Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Bruce Katz
Bruce Katz is vice president and director of Metropolitan Policy at The Brookings Institution. He is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and is the author of Redefining Urban and Suburban America and Reflections on Regionalism.
Interview
Steve Lerner (SDL): I have been using the phrase "fair growth" to describe the equity issues surrounding our development policy. What do you think of the phrase?
Bruce Katz (BK): I travel a lot and I never hear the term "fair growth" and I'm not sure politically it is smart to proceed down that line. The beauty of "smart growth" is that it captures in one phrase a lot of things. It is a big tent... a big umbrella kind of movement. And it is definitely having traction. And no one is going to change that. This is a moving train. You are not going to change the rubric. I think you can fit within the rubric and appropriately so and come to that table and make your case. But that means leaving the margins and coming to the center of the debate. And I don't see that happening.
With a smart growth framework and a smart growth rhetoric urban revitalization issues that have been kept on the fringe for a long time can now be seen as pro-suburban and pro-rural. This should be the heyday of brownfields remediation because people understand that if we redevelop more land in the cities it takes pressure off the fringe and everyone is happy. Is that fair growth or smart growth? It is both.
But if you come in saying "fair growth" and that we are doing this because of equity, people are not going to give you an audience. If you come in and say we are going to do this to take pressure off the fringe, then they will say: let's talk; we have common ground. I think we should think about what we are trying to achieve here and what the rhetoric is and the language is and the political coalitions are that you need to achieve those objectives. And we should understand that we are going to break bread with a lot of strange bedfellows to mix a metaphor.
This is a central question to urban constituencies as to whether they are willing to play in a larger game. I am totally for what fair growth is trying to achieve. To me smart growth is fair growth. The way we define smart growth it is fair growth. But the term sends signals that this is more than just about equity issues. The environmentalists need to be for this and the business needs to be for this. Smart growth sounds like a competitive issue as much as an environmental issue. It is an issue of fiscal equity and metropolitan access. I think the best way to proceed is along a big tent, majoritarian coalition path. Then we can try to steer the conversation at particular points in time. Otherwise you are on the margin. And you are off having some conversation somewhere and it is like: who are you?
I was talking to the Michigan state legislature the other day, this was the urban caucus of Detroit legislators, Grand Rapids legislators, suburban legislators, rural legislators -- it was a broad band. Each one of them wanted to hear a portion of the smart growth debate that they could bring home. The rural guys wanted farm preservation, the urban guys wanted brownfields and renovation, the people in the suburbs said they had a workforce problem. So you want a big menu and then you want to be able to say: you take this part of the agenda, you take this part, and we are all going to work on different committees and agencies. We have to be very strategic or people will say: what does that have to do with what we are doing?
I come out of the legislative arena so for me this is just the way you do business. You have to submerge your own identity and your own mission, in a way, to achieve your own end. And that is what legislators do all the time. It is second nature to legislators. It is different for constituencies that seem to need the message to be clear so they can energize their base. But that may not be the most successful political strategy. I think this is a very important juncture for advocates to decide what the language is because we have a moving train here and it has a big umbrella aspect to it and it is not going to change. It is going to be smart growth.
In Maryland where Glendenning is involved he talks about wanting "quality communities." The phrase Livable Communities I think was a hiccup which was related to Al Gore and it died when he was defeated. Smart growth has held. Having gone around to 15 states in the past six months, smart growth is the phrase that is holding. And the governors may want to call it something different but everyone goes: wink, wink, nod, nod...this is smart growth.
SDL: In that context, how do you see smart growth dealing with the equity issues? There has been a certain evolution from Carl Anthony's lone voice at the San Diego Smart Growth conference to the Urban Land Institute conference on Smart Growth in Atlanta where there was an equity panel. Where is the smart growth movement in terms of adopting some of the equity issues?
BK: If smart growth is about what it is today, which is mostly land conservation, infrastructure reform, some level of governance reform, maybe some growth management and growth restrictions now and then, I think what the equity movement needs to decide is how much of that is pro-equity. I'm not sure equity is even the phrase I would use because it does not resonate in the political context. I think the phrases "metropolitan access" or "access to opportunity" bring in competitiveness. With the word equity you are already saying that you want school equity financing and the notion of equalization does work because it has resonance in the political realm. But in this realm I think what we are talking about most is access to opportunity, whether it is transit, housing, workforce, or schools.
SDL: I think some would call access to opportunity an equity issue.
