New Geography

Author: Rick Cole

  • Rick Cole

  • The Change We Need – Part II: Will We Sustain The Current Economy, Or Create A Sustainable Economy?

    Yesterday, Rick Cole discussed the theoretical basis for the most effective kinds of economic change. Today, he provides specific suggestions. – The Editors

    No brief outline can do justice to weaving together the potentially convergent strands that compose the key elements of the remaking of the American economy. None of the policy prescriptions here are original, but it is important to see them as complimentary parts of a larger whole:

    •GREEN BUSINESS: This means shifting from thinking of “green jobs” as being generated by alternative energy to an understanding that, in the decade ahead, every single job in the American economy will be “green”, as we ruthlessly pursue less wasteful, more sustainable and more productive business practices. This is primarily the domain of the private sector, but Federal policies that deal with taxes, regulations, research, purchasing and grant-making must all be tweaked to actively promote green practices, rather than inadvertently hinder them.

    •SMART GROWTH: The suburban, auto-dominated landscape of the past fifty years is not only unsustainable on a world-scale, it won’t work for a post peak oil, post carbon America. Alternate fuels are not enough, nor will public transit work in sprawled suburbs. Chicago is the headquarters for the Congress for the New Urbanism, a largely apolitical movement of architects, planners, developers and activists promoting a revival of traditional town and city building that emphasizes mixed-use, transit-oriented design at every scale of development from neighborhood to metropolis. While catching on in cities and states across the country, the movement remains largely marginalized in Washington. One exception is Congressman Earl Blumenauer, an early Obama backer from Portland, Oregon. Former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist has also laid out a program for reversing the Federal government’s half century of counter-productive policies.

    •REGIONALISM: Obama’s speech to the US Conference of Mayors embraced this powerful focus on metro regions as the engines of global growth. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution has been one of its leading theoreticians, and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros one of its most eloquent champions. Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Portland, Chattanooga and St. Louis have emerged as models for metro/suburban collaboration to promote infrastructure investment, economic development and land use planning. Europe has pioneered this kind of regional collaboration to stay competitive in the global economy. There is also a powerful social equity dimension to this movement, which ensures that inner cities will not be left of out the regional efforts to improve education, reinvest in older communities, and focus on the creation of high-wage, high-value jobs.

    •TRANSPORTATION: In 1991, Senator Pat Moynihan spearheaded the least-heralded major domestic policy shift of that decade, the landmark ISTEA omnibus transportation bill. Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration failed to follow up on it, and left highway expansion as the continuing Federal policy direction, instead of investing in matching the investment by all other advanced economies in both high-speed rail and public transit. This has been compounded by the Bush Administration’s embrace of libertarian market mechanisms for funding future transportation investment. This failure has fueled sprawl and its appetite for oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The new administration will need to start where ISTEA left off to rebuild our goods- and people-moving capacity 0n an environmentally and economically sustainable model.

    •HUMAN CAPITAL: Obama’s education program needs to be place-based in a way that directly ties into the drive to restore American competitiveness. Mayors around the country have followed the lead of Chicago’s Richard Daly in seeing the revival of K-12 schools as fundamental to restoring America’s great cities as engines of new wealth creation, and not just gentrified havens for young professionals amongst crime-ridden slums. One of Obama’s successes as an organizer was to establish a job training program in the projects. But without a national commitment to human capital, we won’t reduce the underclass, assimilate immigrants, and provide the workforce that can outperform the hard-working offshore workforce clamoring for what were once American jobs.

    •INNOVATION: Obama’s popularity in Silicon Valley mirrors his embrace of venture capital investment in American jobs. The Japanese failed to shake off their decade-long slump because they remained tied to “pork barrel” public works stimulation of their economy. Harnessing private investment and entrepreneurship to rebuild America’s cities, older suburbs and essential infrastructure is essential not only to economic success, but to political success as well. We must find a way to redeploy the huge brainpower and speculative investment that has gone into financing consumer debt and exotic credit mechanisms into rebuilding America’s cities and productive economy.

    •NEW ORLEANS: Of all of George Bush’s public relations stunts and policy failures, none is crueler than his broken promise to rebuild that city. Nothing would be a more powerful counter-point to those wasted years than to use the New Orleans region as a model for a rebuilt, muscular economy that puts people back to work in high-wage, high-value jobs. Of course, the default choice is tourism, gambling, and decay. But great cities are not primarily sinkholes for consumption. They’re centers of enterprise, trade and the generation of wealth.

