Online Documents :::
From time to time, we find helpful articles and reports on the Internet that others should know about. Here are a few documents you can download that we think civic leaders might find helpful.
The Urban Turnaround: A Decade-By-Decade Report Card on Postwar Population Change in Older Industrial Cities, Fannie Mae Foundation, April 2001. How good were the 1990s for America's cities, particularly the older ones that have suffered so much population loss since World War II? They were simply the best, says a study by the Fannie Mae Foundation. Researchers compared population trends during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in 36 cities that, at some point in those years, lost considerable population. The decades affected cities differently — Denver's and New Orleans' worst years were the 1980s; Boston's were the 1950s — but for most cities the 1970s were the worst. In the 1990s, by comparison, 15 of the cities increased population and the rest lost people at a much reduced rates. In grading the decades, Fannie Mae Foundation gave the 1990s a "B," the 1950s and 1980s a "C+," the 1960s a "C," and the 1970s an "F." http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/news/UrbanTurnaround.pdf
U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000, by Jordan Rappaport, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, July 2003. Did America's cities turn the growth corner in the 1990s? A few did – that is, they went from declining in population to growing again – but it was a very few, says Rappaport, an economist at the Kansas City Fed. For the most part, he says, cities that grew before the 1990s kept growing and those that were declining continued their slides. The reason: Population trends are bigger than individual cities, so a city like Cleveland that's in a slow-growing part of the country has a near-impossible task bucking the trends. This is an excellent analysis of the population forces that shape American cities. http://www.kc.frb.org/publicat/econrev/PDF/3q03rapp.pdf
Reinventing the City, The Brookings Review, Summer 2000. The Brookings Review is the quarterly magazine of the Brookings Institute, and this issue is devoted entirely to articles about the future of cities. Particularly good: Edward Glaeser’s article on the role of density in cities of the future and Paul Hill’s article on education reform in cities. http://www.brookings.edu/index/press/brookingsreview.htm?issuevolnum=18:3
Best Places for Businesses and Careers, Forbes magazine, June 2003. Ranking cities was a growth industry a few years back (when Fortune, Inc. and Money magazines advised readers about good places to live or do business). Forbes was late to the game but did it best by teaming up with the Milken Institute, a California think tank that's focused on cities and technology. Forbes' approach involves looking at job and income growth, as well as technology growth that may indicate future growth. Recently, it has added the cost of doing business as an important factor in its rankings. Nice touch: The web page is fully interactive, so you can look up your city, sort the growth leaders, examine how cities in your state are doing and view the data in a number of other ways. http://www.forbes.com/2003/05/07/bestland.html
Grading the Cities, Governing magazine, February 2000. Want to compare your city with other big cities around the country? Governing magazine, which reports about state and local governments, teamed up with the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, to compare the objective performance of 35 big cities, from fiscal management to human resources management, information technology to capital management. http://www.governing.com/gpp/gp0intro.htm
Metropolitan New Economy Index, by Robert D. Atkinson and Paul D. Gottlieb, Progressive Policy Institute, April 2001. Which of America's metro areas are doing the best jobs of adapting themselves to the "New Economy" of technology and knowledge work? No one will be shocked by the findings of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank closely linked with centrist Democrats. The best metro areas for the New Economy are San Francisco; Austin, Texas; Seattle; Raleigh-Durham; and San Diego. The worst are small metro areas: Greensboro, N.C.; Louisville, Ky.; Memphis, Tenn.; Jacksonville, Fla.; San Antonio, Texas; and Grand Rapids, Mich. The study measured the strength and dynamism of the local economy, including the percentage of workers in knowledge jobs, the global connections of the area, the amount of broadband infrastructure and the number of new businesses. http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=107&subsecID=294&contentID=3269
A Window on the New Economy, by Michael Porter and Anne Habiby, Inc., May 1999. This is a brief article by Harvard business professor Porter on how America's inner cities might become advantageous places for businesses to locate. It's part of a package of articles by Inc. magazine on the inner city as a competitive workplace. http://www.inc.com/incmagazine/archives/05990491.html
