5.16.12 |

Richard Florida, known for his book on “The Rise of the Creative Class,” cautions against placing all our eggs in the manufacturing basket. He’s argued for years that it’s jobs in the knowledge and information sectors that will be the key driver of metropolitan economic growth in future years.

Florida is also an editor at Atlantic Cities, where he has a new series of videos about grassroots development efforts going on in Detroit, which has been the classic example of how the loss of manufacturing has decimated a local economy.

“How did the economic crisis impact Detroit?” Florida asks in the first of the five-part video series on “Detroit Rising.”  “The economic crisis flattened Detroit and the metro area. The rate of unemployment for the region surged by 15 or 20 percent. Obviously the city had been so dependent on automotive manufacturing and that industry and the manufacturing industry have been impacted,…over the past half century.   Detroit faced terrible trauma, – huge numbers of foreclosures, businesses shutting down, construction grinding to a halt.”

In a recent article, Florida blames the high concentration of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest for the slowdown in economic growth, citing research by William Testa and Norman Wang from the Chicago Fed showing metros with a higher share of manufacturing employment in 1969 experienced a significantly slower rate of employment growth in the years since.

He concludes that all this focus on reviving manufacturing jobs in the American Midwest may be a big mistake. Instead, metros should be leveraging their universities and human capital – to promote growth in knowledge sector jobs.

But BRR Network Member Howard Wial and his colleagues at the Brookings Institution say not so fast.  Wial had a thoughtful Op-Ed published in The New Republic last week in which he argues that manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors should be complements to each other, not rivals. Adding some needed nuance to Florida’s contention that too much manufacturing is a drag on an economy, Wial writes:

Heavy losses of manufacturing jobs were associated not only with slow overall job growth but also with slow growth in the high-wage advanced service jobs (jobs in the professional service, financial, and information industries), where much of Florida’s “creative class” works (See chart).

Looked at this way, the data show that manufacturing and non-manufacturing jobs, and manufacturing and advanced service jobs, are complements, not rivals.

In effect, when manufacturing tumbles, so too do creative class jobs. The reason: manufacturing is an export industry that brings in income from outside the metro area. In addition, manufacturing sparks innovation. It employs a lot of engineers and attracts R&D funds. The spillover can be sizable. Employees might strike out on their own and start up their own shop making a medical product they figured out how to make or improve on while tinkering with a problem on the shop floor.

Wial says growth of non-manufacturing jobs in a city can also make it easier for that metro to keep manufacturing jobs, especially among manufacturers of new and high-tech products, because firms often need to produce near R&D facilities and engineering firms. A skilled labor force and good highway access may also be good for both kinds of jobs.

“The bottom line,” Wial writes, “is that the retention and growth of manufacturing employment go hand-in-hand with the growth of non-manufacturing employment, including advanced service employment. Policies to strengthen manufacturing in the Midwest’s metropolitan areas will strengthen the rest of those areas’ economies, and vice versa.”

Wial has a new report examining the state of U.S. manufacturing in nature and location, Co-authored with Susan Helper and Timothy Krueger, the report looks at how American manufacturing has been geographically differentiated and how manufacturers can benefit from factors related to location.

Bruce Katz has more on what cities can do to recharge the US manufacturing sector in another op-ed co-authored with former longtime Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Katz and Daley say we need to look no further than local metros to understand how to revive American manufacturing.

“U.S. cities and metropolitan areas still possess significant manufacturing capability and, by extension, innovation capacity,” they write. “A rich industrial heritage has endowed American cities and metros with the companies, skilled workers, educational and advanced research institutions, and production strength essential for moving toward a new economic vision.”

They point to things local governments can do to help revive this sector  — like providing skilled workers through partnerships with local community colleges, for example, and helping to provide firms with a safe, stable place to do business. They include powerful examples like the case of Pelican Products, a firm that produces “high-performance protective cases and portable lighting equipment” sold all over the world. Authors say Pelican chose to remain in Torrence, Calif., because of the skilled workforce and strong flexible supply chain. And in Chicago they point to the city’s work in creating industrial districts – through tax increases, rezoning, and investing in infrastructure and improved freight transport.

For more on recent work in this area see Barbara’s blog post about manufacturing and regional economic development.

Photo by School of Natural Resources

Just Growth: Inclusion and Prosperity in America’s Metropolitan Regions

By Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor (Routledge, 2012). The book’s website offers ordering information and case studies.

