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| President Barack Obama whitehouse.gov |
It is time, once again, for Blogger Candidate Forum. Did any of you watch President Barack Obama's farewell speech from Chicago last night? It was moving beyond words, especially when he paid tribute to First Lady Michelle Obama. During his speech, he kept returning to his original campaign message of hope and change. This message was heard by urban American and propelled him into the White House in 2008. Expectations were high.
Urban dwellers and urbanists had reasons to believe that POTUS would be the catalyst for a new urban era. He was like them: cosmopolitan. He was raised in the state of Hawai'i and Indonesia; lived in different part of the United States before beginning his career in Chicago. Chicago in the eighties and nineties was a city that exemplified the best and worst of urban life. As a community organizer on the South Side, he brought the African-American community together around pressing issues like: contaminated water and asbestos in public housing, familiar problems in long ignored communities around the United States.
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| POTUS as a community organizer blackamericans.com |
Adolfo Carrion Jr, appointed by POTUS to lead the White House Office of Urban Affairs told the Washington Post in 2009,
This is not your father's White House...This is a new way of looking at the new city-metro reality.
Now, in the waning days of the Obama Administration, President Barack Obama's legacy is being measured in all manner, including urban policy. Ms. Misra writes, "In a new book called Urban Policy in the Time of Obama, academic appraise his success and failures." CityLab sat down with the book's editor James DeFillippis, associated professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, to get his his thoughts on POTUS's urban legacy. Below are excerpts from that interview.
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| Chicago South Side, June 1973 Chicago, Illnois theatlantic.com |
JDF: I'm loath to reduce his work to just a grade. But if I had to, I would probably say a B-. There were a lot of interesting ideas, but there was very little follow-through. Most of what we got were a set of fairly small pilot-y kinds of projects: its of planning grants, but very little implementation money...
...I recognize the constraints he was working with. The Republican Party clearly understands its constituents is not urban and couldn't care less about black and brown constituents in cities. Even so, where was the expenditure of political capital to force the issue from the administration? To push for a whole set of policies that would make things more equitable now? To build organizations infrastructure for a more progressive, urban regime forward? We didn't see it.
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| Cover for Urban Policy in the Time of Obama architexturez.net |
JDF: You see very strong continuities in public housing...The Choice Neighborhoods initiative is essentially HOPEVI from the Clinton administration, but with wraparound services and greater community engagement...private financing for mixed-income housing developments.
Some of that reflects political reality. Where's the money for public housing in the capital budget going to come from? Congress wasn't really going to allocate that money...There's a presumption that the market is not just more efficient, but a better allocator of resources in the public sector.
CL: Is the involvement of private entities always a bad thing, though?
JDF: There are times where public-private partnerships are the most logical way to organize things. But the difference is in the starting assumption. Instead of using the market as a helpful tool in a desired policy intervention, whether or not policy interventions become desirable depend on whether or not they can get private financing. Rather than looking for investment capital for things that we've already deemed necessary, what is ultimately done is what there's investment capital for for...it's not that private partnerships are all bad, it's that we start with the assumption that private is going to be good.
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| ARRA logo hitechanswers.net |
JDF: A lot of the [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA] monies went to uses that did benefit our cities and suburban areas. A lot of money for infrastructure came from there. You had a whole set of green technology money attached that was disproportionately going to metro areas. You had a range of interventions around transportation.
Part of what it was able to do was mitigate the brutal fiscal crisis so many municipalities faced in 2009...All that probably deserves more recognition than it has gotten.
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| AFFH naacpldf.org |
JDF: There was real meaningful progress in the fair housing space, aided by the Supreme Court's 2015 decision limiting "disparate impact"...Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing efforts of the U.S. Department of Urban Development (HUD) have been meaningful and useful...
The efforts around [Transit Oriented Development (TOD)] and regional were both really welcome. And there was a great deal of interagency collaboration...From the point of view of environmentally sustainable meters, those were real strides...
We also have over 20 million new people with health insurance...It's hard to overstate the significant of having tons of working-class people get health insurance. We had a Department of Labor that actively pursued issues of overtime, wage theft, and not paying minimum wage, and much of that had an effect on people living in our urban areas...
Homelessness is another one...nation-wide, the numbers have come down significantly. That was a very conscious policy intervention, and I believe it will be a more durable legacy of the the Obama administration...
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| Chinese storefronts Flushing, Queens, New York queens museum.org |
JDF: I often think that most durable and transformative of the Great Societies legislation from 1964 to 1968, when it comes to urban issues, was the Hart-Celler Act of 1965...It's very difficult for me to look at the trajectory of American cities and not see immigration as a central driving narrative. Immigrants are the ones that drove population growth in the urban areas in the latter part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, and it was their kids and grandkids that were moving to the 'burbs...
...The Obama administration went with health care instead of immigration reform. that does seem like a significant missed opportunity...
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| HUD Secretary-designate Ben Carson biography.com |
JDF: With Ben Carson, you have a HUD secretary who doesn't really know or care about housing and urban issues...
What we'll get is vouchering out the project-based stock, time-limiting vouchers, and doing for housing assistance what was done for welfare in 1996 in the Welfare Reform Act. In terms of the more specific policy initiatives from the Obama administration, the little pilot stuff: those will go away...Some of the fair housing stuff is almost certainly going to be rolled back. And whether or not HUD will be enforcing the affirmatively furthering housing? It seems unlikely.
On the other hand, it's really important to say that people who want more progressive, more equitable, and more just cities have to use this moment to argue for something more and different from what we've been getting from the Feds for a long time, because that hasn't been good enough. We have to construct a policy agenda that is more forward-looking, that's more than just about defending legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society programs.
I find myself now in a very frustrating position of having to defend policies that I'm uninspired by. I don't want to defend the status quo, because it's a status quo that I seen want in very ways, but the attack on the status quo is coming from places that are far worse.
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