Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Jonathan Weiss
Jonathan D. Weiss is executive director of the Center on Sustainability and Regional Growth at the George Washington University Law School. The Center draws together legal and policy approaches to sustainable growth - growth that protects the environment while promoting the economy - and helps to provide communities with flexible and common-sense tools to devise and implement locally-driven strategies. Prior to founding the Center, Weiss served as an aide to Vice President Albert Gore Jr. on sustainable growth issues and was Senior Brownfields Counsel at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. At EPA, he was awarded Gold and Bronze Medals for his role in helping to establish the Administration's brownfields initiative.
Interview
Steve Lerner (SDL): Last time we spoke you were doing brownfields work at the EPA and then at Vice President Albert Gore Jr.'s office dealing with brownfields and the Livability Agenda. How did you get interested in this area? As I understand it you began as a lawyer and started working for the Clinton Administration on brownfields.
Jonathan Weiss (JW): That's right. I began at the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response in the bowels of EPA where we began the federal brownfields initiative. It began from the federal side with a couple of federal workers, including myself, sensing that the brownfields initiative was a good concept for communities to clean up and redevelop brownfields; and that the federal government could play some type of role in reducing federal barriers that impeded brownfields clean-up efforts and in developing partnerships with communities.
Lots of this work was already going on about brownfields on the local level but there wasn't much recognition on the federal level that it could be supportive of these activities. The Brownfields Redevelopment Initiative was begun at the beginning of the Clinton Administration and grew into a multi-agency effort. It piqued the interest and garnered the support of the President and Vice President. It really became a central issue for the Clinton Administration. Through a series of efforts, the federal government was able to provide needed support on the local level for brownfields redevelopment. As this program took off it got the support of the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Solid Waste, then the Administrator of EPA, and then Vice President and President. It moved up through the bureaucracy. Our efforts within the bureaucracy to push it were supported and reinforced by the efforts of outside groups that were recognizing the relevance of this issue: environmental justice groups, mayors, developers, the business community, and community development corporations. It was a broad group of constituents on the outside that were recognizing the importance of this issue. That feedback from the outside helped our efforts in getting our own Administration to recognize the importance of this. And it kept getting more attention.
As it did I became more interested in other issues of sustainable community growth. When you begin to work on brownfields one of the exciting things is recognizing how connected brownfields activities are to other sustainable community growth issues. And it is very hard to just focus on brownfields independently of other activities going on in the community. Within the Administration we were able to begin to integrate brownfields with other programs so it broadened the way we viewed brownfield redevelopment efforts. Through my own efforts of trying to integrate brownfield redevelopment with other activities I was able to help carry that out further by working for the Vice President as his aid on brownfields and on sustainable community development generally.
SDL: Was that the Livable Communities Initiative?
JW: That evolved into the Livable Communities Initiative but in some ways my efforts were even broader than the Livable Communities Initiative because there were many other things that the Administration was doing that just couldn't be encapsulated into the Livable Communities Initiative.
SDL: It is like the study of ecology in which everything is connected. So if you pull on one piece of it, like brownfields, it is connected to everything else. So from a bureaucratic or administrative point of view it really requires adoption of sustainable communities as a goal at the center so that it can be integrated into all parts of the government. Is that the issue you are getting at?
JW: Absolutely. Without going to far afield into personalities and political dynamics, because the Vice President was the lead on this initiative, and there were plenty of components of it that could have been incorporated into it that didn't fall into the VP's rubric, that it made it more difficult for us to include those components as part of the Initiative. Your suggesting that this really needed to be at the center would have been much easier had the Vice President become President.
SDL: And you would be somewhere else right now.
JW: (Laughs, without comment.) As the VP was moving forward with the Livable Communities Initiative, the President was moving forward with something he called the New Markets Initiative to provide new business incentives to encourage business investment in distressed areas.
SDL: That came out of that Poverty Tour that was initiated by Andrew Cuomo. Or his press agent says it was.
JW: Secretary Cuomo [former head of HUD] was certainly interested in that, but those were issues in which the Vice President was interested and the Secretary of the Treasury starting with Bob Rubin were interested in as well. Those efforts certainly complemented the Livable Communities Initiative.
SDL: What I hear you saying is that the previous Administration was creating initiatives at the federal level that were going to create real change on the ground that would have addressed fair growth issues.
