure, people like having their space and their 5-car garages, but ...

... life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. Mr. Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, Mr. Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel fuel. In March, the last time he filled his propane tank to heat his spacious house, he paid $566, more than twice the price of 5 years ago.

Though Mr. Boyle finds city life unappealing, it is now up for reconsideration.
....

In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com.

Car-worshippers (and Bush-Cheney-Big Oil apologists) who constantly confound Milwaukee's efforts to get a sane light rail system built would do well to observe Denver, Colorado's experience:

A $6.1 billion commuter rail system has been in the works over the last four years, drawing people downtown without cars, while stimulating swift sales of densely clustered condos near stations.

Coors Field, the intimate, brick-fronted baseball stadium for the Colorado Rockies, has transformed the surrounding area from a desolate skid row into fashionable Lower Downtown, a neighborhood of restaurants and microbreweries in restored warehouses. Along the Platte River, new condos set on a park strip offer an arresting tableau of glass, steel, and futuristic geometry, attracting throngs of buyers at rising prices.

“This is a city where it’s fun to be in the center,” said Tim Burleigh, 56, who sold his house in the suburbs and now walks to Rockies games from his downtown condo.

But, alas, you gotta spend some real money and change the one-person-per-car paradigm to get out from under the thumb of Big Oil. The same "conservative" attitudes (and a few liberal ones as well) that have led to the current crumbling state of our national infrastructure and dismal community standards (optional sidewalks?) are raising the stakes of the upcoming crisis by obstinately denying the fact that we desperately need a mass transit re-fit program at the level of 1956's Federal Aid Highway Act.

And, what the heck, put the word "defense" in the name of whatever act we come up with (ala the Highway Act's alternate name, National Interstate and Highways Defense Act). Imagine a foreign policy scenario wherein OPEC-member nations observe an entire nation gearing up to drastically reduce consumption of their cash cow. Imagine NOT spending lives and money in Iraq (because that's an oil war, pure and simple).

The full NYT story is after the jump. (NYT story Via Calculated Risk:)

See also this entry from Calculated Risk linking to an LA Times story that describes a California community where 15%(!) of homes are bank-owned or in some level of foreclosure.

New York Times Graphic (click to enlarge)

Franklin Plan Commission sandbagged

Signs that post-flood normalcy may be returning:

- On Tuesday I found time to go running (in the process discovering all kinds of brand new aches and pains that come from days of hauling wet pop culture debris from a flooded basement);

- Tonight I'm going to mow the lawn;

- And right now I'm going to bellyache about the decomposition of Franklin's Plan Commission.

Weeks ago, when it looked like Kevin Haley was being forced off the commission (he's since been reinstated for reasons still unclear), I'd put in an open records request for the volunteer sheets submitted by current members of that body. With Haley possibly off the commission, the point I wanted to make was that the remaining members had little in their backgrounds to engender confidence in their ability to safeguard the city's long-term goals and well-being against the ambitions of developers who look no further than their personal bottom line. As has been noted here before, commissioner Kevin Haley was the lone voice against some pretty blatant developer manipulations. No one else on the commission felt moved - - or indeed seemed qualified - - to support Haley's legitimate objections and informed observations.

Now comes news that the mayor has successfully placed former alderman Pete Kosovich on the Plan Commission. As reported by Greg Kowalski on his now-defunct FranklinNow.com blog (continued at his new blog, Metro Milwaukee Today), Kosovich squeaked in when the mayor broke a 3-3 common council tie. The tally, which I'm pasting from Greg Kowalski's blog (with my comments in parenthesis), was:

Olson: NO (Very interesting, and should have set the tone)

Solomon: YES

Wilhelm: NO (Expected)

Taylor: YES (I'll assume Taylor felt he needed to be magnanimous after defeating Kosovich)

Sohns: NO

Skowronski: YES

Mayor Taylor YES (tie-breaker)

With all due respect to the mayor and Mr. Kosovich: What th'...?!?!

