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.
The selection of Adolfo Carrion, Bronx Borough President, to lead The White House Office of Urban Policy (WHOUP) is particularly important as the federal government unleashes the $787 billion economic stimulus package President Obama signed into law on Tuesday. The effectiveness of the stimulus package depends on the ability of federal officials to select among a range of public works projects identified by mayors and other metro officials according to these criteria: the speed with which they can be undertaken; the type, availability, and location of the workers they require; and their short-term and long-term economic effects. WHOUP must coordinate the federal government’s communication with officials at the city and metro level where most of these stimulus projects will be executed in the coming months.
Obama’s cities chief will have the opportunity to show the country that urban policy is uniquely about smart investment, careful planning, and effective policy design rather than wasteful spending on unnecessary projects—that it’s about harnessing the resources concentrated in metro areas, where a vast majority of Americans live, by maximizing present value and extracting future potential.
This year's presidential campaign has not involved the "urban decline" rhetoric that rallied politicians - and policymakers - to the cause of cities in the mid 1960s and late 1970s. Instead, as Alex MacGillis pointed out in Sunday's WaPo, Senator Obama
"has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types - promoting America's cities based on their strengths, not their failings."
This framing involves a slight shift of perspective from urban cores to metro areas. In many ways, this optimistic view of cities as nestled within metros (which aren't as politically, or racially, charged as cities) is productive. Economics backs up the sunny view, as MacGillis notes, with the majority of the nation's GDP generated and of its population and jobs located in metro areas.
But the champions of the metro perspective fail to defend the political relationship - the partnership - that is necessary between the federal government and cities. In interviewing mayors from cities across the country, I have consistently heard that cities will not truly prosper until mayors are provided more substantive opportunities to influence federal policy. This influence would extend beyond calls for more funds for the CDBG and COPS programs to provide mayors and other parochial officials occasions to highlight model local policies and coordinate with state officers and, indeed, with other officials inside their metro area.
Mayors have already joined together in ad hoc groups to meet Kyoto Protocol targets and in official organizations like the Conference of Mayors, but they have little formal means to influence federal policy. If mayors are heard at all, they are heard to be begging for money; if they receive money, they often receive too little or are constrained in its use. Providing mayors a platform for influence, exchange, and coordination - similar to Senator Obama's White House Office of Urban Policy - would capitalize on the economic power of metro areas while restoring urban policy to its proper place in national discourse. At its best, this would mean strengthening the power and authority of mayors at the federal level--something that Obama's transition team should embrace.
In today's WSJ, June Kronholz points out that few mayors become president. They have often been overlooked when they should be empowered. Today, mayors nationwide overwhelmingly want the next presidential administration to reverse that trend.
A recent interview DMI's MayorTV did with Mayor Dannel Malloy of Stamford, CT explores the much-needed political partnership between cities and the federal government. Check it out.
As final preparations for the last presidential debate are made - water glasses weighed and secret memoranda consulted - both candidates have revamped their economic plans for the economic crisis now gripping the country.
McCain was uncertain, at first, about whether to release a revised plan. But even after deciding that certain "economic news and conditions" demanded such action, he seems to have omitted several critical elements from the proposal. No, if you were concerned, he remembered to include a cut in the capital gains tax. And yes, if you're worried he was going soft, he will employ a surge strategy to prevent foreclosures.
This post was written by Harry Moroz and cross-posted from the DMI blog.
"We need to imagine just what a clean, safe, efficient, dynamic, stimulating, just city would look like concretely - we need those images to confront critically our masters with what they should be doing - and just this critical imagination of the city is weak."
Campaign websites - like town hall speeches, candidate adverts, and whisky drinking - are fair game when analyzing the presidential candidates. Indeed, when a few big picture issues like health care or the Iraq War dominate campaign conversation, these websites can be the curious voter's only entrée into a candidate's views on niche issues. Likewise, when the ravenous punditocracy belabors the collective consciousness with stories of vitriolic pastors and gas tax holidays, the campaign websites can be the honest voter's only escape to meaningful policy, disassociated from reality as it may be.
That is why I feel so comfortable applauding Senator Obama's recent addition of an "Urban Policy" tab to the dropdown menu in the upper-left-hand section of the horizontal toolbar labeled "Issues" on his campaign website. In fact, Obama had several months ago released an initial urban plan that called for a White House Office of Urban Policy, "promise neighborhoods" to combat concentrated poverty, increased money for reverse commuters, and an affordable housing trust fund. Senator Clinton, too, had released a plan for "revitalizing our cities" that called for increased funding for early education, green buildings and green jobs, and infrastructure. Both candidates' plans would revive helpful programs that have been left, as Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta might put it, to shrivel up and die. Fair enough.
cross-posted at MyDD and Daily Kos. Yeah, I get around. No, I'm not ashamed.
Yesterday Senator Obama gave a speech in Washington, D.C., in which he outlined a $6 billion agenda to fight the problem of urban poverty in America. The plan is quite bold and comprehensive, and as is often the case with detailed policy proposals, has been difficult for reporters to digest and analyze beyond dollar figures and catch phrases. However, it offers a new perspective on tackling urban poverty in America, and is very much consistent with the Family-based Progressivism attributed to Obama and Policy Director Karen Kornbluh. Since nobody's actually taken it on in a diary or post, I thought I'd take a stab at breaking down the specific proposals offered within the speech, and the rhetoric used to introduce and support those proposals.
If you don't have time to read the extended entry, here are the highlights from the plan:
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