JW: That is where the Administration was heading, through various initiatives, the Livable Communities Initiative being an important initiative but not an all encompassing one. It covered increased funding for brownfields redevelopment and for public transportation and mass transit; and it included a component under HUD CALLED "Regional Connections" to encourage collaboration between cities and surrounding counties in metropolitan areas.
SDL: How was it going to encourage a metro-regional approach?
JW: The Livable Communities Initiative was announced in the form of proposals that were part of the President's budget so lots of the proposals required Congressional approval. The proposal that received the most attention was the Better America Bonds proposal which did not go through even though it had broad support and would have allowed communities to issue zero interest bonds for brownfields redevelopment, improve water quality, and preserve open space farmland.
SDL: The guts were cut out when they didn't pass the bonds.
JW: That's right. When you look at the Initiative that was sponsored by the Vice President and you look at its success by what Congress ended up adopting, it is frankly a mixed record because the Better America Bonds proposal did not pass. On transportation funding there was broad Congressional backing for increasing funding for public transit. However, in some sense, that is looking at it through a narrow scorecard. What the Vice President was announcing was a sea change in the way the federal government was going to approach these issues. And it was trying to build support for that change in policies that would go beyond just these proposals that went to Congress. And in the broader sense I think it was successful in spurring debate and changing public consciousness.
In Congress there has been growing support for Smart Growth Issues. There is now a Senate Smart Growth Caucus that has 25 members, one fourth of the senate, includes Democrats and Republicans, including Senator Bennett, a conservative senator from Utah. There is a House Livability Caucus that has more than 70 to 80 members. These caucuses are studying these issues, meeting with their constituents, trying to develop their own proposals to promote smarter growth. They have requested General Accounting Office (GAO) studies of smart growth and there are already two GAO studies on how the federal government has impacted growth and what can it do to change and how this has effect on the local level. So that is a new interest and it is fueling interest for certain legislation like brownfields legislation in Congress. The Senate has passed unanimously a brownfields bill this session and that legislation has broad support from the business community, environmental groups, environmental justice groups, community revitalization advocates, mayors, and so on, as well as the Bush Administration. And there will be real money behind it. There will be at least $200 million that goes with that. That is a significant escalation of federal support. It was under $100 million under Clinton. When the brownfield initiative began it was started on a shoestring. The original brownfields pilots that received all the attention were $200,000 grants. It is a sign of a brilliant idea that with that little money initially it achieved such success and support. I hate to make the comparison, but the Empowerment Program involved hundreds of millions of dollars.
SDL: Did it do less?
JW: There has been little study of the Empowerment Program. My sense of it is that in some cities it has been very successful and in other cities less so. But it sounds like brownfields redevelopment has caught the fancy of the public and communities in ways that the Empowerment Zone program hasn't.
SDL: How was the Clinton Administration going to use the clout of the federal government to promote metro regional cooperation?
JW: One of the important ways we were starting to move forward was conditioning federal funding on their being tied to regional cooperation. This was not for all funding. But, working with various federal funding programs, we have provided incentives in these programs to encourage cooperation so that if communities wanted to receive funding they would be well advised to show that they had some kind of regional cooperation. ISTEA (the federal transportation bill0 was a model for promoting regional cooperation and it is an example of how transportation money went to communities that were able to set up regional cooperation.
SDL: I know one famous example of that in Atlanta where the air was getting so bad that if they did noting about sprawl the air was going to become intolerable. So the feds threatened to cut of funds for big transportation projects around Atlanta until the many municipalities began cooperating regionally on transportation and land use.
JW: That is an example of a success story. A component of that was the federal threat of enforcement that was also a component of the Clinton Administration policy's not only to use incentives and carrots to encourage cooperation but also a stick to enforce existing air quality rules. And it is an open question as to whether this [George W. Bush] administration is going to enforce those air quality standards or other air quality standards in the way the Clinton Administration did. And an example coming up could be Houston Texas, Bush's home state, which could be shown to be in violation of Clean Air standards. The question is whether the EPA is going to enforce that. There will be more and more law suits brought by environmental groups and cities, trying to ensure that the EPA enforces the Clean Air standards.
