A year ago I posted an idea for something I called a Super-County, a new governmental level that would control metropolitan regions, combining multiple agencies from different counties and states into a single agency which would cut out many levels of beaurocracy and make it much easier for regions to deal with growth, education, traffic, and the environment to name a few.

Recently I found this article in Governing magazine that reminded me of what I said:

The Metropolitan Era
June 30, 2008 By Peter Harkness
Cities and their surrounding suburbs are the new building blocks of an economy both global and local.

Forget about states, cities and counties.

They are so yesterday. What’s in now is metro. No, it has nothing to do with sexual orientation or furniture design. We’re talking about metropolitan areas: the cities along with their environs — including their suburbs, their exurbs, even some of the surrounding rural areas that are tied to the center by employment or commerce.

For decades, urban affairs columnist and author Neal Peirce has trumpeted the underappreciated importance of “citistates,” which he defines as “one or more historic central cities surrounded by cities and towns which have a shared identification, function as a single zone for trade, commerce and communication, and are characterized by social, economic and environmental interdependence.”

Now, as the general election contest gets under way, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program has embarked on an ambitious and clearly well-funded bid to change the way we look at the country and its economy, with the hope of influencing the debate during the campaign and then policy making by the new administration and Congress.

The message goes like this: The top 100 metropolitan areas cover only 12 percent of the national land mass but are home to about two-thirds of its population and its jobs — and even larger shares of “innovative activity”: 78 percent of its patents, 75 percent of those with graduate degrees, 79 percent of air cargo, 94 percent of venture capital funding, and so on. In all, they generate three-quarters of the gross domestic product.

Add in more than 200 other smaller metro areas, and we truly are looking at a metropolitan nation. Peirce puts it in context: “As economic actors, major U.S. citistates compete in size with major world nations. In gross product, the New York region ranks 13th among the world’s top economies, just ahead of Australia, Argentina and Russia. The Los Angeles citistate is bigger than Korea, Chicago greater than Taiwan or Switzerland.” And so, he says, citistates are how “our world is now organizing itself” away from an old way of thinking (federal, state, local) to a new way: global, regional and neighborhood.

The first of two reports from Brookings notes that “we are part of a highly networked global economy in which the world’s major metropolitan areas generate an outsized share of world output. Politics, custom and language continue to separate us into individual nation-states; but trade, migration and investment link Seattle more closely to Shanghai than to Sacramento.”

The problem is that Washington doesn’t get it. Federal officials see only one economy, or occasionally perhaps 50 state economies; the population is divided into 435 congressional districts. The feds “adopt policies that betray no understanding of how our metropolitan dominated economy works,” the Brookings report argues. “And they saddle metropolitan leaders with fragmented, diffuse programs that ignore how thorny public policy programs interrelate and spill across state and local borders.”

Investments Needed

We’re paying a price for this myopia. Productivity is slipping, the supply of scientists and engineers has stalled, research and development funding has declined and patent activity is faltering. K-12 education is underperforming; higher education for the first time on an international scale is slipping. Growth patterns are creating a situation where we’re gobbling up farmland, increasing commuting times well above population growth, and pushing more tons of greenhouse gases into the air.

In short, Brookings concludes, we are ignoring the economic engines that give us the prosperity we now enjoy: our metro areas. To rectify that, it advocates investment in education and training, particularly for new immigrants; in infrastructure to move people, goods and ideas; and in amenities — libraries, museums, public spaces — that draw people into urban centers. And Brookings advocates changing the intergovernmental relationship so that it’s more holistic and flexible. Of course, “investment” is code for “more federal aid,” and so recommendations for a National Innovation Foundation and a Cluster Information Center will be viewed skeptically by Congress.

Washington has neither set a national vision nor any standard for achievement, the report said. It does not lead in areas such as immigration and carbon emissions, where metro governments need guidance. And it doesn’t step aside where it ought to, one reason transportation policy still is biased toward cars and not mass transit.

I’m dubious when any group that doesn’t command money or votes tries to affect the campaign debate, but Brookings may well exert some influence this year. Only 10 days after the think tank convened a large crowd at a Washington hotel to hear its recommendations, Barack Obama spoke in Miami to the nation’s large-city mayors. In language similar to the two reports, he said Washington should “stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America.”

But the presumed Democratic nominee also made it clear that, save for infrastructure help, mayors shouldn’t expect increased aid out of his administration. The federal debt, he said, is too deep.

Link

While not proposing a measure as clear or dramatic as mine, Harkness points out the same flaws I have in regards to the current set up of governmental hierarchy.

