How poor regional planning can suck the life out of cities.

Regionalism is all the rage. The Obama Administration is betting big on regional planning as a way to make smarter decisions on transportation, climate, the economy—all those things that don’t respect political boundaries. The Administration plans to reward communities that work together across jurisdictions toward common goals and, by implication, punish those that do not.

Who can argue with that? I certainly can’t.

But as I sit here in a brand name suburban motel room situated on a highway that could be anywhere, all my doubts about the wisdom of regionalism resurface. I can walk to the Shell station for some Fig Newtons, and I see a Checkers across the street, but there’s too much pavement between here and there to make the trip.

I happen to be in this motel in City A because I landed today in City B for a meeting tomorrow morning in City C. Got that?

All three cities, plus two others, happen to share a single region. On their own, all of these cities have distinct charm. But string them together with the highway sprawl so familiar all over the country, and it sucks all the charm out of the idea of regionalism—fast. In this case, the sum is decidedly less than its parts.

This is by no means the only region to suffer this fate. In fact, it is more the norm than the exception.

Another recent trip produced an almost identical experience. My hotel was in the middle of a suburban parking lot. All that asphalt seriously discouraged a walk to the restaurant across the parking lot. Instead of experiencing the joy of being in a recognizable place that either of the cities that make up the metro area would have most assuredly delivered, I was staying somewhere between both near an expressway exit because it was “neutral territory” for a regional meeting. No one in attendance would feel slighted that the meeting wasn’t being held in his city.

Did regional planning cause this outcome? It’s doubtful, since we’ve barely had any regional planning to date. On the other hand, metropolitan planning organizations have had a hand in regional transportation planning and funding decisions for almost 50 years.

Regionalism makes complete sense conceptually. Our economies, our natural systems, and our transportation systems are, indeed, regional and require a regional approach.

Regionalism can be relatively easy to impose in regions with big, dominant core cities, such as New York and Chicago. In those regions, everyone knows what’s powering the economic engine, and no one can risk killing it off. The dominant city is favored, as it should be, in regional decisions because it’s in everyone’s clear interest to do so.

(Of course, I’ve made it sound easier than it is. Inevitably, there are petty conflicts and a protection of narrow interests in most such negotiations.)

But in those regions with cities of equal size or with a weak central city, the conflicts are writ large. The conflicts are even sharper in regions with a history of racial and economic segregation. That’s challenge enough. The real problem comes when, in the name of regionalism, decision makers become place agnostic. In other words, they can’t favor any one place in the region for fear of offending every other place in the region. That translates into development anywhere in the region being labeled as good development. If a road is built in one part of the region, it must be equalized with a road in another part of the region. If a cultural facility is awarded to one place, the next sports facility should surely be built elsewhere.

The working premise too often becomes, give one of everything to every part of the region. After all, we’re all in this regionalism deal together, and that means everyone shares the spoils equally. It’s only fair, right?

Well, it may be fair, but it’s hardly smart. The result too often is places with no strong center and blurred identity, places of no distinction and no vibrancy, places that force us to drive too much and generate too much carbon, places that are linked together not only by an economy and a transportation system but also by mind-numbingly repetitive development strung in between.

Which brings me back to my unfortunate evening spent stranded in this motel.

If we’re going to promote regionalism—and we should—we need to go in with eyes wide open, knowing that we undermine regional strength when we fail to invest in making vibrant places. When in the name of regionalism the only politically correct meeting place is at an expressway off-ramp, we are consigning ourselves to ever more sprawl. For fear of putting a stake in the ground that any one place in the region matters more than others, we doom our regions to having no places of distinction.

If in the name of regionalism we undermine the region, it simply makes no sense.

Carol Coletta is the President and CEO of CEOs for Cities, and the host of the nationally-syndicated public radio show, Smart City.

Illustration by Will Etling.