BK: I'm not sure the way people are defining "regional equity" right now. SDL: Fair share affordable housing, tax revenue sharing, mixed-income housing.
BK: I think language is very important and I'm not sure that Fair Growth is the phrase that will win the day.
SDL: What should it be?
BK: To some extent the Smart Growth movement to date is pro equity because it is about constraining regional land supply and reinvesting in the city. So, Smart growth is about restoring the core.
SDL: I can hear Robert Bullard, Carl Anthony, and Angela Blackwell saying that if smart growth redirects money back into the core we have to ensure that low-income residents who rent are not displaced.
BK: Right. But let's just check reality here. If we reinvest in the core, if we take 20 percent of decentralization in this country [and redirect it back to the city], that is a major change. It is monumental. So people should not dismiss that because the fiscal ramifications of that change are huge. And in a lot of places the displacement is not as broad as people are saying. The country is not Silicon Valley. The country is more like Cleveland where metropolitan decentralization is undermining all the communities in which low-income workers and minorities live. And Cleveland, given projected growth, could stop growing [outward] today and accommodate population settlement and population growth without much displacement if it was done intelligently.
At the threshold we need to understand that what smart growth is about is about a completely different pattern of growth in this country. That is going to be very difficult to achieve because of the forces that are against it. The forces that are against it are huge both politically and from a market perspective and all the rest. So what I was arguing at Commonweal was that if this is a political movement that has legs, if smart growth is a train that is chugging along, if everyone would check some of their agendas and try to get behind this train and steer it, then we will get much further along. But if we all go off and have separate agendas we are not going to go anywhere and we will continue to see what we have seen to day which is extensive decentralization.
So the first point is that if all smart growth is about is regional land containment, we have to understand that that is a huge deal from a fiscal equity perspective. You want to talk about tax sharing? If you don't build 35 miles out [from the core city] already you would have regional tax sharing. If you are containing your regional land supply you have more potential for fiscal equity.
Smart growth is not a movement that has lifted off the ground in most places because so many constituencies have not participated. Let's be frank: The environmentalists and conservationists are carrying this movement.
SDL: There are some who would say that the reason it has not achieved critical mass is because it has not embraced the equity part of this agenda and that in order to energize those other groups you have to show them that there is something in it for them. I think you are right that if we redirect growth back into existing communities it is going to be helpful from an equity point of view. But I think many renters in these existing communities are legitimately worried about displacement.
BK: Displacement is an issue in certain markets and perhaps in a growing number of markets but it is not by any stretch a universal trend. There is an unevenness of growth in this country between the hot and slow growing markets that really needs to be appreciated or else people are going to send signals out there that should not be sent and they are going to stop positive reform which should not be stopped.
Phoenix is different from Pittsburgh. I would say that the equity agenda is really a continuum and there are some parts of the continuum like fiscal equity that are fundamentally affected by regional land use. If you stop or mitigate the decentralization you are by definition enhancing your fiscal condition. You can achieve fiscal equity through many different means. It is not just through tax sharing. It can be done through equity financing, city/county consolidation, and there are a lot of different ways of achieving fiscal equity. At that end of the continuum there is a lot of common ground between the smart growth and the equity folks and that should be appreciated and understood. As you move along, what is more a smart growth issue than transit. That clearly has been a smart growth message: we need alternative transportation strategies. The equity folks are just twisting that a little and saying: we need transit that serves low-wage centers to employment centers. Fine, easy, that is very consistent. You don't need to change the language I don't think to achieve that goal. You are on a moving train and you need to basically steer it so that you get the transit connections between the places we care about and the places where opportunity lies. Housing issues are a lot tougher.
SDL: I have been reading Evan McKenzie's book Privatopia about gated communities and Homeowner Associations and it paints a grim picture of development momentum which is centrifugal and has been growing outward for decades. It also suggests a residential segregation by race and income that is intensifying. Do you think we are moving inexorably in the direction of greater concentrations of poverty and more race and class segregation in our housing arrangements? Or are we beginning to turn that around now.
