Tag Archives: cities

American cities continue to face falling revenues

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A new report shows that American cities continue to face falling revenues, leading to changes in city budgets and governments:

Belt-tightening continued in cities across the United States in 2011, as fiscal crunches forced local governments to cut back. City revenue is projected to decline 2.3 percent by the end of 2011, according to a new report from the National League of Cities released Tuesday, marking the fifth straight year of declines.

One of the main factors contributing to the decline in revenue is a drop in property tax collections, which are projected to fall by 3.7 percent in 2011, the second straight year of declines. Last year’s drop of 2.0 percent was the first year-over-year decline in city property tax revenue in 15 years. To make up for the shortfalls, cities cut jobs, canceled infrastructure projects, cuts services such as libraries and parks and recreation programs and modified health care benefits for employees.

Hiring freezes were the most common personnel-related cuts made in 2011. Half of cities reported salary reductions or freezes and nearly one in three reported laying off employees or reducing health care benefits. Other actions included early retirements and furloughs.

Even in good times, cities are often concerned with boosting property and sales tax revenues. Commercial and residential development proposals are often scrutinized to see how much they might bring into local coffers versus how they might require in new services. But in times of economic crisis, municipalities and residents, worried about possible rises in property taxes, look even more closely at this issue. Additionally, it is more difficult to obtain federal or state monies when those governments have their own budget concerns.

The belt-tightening will continue unless the economy posts a remarkable reversal. In the meantime, cities big and small, from the size of Chicago and a looming $600 million budget shortfall to smaller suburbs, will continue to look for ways to maximize revenues. In many places, this will lead to some interesting conversations about whether the local government should dig itself out of the mess or whether the residents should help makeup some of the loss of revenues.

Poor in the suburbs: a growing plurality in the United States

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After a headline earlier this week about a “suburban depression,” more data shows the suburbs contain a growing plurality of the poor in the United States:

Significantly, the 2000s also marked a turning point in the geography of American poverty. The 2010 data confirm that poor populations continued their decade-long shift toward suburban areas. From 2000 to 2010, the number of poor people in major-metro suburbs grew 53 percent (5.3 million people), compared to 23 percent in cities (2.4 million people). By 2010, suburbs were home to one-third of the nation’s poor population—outranking cities (27.5 percent), small metro areas (20.5 percent), and non-metropolitan communities (18.7 percent)…

The magnitude and pace of growth in the suburban poor population over the past decade caught many communities unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the growing need. In many suburbs, the safety net is patchy and stretched thin to begin with. The suburban social services infrastructure is not as developed or robust as in urban centers with a longer track record of addressing the challenges of poverty, nor is it as funded. And as governments continue to tighten their belts and philanthropic resources dwindle, safety net service providers are increasingly asked to do much more with significantly less.

There is also an interesting map showing the differing rates of growth in the suburban poor population across major metropolitan regions in the United States.

What’s the long-term solution to this? From what politicians seem to be suggesting, middle-class suburbanites need help keeping/buying a home, middle-class tax breaks, and good jobs. How exactly can the typical suburban communities provide services in this era of economic crisis? I wonder how much politicians and suburban communities are willing to truly deal with this or whether the ones that can afford to (or think they will afford to) will act like the issue doesn’t really exist and can’t be allowed to threaten the image of prosperous suburbs.

Whether corporate tax breaks help the average citizen

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Phil Rosenthal tackles an interesting question that pertains to Illinois and Chicago after recent news about certain companies threatening to leave unless they get more tax breaks: do such deals help the average citizen? While the conclusion is unclear, here is a bit about the effect of TIF (Tax Increment Financing) Districts which typically generate funds for localized development and infrastructure:

The TIF has become a fashionable way for a municipality to encourage a business to set up shop in a particular locale it might not have chosen otherwise.  Some, however, see TIFs as too often just a handout for businesses that want to go somewhere.

“They’re a very popular tool for economic development,” Rebecca Hendrick, an associate professor in political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose book, “Managing the Fiscal Metropolis,” is due out in November. “There are a lot of discrepancies in the empirical research as to whether they’ve had the intended effect. Would the steel company have come in but for the TIF, or would it have come in anyway?”…

“But it turns out that tax rates go up in the entire jurisdiction in the city of Chicago as a result of a TIF being created in the city of Chicago because the way the property tax works is kind of a zero-sum game. If someone gets money, someone else has to pay for it. … Plus, it’s also off-budget.”

