New Geography

Category: Small Cities

  • What Way for the Stimulus? Post-Industrial America vs. Neo-Industrial America

    As a result of the economic crisis, there is a broad consensus in favor of large-scale public investment in infrastructure in the U.S., both as part of a temporary stimulus program and to promote long-term modernization of America’s transportation, energy, telecom and water utility grids. But this momentary consensus masks the continuing disagreement on whether the U.S. government can legitimately promote American industries, and, if so, which industries. This is a problem for infrastructure policy, because different national infrastructures correspond to different national economic strategies.

    Consider the antebellum U.S. in Henry Clay’s American System: federal infrastructure investment in canals and later railroads (“internal improvements”) was part of a package that included import-substitution tariffs to protect infant U.S. industries from British competition. For Clay and his Whig allies and followers, including future Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln, internal improvements and tariffs were not ends in themselves. They were instruments to be used in the pursuit of the Whig-Republican vision of a decentralized, mixed industrial and agricultural economy where business owners, mostly small, and free workers, mostly prosperous, could realize the utopia of Clay’s “self-made man.”

    From Thomas Jefferson to Jefferson Davis, the Southern planters who opposed such ambitious schemes had no objection to infrastructure as such. They favored infrastructure tailored to suit the needs of their semi-colonial slave plantation economy, based on exports of cotton and other commodities to British and Western European factories. Local wharves and harbors that facilitated the shipment of crops to industrial Britain were acceptable to the planters. They opposed infrastructure that would encourage industrialization in the South or the U.S. as a whole, out of fear that urbanization and industrialization would threaten their local dominance over both black slaves and poor white yeoman farmers. They also feared they would be marginalized in national politics – as they indeed were – by industrialists, merchants and financiers.

    Today, the rivalry is not between the champions of an industrial America and an agrarian America. Rather, it is a rivalry between the champions of a neo-industrial America, which includes world-class industrial agriculture, and a post-industrial America, in which most if not all manufacturing and even agriculture will be outsourced. In this formulation, post-industrial America emerges as a consumerist paradise populated by investors, executives of multinational companies, rentiers, realtors, government and nonprofit bureaucrats, and a supporting cast of service sector proletarians including nursing aides, nannies, gardeners, security guards and restaurant and hotel workers.

    Just as there was one logical infrastructure for the industrializing North and one for the anti-industrial plantation South in the nineteenth century, so in the twenty-first century a different infrastructure would be appropriate, depending on whether the goal is a post-industrial America or a neo-industrial America.

    A post-industrial infrastructure can be simple, local and substantially foreign.

    The post-industrial infrastructure can be simple since it involves little more than the roads and harbors needed to bring in high-value-added imports from abroad and ship out low-value-added American commodities. Adequate harbors are necessary, as are adequate highways to help ship U.S. soybeans and timber to industrial Asia while bringing Chinese, Japanese and Korean goods to Wal-Marts for distribution.

    The post-industrial infrastructure can also be local. Just as the Southern planters were indifferent or hostile to regional or national infrastructure projects, so the elites of the service sector are interested chiefly in the infrastructure needs of the half dozen or so coastal megalopolitan areas where they live. Many favor high-speed rail to connect nearby big cities on the coasts, while denouncing federal investment in non-metropolitan areas as boondoggles. The FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) economy of post-industrial America could function reasonably well as long as a handful of colossal city-states – Boswash, Northern California, Greater LA, the Texas Triangle – had state-of-the-art local telecom and transportation and energy grids. So what if the rest of the continent decayed?

    Finally, the post-industrial infrastructure can be largely foreign. Most of the urban service sector elite favors both outsourcing American industry and importing a new metropolitan immigrant proletariat willing to work for lower wages and fewer benefits than native Americans. To be sure, someone must build the components of the metro infrastructure and put them in place. But steel can be shipped in from Asia and assembled in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and Houston by immigrants, legal or illegal. Better yet, the metro-supportive infrastructure can be leased or permanently sold to foreign consortiums and even foreign sovereign wealth funds, in order to avoid the need to raise taxes to pay for upfront costs or repay bonds over the long term. The “leakage” of federal stimulus spending to benefit Chinese factories, law-breaking Latin American illegal immigrants and petrostate sovereign wealth funds will not bother elites who are not only post-industrial but to a large extent too sophisticated to worry about narrow patriotism.

    If the infrastructure of a post-industrial America would be simple, local and largely foreign, the infrastructure of a neo-industrial America should be complex, national and predominantly American.

    A neo-industrial infrastructure necessarily must be complex, because the purpose of a neo-industrial infrastructure would be onshoring – arresting and in some cases reversing the transfer of high-value-added manufacturing and services to other countries. This requires something more than freight rail bringing Chinese imports to Wal-Mart and airports helping to deliver Amazon.com boxes to urban apartments. It requires an infrastructure tailored to the needs of an entire complex ecosystem of factories, design offices, and their suppliers and contractors. And that infrastructure not only must be rebuilt in existing industrial areas like Detroit but also built from scratch in areas such as the Great Plains. It would aim to put many of tomorrow’s factories and research parks in today’s depopulating rural areas and derelict inner cities.

    A neo-industrial infrastructure must be national and inclusive in scope. Its goal resonates with the aspiration of Henry Clay Whigs, Lincoln Republicans and William Jennings Bryan Populists – a decentralized, prosperous middle-class society of small and medium-sized towns as opposed to a country where half a billion people are crammed into a few plutocratic megacities and forced to live in dense apartment blocks.

    Such decentralization – contrary to the claims of some urbanists and greens – need not mean excessive “sprawl.” This is still a very large country with lots of land, as anyone who spends time away from the coasts recognizes.