Regions recognize that the only way they can you improve your air quality is to have some regional cooperation to promote transportation and land use planning. There are a series of funding programs across the federal government that the Administration had begun to change to encourage regional cooperation. Empowerment Zones were one of them. The first Empowerment Zones were funded back in December 1994 and they went to individual targeted distressed areas within cities. One of the things we learned from the Empowerment Zone program as it moved forward was that it was inherently limiting because it was so geographically targeted. So when Congress approved a second round of Empowerment Zone funding and the Administration wrote up the regulations and the application procedures for that second round, it broadened the application criteria to make it possible for different municipalities to apply together and the Administration would give them bonus points for cooperation. The communities were also able to designate areas outside of the targeted poverty area that could also receive incentives as part of the empowerment zone if they were able to show that they could link job creation centers with the high poverty areas.
SDL: How do you read the Bush Administration and they way they are following up these Clinton initiatives? Is there a serious discontinuity? Are a lot of the programs being terminated? Is money being redirected? How is it working?
JW: I think the Administration is continuing in a general way to support these efforts. But they haven't yet defined specifically what priority they will give this. I know they are following it in a general way because as they meet with and talk to constituent groups, they are hearing that smart growth is an important issue. So if President Bush meets with Governors, for instance, and they tell him this is our priority, he will be tempted to follow through just to be responsive. It is unclear yet whether there is any type of White House coordination of different federal activities across the Administration. It now seems as if there is general rhetorical support and individual action within agencies but it doesn't yet look like an overall approach.
SDL: Did they ax any of the programs?
JW: It is a very good question. The good news is that a lot of these issues and concerns have been absorbed into the career bureaucracy so that they are continuing to work on these issues. They may use different words. They are still struggling to find how they are going to talk about these concerns but some of the same activities continue to go on. The brownfields office at the EPA, for example, keeps growing and will continue to be based on this legislation. Rhetorically they are not apt to talk about brownfields as much as they started to at the end of the last Administration, as being part of Livable Communities, but they are still moving forward. There is still a Smart Growth Network that is coordinated by EPA's Policy Office that continues. And EPA's regional offices are working on these issues. HUD and the Department of Transportation are continuing to work on these issues but still looking for direction from up top about how to talk about them.
SDL: Did the Livable Communities Initiative terminate with the Clinton Administration?
JW: My sense is that from the federal government standpoint it did, although if you look at the website there is still a Livable Communities website. So someone revised it in the new Administration. Who is doing that? And the Department of Energy has a center on sustainable excellence that is based in Denver and they have a nice website. Even in the Clinton Administration some of the Departmental programs were under close scrutiny because the Republican Congress didn't want to support it. It got to a petty level where Congressmen said that if we used the word sustainable they wouldn't fund it.
SDL: Even in the language of the Clinton Administration there was Livable Communities, and Smart Growth but there was nothing that spoke directly to the equity component. In the Clinton Administration how did you try to deal with the equity part of this nexus of issues? And how do you see the Smart Growth movement shifting to incorporate an interest in the equity side of these issues?
JW: Part of the difficulty within the federal government was that the straight environmental issues and the sprawl component of Smart Growth were given more attention than equity. It was the EPA that developed the Smart Growth Network and EPA's main focus is the environment and it has less experience with urban equity issues. Within the White House the Vice President was given more flexibility in taking a lead role with environmental issues than in urban equity issues. There were always different forces within the White House pushing to shape the Livability agenda but it seemed like the folks with the environmental concerns had more sway.
SDL: There was that moment back in 1994 when Clinton came out with the Executive Order on Environmental Justice where he said that all parts of the federal bureaucracy must consider environmental justice in their actions. The Environmental Justice executive order was supposed to get all federal agencies to take into account the impact of their actions on communities of color. And yet it doesn't seem to me that there was a real coordination of efforts.
JW: As I look back on it there should have been a much stronger linkage between the Environmental Justice coordination efforts and the Livable Communities efforts.
SDL: But because of the way it was carved up that didn't really happen.
JW: Right. I don't want to underestimate the politics of the Initiative, too. There may have been political advisers to the President who saw the value of the Livable Communities Initiative more in terms of how it would appeal to suburban swing voters and would have been concerned had it been presented as another urban agenda initiative. As I think back on it there was also fear among some that suburbanites would feel very threatened by this...by a perceived federal intrusion into local quality of life issues.