    This is simply a superficial survey of the shape of a fundamental reshaping of the American landscape and economy that could emerge from the wrenching changes ahead. “Change we can believe in” will need to look beyond Washington and its sound bite pre-occupations and stale wedge issues. It will need to harness local movements, as well as Mayors, Council members, Governors, and State Legislators to experiment with and implement a new model throughout our federalist system. Obama carries the unique advantage of having been a community organizer and a state legislator. He can be the model and the inspiration for a broad-based movement for change that is not solely reliant on Washington politics or policy.

    The first 100 and the first 1000 days of the new administration will be a time of harsh testing, for Washington, and for the country. We are too big and complex a nation for any administration to chart a single course for our gargantuan economy and our diverse geography.

    But a clear course that favors investment in capacity over spending on consumption, and a commitment to sustainability over business as usual could have a profound impact on the shape of American metropolitan regions and the communities they contain. That is “the change we need”.

    Read: The Change We Need: Will We Sustain The Current Economy, Or Create A Sustainable Economy? Part I

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • The Change We Need: Will We Sustain The Current Economy, Or Create A Sustainable Economy? Part I

    The Change We Need will run in two parts. In Part I, Rick Cole lays out the kinds of changes we need, and why. Part II outlines his specific policy prescriptions.- The Editors

    Will this historic election alter the American physical landscape as well as the electoral one? Much will depend on whether the Obama Administration will focus on trying to revive the economy or move to reshape it.

    Bold leadership sounds great in the abstract, but embarking on profound changes in the economy is both politically risky and economically daunting. Government, especially the one the new president will inherit, is severely limited in its competence and capacity to reshape the American share of the global economy.

    The easier option is to minimize the “change we need,” and aim for a “kinder, gentler, greener and more regulated” version of the Enron economy bequeathed by President Bush. We may be facing the most profound economic crisis since Franklin Roosevelt took office, but so far, instead of investing in a more sustainable economy, the Democrats seem to be focused on a “stimulus” response to boost spending.

    This is essentially the path followed over the past two decades without success by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democrats. In reaction to the Japanese real estate and financial meltdown in 1989, the party essentially opted to “bail-out” the status quo. The cost has been nearly twenty years of economic anemia and political gridlock.

    As Japan found, a broken economy can’t be successfully “stimulated.” A patchwork of single-issue nostrums (alternative energy, public works spending, health care reform) will not put Americans back to work and America back on track.

    Why not? Why isn’t it possible to revive the Clinton formula for a soaring stock market, nearly full employment and low interest rates? The answer, of course, is that neither the global economic crisis nor America’s vulnerability are sudden or surprising. The problems are deep-seated and structural, and both Clinton and Bush steered around them by postponing difficult, but necessary sacrifices.

    The Republicans, of course, are most immediately and egregiously culpable. Their foreign wars, their reckless deficit spending, their unconscionable tax cuts, their laissez faire dismantling of so much of the middle class safety net, their disastrous energy policies, and their injection of cheap money into a housing/consumer spending bubble are all proximate causes of the stunning decline of American economic prowess. But the long-term, Democratic failure to chart a different course leaves the next president unprepared to offer a comprehensive alternative that makes sense in the global economy in which we now find ourselves.

    The inescapable mathematics of our situation is that America runs on $2 billion a day of money borrowed from abroad. That long-running profligacy has made us into the world’s largest debtor nation by far. For the first time in our history, we are in a position where we cannot reflate our way back to prosperity.

    The retooling of America we face will require a president with an approach as bold and flexible as the New Deal, and a re-investment in real places , instead of the exotic and deracinated instruments that Warren Buffett has derided as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

    The magnitude of the unfolding crisis offers glaring dangers and remarkable opportunities for embarking on a long-term rebuilding of our economy on a far more solid and sustainable foundation.

    One quickly forgotten episode in the campaign gives particular “hope” that Obama may ultimately choose the more difficult, but more promising, path. At a crucial juncture during his primary battle with Hillary Clinton, he bucked both her and John McCain and their blatant pander of a “gas tax holiday” to offset skyrocketing prices at the pump.

    “This is what passes for leadership in Washington,” he responded right before the important Indiana primary. “Phony ideas, calculated to win elections instead of actually solving problems.”

    He went on to acknowledge, “I wish I could stand up here and tell you that we could fix our energy problems with a holiday. I wish I could tell you that we can take a time-out from trade and bring back the jobs that have gone overseas. I wish I could promise that on day one of my presidency, I could pass every plan and proposal I’ve outlined in this campaign. But my guess is that you’ve heard those promises before. You hear them every year, in every election.”

