Making Cities Work: Prospects and Policies for Urban America available in Paperback
Making Cities Work: Prospects and Policies for Urban America
- ISBN-10:
- 0691131058
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691131054
- Pub. Date:
- 01/25/2009
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691131058
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691131054
- Pub. Date:
- 01/25/2009
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Making Cities Work: Prospects and Policies for Urban America
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Overview
Drawing on cutting-edge research in the social sciences, the contributors explore optimal ways to manage the modern city and propose solutions to today's most pressing urban problems. Topics include the urban economy, transportation, housing and open space, immigration, race, the impacts of poverty on children, education, crime, and financing and managing services. The contributors show how to make cities work for diverse urban constituencies, and why we still need cities despite the many challenges they pose. Making Cities Work brings the latest findings in urban economics to policymakers, researchers, and students, as well as anyone interested in urban affairs.
In addition to the editor, the contributors are David Card, Philip J. Cook, Janet Currie, Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, Richard J. Murnane, Witold Rybczynski, Kenneth A. Small, and Jacob L. Vigdor.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691131054 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/25/2009 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
MAKING CITIES WORK
PROSPECTS AND POLICIES FOR URBAN AMERICAPRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13105-4
Chapter One
IntroductionCITY PROSPECTS, CITY POLICIES
ROBERT P. INMAN
Why cities? In this era of high-speed communication, videoconferencing, rapid transit, and high-definition radio and television, could we all not work and play at home? And could not home be anywhere, where the air is clean, the streets are safe, and the schools, including home schools, are excellent? What cities have always offered-proximity and easy access-may simply not be necessary today, thus giving us the freedom to locate wherever the environment, whether the metropolis or the mountains, is most conducive to our needs and tastes. In fact, however, cities are on the upsurge. In the United States, the share of the nation's population residing in cities of over a hundred thousand residents fell from 53 percent in 1960 to 41 percent by 1980, but rebounded to 44 percent by 2005. Even more impressively, the United Nations projects that by 2020, over 55 percent of the world's population will reside in urban centers, with all the benefits and costs this will entail.
Rather than reducing the economic importance of cities, new technologies have in fact made cities even more attractive places for work and play. Efficient production in the new economy appears to require more, not fewer, personal interactions. When the market pays a premium for unique products and specialized services, then production adaptability will be essential for meeting customer demands. Adaptability requires give-and-take communication and proximity, and typically, the closer the better. The recent evidence suggests that most of the benefits of proximity are realized within one mile or less. Cities provide these productivity advantages.
Efficient consumption, particularly of services, also favors dense locations. The provision of health care, education, legal, and financial services is best done in person. The same holds true for much of retailing and entertainment. Finally, and of no small importance to those between the ages of twenty to forty, cities offer a convenient way to meet new people with interests and tastes similar to their own. As the low-cost supplier of proximity, cities have become critical locations for consumer spending.
Finally, cities today retain their historical role as centers for economic and cultural innovations. For innovation, proximity is again the key. Seminars, exhibitions, and informal collegial interactions stimulate creativity while knowledgeable patrons, financiers, and an educated and demanding populace evaluates and rewards cost-saving innovations, promising new products, and provoking or appealing artistic change. Recent estimates, for example, show that doubling the density of employment in U.S. cities leads to a 20 percent increase in patentable innovations per capita. So too, it appears, does density favor artistic innovations. London and New York are the creative centers for contemporary art. Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles-and for a time Portland, Oregon, and Seattle-are the places offering the best new music. Los Angeles (Hollywood) and Mumbai (Bollywood) are where new cinema is produced, while New York is today's center for contemporary dance, and Paris, Milan, and New York for fashion. And while one might easily dispute its inclusion as part of Western culture, there is no doubt that country music would not be what it is today, or what it has ever been, had there been no Nashville, Tennessee.
This book, Making Cities Work, provides ten chapters by leading urban scholars that seek to understand what is required for a successful city in today's economy. The chapters here update the efforts of what had been a landmark survey at its time, 1968, when the future of U.S. cities was not so bright. Titled The Metropolitan Engima: Inquiries into the Nature and Dimensions of America's Urban Crisis and edited by James Q. Wilson, that book offered the first systematic overview of social sciences' understanding of how cities work for residents and firms.