Is the standard for serving on the Plan Commission of one of the fastest growing suburbs in Wisconsin really nothing more than a desire to serve and, as blogger Kevin Fischer explains in his blog entry supporting Kosovich's nomination, a presumed "knowledge of local ordinances, state rules and regulations, and ... experience in dealing with Franklin business and economic development issues"?

The answer more likely resides hidden in the cynical language of a comment Fischer left after his entry:

Appointment of friends, colleagues, etc has been going on in politics for all time. This is nothing new.*

Jim Doyle has appointed tons of people that have been confirmed by the state Senate when it was controlled by Republicans and now Democrats.

Taylor appointed Kosovich because he knows him, likes him, respects him, is familiar with him and thinks he will do a good job.

But you know what else? There are certain developers in town who likely thought they'd been rid of their only obstacle on the plan commission, Kevin Haley. When the mayor inexplicably reversed himself and brought Haley back on to the commission, a "gesture" had to be made.

Enter Pete Kosovich, plan commissioner.

Don't get me wrong; it appears to me that Mr. Kosovich is a nice enough gentleman and should be commended for his desire to serve, but, verily, I doubt that intricate land planning and development theories regularly weigh heavily upon his mind. Will we find on his bookshelves dog-eared, yellow-highlighted volumes like Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use, A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb, the harrowing Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Community and the Politics of Place, The Geography of Nowhere, How Cities Work, Suburban Nation, the pro-sprawl Sprawl: A Compact History, the required-reading Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Regulating Place: Standards and the Shaping of Urban America, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Land Use Planning and Development Regulation Law, and the noxious but still informative in a "know the enemy" sort of way, The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future?

(I must confess, I don't own the above books either: My dog-eared, yellow-highlighted volumes of these tomes washed away when my office was flooded last week.)

No, Mr. Kosovich will rely on his "knowledge of local ordinances, state rules and regulations, and ... experience in dealing with Franklin business and economic development issues."

Just the sort of bootstrap knowledge you need when a developer is trying to sneak in another self-enriching, city-draining strip-mall, huh?

Notwithstanding Mr. Kosovich's admirable desire to serve, this was a bad, old school pol move that will have potentially devastating consequences down the line unless something is done very soon to fix a sandbagged plan commission.

* [Note - I was a fly on the wall (harmless intern) during Tommy Thompson's reign in Madison. Those guys might not have invented cronyism, but they certainly perfected it. What a pit of incestuous vipers. It led to my first (and so far, last) legal deposition, as part of a sexual harassment claim against a Thompson good-old-boy appointee.]

Driving Toward Disaster

James Howard Kunstler, whose name pops up often in this blog, is currently promoting his new novel, World Made by Hand, thus his somewhat higher profile in mainstream media. Just in the nick of time, too.

From The Washington Post.:

Wake Up America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.

By James Howard Kunstler
Sunday, May 25, 2008

Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.

I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years -- inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.

Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.

The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.

These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped clean.

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.

Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.

We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere and, most recently, of World Made by Hand, a novel about America's post-oil future.

The Political Environment: "Light Rail Pays Off In Charlotte: Milwaukee Loses Through Political Timidity"

James Rowen links to a terrific article about transit success by Alex Marshall, author of a favorite book of mine, How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Road Not Taken. 

Meantime, Milwaukee wallows in dogma-enforced mediocrity. 

You will recall that Charlie Sykes hauled out all the old chestnuts the other day when he attacked me for suggesting that light rail, killed by Tommy Thompson eleven years ago, could have offered motorists in the Milwaukee area today an appealing alternative to $4-per-gallon.

And an economic development tool, with stations and lines that attract residential and commercial investment.

That very scenario is unfolding in one city now constructing light rail - - Charlotte, North Carolina - - with a population of about 625,000 people.

Milwaukee's most recent population estimate is 602,000, or about 5% less than Charlotte's.

Here is the text of a recent story from Governing Magazine about what's happening in Charlotte - - and by contrast, what we are missing because of traditional risk-aversion and one-dimensional thinking and governing here.