SDL: Now we are getting to the nitty gritty of this politically.
JW: Remember when the Vice President started talking about this George Will wrote a column saying the Vice President hates suburbs and that is why he is doing this. So I think the Vice President deserves some credit for bringing up an issue that a national politician hadn't brought up before. He was bringing up the smart growth/ sprawl issue. It was entering into new territory and the responses it elicited were all over the map: some were saying that he was attacking suburbs, some people saying he was courting suburbs.
SDL: If it had been played out in greater detail then people could have decided whether or not it was good for suburbs, but it seems to me it was never really courageously articulated. I have a quote from Gore which says that people in suburbs should not want to live at the edge of dying cities. In other words, if you live in the suburbs it is not helpful if the city next to you is dying. So he at least made the point that there was a connection here. That was a step in the right direction. But he did not. To my knowledge, come out and say that a lot of suburbs are now beginning to face problems that were previously faced in the inner city and so it would be good for the suburbs if we initiated more metro regional cooperation. He could have argued that it would be good economically, good in terms of creating more economically diverse communities, and good at creating more racially diverse communities. He could have gone out and said: We can make this better. Republicans aren't talking about this. Let's go for it and try to make our metro regions stronger.
JW: In all fairness he did give talks where he showed that the fate of urban, suburban, and rural areas were linked and that it was important to recognize that linkage. The timing was that he then entered into the presidential campaign. This ties to my own fate because when I saw the campaign starting I could see that for whatever reason the Vice President and his campaign advisers decided that it was more important for him to stress more traditional bread and butter issues.
That push from his political advisers was because he was in a fight for the Democratic nomination and the thought was that he had to appeal to more traditional democratic constituencies on more traditional democratic issues and that this was not an issue these traditional constituencies would gravitate toward. But as we are talking about this, what would have been interesting would have been to frame this issue in such a way that it could be very appealing to democratic constituencies. And that would have been putting more emphasis on the equity side of smart growth.
SDL: And it might have played out well in the inner suburbs as well if it was carefully articulated.
JW: Oh sure. As Orfield points out that is quite a constituency of voters [those in the inner-ring, older suburbs]. That is a lot of swing voters. That could have been a lost political opportunity.
SDL: How did you land here at George Washington Law School?
JW: In the late summer of 1999, as the Vice President was moving into his campaign mode, I decided to leave his office and come to George Washington University to start up a new center here on sustainable growth at the law school. It is university wide brings together different programs in the school but is based in the law school. It is the first program of its kind at a law school focused on these issues. My recognition was that, while I wanted the Vice President to win the presidency, I was much more interested in the issues than I was in the pure politics. This has offered a tremendous opportunity. Within this area of smart growth and the law my biggest interest is the equity piece: smart growth, equity, and the law. That brings together areas that have not been brought together as much as they should be.
SDL: What is the potential for using the law to energize a fair growth movement? When you look at the way federal funds are spent on infrastructure improvements is there not an opportunity to sue the government for the way low-income Americans have been discriminated against as the big dollars go into highways and sewers for the suburbs.
JW: It is a fascinating question and it deserves much more study and it is in a time of real flux. The reason why this should be given importance is because the law itself has been changing dramatically and radically in the last couple of months. Unbeknownst to most of the smart growth community, the Supreme Court issued at decision last month in the Sandoval Case limiting the use of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by private parties. What this case does is suggest that a party bringing an action under Title VI not only has to show disparate impact, which is what you are suggesting, and that is that the spending has a disparate impact that benefits the white wealthy population to the detriment of the poor minority population; under the Sandoval ruling a party has to go one step further and show that the public agency used discriminatory intent in developing that policy. It was a terrible decision.
That is something we at the Center are focusing on and that is analyzing that decision and seeing what impact it has and how parties could potentially get around it using other civil rights action like a section 1983 action under Civil Rights. There is an older statute under Civil Rights law from the 19th century that has a section 1983 and it has been a long shot before to use in these types of fair growth cases because Title VI seemed much more feasible. Now what we have to do is go back and say: in the wake of this decision what is the impact in several respects? What does it mean about existing cases that have been brought up under Title VI, consent decrees that have been entered into based on the original interpretation of Title VI? And now we are discovering that opponents of Title VI consent decrees that were entered into are now appealing based on the Supreme Court case, saying this consent decree isn't valid any more because you didn't show intent and now the Supreme Court has made this decision. This has broad implications for the entire Environmental Justice movement. My particular concern is along your lines on the relationship of Title VI and regional growth and equity questions. Remember the Environmental Justice movement started with concerns about hazardous waste siting. And those actions on hazardous waste siting were also brought in under Title VI. And you did not have to show intent. Now those cases are vulnerable and it is a very different terrain with this decision.
