National Farmers Market Week, August 2nd - 8th

Food is more than just picking up the item and buying it:  Farm and farming issues.  I've been keeping track of some of the broader issues concerning farms and farming, as something we should be thinking about all the time, but especially when it comes to National Farmers Market Week.

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Farmers markets as events.  Most people think of farmers markets as events--I call them activation devices--to go out and do something.  

WRT activation, many years ago I wrote a piece outlining the different reasons to sponsor a market, and how that should shape policy wrt what can be sold, and the distance away by which a farm can be considered local.  

-- "The reason(s) why a farmers market is created shapes the type and mix of vendors allowed to sell" (2011)

One reason is to support farm income and the regional economy.

In DC, you get lots of vendors from West Virginia and Pennsylvania because they get better prices in the big city.

For example, there is research about the social value of markets as community hubs--that's great for the attendees, but what about the value to the farmers? ("Do Farmers Markets Build Community? New Research Says Yes," PPS)

Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Market, University District Farmers Market, Seattle, Washington. Credit: Redstone Photography

Farmers markets are supposed to be places to buy food first and foremost, food that is locally produced ("Local, organic, and bipartisan: How Vermont is challenging Big Food,," Christian Science Monitor).  

Secondarily we think about how farmers markets are supposed to be ways to cut out the middleman in a quest to get better and local (regionally sourced) food, ideally at a cost lower than from the supermarket.  

This is an old photo.  This year stone fruits are in short supply in Utah because of a late freeze in early June.

Well, maybe just maybe cheaper than Whole Foods--last week at the Downtown Farmers Market in Salt Lake City, which is a great one, in large part because there aren't dozens of markets in the area, but a handful, making it worthwhile for a large number of vendors to show up, vendors were selling corn for $8 per dozen.  

Granted it's not the 70s when you could get that many ears from a truck farmer for $1.  Still that's a shocker.

While a lot of the items sold at markets are value added products--e.g., hot sauce made from locally grown peppers, and the sauce costs more than selling raw peppers--the fact is food comes from farms.  And cost-wise, inputs, labor, taxes, it might not be enough ("Massachusetts loves its small farms. Will that be enough to save them?," Christian Science Monitor). 

BLT at Middle Child.

Farm to Table/Featuring local foods in special ways promotes the regional food system.  Farm to table is a longstanding movement where restaurants make items based on what they can source from local farms and farmers markets.  Some restaurants even have their own farms.

Middle Child in Philadelphia features for one month heirloom tomatoes grown at Philadelphia's Urban Roots Farm in BLTs--also with locally grown arugula and bread from the artisan Merzbacher’s Bakery ("Middle Child’s BLT season has arrived. This is how they prepare for the frenzy," Philadelphia Inquirer).  They also offer tomato agua fresca, tomato water ice, frozen tomato pops, and tomato martinis.  

An increasing number of bakeries are using regionally-grown harvested and milled grains, rather than standardized industrial seed varieties ("Regionalizing Michigan’s Small Grains: Highlights from the 2026 Food-grade Grains Field Day," Michigan State University).

VINE Foods, a new agricultural innovator to the market, starts its inaugural harvest of vine-ripened tomatoes on June 25, 2026 at 4451 Knight Arnold Road in Memphis.  Photo: Stu Boyd II-The Commercial Appeal

Relatedly, VINE Foods in Memphis is a small urban farm aiming to grow items that are best grown and consumed locally, like tomatoes ("VINE Foods plants roots in Memphis with innovative urban farm," Memphis Commercial Appeal).  

This is sort of what Urban Roots Farm is doing, and could be done in more places.  They also focus on the recovery and reuse of vacant lots, which is important in cities that have lost population ("Memphis-founded VINE Foods turns abandoned lots into organic produce farms," ActionNews5).

Years ago, I came across the Tomato Independence Project initiative in Treasure Valley/Boise, which now seems inactive ("Building a Better Tomato" Edible Idaho) and if you've tasted a great heirloom tomato off the vine, you know how important it is to spread the understanding of food that is not so industrialized that the flavor is gone, which is a problem with most tomatoes sold at the supermarket.  

More farming and promotion initiatives like this need to be developed throughout the country, to promote the consumption of what is otherwise highly perishable but super tasty locally grown foods.  The Dwarf Tomato Project is a national version, still at a small scale, of the TIP.

Wasatch Community Gardens in Salt Lake holds an annual "Tomato Sandwich Party." (Photo at right.)

Now, VINE Foods needs to find a restaurant partner like Middle Child.

Food needs sun and water (and other inputs) to grow | Climate change.  Crops need sun and water and other inputs to grow.  And labor to tend to the crops and then to pick them.  Bad weather can be catastrophic ("Spring’s bizarre weather caused up to $200 million in lost crops in Pa. N.J. farmers also suffered." Philadelphia Inquirer, "A late spring frost wiped out much of Utah’s tree fruit crop. Here’s what growers are selling instead," Salt Lake Tribune).  Weather is becoming much more extreme due to climate change, and the geographic areas where food can be grown are shifting in response to higher temperatures.

Weeks after December’s historic floods, water remains on Yeng Lee Cha’s farm in Snohomish. Cha says her farm experienced up to 9 feet of flooding, and the water didn’t recede for nearly two months in certain areas. The rushing water damaged farm... (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)

Flooding too ("WA’s Hmong farmers face floods at generational crossroads," Seattle Times).  Not just flooding, but land sinking as water is drained from underground aquifers ("Study finds California farmland is sinking shockingly fast," SFGATE).

1.  Food borne illness is a symptom of regulatory failure and the perils of large scale mass agriculture.  The media is full of reporting on cyclosporiasis associated with lettuce.  "Cyc­lospora isn’t new. Why it’s dif­fer­ent now," USA Today:

Every sum­mer, it seems, we get the same headline: a cluster of cyc­lospori­asis cases traced to fresh pro­duce, a recall, a brief wave of concern and then silence until next year. The news cov­er­age almost always frames this as a food safety story – con­tam­in­ated basil, bad lettuce, a sup­plier that slipped through the cracks.

I want to offer a dif­fer­ent dia­gnosis, because I’ve watched this exact pat­tern before, in a very dif­fer­ent dis­ease. This is a slow, envir­on­ment­ally depend­ent para­site with no capa­city to out­run a func­tion­ing sur­veil­lance sys­tem. It has no abil­ity to evolve its way past inspec­tion. It only needs one thing to spread fur­ther than it used to: for us to stop look­ing as care­fully as we once did. That’s the part of this story nobody is telling.