Chicago has a lot of TIF districts so this is not a small issue. Of course, there are different ways to measure the benefits of such development for the average citizen: should it lead to a smaller property tax bill? Should it lead to more city and state services since they should have more tax dollars? Should it lead to a better quality of life in rebounding neighborhoods? Should it lead to more jobs? The common focus seems to be on jobs, as the recent offer from Amazon.com to the State of California illustrates. But these tax breaks often lead to a very limited number of jobs.

The article also hints that certain kinds of economic change receive press coverage while others do not:

A steel company moving to Chicago gets our attention. One person losing his or her home generally doesn’t. Even 100 people losing their homes might not make the papers.

“One hundred people losing their mortgages may involve the same amount of money as a steel company moving to Chicago,” Bowman said. “One of the reasons that TIF money is provided to these businesses is it does get more attention, and people feel like, ‘Maybe things are starting to turn around if Chicago’s more attractive than Cleveland.'”

So is this more of a journalism problem? If newspapers and other media sources are more interested in the “movers and shakers,” typically politicians, business leaders, and entertainment/celebrity figures, does this help the average citizen? I assume the media would suggest that they are the public “watchdog,” helping inform people about abuses of power. But, the media, often in big corporations themselves, can also easily be cozy with these bigger interests and also want to be boosters and help improve the image of their community.

In these poor economic times, I imagine we will be hearing more about corporate tax breaks and whether local, state, and national governments should be in the business of handing them out.

New proposal for “bus rapid transit system” for Chicago

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A new proposal calls for a “bus rapid transit system” in Chicago:

That’s one reason to like a new proposal by the Metropolitan Planning Council (pdf) that outlines a major bus rapid transit system for the city of Chicago. The system would be pretty expansive. Its 10 routes would wind through roughly 95 miles of windy city. It would link up to Chicago’s existing transit lines and thereby increase transit trips throughout the region by 3 percent, with as many as 7,000 daily drivers converting to public transportation…

More importantly, the proposed system would also be relatively inexpensive. Whereas light rail can often cost around $35 million a mile to build, bus rapid transit can be done for about $13 million, according to the council’s report. Still, modest as the plan is, it might not be modest enough. Currently Chicago has plans for only three fast bus lanes, with another three to come in the future — “BRT light,” as one official put it. A spokeswoman for the city’s transit authority told the Tribune the money for more lines just isn’t there:

“Given the funding constraints, our plan for three routes is an aggressive, reasonable and workable plan,” CTA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan said.

This looks like an interesting proposal, including the livability scores calculated for each bus route. If I had to sell someone on this, I would say that the proposal argues that these buses deliver light-rail like performance without the additional infrastructure costs. The proposed routes seem to be targeted at areas that are not easily served by the El, particularly along several key north-south corridors.

Several questions come to mind:

1. The proposal includes several small case studies of BRT (bus rapid transit) in action in cities like Portland, Johannesburg, and Las Vegas. Is it reasonable to ask that such proposals include city systems that were not terribly effective?

2. Could this find its way to the suburbs? Suburban buses always present difficulties due to limited service over a wide areas and consistent funding issues. But rapid buses that cover well-trafficked routes might be worth considering.

3. The funding issue is a big deal. Is the City of Chicago in any position to approve new mass transit considering its financial state? The proposal suggests this would be beneficial because it would encourage development, improve mass transit, and make the city more livable but would this also provide cost savings? It would be interesting to hear from a panel of experts as to whether Chicago “needs” light rail or BRT. In other words, is this a luxury or a necessity?

American politicians push small town values in a suburban country

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America is a suburban nation: more than 50% live in the suburbs, roughly 30% live in cities, and about 20% live in small towns or rural communities. Despite these demographics, this article suggests that politicians still frequently draw on the idea of small town values:

American politics may live in the cities and suburbs — but it dreams in small towns.

More than a century after the American people migrated from the farms to the cities and then to the suburbs, the image of small-town America endures as the birthplace of solid character and sound values. In the gauzy image of politics, as in popular culture dating back more than a century, small-town America is a place where the people go to church, work hard and help one another in ways unknown in the cities and suburbs of America…

Still, politicians love to wrap themselves in the sentimental image.