The Sector Solution: Building a Broader Base for a New Economy, a report of the Center for an Urban Future, January 2000. This is an argument for changing New York's piecemeal approach to economic development, but it compares New York with other states' programs. This is a good overview of the latest thinking in economic development. http://www.citylimits.org/cuf/econdev/sector2.htm For other articles about New York's economic development practices, see http://www.citylimits.org/cuf/econdev.htm
Business Location Decision-Making and the Cities: Bringing Companies Back, by Natalie Cohen, Brookings Institute, April 2000. What causes companies to locate where they do in metropolitan areas and what can be done to get them back in the inner city? These are the questions Cohen addresses in a study for the Brookings Institute's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. The answer to the first question is complicated, everything from transportation and telecommunications access to availability of large tracts and cost. The second is fairly straightforward: Improve education, speed up permitting, recycle "brownfields" (sites that have been polluted), and market the inner city. http://www.brook.edu/es/urban/cohen.pdf
Location Trends of Large Company Headquarters During the 1990s, by Thomas Klier and William Testa, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, spring 2002. Perhaps the greatest economic development prize of the 21st century will be major corporate headquarters. Witness, for example, the battle a while back among Chicago, Dallas and Denver for Boeing's HQ. But who's actually winning the war for headquarters? According to Klier and Testa, big cities are still the favored places for major companies (those employing 2,500 or more) to locate top executives. The top 50 metro areas ended the 1990s with the same share of big corporate HQs as they started, 87 percent. But there was movement within the top 50. The top five metro areas (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and San Francisco) lost ground and smaller metro areas (particularly Houston, Atlanta, Miami and Nashville, Tenn.) gained ground. Other interesting finding: a lot of "churn" among corporate HQs. That is, there's more moving around and merging than you might think. And small companies can become big ones quicker than you might think. One implication, say the authors, is that "policies to assist the growth of local indigenous firms of smaller size may be more beneficial than policies aimed at recruitment of footloose companies. http://www.chicagofed.org/publications/economicperspectives/2002/2qepart2.pdf
The Economic Costs of Development for Local Governments, by Jeffrey H. Dorfman, Dawn L. Black, David H. Newman, Coleman W. Dangerfield Jr. and Warren A. Flick, University of Georgia, January 2002. This study was written to demonstrate the value of preserving farms and timberland, but it goes beyond that, applying cost accounting to various kinds of development. The authors' conclusion: Subdivisions are the worst kind of developments a locality can have because residents demand many services but rarely pay for them in additional taxes. "(A) growing body of empirical evidence shows that while commercial and industrial development can indeed improve the financial well being of a local government, residential development worsens it," they say. http://www.forestry.uga.edu/warnell/pdf/cfb/EcCost.pdf
Growing Pains: Quality of Life in the New Economy, by John S. Hirschhorn, National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, June 2000. What is the greatest asset a place has to sell in order to create economic growth? Quality of life, says Hirschhorn, director of natural resources policy studies for the National Governors Association. And the greatest threat to quality of life today is . . . growth. In a 74-page study of “smart growth” practices from around the country, Hirschhorn assesses what’s wrong with the way metro areas are developing and a few instances of what’s right. His message: “Unless something is done to preserve quality of life, growth today will stifle growth tomorrow.” http://www.nga.org/Pubs/IssueBriefs/2000/GrowingPains.asp
Airports As Engines of Economic Development, by Cyrus F. Freidheim Jr. and B. Thomas Hansson, Strategy & Business, Third Quarter 1999. Consultants Freidheim and Hansson explain how big-city airports work as economic generators and why the worst strategy a city can pursue is to divide air traffic between two airports (O'Hare and Midway, LaGuardia and JFK, Ronald Reagan National and Dulles, etc.). http://www.strategy-business.com/policy/99308/