The tone of The Metropolitan Enigma was pessimistic. The observed decline of cities, and particularly the bleak economic prospects for cities' poorest residents, was seen as a consequence of larger economic, political, and social forces. Manufacturing jobs, the primary source of city employment, were leaving the city in search of cheaper land, and many residents, especially recent black in-migrants, could not follow. Federal highway expansion encouraged middle-class exit, however, further exacerbating central cities' economic declines. Economic decline led to weak city finances, while weak finances undermined educational opportunities for inner-city children. State and federal policies failed to fill the fiscal gap. Urban crime, particularly teenage crime, was a logical consequence of a weak economy, poor schooling, and the lack of city fiscal resources for a stronger police presence. Urban design theory favored large-scale public housing complexes that only made matters worse. The end result was a fundamentally dysfunctional social environment of concentrated poverty and limited economic opportunity. Seeing no future, it is then no surprise that families dissolved, single parenthood increased, and teenagers rioted. In 1968, cities were in decline.
The authors of The Metropolitan Enigma recommended a two-prong approach for easing the economic and social consequences of then failing central cities. First, spend more regional, state, and federal government money for city infrastructure and economic development. Second, relocate lower-income families into areas with better job opportunities, a richer fiscal base, and socially more functional neighborhoods. Both strategies are what we now call "place-based" strategies. The first favors city locations. If that didn't work, then the second approach was meant to help the less mobile escape their failing city for a more economically favored suburban residence.
Only the first strategy proved politically viable, and even then legislative coalitions for passage typically required funding for rural and suburban projects along with city funding. Figure 1.1 shows the relationship between real (2006 dollars) federal aid per resident in our largest cities (population greater than 150,000 residents in 2005) compared to federal aid to all other local governments, while figure 1.2 shows the relationship between real (2006 dollars) state aid per resident for the same set of large U.S. cities compared to each state's aid to all other local governments in the state. State education aid is excluded from the analysis. Both the federal and state sample periods are from 1962 to 2002 in nine five-year intervals.
The relationship between large-city federal aid and other local government federal aid shows $1 of large-city aid is matched by $1 for all other local governments along a 45? line from the origin of figure 1.1. National politics ensures that if the residents of our largest cities get $1 of federal aid, so too do the residents of all other local governments. At the state level, our large cities are treated worse, on average, than are small cities, suburbs, and rural communities, as seen in figure 1.2. Here, large-city residents receive a guarantee of $99 per resident (the intercept of the solid line in figure 1.2), but then share in additional state noneducation aid only at a rate of $0.31 for each $1 of state aid given to "other" local governments (the slope of the solid line). On average, our large cities received $185 per resident in noneducation aid over the sample period while all smaller local governments received $282 per resident. State policies seem to meet a "big-city obligation" with an average fixed payment of about $100 per resident, and then focus incremental spending on suburbs and rural localities at the rate of about three to one. Clearly, there has been no targeted spending on our largest cities as proposed by the authors of The Metropolitan Enigma. If anything, smaller cities and suburbs have been favored over the past forty years.
Nor is there compelling evidence that the federal and state monies that did go to our largest cities did much to revive their declining economies. The Urban Mass Transportation Acts of 1964 ($150 million) and 1970 ($1.3 billion) that helped cities directly were only modestly funded, while the more significant allocation ($11.6 billion) approved under the National Mass Transportation Systems Act of 1974 was for light-rail and only encouraged the further exit of the middle class to the suburbs. The Surface Transportation Acts of 1978, 1982, and 1987 did promise more funding for mass transportation, but in the end the appropriations fell far short of the promised authorizations. City public transportation ridership continued to decline and suburban-to-city car usage continued to increase. By the 1990s, the central focus of federal transportation policies was to ease suburban commuting costs with funding for more highways and even subsidized city parking for commuters.
Federal housing policies for cities have emphasized the construction of moderate- and low-income housing, both in the central city and suburbs. The most successful of these programs was Section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which offered rent assistance to lower-income residents. There were no restrictions on location. The flow of capital into lower-cost housing was also stimulated by the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act's aggressive pursuit of bank redlining practices. Finally, the Housing Act of 1990 provided funding to cities to upgrade-or knock down when appropriate-dysfunctional public housing and replace that housing with mixed-income housing complexes. The act also offered vouchers for the rental or purchase of housing by lower-income families displaced from public housing. The expanded supply of low-income housing has proven to be a mixed blessing, however. It did provide improved living space for the poor, but it has also concentrated the location of the poor in the central cities and inner-ring suburbs where this housing was built. As the chapters in this volume will stress, poverty concentration in cities has had significant adverse effects on city economies and therefore city residents, both poor and rich.