Import inspec­tion capa­city, pro­duce sampling at the bor­der, the state pub­lic health labor­at­or­ies run­ning whole-gen­ome sequen­cing to match an isol­ate from a sick patient to a spe­cific lot num­ber, the epi­demi­olo­gists con­vert­ing scattered case reports into a recog­nized cluster – this is the immune sys­tem pro­tect­ing our food sup­ply. And like any immune sys­tem, when you starve it of resources, you don’t get a health­ier host. You get a slower, blinder response to a threat that was always there.

Decades ago Jim Hightower wrote a book, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, criticizing Agricultural Colleges and their research programs designed to promote big agriculture by creating nee tools and crop seeds modified for easier picking and distribution over great distances rather than for nutrition and flavor.

Who knew that one of the outcomes of Big Agriculture/Big Farming could be Big Diarrhea.

Trading farm futures on your phone.

2.  Tariffs, foreign policy fights, etc.  Many farmers have lost access to markets because of tariffs or responses to US foreign policy ("Already under financial pressure, farmers squeezed further by tariffs and Iran war," PBS).  

Plus the Iran War has impacted the production of fertilizer inputs and the transport of fertilizer using the Strait of Hormuz ("The Iran War threatened a food crisis. The next Gulf conflict could do the same," Reuters).

... another reason why many farmers are active in buying and selling futures.  Or going bankrupt ("Minnesota bankruptcies rise as a ‘perfect storm’ of challenges roils farm country," MinnPost).

3.  Farming is hard work and its hard to convince younger people to take it up ( "Why The Kids Won't Farm," New York Times).

4.  Food science and technology.  Growing food involves scientific research ("Her Lab Worked to Future-Proof Fruits and Vegetables," New York Times), some of which the US under the Trump Administration doesn't want to fund anymore.  Some favor large scale production--industrial food--others don't ("Stop Worrying, and Learn to Love Industrial Food,," and "What Our Industrial Food System Can't Do," NYT).

5.  Food as intellectual property/Big corporations and massive supply chains.  As seeds beome patented, problems are created for farmers, including if they aren't licensed ("A California farmer is giving away tons of nectarines that he’s not allowed to sell" AP).  

Driscoll's has shifted from being a large farming operation to a massive "systems integrator" operating across the globe to make strawberries available every month of the year ("Why Are Berries Everywhere, in Every Season? Driscoll’s," NYT).

A fire burns piles of grapevines and stakes after they were ripped out at Sarmento Vineyard. Photo: Nic Coury for The New York Times

6.  Big farmers are less flexible with major changes in conditions.  For example, because people are buying fewer canned peaches, Del Monte is closing canneries and peach orchards need new markets (s ("California farmers must destroy 420,000 peach trees after Del Monte closes its canneries and cancels more than $550 million in long-term contracts," Fortune Magazine).  

As people drink less alcohol, including wine, more vineyards are shutting down ("Sales Are So Low, California Wineries Are Burning Their Vineyards," NYT).

7.  Right to repair.  Like with the concept of food as intellectual property, farm equipment has become much more technologically complex, full of electronics and sensors and connections to data systems and services that make recommendations on how to plow particularly plots, how much seed and fertilizer, etc.  

As equipment becomes more complex companies like John Deere had licensing agreements that prevented farmers from fixing the equipment themselves.  They had to wait for registered technicians, which can put equipment out of service for days. 

For years farmers have been fighting for the "right to repair."  They made some gains at the state level ("Colorado gave farmers the right to repair their own equipment, but Great Plains, Oklahoma farmers continue waiting," KOSU/Oklahoma Public Radio) but enacting federal legislation was impossible.  

Nevertheless, John Deere, the leading manufacturer, finally capitulated ("John Deere owners will get the right to repair their own equipment under a new FTC settlement," AP).

Farmers Andrew Cadwallader and his father David Cadwallader (front) at Waldac Farms in Salem, N.J., on Jan. 29. Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

8.  Smaller farms need multiple revenue streams to survive.  In the past, there has been opposition to farms adding event spaces and agritourism accommodations, new types of facilities,  

There was a dairy selling ice cream issue years ago in Baltimore County, selling out to housing developers, now solar and wind farms, which some farms aim to add to increase and stabilize revenues.  

Boston Globe photo.

Salem, Pennsylvania wouldn't allow a dairy farm to add solar panel electricity generation to add revenue ("Will this Salem County town love its last dairy farm to death?," Philadelphia Inquirer).  So they got rid of their cows.  From the article: 

The future of a family farm in rural Salem County was at stake, and after multiple meetings and hours of presentations, questions, pleas, and complaints, a local planning board was set to vote.

Before the vote, one longtime resident of Mannington Township came to the podium with a warning. In preparation for this crowded, mid-March meeting, Alice Waddington, 98, said she’d made a list of dairy farms she remembered from her decades in the little town.

At one time, she said, there were close to a dozen. “There’s only one farm left milking cows,” Waddington told the board, “and that’s the Cadwalladers.”

In Vermont, farmers are fighting similar kinds of restrictions ("A rural rebellion in Vermont is on the verge of unlikely success," Boston Globe).

9.  Some farmers are making more money off social media than farming ("The Family Farmers Making More From Clicks Than Crops," Wall Street Journal).  This is led by younger generations of the family.

Pontiac Michigan: a lagging African American city in one of the nation's wealthiest counties

I've written about Oakland County, Michigan vis a vis Detroit, and how the multi-decade County Executive, L. Brooks Patterson, spent a lot of time working to keep the county ascendant at the expense of the majority black center city.

-- "The rise of Oakland County is built on Detroit's fall," 2014
-- "One more idea about Detroit: merging not with Wayne County but Oakland County," 2019
-- "Revisiting stories: the death of L. Brooks Patterson, County Executive, Oakland County, Michigan," 2019
-- "Michigan politics as an illustration of the impact of the decline of industry on social capital," 2020

Oakland County has not quite 1.3 million residents and the population is roughly 75% white and 14% black.  Located immediately north of Detroit, later waves of black outmigration from the city led to significant demographic changes in communities like Southfield and Oak Park, which are now majority black.

Built on the earlier success of the auto industry, as of the 2010 Census, Oakland was the seventh wealthiest county in the US--and the second wealthiest, after Fairfax County, Virginia, of places with at least one million residents.

