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 My task this morning is to provide a quick overview of the state of the art of regional planning and visioning efforts today. Many of you are policy aces with knowledge far beyond mine in aspects of this question. But let me try a couple of themes or approaches.
First, regionalism is turning into a big deal -- in the U.S., and around the world. Ask about why the spread of regional planning, and the answer's the same Curt Johnson and I advanced in our Citistates book 12 years ago: from economy to environment, education to workforce, any region is immensely interdependent. Fewer people believe national governments can or will pull regions' chestnuts out of the fire. Individuals use the region as if it were a single big town; municipal borders matter less and less. Global communications and trade permit direct region-to-region transactions that easily ignore nation-state lines. Regions need to think about challenges to their economy, not to mention responses to threats ranging from terrorist hits to abrupt world energy shortages to global warming. I think it's no accident the push for regional planning has grown exponentially since the 1980s: it's our rapidly changing global-political environment.
Second, whether planned or unplanned, big changes are coming to U.S. regions. Most are experiencing strong continued population growth, a lot from abroad. They'll absorb most of projected U.S. population gain of 63 million between 2000 and 2025. Virtually all metro areas, even those with minor population expansion, are still registering population growth at their outer fringes, a phenomenon mostly triggered driven by workers in the city or closer-in suburbs driving outward and outward to find affordable housing. The byproduct is worsening highway congestion and costly extended infrastructure. At the same time, it seems that significant new numbers of Americans are taking to the idea of living in more coherent, connected communities, rather than the mishmash of developer-driven commercial or residential suburban growth pods.
The biggest trend impacting real estate may be aging of the baby boomers -- one boomer turning 50 every 8 seconds, a trend to continue for the next 13 years. Roughly a third are already deciding to abandon their single family house, having concluded kids are off to college and the dog finally died. They tend to move to low maintenance hi amenity living situations near places they want to go- so as not to be caught in long commutes-- new locations convenient for work, medical facilities, shopping, and town centers.
The second most powerful trend is creating town centers-- even inserting them in suburban places that were formerly endless series of subdivisions interspersed by tacky strip malls. All over the country there's interest in retrofitting old shopping centers or other suburban spots as civic centers, micro- downtowns, where mixed uses, broad sidewalks, even farmer markets can flourish. And it's a movement spreading like ground cover.
In the process of all this, density is becoming less of a bugaboo -- or put another way, people seem to be caring a lot more about quality of design, place, experience. Get those fundamentals right and no one cares about how many units per acre. Check such absolutely massive developments as Denver's Stapleton site, or Salt Lake City's Daybreak project, or the infill in Denver's once-bedraggled Platte River Valley, and you see a fascinating future in improved, in fact much denser American urban development taking shape.
But not just that -- there's the huge new popularity of public transit, especially rail. Seventeen regions of the country that didn't have rail systems a decade ago, mostly places where the mere mention aroused a snort, are now actively building them. Just check Denver, with its recent Fastracks vote -- a $4.7 billion initiative to build some 119 miles of light rail and commuter rail, and not just so suburbanites can get into town without sitting in massive traffic jams, but also so all the folks choosing to live in downtown Denver can get out to their work places in the suburbs without a car.
You all know the story -- the Phoenixes, Sacramentos, Dallases, Salt Lake Cities of the world opting for rail systems they'd have scorned until recently. Even in Houston, there's such fervor for rail that Tom Delay had to set aside his total opposition.
Many of us, I imagine, have seen the recent report, Hidden in Plain Sight: Capturing the Demand for Housing Near Transit. Sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration, it suggests demand for compact housing near transit is more than likely to double by 2025 -- more than 14.6 million households likely to want to rent and buy housing near transit. Which would mean building 2,100 residential units near each of the 3,971 stations included in the study.
What that requires, if course, is clear planning... locating the rail stops, for example, with use of GIS data to identify where there are real activity centers, not just parking lots. Around designated stops, special zoning overlays for more compact communities, pedestrian friendly design, shopping streets, real sidewalks and bikeways and parks. And in place of stale old zoning, maybe application of the imaginative new form-based codes, focused on basic building form and choice, that the New Urbanist crowd has been working on. Describing this, the word visioning keeps racing back into my mind: TODs should present golden opportunity, through processes ranging from charrettes to visioning with tools like the Orton Foundation's CommunityViz, to engage broad numbers of citizens in shaping the environments of their own future. Some of this happening now, here are there. One notable success is a $200 million, mixed-use development in Contra Costa, California, on a site directly adjacent to the Pleasant Hill BART station. The code, and the full public involvement that it generated, created trust and a green light for a project that had been stalled close to 20 years.
Where American regionalism seems headed, and where it should be most powerful, is in connecting themes, helping advocates, businesses, non-profits, all the players start to understand -- not just that their cause isn't the only one, but that it may only be liable to solution in a much broader context.