Rick DeVos is an unlikely urban hero. A Grand Rapids native, he is a scion of the famous (and famously conservative) Rich DeVos, co-founder of Amway. Yet, here he is, reinventing the rules of art, with his creation of ArtPrize, now underway in his hometown (and covered previously on GOOD). If urban leaders are paying close attention, they will use DeVos’ art inspiration as a way to transform the way they do business.

On October 8, ArtPrize will award the world’s largest prize for art—$500,000. It is a first-of-its-kind art competition allowing any artist to enter, as long as the artist could find a willing exhibitor in downtown Grand Rapids. In other words, no curators were involved. The winners of ArtPrize will be selected by public vote, which, of course, is heresy in serious art circles.

When DeVos announced the competition in late April, many in the art world whispered that he was crazy, that no serious artist would apply, and that the amateur nature of ArtPrize would embarrass the city. When urged to give curators a role and put a check on public opinion, DeVos resisted, holding firm to the principles he adopted to drive his creation. Those principles were decentralization, openness, participation, and entrepreneurship.

Essentially, DeVos provided a platform and a cash prize. Everything else is contributed by others. The artists provide (and install) their art. The city’s property owners provide secure exhibition space. Citizens provide the votes to select the winner.  Everyone promotes the event.

Judging by the first week of ArtPrize, the experiment has been an overwhelming success. More than 1,200 artists contributed work to 159 venues. By the first evening, thousands had registered to vote.

Moreover, the quality of the art that found a home at ArtPrize, by all estimates, is not the crap that many experts predicted.  In fact, it’s quite good overall, and some pieces would stand up in any gallery anywhere.

What can we learn from ArtPrize?

The competition makes it clear that the middle, once again, is threatened and may soon become obsolete. The middle, in the case of ArtPrize, are the arbiters of taste. DeVos’ deep belief in decentralization resulted in a platform to match buyers (initially, those with exhibition space and ultimately, voters) and sellers (artists) directly to one another.

ArtPrize also proves the value of rapid (in this case, lightning-fast) prototyping. This initiative went from zero to 1,200 artists in five months. Although DeVos always intended that the competition would be decentralized, the timeline forced him to pursue radical decentralization. And that led to rapid prototyping. As DeVos put it, “We had so little time that we were forced to admit when stuff was not working. We just tried something else.”

Another lesson demonstrated by ArtPrize is the value of giving people permission to be entrepreneurial. Artists, by nature, are risk-takers. They make things that are unfamiliar and new to the rest of us, then send their creations out into the world to be judged by the rest of us. But ArtPrize was a platform for entrepreneurship at a massive scale—for artists promoting their work with their own networks, for venue owners, for bloggers, for those promoting Grand Rapids, and for ArtPrize voters.

Finally, ArtPrize organized as a platform rather than as an institution. It completely defied the convention of nonprofits.

Each of these lessons—elimination of the middle man, the value of rapid prototyping, the value of giving people permission to be entrepreneurial, and the evolution from institution to platform—has broad application to other areas of urban life. Imagine if local government transformed itself into a platform to match citizens to opportunities to improve the community… if local government relied on technology to eliminate middle managers who serve simply to move information back and forth… if local government simply moved with a sense of deadline and urgency.

These transformations are coming. They will happen. And we will have ArtPrize to thank for showing us the way.

Carol Coletta is the President and CEO of CEOs for Cities, and the host of the nationally-syndicated public radio show, Smart City.

Photos by flickr user (cc) stevendepolo.

Urban policy is generally understood to include such things as housing, neighborhood revitalization, and poverty alleviation. While all of these are important to the success of cities, even in combination they don’t come close to equaling the importance of talent to the success of cities.

Talent—defined as the percentage of college graduates in a city’s population—explains almost 60 percent of a city’s success as measured by per capita income. To wit: If urban policy does not include the development, attraction, and retention of talent, it doesn’t have a prayer of making a real difference for cities. But this truth isn’t easily absorbed by urban leaders.