Playing from Strength: The Market Power of Cities, By Franklin D. Raines, The Brookings Review, Summer 2000. This is an article from the "Reinventing the City" issue of the Brookings Review, mentioned above. Raines is CEO of Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance corporation. It's especially worth reading because Raines offers a way of looking at cities by their economic functions – and economic reach. http://www.brookings.org/press/review/summer2000/raines.htm
U.S. Metro Economies: The Engines of America’s Growth, United States Conference of Mayors and National Association of Counties, May 2000. Metropolitan areas are driving the U.S. economy, says this report by Standard & Poor’s DRI for the mayors’ and county executives’ organizations. Not only are 84 percent of workers in metro areas, but 95 percent of high tech and 94 percent of business services employees, says the report. If New York and Los Angeles were nations, the report goes on, they would rank 16th and 17th, respectively – behind Australia and ahead of Argentina. http://www.usmayors.org/citiesdrivetheeconomy/
State of the Cities 2000: Megaforces Shaping the Future of the Nation's Cities, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, June 2000. There are four "megaforces" at work in America's urban areas, this government report suggests. They are the high-tech employment boom; the boom's flip side, the rapid inflation in urban land costs, which is driving up the cost of housing; the shifting demographic tides caused by immigration; and the lessening connections between central cities and their suburbs. The 137-page report is part analysis, part prescription and part pat on the back for the Clinton Administration. It is in Adobe Acrobat format. http://www.hud.gov/pressrel/socrpt.pdf
Internet Cluster Analysis 2000, Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network, Oct. 11, 2000. Don’t let the academic sounding name fool you. This is a lively report on what’s going on around the world (and around the U.S.) with Internet companies – and why they locate where they locate. Some factors are predictable – talent and capital – but some are surprising. The rising factor, the report says, is government. Many state and local governments are becoming “extremely proactive” in working with Internet companies in order to build their economies, the study says. Some have invested in high-tech industrial parks; others are offering tax incentives and grants. Joint Venture is a non-profit organization that’s dedicated to economic and community development in the Silicon Valley area of California, near San Jose. http://www.jointventure.org/resources/svcluster00/home.html
High Tech Specialization: A Comparison of High Technology Centers, Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, January 2001. Not all high-tech towns are alike, the Brookings Institution reminds us in a study of 14 metro areas. The study looked at employment, patents and venture capital patterns. It found that Denver, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. are very strong in software employment, but weak in hardware jobs. Phoenix was just the opposite. Raleigh-Durham, Boston and San Diego were major centers for biotech; other places had almost no biotech employment. The big five high-tech centers, ranked by employment, are San Jose, Washington, D.C., Boston, Minneapolis and Atlanta. Brookings has posted its study, a press release about the study and profiles of the 14 metro areas on its web site. http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/cortright/pressrelease.htm
Where Are You on the Talent Map? Fast Company, January 2001. Knowledge workers value the places they live as much as the companies they work for, says this article in Fast Company, a magazine for new economy workers. The article uses the research of Richard Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to look at which places tend to attract talented workers. "We've shifted from a company-centric economy to a people-drive one," the article quotes Florida as saying. "People are turning to community rather than to corporations to define themselves." One hint to cities from Fast Company: Don't just build new sports stadiums, build bike paths too. "Business is not a spectator sport," it counsels. http://www.fastcompany.com/online/42/pp_florida.html
Headquarters Wanted: Principals Only Need Apply, by Thomas Klier and William Testa, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, July 2001. Chicago and the state of Illinois spent a reported $60 million to lure Boeing's corporate headquarters to town. Clearly, large corporate headquarters are valuable to a local economy. But how are the biggest cities really doing in the competition for headquarters? The top two cities for HQs in 1990 are still tops in 2000, the Chicago Fed reports. New York has 239 big-company HQs (defined as companies with 2,500 or more employees), a gain of 19 since 1990, and Chicago has 107, up 11. But others among the top 20 metro areas have seen considerable movement in the rankings. Biggest winners: San