I, like most Americans, look at Washington as a broken system. Our leaders clearly don’t understand the changes that are happening all around us. I can’t blame them entirely since the rest of the public also doesn’t quite know what is going on (I’m not going to pretend I know either but I am at least aware of the changes.)

This brings up an op-ed in today’s New York Times by Sudhir Venkatesh, professor of sociology at Columbia and author of American Project, as well as a number of other books on urban poor and globalization. His piece looks at another governmental problem facing cities, HUD (The Department of Housing and Urban Development).

To Fight Poverty, Tear Down HUD

By SUDHIR VENKATESH
Published: July 25, 2008

WITH the nation embroiled in a housing crisis, one would expect the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be playing a central role. But HUD is a marginal player. Although its Federal Housing Administration division has agreed to underwrite new mortgages, it is merely following the leadership of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

This is no accident. HUD’s sidelined role is a product of its anachronistic approach to both housing and cities. It might be best to simply close the agency and create a new cabinet-level commitment to urban development.

In 1965, when HUD was created, its mission was to spur growth in and around cities. The agency provided mortgage assistance to veterans and first-time homeowners, it built housing for the urban poor, and the Federal Housing Administration spurred suburban expansion by recruiting developers and home buyers to a relatively new, untested market.

Since its inception, HUD has had a fairly straightforward recipe: develop good relations with mayors and local real estate leaders, then award grants and underwrite loans that affirm local development priorities. The longtime mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, was often credited for creating the “city that works,” but it was the support of HUD and the housing administration that helped him eradicate slums, build public housing and create the vast array of working-class neighborhoods that are now Chicago’s signature.

But in the last four decades the urban landscape has changed from discrete, independent cities to vast, interdependent regions where people and goods move freely. Between Los Angeles and Orange County, Milwaukee and Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia, cities have no choice but to collaborate on decisions over land use and economic development. In taxation and zoning, regional agencies like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Southern California Regional Rail Authority are as powerful as big-city mayors. And for the first time in our nation’s history, poverty is rising faster in suburbs than in urban cores. In this new era, HUD’s each-city-is-a-separate-whole approach is not only too inflexible and short-sighted, it also hinders effective regional growth.

To see why, consider HUD’s most prominent urban development program: Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (VI). Introduced with much fanfare in 1993, HOPE helped municipal governments demolish dilapidated public housing projects and revitalize their inner cities. To receive program money, mayors agreed to move families from the projects to low-poverty neighborhoods and build mixed-income housing where the projects once stood.

Clinton administration officials were quick to credit HOPE for reducing inner-city poverty. Big city mayors loved it because it gave them license to raze unsightly projects and gentrify their downtowns. Attractive parks and revamped schools — entirely new communities, in essence — brought thousands of middle-class families back to the central city.

But a closer look reveals a more complicated story.

In large cities like Atlanta, Baltimore and Chicago, the program reshuffled project residents to outlying neighborhoods and struggling inner-ring suburbs whose mayors lack the experience and resources to help the incoming poor and stem rising crime and gang activity. More than 80 percent of the families who left Chicago’s demolished projects moved into equally poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.

Lawsuits have appeared every few years since the inception of the HOPE program, alleging that HUD used these funds to resegregate the poor, a violation of civil rights statutes.

A 1998 report from the Government Accountability Office also concluded that HUD oversight was lacking, and HOPE VI was giving greater weight to the interests of real estate developers. This raised widespread concern since private developers are less likely to build affordable housing or maintain usable public spaces.

And the construction of mixed-income housing on HOPE sites has lagged, leading to concerns that HUD policies have reduced the low-income housing stock.

How could a program aimed at curbing inequality and helping the poor end up creating new pockets of poverty? The answer lies partly in HUD’s myopic focus on gentrifying urban cores. The agency ignored studies showing that former project residents would have difficulty finding rental housing in outlying neighborhoods and did not provide assistance for inner-ring suburbs with high rates of foreclosures. HUD resisted calls to slow down housing demolition and to move the poor to areas of high job growth.

By making no effort to ascertain needs and resources on a regional scale, HUD has ended up eliminating poverty in one place while creating distressed, low-income communities in others. If HUD had developed a broader vision, one that tied together inner city and suburb, it could have created policies to help both areas adjust to the modern urban landscape.

In correcting HUD’s missteps, we must first separate “housing policy” from “urban development.” Today, housing policy is dictated by private markets, so why not give the Commerce and Treasury Departments oversight of a single authority that administers Federal Housing Administration financing — needed to keep homes affordable for the majority of Americans — and all of HUD’s other housing programs?