But if we could increase college attainment by just 1 percent in each of the top 51 metro areas—areas with 1 million or more residents—the nation will realize an additional $124 billion in personal income. We call that the “Talent Dividend.”

Break that number down locally and it becomes even more impressive. In Indianapolis, for instance, a 1 percentage point increase in college attainment would result in a $1.3 billion annual increase in personal income. According to the city’s leaders, that is roughly equal to the local payroll of the city’s largest employer, Eli Lilly.

If local leaders believed they could recruit a business that equaled the size of their city’s largest employer, what would they do? They would fire up the corporate jets, put together an aggressive package of tax incentives, stage lavish dinners, put the governor on call, and put the mayor out in front of the effort. That is essentially what is at stake with a relatively small increase in college attainment among a city’s population.

There are three ways to increase talent:

You can attract talent.
You can develop talent.
You can retain talent.

For many cities, attracting talent seems like a cheap shortcut to solving the problem. It doesn’t require the expensive, hard slog that developing talent requires. But if talent only moves from one place to another, that means no net gain of talent to the nation. Besides, it’s not a winning proposition for most cities. Only 16 of the top 50 metro areas gained 25-to-34-year-olds from 1990 to 2000, and they are the best-educated, most mobile part of the U.S. population. (Just to complete the math, that also means 34 metro areas actually lost 25-34 year-olds in that decade.)

There’s only one sustainable way to increase talent in most communities, and that is to develop it. It means we’re going to have to do the work all along the education spectrum to make it happen.

But the goal is by no means out of reach. We’ve found that in all 30 of the markets we’ve studied, if we could simply get 3 to 4 percent of those with some college to complete their degrees, we could achieve the Talent Dividend.

Jim Collins admonishes CEOs to “get the right people on the bus” if they want to build companies that last. Cities must do the same thing. But unlike companies, cities don’t have the luxury of hiring and firing their citizens. Instead, they have to work with what they have. And that means turning the city into a talent-producing machine.

Which city will step up to the challenge first? The one that does, wins.

Carol Coletta is the President and CEO of CEOs for Cities, and the host of the nationally-syndicated public radio show, Smart City.

People who love cities have known for years what the rest of the country is just starting to figure out: urban life is a beautiful thing. But even city lovers may be surprised at the premium home buyers place on urban living.

A new study from CEOs for Cities to be released this week shows that homes in close proximity to multiple destinations, such as stores, libraries, parks, coffee shops, restaurants, are more valuable than similar homes in neighborhoods where there is less to walk to, pointing to a bright spot in the residential real estate market.

The report, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Housing Values in U.S. Cities” by Portland, Oregon economist Joseph Cortright, analyzed data from 94,000 real estate transactions in 15 major markets and found that in 13 of the 15 markets, higher levels of walkability, as measured by Walk Score, were directly linked to higher home values. (If you are not familiar with Walk Score, it calculates the closest amenities to an address, then assigns a “Walk Score” from 0–100, with 100 being the most walkable and 0 being totally car-dependent. Walk Scores of 70 or more indicate neighborhoods where it’s possible to live without a car.)

“Even in a turbulent economy, we know that walkability adds value to residential property just as additional square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms and other amenities do,” said Cortright. “It’s clear that consumers assign a tangible value to the convenience factor of living in more walkable places with access to a variety of destinations.”

Here’s an example of the effect of walkability on housing values from Charlotte, North Carolina: The Ashley Park neighborhood has a typical Walk Score of 54, and the median home price is $280,000. In the Wilmore neighborhood— above average Walk Score  71—an otherwise similar home would be valued at $314,000. Controlling for all other factors including size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, age, neighborhood income levels, distance from the central business district and access to jobs, if you were to pick up that house in Ashley Park, and place it in more walkable Wilmore, it would increase in value by $34,000 or 12 percent, Cortright said.

