The Atlantic Cities:

“Does Having Lots of Local Governments Help or Hurt Economic Development?

Richard Florida. May 6, 2013

Americans are far more likely to like their local government than that at the state or federal level, a recent Pew Research Center report finds. But can some places have too many local governments?

Urban planners and good government types have long been concerned with what they see as the growth and proliferation of local agencies across counties and metro areas. They even coined a word for it — “political fragmentation” — which they argue generates duplication and inefficiency in the delivery of local services. The ultimate consequences include higher tax burdens, increased fiscal stress on local governments, and reduced levels of economic growth.

Some advocate consolidating government agencies across cities, counties, and metro areas — a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “metropolitan government.” Metro government has already been instituted in a number of metro areas including Indianapolis, Nashville, Kansas City, Louisville, and Jacksonville. Calls for government consolidation have only risen in light of the increasing budget woes and fiscal stress that have followed the economic crisis.”

Photo: jabiru/Shutterstock

GOOD: 

Social Designers: Why Our Own Neighborhoods Need Us as Much as Sub-Saharan Africa

Julie Kim. April 8, 2013

There are three ways of doing good work in the world that I think we need to consider in closer relationship to one another: humanitarianism, design, and local activism. Right now, we’re seeing a lot of emerging models for applying our expertise abroad, especially in the developing world. Culturally, there’s a certain cache and starpower we attach to global humanitarian work.

But let me ask a question: Is there the same level of commitment to and investment in our local communities? Are we as aware of the need in our own back alleys? And maybe the hardest question: Do we care as much about these local issues? Do we care as much about these people?

I’ve lived in San Francisco for almost 15 years now and so it’s the place and the community I know best. But the opportunity for local design activism is everywhere. Because human need is everywhere.

It’s the sad truth, but also the huge opportunity for us to step in as designers.

Need, and the concept of who is needy, is very tricky to define. By certain definitions, nobody in America needs a thing. The thinking goes: there are always people in the world who are worse off. I think that’s a dangerous mentality to fall into. We see human need as existing not here at home, but somewhere else, far away, over there.”

Photo: Shutterstock

The Atlantic Cities: 

“For Cleveland, Climate Change Could Mean Tons of Toxic Algae.

John Metcalfe. April 4, 2013

That’s toxic cyanobacteria swirling in the lake waters north of Cleveland. At the time, this slippery stuff covered nearly one-fifth of Erie’s surface, becoming the biggest bloom in the lake’s recorded history. It looked and smelled awful, turned fishing into a hook-detangling nightmare and killed untold numbers of marine creatures by hypoxia.

Worse, the algae’s loaded with foul substances harmful to the heart, blood and skin of many creatures. A dog that ingests one byproduct called microcystin can curl up and die within hours. (In humans it can cause flu-like symptoms, just in case you’re about to eat a bowlful.) The algae might also cause fish to change sexes.

The monstrous algae invasion represented a biological throwback to the 1960s, when tons of phosphorus in the Great Lakes seeping from agriculture, sewage systems and industry summoned up bloated algal titans of an immensity never before seen. These blooms disappeared for the most part after the ’70s thanks to the U.S. and Canada enacting the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. But it appears we’re mired once again in the days of floating slime, with algae levels creeping up since the ’90s.”

Image: NASA

Citytank:

Driven into Poverty: Walkable urbanism and the suburbanization of poverty

David Moser pens a compelling essay that examines the ways in which sprawling auto-dependent land use patterns exacerbate poverty. As more low-income individuals and families are pushed to the suburbs, “this problem is gaining urgency.”

David Moser. March 8, 2013

American suburbs are a particularly bad place to be poor. Though poverty poses dire and unjust challenges no matter where it exists, sprawling and auto-dependent land use patterns can exacerbate these difficulties. And this problem is gaining urgency, as more and more of America’s low-income individuals now live in suburbs (or are being pushed there), a phenomenon the Brookings Institute has called “the suburbanization of poverty”.