The county has lots of office parks, Oakland University, and an industrial promotion initiative called Automation Alley, aimed at keeping its industrial base competitive.  While definitely a suburban community, it has a number of traditional town centers predating suburbanization, like Royal Oak, Ferndale, and Birmingham, and Pontiac, the county seat.

Pontiac, about 20 miles north of Detroit, is the Oakland County seat, but in the 1970s, the county government began relocating most of its facilities to a new automobile-centric headquarters campus in adjacent Waterford Township, with criminal justice facilities (courthouse, jail) remaining in the city.  This removed the valuable energy government office districts can provide to city economic health.

When I lived in Michigan, Pontiac was known for its industry--home to GM's Pontiac Motors division when that brand still had verve, but also GM's extensive medium truck and bus manufacturing operations, and for being a majority black community in a predominately white community.

It was one of the first cities in Michigan to employ busing to achieve school integration, and it was challenged violently, with bombings of buses in 1971.

Pontiac is about 20 square miles, while Oakland County is 907 square miles.  Today the city has about 60,000 residents, down from a peak of 85,000 in 1970.  The population is about 52% black, with over 20% of the population below the poverty line. By contrast, the overall poverty rate in Oakland County is 7.8%.

Deindustrialization.  At its peak, GM had 30,000 employees working at various plants in Pontiac, and was the largest property holder and paid the most in property taxes ("Pontiac, Michigan feels brunt of GM's pain," Reuters).  

But GM's dissolution of the Pontiac brand, the sale of its bus manufacturing operations, and the cessation of the manufacturing of large trucks led all but one of GM's facilities to close there by 2010. 

Now there are a few hundred employees, at a single facility.

The city also suffered population outmigration and went through some iterations of urban renewal, including the construction of a ring road around the city, to facilitate car-based commuting traffic, at the expense of walkability and the economic health of the Downtown.

Football stadium. As part of an earlier period of outmigration from the center city, for a time, the Detroit Lions football team relocated to a covered stadium built in Pontiac, called the Silverdome, although the team returned to Detroit in 2002.  

(For a time, the Detroit Pistons basketball team played at a suburban arena in nearby Auburn Hills/Auburn Township.  Chrysler moved from inner city Highland Park to Auburn Township as well.)

Being located on the edge of the city, by freeways, the stadium provided zero energy to Pontiac's core.  

Although Pontiac was hardly an exception, as other suburban stadium and arena projects across the county also had minimal positive impact ("Framework of characteristics that support successful community development in association with the development of professional sports facilities").

Deindustrialization was a problem across the state and the state failed to step up.  Like Detroit and Flint ("The real lesson from Flint is about municipal finance," 2016), Pontiac was one of a set of legacy cities in Michigan that because of the drop in property and income tax revenue from population shrinkage and deindustrialization went into bankruptcy, being the first to do so in 2011.  Plus, the economic multiplier effect.  Each auto job supports 3-4 other jobs.  Not all are local (e.g. parts plants from afar) but many are, furthering job losses and economic decline.

Even when plants stayed open, automation often reduced employment by as much as 75%.  It occurs to me that in multiple cities across Michigan, facing similar problems, not limited to GM or Chrysler or Ford:

• Battle Creek (Case Equipment moved to Kentucky), Bay City (GM), Benton Harbor, Detroit, Flint (GM, Buick), Jackson, Kalamazoo (Upjohn and GM, see "Former GM plant in Kalamazoo finds second life as successful business park," Kalamazoo Gazette--while successful the industrial park replacing the GM plant has 1/8 of the workforce), Lansing (Oldsmobile), Pontiac (Pontiac, GM Truck), Saginaw (GM)  

that like the Massachusetts Gateway Cities Initiative, the State of Michigan should have developed a state-wide initiative addressing deindustrialization and its impact on center cities across the state ("Growth Ideology in a Period of Decline: Deindustrialization and Restructuring, Flint Style," Social Problems, 1992, "Understanding Resilience Through Regional Responses to Economic Restructuring," dissertation, 2010).

Instead, later Republican administrations focused on cities declaring bankruptcy, fitting their narrative of incapable cities run by Democrats, rather than developing a broader economic revitalization initiative.

Pontiac looks to do Downtown street calming.  A recent article in the Detroit Free Press, "State agrees to unwind Pontiac's Woodward 'Loop' that leaders say strangles their downtown," says that the city is going to get rid of the ring road, in an attempt to reapply more city-centric urban design principles. From the article:

When it opened in 1964, the design of Pontiac’s Woodward Avenue Loop — formerly called Wide Track Drive — was hailed as a triumph.  (Wide Track was named after a Pontiac Motors marketing campaign for its cars.)

Its swaths of one-way pavement unsnarled bottlenecks and shunted GM workers as well as parts-laden tractor-trailers through Pontiac’s downtown and to half a dozen bustling factories. The high-capacity roadway played into the dreams of midcentury designers, on a binge they called urban renewal.

The road re-routing created a set of five one way streets, each five lanes wide.  It was decidedly anti-urban, facilitating car movement over people and a thriving downtown.  

Moving the government center and the creation of Pontiac Mall, on the border of the city and Waterford Township, were other actions that redirected economic activity away from Pontiac's Downtown to other parts of Oakland County. 

Why does Pontiac lag in the midst of great wealth?

And I hate to admit, reading that article, that I hadn't ever really thought about the reality that while Oakland County is wealthy and white, could that wealth have been harnessed to spur the economic revitalization of Pontiac, to reverse the steady drumbeat of decline?

Deindustrialization and outmigration?  It's not just deindustrialization, although that's a factor.  Pontiac was on the decline long before GM shut down its plants, just like many other cities across the state, the Midwest, and the nation.

Lack of political longevity?  The now deceased County Executive L. Brooks Patterson was in office for 27 years.  Certainly, unlike Mayors who are in office for usually no more than 2 terms, he had the opportunity to address Pontiac's poverty over the long term.  (Community revitalization is a multi-decade process, see "Main Street Niches in a Mass Sales World," 2004.)

Lack of attention to revitalization needs in legacy communities?  It's not like Patterson wasn't paying attention to the needs of inner ring suburbs, as Oakland County is the first and only county in the US to have created a county-wide Main Street commercial district revitalization program, which it did in 2000.  Pontiac participates, and has had a Downtown Development Authority for decades.

Tax harmonization.  Could the county have applied various tax harmonization strategies, like what has been done in Greater Minneapolis, or how various counties share sales taxes with legacy communities. (This likely would have required approval by the state legislature.)