    But more important, there can only be an independent middle-class majority in a United States with 400 or 500 million people in 2050 if most Americans live and work in relatively low-density areas where homes are affordable and small business rents are not crippling. That means building new towns and new industrial centers away from the existing ones, to spread out the population and accommodate tens of millions of new immigrants with desirable skills. The rich, who will remain concentrated in a few metro areas, where they can socialize, compete and conspire with one another, must be taxed by the federal government to subsidize the infrastructure of the entire continental U.S., not just their own cities, metro areas and states.

    Last but not least, a neo-industrial infrastructure must be predominantly national with respect to its components and its workforce. It would be self-defeating to design an infrastructure friendly to American industries and workers and then hire foreign industries and foreign workers to build it. Most or all federal infrastructure spending should be reserved for corporations and suppliers whose high-value-added production takes place on American soil. And all jobs directly or indirectly related to infrastructure construction should be reserved for citizens or legal immigrants. Law-abiding American citizens should not be taxed to subsidize law-breaking illegal immigrant workers and the unpatriotic, criminal contractors who employ them. This is not “nativism.” The right kind of legal immigration would be an important part of any neo-industrial strategy, as would taking advantage of foreign direct investment by foreign companies and sovereign wealth funds in mutually beneficial ways.

    The debate about infrastructure, then, is also a debate about the future industrial profile of America. Will America in the twenty-first century be neo-industrial or post-industrial? This debate, in turn, may well determine whether the U.S. will become a decentralized, continental middle-class society or a collection of plutocratic, hierarchical city-states. The stakes could not be higher.

    Michael Lind is Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Director of the American Infrastructure Initiative.

  • The Dawn of a New Age in the War on Poverty

    An article published in the Chicago Tribune on June 29, 1992 is entitled “The Great Society’s Great Failure.” It profiles the Inez, Kentucky family that appeared in the famous front porch photo that launched LBJ’s War on Poverty in 1964. Suffice it to say without revealing the particular gory details of their thwarted lives, the family’s fate was as dismal as the outcome of the War on Poverty. Mike Duncan, an Inez banker and now chairman of the Republican National Committee – battling to retain his position – put it mildly: “The War on Poverty did not succeed.”

    In 2009 where do we stand with America’s War on Poverty? Inez and the rest of Martin County were described in the article as “one of the poorest counties in a poor state. Of its 12,526 people, all but 27 are white.” The image stuck and Inez has been digging out ever since.

    The community’s lack of progress over the past several decades has been particularly ironic: until recently, the rest of America has been experiencing one of the greatest economic expansions in history.

    Now we have elected our first African American to the office of the presidency, a man who cut his political teeth working among the black poor of Chicago’s Southside. Barack Obama’s election has no doubt raised hopes around the Southside and other predominately African American distressed communities. But can the same be said for the more numerous, equally intractable neglected communities – labeled poor, white, aging, and rural (PWAR) – like Inez?

    This line of thinking has become even more popular as evidenced by the racial overtones, masquerading as satire, included on a CD released by a challenger of Mike Duncan for the RNC chair position. Politicos say there is a divide within both of the major political parties – appeal to the PWAR and die or reach out to gather more under the tent. PWARs are rarely spoken of in the media except in pejorative terms

    So far, there is little evidence that poor rural whites – epitomized by Appalachia – have any strong advocates in the new administration. There is not a single cabinet officer from anywhere in the deep or mid-south nor any important figure in the majority party from the region.

    So, what happens to the fortunes of the regions – the South in particular – in the new order? Will the battle of red versus blue gain new ground or will other rivalries and labels rise up? Will a region whose economy revolves around coal have a chance in a “new green world?”

    Right now places like Kentucky – decidedly red – could well be marginalized. The media enjoys painting our citizens as ignorant rubes (how else could they have voted against Obama?) This was implied in the mainstream news. (CNN had particular fun with it while profiling Clay County, Kentucky before the election and conducting a trailer escapade in Carlisle, Kentucky after the election).

    Seventeen years after the Tribune’s article, Inez and the rest of Martin County have chosen to declare their own war to overcome the endemic national stereotype that the War on Poverty placed upon them. This new spirit of localism was born first among the community’s young professionals who left Inez as high school graduates and have now returned as educated professionals seeking to earn their own piece of the American Dream. Their hope has been burnished in the fire of experiences gained as they saw and experienced the rewards of hard work and determination in other places. They concluded that Inez and Martin County could be something different, and they have returned to make it so.

    It is clear that President-elect Obama has a choice: be a great president and a uniter, or not. They say FDR was great because he reached out to those who were not for him. The times now are eerily similar. One hopes that a man who grew up as an outsider might realize that the “hill” people of Appalachia or the deep South aren’t all pathetic as portrayed in the news media; perhaps they don’t understand the message of hope because they have been betrayed before by “outsiders” attempting to convert them to the “mainstream.” The failures of the ‘war on poverty’ are still well remembered here.

    Not all 100 or more million new Americans who will be here by 2050 will head for the eight supercities. The vast majority won’t find work that will allow them to settle in the so-called “creative” hotbeds. Many will head for small to mid-sized towns with more affordable lifestyles, and perhaps more durable values. Perhaps others will begin to believe in the old adage that we can live and work anywhere and will do so, taking the opportunity to bring change to our communities.

    For its part, Inez, Kentucky has decided to rewrite its story and believes it can do so. As an Appalachian native, I believe it too. Their story is one of grit, determination, and sheer willpower to change the course of the future in a positive way. At a recent public meeting, an African American woman who had moved to Inez from D.C. stood up and provided a testimonial of faith and belief in her newfound home. She hoped others would come and begin to appreciate the lifestyle of a small town in hill and coal country. I had to ask afterward – is she for real? “Yes” came the reply, “she is very real.”