So this gets on to you point: what is the role of the law in this. The role of the law is enormous and this Supreme Court case is just an example. It seemed to have caught a lot of people by surprise. There hasn't been much analysis yet of the implications. But that is why we have this Center. We are going to be doing an analysis of this Supreme Court case. We hope to have a forum next month to bring in a couple of experts. It will also form a basis for our next conference early next year on Smart Growth, Equity, and the Law.
SDL: It does appear that there is a replication of economically segregated developments around the country? The new urbanists who do a few mixed-income communities have to go through hell to get past the zoning. So we have created a system that makes it easy to create communities that are economically and by extension racially exclusive and segregated. Is this a major problem we face as a culture and if so what are we going to do about it?
JW: I see it as a major problem and my bias is to see our legal framework as setting up a system that encourages this type of sprawling development. Right now there are all types of incentives in the system for new communities to be developed on the [urban] fringe, often of a single income class, and for those communities to incorporate and become a municipality. And that process, which continues, is not something that has been set in stone. We created the system that has promoted that type of development and we can create a system that helps to promote other types, more equitable types, smarter types of development. That will take a dramatic change in public consciousness that I think we are beginning to enter into now, but that change needs to ultimately be reflected in changing our laws. Some of the most basic of those are laws promote municipal incorporation and give little incentive for municipalities to cooperate with neighboring municipalities. This ends up draining taxes and support from older neighborhoods and draws that support to newer ones that have much less need for it. Part of the education process is getting people to see that it is our system that is driving these choices rather than people's individual free will. There are all these factors that are informing and influencing these seemingly independent decisions people make about where they want to live.
SDL: I look at exclusionary zoning apparatus as anti-democratic and thwarting the most basic principles of this democracy. And yet it is firmly entrenched. What do you see as the most promising strategies for making these borders more permeable?
JW: About exclusionary zoning: part of the education about smart growth has to be about what really is smart growth and if smart growth is just about municipalities limiting development and using exclusionary zoning in order to do that. That approach, in my opinion, is not smart growth. And that is a very important message to get across. In terms of trying to lessen exclusionary zoning, I think it is very important and the law can play a helpful role in looking at how to promote alternative forms of zoning like inclusionary zoning. But very few municipalities have engaged in inclusionary zoning. Still, within our system, there are lots of hurdles in order to do innovative things. And hopefully our Center can play a role in providing examples of how communities have used inclusionary zoning methods, how they have gone about changing the law to allow for these and provide some assistance as they move forwards because there are other alternatives out there. I agree that exclusionary zoning is often an evil that we need to place lots of attention on.
Another creative approach that deserves study is what New Jersey did with the Mount Laurel decision. It was the Supreme Court of New Jersey that decided on this fair share affordable housing approach and they drew their authority for that by looking at the state Constitution. They had a very liberal interpretation of it. It raises the possibility that state constitutions, which have been woefully understudied, can be amended to give courts and communities much more flexibility to try some of these innovative approaches to more equitable growth.
SDL: Do the state constitutions have to be amended? Gerald Frug at Harvard Law School suggests that the municipalities are the creatures of the state and if the state wants to change the rules they can.
JW: It is a multi-level approach and they all can go forward at the same time. One is changing state laws directly through the state legislature. Another is changing state constitutions which also have tremendous power and influence over the way courts interpret what can be done at the local level.
SDL: Change them in what way?
JW: We are looking at the possibility of amending state constitutions in a way that promotes and spells out a fair share approach [to the siting of affordable housing]. And I think we should think broadly about this. It should not just be about fair share on housing, as the New Jersey court did. There is no reason why we can't think about expanding the fair share [concept] to other issues like transportation funding or infrastructure, or tax revenue sharing, which is another fair share concept. Courts could begin to play a role in interpreting state constitutions to broaden the types of activities that are permissible and you could get into other aspects of fair share.
