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Posted Jul 1, 2017, 7:38 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
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What’s the Greatest Risk Cities Face?
What’s the Greatest Risk Cities Face?
July/August 2017
By POLITICO MAGAZINE
Read More: http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...experts-215308
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We asked mayors, urbanists and other thinkers to name the biggest threats that American cities currently face, and most took the long view—looking beyond Trump to challenges like urban broadband deserts, a shallow mayoral talent pool, crippling pension crises, and state or federal meddling.
- Vanishing families: The revival of U.S. cities over the past decade has largely been a function of younger Americans, particularly those with a college education, seeking out the excitement and diversity of an urban life. Those younger singles and couples have been flowing back into big cities across the country in various degrees—from D.C. to Denver and even Detroit. But if cities want to become more than just a home for the low and high ends of the economic scale, they will need the stability of families. Millennials will have to decide to stay in their urban homes after the footloose days of hipsterdom and into the more complicated years of parenthood. To do that, cities will need to improve public schools and make sure there are affordable options for those needing larger, family-sized dwellings.
- The menacing skyscraper: As cities expand, more buildings are constructed. But those buildings are putting the health of our cities at serious risk, both at ground level—all those toxic fumes that buildings emit—and at the larger biospheric level, since buildings are major emitters of greenhouse gases. Thankfully, we have made many discoveries that can address this problem. In the future, no building in a city should simply be a building. It also must become an instrument for biospheric capabilities. One example, already in existence, is a kind of invisible paint laced with bacteria that neutralize greenhouse gases; another is a type of bacterium that, when added to the organic runoff from bathrooms and kitchens, produces a kind of plastic that is biodegradable. Using such bio innovations outside and inside vast corporate buildings can, and should, become a whole new business sector.
- The pension bomb: American cities will not be able to confront important challenges, including decaying infrastructure, new transportation investments, gangs, and especially the increasing mental health and addiction crises until they resolve the hidden financial crisis that few talk about: billions in unfunded pension liabilities. Each year, these off-the-book liabilities continue to drain state and city budgets and are bailed out with no long-term resolution. Most large companies have had the foresight to enact reforms over the past two decades, but local, state and federal governments are still in denial, while some baby boomers are continuing to retire as early as 40 to 50 years old. Cities cannot continue to hide this growing liability. Politicians and city management must address current and future unfunded pension plans with major reforms to avoid bankruptcy—or massive tax increases.
- The income gulf: The biggest risk facing cities is really the same risk we face as a nation: income inequality and the creation of a permanent underclass of residents who feel no stake in the well-being of their country or of their city. Urbanization, the global movement of people to cities, can exacerbate racial, economic and social divides or it can ameliorate them. Progress is a choice. Australia is one of the most urbanized developed countries on the planet, yet it has lower levels of income inequality than countries like the United States, Britain and Israel. How have the Australians done it? By holding true to wage and labor policies and public investments that sustain an inclusive economy, one in which hard work is rewarded with a livable wage.
- The shrinking mayoral talent pool: During the 1940s, Hubert Humphrey was mayor of Minneapolis and Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor of New York. Seventy years later, fewer and fewer people of similar dedication are willing to enter government, as elected public officials, appointed public servants or career government employees. If this pattern continues, local government will deteriorate even further. In response, the disillusioned citizens who currently pay for local government will vote to cut taxes and city budgets still further. They will become increasingly dependent on business improvement districts, conservancies, neighborhood coalitions, block associations and other nongovernmental organizations, which they support financially because those entities are responsive to their demands and accountable to them for their actions.
- Broadband deserts: Usually conversations about lack of broadband access focus on rural areas and small towns. But even in wealthy cities, poorer areas often get inferior service from the telecom giants—and even where there is access, many underserved and marginalized people can’t afford to get online, relying on libraries or insecure public WiFi systems. About a quarter of Americans—many of them city residents—still do not have reliable broadband at home. This is not just about weakness or fragility in our telecommunications systems (though they do reliably fail in emergencies). Even in a booming market and in everyday conditions, the telecommunications market, long captured by industry giants, builds infrastructure only where it knows it will make a good return on investment.
- Washington, D.C.: The reality is that cities have significant powers, and those that wait for Washington will fall behind their global competitors. Markets are already moving toward cities, but to maximize their market power, cities need to remain on the cutting edge of new industries and technologies, as Pittsburgh has done with its investments in robotics and automation. To leverage their fiscal power, cities need to harness the substantial assets, particularly land, that are under their control; Copenhagen’s City & Port Development Corp., offers a good model for how to use smart zoning and intelligent land management to regenerate a large waterfront district and provide capital for infrastructure investment.
- Punitive state legislatures: Cities face a number of challenges, from crime to income inequality to pension and post-employment benefit shortfalls. But at a time when cities most need their autonomy to address these issues, it is being taken away from them by state legislative bodies. Recently, state legislatures have stepped in to preempt how cities can police guns, set minimum wage levels, ensure fairness for women- and minority-owned businesses, and address pension problems. State legislative bodies used to help local governments out, but today they are exacerbating the challenges that cities face by blocking them from acting. America’s large cities are positioned to be the true innovators of American government in the coming years—the “laboratories of democracy” that urban dreamers have always wanted them to be.
- States are the brazen hypocrites of the system: They complain endlessly about mandates from Washington, then turn around and impose crippling restraints on urban governments seeking to cope with 21st-century problems. In the past year alone, states have enacted laws barring cities from setting their own tax rates; raising their minimum wages; protecting residents from various kinds of discrimination; and enacting even modest gun control policies. Much of this, of course, is simple partisanship. The cities are the one remaining bastion of Democratic political strength. State-level Republicans aren’t in a mood to put up with it. But to treat this wave of preemption as mere partisan overreach is to underplay its importance. The American experiment in federalism is built on the coexistence of local, state and federal power. Disable one of those three, and the whole experiment is compromised.
- The “public” stigma: In too many cities “public” means shoddy, dirty, dangerous and second-rate. The low quality of, and low expectations for, public services and spaces might not seem like an existential threat to cities, but when people stop believing in the value of public provisions, stop using them and paying for them, cities lose their core function: to be places of opportunity, places of mixing of people, ideas, cultures and habits, which produces more innovation and more mixing—a virtuous cycle. America’s cities have never fully realized their promise of opportunity and integration, but to the extent that mixing and advancement happens, it is supported by a robust public realm where people can come together and know each other as fellow residents; by strong public schools that prepare a city’s children and introduce them to each other; by extensive public transit that overcomes neighborhood isolation. Public shouldn’t mean “for use by the poor.” It should mean “for the good of all of us.”
- Unequal mobility: In research conducted at the Harvard Graduate School of Design—looking at case studies in Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Stockholm and Vienna—we have found that urban transport policies and programs trying to improve mobility can inadvertently worsen segregation and inequality. For instance, the rise of bike-share and ride-sharing services has addressed public demand for alternative forms of transportation, but often at the cost of neglecting high-need areas and socioeconomically vulnerable populations. As affluent, educated and socially privileged groups descend on the urban core and take advantage of proliferating amenities, those areas face escalating property values.
- Only a few cities (for example, Vienna) have successfully used transportation investments and services to promote mixed-income, transit-oriented, higher-density urban development in ways that advance inclusion and equity. Such cities succeed by combining innovative transport programs with strong political leadership. Programs can take many forms, but they must integrate public transit goals with alternative urban land uses geared toward the public good. Otherwise, new mobility and accessibility services will continue to be scarce commodities, all too readily offered by private firms and distributed through a competitive consumer market.
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