Francisco (now No. 3, with 91 HQs, a gain of 39), Houston (No. 7, 70 HQs, up 29) and Atlanta (No. 10, 53 HQs, up 25). Biggest losers: Cleveland (No. 13, 35 HQs, a loss of 11), Seattle (No. 19, 19, a loss of one), and Boston (No. 9, 66 HQs, a gain of 11, but that was enough to move it down four places in the relative rankings). What causes cities to attract corporate headquarters? Some of it is simply the population growth of the cities — those that attracted the most new residents also tended to attract more new HQs, researchers found. But the industry mix also played a major role. The Northeast and Midwest doesn't "grow" companies as fast as high-tech areas in the West and South, the Chicago Fed reports. http://www.chicagofed.org/publications/fedletter/2001/cfljuly2001_167a.pdf
Southern California Minority Small Business Atlas, Community Development Technologies Center, November 2000. Odd name for an important study of minority businesses in a region that is fine-grained with ethnic groups. Everything you ever wanted to know about the whys and hows of small ethnic-owned businesses are in this study (41 percent depend on credit cards as their main source of funding; 54 percent have fewer than five employees; about 40 percent of owners got into business because they felt it was the only or best way to make money; more than 75 percent had some college education). There are also some important findings – that ethnic businesses have enormous problems growing beyond their own ethnic networks, although some groups are more successful than others. Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans, for example, are more successful than Vietnamese Americans are developing multi-ethnic customers. http://www.cdtech.org/item.php?id=2
The “Vanishing Farmland” Myth and the Smart Growth Agenda, by Samuel R. Staley, Reason Public Policy Institute, January 2000. Don’t buy the “smart growth” thesis that modern suburban development practices are bad for quality of life? Then this report may be your cup of tea. The Reason Foundation in Los Angeles is the foremost critic of smart growth movement, and Staley is the point person on land use. His report focuses on rebutting arguments that valuable farmland is being lost to suburbia but offers criticisms of smart growth in general. http://www.rppi.org/pb12central.html
Do Highways Matter? Evidence and Policy Implications of Highways' Influence on Metropolitan Development, by Marlon G. Boarnet and Andrew F. Haughwout, Brookings Institute, August 2000. The debate over urban sprawl has reawakened interest in the role highways play in promoting dispersed suburbs. This paper looks at how highway development is linked to housing patterns. (Their conclusion: Highways play a big role.) They make recommendations about how to make future highway decisions. http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/boarnetexsum.htm
Report Card on America's Infrastructure, American Society of Civil Engineers, March 2001. How well is America building and maintaining its roads, airports, school buildings, public transit systems and water facilities? Very poorly, says the ASCE, a group representing the people who build and maintain America's infrastructure. In fact, says the group, the U.S. as a whole earns only a D-plus for its overall efforts. Schools, rated a D-minus, are considered the direst problem ("75 percent of our nation's schools are inadequate to meet the needs of school children"), but other infrastructure is also in poor shape, including airports ("capacity has increased only 1 percent in the past 10 years while air traffic has increased 37 percent"), drinking water ("an annual shortfall of $11 billion needed to replace facilities"), wastewater ("enormous needs") and dams ("2,100 unsafe dams in the United States".) The best rated infrastructure: solid waste, with a C-plus (""waste recovered through recycling has nearly doubled" since 1990). This is a group with a vested interest in creating more public works projects. Still, it's a grim picture. http://www.asce.org/reportcard/index.cfm
Broken Detroit: Death of a City Block, Detroit News, June 17-21, 2001. The Detroit News has produced a series about the decline and abandonment of one block that reads like a true-crime story. The 1967 riots caused the once-thriving neighborhood to suddenly empty out, but white flight had begun long before then, the newspaper says. The result of this long, sad story is a street where so many former homes have been torn down that it has largely become “urban prairie.” http://www.detnews.com/specialreports/2001/elmhurst/