“The people still have the same spirit in Waterloo that Iowans have always come to exemplify. We work hard. We don’t spend more money than what we take in,” Bachmann said in Waterloo, where she was born.

Perry wears his childhood in Paint Creek, Texas, as a badge of honor. “Doesn’t have a zip code. It’s too small to be called a town,” he said during a recent visit to Waterloo. “What I learned growing up on the farm was a way of life that was centered on hard work, and on faith and on thrift.”

Obama can’t claim a childhood in a small town — he was born in Honolulu. But he, too, reveled in small-town values during his recent Midwest bus tour.

So while Americans may no longer live in small towns, they want to hold on to particular characteristics such as hard work, community, and religious values. These are symbolic values, perhaps even more so than actual actions that people carry out. (There is often a disconnect between what people say they believe and what they actually do.) And, of course, people may want to hold on to these values but they don’t necessarily want to live in the places where these values arose.

This reminds me of a theory I have had about the popularity of American suburbs: they are a uniquely American adaptation that combines some of city and rural life. This is about perceptions. On the rural side, suburbs still offer lawns, single-family homes, good schools, safety, and community life. On the city side, suburbs have easier access to the city, more cultural amenities, more jobs, are more open-minded, and more opportunities over all. Suburbs don’t really offer the best of either of these worlds but offer some of both, allowing Americans to straddle these two worlds.

A question: how difficult is it for Americans to elect urban politicians to higher office (particularly compared to more rural candidates), candidates who would portray themselves solely as a city dweller and act like city dwellers? Perhaps Barack Obama is the closest we have come to this but because of political realities has primarily tried to appeal to working and middle-class suburbanites who may just swing the election.

Quick Review: ASA 2011 Las Vegas

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The 2011 American Sociological Association meetings are still going on in Las Vegas. While I was only out there for the first half of the meetings, here are a few thoughts on the annual convention:

1. Las Vegas presents a series of contradictions and this irony should not be lost on sociologists.

1a. When you fly in and out, you really see how the city rises right out of the desert.

1b. I stayed a little bit off of The Strip and this daily walk was interesting in that the landscape several blocks away was really empty, desert lots and more rundown facilities. The airport backs right up to the south end of The Strip.

1c. The opening plenary session on Friday night included discussions of different sociological traditions including feminism and Marxism. The reception afterwards included a greeting from a Las Vegas girl in a feathery costume and a Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonator providing entertainment. Can one easily go from discussing inequality and oppression to enjoying the fruits of capitalistic success? The answer appeared to be yes.

2. Some of the main themes I heard at the sessions I attended: an interest in explaining the Tea Party; some nervousness (?) about the reelection prospects of President Obama; explanations that Democrats won the recent recall elections in Wisconsin (despite media reports to the contrary).

3. The conference is being held at Caesar’s Palace, just a gargantuan facility. The main conference hall must have been at least 1,500 feet long. Two downsides to the conference setting: a lack of nearby coffee shops (the closest one had ridiculous lines on both Saturday and Sunday mornings) and it was difficult to walk to other nearby attractions. One thing I noticed: while typical ASA meetings tend to tie up the facilities in one or perhaps even two big city hotels, we were just a drop in the bucket of Caesar’s Palace.

4. The Strip has to be one of the most fascinating streetscapes in the world. The combination of heat, casinos, people drinking while walking, families, the homeless, and more is a sight to behold. Of course, it is more interesting because it is all inauthentic: this isn’t a neighborhood where people live but it is an endless stream of visitors.

5. I know the country is experiencing economic difficulties but I don’t think you could tell this by simply looking at The Strip. There were plenty of people of all ages and backgrounds walking around and spending money. If you wanted to find a place to study consumption and/or tourism, this would be it.

6. One thing I just cannot understand: why is there not public transportation from the airport to The Strip? While there is a monorail that runs behind the hotels on the northern end of The Strip, one has to take a shuttle or a taxi from the airport. I don’t know if these private firms have a lot of political clout but it seems like the city would want to help people get from the airport to The Strip as quickly and cheaply as possible.

7. People say the heat is a “dry heat” – I do think it makes a difference. While it was roughly 103 degrees during the days I was there and it was still 94 degrees at 10 PM one night when I was out walking, I definitely felt the humidity in Chicago on Sunday night.