This book argues for “just” economic growth, tying equity and economic progress together. Using analysis of 192 metro regions as well as seven in-depth case studies, the authors show why equity and economic growth must go hand in hand, and how metro regions can promote both.

As we all know all too well during this harsh recession, renewed economic growth is critical to not only our livelihoods but our well-being. Far too many are lying in bed awake at night wondering how on earth they are going to survive being evicted from their own home or whether they will have to pack up the boxes and move from their home state after 55 years. We need job growth.

But, as the authors argue (Pastor is an economist by training and Benner is a professor of human and community development), job growth alone is not enough. We have ample examples, they write in “Just Growth: Inclusion and Prosperity in America’s Metropolitan Regions,” of regional and metropolitan economies that were meccas of rapid growth, but also rapid polarization and inequality. We need more than just growth. We need “just” growth.

Achieving this, they argue, will require a stretch from both business leaders in the region, who have long been more concerned about growth than equity, and it will require a stretch from those who have long fought for economic justice yet “have not always thought about how best to promote the economic part of that couplet.”

Before the economists in the audience dismiss this prospect of both justice and growth, there’s a strong research base in recent years that have shown that equity and growth complement one another. At its most basic, instability and poverty, these studies find, can lead to social tension and political instability, which in turn can lead to lower investment, higher uncertainty, and thus lower growth. As a recent Federal Reserve Board report finds, a skilled workforce, high levels of racial inclusion, and progress on income equality “correlate strongly and positively with economic growth.”

Part of the reason for this connection between equity and growth, others have found, lies in the kind of global economy we live in today. Skills matter, but so does the quality of life in a metro area to retaining that talent. Social tension, inequity, and blight are parts of that quality of life.  Benner and Pastor add to this the idea that:

[G]rowth may have something to do with the ways in which less equal areas underinvest in basic education, the impact of social tensions on economic decision making, the erosion of the “social capital” that can tie a region together, and perhaps the effects on health problems and hence worker efficiency.

Therefore, to get at the “how” and “why” equity matters to economic growth, they look at 192 metropolitan regions in the country, using quantitative methods to find which regions have performed better and worse than the median and the economic determinants behind their performance. They then drill down with a series of case studies in seven metro regions, spending time on the ground in discussions and interviews with key players, finding out why they performed as they had. Their case studies are in Kansas City, Jacksonville, Nashville, Columbus, Sacramento, Denver, and Cleveland.

In short, they find the following:

• Strong levels of unionization in the region has a dragging effect on equity.
• A strong public sector has a stabilizing effect.
• Less concentrated poverty has a positive effect on growth and equity.
• A large immigrant population enhances growth but reduces equity.
• An influential middle class of blacks and Latinos spurs equity and growth.
• A regional economy of high-tech economies produces more growth than equity.
• An economy with significant construction employment is associated with both growth and equity.
•  Small firms tend to contribute to growth but not equity.
• A set of likeminded networks of professionals who can work toward consensus matters most.

The last bullet–and one of the most important — they call an epistemic community, or a shared sense of what you know and who you know it with.

A diverse epistemic community …is hardly a bumper sticker slogan–”no justice, no peace” has a more fighting ring and romantic tone than “let’s share the same facts”–but conscious efforts to develop a shared understanding of the region amongst diverse constituencies seems to make a difference for blending the imperatives of equity and growth. …The members of an epistemic community have similar normative values, and draw similar interpretations and make similar policy conclusions when presented with given situations…When such collective knowledge includes not just the “usual suspects” of urban growth coalitions but a broader constellation of community interests and perspectives, it seems to make a difference in regional trajectories.

The key here, they say, is that there must be a role or some process that helped bring a broad group of people to the table (and keep them there) to develop shared perspectives and understanding.

Their three main conclusions to making growth and equity happen are:

• To achieve equity, create ties that bind through a shared sense of regional destiny or other forms of solidarity
• To achieve sustained growth, create a responsive and stable employment base that can adjust to broad market changes and is cushioned by a stabilizing public sector
• To achieve both, regions need leadership that can be sustained through a shared understanding of the region’s problems and possibilities.

Ultimately, the authors argue, we have to arrive at a shared understanding that we’re all in this together, and that what works for some, must ultimately work for everyone. The book shows how to do it.

On a personal note, as a reader and writer, I have to say, the book is a joy to read. A book on regional economic development is usually on the nightstands of the wonkier among us–and usually is larded with ponderous, overly complicated prose. Not this one. The authors show how one can balance rigorous quantitative analysis with a light pen, and even a dry bit of humor. Well done.