    Such courageous “straight talk” must also acknowledge that we can’t work our way out of unprecedented levels of consumer and public debt by borrowing money. That way lies Argentina. President Obama is going to have to deliver big time on the somewhat hazy promise of rebuilding our economy with green jobs, but at a scale and scope that few have dared even suggest so far. He is going to have to do that in the face of almost irresistible political clamor to go the other direction: to somehow keep the casino economy going by cutting taxes, propping up banks, stimulating consumer spending, and keeping the American people on the job doing things that make our problems worse, from building freeways to financing more suburban subdivisions so we can continue to export a trillion dollars a year to oil exporting nations.

    Building a sustainable economy is such a huge, complicated, politically challenging endeavor, that it will take every bit of Obama’s personal charisma, and leadership abilities, and the backing of an unprecedented movement of support.

    Fortunately, however, there is a vast untapped source of innovative and promising ideas and practitioners working off the radar screen of the national political class in Washington and its small-minded media annex. They have laid out a framework for restoring American competitiveness that is based on investment rather than consumption – on sustainability rather than short-term fixes.

    Read: The Change We Need – Part II: Will We Sustain The Current Economy, Or Create A Sustainable Economy?

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • Creating an Authentic Place: Tales from Two Southern California Cities

    What makes a place “authentic”? In places we cherish, we look for something unique and tangible. But personal experience of a place is not merely a product of the landscape and “built environment.” It is also shaped by myths and perceptions.

    As City Manager of two California towns, I’ve grappled with the treacherous crosscurrents of reality and myth, of change and preservation.

    Azusa, California is a working-class suburb where the majority of the population are from the stock of Mexican immigrants over the past century, along with a largely comfortable mixture of the rest of Southern California’s extraordinary diversity. Ten years ago, Mayor Cristina Cruz Madrid memorably described it as “the caboose on the foothill train,” standing in sad contrast to its more affluent middle-class neighbors along the majestic (but often smog-obscured) San Gabriel Mountains. An ambitious effort to shake that image has had mixed results but some very real accomplishments.

    Ventura, California is a beach town with higher aspirations. Its city government promotes it as “California’s New Art City” and aims to be a model of smart growth, environmental sustainability and civic engagement. Ventura’s citizens laid the foundation for this ambitious agenda when more than a thousand of them participated in a citizen-driven “visioning effort” at the beginning of this century. But it remains unclear how deep or widespread the public enthusiasm for these notions truly is.

    Both these towns struggle with distinguishing their actual, imagined and desired identities — and destinies.

    People have lived in Azusa. for six thousand years. Phonetic variations of “Azusavit” were recorded by Spanish padres as the village origin of the native “neophytes” inducted into labor at the nearby Mission San Gabriel. Yet despite this long history, today’s Azusa blends with little distinction from the tract homes, apartments and commercial strips of the thirty other cities that two million San Gabriel Valley suburbanites call home. But it’s making considerable strides in re-anchoring a sense of place.

    The symbolic turning point came in 1995, when voters overwhelmingly rejected a scheme to introduce casino gambling as the panacea to the city’s declining fortunes. Voters installed a new City Council and chose instead to focus on beautifying the sagging Downtown. When the pedestrian-scaled street lamps that were installed were mistakenly painted purple, the Council persevered despite ridicule. Two dozen new businesses made believers out of skeptics. Purple was embraced as the city’s distinctive color.

    Development of new homes sought to attract middle-class homebuyers. Public schools adopted a “no excuses” determination to boost test scores. A rash commitment to plant 2,000 new trees in the year 2000 ended up adding over 3,500 new trees. The seeds of those efforts have flowered in a renewed spirit of citizen volunteerism. Neighborhood improvement zones were launched to “improve all of Azusa, one neighborhood at a time.” An ambitious new General Plan proclaimed “a 21st Century vision for Azusa” as “the Gateway to the American Dreams.” More than a million square feet of office/warehouse/light industrial “flex space” was added, a residential development slated for 1250 homes broke ground and the long-neglected Downtown began to show new signs of life.

    But change is never painless. To some, new development seems to violate the city’s “unique natural, historic and cultural heritage.” There is considerable concern that new structures might be undermining the cherished small town character.

    This has led to a continuing political struggle. Is the new development creating “a distinct identity and sense of place” or altering the community’s existing character beyond recognition? This reflects a deep ambivalence of local residents about change. So much of current development is simply generic “product” that even the value of new investment (and more permanent benefits of expanded jobs, housing and tax base) may seem like a poor trade-off against the loss of the familiar.

