Restructuring Local Government
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posted by Bob at Tuesday, April 24, 2007
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Tuesday, April 24, 2007
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Article Summary
Orfield, Myron.1997. "Metropolitics: Coalitions for Regional Reforms," Brookings Review. 15(1):6-9.http://www.brookings.edu/press/review/winter97/morfield.htm
Using Minneapolis-Saint Paul as an example, Myron Orfield discusses the urban decline, inner-suburban decay, and urban sprawl that has blighted so many American cities over the last several decades. He then presents regional solutions for deconcentrating poverty, which Orfield sees as the key to solving the myriad of urban problems that stem from poverty and segregation.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Minneapolis-Saint Paul experienced the “push” of concentrated need in the inner city, along with the “pull” of concentrated resources in the outer suburbs. These forces combined to create intense white flight from the inner core of the Twin Cities, resulting in rapid segregation and the concentration of poverty. Crime and joblessness in these areas soared. At the edge of the Twin Cities metropolitan region, the most prosperous developing communities used restrictive zoning to exclude "undesirables" and build a broad, rich tax base to keep services high and taxes low.
The traditional approach to solving the problems of America’s inner cities has been to try to turn their disadvantaged residents into middle-class people. This has proven to be nearly impossible; the solution remaining is to end the unnatural concentration of poverty. Deconcentration helps solve the problems of poverty on two levels. For individuals, it opens access to opportunity in the form of jobs, unstressed schools, and adequate local services. For a community, it breaks poverty down into more manageable pieces and creates community and metropolitan stability.
Orfield gives two steps, to be implemented on a regional level, toward the deconcentration of poverty. The first is regional reform in fair housing, including the destruction of regulatory barriers to affordable housing in the suburbs. Orfield contends that once affordable housing is built at the metropolitan periphery, the expansion of the urban and suburban distressed areas will slow and ultimately stop.
The second reform is tax-base sharing. The most prosperous areas of the metropolitan region will share a certain portion of commercial, industrial, or residential property taxes on high valued homes region-wide. Orfield argues that property tax-base sharing: (1) creates equity in the provision of public services, (2) breaks the intensifying metropolitan mismatch between social needs and property tax-based resources, (3) undermines local fiscal incentives supporting exclusive zoning, (4) undermines local fiscal incentives supporting sprawl, and (5) ends intra-metropolitan competition for tax base.
In Minneapolis-Saint Paul, working class suburbs have joined forces with the inner city to create regional reform. The first step was the metro-majority coalition in the state legislature, followed by the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability. These local coalitions that are beginning to take action in the Twin Cities provide an example to cities everywhere facing polarization.
The original post is from Cornell University.
This is old news current practices.
Folks this is the reason we don't have real affordable housing for low income people. The City planners and elected officials do not want it!
People aren't finding that affordable housing dream in the suburbs either.
There is many reasons why this concept is a total failure. One only needs to look at increasing violent crime with in the inner cities.
Recent studies by the University of Minnesota have reported many low income people migrate back to the inner city's for transportation issues. Racial issues and much more.
FACING POLARAZATION! That is exactly what these no minds are doing... Polarizing the City!
Metropolitics: Coalitions for Regional Reforms
by Myron Orfield
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"It couldn't happen here." Not in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. We thought we were immune to the urban decline, inner-suburban decay, and urban sprawl that had blighted so many other American cities. We were reform minded. Our philanthropic and governmental centers were coordinated and responsive. But with the 1980s, the all-too-familiar patterns of metropolitan polarization—the push of concentrated poverty and the pull of concentrated resources—indisputably showed up right here at home.
Polarization begins with the initial concentration of poverty in the city core and the consequent disinvestment and middle-class flight. Waves of socio-economic decline roll outward from the city center astonishingly fast, with deeply distressed communities, like disposable cities, marking their passage. Strict zoning rules and competition for tax base by developing fringe communities lead to wasteful, low-density overdevelopment. Spending on infra-structure, such as highways and sewers, in the developing suburbs drains more resources from the built community. The increase of property wealth in prosperous outer suburbs and the decline of property wealth in central city and inner suburbs represent an inter-regional transfer of tax base from some of the poorest and most troubled communities in American society to some of the most thriving and affluent.