Plus:

The authors have created a website with case study information and other resources, as well as a space to join in the conversation.

5.10.12 |

In two thoughtful posts at the Urban Institute’s MetroTrends blog, BRR Network member Rolf Pendall says that while it’s true state and local governments need more autonomy and flexibility in their development policies, there is still very much a need for federal housing oversight.

As a researcher who studies land use and affordable housing, Pendall should know. His work has been important is helping us understand how policies like zoning laws, and transportation planning affect community equity in areas such as affordable housing, ethnic and racial diversity, and the environment. [See our post on “How Equity in Transit Development Can Strengthen Regions,” for example.]

While speaking to supporters at a closed-door Florida fundraiser last month, Romney said, “I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them,” according to NBC News.

“Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later,” Romney continued. “But I’m not going to actually go through these one by one. What I can tell you is, we’ve got far too many bureaucrats. I will send a lot of what happens in Washington back to the states.”

“While I disagree with that position,” Pendall writes, “I agree that state and local governments ought to have more autonomy over their urban development programs and policies than they currently do.”

Pendall says that programs like the Community Development Block Grant, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit are successful because they give substantial leeway to state and local authorities to decide how best to use federal monies and the opportunity to debate the future of cities and neighborhoods along the way.

“This discretion allows slow-growing places to buy, renovate, and rehabilitate established housing,” Pendall writes, “and allows fast-growth locations to build new housing.”

In the future, he says successful metros will depend on this flexibility — the ability to deploy resources across domains and thereby get the most out of government investment . Local authorities can decide to support the development of infrastructure, for example, or fund programs in transportation, health, education or criminal justice  — all areas that overlap and often directly affect housing policy. He writes:

Most of our housing and homelessness policies and programs are still locked into particular purposes, with separate funding streams, offices, and even agencies (HUD, USDA, Treasury, the VA, and so on), not only reducing the reach of these programs but also often conflicting with state and local priorities. Local governments clearly want more flexibility even among their HUD programs, as shown by the wild popularity among housing agencies of the Moving to Work demonstration.

HUD’s Moving to Work project gives local public housing authorities the flexibility to design and test new strategies in employment and housing programs, granting flexibility and even exemptions from some current requirements in voucher programs, for example.  Similarly, we’ve written about HUD’s new Smart Cities, Smart Communities program that aims to help some struggling metro regions cut through federal red tape and better leverage federal dollars.

In a subsequent post Pendall argues that despite this need for flexibility, we still need federal housing and development oversight to guide and shape national policy. He says HUD needs to be involved in defining affordability, for example, to broker evolving standards for safety, quality, and energy efficiency in housing, and crucially, to ensure racial residential integration. He reminds that we need federal housing policy to enforce the goals of housing legislation which requires that “every American family should be able to afford a decent home in a suitable environment.” Let’s hope Mitt Romney is listening.

Read the full post sat MetroTrends. You can read more of Pendall’s work at the BRR Network.

Photo by Joe Wolf.

They find that crime in neighborhoods where many public housing residents have moved is not as high as projections would have it. The backdrop to these findings is a significant decline in crime city-wide in metros such as Atlanta and Chicago.  Susan Popkin, a scholar at the Urban Institute, told an audience in Chicago at an Institute for Policy Research (IPR) seminar that the findings point to the very positive effects of the tear-down, as far as crime goes.

While crime certainly did not spike in neighborhoods where public housing residents moved, Popkin and others noted, the moves were not always easy on families.  Young men in particular are more likely to be victimized in the new neighborhoods. In addition, the neighborhood’s “collective efficacy” is often challenged. The ability of neighbors to monitor kids, keep track of each other, among other things, changes with an influx of newcomers.

As Stefanie DeLuca, associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins reported, the housing vouchers that high-rise public housing families received after their buildings were torn down were in theory designed to help them find apartments in lower-poverty neighborhoods.  However, her interviews show that this is often not the case, for several reasons.

Families, she said, tend to look first for a higher-quality apartment rather than a lower-poverty neighborhood. The families are used to keeping their children indoors to protect them from the dangers outside, so a bigger apartment with better features is often more important than the neighborhood itself.  The families also tend to opt for lower-crime neighborhoods over lower-poverty neighborhoods.  Landlords also frequently don’t want to rent to the families, which limits their choices. And for many, moves are a reaction to something sudden: a fire, the ceiling caves in, or the two-flat is sold by the owner. There’s not a lot of time to think and plan, and many families just take the next best unit down the block.

