The federal government and cities

Professor Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University has an op-ed in the New York Times, about the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, entitled "To Fight Poverty, Tear Down HUD." He says that HUD is focused on cities, and that metropolitan regions and connections between cities are more important.

I would say that HUD has two missions that aren't necessarily congruent. One focuses on developing housing for poor people. The other is on urban development and revitalization.

The belief in the field is that these missions are in one and the same. But I think it's fair to say that improving housing for poor people didn't improve cities.

I have the same reaction in reading Barack Obama's platform on city issues, partly a response to Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter's call for a debate between Democratic presidential candidates on urban issues. (See Urban Policy.)

The Obama platform focuses on poverty issues. I understand that. He was a community organizer. But cities and metropolitan regions are also about economic development and growth. It's the basis of how and why and where cities and regions develop. It's the heart of the field of urban economics. And it's the heart of arguments in Jane Jacobs two books after Death and Life of the Great American City, The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

At the library today I happened onto a monograph series from the Society of Economic Anthropology. One of the collections is entitled "Economic Analysis Beyond the Local System."

I thought about the aptness of that title in terms of what I think about and discuss in terms of thinking and addressing local issues on the different scales of local-neighborhood, local-city, and even local-region, although for the most part I think about this within the city, so that I think about this mostly in terms of how neighborhood planning processes fail to engage with and acknowledge citywide needs and concerns simultaneously.

But this idea of analysis beyond the local system is key to understanding urban issues and urban poverty and urban growth, as well as the relationship between municipalities and other levels of government be they local such as with counties, regional such as with metropolitan planning organizations, states, or the federal government.

A very practical guide to dealing with local economic development engaging improving the lives of people rather than focusing on jobs more theoretically is Temali's Community Economic Development Handbook.

Getting back to Prof. Venkatesh's article, cities need to be innovative and energetic (see the writings of Richard Florida, Charles Landry, even Edward Glaeser, among others) and the last thing a government agency, especially at the federal level, is concerned with is innovation.

In short, looking to government for the answer is likely a failing strategy.

As aggravating as it is, working on urban revitalization from the ground up level is exciting, challenging, and worthwhile. But dealing with it from the aspect of dealing with government regulation, electoral politics, and working with appointed government officials, it can be terrible, difficult, and seemingly intractable.

One of the ways that HUD could be better is if it too focused on "indicative planning" or building the capacity for vision. The UK planning agencies produce memos and reports, ranging from "Planning Policy Guidance" memos, to incredible reports such as Living Places: Cleaner, Safer, Greener, as well as the work done by organizations such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and English Partnerships.

I don't really feel as if we have an equivalent set of planning guidance and stretching and pushing and striving in a similar fashion here in the United States.

If HUD published PPG memos on linking land use and transportation planning, shifting from an automobility planning paradigm, the link between density and livability as well as transit success, building a local economy, foodways and urban agriculture, eliminating free parking, accessiblity planning linking land use and transportation infrastructure in land use decisionmaking, rebuilding a system of railroad-based transportation, etc., we would be far better ahead than we are now.