Fragmentation of authority, planning and execution have been endemic to urban policy for the better part of four decades. A new report from the Drum Major Institute--"No Economic Recovery Without Cities: The Urgency Of A New Federal Urban Policy"--sounds a clarion call for dramatically turning that around, while also focusing efforts to ensure maximum impact from the existing federal stimulus.
Writing at Huffington Post, report co-author Harry Moroz called for the White House to play "a more active and visible role in cities":
Why not reactivate Obama's grassroots operation so that federal officials and urban stakeholders collaborate in real time and share responsibility for the stimulus? Why not set up stimulus accountability outposts of the White House in cities? Obama came into office with a metro mandate and now is the time to claim it.
All the doubts about the stimulus -- from foes like Senator Coburn and friends like the Conference of Mayors -- will only increase until President Obama empowers his White House Office of Urban Affairs to refocus the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on bolstering the urban areas that will drive economic recovery.
The report itself presents a more robust argument for pro-active White House involvement. From the executive summary:
The White House Office of Urban Affairs provides President Obama a unique opportunity to articulate a national agenda that recognizes urban areas as integral, indeed indispensable, to national prosperity. The last fifty years of federal urban policymaking have been characterized by two ideologies. The first considers urban decline as both a justification for and a mode of urban policymaking. The second deems federal urban policymaking intrusive and harmful to national economic growth. But research shows that cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas are engines of economic growth. Neither ideology recognizes this and so both fail to tie the fate of cities to the fate of the country at large.
To be successful, the Office of Urban Affairs must coordinate partnerships between the federal government and state and city officials based on a long-term investment strategy in the nation's cities. This involves investigating how present and future policymaking impacts urban areas, inserting the executive branch into discussions of local and regional program decision making, and proposing alternative budgets that incorporate long-term returns to short- and medium-term investment.
The plain fact is, there are solid pragmatic reasons why the federal government should take a leading coordinating role. This doen't necessarily mean dictating to state, local and regional governments. People who actually work at these levels know that lack of coordination, timely response and dependable long-range planning are routine problems that just don't have to be there. A proactive federal government can solve such problems without imposing any more top-down control than currently exists. In fact, close collaboration can help cut through constraining red tape.
The report goes on to lay out a set of "policy principles" to guide the development of a "strategy for metropolitan America". They can be read as just a list of good ideas that some might say are self-evident. But just because some might think they're self-evident doesn't mean we have policy to match. That's just the point. We can make dramatic improvements in our urban policy precisely because there's such a backlog of common sense insights that haven't been instrumental in how urban policy has been carried out. Combining the insights embodied in this list can produce dramatically more effective policy outcomes. This is just the point I've been trying to make in a number of different diaries I've written about multi-causal factors involved in community health and the creation of opportunity zones.
Here is their list of principles:
Cities are "greener" than the suburbs: The Office of Urban Affairs should promote policies that encourage higher-density, transit-oriented development by tying federal funding for transportation to projects that encourage dense development anchored by transit stations.
Public transit keeps housing affordable: The Office of Urban Affairs should examine the way that federal transportation dollars are currently delegated to highway projects versus public transit projects and advocate for more parity in funding transit.
It's not just homeownership: The Office of Urban Affairs should focus on providing affordable housing opportunities beyond homeownership.
We need energy-efficient buildings: The Office of Urban Affairs should advocate increased funding for energy efficiency projects by rewarding those jurisdictions that adopt green building codes. The Office could also advocate for the first national green building code.
Giving people transportation alternatives: The Office of Urban Affairs would help improve environmental, safety, and traffic efficiency standards by supporting urban efforts to provide transportation alternatives.
Save lives by cleaning the air at our nation's ports: The Office of Urban Affairs should address the health and environmental impact of our nation's ports.
Job quality matters: The Office of Urban Affairs should take steps to increase job quality by emphasizing the significant impact increases in the federal minimum wage and unionization have on the urban workforce.
Economic development subsidies need to enhance job quality: The Office should support public subsidy accountability measures, such as the efforts of Representative Dennis Kucinich [D-OH], to tighten the IRS regulations that govern the use of tax-exempt bonds for the construction of sports arenas.
Public housing is vital: The Office of Urban Affairs should seek to end years of declining funding levels for public housing. The Office should also advocate the construction of new public housing units in order to address the needs of those families making below 30 percent of the area median income.
Fix our urban school systems: By promoting the housing and land use discussed above, the Office of Urban Affairs can address the concentrations of wealth and poverty that have led to the gap in urban and suburban educational achievement. The Office should highlight urban education efforts with proven effectiveness and leverage these efforts with increased federal support.
Immigration policy must strengthen the rights of immigrants: The Office of Urban Affairs should support federal immigration reform and should emphasize the impact that inaction by the federal government is having on cities.
It's an ambitious vision of how the White House can catalyze a significant improvement in the quality of urban life. The stimulus alone will not provide enough money to do that. But it will provide an opportunity to make a significant start in a new direction. Considering how much of the energy to elect Obama came from these urban communities, and considering Obama's own community organizing background, this is a very sensible, very pragmatic sort of vision to advance.