BK: We did some work on immigration in the Washington region, which basically shows that we are becoming more diverse and dispersed. Some 46% of new arrivals in the 1990s went to the outer suburbs. They went beyond the beltway. In this region it was the Asians. But only13% of new immigrants came to the city; so 87% went to the suburbs. The suburbs are incredibly diverse. If you look at the separation studies, racial separation went down in the 1990s. It went down faster in the fast growing places than it did in the Northeast and Midwest where there remains heavy hyper-segregation. Latino segregation went up. But no one knows if that is short term that is a result of large numbers of people coming in. Is it similar to what happened to the large numbers of Jews and Italians and Irish who came here and then assimilated. Asians assimilate very quickly, although there is some difference among Asians in that regard. Even with African Americans, racial separation went down slightly but improved more in fast growing places and less in the older industrial centers where hyper-segregation remains. And obviously, Detroit, which lost half of its white population in the 1990s remains at the extreme of the spectrum. And white flight continues to be the dominant trend there.
We are about to go through a period where there is a lot more experimentation in the country where the difference between Portland and everywhere else begins to become grayer. A lot of places like Maryland and New Jersey, the build-out states, Delaware, Rhode Island, the small states, the environmentally sensitive states, really begin to experiment a lot more aggressively with growth trends and take the edge off of sprawl. They will begin to mitigate decentralization by 20 to 50%. So what you will begin to see in those states is the growth of much denser metropolitan areas. Infill will become much more the norm as opposed to the exception. The restoration of commercial corridors, the urban employment clusters, transit oriented design...all that stuff will begin to play out. That begins to describe 20 % of the country. I don't think more; I think this still becomes the minority trend because the forces on the other side are enormous - politically.
We have to win here. We have to win. I'm a political person. Myron Orfield is a political person. We don't fight to lose. We fight to win. So we manipulate language to still achieve our ends but to ultimately score legislative and practical victories. And I think we need to get strategic enough to do that or else we are having side conversations that are not really in the center of the debate.
If that growth pattern is right, if 80% of the country continues to decentralize out that is pretty distressing but I think it is also pretty realistic. It will depend in part in whether we have the strength to build coalitions because it is really tough to build these coalitions. A lot of states are starting with very small, very incremental, baby steps. There is a cacophony of voices: everyone wants everything. There is no sense that we are going to win the smart growth battle first and that will set us up for the next victory. And that is the way this works. You score a victory on planning and two years later you come back and score a victory on transportation, and then you come back with something else. But it requires building the majoritarian coalition that will permit us to move forward.
SDL: It seems scattershot as opposed to a systemic approach. Is it your view that it has to evolve that way? I was just with Jonathan Weiss talking with him about his experience in the Clinton Administration trying to put something together at the federal level that would encourage metro-wide planning and using the federal carrot stick to encourage some of this stuff. Progressive develop are trying to do some of this mixed income, infill developments and they must fight local zoning regulations to build a mixed income, new urbanist project. By contrast, their competitors are going out in greenfields and putting up three projects in the time it take s the infill developers to do one project.
BK: You have to be a masochist to do the new urbanist stuff.
SDL: Does this not call out for a more systemic approach. I see the rules that permit exclusionary suburbs as based on a system at odds with our democratic principles. It would seem that our zoning laws and fragmentation of governance is an archaic approach that has become an obstacle to the creation of mixed-income, mixed-race, mixed-use, livable, walkable communities of quality. So why is the government not doing something about this? I have seen the heroic efforts of new urbanist, smart growth developers here and there around the country. But it doesn't seem to attack the whole problem.
BK: Right. Let's distinguish between building in the city and building in exclusionary suburbs. Urban infill is a headache of major proportions. We are carrying on a major project here on urban land reform because the flip side of stopping sprawl is restoring the core. The core is not going to get restored unless you have a functioning real estate market. You won't have a functioning real estate market unless you have efficient and transparent rules that govern that market. That is what the Philadelphia Plan is about. It is about creating transparency and efficiencies and showing that there is profit to be made by developers, not in ten years, after the developer has bled to death, but in a two or three year cycle.
The cities have to be completely reformed. Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis are partly the way they are because they are anti-market. They don't have functioning [housing] markets. So the developers who want to do the right thing have to bleed to do the deal. Or the Community Development Corporation has to bleed to do the deal. The CDCs know this better than anyone else because they have to go through all this [nonsense]. The urban side of smart growth [requires that urban housing markets] become competitive. In some markets, like Atlanta, becoming competitive will have to be tempered with equitable development and you will have to be incredibly conscious about displacement of renters, not home owners, because homeowners will do fairly well in a rising market. And you will have to take steps to ensure that the community participates. But in a lot of other places that is not the issue. The issue is whether you even have a [functioning housing] market. This notion that real estate values will go through the roof: it is not going to happen. So on the urban side this requires aggressive, ambitious, strategic reform so that cities can compete on an equal footing with suburbs, albeit with a little more sensitivity, depending on the market, with displacement and gentrification.