To date, many of the families who received vouchers have tended to move to highly segregated neighborhoods. Two-thirds of African American voucher-holders in Chicago are living in neighborhoods where 90% of the residents are African American, according to DeLuca.

This continued segregation still matters for a number of reasons. Segregation exacerbates income inequalities and school differences, and child cognitive development is influenced by high-crime, high-poverty neighborhoods, Lincoln Quillian, professor of sociology at Northwestern, told the audience at the IPR seminar. Segregation cements systematic gaps in opportunity. It’s not important that someone live next to a white person, he said. Rather, the effects of segregation arise from the effects of concentrated poverty, poor schools, higher crime and other elements of the neighborhood.

Neighborhoods with higher levels of crime also carry a scar. Crime and victimization mark families and children in many ways. People who live in high-crime environments are more likely to witness a violent crime or know someone who has been victimized, which can profoundly shape one’s outlook on the world. Fear of crime can lead individuals to withdraw from their communities and live more sheltered and isolated lives. Finally, a growing number of studies are finding that exposure to crime, and especially violence, can heighten stress in children and lead to lower cognitive test scores and diminished performance in school.

High rates of incarceration in neighborhoods also removes large numbers of young adults—fathers, in particular—from the community, disrupting social networks, breaking up families, and weakening local institutions.

All of these factors point to the need for more services and supports of families before, and after, they move to new neighborhoods, the presenters each stressed. DeLuca pointed to the more positive results in Baltimore, where counseling and supports are more robust. There, families are moving to less segregated and lower-poverty neighborhoods than in other cities.

We’ll know more about what works and how families are faring as these and other scholars continue to track public housing residents. IPR scholar Dan Lewis, for example, will be interviewing and tracking the movements of residents in one of the last remaining large-scale public housing developments in Chicago. And DeLuca will continue her in-depth interviews with families who have moved as well. These interviews add insight to the numbers, and are invaluable to our continued understanding of how public policy affects urban resident’s lives and shape metro areas more broadly.

photo credit: David Schalliol 

5.2.12 |

We’ve written before about the challenges of regional governance. Because of our fragmented governmental bodies, municipalities, public utilities, school districts, public transit systems, for example, all have difficulty when they need to work across their own jurisdictional boundaries. The Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz has estimated that the United States has “19,492 units of general purpose municipal governments, 13,051 school districts, and 37,381 special authorities.”  Coordinating between these entities can be an administrative nightmare – with different public data systems and infrastructures, not to mention politics.

In a series of posts at the National Resources Defense Council’s Switchboard blog this week Kaid Benfield highlights these difficulties and points to a few exciting solutions. Benfield says that though regions may be one of the most effective drivers of economic growth and powerful scales for addressing environmental and social problems, without a regional governmental authority it can be very difficult to coordinate efforts.

In the Philadelphia-Camden region, for example, Benfield notes that it can take three separate tickets, from three separate transit entities, and over an hour, to go a mere five miles on public transportation. The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, he notes “comprises two states, nine counties, and a staggering 353 municipalities.  No wonder transit systems are fragmented as well.”

BRR network members Kathryn Foster and Bill Barnes are studying models of regional governance and how this impacts a region’s ability to bounce back from economic or other kind of shocks. They propose new ways of thinking about what it takes to solve problems at the regional level, emphasizing capacities and purposes for example, instead of just governance structures. They suggest examining what has made regional efforts succeed or fail in the past, for example, or how competition instead of cooperation between regions is hurting all of the parties involved.

Benfield says metropolitan planning organizations need more legal authority to act. In Portland, where Metro, is one of the nation’s only elected regional governments with this authority, the region has had success in their redevelopment efforts, containing sprawl, protecting the environment, and streamlining effective public transit. The authority even has it’s own app to support sustainable living. “Walk There!” provides information on walks throughout the region – with directions, maps, and audio recordings that highlighting interesting regional details.

Benfield sees promise in California’s new planning law, SB 375, that is designed to reduce pollution of greenhouse gases, with regional metropolitan planning organizations leading the implementation on issues of land use and transportation investment.

