Neal Peirce

Metros are key to the future.

Washington Post Writer's Group, May 24, 10.

Tagged with urban planning, neighborhoods, communities

The nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas are home to 66 percent of Americans, and they’re adding people almost twice as fast as the rest of the country. Our lead corporations and most highly skilled workforces are focused in them. Metros are clearly key to the country’s fate in this fiercely competitive global century.

But can individual metropolitan regions “get their act together” to educate their growing immigrant populations and expanding ranks of the poor — their workforce of the future? As their “baby boomers” turn 65 by the millions, how can they be supported in totally auto-dependent suburbs? If metro sprawl recommences with economic recovery, what happens to America’s need to cut carbon emissions and wean itself from foreign oil?

Those are among key issues raised in the Brookings Institution’s new report — “State of Metropolitan America – On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation.”

Metro-wide cohesion has never been easy: our regions have developed as a broken patchwork of dozens, sometimes hundreds of individual municipalities and even more school districts. We rarely agree to big-scale mergers.

So what are the prospects for improved city-suburban collaboration, some chance to deal with our most pressing problems?

The Brookings report hints at both possibilities and new hurdles.

On the plus side, a powerful stereotype of divisiveness is fading — the idea of cities as declining, poor, minority-packed places, surrounded by young, white, wealthy suburbs. The 2000’s have seen white population grow in many once-troubled cities such as Atlanta, Boston and Washington. Concurrently, Hispanics and blacks have been moving to the suburbs in big numbers; in fact majorities of all our metros’ major racial and ethnic groups, including first-generation immigrants, now live in suburbs. Many high-density suburbs now resemble inner cities in their growth trajectories and commuting patterns.

Suburbs on the urban fringe were growing rapidly until 2006 but then got hit heavily by rising gas prices and then foreclosures. If regions can now stop gobbling up countryside for continued waves of subdivisions on fresh ground, a process that demands ever more roads while older ones crumble, there’s more chance that resources may be turned to sensible “fix it first” infrastructure policies.

Sheer fiscal reality could drive that process. Many of our local governments, especially in urban fringe areas, have been wholly dependent on real estate taxes and the economy of constant new construction. With lowered tax yields and far less construction, many may be open to new accords with their neighbors.

And as Americans increasingly perceive the downward slide in our international competitiveness — signaling the need for education, infrastructure investment and research if we’re to keep pace — the ground may be more fertile for inventive new city-suburban alliances.

There’s also a chance that the federal government’s new “livability” agendas, encouraging and rewarding regions that coordinate their housing, transportation, energy and environmental efforts, may elicit more ingenuity and cohesion among once-warring local jurisdictions.

But a serious new array of obstacles may also confound metropolitan cohesion…