Blogger Candidate Forum: Making Urban Opportunity Great

http://www.citylab.com

The White House
Washington D.C.
whitehouse.gov

Hello Everyone:

It is Wednesday and time for Blogger Candidate Forum.  As President-Elect Donald Trump continues to build his administration, we turn our attention to his urban opportunities.  Whether you believe our cities are the future or mess, Solomon Green and Erica C. Poethig point out in their CityLab article, "The Next President's Urban Opportunity," that the incoming administration can do a lot to aid American cities with or without Congress.  Let us be honest, both the Senate and House of Representatives have a tendency to be very obstinate.  Thus, relying on 535 people to come together and work together to better American cities is an act of divine intervention.  Alright, that may be a slight exaggeration but over the last eight years, this esteemed legislative body has not had a great bipartisan track record.

Detroit skyline
man.com

The voting patterns evident in the November 8 election seemed to follow demographic trends: this was the most "urban" election in American history.  Mr. Greene and Ms. Poethig write, "More people live in America's cities and metropolitan areas today than ever before."  Not only that but for the first time since the end of the Second World War, many American cities are expanding at the same rate as the suburbs, "...which for decades absorbed most of the population growth in metropolitan areas."

The Great Recession forced young families to either postpone or avoid buying homes in the suburbs, and the demand for urban amenities has jumped as large employers and small startups move back to the urban center.  Demographic changes over the next decades appear to indicate an accelerate the growth of cities, as millennial, aging baby boomers, and immigrants increasingly opt to make their home in urban communities.

Montage of New Orleans, Louisiana
en.wikipedia.or

Simultaneous with urban growth is the increase  in income inequality, and this schism is the greatest in the largest cities.  According to a Brookings Institution report, City and metropolitan inequality on the rise, driven by declining income (http://www.brookings.edu; accessed Dec. 7, 2016)  from January 2016, "...large metropolitan areas in the U.S.-as well as their central cities-tend to have greater income inequality then the nation as a whole."  Additionally, the increasing gap between rich and poor individuals within metropolitan areas coincided with the growth schism between affluent and less affluent places.  The reporters's colleagues at the Urban Institute recently presented evidence that "...the disparities between  America's most- and least-fluent neighborhoods within metropolitan areas have grown rapidly over the past two decades.."

Hollywood neighborhood
Hollywood, California
streetgangs.com

    The subject of income inequality dominated political discourse, finding its way to center stage during the primary debates (less so during the contentious general election debates) and party conventions.  Many election watchers, including President Barack Obama, declared that, combating rising inequality is the absolute most important challenge facing President-elect Trump.  This should not be a real surprise because nation-wide income inequality has risen to levels unseen before the Great Depression, and it is the voters that are feeling the impact.

However, if inequality is the most acute in the cities and throughout metropolitan areas, Mr. Greene and Ms. Poethig ask, "why hasn't either presidential candidate applied a distinctly 'urban' lens to the challenges of this growing problem?  And how can the president we elect on Tuesday [this article was posted before the election] harness demographic changes and economic shits to reverse this trend and help reduce inequality in these places?"

Leimert Plaza Park
Los Angeles, California
leimertparkbeat.com

The answer to the first question is easier than trying to answer the first.  From a political perspective, urban dwellers are lean overwhelmingly toward Democrat, thus it would appear that the Clinton campaign took those voters for granted.  The authors speculate, "This would explain why Clinton's 'Breaking Every Barrier' plan to improve economic opportunity for poor communities and people doesn't specifically earmark funds  for cities.  It would also explain Trump's willingness to describe urban neighborhoods with high concentration of Latinos and African Americans as a living 'hey' and declare that 'places like Afghanistan are safer than some U.S. inner cities."

From a pragmatic point of view, many of the policy initiatives that could be most effective in alleviating economic inequalities in cities-i.e. housing, education, land use, transportation, and economic development-are mainly, though not exclusively, controlled by state or local governments.  Under the American federalist political system, and in context of the traditional local control in policy arenas, a more aggressive 'urban agenda' by a president could appear to be radical overreach.

The President- and Vice President-elect
cnn.com

 However, this does not mean that the incoming administration will stand idly by while inequality continues widen in the cities.  Mr. Greene and Ms. Poethig point out, "After all, many of the patterns of segregation and uneven development we see today were driven by decades of federal policies and (dis)investments, from racial redlining in credit markets to siting of public housing developing and the funding interstate highways."  There some solutions, at the federal level, that would remedy the situation or positively promote equality but that would require congressional action or as your truly put it, an act of divine intervention.  Be that as it may, Solomon Greene and Erica Poethig offer three general suggestions for the new administration.

Baltimore Inner City
Baltimore, Maryland
123rf.com

Break down silos:  the efficacy current federal urban investments is hampered by entrenched divisions and lack of communication between the federal agencies that administer them.  Frequently, it is a case of one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing-i.e. one agency does not know what investment another agency is making in a specific place.  This may give rise to programmatic priority conflicts and grants often include burdensome and inconsistent reporting requirements.  The Obama administration did make significant strides in cracking these silos by incentivizing government agencies to incorporate place-based strategies and by encouraging inter-agency coordination in a particular places.  However, more is required.  The authors write, " In this regard, the federal government can draw inspiration (and models) from local governments that are leveraging both new technologies and bold leadership to share data and create cross-functioning teams that increases coordination and improve accountability across city agencies."

Downtown Athens, Georgia
indigoathens.com

Incentivize Inclusionary policies: the biggest tool at the federal government's disposal is money.  The federal government annually distributes over $600 billion-17 percent of its  budget-to states and municipalities, supplying about a quarter of their general revenue.  The authors suggest, "Agencies could give cities that take certain qualifying steps to overcome inequalities a 'leg up' for the share of these grants that are awarded competitively."  The Department of Housing and Urban Development has experiment with this method by awarding bonus points on discretionary grant applications to localities that participate in the Sustainable Communities  Initiative and contribute to regional sustainability plans."  Madame Secretary's Breaking Every Barrier initiative uses a similar approach by rewarding municipalities that implement land-use strategies that make it easier to build affordable rental housing near good job with  competitive grant from the Department of Transportation.  The affect of these incentives would be greater if the bonus points were coordinated and awarded throughout agencies.

Greenville, South Carolina
Photograph by Dan Burden: PBIC
switchboard.nrdc.or

 Get ahead o the curve: municipal government are increasingly developing predictive analytics with their own data and private sector "big data" to stay ahead of and prevent problems like traffic collisions, homelessness, and public health issues.  Making public data more available through open data portals has also enabled other civic-minded actors who have developed technology solutions to some of more pressing challenges. The federal government does have access to the plethora of data on cities.  The authors note, "Federal agencies manage 8.4 trillion records, and much of this data is or could be geocoded."  Recently, the Obama administration established the Opportunity Project, which made federal and local datasets available through open portal agreements to support and develop tools for economic opportunities.  The incoming administration could go further by investing in data integration, written within and without the federal government, to make projections about the challenges facing cities that drive inequality.

There are, of course, many more proposals that could go even further in promoting economic opportunity and mobility in cities, but that would require an act of Congress.  One example is more funding for housing vouchers or major investments in repairing and maintaining the nation's infrastructure.  Again, this would would require an act o divine intervention.  The bottom line is, if we want to "Make America Great Again," the incoming Trump administration must make the case that "...with two-thirds of the nation's DP being generated in cities the economic future of our cities is also the economic future of our country."