SDL: There are exciting ideas that we could energize our metropolitan areas through better regional planning and cooperation, fair share affordable housing and transportation and tax revenue sharing, housing vouchers, transit oriented design, and setting aside open space and develop around it. There are a lot of smart ideas out there. There are also examples of where it has been done. But when you get to the politics of it, and ask where the power it\s to do it, it does seem to be with the state legislatures. They have devolved power onto these municipalities that create the fragmented governance that is half the problem here. When you get to the politics of changing this system it seems insurmountably difficult. Do you see the possibility of changing the way people look at this and the law? Do you really see it as possible to get a political coalition that is going to tell people in exclusionary suburbs that we are not going to do it this way?
JW: I think it is a long term process. An important step in that process is opening up the system so that people understand [better] what is informing decision making now. We want citizens to see the connections between these issues and that is a long term educational process. I see that our Center can play an important role in that education process. We can take advantage of the fact that we are at a university perceived as being more neutral than advocacy groups that are cropping up on both side of the issue. I think there will be a greater yearning for some neutral sources of authority and that we can help fill that role and be a clearing house of information on the equity and legal issues [concerning equitable development]. I see this as being a democratic idea that the laws are too important to be left to the privileged few as they have been in the past and to lawyers often representing developers and municipal officials. The public, which these laws impact, have had very little say about the development of the laws or their implementation. It is important to open up the legal process to citizens, especially citizens in underserved communities, because they are the ones who have been most impacted by these growth patterns and have had the least to say about it.
SDL: How is the Center going to help them?
JW: Through conferences and publications and workshops and training sessions.
SDL: If they call up and say we need an analysis of this new Sandoval Supreme Court ruling will you be able to provide it?
JW: What we are doing, since we are relatively new now is building the capacity to do all of those things. [We intend to] actually develop curriculum to do training sessions in the field, working with communities, and spelling out how the law has played a role in growth patterns in their community and what can be done to change those laws and what type of tools are currently available to engage in the process.
SDL: So if citizens find an official who is interested in inclusionary zoning, you could send them a packet of materials about inclusionary zoning, what it looks like, and where it has worked?
JW: And perhaps we could go down to that community and provide assistance in developing inclusionary zoning ordinance. That is what we hope to do. This is the first program like this at any law school. The sky is the limit. I see us as creating a new area of public interest law. I would think of it as a victory if we could encourage other law schools to adopt programs to do this and those schools could then provide assistance to communities in their neighborhoods. They would be able to encourage law students to go into this field. We have just started the first masters program in law on sustainable growth for law graduates some of whom may have been out working for 10 to 20 years. Some of them may want to come back for a year and get a one year graduate degree in sustainable growth. That is something we hope other law schools will do.
SDL: At a law school I would expect the rhetoric to lean towards "fair growth" and not "sustainable growth" because it is about justice.
JW: Our definition of smart growth or sustainable growth is that it includes equity and fair growth as a very important fundamental component of it. I define sustainable growth as having an important equity piece but that is an educational issue because a lot of people don't see sustainable growth as having an equity component. Part of it is that the mainstream environmental community has been so successful on focusing on the environmental aspects of sprawl [that equity is overlooked].
SDL: I think some environmentalists recognize that the smart growth agenda will not go far unless it is energized by the equity agenda. If you just talk about environmental issues you get a small slice of the population but if you widen it to include an interest in making metro areas work better then you get a lot more people.
JW: We still have to push on those linkages. With this Sandoval case, groups that were interested could file friend of the court briefs. No mainstream environmental group even filed a brief on the case.
SDL: Does that include the Natural Resource Defense Council?
JW: No, [they have not]. Part of it has been the emerging nature of these issues. So it is great you are doing this research because the groups concerned about this from the equity side are still rather disparate. But part of our goal is from the legal side to bring those groups together.