    A recent Esquire magazine feature called on “natives” to describe each of the 50 states. Actor Harry Dean Stanton, in the midst of philosophical ramblings, said: “There’s no answer to the state of Kentucky.” I don’t believe that’s entirely true.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.

  • Scrap Zoning; Legalize Great Places

    Crisis offers opportunity. With real estate in a freefall, there is an opportunity to lay the foundation for a more prosperous and sustainable American landscape.

    If only there is the vision and political will.

    What is the single most significant change that can be made in every town and city in America? One that would aid economic development, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, foster healthier lifestyles, reduce dependence on foreign oil, protect open space and wildlife habitats, and reduce wasteful government spending?

    Scrapping zoning codes.

    Take any great place that people love to visit. You know, those lively tourist haunts from Nantucket to San Francisco. Those red hot neighborhoods from Seattle’s Capital Hill to Miami Beach’s Art Deco district. Those healthy downtowns from Portland, Oregon to Chicago, Illinois to Charleston, South Carolina. What do they all have in common?

    The mix of uses that gives them life are outlawed by zoning in virtually every city and town in all 50 states.

    Widespread adoption of zoning is a legacy of Herbert Hoover. As Commerce Secretary, he pushed zoning regulations to cure “the enormous losses in human happiness and in money, which have resulted from lack of city plans which take into account the conditions of modern life.” He championed the “Standard Zoning Enabling Act” to address “the moral and social issues that can only be solved by a new conception of city building.” After the Supreme Court upheld zoning in 1926, zoning — and sprawl — spread from sea to shining sea.

    The high court based its decision on the need to protect health and safety by “excluding from residential areas the confusion and danger of fire, contagion and disorder which in greater or less degree attach to the location of store, shops and factories.” The quite sensible idea that people shouldn’t live next to steel mills was used to justify a system of “zones” to isolate uses that had lived in harmony for centuries. Suddenly, new neighborhoods were segregated by income, and commerce was torn asunder from both customers and workers. Timeless ways of creating great places were ruthlessly outlawed.

    This coincided neatly with the rise of the car industry, and the systematic dismantling of America’s electric streetcar network. Today, we look back nostalgically on the “streetcar suburbs” and the booming cities of turn-of-the-century America when we sing:

    City sidewalks, busy sidewalks
    Dressed in holiday style
    In the air there’s a feeling of Christmas.
    Children laughing, people passing,
    Meeting smile after smile
    And on every street corner you’ll hear. . .
    Silver bells, silver bells
    It’s Christmas time in the city.

    But zoning, cars, and suburban development put an end to such “contagion and disorder,” replacing busy “city sidewalks” with enclosed malls, parking lots, and traffic congestion.

    Today, almost everyone admits the environmental and social devastation caused by sprawl, though some still defend it as a response to the consumer market. But “The American Dream” of single-family tracts, shopping centers and business parks owes more to zoning mandates than to market economics. Zoning was imposed on the American landscape by an unholy alliance between Utopians preaching a “modern” way of life and hard-headed businessmen who profited from supplying that new model, including an auto industry steeped in the ideology that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

    Politicians at every level bought into sprawl, playing both sides of the zoning game to harvest votes and campaign cash. It’s no coincidence that the rocket-fueled career of Vice President Spiro Agnew began at a suburban zoning board. He would have succeeded Richard Nixon as president if criminal charges for taking bribes from developers hadn’t caught up to him and forced his resignation first.

    For a long time, support for zoning was impregnable. In the only country on earth to organize its urban form around Crayola colors on a map, those who questioned zoning were treated like the lunatics who denounce paper money.

    Until now, perhaps. Younger Americans are turned off by the devotion of Baby Boomers to the landscape of “Leave it to Beaver.” Environmentalists are slowly realizing that, in protection of the environment, cities aren’t the problem, they are actually the solution. A movement of post-modern planners, architects, developers, transit advocates and historic preservationists has emerged under the banners of “smart growth,” “new urbanism” and “green building.” And at the local level, citizen activists (and even elected officials) are finally pushing to reverse suburban sprawl. A new vision has emerged around building compact and energy-efficient communities for the future.

    What’s been lacking is the tool for producing that outcome, and for supplanting zoning at the local level. If “zoning” is the DNA of sprawl – the coding that endlessly replicates the bleak landscape of autotopia – then what is the DNA of livable communities?

    It is found in timeless ways of building, updated for the 21st Century, including the need to accommodate cars. It regulates incompatible uses without the absurdities of conventional zoning. It is calibrated for new buildings to contribute to their context and to the larger goal of making a great place. It does so primarily by regulating the form of buildings, since that is what determines the long-neglected public realm of streets and sidewalks. It does that by regulating setbacks, heights and the physical character of buildings.

    It exists, and it’s quietly spreading.

    Where it’s been tried, it’s been a success. Seaside, Florida, the poster town for “new urbanism,” was “coded” rather than zoned, and ended up on the cover of Time magazine. In 2003, Petaluma, California scrapped its zoning regulations and adopted a new code for 400 underdeveloped acres in their Downtown, producing more than a quarter billion dollars in new investment. Miami, Florida is the first major city in America to embark on replacing zoning citywide.

    Unfortunately, this promising alternative is currently saddled with two competing names, both of them unsatisfactory if the movement is truly to catch fire.

    “Form-based codes” is the cumbersome term popular amongst planners. It is a literal tag that captures the emphasis on regulating the “form” of buildings, rather than the obsession with their “use” that is common to all zoning codes. But Americans suffer collective amnesia about why the form of cities determines their character; so while it addresses the “how” of coding, it fails to convey the “why.”