On the exclusive suburb side it is a political deal. Will the courts or legislatures or will the employer interests build up to allow a portion of new affordable housing supply go into the employment rich suburbs? I would say, yes, we are going to see that happen. But it will never get up to a fair share because there is a point at which the existing residents will rebel.
SDL: Would an inclusionary housing regulation work that required that 10-15% of new construction be affordable?
BK: Inclusionary zoning would be one way of pursuing this. Montgomery County, Maryland has it as does Fairfax County, Virginia. We are about to put out a paper on this. But how you get inclusionary housing is really a tactical question. Is it smart to go into major employers and ask: "Can we compete as a region if we do have a reasonable mix between jobs and housing? Are we all going to be stuck in traffic because of class separation?" That is one way of going into this. Another way is to go straight at them and say: "You have to take your fair share [of affordable housing in the suburbs]." That is what happened in the New Jersey Mt. Laurel court decision, which didn't really play out very well. It didn't work out well because it is very hard to impose those rules on a recalcitrant public or citizenry.
Let's be clear about this. This is not the Judaic/Christian ethic. It is that [smart growth and inclusionary zoning] will make the region more economically competitive and relieve traffic congestion. As such it is as much the suburban self-interest as the self interest of those [low-income urban residents] that are getting access to the [new suburban] housing. This is where we need more conversations. People like me and Myron Orfield are trained to be opportunist and get the 51% of the vote. We focus on what it takes and who are your allies. The poster child for your allies may be the head of the biotech cluster and not the central city advocate. That is just smart politics. In the end you get what you get. You get as far as you can go. And then once affordable housing is ingrained like it is in Montgomery County, then you can go back at it again and again.
SDL: The way federal monies have been spent on infrastructure is unfair because low-income urban residents are getting overcharged because the bulk of federal monies for transportation and sewer construction are being spent in the outer suburbs instead of on repairing and investing in the urban infrastructure. Can the redirection of federal infrastructure spending be used as a lever to up the exclusionary barrier to affordable housing in the affluent suburbs?
BK: In Minneapolis they said: "Guys, we are 75% and we are going to wire the rules. You can live in your gated communities but we are going to tax the hell out of you. Or at least we are going to take a portion of the up-tick in revenues so that you don't gain it all. That kind of politics works in some places and I am all for it but I am not for it where it doesn't work. Knowing your political culture and the composition of your state legislature it won't take too long to figure out what will work and what won't work. In some of these states such as those that contain Detroit, Chicago, and Atlanta it is a one metro area state. Other states are two or three metro area states such as those dominated by Philadelphia, Pittsburgh St. Louis, Kansas City, and Charlotte/Raleigh, Some of them, like Ohio, have lots of them: everywhere you look there is another central city of 300,000. So my sense is that the federal government is to some extent involved and its role remains critical but I don't think we should expect that much in the near term.
I mean, let's just get a grip. In the next three to five years if we can hold T-21, if we can hold Welfare, if we can hold Regional Workforce ...if we can hold all of those things that would be very important. But the fight is at the state level, because the states control most of this stuff anyway. The feds have devolved most of this stuff to the states, to a large extent, except for income redistribution. So that is the fight and the question is what do you really think is politically doable in a region or state. And it cannot be cookie cutter it has to be tailored to those market realities and the local political culture. Or else you are going to import something that will be politically alien.
SDL: What could the feds do that would help? Is it tying highway dollars to greater metro cooperation? Is there a carrot or stick for the dispersal of affordable housing?
BK: This is not really about the Republicans or the Democrats at this stage. On the environmental part it is, absolutely. The big linkage they have made is to air quality and to endangered species. So the difference is that a Democratic administration would enforce that stuff.
SDL: As they did in Atlanta where they cut off federal funds for highways until there was a plan to improve air quality in the region.
BK: Absolutely, we would have had more Atlantas. They would have gone into Charlotte; they would have gone into all these other places, which really would have been a regional land containment game. Transit would have become the norm instead of the exception. So the equity agenda would have been served by that. And they would have used air quality as the vehicle [for forcing change]. That is going to stop now [with the new Bush Administration]. And it is going to be laissez faire and no one gets whacked over the head [for failing to meet air quality standards]. The Democrats are as allergic to the kind of policies you are talking about as are the Republicans. I was at HUD where we did Moving to Opportunity. We did a very ambitious, though small scale, attempt to compel racial integration in the suburbs and we got clobbered in Maryland by Senator Barbara Mikulski, a liberal Democrat. And we were called to task by the White House on this stuff. I don't think the federal government will have the stomach to do that. They will have the stomach to do individual civil rights enforcements.