Ben Starrett, for example, has noted that regional breakthroughs have proven easier to come by in such fields as energy, telecommunications, air quality and some elements of transportation planning. The issues that more often resist agreement include fiscal and tax disparities, land use, education, child care, business location and where new jobs will go -- the latter a continuing issue as many suburbs still seek to poach economic activity from the inner city and to place ir in places not served by transit.
Some of the organizations here today -- Metropolis 2020, for example -- are exemplary in learning how to make progress by fusing what at first may seem disparate themes and interests, such as transit, housing and land use. The Center for Neighborhood Technology pioneered with location-efficient mortgages -- tied of course to transit, which it championed for oft-neglected neighborhoods. I've admired how the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group glommed on early to such issues as affordable workforce housing and enhanced public transportation, and then coped with local NIMBYism by reaching out to form alliances with environmental organizations. There is no question that the Envision Utah scope has been multi-issue.
The Alliance for Regional Stewardship, which has watched those efforts and many more, takes the stewardship word John Gardner liked so much and focuses on what it calls inclusive stewardship meaning regional and community leaders agreeing to take shared responsibility for a long-term commitment to place. By the Alliance's definition, these new ways for leaders to work together, as collaborators rather than adversaries, is distinct from historic top-down, we-know-best regionalism, business or government dominated. And different too from hardscrabble bottom-up advocacy -- the kind that may win concession from powers-that-be, but grudgingly, and without laying groundwork for mutual work in the future.
Thematically, goes this argument, a regional coalition has to watch for opportunities on four fronts. First, the economic stakes in smart business goals, skills of workers and assuring an adequate workforce, to up the value of the region's economic output and increase living standards. Second, social inclusion, so that there's a place at the agenda-setting table for the broad collection of neighborhoods, ethnic groups, population types any area has in its regional society. Third, the environment, watching for the strong inter-relationships played out in patterns of growth, sprawl, parks and open space, environmental perils and urban flight, and planning strategies to address them jointly. And finally, governance -- community engagement on issues, broadening leadership structures to reflect today's society, public official caucuses, and focusing on a fair deal or better from federal and state governments.
Keeping that many actors and causes on stage, acting collaboratively, is no easy trick. What's more, new issues may crowd onto the stage -- green energy scenarios and planning, for example-- potentially a powerful tool to keep a region afloat in a century of global warming. Or homeland security, with its focus on multi-jurisdictional first responders and medical facilities a regional issue if there ever were one. In our recent Boston Citistates report, Curt Johnson and I took up the health sector, extraordinarily important there, as a central topic, asking if that proud, hospital-, lab- and pharma-region could possibly can develop a region-wide health strategy that emphasizes quality, IT breakthroughs, and health outcomes over medications and procedures.
Or the addition and inclusion of new players. There the prime example I'd cite would be eds and meds, the universities, colleges and major medical institutions. They're now such a huge chunk of our regions' economies as big employers and buyers, real estate operators, repositories of vital knowledge from the economy to the environment, and potentially very influential regional conveners.
Clearly, it's helpful to have at least one region-wide organization that can keep its eye on all these issues and causes and needs. Not often enough, community foundations play that role -- we've seen very powerful models preparing our recent Citistates reports, in the Kansas City Community Foundation and the Boston Foundation. But with sufficient support and prominent leadership, independent groups -- Envision Utah, Metropolis 2020, the Bay Area Partnership, the Collins Center in South Florida, for example -- can play the critical catalyzing and mediating and leadership role. But it seems to take an in idiosyncratic set of circumstances to gin them up and sustain them, and we've seen some very promising alliances falter and dissolve. Or never gain significant altitude in the first place.
And of course the answer is sometimes political. That's how, just as everyone was about to give up on governmental consolidation, Louisville went ahead and pulled it off with the regional mayor-to-be, Jerry Abramson, arranging a lot of the alliances for approval. In the last year, we've heard calls for government consolidation from such regions as Buffalo, Cleveland and Pittsburgh -- plausible given the economic woes each is suffering, but doubtful, I'd guess, because the groundwork of trust that a really strong regional organization can lay still seems lacking in all.
One piece of good news seems to be on the business front. Yes, we know that the old big-business-leads model of the Allegheny Conference, the Vault in Boston, the Phoenix Forty and others has cratered. Many executives are preoccupied by national and global positioning, firms selling out in mergers, leaving our regions with what some call a business absentocracy. But the desertion isn't universal. Beyond the groups I've mentioned already, there are several around the county one could call business-led but not business-dominated. Prime examples are the San Diego Dialogue, the Sierra Business Council, the Tampa Bay Partnership, and a new Itasca Project in Minnesota -- the latter 40 senior CEOs worried about regional quality of life, organized in the last year and selecting first how the Twin Cities can grapple with the torrents of highway congestion, roads and public transit, and find the dollars to do the job.