    It clearly lacks the appeal of “No Child Left Behind” or “Homeland Security” as a marketing tool for reform.

    Recognizing this, Seaside’s designer, Andres Duany, coined the term “smart codes.” The advantages of replacing a “zoning code” with something called a “smart code” are pretty obvious: “smart” is much better than “dumb,” which is why “smart growth” has caught on as a slogan. The obvious tool for promoting “smart growth” would be “smart codes.”

    But the problem with the term “smart codes” is the same as the problem with the slogan “smart growth.” Pretty soon, everybody starts calling their codes “smart,” even if they aren’t. This has actually happened with lots of really atrocious developer schemes that have masqueraded as “smart.”

    The magnitude of the problem may trump the limitations of the current names for the solution. While some still claim that the real estate meltdown is only a nasty cyclical slump, that’s just whistling past the graveyard. The model is broken. Building and financing generic products (class A office; suburban housing tract; grocery-anchored strip center; business park, etc.) through globally marketable securities has become radioactive. By the time supply and demand right themselves, the un-sustainability of the whole underlying system will be laid bare.

    Of course, one can never underestimate what historian Barbara Tuchman called “the march of folly.” Perhaps in the interest of “stimulus” to the moribund economy, we will be willing to spend trillions more to subsidize sprawl. But in the end, as economist Herbert Stein pointed out, “That which cannot go on forever, won’t.”

    Before that day comes, we can save untold environmental, economic and social damage by the widespread adoption of coding that respects human scale, restores the proximity of complimentary uses, and repairs the damage done to the American landscape and our rich (but abandoned) tradition of creating fine neighborhoods, towns and cities.

    Scrap zoning. Adopt coding. Legalize the art of making great places that people cherish, that produce economic value, and that leave a lighter environmental footprint on the land.

    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.”

  • Hyde Park, St. Louis: Are We Almost There Yet?

    Among potential titles for this article about the Hyde Park neighborhood of St. Louis, I played with The Archaeology of Stasis. My husband suggested It’s Not Happening Here. But neither seemed right. Both were too depressing to describe a place where people are working hard for change. I wanted a title that suggested a lot of hard work, but hope nonetheless.

    I recently toured the neighborhood on a chilly Sunday morning with a former graduate student of mine, Dan Gaeng. Hyde Park is in north St. Louis, near downtown. Its roots extend to the 1830s and ‘40s, when large numbers of German Americans settled there. Today, it is predominantly African-American. Dan, whose dad grew up in Hyde Park, had written a paper about the neighborhood, and it captured much of what I feel about the city of St. Louis in general. All the ingredients are here for a city that can turn the corner and make urban living a reality for a wide swath of folks – a few solid industries, devoted locals, an ideal location for communication and transportation with the rest of the nation, beautiful old housing stock, at least the bones of a viable public transportation network, ongoing local traditions, and affordable living. Yet St. Louis never seems to get there.

    There are some neighborhoods that have done it, to be sure. And downtown looks a lot better than it did when it served as the post-apocalyptic setting for “Escape from New York.” But there’s still a sense that St. Louis is stalled, moving neither toward recovery nor toward total desolation.

    The negative tinge to my headline candidates no doubt owed something to Kenneth Jackson’s 1985 Crabgrass Frontier. The author traces the construction of interstates, federal housing programs, mortgage lending practices, and white flight to explain the abandonment of urban cores for increasingly distant suburbs. St. Louis is a poster child of the phenomenon. Jackson quotes former St. Louis mayor Raymond Tucker, who explained in frustration, “We just cannot build enough lanes of highways to move all of our people by private automobile, and create enough parking space to store the cars without completely paving over our cities and removing all of the economic, social, and cultural establishments that the people were trying to reach in the first place.”

    Excoriating a 1973 RAND study that suggested that St. Louis could become “one of many large suburban centers of economic and residential life,” Jackson suggests that “such advice is for those who study statistics rather than cities. Too late, municipal leaders will realize that a slavish duplication of suburbia destroys the urban fabric that makes cities interesting.”

    And he paints a grim picture of neighborhoods like Hyde Park, as he notes St. Louis’s declining population. “Many of its old neighborhoods have become dispiriting collections of burned-out buildings, eviscerated homes, and vacant lots. Although the drone of traffic on the nearby interstate highways is constant, there is an eerie remoteness to the pock-marked streets. The air is polluted, the sidewalks are filthy, the juvenile crime rate is horrendous, and the remaining industries are languishing. Grimy warehouses and aging loft factories are landscaped by weed-grown lots adjoining half-used rail yards. Like an elderly couple no longer sure of their purpose in life after their children have moved away, these neighborhoods face an undirected future.”

    Twenty-three years after Jackson’s words, Hyde Park’s perseverance suggests that his portrait, while apt, misses a remarkably resilient local pride. Indeed, one title I considered was On the One Hand, On the Other Hand. It’s not that Hyde Park hasn’t suffered from the very trends that Jackson describes. In the mid-1950s, I-70 split the residential side of the neighborhood from its industrial workplaces. Pedestrian traffic virtually stopped. The decline of industrial employment in the city and white flight followed. The neighborhood appeared to hit bottom in the late 1960s, when youths began stealing from elderly residents.

    Since then, a series of revitalization efforts have made their own mark. The result is a patchwork of hope and despair. Renovated nineteenth-century homes mix with recently constructed townhouses, shuttered and crumbling row houses, and piles of burnt-out bricks. Some owners clearly take pride in their houses and yards (many yards still proudly displayed Obama signs on my post-election tour), while other properties appear barely occupied. The traces of old business names are visible on the bricks. It’s just the kind of local color that proponents of gentrification are fond of preserving, but there are few local businesses in operation now. An artist has purchased a former library, which he hopes to turn into a gallery, but it’s not yet open, and there’s no public art in the neighborhood.