But it’s the examples of communities voluntarily collaborating to improve their neighborhoods that Benfield concludes with, that I find the most hopeful. In Silicon Valley, for example, 19 cities, counties, and local and regional agencies, public and private, are collaborating in the Grand Boulevard Initiative,  to redevelop the El Camino Real corridor, a 43-mile commercial stretch of road in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. The car-centric corridor includes many business that have not survived the recession and the groups are working together, voluntarily, to plan and revitalize the stretch and surrounding communities by introducing mixed-use development, bike lanes, and public outdoor spaces.

The neat part about this model is that the entities have agreed on guiding principles that set a framework for development, while leaving the choices about what the development looks like in each place up to the individual jurisdictions.

This kind of collaboration can be very difficult, Kathryn Foster says, and it’s often one of the key reasons regions fail so often to work together.

“Whether you are poor inner city or a struggling inner ring suburb or an affluent suburban community, you are probably not going to agree. Your interests, your resources, your policy goals are different,” she told me in a recent conversation. But she says jurisdictions don’t need to agree on everything in order to come together, as this Silicon Valley example shows.  “The only agreement you may need is that ‘we are all committed to be at this table to work together,’ but it doesn’t mean we have to get to yes all the time.”

Plus, Benfield spoke about some of these issues in March at a forum at the New America Foundation on Defining Resilience. See the panel on “Resilient Cities: Rethinking the Urban Landscape.”

Map by The Grand Boulevard Initiative.

The map at the left illustrates our cell phone calling patterns, detecting communities of callers within networks. Highly connected counties are grouped together by color. People in Missouri, for example, tend to call friends and family (and colleagues) in Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois. Equally fun is the maps for words we use or our sports allegiances.

The take-away message from these maps is that state lines miss a lot of regional connections.

My sister, who grew up northern Iowa, and my husband from Little Rock, reminisce about listening to KAAY (“The Mighty 1090″) AM radio station, beaming its high wattage music out of Little Rock late at night in the 1960s– an experience that joined them irrevocably as teenagers in a teen culture. But for the most part, they two were products of the regions they grew up in. Then along came technology, and the world got smaller, the borders and regions were erased, or so the story goes.

But yet, some things never change. As the maps show, we’re still very much wed to place, and those places are regions. The borders of the states mark political and administrative boundaries, but culturally and economically we’re more a country of regions. As the article notes:

New England is incontrovertibly a single region, connected by interaction, mobility, and culture. Similarly, certain states such as Texas and Kansas are their own distinctive regions.

On the other hand, New Jersey and California have a distinct bisection that divides them, though not always in the same way or place. For example, California is divided into Northern and Southern California, when we look at voice phone calls, but it’s divided into three sections, when we use digital text message records.

green is "soda"; black is "pop"; turquoise is “Coke”

Similarly for baseball fandoms. There’s Yankee Nation and Red Sox Nation, and likewise here in Chicago, there’s Cub’s territory butting up against Cardinals territory in St. Louis.

Perhaps the most recognizable regional division is with the word for soda/pop/Coke (see the map at the right). My husband, having lived in Chicago for decades, no longer calls everything “Coke” (although it was a slow habit to break), but my sister still says pop to this day. And they’re not alone.  Check out the maps–and figure out where your regional home is.

The boundaries we see in these various maps underscore the message that regions still define us, and state borders are only arbitrary lines when it comes to our patterns of living.

We also heard this week that net immigration to the United States from Mexico has come to a halt, according to a new report out this week from the Pew Hispanic Center.

The analysis found that between 2005 and 2010, 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the U.S. and about 1.4 million Mexican immigrants and their U.S. born children moved back to Mexico. These numbers are a marked change from a five year period a decade earlier when between 1995 and 2000 about 3 million Mexicans immigrated to the U.S. and just under 700,000 Mexicans and their U.S. born-children moved from the U.S. to Mexico.

The result is the first decrease in the population of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. from Mexico in several decades. In 2011, about 6.1 million Mexicans were living here illegally, down from a peak of nearly 7 million in 2007, findings show.

Authors Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera attribute the standstill to a combination of factors:  “a weakened U.S. job market, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, and changing economic and demographic conditions in Mexico.”

“We really haven’t seen anything like this in the last 30 or 40 years,” Passel, senior demographer at Pew told the New York Times.

Though experts are hesitant to call a definitive end to the largest wave of immigration in our history, advocates argue that current reform efforts, like the one in Arizona, that focus primarily on border control are misguided. Instead, they say we should focus on comprehensive immigration reform and helping the 11.5 million undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S.