SDL: Myron Orfield said that was because it wasn't presented in a way that worked for the inner suburbs. If HUD had gone to the inner suburbs and said: look, you already have enough affordable housing, we are talking about introducing affordable housing into the affluent suburbs. He thinks that would have worked.
BK: The problem is that the feds don't have that capability to go anywhere they don't have much capacity. It is like the emperor has no clothes. The feds are basically a government with a lobotomy outside the justice department and law enforcement. It is skeletal. You can only do something in a few small places and you have to pick your targets and pick them well because you don't have nuance. The feds are a blunderbuss operation. Ultimately I think this about states, regions and localities. And the feds can give the architecture, it can give the ability to shift highway dollars to transit, it can give more power and more accountability to metropolitan entities.
SDL: I interviewed Gerald Frug at Harvard Law School who said that if the states legislators were convinced that their state would do better if metro regions functioned more efficiently, then they have the power to make that happen.
BK: But in different states that would take on a different character. In state like Minnesota, Georgia or Illinois it is about Minneapolis/St. Paul or Atlanta, or Chicago. And therefore the state legislature can say: guys, we are coming up with a solution in this one metro area and everyone else can ignore it. This is the cash cow of our state so the guys in Chicago want to have this special Metro arrangement so we will do it in just this one place. In other states you can't do that you can't have a Cleveland only solution. It has to be all the metro areas in Ohio.
SDL: As is the case in Oregon.
BK: Right. Oregon is a one state solution. I am optimistic because everyone has to do this because it is built on real citizen frustration, particularly in the growing suburbs. So everyone has to do something. It's a continuum: parts are consistent with an equity agenda and parts of it take the agenda farther than the politics will allow it to go right now. And you don't have to have one Politburo thinking through what is the equity strategy here. I think it is great that you have lots of different players: some trying to use the courts, some trying to take the legislative agenda as far as it will go, others basically saying we can win here first and go there next. But realistically we are going to go down the path of land containment first, transit will be part of that as infrastructure reform, workforce will definitely be part of it because we want to have a skilled labor force for the region. Housing will be the toughest and housing is just a proxy for schools. The two of them are completely inter-related. They don't have to be but they are. We are not going to have metropolitan vouchers; we are not going to do that although I don't think that would be such a bad idea. I look at the world in terms of what is doable, what is the low-hanging fruit, what do I get after I have the low-hanging fruit, what comes next. What can I build now with the same alliance and same coalitions? What is a little beyond our grasp now that seems like we could get it in five to seven years? And it has to be state by state because that is the reality.
SDL: There is a debate between those who want to put affordable housing money into buying land in the job rich suburbs, in an effort to reduce the spatial mismatch and create mixed-income communities; with those who think it is silly to squander limited money for affordable housing in high land cost areas. They insist that we should spend the money in poorer areas, like the city, where you can get more affordable housing for your dollar. Further, the job rich suburb often doesn't have good mass transit so the poor would have a difficult time getting around.
BK: If the affordable housing in the city is geared toward mixed-income integration I don't have any problem with it. But if it is just creating new warehouses for the poor I have a huge problem with it. That's the big issue: is community development smart growth? Sometimes it is and sometimes it is not. We need to have that conversation. I do not accept the fact every piece of real estate built by a community development corporation is smart growth. I don't think many of them are sensitive to the need to build mixed-income communities. That is a different kind of a mind-set: it is a market mind-set not a service mind-set. So that is an underlying part of what Myron Orfield is saying. We know what concentrated poverty does. Concentrated poverty is the evil. That is why I have my picture of blowing up the high-rises [public housing poverty towers] in Newark on the wall.
We are in the very early stage of testing something called economically integrated housing. Most of the CDCs have not embraced this because most of the CDCs don't know how to do it. It means you have to manage to the market. You have to build to the market. What they have built to is a captured market which is everyone below the federal income lines.
SDL: I was just out with Mary Nelson in Chicago and they started out with just the low-income housing, but now they are mixing in some that are market rate.