In the typical metropolitan areas studied, the premium for neighborhoods with above average Walk Scores compared to those with average Walk Scores ranged from $4,000 to $34,000, depending on the metro area. That’s big money for both homeowners and cash-strapped local governments trying to figure out how to stave off falling property values (and falling tax revenues).

A number of trends are reshaping the American Dream, and the value home buyers now place in urban neighborhoods is clearly one of the most important.  Now, planning, zoning and development decisions have to catch up to consumers.

You can listen to an interview with report author Joe Cortright on Smart City here.

Carol Coletta is the President and CEO of CEOs for Cities, and the host of the nationally-syndicated public radio show, Smart City.

During a decade when Americans returned to cities for the first time in 50 years, it surprises me that “urban” can still be a code word for all things negative.

Attach the word “urban” to almost any ill, and what is bad becomes worse. Urban poverty is worse than poverty. Urban crime is worse than crime. It must follow that urban neighborhoods are worse than just neighborhoods, right?

Wrong. In fact, really wrong. But you would hardly know it unless you looked closely at reality.

When GM depicted a new vision of the good life for Americans at the 1939 World’s Fair, it looked like a dream come true. Vivid pictures romanced a new highway system through rural farmland into the heart of a well-ordered city, where every family would live in a single-family home in a single-use neighborhood filled with families from a single income bracket. Such promised order, combined with the freedom of a car in every garage, offered previously unimagined possibilities.

And it worked. General Motor’s compelling vision for car-oriented suburbs spawned a new American ideal. A lot of people shared that dream. And that dream has shaped our lives today. We have freeways connecting every major city in America, and most families have not just one car but a car for every adult in the household.

We also have gridlock traffic. And pollution. And an addiction to foreign oil.

Our health is in danger from sitting too much and moving too little. Many mortgages are underwater. And we’ve undermined the natural advantages of cities for innovation, opportunity and efficiency by spreading too few people over too much land.

It is increasingly clear that the old American dream is shattered, and we need a new dream to replace it, one better suited for today’s realities. We need a new definition of the good life.

Signs of the new American good life are everywhere. Young adults, with their pursuit of 24/7 lifestyles, led the way back to the city. By 2000, they were 33 percent more likely than other Americans to live in neighborhoods close to the center of town. The interest in cycling has exploded, with commensurate responses by municipal governments in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and, just recently, Boston, to make cycling easier and safer. Similarly, the local food movement has gained a foothold with the mainstream, with farmers markets popping up in the most unlikely places. More Americans are choosing dense condo living than ever before. Households without a nuclear family inside are now the majority, just as “non-traditional” students now dominate college enrollment. Suburbs are being remade with the addition of commercial uses and public space to introduce new vitality into these places. Zipcar has made the idea of Americans sharing their assets almost normal.

Perhaps the biggest upset of all is that Americans have reduced their driving for the first time since World War II.

The problem is this: These remain only disconnected signals. To date, Americans are unable to see the new pattern that is developing.  There is not yet a compelling narrative about this emerging good life into which Americans can project their own lives—certainly nothing with enough power to counter the stories we tell ourselves about what is “normal.”

Even though the signs may be all around them that something new and important is underway, they haven’t put the pieces together.

That’s why CEOs for Cities—a national network of urban leaders from the civic, business, academic and philanthropic sectors, of which I am the president and CEO—is launching a new movement we call Velocity in mid-September.  Its purpose is to create an energizing agenda for next generation cities and nurture the initiatives needed to advance that vision—and to pull it all together in a way that defines a new aspirational lifestyle for Americans, one that eventually becomes the “new normal.”

We’ll be discussing more about the development of this new American dream in a multi-part series here at GOOD. In the meantime, if you see experiments in your world that you believe tell us something about the new American dream, share them here.

Carol Coletta is the President and CEO of CEOs for Cities, and the host of the nationally-syndicated public radio show, Smart City.