SDL: Paul S. Grogan, author of Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Revival writes that there are cities that are turning around and it is not as gloomy as Anthony Downs, Bruce Katz, and Myron Orfield make it out to be. Robert Land, at Fannie Mae, says there are a lot of wealthy cities and that not all inner-ring suburbs are doing so badly: look at Bethesda. And it is not just a favored suburb; it is a favored half or three quarters of the city. So the metro regional picture is complex and it is easy to over simplify the reality. I understand that the suburbs are not monolithic but I can go to almost any city and walk around and figure out where the class and color lines are. Peiser says let's not intervene in ways that may reduce the amount of affordable housing that is produced. It gets back to the debate about where to place affordable housing. Orfield says we have to spread it out in the exclusionary suburbs to avoid economic and racial segregation. This will give people choice. Others in CDCs who are placed based want to build the affordable housing in their neighborhoods as a hedge against gentrification. They point out that building affordable housing in exclusionary suburbs will cost a huge amount.
JW: I hate to make this sound like a cop out but I think it is a combination of both. We have to continue to focus on rebuilding existing neighborhoods and encouraging their revitalization while at the same time attempting to connect those neighborhoods more to the regional economy. These two elements can move forward at the same time and be mutually complementary. There needs to be an education process where the folks on each side of the debate know and understand more about the other and that education process is already moving forward. Even Mary Nelson, over the years, while not embracing a regional strategy has gotten much more interested in sustainable community developments and linking her efforts to public transportation for instance. So there has been a broadening of the community development field.
SDL: There are conflicts in Minneapolis between Russ Adams and Myron Orfield over this.
JW: The good news is that they are even having this debate. I look forward to many more debates as people begin to discuss these issues. These issues are inherently controversial on some many levels. If we really want to change things down the road, shifting public consciousness will lead us in that direction but it will still take very hard debates because this is tough stuff. On the federal level you can already see how hard that is going to be with the concern now over gas prices. Some would say if we want to discourage sprawl we have to discourage driving and we have to raise the price of gas and we can use a gas tax to reinvest in infrastructure. Felix Roydon (sp?), the business leader in New York and former ambassador to the Clinton Administration, has for years been arguing for a gas tax but he was just a voice in the wilderness. You can see how hard [politically] it is going to be to take on an issue like that.
SDL: I will play the devil's advocate. I can hear a conservative voice saying that this is social engineering. And that his talk about fair share affordable housing and equity is just a new brand of socialism. What do you say to those who say: I made my money and now I have the right to decide among whom I choose to live? Why shouldn't the wealthy be permitted to have their municipalities where they do things the way they want to do them?
JW: Part of the education process involves getting these folks to recognize that there are downsides to them in the way the system is set up now. There are so many issues that are regional and require municipalities to cooperate - like traffic and transportation - and that the way the system is set up those problems can't be tackled. They [the affluent residents of fast growing suburbs] are actually paying the price for that in their own quality of life.
SDL: This feeds into the argument made by Henry Richmond's that we are at the same stage with regional cooperation that we were before the states joined together into the union through the articles of confederation.
JW: Getting them [the affluent] to see the impact of what their decision is and that this impact can be very negative would be an advance. Right now citizens really don't have much of a choice. They seemingly are deciding where they want to live but there are plenty of other folks who don't have the flexibility of having a say into where they live. What we are doing is giving people information about how the system works and the chance to have a voice in helping to have options and choices. The system's impact is often discriminatory on the poorest citizens who have had the least say in how the system is set up. So it is not socialist it is only democratic that people should be able to have a say in how they live and how the laws are set up.
SDL: I can hear objections from both sides of the political aisle about a new layer of metro regional governance. Residents from the exclusionary suburbs will say, look: we play by the rules, we pay our taxes, we chose a nice place to live, and we are doing just fine, thank you very much. Grosse Pointe is very nice. You drive to the city and it is a disaster but we built the office park out near us so it works for us. The other objection is from inner city advocacy groups such as the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago and they would likely argue that the metro regional government would be too far away for the average citizen to have a real influence on it. They might argue that they have enough trouble getting their aldermen to listen to much less trying to get the attention of the czar of the metro region.
JW: It is not either or. It is retaining local control while at the same time, on issues that transcend boundaries, developing governing structures that are more regional in nature. I think it will scare people to bring up an entire new regional government.
SDL: But will that not be necessary?
JW: I think it will differ from place to place but we are certainly headed toward having greater regional governance structures. That will be a longer term process and developing those regional linkages that will lead to their acceptance. I think we are now laying the groundwork for that but it will be some time before there is public acceptance of it. But growth issues are becoming so [powerful] that the traffic, air pollution, and loss of open space problems are driving this [movement towards metro-regional solutions].