Fight or Flight: Metropolitan Philadelphia and Its Future, Metropolitan Philadelphia Policy Center, October 2001. Looking to curl up with a long, depressing book? Try this 94-page report, a profile of a region beset by abandoned neighborhoods, suburban sprawl, miniscule population growth, anemic job creation and punishing taxes. "The sad truth is that when we compare ourselves to our peers," the report says, "we see Metropolitan Philadelphia falling into the second tier of regions. In fact, right now we have more in common with Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore and Cleveland than with Boston and Washington." Recommendations: Curb sprawl, reduce and equalize local tax burdens, target infrastructure dollars wisely and figure ways of marketing vacant urban land. Most important, act regionally, the study urges. The policy center is a collaboration among organizations representing business interests, environmentalists and urban advocates. http://www.metropolicy.org/FlightorFight.html
Preparing St. Louis for Leadership in the 21st Century, Focus St. Louis, July 2002. The title is somewhat misleading; this is really a report on the "generation gap" facing St. Louis and other cities. What is the generation gap? The declining number of people in the 20-34 age group. In the 1990s, that age cohort shrank by 5.4 percent across the U.S., but as this report makes clear, the impact was felt differently in different places. Austin, Tex., for example, saw a 39 percent increase in twenty-somethings in the 1990s, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., saw a 35 percent increase, and Atlanta a 26 percent increase. Meanwhile, St. Louis saw its 20-34 age group shrink by 15 percent. Providence, R.I. and Pittsburgh (minus 17 percent) had generation gaps even greater than St. Louis'. What to do? Focus St. Louis, a citizens league, recommends better connections between the city's universities and employers, more creative connections between young people and non-profits, greater emphasis on in-town neighborhoods that offer diversity and nightlife, and better marketing of the city to young people. Consequences of failure: A duller, less economically viable place, with a lot more gray hair per capita. http://www.focus-stl.org/prio/pdf/econreport2002.pdf
City Growth and the 2000 Census: Which Places Grew, and Why, by Edward L. Glaeser and Jesse M. Shapiro, Brookings Institution, May 2001. What causes some cities to grow rapidly and others to grow slowly — or decline? A number of sometimes contradictory factors, say Glaeser, a Harvard economist, and Shapiro, a grad student. Sunshine helps. Cities with warm weather grew much faster than colder places in the 1990s. Having lots of college educated people also helped. "Skilled communities rise — unskilled communities fall. This has been true in every time period going back to the late 19th century," they write. Being car-crazy also helps. Cities built around automobiles grew faster than cities built for public transit. One intriguing oddity: Having lots of people employed in health care appears to cause places to grow more slowly. Why? The authors aren't sure (although they're sure it's not related to the average age of residents). It could be that hospitals simply locate in poorer places, they say. http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/es/urban/census/whygrowthexsum.htm
Downtown Rebound, by Rebecca R. Sohmer and Robert E. Lang, Fannie Mae Foundation and Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, May 2001. It's no illusion. Big-city downtowns are back, but in a surprising way: not necessarily as the all-important central business district but as a place to live. This highly readable study looks at 24 big cities and their downtowns. In most, the city's population was up and so was downtown's. (Best of this booming group: Houston, where the downtown's population grew 69 percent in the 1990s, while the city overall grew 20 percent. Next is Seattle: 67 percent growth downtown, 9 percent citywide; then Chicago: 51 percent downtown, 4 percent citywide.) There are also places where downtowns were up while city population was down. (Cleveland: 32 percent growth downtown, while the city lost 5 percent of its population.) There were a few cities where the overall population was up, but downtown's was down. (Charlotte: 1 percent decline downtown, while city population grew nearly 37 percent.). And there were two places where both downtown and city population declined in the 1990s. (Cincinnati: downtown population down 17 percent, city population down 9 percent; St. Louis: downtown population down 18 percent, city population down 12 percent.) http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/DowntownRebound.pdf
Office Sprawl: The Evolving Geography of Business, by Robert E. Lang, Brookings Institute, October 2000. Many U.S. metro areas are seeing new office construction move so decisively that they becoming “edgeless cities.” Already, says Lang, Miami and Philadelphia are in that category. Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Detroit seem headed that way. Only New York and Chicago, among the cities studied, still have “core-dominated” office markets. An edgeless city is one in which the suburban office markets are so dispersed there is no discernable pattern, unlike an “edge city” where the suburban markets are large and relatively concentrated. http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/officesprawl/report.htm