In Seattle, a lot of leadership falls to the Trade Alliance of Great Seattle, with its yearly learning trips to leading world citistates. I've been on several, observing in Hong Kong, Sydney and Berlin degrees of leadership collaboration clearly leagues ahead of us.
Can equity -- fair breaks for poor neighborhoods and populations -- get onto the big-time regional agendas? It ain't, in a word, easy. Many regions' minority demographics are shifting from black only to increasingly Latino, maybe even Asian, creating early challenges on ways to convene and then get groups working together. Minorities are often highly suspicious of regional initiatives they think might undercut their more recently-won political power. Heads of CDCs often say, or at least mutter -- Housing is my business; I'll leave region-wide work to others.
Still, there can be huge advantages in fostering alliances among groups focused on families, on housing, on transportation, on environmental justice. In Milwaukee, labor and community groups coalesced to pass a living wage ordinance and in redirecting transportation funds to get city workers to suburban work sites. OPTIONAL: Doing a report in San Antonio a couple years ago, I was tremendously impressed by Project Quest, 10-year old alliance of regional employers, local colleges, and the founder, the Saul Alinsky-type COPS/Metro organization, to channel low-income youth toward high-paying mid-skill jobs. There's a growing list of such efforts around the country.
Another strategy is neighborhood-based organizing themselves to exercise some political clout at the regional table. The MOSES housing group formed in Detroit's poor neighborhoods led a successful fight to get Michigan's legislature to unify the city and suburban public transit agencies. Now it's filed a law suit to force the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, the region's MPO, to grant the Detroit something close to its rightful voting power, based on population, when multi-million dollar road and transit decisions are made. Right now Detroit city is pitifully underrepresented on MPO decisions -- an equity issue mirrored in many places around the country.
But political organizing, while critical in many places, is not a sole answer. Let me quote my colleague Manuel Pastor, who constantly writes and advocates for a meaningful regional voice for disadvantaged populations and neighborhoods. The region, Pastor suggests, is the best arena of our times for discovering balanced solutions, Uncommon common ground such as championing issues of region-wide economic competitiveness even while one works to achieve more equity for people who've been left out. The region, in Pastor's view, is the place where we can have 'face-to-face, race-to-race, and space-to-space' conversations. His point impresses me because it's such a radically different approach in this era of rigidly partisan, adversarial national and state politics. Part of the region's charm, argues Pastor, is that we are forced to talk outside codified structures and reach areas of tough agreement.
This relates back to the idea of region as place, the acknowledged arena where we all have stakes, where we're all impacted by decisions made or ignored, by wealth rising or falling, by the quality of air and water and routes of transportation, by every issue from parks to schools to downtown and neighborhood quality. The interrelationships just can't be missed. But contrast that with the federal or state government scenes. There the bureaucracies most familiarly work in silos -- departments dealing economy or labor, environment or housing, transportation or agriculture. Making cross-area connections is close to an unnatural act. Indeed, maybe today's conference is just that!
But a good idea. Because if the region is the real living world reality of the times, breaking silo isolation is imperative. I just did a column on how some governors, Romney of Massachusetts and Rendell of Pennsylvania among them, are trying to do just that -- creating a super-cabinet for development issues in Massachusetts, or in Pennsylvania by focusing on a lot of fine-grained outreach to individual cities and towns. The Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, with its recent landmark report on Pennsylvania's dilemmas and potentials, is state of the art on the immense potential of state governments to reform their approaches so that regions and their people can prosper. Our ultimate goal, I've long felt, should be to persuade state governments to view their metro regions as smart modern-day corporations do subsidiaries -- profit centers to be cultivated, incentivized for better performance, but not micromanaged and discriminated against.
It may seem we're quite a ways from that ideal most places around America. But there can be no question -- in whatever precise form it comes, broad-based visioning for our metro regions is a vital first step. It lets one bypass entrenched municipal and county lines. It creates the conversation our politics doesn't allow for, so that multiple constituencies can start, however tentatively, reading off the same page. By combing economic, environment, social issues, it provides a potential start at fostering truly sustainability.
The bad news is that visioning doesn't fit the politics of sound-bite, search-discredit-and-destroy politics. It takes time, which today's Americans seem very short on. It may be seen as threatening, from leaders of suburban political empires to inner-city power wannabes. It's tough, as I noted, to get everyone to the table.
And its not cheap! Envision Utah, which is now emerging as a sort of gold standard of regional visioning, went from dozens of town hall meetings and hands-on community-design workshops to mailed surveys, print and broadcast ads, Internet sites, media campaigns and tours, and even a public television documentary. But at significant cost: as I understand it, $7 million in federal, state, and private funding, and $2 million more in in-kind support from the Utah planning and budget office. I'd argue those $7 million were better spent than on some surplus exurban development road. Because in the end a clear civic view, a direction for growth and ultimately the community's quality of place, quality of life, did emerge.
Call it, if you will, regions with a purpose. Having come a long ways, with many leagues to go, that's where I see regional planning and visioning today.
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