More than Just a Train

June 2008 Governing Magazine

By ALEX MARSHALL

I’m starting to believe the hyperbole about the revolution being spawned by Charlotte’s new light-rail line.

Riding the spiffy silver and blue trains of Charlotte's new light-rail line, I watch through the train's windows how cranes and excavators push around dirt for new development projects.

Back when urban junkies — myself included — dreamed that cities could center around train lines, we railed at the formula-oriented developers who could crank out only cul-de-sacs and subdivisions near the newest highway off-ramp.

They ignored the possibility of putting apartment buildings and mixed-used projects beside a trolley line, even if a city could manage to get a rail line built.

No longer.

Now big international companies such as Cherokee Investment Partners, which is involved here in Charlotte, are poised — even eager — to swoop down, buy land and put up pedestrian-friendly businesses and homes around new transit stations.

And they're being joined by plenty of competitors.

This is not to suggest that progress in Charlotte has been easy. Arranging streets, parking, condominiums, shops, plazas and other components of development around transit here involves many choices.

Planners and developers still are struggling to balance the competing needs of parking and active street life in these new projects.

But in terms of a market and a vision, there is increasing clarity. Living near a transit stop has become part of a tried-and-true formula of downtown living.

Charlotte opened its $465 million, 15-stop, 10-mile "blue line" last November.

LYNX, as it is called, has about 13,000 riders daily, well ahead of the low-ball federal projections.

Now, the city and region are working on the many other ideas for lines and extensions.

A total of 7,000 new condominiums are planned along the line.Seeing how successful Charlotte's new line is, I start believing what I first dismissed as hyperbole — that it was revolutionary.

David King, who helped shepherd through assistance for LYNX from the state's transportation department when he was its deputy secretary, says, "Most people don't realize this is going to change the face and shape of Charlotte."

Last November, just weeks before LYNX opened, a grassroots referendum backed by angry anti-tax and anti-transit activists asked voters to repeal the half-cent sales tax for transit funding.

It failed by a two-to-one margin.

"The light-rail vote was a seminal moment," says Mark Peres, the president and editor of Charlotte Viewpoint, a magazine about culture and civic life.

"We were being held hostage by a minority viewpoint. Those people just sort of went away. It's just seismic in its impact."

The original plan for financing the system, however, builds in some difficulties for the future.

Back in the late 1990s, Mecklenburg County and the city of Charlotte banded together with Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro and other cities to push a bill through the legislature allowing counties to propose tax increases to their citizens to fund transit.

Charlotte's voters approved the tax in a referendum. There also emerged an agreement that the state DOT would match local funding, or 25 percent of the total cost.

The federal government was expected to pay 50 percent.Now, as new lines are planned that go beyond Mecklenburg, there is a question of who will pay and how.

Will surrounding counties and localities enact their own sales taxes?

Or is Charlotte expected to be the primary local funder, even for lines outside Mecklenburg County?

And what should the role of the state transportation agency be?

It is, after all, the one agency whose jurisdiction cuts across multiple county lines.

I believe the parties should explore having the state agency take more direct responsibility for building and paying for transit within urban areas.

When the state builds a road, it takes on the burden of coordinating with all the counties it goes through. It buys land, negotiates rights of way and designs and builds a project.

Why should transit be any different?

DOTs are traditionally highway-minded, and North Carolina's is certainly no exception. But bringing these agencies into the transit fold suggests a way to turn them into allies.

Eventually, it makes sense for state transportation money to be portable and to be used for either roads or transit lines, as conditions fit.

Whatever the models developed, it's a near-certainty that the new lines here in Charlotte will be built. There is simply too much interest in this new way of living.

Editorial: "The truest fact of American politics is that no candidate running this year is going to upset or even challenge the suburban sprawl industry. "

Bruce Fisher makes a contention that is hard for many to swallow:

Towns are the problem. Towns disrupt regional planning. Towns insist on going it alone. Towns poach development from cities and from each other. And towns demand that subsidies flow.