Then, the development needs of our nation’s regions — wide areas like the Northeast corridor or Southern California — could be considered anew. Block grants could provide incentives for municipal and county governments to collaborate. Regionalism must be embraced, even if it tests local officials who fear losing their traditional sources of government financing.

Promoting coherent regional development will also entail linking urban policy concerns like community development and social services with work like rehabbing roads and building railways. With gas prices driving Americans to public transportation, this is a fitting moment to think holistically.

But adding a few more buses won’t do the trick. Americans live too spread out, and economic activity is no longer limited to downtowns. Community-based initiatives — from vocational programs to rezoning efforts to designing effective transportation corridors and recreational space — are sorely needed but will be effective only if they tie into a broader vision that anticipates growth on a large scale.

Even our most persistent problems of inequality will require new strategies. A federal agency devoted to regional planning could help the Health and Human Services Department reconfigure anti-poverty programs to aid suburban communities that have so far gone unnoticed but are desperately in need. It could motivate the Labor Department to develop training programs and support the transportation needs of workers.

We need an agency that can work outside old boundaries and design a regional approach to revitalizing cities and suburbs. Dismantling HUD would be a great place to start.

Link

Venkatesh’s point is that the agencies that we put in place 40 years ago to deal with cities have not evolved as our cities have evolved. Cities are much less important than regions today and our tools for dealing with the new problems regions face are totally inadequate.

This is where the articles dovetail. The world has changed and we are on the verge of being left behind. Mayors for the last 50 years have faced funding problems when their tax bases left the city for the suburbs. The suburbs welcomed the new growth because growth meant tax money. The cities that were left behind were left to rot and die, though this has not happened completely, even the ones that have bounced back still face daunting infrastructure problems.

What is interesting is that now the suburbs are starting to see trouble on the horizon. Too much growth too fast has overburdened many communities. Zoning, which was put in place to keep the character of a place, has led to massive houses on large lots which require cars to get anywhere and everywhere; cars that require more oil and housing that are becoming harder and harder to heat. The suburbs are locked in an unsustainable downward spiral of consumption.

As the suburbs begin to realize their fate, cities are looking to cash in. Already young professionals are looking to live in more humanized places, places where you can walk and interact with people face to face, not car horn to car horn. These are the children of the suburbs who don’t see them as a place to escape to but a place to escape from. Mayors will welcome this influx of population across the nation as they finally see an end to population decline. But the dark truth that isn’t being addressed is that after 40 years of neglect, the schools and roads (as well as rails) of cities are in no shape to take on the growing populations.

What are needed today are tools to deal with cities and suburbs holistically, not as two competing bodies (or pitting cities against cities against suburbs.) Competing with ourselves will not work in a global economy. We must see our settlement patterns from a regional perspective and we must have the right tools to deal with the problems of cities on a regional scale.

I still think a new Super-County would be the best answer here as it would not only combine multiple agencies and streamline beaurocracy, but since the leaders of the super-county would be elected it would give the people of the entire metropolitan region a voice. As of now only mayors of neighboring cities can come together and talk about growth, but this doesn’t happen because Federal policies pit them against one another. An elected board of a super-county would be representing the citizens of both cities and therefore would work for the best solution for both instead of giving one an advantage over the other.

But carving up new political territory is perhaps too ambitious of a goal just yet. What is needed in the mean time is a completely new Federal policies towards cities, ones that brings us together for the greater good, policies that gives cities the tools to deal with the changes that will come in the new century, and policies that can build holistic, sustainable communities instead of either gated off McMansions or low-income ghettos.

Inspired by The Errant Isle of Manhattan, I decided to see what New York City looked like compared to other American metropolitan areas.

Click for more.

While reading the thread about Boston annexing part of Dedham for development, whighlander posted this interesting thought:

No Boston Annexing beyond a bit here and there is a bad idea
However, All of the Cities and Towns within and touching I-495 should be included into a new Metropolitan County
Boston County would absorb all of Suffolk, Most of Eastern Middlesex, Much of Essex, Norfolk much of Plymouth, even a bit of Barnstable
Then the Crazy Quilt of Authorities could be ceded {Debt Free} to Boston County
-Boston County would control Logan, Hanscom Airports, Parking Garages, Railroad Stations, The Subway, Water System
-Boston County would be supported by redirecting {not adding} 1 or 2 cents of the 5 cent sales tax
-Boston County would be governed by an elected County President and a bicameral legislative body {lower house 1 rep per some # of capitas something of the order of 400 reps approximately 10,000 capitas per rep}, upper house 1 per city or town no regard to population}
This moves more government closer to the people gets rid of the massive bureaucracies of the authorities, makes the State gov’t smaller at least a bit
Overall a more representative government
then the Congressional districts can be realigned to get rid of the miserable gerrymandering as Boston County would still have 3 or 4 US Reps and leave one for the Cape and South Coast and one for the extrema of Essex and Middlesex by the NH Border
A dream — but it seemed appropriate to insert it here
Westy