Best practice county revitalization initiatives.  To be fair, plenty of counties have areas of persistent poverty.  But should this be the case?   

Are we taking poverty for granted, especially when it is co-terminate with race?

Recently I made this point about Montgomery County, Maryland and how its East County section remains a laggard ("East County, Montgomery County, Maryland: Council redistricting spurs ideas for revitalization | Part 1 -- Overview").  

Fairfax County, Virginia has been working on the revitalization of the Route 1 Corridor for decades ("Fairfax County’s Richmond Highway area ripe for development during next decade," Virginia Business).  And both counties are comparable to Oakland in terms of wealth.

The most typical initiatives focus on inner ring suburbs. But Pontiac is different as it was never a suburb in the traditional sense, but a stand-alone city, secondary to the center city, but significant and unitary, with its own economy, newspaper, civic institutions, etc.

Previous entries call attention to Hennepin County, Minnesota ("A County and Its Cities: the Impact of Hennepin Community Works", Journal of Urban Affairs) and Oklahoma City--not a county exactly, but the city is larger than other city-counties like Philadelphia or San Francisco ("Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape"). 

Maryland had/has a couple of smart growth related initiatives.  The "Community Legacy Revitalization Program," is a state program funding revitalization planning and projects in existing places, and there was a similar initiative at the county scale in Baltimore County under former County Executive Jim Smith ("Community renaissance set down in writing," Baltimore Sun; "Baltimore County Confronts Suburban Decline").  

Is it racism or the "soft bigotry of low expectations"?

Pontiac is a little place, 60,000 residents and 20 square miles.  In the midst of great wealth. 

From the standpoint of money, political administrative longevity, and political capacity, there's no reason that Pontiac should have continued on its negative trajectory.  Just like the way that cities like Bilbao have been renewed, using an approach that I call "transformational projects action planning." 

-- "Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2017
-- "Economic restructuring success and failure: Detroit compared to Bilbao, Liverpool, and Pittsburgh," 2014
-- "Minneapolis Super Bowl: Urban Revitalization and Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2018
-- "Downtown Edmonton cultural facilities development as an example of "Transformational Projects Action Planning"," 2018

there's no reason that Pontiac couldn't have been improved similarly.

It seems like economic revitalization there ought to be a straightforward process although granted they went through a bunch of flawed urban renewal iterations and severe deindustrialization

10 Pontiac School District buses were destroyed in an attack by the Ku Klux Klan.  Detroit News photo.

On the other hand, L. Brooks Patterson did start his political career defending opponents to busing and school integration.  In Pontiac! ("RIP, L. Brooks Patterson, Racist," Detroit Metro Times, "Busing set off Democratic debate flare-up, but does it still matter in Detroit?," Detroit News).

While Patterson's campaign "against" Detroit and Wayne County could be termed to be more a kind of "economic county-ism," racism was an issue.

But wrt Pontiac, perhaps it was more about benign neglect in the context of institutionalized and/or structural racism, and the failure of the state to think systematically about deindustrialization and its impact across the state.

The default is to see Pontiac/blacks as perennially poor, as a condition not particularly amenable to change.

While it's rare for counties to develop revitalization programs the way that Hennepin County did--which it did out of desperation, facing severe property tax revenue losses in the face of economic and population decline in Minneapolis--we can raise the bar for counties like Oakland, where overall they are fine economically, but possessing severe pockets of poverty and decline.

Some recommendations.

1.  The State of Michigan should develop a program addressing deindustrialization more systematically, using the Massachusetts Gateway Cities Initiative and "Hennepin County Works" program as models.

2.  Oakland County should make "leveling up" Pontiac its number one economic development priority.

3.  Building on the nascent road dieting effort and examples of successful communities nearby like Royal Oak ("Downtown Royal Oak social district opens this weekend -- Here's what to know," Fox2 Detroit, "Baker College to Build Flagship Metro-Detroit Campus in Downtown Royal Oak," "Royal Oak and Rochester Downtowns Win National Awards," OC Times) and Birmingham, focus on redeveloping the residential and retail possibilities Downtown.

-- Reinventing Suburban Business Districts (ULI)
-- Reinventing America's Suburban Strips
-- Revitalizing Distressed Older Suburbs
-- Putting the Urban in Suburban: Art and Business of Placemaking
-- "The secret to a successful suburb: Lakewood, Cleveland Heights and the Inner-ring Divide," Cleveland Plain Dealer

4.  Develop a revitalization plan using the Transformational Projects Action Plan approach, with Oklahoma City's Metropolitan Area Projects program and the downtown streetscape program as best practice models..

5.  Why not merge Pontiac into Oakland County?  This would make County prioritization of Pontiac revitalization unavoidable.

6.  Baring that, why not consolidate Pontiac and Waterford Township (Michigan makes it almost impossible now for cities to annex townships.  Waterford is 92% white and has 72,000 residents). But combining the two would make it tied as the state's third largest city, and would add the stronger residential tax base of Waterford.

7.  Consider merging the Pontiac School District with adjoining school districts, like Waterford. This is difficult, as communities like local control of schools.  

OTOH, a majority of Oakland County school districts are shrinking and consolidation could be advantageous, especially if combined with a MAP 4 Kids program of construction and other improvements like the second phase MAP program in Oklahoma City ("MAPS for Kids wraps up," Daily Oklahoman).

One more idea about Detroit: merging not with Wayne County but Oakland County

Rebecca Cook, Reuters.

In the 2014 piece, "The rise of Oakland County is built on Detroit's failure," I did discuss city-county merger as one way to change the trajectory for the City of Detroit, which while revitalizing at its core, faces real long term issues concerning lack of market demand for residential living.

I favor city-county merger for legacy cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis (it will be on the ballot but I haven't written about it yet), Baltimore ("Opinion: What Baltimore and D.C. can do to start working better together as a region (Baltimore Business Journal op-ed)," 2016), and Detroit, as a way to deal with difficult financing and governance issues ("The real lesson from Flint Michigan is about municipal finance," 2016).

But Detroit's decline has significantly impacted Wayne County too, and the County has other issues besides Detroit, aging infrastructure

Since the tri-counties haven't grown much, there isn't much chance of Detroit's recapturing the lost 1.2 million residents...

That's why after I wrote the 2014 piece, I realized that instead of merging with Wayne County, Detroit should merge with Oakland County, which is the most economically successful county in the Detroit Metropolitan Area.

That would be an unprecedented kind of merger.