    There is a full grocery store on the northern edge, but it’s a hike from the most vibrant part of Hyde Park, the cluster of homes that surround the still-active Holy Trinity Catholic Church and parish school. The church has bought up some of the area’s property and encouraged resettlement, much of it in Section 8 housing, but three of the most recent homes are shuttered because no one has purchased them. Former locals and parish school graduates do return to church on Sundays, but the neighborhood is now mainly non-Catholic.

    A local developer, who calls his company Blue Shutters (to contrast with the ubiquitous red shutters that signal the city’s purchase of a desolate building), has renovated several houses. He also has plans for the Turnverein, a one-time German exercise hall, which could serve as a community center. Dan mentioned that his parents held their wedding reception there. Unfortunately, the Turnverein had a serious fire in 2006. As the St. Louis blog “Ecology of Absence” noted, the fire received hardly any attention in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The neighborhood received historic district status in the 1970s, but when I mentioned to my co-workers, students and neighbors that I had toured Hyde Park, none of them knew where it was.

    And maybe that doesn’t matter. I see no way that Hyde Park could become the kind of gentrified neighborhood that lures hipsters and boutiques, and makes city council members salivate. Moreover, the folks who have committed themselves to the slow and steady efforts of revitalization don’t seem to want their home to be such a place. As one of the residents whom Dan interviewed said, “Other people have wondered why I haven’t left, and I say, ‘Why should I? I’m fine here’. The neighbors look out for each other, and I like the house and neighborhood. There is a nice mixture of people, from the poor to the college educated and well-off. That’s important to me. I don’t want to live in just a homogeneous upper-middle-class area.”

    A remarkably diverse selection of institutions and people are involved in Hyde Park’s revitalization: “Ecology of Absence” blogger Michael Allen (also the Assistant Director of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis), Holy Trinity Church, and the Friedens Neighborhood Association, which is training local high school drop-outs in construction trades and providing G.E.D. preparation. Of course, there are also the dedicated folks who patiently turn out for one redevelopment meeting after another to plot the painstaking steps – the creation of an entry monument, for example, or streetscape enhancements – that could turn Hyde Park into a place that feels fully inhabited.

    It’s possible that twenty-three years from now Hyde Park will make me think not about Crabgrass Frontier, but about another book I read with my graduate students: Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, a study of the grassroots efforts behind the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi. Activist Ella Baker called the day-to-day efforts behind the movement “spade work.” It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t get a lot of credit, but there’s no real movement without it. There’s a lot of spade work going on in Hyde Park. It just might build a place.

    For more on Hyde Park, see:
    Ecology of Absence Blogspot, Friedens Neighborhood Foundation, Landmarks Association of St.Louis, St.Louis Development Corp.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • Bailing out on the Dreamland…And Returning Home

    My father, who was from eastern Kentucky, headed with millions of other Appalachian people for the “promised land” after the great depression. The promised land in that day consisted of cities such as Dayton, Detroit, Gary, and Cincinnati, out of which rose great factories that employed thousands on giant “campuses.” They thrived through the vigor of this transplanted workforce – uneducated like my father but full of gumption, tenacity and work ethic.

    My father tells of begging for a job: when turned down by Personnel, he went running, not walking, to see the foreman who put him “right to work that night.” It was in those factories that my dad and other “immigrants” found good middle-class pay…if little in the way of inspiring work. But, he and the others were not picky, as necessity was the mother of this invention.

    Today the world is different. Many of the workers who left for jobs in other cities are returning home to Appalachia – and not entirely by choice. Many of them are being laid off from the auto factories with little else to turn to but family and ties to “place”.

    This creates a new challenge to areas like Appalachia and my region, eastern Kentucky. These are no longer inevitable geographies of distress; certainly they are no more challenged that those of the former dreamscapes up north around the Great Lakes.

    The media will be slow to see this change. Recently CNN focused on the poorest of the poor in Clay County, Kentucky in ways that fit the media stereotype as a home to the ignorant, the racist and the sexist. They even quoted a Clay County woman who observed that “Hillary’s place was in the home.”

    The media is not the only group stuck on the old images. From Kennedy’s famous tour to LBJ’s announcement of the War on Poverty in 1964 from a front porch in Inez, Kentucky to John McCain’s visit during the primary, the region has proven to be an enigma to presidents and policy makers who abhorred the intractable poverty they saw there. It just wasn’t right that an America of plenty would have that “other” “third” world so resistant to the policies and dollars designed to provide transformation.

    In the past, policies were implemented that alternately featured the fundamental nature of the people – not always flattering – to absentee ownership and the exploitation of its rich minerals by outside interests. Or they reflected radical policies and programs that did not take into account the unusual ties to local culture and the strong sense of place and community – attributes that are not often in line with of the culture of consumerism and national mega-corporate prominence.

    Have we reached a turning point where the peeling away of the onion reveals not a past assessment of red America as epitomized by sound bite depictions but one of lessons that can be learned? We were surprised if not alarmed by a Greenspan who admitted that he too was caught off guard by the crash of 2008. We were lulled into believing that Harvard and Yale graduates really do know more and are smarter than the rest of us. We were lulled into believing that just one more plastic Santa or TV set made in China was going to fill the void in our busy lives.