Given how much things have changed over the last 100 years, with highways, high-speed trains, air travel, the internet, etc…, is it time for a new governmental structure too? I am not talking socialism v. democracy, that is theory and I really don’t want that to come into play here, but I mean is our structure of town/city/county/state really the best way to run things when borders are almost meaningless in this day and age?

What do I mean by meaningless? I talk to people who are in Russia, Australia, Japan, South Africa, India, every day via the internet. With the advent of cheap digital cameras I can also see what their lives are like (amazingly they are very similar to mine). Hell, Europe just got rid of most of its purely administrative borders years ago. When this country was founded we were 13 SEPARATE colonies. We could have easily separated and then became 13 separate nations.

The idea of the Megalopolis is not new and I think we are all well aware of it in Boston. I can get on a train or bus in NY or Washington and arrive in Boston and have everything feel very similar (yes there are regional differences but over all things are very much the same, i.e. McDonald’s). And now there are other growing Megalopolises in America, Seattle-Portland, Dallas-Ft.Worth, Chicago-most of the mid-west, Southern California, etc. This idea is far more accelerated in the developing world with mega-cities with 10, 20 million people each. We may think that is far off but remember metropolitan New York City has 20 million people in it today. That only accounts for the city proper, most of Long Island, and small areas of Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York.

Given this new urban structure, how can current city and state governments deal with having societies exist that fall under different jurisdictions? When there is a back up on the George Washington Bridge in New York it screws up traffic from Boston to Washington. But there is nothing Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, or Virginia can do about it if the highway department in New York can’t deal with it.

New York City has threatened secession a few times but these have always been seen as purely symbolic.
But perhaps what we really need is some separate governmental level to take into account the needs of these growing megalopolises; a super-county.

Why are cities like New York, Boston, Philly, and Baltimore fighting each other when we are all in the same boat. The northeast is hurting, we are losing people and jobs because it is so expensive to live here. Different cities have different development policies and different housing problems. But when you look at it regionally you see that all these cities are facing the same problems with education and traffic. But cities all have their unique problems that other cities may have an answer for but cannot change their own policies to affect. Philly can never seem to catch a break, New York is looking at more people then it knows what to do with, and Boston is too proud of it’s own farts to do anything about the precarious economic situation it is in (and seems to always be in). There has to be a better way.

A super-county would be between the state and the county. The purpose of the super county would be to help streamline and iron out the differences between areas in the megalopolis and create efficient growth. A state is not going to want to give up its best parts so the rest suffers. At the same time the state needs to make sure everyone in the state gets their fare share. Many city dwellers feel that states take advantage of the city. The super-county would be a balance to this. The super-county would know what was up all along the megalopolis and thus know what it needed from each state. The states would pay taxes into the super-county rather than dolling out taxes to individual counties and cities. The super-county would use these taxes for the benefit of the entire region (like a couple high-speed rail lines). Planning, transportation, development, education, emergency response, and health care could all be coordinated along the entire megalopolan region. Freight traffic could be better transported in and out of the region if ports weren’t competing with one another; and as an added benefit traffic would be better if so many trucks were taken off the road. The super-county would also address the problem where the wealthy middle class leaves for the suburbs. That loss of tax revenue is devastating to a city, especially one which needs that revenue to fund so many of the cultural programs that makes people want to live near a city in the first place. If some portion of those taxes went to the super-county then the entire city and region would be better off.

A huge area for the super-county to affect is the environment. Cities are dirty (air, water, noise, and light pollution) and they create their own weather with all the heat and energy they emit. If New York does something to cut pollution but Philly and Boston do not then the environmental impact is going to be small. If the entire region could cut down emissions then that would have a much larger impact. As it is now all we can do is have different states pass different laws that are skewed to account for the rest of the state. Would you want medicine that is good for a headache when you have a gunshot wound? We need an environmental plan that deals with the specific problems caused by large urban areas.

The point of a super-county is to have a level of government that can address the needs of multi-millions of people living close together, something that has never happened on this level ever before in human history. We need a machine to run this type of environment because what we have now is not adapted for the brave new world that is ahead of us.