But outside of creating more rigorous metropolitan government structures, along the lines in Greater Portland Oregon and Minneapolis-St. Paul, that's maybe the only kind of quantum scale change that could truly change Detroit's trajectory.

All the great media discussion notwithstanding:

-- "12 big developments set to transform Detroit," Curbed Detroit
-- "Detroit's Revival Is in Full Swing, But Some Question Its Future," Barron's
-- "Commentary: How Detroit Became a Model for Urban Renewal," Fortune
-- "Detroit's Big Comeback: Out Of Bankruptcy, A Rebirth," NPR
-- "Is Detroit Really Experiencing a Full Recovery?" CityLab

When I did a tour of New Orleans in 2006, after Katrina when the city was devastated, the native tour guide was outraged, and wanted us to be outraged too. I said, "how is this any different from what happened to Detroit?"

Detroit suffers from racism sure (see the writings of Thomas Sugrue) but it was also the auto industry's plan to break the UAW, which mostly has worked, but at the expense of cities in Michigan, especially Detroit and Flint (Pontiac, Lansing, Bay City, and Saginaw too).

In the 1950s, Detroit had something like 15 auto assembly plants, each of which employed thousands of people, and scads of supplier plants, each of which employed hundreds or thousands of people.  Now Detroit has two assembly plants.

Similarly, Flint at its peak had over 80,000 people employed by GM.  Now it is fewer than 8,000.

So that is why Michigan shifted Republican over the past few decades as auto workers, who tended to vote Democratic (cf. George Wallace, and Reagan Democrats), lost their jobs and left the state.

It's also why I get f*ing tired of reading comments on articles about how Democrats who run cities drive them into the ground.  The issue is far more complicated.

Look at all those robots!  Photo from "10 Auto Industry Jobs that Will Die Due to Automation," MoneyInc.

At the end of the day, locally elected officials have little control over what corporations do and mega economic trends like capital investment, globalization, the replacement of workers with machines, industrial consolidation, etc.

The systems that fund local government were created when the nation was growing rapidly.  We are past that phase now, and in many cases, especially for legacy communities with aging infrastructure and growing pension liabilities, local government funding systems won't generate enough revenue

The so-called myth that cities are growing when suburbs are still growing more

The other day, the New York Times ran a story, "Return to Cities an Urban Legend, Mostly," making the point that despite all the talk of population growth in the cities, more people are moving to and more growth is happening "in the suburbs."

I think this story misses very important points, a kind of "burying the lede."

Suburbs make up a much greater proportion of a metropolitan area's land mass and population.  It should be obvious that as metropolitan areas continue to grow, more people live in suburbs. It should be clear why this is so. Compared to the entire land mass and population of a metropolitan area, the formal center city, such as Washington, Baltimore, Boston, New York City, etc., is but a small proportion of a metropolitan area's total population and land mass.

For example, the DC metropolitan area has a population of about 6 million.  Less than 15% of this population is located in DC. DC comprises about 1.5% of the total land area of the metropolitan area (less when you take into account how much of the land is controlled by the federal government and not subject to development). Given these facts, it's unlikely that the city could capture a majority of population and economic growth.

New York City is part of a three-state metropolitan area greater than 13,000 square miles. The total population of the metro is slightly more than 20 million. New York City has about 8.5 million residents, in an area a cotch larger than 300 square miles.

What is significant first is that center cities are dense, with a large population in a small area. DC is about 60 square miles and has about 680,000 residents. The suburbs Fairfax County, Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland are each about 400 square miles in size, and each has about 1.1 million residents. Each is about 6.5x larger than DC physically, with less than twice the population.

What is significant second, is rather than a story of center city shrinkage--which was the case from the 1950s to around 2000--there is a renewed interest in living and working in center cities, and center cities are capturing more residents and more business than they had previously. Since roughly 2000, there has been a change in demand for urban living.  It's marginal, but significant enough to demonstrate significant "relative" levels of population in-migration, new construction especially of multiunit housing, etc.

Much of this in-migration has been centered upon downtowns or the "central business district," which has shifted from a unidimensional office canyon active only in the daytime to a mixed use district including a significant proportion of multiunit housing and night-time districts supported in large part by residents.

-- Downtown Living, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2002
-- Who Lives Downtown, Brookings Institution, 2005


Downtown Living Infographic

This is true for most major cities, Chicago being an exception in terms of experiencing population shrinkage, but growth in terms of business headquarters capture.

Baltimore too is an exception, which is why I have suggested that Baltimore City and Baltimore County re-merge--they de-merged in 1851--becoming the nation's seventh largest city ("Baltimore Business Journal).

Interestingly, in DC specifically, we have been less successful than other cities like Boston or Chicago, in capturing large businesses relocating from the suburbs. E.g., Hilton moved from California to Tysons, and Choice and Marriott stayed in the suburbs with their moves/announced moves. A large Nestle division is moving from California to Rosslyn, not DC. (Although Caterpillar recently announced a move from Peoria to Deerfield, not Chicago proper, because they want easy airport access).  Etc.

The suburbs are intensifying too.  The NYT article does make a crucial point, that suburbs are moving to a newer stage of development that is confusingly also called "urbanization" in the academic study of land use.

The phenomenon called the "edge city" 30 years ago is moving to a new stage that is moving towards greater accommodation of transit and walking, more focused on developing placemaking qualities, and somewhat less automobile-centric.

This is demonstrated within the suburbs in how the "intensifying areas" are succeeding in terms of adding population and business activity, the more disconnected and car-dependent areas of these places are languishing.

 The fact is that the market is bifurcating along the lines of concentration vs. disconnection. See "Continued Strength In Suburban Office Markets Dispels Myths, Bisnow versus "Big foreclosure suit ensnares suburban office, industrial buildings," Crain's Chicago Business. I have written about this in terms of the Fairfax County market, which is going through "reproduction of space" as a result of the Silver Line subway refocusing development in the Tysons-Reston Corridor.

With opposition.  Although intensification in the suburbs is accompanied by a great deal of angst, as suburban residents often believe that suburban intensification is somehow a kind of repudiation of the "suburban ideal."  See "End of free parking is the last straw for some Reston residents" and "In downtown Bethesda, residents and county debate whether more height is right," Washington Post, and "Reston: On a Collision Course," Connection Newspapers.

Suburban growth accompanied by growth in poverty and demand for aging services.  Just as suburbs continue to capture "more growth," as suburbs mature they are capturing more poverty ("Suburbs and the New American Poverty," Atlantic).