BK: But they are the gazelles of this movement and the question is if the movement goes there or if it remains a cookie cutter operation.
SDL: Resources for affordable housing are limited and as a result some choices have to be made. Mary Nelson runs a location-based organization that is rooted in the community. She is not looking for money for affordable housing in some affluent suburb. She is looking for money to put up housing where she is. When I arrived there it looked pretty destitute. Crack deal happening in front of her building. She is saying this area is going to gentrify so she is trying to build as much low income housing as possible before the gentrification comes in and creates the mixed-income community.
BK: Chicago is one of the urban success stories. Chicago has a lot of strength that you don't find many Midwestern cities. In that market she may be right. The whole question of sequencing of development in low income neighborhoods is something that in theory sounds good but we haven't really tried it yet.
SDL: What do you mean by sequencing development? To me that would mean that before you invite the market developers in you try to establish some low income housing that can be maintained once the area is gentrified. So on some properties the community retains the equity in the house so they can keep it affordable.
BK: Right, that's the community land bank or land trust. That sounds smart. We haven't done it in that many places. The key here is to do something that is the norm not the exception -- to do something systemic. Transit interventions tend to change the geography.
SDL: But you are not going to get something systemic unless you lay out before the American people what the problem is and what the goal is. If I were running for President I would argue that we may be heading for residential racial and economic segregation. Therefore the federal government will do what it can to promote mixed-income developments by requiring that a certain percentage of new housing be affordable.
BK: I'm not sure that would work. In certain progressive states I would say that. Look at Glendenning who did a really soft sell [on affordable housing]. He did a hard sell on [cleaning up] the Chesapeake Bay. He said this is our state treasure and you can't eat the clams or crabs any more, this is going to hell, and we are all Marylanders and this is what we care about. That was one sell. And the other was: "I used to be able to go into downtown Gaithersburg...he wasn't talking about Baltimore, he was talking about small and medium sized places in the state that had lost their sense of centrality and character. This was almost a nostalgic vision of how we used to live and he wanted to recapture the town centers, the places you could take your date. He never talked about concentrated poverty and mixed-income developments because that is the language of policy it is not the language of people. The language of people is: what does this mean to my life. And if you are going to tell me about areas of concentrated poverty I'm going to say: thank God I do not live there and don't let them in here.
When we blew up the public housing we said to the country, you know what, we are going to blow this [mess] up. And everyone said yeah because it reflected their values. That was the calculation. This reflects middle class values. And we built back economically integrated housing. We didn't tell them that stuff. We never talked about it. We built some and we are trying to build more. When we went to city constituencies we talked about it. But when we talked broadly about it we talked about blowing all this stuff up because we knew that would resonate. We knew that we could work with Republicans in Congress to get money for what we care about because you are not just going to leave the rubble. So let's build a whole different vision of public housing.
SDL: I hear Angela Blackwell say that mixed-income communities are more fun and that the problem with concentrated poverty is not just a problem for the poor it is also a problem for affluent white communities that don't have any diversity. Do you think we can do a Benetton campaign and sell mixed-income communities, sell diversity? What I hear you say is that you have to be very diplomatic and strategic in the language you use in how you present this to different constituencies.
BK: Yes. It cannot be a social engineering. You will be rejected and thrown out if you use the language of social engineering.
SDL: Haven't our subsidies for sprawl been a type of social engineering?
BK: In the first years of the Clinton Administration Henry Cisneros and me stopped using the language that we were going to de-concentrate the poor because we had our heads handed to us. We went to the language of: We Want to Give People Choice in the [housing] Market. It sounded like we were Republicans. We would be sitting in conferences and say: we want to give people choice in the market and we had the high ground of language, the high ground of rhetoric. People couldn't come at us and say: Well, we don't want to give people choice because we could respond: "OK, you don't want to give people choice? You are a bigot." When you say deconcentration of poverty it sounds like we are going to do this to you. It is very different. It may sound like a subtle difference [but it isn't]. It has the same goal; the same outcome.
SDL: Tell me about Moving to Opportunity. How did that one go?
BK: Again, in Baltimore we had our head handed to us but everywhere else it worked. Baltimore is a very, very racially divided place. And the mayor had run on a racially tinged campaign in 1995 and he really poisoned the atmosphere with the white suburbs. It could have been handled better by HUD.
SDL: Do you see Moving to Opportunity as an element of an enlightened housing policy?
BK: Absolutely. And I think Angela [Blackwell] does as well.
