To the Would-Be Presidents: Don’t Forget the City Issues

The title comes from a piece by NYT columnist Clyde Haberman. On some elists people are writing about "smart growth" policies of the various presidential candidates. Not that I would likely vote for a Republican, but Mitt Romney did create a coordinated state-level agency to coordinate planning within the state, called the Office for Commonwealth Development, which provided incentives for local governments to make better planning decisions. (This was an initiative comparable to that undertaken by Parris Glendening, when he was Governor of Maryland. Today, Gov. Glendening is considered one of the political deans of the Smart Growth movement.)

Anyway, here are a couple things to think about:

1. In maybe 2002/2003, I wrote about the need to create in a presidential candidacy initiative around urban issues and sustainable land use and resource planning. (That interests me more than "smart growth".) This wasn't necessarily to produce a winning candidacy, but to bring focus and attention on urban-city issues. I created the Urban Agenda blog to lay out this kind of case, but it was always intended to be a group blog, and I've never found enough people who would be willing to write about this a few times a week...

It lives on in the blogger label "progressive urban political agenda."

2. A couple days ago I was thinking about this broad issue in terms of national planning in the UK and their various PPG (Planning Policy Guidance) memos, and how in the 1920s you had the Model Building Code and the Model Zoning Ordinance created by the US Dept. of Commerce as guides for localities.

There is room for EPA/HUD/USDOT to do this still--to provide strong guidance about planning issues to states and local municipalities, instead of having the wild wild west scenario as preferred by the Growth Machine.

But it would require support and political coverage from the President and from a cabinet Secretary, say from HUD to really care.