    Have we turned a corner? My father tells of his father making mandolins to supplement his small income as a dirt farmer. He also tells of crops failing and of meager, if existent, Christmas presents. But each spring this man with ties to the land and place reminds me to “plant my corn when tree buds are the size of squirrel ears.” Now I don’t know the first thing about planting corn or even what a squirrel ear looks like. But as we move through the current crisis and a reassessment of the American Dream, I hear echoes of a desire here not to embrace modernity but to seek a return of front porches; local foods and farms; a desire for something beyond the cold flickering computer screen in the middle of the night; and an understanding that we may have, if not more information, perhaps more wisdom than those who hold themselves out as experts.

    All this will be critical as we consider people returning from the Great Lakes and the big cities back to Appalachia. Rather than seeing them as new victims, or unreconstructed red staters, the Obama Administration needs to regard these people as assets for renewing a part of the country that, always close to last, can begin to fulfill its own potential on its own terms.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.

  • Bailout or Just in Time Delivery?

    Toyota is careful in its ways; it didn’t get where it is today by idly locating manufacturing plants. And, so it chose Georgetown, Ky. – 12 miles north of Lexington on I-75 – for the location of its first and largest U.S. plant. It was followed in the ensuing years by numerous other foreign auto plants locating in the South – BMW, Mercedes, Saturn, Hyundai and yet another Toyota (in Mississippi).

    Why, you may ask, did they come to the South? The easy answer is that they came for cheaper land and labor. They were also drawn by large and much criticized tax incentive packages as the South decided – value judgments aside – to get in the game and establish a manufacturing base to replace the sagging agriculturally based small farm economy. Here in Kentucky, the less than bright future for tobacco was ample motivation for welcoming Toyota.

    But I believe there is more to this move. They came also for laborers eager to find the good paying auto jobs that had escaped the South for too long. The influx reversed a trend of Southerners leaving for the great factories of the North as my father did 60 years ago as he fled Appalachian Kentucky for Dayton, Ohio.

    Also, contrary to East Coast “attitudes” they came for another reason – the work ethic common to this region. In Kentucky workers from 116 of its 120 counties were hired when Toyota began operations – 7,000 strong. They wanted to work, and were willing to move, commute, or hitchhike for the opportunities. Just as importantly, Toyota created a new employment strategy of hiring a “cushion” of temporary employees to insulate full-time employees from the impact of an eventual economic downturn.

    This image contrasts that of Southerners – particularly those in Appalachia – as generally lazy, fat, dumb, happy, pregnant, barefoot, toothless, racist, sexist or any combination thereof. Speaking of lazy, we can thank Gary Tuchman and CNN for the latest contribution to stereotyping our Commonwealth when they chose to find poor sad people on a front porch in Clay County Ky., to enunciate in butchered English their discouragement with the state of the world.

    So when we hear about the bailouts, first for the financial industry and now the Detroit-based U.S. auto industry, we have reason for skepticism. Our auto industry – that is the generally healthy industry created by Japanese, Korean and German manufacturers – doesn’t seem on the bailout list. Neither do our local banks. They’re not too big to fail and not stupid enough to follow the lead of Wall Street.

    Of course, we don’t want to see any part of America fail, including Detroit. According to one Toyota executive, the webbing of the auto industry is so intertwined that the failure of the U.S. auto industry would bring down the entire house of cards, including the supplier plants that Toyota and other “new age” manufacturing plants call “just in time delivery” facilities.

    But others do see the bailout as undermining a trend that favors efficiency in manufacturing – and the wise investment Toyota and other companies have made in developing smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Still others are baffled about what they would do if it was their congressional vote. The global economy has grown complex in many ways. Among the most vexing issues are those surrounding present and future government involvement in private companies.

    Ultimately we wonder what the attitude of the new administration will be toward Kentucky and the South. Kentucky in particular stood out once again with early poll closings, to be declared “red,” by a large percentage as it went to McCain. Obama tiptoed only once into the state, and that was in “blue” Louisville. He made no effort to win us over as Kennedy and Clinton had in earlier presidential campaigns. We will soon learn if he remains true to his rhetoric that proclaims that we are neither “red” nor “blue” but one America.

    There’s much our new President could do for this part of the world. The mega car factories might show what our workforce is capable of but they have not been enough to reverse our relatively low per capita incomes. New investments – roads, waterways, freight rail lines, skills training – could help lift our region up even further. We just hope that the new President realizes that all of America will benefit if the South can build on its automotive industry success to achieve a much broader prosperity.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.

  • Understanding the Geography of the 2008 Election

    Scholars as well as pundits and politicians will study this remarkable election exhaustively. Many, including me, will use county data, because they are convenient and available. From a statistical point of view, counties are lousy units, because of huge variation in size and excess internal variability. But we can’t resist, so here are some at least suggestive findings.

    First, what correlates with the percent voting for Obama? By far the strongest variables are negative – characteristics associated with voting Republican: a county’s share of husband-wife families (-.64), the rate of home ownership (-.55), percent working in craft occupations (-.52), and religious membership (-.51) all work against Obamamania. Other high negative correlations were with percent rural (-.48), with percent white (-.47), other positive were median rent (.45) and percent foreign born (.45). These are not at all surprising, and are what the exit polls told us.

    The highest positive correlations for Obama lay in percentages of non-family households with 2 or more persons (partners, roommates, .50), percent in urbanized areas (.49), or using public transit (.48), and percent with a BA or higher degree (.46). What these figures highlight is the continuing basic polarization between large metropolitan (+ variables) and non-metropolitan (- variables) areas, and simultaneously between the more modern and diverse character of the big city and the more traditional and conservative values of much of non-big city America.

    But, you may protest, we thought race, ethnicity and age played a big role in this election? Indeed, they did, but the correct dependent variable should be the degree of change in the share voting Democratic. In other words, what helps distinguish the 2008 from the 2004 results? The largest effect, of course, is simply the quite large 5-6 percent shift in national sentiment because of economic uncertainty and disillusionment with the Republican regime.