When the original "unique selling proposition" of the suburbs was how center cities functioned as a metropolitan area's "poverty sink" with a disproportionate share of the region's poor, and the demand for social services to serve them. I used to call that reality a type of "quality of life subsidy" to the suburbs, one dumped on the cities, but now there is a turnabout.

-- Confronting Suburban Poverty website
-- Build a Better Burb website
-- First Suburbs Consortium, Greater Cleveland

Similarly, as people age, suburbs are forced to meet a greater demand for aging services, with limited financial means to address the need ("Aging in the American Suburbs: A Changing Population," Aging Well Magazine.

Center city proponents need to be conversant with the nuances.  In any case, there are many ways to look at this issue, and proponents of center city primacy must be able to discuss the objective and subjective elements of the argument.  A particularly good argument is presented by Steve Belmont in Cities in Full, which argues for "recentralizing growth" on the center city.  And in some respects, that is what is occurring, with a lot of opposition from states, suburbs, and Republican legislators.

I have argued for a long time ("DC as a suburban agenda dominated city") that the people most traditionally active in local civic affairs in DC came to the fore during the period of the shrinking city when the priority was staunching outmigration and stabilizing neighborhoods in the face of trends that did not favor urban living.

Now that the city has the opportunity to grow in terms of population and business activity, people may need a different skill set and attitude, and also concern themselves with satisfying future residents, not just current residents, based on events and experiences solely from the past.

The digital economy renews the value of "agglomeration economies" Reading Richard Florida's new book, The New Urban Crisis, I wouldn't claim that this point was made as directly as it should have been, but it spurred me to think about how with changes in economic and social conditions in terms of the impact of digitalization and globalization, "agglomeration economies" have again become increasingly important.

"Agglomeration economies" is a fundamental concept from urban economics. The Geography of Transportation webpage at Hofstra University defines them thusly:

Agglomeration economies are a powerful force that help explain the advantages of the "clustering effect" of many activities ranging from retailing to transport terminals. There are three major categories of agglomeration economies:

Urbanization economies. Benefits derived from the agglomeration of population, namely common infrastructures (e.g. utilities or public transit), the availability and diversity of labor and market size;

Industrialization economies. Benefits derived from the agglomeration of industrial activities, such as being their respective suppliers or customers. This favors the emergence of industrial clusters;

Localization economies. Benefits derived from the agglomeration of a set of activities near a specific facility, let it be a transport terminal (logistics parks), a seat of government (lobbying, consulting, law) or a large university (technology parks).:

The job market and the world economy is much more competitive and operates much faster, making agglomeration or "clustering" valuable again when in the post-war period through the first decade of the 21st century, automobile-centric land use and transportation development paradigms allowed automobility to trump the clustering value of place/location.

Transportation and agglomeration economies.  Transportation efficiencies have always been the primary factor in the development of cities, starting with how most cities developed as ports on oceans, lakes, and rivers.

For example, wheat was milled close to where it was produced (Minneapolis-St. Paul) because of the cost of transportation.  Heavy appliances like stoves and bathtubs were manufactured locally because they were "too heavy" to transport cheaply to other markets, etc.

The development of an integrated railroad system meant that businesses could transcend constraints on their ability to do business imposed by the difficulty and cost of transporting goods, and led to the creation of a unified national market and the consolidation of various industries.

Mills could locate far from where wheat was grown and no longer did every city need its own manufacturing plant for appliances.

It still wasn't perfect, because railroads didn't charge a flat rate for transportation of goods, they charged on the basis of the value of the product, so there was still a reticence to ship long distances goods that were particularly expensive.

The road network enabled--for a long time but not indefinitely--automobile transportation to trump the value of agglomeration.  The creation of a ubiquitous and integrated road network serving local, metropolitan, regional, multi-state and national markets supported the rise of a deconcentrated land use and transportation planning paradigm, where uses are separated, and people mostly use a personally-owned automobile to get from place to place.

Cheap cars, cheap gas, the "open road" and plenty of free parking enabled the outward spread of commerce from center cities to the arterials and freeways of the suburbs with the creation of strip shopping centers, shopping malls, and business districts off freeways.

The carrying capacity of the road network is fixed.  This works, at the cost of owning and maintaining a car, building and maintaining the road network, and at the economic, military, and environmental costs of a fossil-fuel based mobility network.

But it stops working when any of those factors/conditions change substantively, including the "carrying capacity" of the road network.

Richard Florida argues that as metropolitan areas reach a population of 5 to 6 million, an automobile-centric mobility network has decreasing marginal returns.  (I believe that the writings of Newman and Kenworthy make a similar point.)

There is a line in the Jacobs book Nature of  Economies, when she responds to a question of "Why aren't there enough roads?" with the response, "You're asking the wrong question.  The right question is 'why are there so many cars?'"

Cities long ago recognized that the carrying capacity of the road network wasn't great enough to satisfy the various mobility and exchange needs of the cities and developed robust transit systems. According to a book review of David Engwicht's Reclaiming our cities and towns: better living through less traffic:

Engwicht maintains that cities were originally created as places for people to come together to trade goods and stories. A city, by definition, can be seen as a concentration of exchange opportunities. Cars get in the way of these exchanges in several ways. They drive people out of public spaces and create inhospitable environments for social interaction because of noise, fumes, and the barrier effects of the stream of traffic. Furthermore, they eliminate what he calls the "spontaneous" exchange — the unplanned encounter — thereby depriving cities of their essential spontaneity and life.

Traffic also sets into motion a wide range of self-reinforcing inefficiencies, according to Engwicht. Cars require roads, which require space, which require urban expansion, which requires more travel, which in turn requires more space.

Conclusion:  The need to reposition economic development and governance systems around metropolitan areas.  The issue isn't whether or not cities are growing faster than the suburbs but is the economic value of the metropolitan area and the necessity of strong center cities as thriving anchors of these places.

This is the general argument of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Brookings Institution, that "metropolitan areas" -- that is center cities and the suburbs combined -- should be seen as the primary building blocks of the national economy and that US political and governance systems should be reformulated to recognize and support this reality.

Brookings laid these arguments out in the book Metropolitan Revolution.

See my review and also "Resurging cities, resurging metros, the impoverished and the Metropolitan Revolution (continued)" and "States, economic development, and sub-state/metropolitan area political restructuring."

In the meantime, the Trump Administration is doing all it can to screw cities in terms of proposals to defund transit, housing programs, health insurance programs, other poverty programs, etc.