Yet, observing "planning strategy" here in Franklin, I see more competitiveness with neighboring municipalities than I see real planning. "If we don't offer this or that incentive or subsidy, Oak Creek will get 'em!" So, another TIF district is born.

Can you imagine the reaction to a proactive regional strategy by the Little Caesars who run suburban enclaves?

From Courant.com:

Ghost-Towns In A Sprawl-Land

By BRUCE FISHER

May 25, 2008

The truest fact of American politics is that no candidate running this year is going to upset or even challenge the suburban sprawl industry.

Sprawl is the endless increase in housing supply, the endless outward redistribution of population from cities and older suburbs, the endless federal subsidy for roads and the endless chatter about "good schools" that is just a code for "schools without poor, visible minorities" that dominates American political life.

Sprawl exists because of a bipartisan commitment to avoiding any talk about reining in the immense power of the real estate industry.

Americans tend to believe that sprawl is a natural consequence of free market forces when, in fact, sprawl is a consequence of decision-making by governments that are responsive to one single industry.

Alas, the people who would lead our national government are not addressing sprawl. That means that the long-avoided discussions America ought to have on race, on climate change, on imported energy, on highway construction and on agriculture will all continue to be lacking a certain element of reality.

Meanwhile, as the silence continues, sprawl continues to rule. And American cities will continue to die.

Folks in Hartford may be forgiven for believing that this is a Hartford phenomenon. The population within the city's boundaries fell from 136,392 in 1980 to 124,387 in 2003.

Did you know that it's San Francisco's problem, too? And Boston's? And Cleveland's?

In 2005, the Census Bureau measured domestic migration — people moving within the United States — from 1990 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2004. The report provides the number of people moving into and out of each state and the 25 largest metropolitan areas.

What that report showed is that thanks to immense national, state and local subsidies, population is being shifted out of cities and out of older suburbs and into sprawling suburbs.

The main incentive for sprawl: silence.

So far, Barack Obama is the only candidate who is speaking about urban America.

But he is speaking within the bounds of the 1960s paradigm about cities. His talk is all about the poverty of the deserted minorities of central cities, and not about the huge countervailing incentives that keep poor people marooned inside central cities.

The Brookings Institution's Center for Metropolitan Studies is trying to change the paradigm by getting thought-leaders across many disciplines to start thinking about cities again — not as enclaves, but as the indispensable centers of regional economies.

Governmentally, cities remain isolates. Former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk suggests that the cities of the Northeast and Midwest are dying because they are trapped within "little boxes" that have no planning power over their suburbs, and so remain isolated.

That means that suburbs get to make their own planning and spending decisions as if they are independent, supreme, self-sustaining entities rather than components of regional economies.

Towns are the problem. Towns disrupt regional planning. Towns insist on going it alone. Towns poach development from cities and from each other. And towns demand that subsidies flow.

So in a marketplace where there is already a huge oversupply of housing, the availability of county, state and federal funds to build new roads and to maintain an already-overbuilt infrastructure leads to more and more subdivisions being built.

If our politics is going to be run by towns, is there any hope for cities or for metro regions?

There's despair about Washington, because Washington has been stuck in the 1960s mind-set — which is, to be brutal about it, that cities are for the very rich and the very poor, and that suburbs are for white folks, and that there's nothing to be done about it because the free market means that folks are going to live where they're going to live.

Governors are the logical players to disturb the political status quo.

Until they do, though, cities will continue to get special aid. Suburban real estate developers will continue to receive their subsidies for further sprawl through the town governments they already control.

Thus suburban town officials across the Northeast and Great Lakes states will continue to do what town officials do — which is to facilitate the sprawl that kills cities.

Because the inevitable alternative is something like this: If cities are to live, the power of town governments must die. That's a paradigm shift that would disrupt everything we think we know about race relations, transportation, imported oil, agriculture and democracy.

But wait — isn't that what we need?

Bruce Fisher heads a public policy institute in Buffalo, N.Y., where he served as deputy county executive from 2000 to 2007.

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