Federal efforts to stimulate inner-city economic development and job opportunities have included the Model Cities initiative within the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) of 1973, the Community Development Block Grant of 1974, the Urban Development Action Grants (UDAG, as section 199 of the Housing and Community Reinvestment Act) and the Targeted Job Tax Credit (TJTC) program both approved in 1977, and finally, the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Communities (EZ/EC) program approved as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. Model Cities funding never exceeded $1 billion, and this limited budget was spread over 150 locations to ensure sufficient congressional support for budget approval. CETAwas a federally funded job creation program administered by the central cities. The funds were used by cities to hire low-skill workers for entry-level city jobs. No significant training occurred, and city funds were simply replaced by federal funds, which were then allocated as "free money" for tax relief and expanded city services largely benefiting middle-class city residents. The UDAG and TJTC programs were both short-lived, and in their time proved ineffective in stimulating economic growth in cities' poorer neighborhoods. UDAG grants were subsidies to private developers and were largely capitalized into the price of city land. TJTC subsidies lowered the effective wage for low-skilled workers, increased firm profits, and in end also enhanced inner-city land prices. Few, if any, new low-skilled jobs were created. Current federal efforts at stimulating central city economies are now limited to funding for Empowerment Zones. Over the course of three rounds-1994, 1998, and 2001-the federal government has selected 122 cities to participate in the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Communities program, but again federal dollars going to each community are modest ($100 million per community), and like its predecessors (UDAG and TJTC), most federal monies benefit developers and the owners of land rather than the residents in the favored, low-income neighborhoods. Like most federal and state policies of the 1970s and 1980s, these place-based programs benefited those who owned the places and not the lower-income residents who lived there.
If not by these federal or state policies, how then have we moved from The Metropolitan Enigma's pessimistic assessment for urban America to the more promising future now seen for the average U.S. city? Many cities whose futures looked so dim in 1968 are thriving today, or are at least on the mend. New York City, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Jersey City, and Des Moines had each lost population in the 1960s, but have gained population in the past ten years. Philadelphia, Newark, and Louisville have all slowed their population losses to a small trickle. Still, some large cities have continued their decline-for example, Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Saint Louis. These different economic fortunes of U.S. cities have occurred not because of differential availability or the success of federal or state policies. What is it, then, about the successful cities that leads to growth and prosperity for their residents and firms, while other cities stagnate or decline? This is the new urban enigma, and the central agenda of this book.
Edward Glaeser provides an overview of city growth and decline in chapter 2, clarifying in the process the necessary economic conditions for city prosperity. For once-declining cities such as New York and Boston, Glaeser stresses the need to reinvent the local economy-in these two cases, to make the transition from a manufacturing city to a service city. For small- and midsize cities the key to growth is finding a niche, a comparative advantage, in the new idea-driven, service-based economy. In most all instances of success, city growth occurs because of the presence of a college-educated workforce and the proximity of those skilled workers to each other. Only skilled workers have the ability to use and create new technologies, while workplace density enhances the productivity of those technologies through idea sharing. In Glaeser's analysis both conditions, skills and density, are necessary for local industries to remain competitive and grow.
For the skilled city to work, however, workers must interact, and that means converging on a common location to do business. Efficient transportation infrastructure and utilization (i.e., pricing) is essential for a productive city. This is the topic of chapter 3, in which Kenneth Small explores how to manage urban transportation. As Small emphasizes, for any transportation system and pricing strategy there is an equilibrium number of trips balancing the private benefits of travel in produced goods and services against the private costs, discomfort, and inconvenience of travel. That equilibrium can be inefficient, though. In particular, roadway congestion will discourage the efficient agglomeration of economic activities and undermine the productive potential of the city. In addition to skills and location, an efficient transportation policy becomes a third necessary condition for the economically efficient city.
