If you don't get it you don't get it*

* An old advertising slogan for the Washington Post

Colbert King, a chief editorial writer for the Washington Post through this week, and Saturday columnist on the op-ed page, is for the most part trenchant and insightful. Today he really misses it.

The Federal City Council is a pro-business organization that was created in part by the Washington Post, when Philip Graham was publisher of the paper. Graham's son, Donald, is on the FCC today. This isn't to say that business is necessarily bad, but just that like everybody else, this organization has an agenda.

I joke with a colleague that it's bad to meet people from organizations that you tend to oppose, because it gets hard to demonize them. E.g., I've met Victor Reinoso, soon to become Deputy Mayor of Education and I don't think he's a bad guy, and I wish him the best in the quest ahead to improve the quality and outcomes of the DC Public School system.

So while today's column, "A Tale of Two Councils," makes the FCC out to be a selfless group of residents who happen to work for businesses, concerned for the future of the city, I can't help but think of how the Building Industry Association of Washington chortled in a summer edition of their newsletter about how they scuttled a provision in the now passed historic preservation technical amendments legislation by going directly to Chairman Cropp. It so happens that the provision was one that I'd advocated strongly for many years--to provide stronger review and protection against demolition for buildings eligible for designation as historic.

This is merely business as usual. But let's recognize it for what it is.

No one has any business writing or advocating about municipal issues and not making themselves familiar with the work of Harvey Molotch, and his seminal paper, "City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place." A kind of case study of the Growth Machine is Dream City, by Jaffe and Sherwood. (Especially chapter 4, about the development regime and the reconstruction of downtown during the Barry years.)

Read those items, and then you begin to understand. Making out the FCC to be selfless is comparable to saying that people like John Ray and Fred Green--"director" of the DC Office of Planning during the period when the office deteriorated into a semi-functioning unit (like much of DC government at the time)--have vision.

So when Colbert King thinks that the FCC is great because it:

· Is managing an effort to raise more than $100,000 in private money to support the development of Chairman-elect Gray's multiyear strategy for the D.C. Council

I merely think of all the suggestions and machinations designed to favor business interests over citizens that are likely to result from whatever "independent" "consultants" papers that result. After all, as Graham Allison said in the book Essence of Decision, "where you stand depends on where you sit."

Here's the abstract from Molotch's paper:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine. The relevance of growth to the interests of various social groups is examined in this context, particularly with reference to the issue of unemployment. Recent social trends in opposition to growth are described and their potential consequences evaluated.

A better column today is Jonetta Rose Barras' piece in the Examiner, "Wanted: Municipal Management Cop," which suggests that DC add an Ombudsperson to the governmental structure, to provide government oversight with true independence. (I might not agree with her suggestion for the position, Kathy Patterson, but the idea is worth considering.)

And I have been remiss in not mentioning Barras' column from last week, "A New Man Rides Into the Neighborhood," which discussed economic development and the soon-to-be-in-office Neal Albert as DC's Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

What I meant to write is that there is a difference between Community Development, Community Economic Development, and Economic Development, in the ways that most municipal governments define these terms as goals and objectives.

I have mentioned from time to time that Comprehensive Plans need to refocus elements on "Economic Development" more generally to something more along the lines of "Building a Local Economy." Economic Development for commercial interests tends to be somewhat different from neighborhood stabilization and revitalization, or community development.

Community Economic Development better melds the two, and is the next generation of Community Development, which has focused over the decades on housing development, particularly for lower-income populations. In most cities, this is the realm of local agencies termed the Dept. of Community Development or Dept. of Housing and Community Development. (In DC it is the latter.)

The overfocus on housing development for the most part hasn't contributed to economic betterment of neighborhoods--because the problem tends to be more broad, how the neighborhood is connected to the region economically. The state and availability of housing is merely a function of the overall economic condition.

On the other hand, I am not knocking investing in the core of the city, particularly in the Central Business District, as this is where a great deal of money is generated in terms of property and sales taxes. But Economic Development needs to be better balanced, hence the desire for "Community" Economic Development.

I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that the Federal City Council is unlikely to recommend a rebalancing in whatever transition suggestions are made to either Council Chair-Elect Gray or Mayor-Elect Fenty.

Index Keywords: Growth-Machine