In a discussion on this blog back in July, BRR Network Member Manuel Pastor told Barbara that experts agree on the basic components needed for reform: “legalization of most of the undocumented who are here, tighter controls and verification of immigration status for employment, and some new method for insuring that we have labor flows — of both skilled and lesser-skilled — in the future (so we don’t have the sort of suppressed demand that produced the current undocumented population).”

Pastor’s work examines how demographic shifts like rapid immigration are affecting us metros and regions. He continues:

But with federal legislation bottled up, localities have been trying to deal with this. Generally, it’s been municipalities and states, with some going in the direction of New Haven — which made ID cards available for residents regardless of immigration status — or Georgia — which recently passed legislation perhaps more restrictive than what Arizona passed. There are very few metropolitan efforts, although we have seen some of the major metro mayors call for reform and Chicago, Denver, and San Jose have a number of very interesting metrowide efforts.

Research led by USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration which Pastor directs, finds that there could be big economic benefits to the state of California, for example, by legalizing the state’s 1.8 million undocumented Latino immigrants – benefits that would occur from higher wages, tax payments, job creation, and consumer dollars spent locally.

“People keep using our economic condition as an excuse to not do comprehensive immigration reform,” Pastor said in the LA Times when the study was released. “It’s just the opposite: What we need to do to right our economy and move forward is create a path to legalization.”

Writing at The Center for American Progress, Daniel Wagener flagged the lower Mexican birthrates cited in the pew report as an important trend to watch in the coming years.  “Lower Mexican birthrates mean that in the future there will be fewer people available to immigrate, likely making the current reduction permanent. A typical Mexican woman was expected to have more than seven children in 1960, but by 2009 that number dropped to just more than two. This will greatly decrease the number of young workers seeking to come to the United States.”

Photo by Mary Anne Enriquez

The first, Housing an Aging Population: Are We Prepared? by the Center for Housing Policy considers the ramifications of an aging society. The second, Public Housing Transformation and Crime, by the Urban Institute, looks at the effects on crime of relocating residents from a failed housing experiment: public high-rise housing.

By 2030, the number of elderly is expected to double, according to government predictions. Some scholars think those numbers are too low. Either way, the nation will experience a shift in its housing needs, ranging from a need for more accessible housing to more affordable housing.  As the report notes:

Older adults are more likely than younger adults to spend more than half their income on housing. Cost burdens also increase with age. One in four households 85+ pay at least half their income for housing, …The incomes of older adults tend to decline with age … But property taxes, maintenance, and utility costs all tend to rise over time for both older homeowners and renters (as reflected in higher rents). Accumulated savings and home equity can help, but levels of net worth vary dramatically among older adults, and are particularly low among racial and ethnic minorities.

The report offers several policy suggestions for meeting this shifting demand, including assistance with home modification using a range of funding sources; connecting residents to social services through expansion of the Home and Community-Based Services Medicaid waiver program, PACE, and volunteer efforts, and expanding housing vouchers and property tax abatement programs to ease costs. Perhaps one of the most important to keep elderly connected and active is to expand public transit and create volunteer driver programs to help residents get around without driving.

Metro policies also come into play. As the report notes, by adopting more flexible zoning policies, communities can help foster a diverse range of housing types including accessory dwelling units (i.e., granny flats), high-density rental developments, assisted living residences, continuing care retirement communities, and congregate housing.

The report also recommends experimenting with more communal housing that promote “active neighboring” and/or allow professional caregivers to live among residents. (Policymakers would do well to work closely with demographers and public health officials, many of whom are projecting less disability among the elderly and longer, healthier lives.)

Although not in the report, an article several months ago offered a possible model for cohousing: micro-lofts. Such lofts are about 150 square feet with 14-foot ceilings and a mini-kitchen. They’re clustered around larger communal space with a garden or a big living room. (Think dorms for adults–or more glamorously, hotel living).

I can imagine this kind of communal living for Boomers who want to remain in cities, stay connected to friends, and avoid becoming isolated in later years. Micro-lofts also seem particularly good fit for the rising number of singles today. Women are particularly likely to be living alone in their older years.

The second report reminds us just how importance it is to plan smartly. As the failed urban planning experiment of high-rise public housing comes to end in major cities, a new report, Public Housing Transformation and Crime, looks at the impact on crime rates of relocating former high-rise residents to new neighborhoods in two cities, Chicago and Atlanta. The goal of tearing down high-rise public housing and relocating residents is to de-concentrate poverty and allow families to rebuild more positive social networks and ties. However, many neighborhoods–often already vulnerable– worried that crime would spike as these families moved in.