What is not necessary for city efficiency and growth, although often an attractive by-product, are city amenities-good restaurants, theater, music, sports teams, and shopping-gathered in what Glaeser calls the "consumer city." In Glaeser's terms, a consumer city is a consequence of, not the cause for, the productive skilled city. This important point is amplified by the many valuable examples of "city spaces" offered by Witold Rybczynski in chapter 4. Cities have tried all manner of design strategies to lure suburban residents back and encourage city residents to do center-city shopping-such as walking or pedestrian malls, semimalls with widened sidewalks and narrowed streets, transit malls accessible only by bus, and finally just plain mall malls. None have worked, unless there were first city residents in abundance wanting to shop in city stores.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MAKING CITIES WORK Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables vii
Foreword by Robert P. Inman xi
Acknowledgments by Robert P. Inman xiii
Contributors xv
Chapter 1: Introduction: City Prospects, City Policies by Robert P. Inman 1
Chapter 2: Growth: The Death and Life of Cities by Edward L. Glaeser 22
Chapter 3: Transportation: Urban Transportation Policy by Kenneth A. Small 63
Chapter 4: Space: The Design of the Urban Environment by Witold Rybczynski 94
Chapter 5: Housing: Urban Housing Markets by Joseph Gyourko 123
Chapter 6: Immigration: How Immigration Affects U.S. Cities by David Card 158
Chapter 7: Race: The Perplexing Persistence of Race by Jacob L. Vigdor 201
Chapter 8: Poverty: Poverty among Inner-City Children by Janet Currie 226
Chapter 9: Education: Educating Urban Children by Richard J. Murnane 269
Chapter 10: Crime: Crime in the City by Philip J. Cook 297
Chapter 11: Finances: Financing City Services by Robert P. Inman 328
Index 363
What People are Saying About This
This volume brings together provocative insights from the top urban scholars on how to make American cities better places to live and work. It is a must-read for those who care about cities.
— Alice M. Rivlin, Brookings Institution
Making cities work is hard work. This book offers a thoughtful collection of new information and creative solutions that can advance the progress of our cities—and improve the quality of life in our nation. It is a must-read for those who want to lead our cities and help our nation.
— Edward G. Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania and former mayor of Philadelphia
This essay collection bristles with common sense—and even optimism. Reviewing the successes and failures, the authors conclude that cities need less from federal government, not more. What cities really need is a high quality educational system, a skilled work force, and an efficient, flexible transportation system. If the city gets all that right, it can make the successful transition from manufacturing to a modern service economy.
— Paul Peterson, Harvard University
This book is brimming with interesting ideas about how to make cities work better—from improving education and reducing crime to financing city services more effectively. Making Cities Work is sure to stimulate thought about ways to enhance the functioning of urban areas in America.
— John Quigley, University of California, Berkeley
An invaluable contribution that injects data and original research from leading analysts into the theoretical debates about the proper role of cities in today's economy. These essays cut through much of the speculation and guesswork about the causes and consequences of urban distress and give us a much clearer basis for addressing the social and economic issues of urban life over the coming decade.
— Clayton Gillette, New York University School of Law
"Making cities work is hard work. This book offers a thoughtful collection of new information and creative solutions that can advance the progress of our cities—and improve the quality of life in our nation. It is a must-read for those who want to lead our cities and help our nation."—Edward G. Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania and former mayor of Philadelphia"This volume brings together provocative insights from the top urban scholars on how to make American cities better places to live and work. It is a must-read for those who care about cities."—Alice M. Rivlin, Brookings Institution"This essay collection bristles with common sense—and even optimism. Reviewing the successes and failures, the authors conclude that cities need less from federal government, not more. What cities really need is a high quality educational system, a skilled work force, and an efficient, flexible transportation system. If the city gets all that right, it can make the successful transition from manufacturing to a modern service economy."—Paul Peterson, Harvard University"An invaluable contribution that injects data and original research from leading analysts into the theoretical debates about the proper role of cities in today's economy. These essays cut through much of the speculation and guesswork about the causes and consequences of urban distress and give us a much clearer basis for addressing the social and economic issues of urban life over the coming decade."—Clayton Gillette, New York University School of Law"This book is brimming with interesting ideas about how to make cities work better—from improving education and reducing crime to financing city services more effectively. Making Cities Work is sure to stimulate thought about ways to enhance the functioning of urban areas in America."—John Quigley, University of California, Berkeley"An excellent book. Making Cities Work seeks to address a central question: what is it about successful cities that leads to growth and prosperity while other cities stagnate and decline? The unifying characteristics of all the chapters are that they are policy oriented and fairly informal—experts writing with attitude on topics they know well. I learned a lot."—Brendan O'Flaherty, Columbia University
An excellent book. Making Cities Work seeks to address a central question: what is it about successful cities that leads to growth and prosperity while other cities stagnate and decline? The unifying characteristics of all the chapters are that they are policy oriented and fairly informal—experts writing with attitude on topics they know well. I learned a lot.
— Brendan O'Flaherty, Columbia University