SDL: Gattreaux writ large?
BK: Absolutely. I just wrote something about making the administration of Section 8 vouchers metro wide and blowing up the public housing agencies because they don't [care much] about this stuff. So we need to put people in control of this resource who really fundamentally believe in it and probably make it a private entity because I think corporations should be on the Board. We could have the civil rights groups and the corporations run it and get it out of the hands of the politicians.
I don't disagree with the ends. I just think you have to be really savvy about this stuff and if you want to use certain language then focus group it in an exurb. Do not think that what sells to the converted will sell in the suburbs. Before I spent any money on a Benetton campaign I would get some pollsters and focus group it. And check your judgments at the door. Don't think it will end up where you started.
If the CDCs want to be for affordable housing in the city, God bless 'em. That is my attitude. That is their constituency, that is their base, and that is what they should be doing. But someone with as much power and vision should be arguing for the other side and that is for the mixed income suburbs. And it could be employers, it could be religious communities in the suburbs, it could be the Angela Blackwells.
SDL: I saw her at a Fannie Mae Fair Growth gathering and asked how much energy she thinks should be put into getting affordable housing into the affluent suburbs and she said that wasn't the highest priority because they didn't have any transit. She thinks that establishing mixed income developments along transit lines is more promising than trying to shoehorn it into resistant suburbs.
BK: I am a real believer in choice. I think that not only does the language [of opportunity] fit with middle class values...it is like Rewarding Work or Making Work Pay. The reason we are so much further along on the earned income tax credit and the refundable child credit is because our language changed. We moved from: "These people are deserving" --a service model which argued that we have to help these people -- to "These people are working for God's sake and they are playing by the rules. We have to reward them for working and struggling to make ends meet." It was very different language and taps into a different American sense of tolerance.
SDL: And the Protestant Work Ethic.
BK: People may say: you're just a bunch of politicians. No, this is the eternal struggle within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and everyone else. We are just using different language to achieve our goals.
SDL: An incredibly large percentage of the real estate market that is reinvented every decade. So, while it may be hard to go into an affluent suburb and introduce affordable housing, it may be possible to require that 10-15% of new development be affordable.
BK: Right, it is about stock and flow: the stock is hard to change; the flow you can change. The flow is dependent on public subsidy and public decision making so you can change the flow. That is the way to go. And the more you can use market mechanisms to do it, the better. Inclusionary zoning is really a market mechanism. Do you want us to approve this? Take 15 percent and make it affordable and we will give you a density bonus so you won't use the bottom line but we have the power to say yes or no. It is just setting up the rules of the game.
SDL: There is a huge amount of money that goes into building infrastructure every year. If we follow the money it would seem that if you want to have smart growth you have to change where the infrastructure money is spent at both federal and state level. In order to do that the fairness issue is hard to get around. I guess we could say: you will be in traffic less if you invest in transit but for me it is hard to get away from fairness.
BK: Glendenning has done this. He did not call it Fair Growth but he basically says we should invest in places where we already have people and where we already have investments because that is smart fiscally. And it is smart environmentally because it takes pressure off our land. We don't want to look like everywhere America. We are better than that. We are Marylanders. We want to preserve our countryside because that is part of our heritage and our cultural legacy. He could have come in and said: Look there are more of us in big urban counties than there are of the exurbs and we are going to outvote you and that is fair because we have the people. But he didn't do that and it was really a smart way of achieving the same end. From the partisan perspective what is Glendenning doing? He is funding Democratic strongholds: Prince George's, Baltimore County, Baltimore City, and Montgomery County. The political people in Maryland know that. But he put it in a framework that made it substantively correct to have a different partisan outcome.
You don't want to start on distributional politics. I think you want to come in and say: Here is a goal we want to reach as a state. We want to preserve our land and rebuild places we have invested in. Everyone who is involved, the cognoscenti, know exactly what is going on. But I think the other approach gets into the lowest common denominator allocation politics which I think you want to avoid. You go down that road and who knows where that ends up because the bulk of the taxes are paid in the suburbs. I'm not sure we want to go down that road. You want to go down a road that allows you to achieve a substantive goal but in a politically smart way.
SDL: All the environmental justice people say: it always comes down to this. We have to avoid talking about fairness, not talk about class, not talk about race and ultimately a deal is cut and our interests are left off the table. We are not even at the table. These decisions are being made in the distant affluent suburbs, in the state house, and we are not getting listened to.
