No Economic Recovery Without Cities: The Urgency Of A New Federal Urban Policy

No Economic Recovery Without Cities: The Urgency Of A New Federal Urban Policy
By Harry Moroz, Research Associate & John Petro, Urban Policy Analyst

Executive Summary
President Obama’s newly created White House Office of Urban Affairs (WHOUA) represents a new direction for federal urban policy. This approach views cities and their metro regions as the powerhouses of our national economy, a decisive break from past federal urban policies. The Office of Urban Affairs is an opportunity to maximize the economic potential of cities through well-coordinated, productive relationships with the federal government.

The White House Office of Urban Affairs provides President Obama a unique opportunity to articulate a national agenda that recognizes urban areas as integral, indeed indispensable, to national prosperity. The last fifty years of federal urban policymaking have been characterized by two ideologies. The first considers urban decline as both a justification for and a mode of urban policymaking. The second deems federal urban policymaking intrusive and harmful to national economic growth. But research shows that cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas are engines of economic growth. Neither ideology recognizes this and so both fail to tie the fate of cities to the fate of the country at large.

To be successful, the Office of Urban Affairs must coordinate partnerships between the federal government and state and city officials based on a long-term investment strategy in the nation’s cities. This involves investigating how present and future policymaking impacts urban areas, inserting the executive branch into discussions of local and regional program decision making, and proposing alternative budgets that incorporate long-term returns to short- and medium-term investment. Such an approach is informed by the mistakes of past urban agendas that presented federal urban policy as an emergency measure or an unnecessary encumbrance, neither of which could have long-term national benefits.

The Office of Urban Affairs should formulate a national urban policy that emphasizes the natural and historic strengths of cities – the way in which cities are uniquely situated to address the challenges that the country now faces – and the innovative policies that these cities have already enacted in the absence of federal leadership. The Office will need to approach the challenges facing cities and the nation in a way that acknowledges their interrelated nature. The office will also need to acknowledge that the fate of cities and their suburbs is interrelated and, by extension, that the fate of metropolitan America is linked with that of America itself.

As such, DMI offers a number of policy principles to guide the Office’s efforts to develop a strategy for metropolitan America. These principles describe how the Office can strengthen the urban cores of our metropolitan regions by promoting their strengths, while recognizing that external factors still inhibit the ability of cities to prosper.

Cities are “greener” than the suburbs: The Office of Urban Affairs should promote policies that encourage higher-density, transit-oriented development by tying federal funding for transportation to projects that encourage dense development anchored by transit stations.

Public transit keeps housing affordable: The Office of Urban Affairs should examine the way that federal transportation dollars are currently delegated to highway projects versus public transit projects and advocate for more parity in funding transit.

It’s not just homeownership: The Office of Urban Affairs should focus on providing affordable housing opportunities beyond homeownership.

We need energy-efficient buildings: The Office of Urban Affairs should advocate increased funding for energy efficiency projects by rewarding those jurisdictions that adopt green building codes. The Office could also advocate for the first national green building code.

Giving people transportation alternatives: The Office of Urban Affairs would help improve environmental, safety, and traffic efficiency standards by supporting urban efforts to provide transportation alternatives.

Save lives by cleaning the air at our nation’s ports: The Office of Urban Affairs should address the health and environmental impact of our nation’s ports.

Job quality matters: The Office of Urban Affairs should take steps to increase job quality by emphasizing the significant impact increases in the federal minimum wage and unionization have on the urban workforce.

Economic development subsidies need to enhance job quality: The Office should support public subsidy accountability measures, such as the efforts of Representative Dennis Kucinich [D-OH], to tighten the IRS regulations that govern the use of tax-exempt bonds for the construction of sports arenas.

Public housing is vital: The Office of Urban Affairs should seek to end years of declining funding levels for public housing. The Office should also advocate the construction of new public housing units in order to address the needs of those families making below 30 percent of the area median income.

Fix our urban school systems: By promoting the housing and land use discussed above, the Office of Urban Affairs can address the concentrations of wealth and poverty that have led to the gap in urban and suburban educational achievement. The Office should highlight urban education efforts with proven effectiveness and leverage these efforts with increased federal support.

Immigration policy must strengthen the rights of immigrants: The Office of Urban Affairs should support federal immigration reform and should emphasize the impact that inaction by the federal government is having on cities.

Read No Economic Recovery Without Cities: The Urgency Of A New Federal Urban Policy in its entirety