    Ventura

    That question is even more clearly drawn in the coastal town of Ventura. The community is officially known as “San Buenaventura,” the name that Father Serra, the legendary founder of the California missions chose to honor Saint Bonaventure, an Italian, but the name also evokes the spirit of a city of good luck. That good fortune seemed to run out, however, with the end of Ventura’s oil boom in the sixties. The city’s historic core declined, even as farmers and ranchers turned to raising largely undistinguished tract homes on the city’s outskirts. After the 101 interstate sliced through, Ventura began a long, slow fade – especially compared to Santa Barbara, its neighbor just 22 miles up the coast which styles itself “the American Riviera.” .

    Like Azusa, Ventura in the last few years has gotten back on track. The once seedy and largely deserted core came back to life – largely thanks to the grit of individual entrepreneurs. The City did back construction of a theater and parking structure, which helped accelerate an indigenous restaurant and retail revival. Then came the “Seize the Future” visioning effort that thrust forward new leadership determined to make Ventura a “national model” for “smart growth,” “livable communities” and “civic engagement.”

    But the push for new investment and “new urbanist” development has run into the same predictable “not in my backyard” response seen in Azusa and many other communities. (link to Kiefer and Bradford NIMBY pieces). There’s much talk about preserving the “soul” of the community. This includes a shifting and even contradictory mix of protecting the town’s laid-back beach town attitude along with its largely unspoiled hillside and ocean views, its stock of old buildings and its quirky landmarks.

    Nothing is more symbolic of this than the debate over the fate of the “Top Hat Burger Place.” The 450 square foot Downtown hamburger stand stood in the way of an aggressive developer’s plans for three-story condos over boutiques. Sentimentalists and preservationists banded together with anti-elitists to insist the stand stay or be relocated at the developer’s expense. Others welcomed the demise of what they saw as an eyesore reminiscent of Downtown’s hardscrabble past and rolled their eyes about claims that the plywood structure qualified as an historic landmark.

    On a split vote, the City Council approved a compromise that donated a slice of a city-owned parking lot nearby as the relocation site for the Top Hat. Given the current real estate recession, it was no surprise when the development project tanked, leaving the apparently ‘recession-proof’ hamburger stand in its current location.

    Now, American Apparel is opening the first retail chain outlet in Downtown. Could this be the harbinger of Ventura’s transformation into another trendy “lifestyle center” of national chains?
    Such concerns are not new. More than a century before Wal-Mart steamrollered old-fashioned downtowns across America, Woolworth’s, Sears and Penney’s created the foundation for a consumer society dominated by giant chains.

    Can places like Azusa and Ventura maintain a special identity amidst the gale force winds of the global economy? Some extreme advocates favor opting out and resisting every change in the landscape even in dilapidated neighborhoods. The other extreme pushes for undermining local neighborhood and district character to benefit out-of-scale real estate “projects” replicating some generic formula, be it “mixed-use town center” or “townhome village.”

    Towns need to find something better than a tense balance between these two extremes. First of all they need to put a distinctive stamp on new development so that it remains scaled to the local character. This is the struggle many cities – including Azusa and Ventura – must undertake if they want both to preserve “a distinct identity and sense of place” in the era of the global economy while remaining vital and economically diverse. They do not have the option of becoming a hermetically sealed stasis town like Carmel, where tourists come to experience an historic theme park of a town. Instead, like most real places, they must face difficult choices about what to retain and preserve – and what to improve and replace. Perhaps the best standard to follow may be to discern what feels like “home” to residents. Ironically, that premium is likely to also attract visitors and commerce that may ultimately threaten that very distinctiveness. But that is a problem that most struggling communities would look forward to grappling with.

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • Suburbs Will Adapt to High Gas Prices

    Will high gas prices doom the suburbs? The short answer is no. America’s investment in suburbia is too broad and deep and these will drive all kinds of technological and other adaptations. But the continued outward growth of new suburban housing tracts and power centers is unsustainable.

    It is, of course, risky to predict anything, particularly the future. No one can predict with certainty the direction of gas prices, let alone how they will reshape our landscape. While the long-term trend for oil and gas is almost certainly rising prices, volatility will continue to make short-run bets risky either way.

    But whether gas prices plateau, spike or even decline in the next five years, larger forces will reinforce the shift to greater reinvestment in older urban areas – and towards reinvention of existing suburban areas, particularly those with strong economies.

    There will still be some “greenfield” peripheral development, but unplanned “sprawl” will wither. New development will be look more like New Urbanist new towns. There will be a revival of the integrated planned community, like Reston in Virginia, the Woodlands near Houston or Valencia and Santa Margarita in Southern California.