There are many reasons suburbs make the experience of poverty worse, but first among them is that automobiles are really expensive. Purchasing, maintaining, repairing, insuring, and fueling a car can easily consume 50% or more of a limited income. For someone struggling to work themselves out of poverty, these expenses can wreck havoc on even the most diligent efforts to maintain a monthly budget. With gas now approaching or exceeding $4.00/gallon, a full day’s work at minimum wage sometimes won’t pay for a single tank of gas. The burdens of sprawl weigh heaviest on the poor.”

Switchboard:

“Are Main Streets a thing of the past? Is that OK?

Kaid Benfield. February 4, 2013.

As someone whose job is to promote sustainability in our communities, I sometimes think the traditional American Main Street is a terrific model worth preserving and emulating.  It meets so many of the basic aspirations of smart growth:  it’s walkable, compact, centrally located, with many types of shops and services integrated together, usually with places to live on upper floors or in houses a short walk away.  It has a human scale, neither skyscrapers nor sprawl but something in between.  Does the past point the way to a more sustainable future?  Some smart observers strongly believe so.

But, when it comes to “Main Street,” the definition can get a little fuzzy.  The Cambridge Dictionary of Essential American English is as good a place as any to start:  Main Street is “the main road in the middle of a town where there are stores and other businesses.”  The Oxford English Dictionary cites usages going back as far as 1598.  When those of us in the field of placemaking use the phrase, we’re generally thinking of the kind of shopping districts that used to serve smaller towns and cities.  Frequently the shops and services were aligned adjacent or close to each other along the most prominent street in town, which many places literally called Main Street.”

Photo: Broadway Street, Cottonfalls Way, KS. Sandy Sorlien 

The Atlantic Cities: 

In Search of ‘Eldertopia’

Lisa Selin Davis. Jan 31, 2013

Some 54 million Americans over the age of 55 are hoping to grow old in their own homes, and that population should increase by 50 percent over the next 30 years. Their hope is no easy thing to realize, because most American housing stock wasn’t built grow (or shrink) with us as our needs evolve.

But cutting edge strategies for aging-in-place are coming from an unlikely source: the university classroom.

“We have a responsibility to train the next generation of architects to think about accessibility and housing flexibility,” says Georgeen Theodore, associate professor and director of the Infrastructure Planning Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “It shouldn’t just be a niche market for older adults, but part of the larger project of housing.”

Theodore’s students interviewed senior citizens to understand their needs at different stages of life, then considered the full spectrum of issues related to aging in place: connectivity, transit, density and social interaction among them. Incorporating these notions, her students dreamed up housing types and communities that could shift with the needs of the inhabitants.”

Photo: Katie Chu

The Atlantic Cities: 

“Defending Youngstown: One City’s Struggle to Shrink and Flourish

Daniel Denvir. Jan 31, 2013.

Progress is measured by the bulldozer’s pace in Youngstown. The hobbled Ohio steel giant has lost more than 100,000 residents since the 1950s and has been racing to tear down the now dilapidated homes jobless workers left behind.

The city has demolished at least 2,566 structures since January 2006 and is constantly seeking new funds—from the stimulus, from the multi-billion dollar state attorneys general settlement with misbehaving mortgage servicers, and now, perhaps, from leasing the city’s land for natural gas drilling, or fracking—to knock down more. Many homes, however, fall to arson first. It is a way to cash in on insurance, or for scrappers to steal copper wiring and plumbing. Or, sometimes, it’s just the pyromaniac ennui born of unemployment and nihilism.

“We have guys,” says local activist Phil Kidd, my guide through the city’s pockmarked streets, “who are caught and say, ‘I like watching houses burn; I like the lawlessness of it. I wanted to see how long I could get away with it.”

Firefighters have even suggested that neighbors might set some ablaze, eager to see a long-decaying vacant structure prioritized for demolition. Arsonists torched 158 houses in 2005 alone.

Transforming this decaying tableau was at the heart of an ambitious plan called Youngstown 2010, implemented in 2005, set to retrofit a city built for more than 200,000 for the much smaller city of today. In a sober inversion of traditional civic boosterism, city leaders and community organizers set their sights on small.