BK: I would disagree with that. I don't believe that people have used the legislative and political system to achieve their end. I go to these states all the time. I don't see urban legislators hanging around. I see a lot of suburban legislators at the table. Could the urban legislators come to the table with an agenda? Absolutely, the smart ones do, but they are the exception and not the rule. These other [suburban] groups have worked on the MPO Boards and other Boards in the region. Have they gone to the Mayor and said do you know what is going on here? We don't have proportional representation. The Boards at the County level are weighted towards the outer suburb - the water board, the sewer board. So I don't think we have really intervened in the system in the way we could. I think it is true that in a lot of places we are not at the table but it also is not clear to me that many tried to be at the table. And right now is a time that the table is getting reset. So whatever happened in the past, forget about it, we are now going forward. And going forward a very different conversation is taking place. I'm not saying that people should completely check their language and rhetoric at the door. I think we should think about this as multiple constituencies where someone is throwing verbal bombs, and some is suing, and someone is striking deals. But at the end of the day they are all somewhere having conversations, wink, wink, nod, nod.
This is what goes on in Minnesota when Myron Orfield did all this stuff and some were out there [on the street] with their signs and others were inside cutting deals [at the negotiating table]. They broadened the envelope and provided more running room to strike better deals.
SDL: Why is the urban constituency not there? Is it because African Americans are worried about losing their base; or because the issues are so complicated they don't appeal to the constituency?
BK: Robert Bullard and Angela Blackwell are not representative of the urban political constituency. Mary Nelson is more rooted in fighting for stuff here. It is a more insular, inward look. It is not metropolitan in focus because they say: what can we do about that? So we have not grown an urban political class that thinks in metropolitan terms. We have grown an urban political class that stops their thinking at the border for the most part. That has been decades in the making and policies reinforce it because when we get the Community Development Block Grant a lot of money goes to localities. So this is our little pot [of money] and no one looks up and says: "By the way, over the last three decades the economy [and population] has decamped forty miles outside the city. I go through this in Washington, DC all the time. We have political leaders here who are for the tech way, for goodness sakes, which is 50 miles from here where they are going to start another beltway. What planet are you on. They explain: well, the real estate community, they are doing this with us and so we thought we could be for that. No, this is your life blood. So I think we have not developed an urban political class that really has participated in a lot of these issues and I think that is the long game, this is the permanent campaign, we all are working on how people think about metropolitan growth dynamics and allow them to enter into the political debate.
SDL: Is that what you call the smart growth movement.
BK: Yeah, I think smart growth is very much the outside game of that. I think the inside game is urban reform. I think cities are completely dysfunctional for the most part. I think cities are partly to blame for what has gone on because they made it impossible to do development, plus there is the patronage and the bureaucracies. These are impossible places to do business and it is the poor people who suffer most. It is very important that we are careful about the gentrification and displacement argument because it really sounds like market revival is anti-poor. That is not necessarily true. Cities are big places. Gentrification in one neighborhood does not mean gentrification of an entire city. And cities need more higher-income people to survive. If they don't have that they already are on life support systems [because they don't have a solid tax base]. If we don't begin to grow income or bring in people with higher incomes these [urban] places are going to be bypassed. Many of them already are.
SDL: What about what is happening in Fall River, outside Boston that drew the line and said it didn't want any more affordable housing for the refugees from Boston.
BK: I remember that article in the New York Times. If I were mayor of that city, that would be my attitude. Force it into the exclusive suburbs. That's that kind of coalition in the making. You get the Fall Rivers of the state saying we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more. That is a great coalition. That is why we are spending a lot of time building older suburban consciousness residents there ask why they are the ones that are called upon time and again to bear the brunt of the [affordable housing] burden.
SDL: I know some cities are rich and some poor and in some cities the real estate market is hot and in others it is not. Nevertheless, in those cities where there is a limited amount of real estate and real estate values and property taxes go up, then the low-income renters will be forced out.
BK: That is true in a small number of places city-wide. Smart cities will look into the gentrification tool box and make sure that they are not losing whole neighborhoods. Low-income homeowners should be able to see their places and make money and move somewhere else. So [the more intractable problem] is about renter displacement. Those places to me are still not the majority in American cities. And we still have 30 cities out of the top 100 that basically lost ground in the 1990s: absolute ground not relative ground. The bulk of the rest of American cities lost relative ground to their suburbs and exurbs. I think we have to step back and look at the larger equation.