The Urban Institute report finds some support for this, although not as dramatic as many claimed:

Many neighborhoods to which public housing families relocated experienced no adverse effect on neighborhood crime, …. But in neighborhoods where relocated households were more concentrated, …crime did not fall at the expected rate.

Researchers estimated that tearing down Chicago’s public housing and relocating residents with vouchers was associated with a 1 percent decrease in violent crimes citywide between 2000 and 2008 (and a 4.4 percent drop in gun crimes). Declines were similar in Atlanta.

Crimes in the neighborhoods where residents tended to relocate were 2-5% higher than estimates would predict, however.  Although, as the study notes, this is not the huge spike that many expected. The researchers estimated crime rates in neighborhoods based on larger trends in the metro area.

Again underscoring the fact concentrating poverty is never a good idea, those neighborhoods with a higher density (per 1,000 people) of former public housing residents had higher crime rates than lower-density neighborhoods.  A higher-density neighborhood with 6 to 14 relocated households per 1,000 households, on average, had a violent crime rate 11 percent higher in Atlanta and 13 percent higher in Chicago than it would have had with no relocated households.

The report underscores the importance of providing support to families relocating. The large-scale Moving to Opportunity experiment came to similar conclusions. MTO gave public housing residents vouchers to move to new neighborhoods as well, and counseling and supports were critical to their success. As the Urban Institute report concludes

A crucial policy implication from this research is the need for responsible relocation strategies—like those now employed in both Chicago and Atlanta—that offer former residents a real choice of housing and neighborhoods, and provide long-term support to them once they leave public housing. Other housing authorities planning large-scale redevelopment should learn from the experiences of these two cities about how to support former residents in moving to a wider range of communities and not creating new concentrations of poverty in other vulnerable communities.

photo credit: Rodrigo Peredo for the New York Times

The first project of the trust, according to a City Hall press release, will work with debt and equity investors to finance $200-225 million to retrofit municipal buildings for more energy efficiency–reducing consumption by 20% according to estimates. Another proposed project is a 10-route Bus Rapid Transit network in the city. Buses would travel on dedicated lanes, have rapid boarding systems, and coordinated traffic lights.

Yet with the parking meter privatization fiasco still fresh in their minds, Chicago aldermen told Emanuel to “slow down” earlier in the week during hearings, so the vote isn’t a done deal yet. They also chafed at the lack of say they would have in the eventual projects. A five-member board would decide how the money is spent. Calling the trust an  ”Investigative Reporter Stimulus Act,” Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass further mocked the urgency that Emanuel insists on in passing the initiative.

Others, however, have gotten behind the trust as an innovative way to build a regional powerhouse with Chicago at the center.

First and foremost are the investors– among them Citibank,  Citi Infrastructure Investors, Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets Inc., J.P. Morgan Asset Management Infrastructure Investment Group, and Ullico. They will earn back their investment in various ways–although just how, and how much, remains unclear.

World-class infrastructure is indeed important to any metro area. The transportation and logistics sector in the Chicago region is seriously threatened by congestion and aging infrastructure. And the build-out and repair is an enormous undertaking. As Metropolitan Policy Council’s president Mary Sue Barrett said, “Expecting sectors to ‘go it alone’ in … solving its infrastructure challenges is short-sighted.”

Addressing infrastructure could also complement a more regional approach to planning in the metro area. The infrastructure trust was unveiled a day after Emanuel presented his Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs, which identifies 10 “mutually reinforcing” strategies for growth. One of its first goals listed is to increase gross regional product.

Take transportation. Where is the tri-state region’s master plan for a comprehensive, integrated plan for road, rail and air travel? Where are inter-county bus services? Express rail to and from airports? Holistic regional planning for air service and serious road congestion mitigation plans that cross jurisdictional boundaries?

The OECD report also pointed to inter-regional rivalries and the lack of cooperation as damaging the area’s prospects. The OECD, Worthington notes, does not suggest creating yet another regional body to add to the numerous transportation boards and metropolitan planning boards in addition to too-numerous-to-count  county, municipal and state governments. Instead let the MPOs lead an effort to “collaborate on land use, water, and transportation issues, going across state lines to do so.”

Whatever the outcome of the City Hall vote today, it seems that a regional perspective is at least beginning to be taken seriously.