    The forces converging to curb sprawl go beyond gas prices. There will be regulatory and market pressure to cut carbon emissions to address global warming, but the most serious threat to outward sprawl will be the private and public shortage of financing for new infrastructure, which is likely to be chronic. Given the deepening crisis in the housing and lending industries, in the long interval building resumes, new development will be very different from what we’ve seen in the past fifty years of most conventional suburbia.

    Of course, even if we adopted a universal program of “smart growth” across America tomorrow, it would be decades before we had repaired and reshaped our landscape and economy to a more sustainable model. In the meantime, there will be tremendous pressure to exploit existing and new energy sources to maintain the suburban model we live in. But we can’t ignore the pragmatic economist Herb Stein who first observed, “Things which can’t go on forever, don’t (known as Stein’s Law).”

    In part, because of legislation such as AB 32, the “Global Climate Solutions Act,” California may be one of the first test cases of this transition. Whether you think this is the greatest threat to our planet in human history or you think this is environmental hysteria, global warming legislation is now a political reality.

    We can’t meet reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 – the fundamental goal of the legislation – without reducing vehicle miles traveled. With transportation producing 40 percent of the problem, improved fuel efficiency will help – and so will switching to alternative fuels and increased telecommuting. But those gains will be essentially wiped out by the offsetting increases in population and mileage that people are traveling.

    While the costs of retooling new growth to be more sustainable will be significant, so are the opportunities. This year alone, according to the Economist, the oil importing nations will transfer two trillion dollars to the oil exporting nations. That’s money that will not be go to improve our infrastructure, protect our environment or educate our youth. It goes out our tailpipes.

    Here in California, the $20 billion transportation bond that voters approved in 2006 comes nowhere near to closing the $100 billion dollar gap in transportation infrastructure needed to address auto congestion and goods movement by truck. There is no way California’s government or economy can afford to continue to pay that cost. But it has taken gas at nearly $5 a gallon for people to wake up and smell the fumes.

    But halting sprawl is not the same as reversing it. Gas prices, AB 32 mandates, highway spending deficits and environmental concerns all conspire against more red-tiled roof subdivisions in Palmdale and Victorville. Yet growth pressures will fuel new demand down the road, so older suburbs and cities have to find ways to develop family-friendly housing and attract jobs that have been flowing to the suburban edge.

    These are two different, but related challenges. Older suburbs have to find a way to gracefully urbanize by strengthening or creating walkable centers and adding more population along commercial/transit corridors. They need to transition from auto-dependence to a wider range of real transportation alternatives. Above all, they face the challenge of persuading residents that reinvention of the suburbs can improve their quality of life and standard of living.

    Planners make a mistake if they try to tell suburban residents to give up what they like about suburbia in terms of space, privacy and safety. Acceptance of higher densities in existing suburban communities will only come if design of more urban housing improves and new development offers residents tangible improvements in amenities such as pedestrian-friendly districts, parks, bikeways and opportunities to work close to home.

    Older cities, on the other hand, already have much of the physical framework in place, but need to improve their parks, schools, libraries and neighborhoods. They must make themselves attractive to retain working and middle-class households, especially families with children. The key challenge will be to overcome the entrenched special interests that dominate urban politics to focus on the efforts that make a city hospitable to residents and businesses and be less dominated by the interests of developers and public employee unions.

    All across the state there are promising examples that suggest suburban and urban communities are getting the point. in the short run, the weak economy and awful financial market, both for public and private sectors, will slow change. But California has shown incredible resilience over the past 150 years. Our growing population and changing demographics will open up a huge market for reinvesting in our older communities.

    Now is the time to prepare for that time. Remember during the last deep real estate downturn, former Governor Pete Wilson abandoned his promise to tackle statewide growth management. His excuse was, “I wish I had some growth to manage.” The tragedy of that missed opportunity was that it wasn’t long before growth again overwhelmed our capacity.

    What if we’d not only put in place a coherent growth management strategy like Oregon, New Jersey or Maryland – but we’d established the collaborative regional structures in place like in metro Denver, Salt Lake City or Portland? Today, we’d be finishing the Subway to the Sea, the Gold Line extension to Ontario Airport and we’d have regular commuter rail between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Maybe then, $5 gas would be a little less painful.

    For too long, we’ve viewed cities and suburbia as natural antagonists. But the future may lie with greater convergence. Cities can become greener and more attractive to population growth. Suburbs can begin to urbanize in graceful and sustainable ways. Both are due for reinvention and reinvestment. The challenges we face will give us the opportunity – and the necessity – for doing just that.

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”