And the DC area specifically, as the Trump Administration proposes significantly less money than is required to build new facilities for agencies such as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Opinion: What Baltimore and D.C. can do to start working better together as a region (Baltimore Business Journal op-ed)

I wrote an op-ed in response to an article that ran in last week's Baltimore Business Journal discussing the meeting of a group of stakeholders from DC and Baltimore sitting down over dinner and talking about the need for a stronger focus on regionalism.

I have paid attention to Baltimore pretty carefully since I got involved in urban revitalization as an avocation and vocation, partly to contrast the difference between strong and weak real estate markets and to be able to become more nuanced in understanding the differences in opportunity that result from significant differences in material conditions.

For example, DC still has a strong center and a transit network, while Baltimore is bigger, has more poverty and crime (although for a time crime was worse in DC), has lost relevance with the outmigration of population and economic activity, and has a couple rail transit lines, but no transit network.

I worked briefly as a planner in Baltimore County in FY2010 (I wasn't able to stay on for a couple reasons, one being during the recession they were cutting staff and agencies not adding people) and that gave me more insights into some of the issues in the metropolitan area, and I have written many blog entries over the years about it, including:

-- "From the files: transit planning in Baltimore County"
-- "Best practice suburban bicycle planning using the 'action planning' method"
-- "Morgan State University should move their architecture and planning school to Downtown/Station North Arts District"
-- "Marketing resident attraction"
-- "New Baltimore area regional plan for sustainability"
-- "One big idea: Getting MARC and Metrorail to integrate fares, stations, and marketing systems, using London Overground as an example"

Here's the article but note that the actual article is locked and only available to subscribers.
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"Opinion: What Baltimore and D.C. can do to start working better together as a region," Baltimore Business Journal, 12/16/2016

In “Building a case for regionalism between Baltimore and D.C.,,” published Dec. 9, Melody Simmons reported on a recent meeting of Baltimore and Washington stakeholders.

As a planner-writer with experience in both communities, I believe building the Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas into a single region is dependent on three things:

1. Each metro needs to “get its house in order” by functioning and acting at a “best practice” level;

2. More efficient physical connections need to be constructed within and between the metropolitan areas; and

3. More attention needs to be put on working together — rather than reflexively choosing to be obstreperous, the first inclination needs to be to collaborate.

Here are five initiatives where Maryland can start setting the stage for making real a powerhouse Baltimore-Washington region:

1. The state must acknowledge that the two metropolitan areas drive the state economy and rather than pit the areas against each other or against other parts of the state, a program of high value investment in both the Baltimore and Washington areas needs to be prioritized.

2. While as a Washington resident I would never argue for re-merging the city into Maryland. Maryland should “take ownership” of D.C. by recognizing it is the linchpin of the economies of Anne Arundel, Charles, Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties.

3. For example, the state government needs to have an open mind about financial solutions for the D.C.-area’s sputtering Metrorail system and should be “all in” on not only building the Purple Line as currently planned, but should initiate the planning process now for extending the Purple Line from New Carrollton to Alexandria, Va., and extending the Purple Line from Bethesda to Tysons in Northern Virginia should be part of any discussions about rebuilding the American Legion Bridge.

4. As the home to national political dysfunction, Washington has serious image problems. For different reasons, so does the Baltimore area. The metropolitan economy languishes in the face of Baltimore’s crime and population shrinkage despite the city’s incredible array of assets.

To completely redefine “Baltimore,” serious consideration must be given to a merger of Baltimore City and Baltimore County. The two jurisdictions separated in 1851. Consolidation isn’t easy, but Louisville and Lexington in Kentucky and Nashville, Tenn., offer models that show that it can be done.

A combined city and county would have a population of 1.425 million, making it the nation’s seventh largest city, the most populous and powerful jurisdiction in Maryland, and a much bigger player in the multi-state mid-Atlantic region.

It would increase bonding-financing capacity and enable significant transformation of the role of transit. A merger of the city and county community colleges would create a powerhouse institution as well, as would the merger of the parks and recreation systems

A merger could create difficult political issues, because the formerly suburban county would have more legacy residents and like in Toronto and London, where more conservative suburban voters tend to outvote more progressive voters in the core, this could create representation and governance issues.

A slightly different governance model could be adopted, providing for city-county consolidation, but also the creation of separate boroughs within “the city.” Boroughs are smaller and more local governments, with elected representation and responsibilities for planning and the delivery of certain services. London, Montreal, and Paris are some of the cities that are organized in this fashion.

5. High quality transit defines great cities. Right now transit in the Baltimore area doesn’t have the kind of multiplicative place and investment value that can intensify development and population. That’s why it’s so hard to build transit oriented development projects like State Center or Penn Station, or new lines like the Red Line.

The major impetus for New York City’s consolidation in 1898 was to increase its ability to raise funds to build the subway system. A merged Baltimore would have the heft to address strengthening, extending, and leveraging transit investment.

Reconfiguring the light rail system to serve Towson and extending it a bit into Hunt Valley, extending the line southward to Howard County, spiffing it up with new, design forward, rail cars, connecting the light rail and subway lines more directly in the vicinity of Lexington Market, and extending the subway line to White Marsh would begin to create a transit system and network out of what are now two disconnected rail lines.

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They did a good job cutting the piece down.  But mostly, they did so by cutting the last three points.  Here's the rest:

6. MARC is one of the more successful commuter railroads in the US. In recent years, the system has added weekend service on the Penn Line between Baltimore and Washington, but the Camden and Brunswick lines operate only on weekdays, and the Brunswick line doesn't offer reverse commute service from Washington to business districts in Montgomery and Frederick Counties.

Like how London reconfigured some rail lines to function as a railroad equivalent of subway service, MARC should integrate its fare media system and station network into the local transit systems in Baltimore and Washington--the MTA CharmCard and WMATA SmarTrip fare cards are already interoperable.

Building on that, Maryland should create a framework where DC can become a co-owner of MARC system, with expanded coverage and stations within DC, new lines to Annapolis from Baltimore and Washington, service to Charles County, and reverse commute service added to the Brunswick line. An improved station in West Baltimore, a new station in East Baltimore, and service between Frederick and Baltimore should be part of this program.

7. Longer term the merger of MARC and Virginia Railway Express should be on the table -- I suggest calling the new system RACER, for "Railroad Authority of the Chesapeake Region" -- extending the Penn Line into Virginia, and adding lines throughout the multi-state region including connections to Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Richmond.