    But beyond that, the pro-Obama variables tend to be the percent of women in the labor force, percent with a BA degree, median household income (yep, time to toss out the traditional wisdom of Republicans being the party of the ‘rich’), non-family households, professional-managerial occupations, and, yes, percent Hispanic, percent Black and percent aged 25-34. In contrast variables leading to a lesser shift, no shift, or even more Republican, were again church membership, percent rural, percent in crafts jobs, and percent 45-64 or over 65, and percent with less than a 9th grade education.

    Overall, education, occupation, age, race and ethnicity help us understand Democratic strength in large metropolitan America and also in rural and small-town American Indian, Black and Hispanic areas, especially in parts of the South and West. But areas and regions with a less educated and professional populace, with higher rates of religious persuasion, with fewer women in the labor force, and with older populations remained loyally Republican. This helps us understand the resistance to Obama and the Democrats in Appalachia and across the border South, from WV, through KY and TN, AR, LA and OK.

    An interesting geographic phenomenon should be noted: the emergence of Chicago and the upper Midwest as part of the new Democratic coalition. Metropolitan Chicago provided Obama with a margin of almost 1.5 million votes, more than New York or Los Angeles. This presaged a gigantic increase in Democratic margins throughout the upper Midwest, including IN, IL, MI, WI, IA, and MN. In this one part of the country more than 150 counties moved from the Republican to the Democratic column. In addition to the big shifts on the coasts, this is where Obama gained the most ground.

    If this pattern continues, the Democrats may well have achieved a critical mass in their core support, adding a powerful upper Midwest base to their almost total control of both coasts. These would leave the GOP with little more than the heart of the Old Confederacy – even that is threatened in places like North Carolina and Virginia by modernization – as well as more socially conservative regions such as Appalachia and parts of the Great Plains. It’s not a pretty picture if you are a Republican.

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

  • Influence of ‘Creative Class’ Ideas in Sweden

    By Nima Sanandaji, Johnny Munkhammar, and Peter Egardt

    The American academic Richard Florida has gained international attention for his theories about the “creative class”. According to Florida, the key to urban success lies in attracting certain groups of people, such as artists, scientists and twenty-something singles. Florida insists that this can be accomplished through nursing a specific type of culture within a city: hip cafes, art galleries and other manifestations of indigenous street-level culture.

    Florida’s theories have become rather popular in Sweden, the country which tops the list of his creativity index. In a recent study about urban development in Sweden, we have found that Florida’s ideas mainly attract the political left. The Social Democratic Party, as well as the former communist party, embrace Florida’s ideas on their party web pages. The Social Democrats go as far as to quote Florida in a parliamentary bill.

    In Sweden, Florida’s ideas are used by those who wish to argue that public funding of cultural events, rather than a competitive business climate, is the way to achieve economic growth. These urban planners quote Florida in their development strategies, shifting focus from business friendly reforms to attracting “unusual shops” in order to bring development to communities struck by high unemployment and other social ills.

    Swedish cities thus risk choosing the same strategy as Berlin, where the focus of administrators for many years has been to attract art galleries, fashion shows and hip cafes, but where basic conditions for development have been neglected. The bureaucracy in Berlin has a less-than-business-friendly attitude, and taxes for those with typical means of income, as well as for entrepreneurs, remain high.

    The result of these policies, aiming to market Berlin as “a city of glamour” to attract the creative class, has been rampant unemployment. Between 2000 and 2006 The European Union spent close to 2 billion US dollars (1.3 billion Euros) to attempt to curb the economic crisis in the city.

    Florida has, together with two Swedish co-writers (amongst others), recently published an index of creativity in Swedish municipalities. The results of this index are interesting to examine. In accordance with observations made by Harvard Professor Edward L. Glaeser, Florida’s definition of the creative class builds upon the inclusion of well educated people; municipalities with high percentages of educated people are defined as being creative.

    However, in many cases, the rankings in Florida’s Swedish index have little to do with actual creativity or the fundamentals for growth and progress within a municipality. Among 290 Swedish municipalities, the one best fitting Florida’s criterion of creativity is Södertälje.

    This is quite astonishing, since Södertälje is seldom seen as a role model for other municipalities. Among the 26 municipalities in the Swedish capital region, Södertälje has the second highest unemployment rate. The business climate there ranks, according to the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, as only the 199th most business friendly amongst Swedish municipalities.

    The municipality in the capital region that has the highest unemployment rate is Botkyrka. It is number 233 in business climate. In Florida’s index, however, Botkyrka gains a respectable position as the 22nd most creative municipality.

    While places with failing business climates, high unemployment, high crime rates and overall failing development can be ranked as highly creative in Florida’s Swedish index, actual creativity is not always acknowledged.

    Gnosjö is a small Swedish municipality made famous by its frequent use as an example of how a spirit of entrepreneurship can lift up a community. The unemployment rate is much lower in Gnosjö than in the rest of Sweden. Gnosjö is indeed full of creativity, but in Florida’s index it only ranks as the 141st most creative municipality. Florida’s index fails to catch the real origins of creativity and cultural development in Sweden.

    Abroad, many believe Sweden to be the very showcase for social democratic welfare states. However, ambitious reforms implemented during the past few decades have transformed Sweden into a competitive economy with an increasing degree of economic freedom and strong growth.

    In the wake of this development, culture, fine food and the arts have all blossomed in Swedish cities. Tourists, as well as businesses, are attracted not least to the capital city of Stockholm. The strategy underlying this development has been based on a sound business-and-growth-friendly policy orientation, not a Berlin style emphasis on public subsidies of culture over families and businesses. Cultural development has occurred as the result of a growing economy, not the opposite.