"Boomburgs": The Emergence of Large, Fast-Growing Suburban Cities in the United States, by Robert E. Lang and Patrick A. Simmons, Fannie Mae Foundation, June 2001. What do you get when you combine a large municipality, fast growth, a setting outside a core city and a place that's still essentially suburban in nature? You get a "boomburg," says this study from the Fannie Mae Foundation. "Boomburgs are defined as places with more than 100,000 residents that are not the largest city in their metropolitan areas and have maintained double-digit rates of population growth in recent decades," the study says. There are 53, half of which are in California. One big difference about the boomburgs is their suburban nature. Few have a dense business core. "Boomburgs are urban in fact," adds the study, "but not in feel." http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/boomburb.PDF
Melting Pot Suburbs: A Census 2000 Study of Suburban Diversity, by William H. Frey, Bookings Institution Center on Urban & Metropolitan Policy, June 2001. Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan, studied 102 metro area’s suburbs, looking at racial and ethnic patterns in the 2000 census. His findings: Minorities now make up more than a quarter of suburban populations, up from 19 percent in 1990, and in some areas they accounted for the majority of suburban population gains in the 1990s. The gains were particularly great in what Frey calls the “melting pot metros” of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Houston. In some of these metro areas, white suburban populations actually declined in the 1990s while minority populations soared. Other findings: Asians are most likely to live in the suburbs, then Hispanics (almost half are suburban residents), then African Americans (39 percent). http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/census/frey.pdf
Moving Up, Filtering Down: Metropolitan Housing Dynamics and Public Policy, by Thomas Bier, Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, September 2001. People move a lot in America, 13 times for the typical adult. When a family moves, what choices for housing does it have and what impact do those choices have on a metro area? These are the questions Bier, a researcher at Cleveland State University, answers in this paper for the Brookings Institution. His findings: As families grow more affluent, they move outward. In Cleveland 91 percent of city residents moved farther out when they traded houses, as did 81 percent of suburban homeowners. Reason: In the Midwest, at least, it’s almost a rule that the nicer houses are on the edge of town. The implications are obvious: As affluent families leave, central cities and older suburbs stagnate, decline in price (“filter down” in Bier’s term) and are abandoned. But why are the nicest homes so far out? Partly it’s economic (large tracts are more available there), but federal housing and state transportation policies also play a role, Bier believes. Hopeless? Not quite. Bier proposes some possible solutions, from bulldozing large tracts in inner cities and older suburbs for homebuilders, to drawing growth boundaries and sharing taxes. http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/bierexsum.htm
Job Sprawl: Employment Location in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, by Edward L. Glaeser, Matthew Kahn and Chenghuan Chu, Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, July 2001. "Urban sprawl" is usually seen as a residential problem: Too many people living too far from each other. But job sprawl is equally as pronounced, says this study from the Brookings Institution. In fact, among the 100 largest metro areas, only 22 percent of people work within three miles of the area's downtown. The Northeast and Midwest are the least sprawling (most concentrated of the top 100: Grand Rapids, Mich., followed by Madison, Wisc.); the South is the most sprawling (top job sprawler: Baton Rouge, La., followed by Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.). Two interesting findings: The age of the metro area does not seem to be a factor in job sprawl — that is, younger metro areas often sprawl less than older ones — but there a connection between job sprawl and political fragmentation. In places with lots of jurisdictions, jobs tend to move away from the traditional downtown. http://www.brook.edu/es/urban/publications/glaeserjobsprawl.pdf