8. DC’s public higher education system does not have institutions of quality comparable to the University System of Maryland. Why not treat DC residents as “residents” for enrollment purposes at Maryland’s public institutions of higher learning?

There are plenty of other initiatives that can be added to this list, ranging from integrating tourism planning, building the region into a biotechnology powerhouse, better leveraging the value of federal research facilities and higher education institutions, integrating airport planning, supporting the Port of Baltimore at the multi-state scale, etc., but this is definitely a start. Now on to making a list for Washington.

Launch of the Greater Washington Partnership

Interestingly, last week the Baltimore Business Journal ran a piece, "Building a case for regionalism between Baltimore and D.C.," about a meeting of stakeholders from both Baltimore and Washington talking about the opportunity within coming together as a true region. (Note that I define a region as a combination of two or more metropolitan areas.  That's why I try to not refer to Greater Washington as a region, but as a metropolitan area.)

Of course, I don't have a problem with that, but I whipped off an op-ed for the BBJ about necessary antecedents.  I wrote that:

1. Each metro needs to "get its house in order" by functioning and acting at a "best practice" level;
2. More efficient physical connections need to be constructed within and between the metropolitan areas; and
3. More attention needs to be put on working together--rather than reflexively choosing to be obstreperous, the first inclination needs to be to collaborate

and listed eight initiatives that the Baltimore area and or the State of Maryland could take up that would help build what we might call the platform for regionalism. At a list of eight, I had already cut about five items from the list. (I haven't yet come up with an equivalent list for Washington, DC and Northern Virginia.)

My piece was more than twice the length of the 500 words they said to submit, so I will be interested to see the final, edited article.  I'll do a full write up when the piece is published.

In my e-box this morning was the longest press release I have ever received, about the creation of Greater Washington Partnership, which will focus on economic development matters "from Baltimore to Richmond."

From the press release:

A group of leading CEOs and entrepreneurs today announced a first-of-its-kind collaboration for the Greater Washington region – from Baltimore to Richmond – to address the critical economic issues facing the region and ensure it remains one of the world’s best places to live, work and build a business. The new Greater Washington Partnership (Partnership) will advance inclusive, actionable solutions that strengthen the regional economy and position Greater Washington as a leading global region and center for commerce and innovation.

The Partnership brings together civic-minded business leaders who share a commitment to the future of Greater Washington. It draws from a cross-sector of leading industries including health care, life sciences, energy, manufacturing, professional services, education, sports & entertainment and financial services.

The Founding Board of the organization includes the CEOs and leaders of Ramsey Asset Management, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Monumental Sports & Entertainment, Johns Hopkins University, Capital One Financial Corporation, Dominion Resources, MedImmune, S&R Foundation, WGL Holdings, Inc. and Washington Gas, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP, Under Armour, The Carlyle Group, McKinsey & Company, MedStar Health, T. Rowe Price, Rally Health, and EY.

The Partnership will focus on the high impact drivers of the region’s economic growth including:

• Advancing infrastructure solutions that strengthen regional mobility and improve quality of life; 

• Educating and training individuals for the jobs that employers need to fill now and in the future; 

• Increasing recognition of Greater Washington, from Baltimore to Richmond, as a vibrant hub for business and innovation; and

• Building long-term leadership positions in high-growth industry sectors.

“The Greater Washington region is more than just home to our nation’s capital, it’s one of the most vibrant, diverse and dynamic places to live and work in the world,” said Russ Ramsey, CEO of Ramsey Asset Management, Chairman of the Greater Washington Partnership, and former Chairman of Washington 2024, the organization established to lead the region’s recent effort to host the 2024 Olympic Games. “The unity, goodwill, and cooperation achieved through the 2024 bid process provided a brief glimpse of what we can accomplish together if we harness the energy and untapped resources available to us. The Greater Washington Partnership is how we do that, and I am thrilled to lead an impressive and dedicated group laser focused on improving this great region we call home.”

-- Greater Washington Partnership

Of course, I would be remiss by not mentioning that this is another example of what Harvey Molotch calls the "Growth Machine," which makes the point that despite seeming intra-elite competition, local political and economic elites are for the most part united on a pro-growth agenda focused on intensification of real estate, since local governments are dependent on property taxes (and sales taxes) for the bulk of their revenues.

(Harvey Molotch's paper, City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place, published in 1976, and later expanded into the book Urban Fortunes: Towards a Political Economy of Place, serves as the foundation for this theory.)

I don't have a problem with the reality that the Growth Machine exists and operates, but I do have a problem with how the agenda tends to be pretty narrow, developed as it is by a limited number of highly connected people (and their consultants) who don't seek out other ways of looking at the world, with a tendency to focus on big projects (see the discussion in Roberta Gratz's Cities: Back from the Edge, which I think of as a primer based on Jane Jacobs) that often don't have the kind of payoff that is touted.

Plus, while I believe this is an important initiative, it will be very difficult to balance the competing interests of two states and three metropolitan areas.

Relatedly, I wrote this as part of the BBJ op-ed:

While as a Washington resident I would never argue for re-merging the city into Maryland, Maryland should "take [virtual] ownership" of DC by recognizing it is the linchpin of the economies of Anne Arundel, Charles, Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George's Counties.

For example, when we need a plumber at my house, we call one plumber exclusively. He lives in Charles County, but only works in DC, because he knows he can charge much more for his time and expertise--we're fine with that because he's willing to work with "historic buildings"without trying to make over the bathroom or kitchen fixtures into the latest and greatest from Home Depot--compared to his home market.

Like our plumber, with National Harbor and the new MGM Casino in Prince George's County, Maryland recognizes proximity to DC as a key competitive advantage.

But rather than cherry pick, the state needs to acknowledge the place and position of DC within its economy and act collaboratively rather than competitively.

In this vein, the State government needs to have an open mind about financial solutions for the DC-area's sputtering Metrorail system and should be "all in" on not only building the Purple Line as currently planned, but should initiate the planning process now for extending the Purple Line from New Carrollton to Alexandria—and extending the Purple Line from Bethesda to Tysons in Northern Virginia should be part of any discussions about rebuilding the American Legion Bridge.

And I think this verysame point is the crux on whether such an initiative can be successful.  Virginia and Maryland "have to take a kind of ownership" in DC being successful, even though DC will get some of those benefits too, not just their respective states.

It's about cooperation and collaboration not just marketing their states against DC on an almost continuous basis.