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.
Copyright © 2008, The Hartford Courant
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