Kidd imagines a more ecologically in-tune metropolis, a “rurban” post-industrial city interspersing large-scale urban farms and forest amid neighborhoods targeted for density. Knocking down the blight must come first.”

Photo: Sean Posey

The Wall Street Journal: 

“Crime Migrates to Suburbs

As Homicides Fall Sharply in Cities, They Are Rising in Surrounding Communities

By Cameron McWhirter and Gary Fields

RIVERDALE, Ga.—Friends of African immigrant Demba Balde worried about his safety when he opened his Metropolitan Food Mart in southwest Atlanta. The two-room store, which sold beer, candy, cigarettes and other items, was in the middle of one of the city’s most violent areas.

But the 49-year-old native of Guinea-Bissau ran his shop without major incident for years. Every night after closing, he drove to his modest home on a quiet street in this unincorporated area of Clayton County, about 15 miles south of Atlanta.

He was home unloading groceries from his van late one night in September when neighbors heard loud bangs. One woman in a nearby house heard a man scream either “No!” or “Ow!”

Police found Mr. Balde across the street in a neighbor’s driveway, dead with two bullet holes in his chest. So far, they say, they have no leads in the killing.

The decline in homicides nationally has overshadowed a countertrend: rising murders in the suburbs, the communities that ring cities and have long been promoted as havens from violent crime. U.S. homicides fell sharply from 2001 to 2010, including a 16.7% drop in big cities, according to a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics study of the most recent, reported data. That is because of a host of factors, including better medical treatment for victims of violent injury and aggressive police measures in megacities like New York and Los Angeles.”

Photo: The Metropolitan Food Mart in Atlanta, which was owned by Demba Balde, an immigrant killed at his suburban Clayton County, Ga., home. Mike Belleme for The Wall Street Journal

“The Atlantic Cities: 

Gun Violence Is an Everywhere Issue

Richard Florida. Dec 15, 2012

All too often gun violence in America is posed as an urban problem. True, large urban centers have the highest rates of murders by gun. But our suburbs, small towns and rural areas are far from immune to the tragic consequences of guns, as the mass murder of children in Newtown, Connecticut, shows, not to mention the killing spree in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater this past summer, or the gunning down of Gabby Giffords and others during a political event in Tucson, Arizona, or 1999’s mass shooting at Columbine High School.

With the help of Atlantic Cities’ fellow Sara Johnson, I examined several lists of the locations of recent mass shootings in America. While the data do not cover every mass shooting and have limited geographic information, our accounting clearly shows that the wide majority of mass killings and especially mass school killings have occurred not in the urban centers of large cities, but in the small towns, burgs and villages of our suburban and rural areas.

By our accounting, more than 80 percent of America’s 21 worst mass killings identified by theHartford Courant took place in suburban towns or rural areas, including each and every one of what the paper identifies as the five “worst school massacres in U.S. history.” More than two-thirds of the 61 mass shootings that occurred between 1982 and 2012 according to a list and map compiled this year by Mother Jones can also be traced to a suburban or rural location.”

Photo: Reuters

The New York Times: 

As Coasts Rebuild and U.S. Pays, Repeatedly, the Critics Ask Why

DAUPHIN ISLAND, Ala. — Even in the off season, the pastel beach houses lining a skinny strip of sand here are a testament to the good life.

They are also a monument to the generosity of the federal government.

The western end of this Gulf Coast island has proved to be one of the most hazardous places in the country for waterfront property. Since 1979, nearly a dozen hurricanes and large storms have rolled in and knocked down houses, chewed up sewers and water pipes and hurled sand onto the roads.

Yet time and again, checks from Washington have allowed the town to put itself back together.

Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas. If history is any guide, a large fraction of the federal money allotted to New York, New Jersey and other states recovering from Hurricane Sandy — an amount that could exceed $30 billion — will be used the same way.

Tax money will go toward putting things back as they were, essentially duplicating the vulnerability that existed before the hurricane.

“We’re Americans, damn it,” said Robert S. Young, a North Carolina geologist who has studied the way communities like Dauphin Island respond to storms. “Retreat is a dirty word.”

Photo: Jeff Haller for The New York Times