New Community Design to the Rescue: Fulfilling Another American Dream, by Joel S. Hirschhorn and Paul Souza, National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, July 2001. About a third of homebuyers say they'd prefer to live in a "new urbanism" or "new community design" setting, where shops, offices, transit stops and schools are mixed with homes and condos, but only a fraction of new housing developments are designed this way. We'd probably be better off if more were; we'd use less energy, spend less time in traffic and exhaust fewer pollutants. So what can a conscientious governor do to help his or her state build more of these new community design developments? This is a background paper on the NCD concept that contains a checklist of things states can do to help, from building public support to assisting local governments, changing land-use laws to stopping funding for projects that cause sprawl. http://www.nga.org/cda/files/072001NCDFULL.pdf
Smart Codes in Your Community: A Guide to Building Rehabilitation Codes, Office of Policy Development and Research, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, August 2001. Don't let the title put you to sleep. This is a useful report about an important topic: Older houses and commercial buildings and how to encourage their reuse. Nearly 28 percent of homes and 20 percent of retail and office buildings were built before 1950. As they age, cities face two paths: People can rehabilitate these older buildings or let them decline and become blighted. Problem is, many cities' building codes make it easier to walk away than fix them up. This guidebook shows how to revise local codes to encourage alternation and reuse of older structures. http://www.huduser.org/publications/destech/smartcodes.html
2001 Urban Mobility Report, by David Schrank and Tim Lomax, Texas Transportation Institute, May 2001. Is traffic getting worse in most places? Yes, more than three times worse than the early 1980s. Are more roads the answer to the congestion? Yes, but only partly. Public transit must be part of the solution, along with more efficient highways and changes in land-use patterns. These common-sense ideas and unique congestion measurements make up the bulk of this 71-page report by a unit of Texas A&M University. There are also the rankings that make the news every year when this report is released: the metro areas with the greatest congestion and highest congestion costs (time wasted sitting in traffic). The most common index is annual hours of delay per person. In that woeful contest, Los Angeles was first, followed by Atlanta, Seattle, Houston and Dallas. http://mobility.tamu.edu/
Magic Bus, by David H. Freedman, Business 2.0, August 2001. The public transit solution of the future may be . . . a bus? Don't laugh. Buses are cheap, flexible modes of transportation and, as this article explains, are growing increasingly high tech. Freedman focuses on Montgomery County, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C., which has some of the worst traffic problems in the country — and one of the most advanced bus systems. The Montgomery County system is pioneering technologies that keep track of buses through global positioning systems, manage traffic signals so buses get extra time, weave vehicles through construction sites or accidents, and dispatch new buses if demand is heavy. There are "smart signs" at bus stops to tell riders when the next bus will arrive, and there will soon be web sites that can send real-time information about routes to your desktop computer or cell phone. Next challenge: Work on the ride itself. Despite all the gee-whiz technology, Freedman reports, "the plastic seats were hard, riders were banged around by the frequent stops and turns, and there was a persistent whiff of diesel." http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,16664,FF.html
Competitive Cities: A Report Card on Efficiency in Service Delivery in America’s Largest Cities, by Adrian T. Moore, James Nolan and Geoffrey A. Segal with Matthew Taylor, Reason Public Policy Institute, April 2001. Is your city government a bargain or a spendthrift? Is it pinching pennies or wasting money when it picks up trash, polices the streets and maintains local parks? The Reason Public Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, proposed to find out when it launched its first-ever “Competitive Cities Report Card” on how efficiently cities provide services. So who’s the number-one penny pincher? Phoenix, Ariz., followed by El Paso, Tex.; Tulsa, Okla.; Memphis, Tenn.; and Nashville, Tenn. And the most wasteful among the 44 cities surveyed? From the bottom: Los Angeles; Oakland, Calif.; Seattle; San Jose, Calif.; and Detroit. http://www.rppi.org/ps282central.html
Absentee Minded, by Jim Schutze, Dallas Observer, Aug. 30, 2001. This is a jaw-dropping expose of how elections are stolen in Dallas, not by voting dead people but through manipulating Texas' liberal absentee-ballot processes. The way it works: Campaign "brokers" help poor elderly people file for "early ballots," then show up at their homes when the ballots arrive. Many times, the brokers fill out the ballots for the voter and leave with the ballot in hand. Then it gets interesting. As one explained to Schutze: "Say the broker goes to (a candidate named) Caraway with 1,500 ballots. He says, 'These votes are for you. I want $3 apiece for them.' Caraway says no. So he takes them to the other candidate. 'These votes are for Caraway. I want $3 apiece for them.' If the other candidate pays, the broker throws the ballots away." A brilliant, depressing piece of reporting. http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2001-08-30/feature.html/page1.html