    Nima Sanandaji is President of the think tank Captus. Johnny Munkhammar is President of the consulting agency Munkhammar Advisory. They are authors of a report for the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce about urban development. Peter Egardt is President of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.

  • 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.”

  • New Urbanism’s Economic Achilles Heel

    By Richard Reep

    Whether one believes that form follows function or that function can follow form, a town or a city needs three key elements to be healthy. Firstly, a sense of place that includes the sacred is important to people to provide a basis for spiritual involvement. The city must then be able to reliably deliver safety and security to its inhabitants in order to grow and mature. And lastly, a city must provide the means of employment for its inhabitants.

    New Urbanism, in its quest to dictate the physical form of an urban development, has ignored the last key element. An examination of New Urbanism in developments in Central Florida shows a glaring lack of employment, raising questions about their sustainability and long-term viability.

    As we enter the second decade of Celebration, it is useful to look at this city and its influence on the surrounding region. Opened in 1996, Celebration incorporated much of the design philosophy that was formulated around the idea that a city should have a certain “look.” This design philosophy was promulgated to the general public in Suburban Nation, a book that lashed out at the current suburban form and proposed a new form based on a nostalgic notion about a golden age of American town-making, generally in the first decades of the last century.

    By regulating the specific architectural form of a new development, the New Urbanists proposed to improve the blandness, placelessness, and lack of character that is the lot of most contemporary suburbs. Celebration, sponsored by Disney, opened to white-hot press acclaim nationwide. Phase 2 was opened ahead of schedule due to demand for new homes. Market values of homes rose quickly beyond the norm for Central Florida. Developers took notice.

    Soon, other spawn of Celebration began to show up in Central Florida, and today we have several New Urbanist communities that aspire to the same level of success. Baldwin Park, funded by Chicago’s Pritzker family, is a smaller scale version of Celebration located in the City of Orlando and convenient to downtown. Avalon Park, in the southeast corner of Orange County, is accessed from the perimeter highway that is turning Orlando into a mini-Atlanta. Horizon West, the youngest of these, is due west of Downtown Orlando, and offers another New Urbanist antidote to subdivisions, adhering to the same formula of “live, work, and play.” All of these, including Celebration, are coping with the housing crisis, foreclosure crisis, and various other current market conditions just like the rest of us.

    Sadly the “live, work, and play” slogan, which comes from New Urbanist literature, does not bear out in reality. The notion is fine enough: that people can reduce commutes by living and working in the same community. During the supposedly halcyon days of pre-auto, early 20th century America, this was the reality for many Americans. One’s life could occur within a small, walkable radius, reinforcing itself and reinforcing the social bonds of a community.

    But the early 21st Century is very different than the early 20th and New Urbanist attempts to travel backwards in time have met with limited success. To work near where you live, there needs to be employment down the street. None of these communities have employment opportunities – jobs – down the street from the residences. The dwellers of all these communities get in their cars and drive to their jobs off-campus. New Urbanism thus becomes an after-6pm-and-weekend lifestyle choice, not a new way of life.

    In Celebration, many of the early residents were Disney executives; only 4 or 5 years after opening did Disney develop office space in Celebration for some of their offices. Baldwin Park, approximately 2 miles from Downtown Orlando, never pretended to capture the employment aspect, instead selling itself (to many Celebration residents who rushed to this newer, hipper version of their town) as a downtown commute. And neither Avalon Park nor Horizon West have employment opportunities within their town centers. What they do have is easy access to the area’s ring road – ensuring vehicular congestion outside of their New Urbanist communities.

    What is in their Town Centers? Ironically, you find only a small shopping district and the ubiquitous Publix, Florida’s home-grown grocery store chain. The formula of “live-work-play” must stick in the craw of those who are employed in these stores, because the Publix employees, Starbucks baristas, dry cleaner cashiers, and others who do work in these Town Centers can not possibly afford the New Urbanist real estate. Rather than a social continuum (as was more common in the idealized version of America), there is a new social schism, with the New Urbanist underclass forced to commute to the New Urbanist communities from more affordable but less trendy housing nearby.

    In contrast, the region’s native communities have been thriving throughout the same growth period. Communities like College Park, adjacent to Orlando’s downtown, offer something that New Urbanist communities do not: diverse housing, from garage apartments and rental communities up to stately mansions, all within walking distance of each other. They offer an idiosyncratic mix of sacred places, playgrounds, schools, and shops in what the Philadelphia architect and theorist Robert Venturi calls “messy vitality.” No overarching body dictated the form, developed transects, or rigidly controlled the distance between the front porch to the street to achieve these vibrant, socially cohesive, and proud neighborhoods.

    New Urbanists claim to reduce the need for cars, but Orlando’s New Urbanist communities make the car more necessary than ever. Built on the periphery of the metropolitan area, they require a vehicle to complete the circle of functions necessary for a healthy society. Orange County planners have been submissive to the New Urbanists – especially after Celebration – but increasingly recognize that they do not solve the problems they claim to solve and instead invent more: higher traffic, less affordable housing near city centers, and lumpy development sprawl.

    The lesson for Orlando is to refrain from being seduced by the beauty contest that New Urbanists proclaim, and instead integrate all the key deeper social values such as safety, security, sacred places, and employment together. This is basic stuff recognized by greater minds – think of George Mitchell at the Woodlands or Victor Gruen in Valencia – who understand that employment constitutes a critical component to building a successful new community. Until New Urbanists learn this basic economic lesson, their contribution to our communities will remain sharply limited.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.