Building libertarian cities in the middle of the ocean

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This has been talked about for a while but here is a brief update on independent libertarian cities to be built in the oceans:

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”…

The Seasteading Institute’s Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.

While this sounds like some post-apocalyptic scene, these cities could provide an interesting Lord of the Flies situation. Even though these places will (or may) be built in order to escape regulations, they will have to adopt rules and norms of their own in order to survive. I will be interested to see what sort of society will develop in these new cities.

I also imagine that someone will try to control what happens on these islands. Although these places may be in international waters, I think there will be a discussion about how these rules should be altered. Won’t someone want to tax what happens on these islands or to make sure that they are not national security threats?

“There Are No Children Here” 20 years later

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Alex Kotlowitz’s book There Are No Children Here is a modern classic that describes the life of children within some of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. Here is a little bit about the book and its aftermath:

“I’ve never thought about it being (a statement) about public housing,” Kotlowitz said while sitting in a cafe Friday near his home. “It could have taken place in any inner-city neighborhood.”…

Public housing now in Chicago is “not perfect, but it’s quite different from when we first started,” Popkin said, citing the transformation at Horner, the CHA’s commitment to resident services and the way that the agency is managed.

But many things remain the same. The poor are still extremely segregated, Kotlowitz said. Deadly violence still defines impoverished communities where rampant shootings are committed by a new generation of so-called cliques…

The brothers [Lafeyette and Pharoah Walton], now 36 and 33, have dealt with their share of adversity. They have both served time in prison and continue to struggle with poverty.

As Sue Popkin suggests, the book helped humanize the problems these children face. It is one thing to have stereotypes and broad ideas about what happens in poorer neighborhoods but another thing to get to know and start rooting for children who live there.

On the whole, it sounds like there is still a lot of work to do regarding public housing, poor neighborhoods, and helping children in these neighborhoods obtain a good education and reach a middle-class lifestyle. Would another, similar book help in this cause? These concerns rarely bubble up to the top of American public discussions.

Determining which cities have a future

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SmartPlanet looks into an infographic that supposedly says whether “if your city has a future or it’s destined to turn into the U.S. version of a favela”:

Meanwhile, according to the chart from PPS (click on it for a larger version), Atlanta is easily the most massively dysfunctional metropolis ever to be un-designed by a conspiracy of developers and compliant local government. From comedian David Cross (”David Cross Doesn’t Like Atlanta” – NSFW) to peak oil theorist James Howard Kunstler (”The Horror of Downtown Atlanta“), everyone who has ever been forced to live in or visit Atlanta knows that it is a city as ill-equipped for walkability and sustainable transit as any in the U.S., with the possible exceptions of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and pretty much every other city in Texas.

Many cities are teetering right on the edge of acceptability, by PPS’s measures. Austin, Texas may sound cool in theory, but in the past 20 or so years it has become a suppurating pustule of sprawl and the bane of commuters throughout its metro area. Similarly, university town Gainesville, Florida has a marvelously walkable historic core surrounded by a not-so-tasty shell of tract homes, McMansions and cul-de-sacs…

Ultimately, though, all these efforts are piddling when compared to what our resource and finance-starved future is going to require: shorter commutes, more walkability, and a relocalization of just about all the essentials of everyday life. Everything, in other words, that was present in Brooklyn about the time that the Brooklyn Bridge went up. And despite that city’s incorporation into New York City as a borough, it retains, to this day, the local character that made it such a high-functioning metropolis a century ago. I may be be biased, but when I think of cities that work, Brooklyn will always be at the top of my list.

The infographic seems to be based on New Urbanist-type principles: walkable cities with vibrant street life where the infrastructure serves people and not cars. More broadly, the infographic presents either a sprawl or anti-sprawl perspective.

The discussion hints that cities can change from being on one side of the ledger to the other. But large-scale changes (across an entire city or region) take time compared to neighborhood-by-neighborhood approaches. Particularly in this time of economic crisis and budget shortfalls, how many cities can even have a discussion about big New Urbanist-type changes?

Will anyone bother looking at this infographic in ten or twenty years to see if the predictions were correct?

Comparing the economies of US cities to countries

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A little fun information: New York’s GDP is similar to Canada, Los Angeles’ GDP is similar to the Netherlands, and Chicago’s GDP is similar to Switzerland.

This is a reminder that US cities/metropolitan regions are economic powerhouses.

h/t Instapundit