What Are the Benefits of Hosting a Major League Sports Franchise? by Jordan Rappaport and Chad Wilkerson, Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, First Quarter 2001. If public subsidies of professional sports franchises are such lousy investments — and most economists agree that they are — why do cities agree to them? This lengthy report (32 pages) by a pair of Federal Reserve economists takes you through the dismal economics of stadiums, their meager financial returns, but then points to an entirely different way of valuing pro sports — as major contributors to a region's quality of life. Pro sports, Rappaport and Wilkerson argue, are a way of building the "satisfaction or happiness residents derive from shared metro area attributes." How do you calculate the worth of that satisfaction? One way, they suggest, is to look at what metro areas spend to obtain a new franchise when an old one is lost. The St. Louis Cardinals football team left in 1987 when the city refused to contribute $120 million to building a new stadium. Three years later, the city voted to pay $280 million to lure a new franchise to town. "Losing a football team," the authors conclude dryly, "seems to have caused metro area residents to revise upward their estimates of the associated quality of life benefits." http://www.kc.frb.org/Publicat/econrev/PDF/1q01rapp.pdf
"We've Taken the Greed Out of Sports," by Geoff Calkins, Fast Company, November 2000. Ever wonder what could happen in your city if business savvy were applied to civic work? This is one of those stories. In 1997 Memphis CEO Den Jernigan and his wife Kristi brought a minor-league baseball franchise to town. But rather than own the team, the Jernigans decided to deed it to a 501(c)(3) non-profit, whose purpose was to reestablish baseball and softball in inner-city schools and neighborhoods. But it gets better. Jernigan painstakingly arranged a deal to build a new baseball park for his team, using mostly private money, four blocks from the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis. The most elegant and expensive minor-league ballpark in America, it has become a symbol for Memphis and touched off a downtown revival. Says Jernigan in this article in Fast Company, a business magazine, "I'm not an owner, I'm a founder. This team is a community asset. We've taken the greed out of sports." http://pf.fastcompany.com/online/40/wf_jernigan.html
Market Conditions and Public Affairs Programming: Implications for Digital Television Policy, by Philip M. Napoli, Benton Foundation. In this study, Napoli, a business professor at Fordham University, studied local affairs programming in 24 TV markets, from Los Angeles to Elmira, N.Y. and Bend, Ore. He didn't find much, just 0.3% (one-third of 1 percent) of the commercial broadcast time was devoted to local news and discussions. Napoli's conclusion: Federal regulators may want to nudge broadcasters to fulfill their responsibilities to their communities. http://www.benton.org/Television/lpa.pdf
The Changing Face of Public Education, Education Week, April-May 2000. A primer on what is happening in public school systems around the country as "choice" enters the education vocabulary. Basically, this series argues, the "one-size-fits-all" approach to public education is being replaced by alternatives, from charter schools to vouchers. The result: a "consumer-oriented" brand of public education. http://www.edweek.org/sreports/changinged.htm
No Health, No Wealth, by Annette Fuentes and Rosemary Metzler Lavan, Nation magazine, Dec. 18, 2000. One of the biggest and quietest structural changes in communities of the past 20 years has been the conversion of non-profit community hospitals into for-profit hospitals. In the wake of this change, more than 130 foundations were created to hold the assets of these conversions. Oddly, few people have followed what actually happened to these foundations. Nation magazine, a liberal political journal, has taken a look and doesn't like what it sees. While some of the conversion foundations have made a real impact on local health care, "there is substantial evidence that a number of them are not living up to their obligations," say the authors. The authors believe that the conversion foundations should fund only public health activities; what they find is that some are funding local arts, education and economic development efforts as well. http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20001218&s=fuentes