Since the 1993 session of the Minnesota state legislature, a powerful reform coalition in the Twin Cities has been fighting back. Spurred by the advent of cheap, accessible cartographic software whose mapping of demographic and economic data graphically delineated their shared plight, the central core, the older suburbs, and the developing low-tax-base suburbs on the periphery have joined forces. They have stretched across the metropolitan divide in support of a regional reform agenda that includes fair housing, property tax-base sharing, reinvestment, and revitalized regional governance.
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The Push of Concentrated Need
During the 1980s, Minnesota's Twin Cities became the nation's fourth fastest "ghettoizing" region. Inner-city tracts with more than 40 percent of their residents in poverty tripled from 11 to 32; their population grew from 24,420 to 79,081. Surrounding these ghetto neighborhoods, "transitional" neighborhoods (between 20 percent and 40 percent of their people in poverty) expanded from 43 to 57 census tracts, from 102,682 to 153,700 people.
As it does in every city it visits, the residential concentration of poverty in the Twin Cities created social repercussions far greater than the sum of its parts. Physical separation from jobs and middle-class role models, as well as dependence on a dysfunctional welfare system, devalued education and work in the eyes of inner-city residents. Social isolation fostered what some experts have termed an "oppositional culture" and contributed to soaring crime.
By 1994, both Twin Cities' central cities were struggling under a disproportionate share of concentrated poverty—and racial segregation. More than half the children in the Minneapolis school system were on free or reduced-cost lunch. Minority student enrollment had risen to 59 percent. Saint Paul suffered the same lot. Both core cities lost one-third of their preschool white children.
Crime and joblessness soared. In the poorest neighborhoods of the Twin Cities, violent crime rates were 10 times the metro average, 30 times the suburban average. And as social needs multiplied in the inner city, the financial resources to address them dwindled. In Minneapolis, residential property around the expanding poverty core lost 10-25 percent of its value over a five-year period, and businesses decamped for the exclusive suburbs.
The chaos did not stop neatly at central-city borders but spread into working-class inner-ring suburbs. By 1994 most inner-suburban school districts were gaining poor children—and minority children—faster than Minneapolis. Eighteen of 29 inner-ring cities had lost large numbers of white preschool children. The inner suburbs were the only place in the region except the city core where crime was increasing. And lacking the central city's business district and elite neighborhood tax base, social welfare and police infrastructure, and organized political network, the inner suburbs faced prospects even bleaker than those of the core cities.
The Pull of Concentrated Resources
At the edge of the Twin Cities metropolitan region, the most prosperous developing communities used restrictive zoning to exclude "undesirables" and build a broad, rich tax base to keep services high and taxes low. The "favored quarter" (a term coined by the real estate industry) dominated economic growth. During the 1980s the Twin Cities' prosperous southern and western edge suburbs, with 27 percent of the region's people, had 61 percent of the region's new jobs. They also enjoyed the region's largest property tax base growth. Two communities in particular, Eden Prairie and Minnetonka, together had the same commercial-industrial tax base as Saint Paul ($1.5 billion), but only one-third as many residents and, unlike Saint Paul, virtually no poor people. Southwestern suburban schools enjoyed insulated, stable prosperity and high achievement. Neighborhood crime rates, already low, steadily declined.
But these neighborhoods are closed to all but the prosperous. The zoning practices of the southwestern suburbs—almost no new apartment buildings, large lots for single-family homes, and other regulatory barriers—prevent lower-income workers from reaching for opportunity and keep the marketplace from responding to their quest for affordable housing. Not surprisingly, a metropolitan mismatch has developed between where the jobs are and where the people who need them are. More and more people are bused—on what one worker riding them dubbed "Soweto Expresses"—from the city to minimum-wage jobs in the southwestern suburbs. Thousands of jobs go unfilled for lack of workers.
What's more, over the past two decades, state, metropolitan, and local governments in Minnesota have spent billions of dollars building freeways and sewer systems in the Twin Cities' southwestern suburbs. Of the $1.1 billion spent during the 1980s on new highways for the entire metropolitan area, 75 percent went to the southwestern suburbs. In addition, in the mid-1980s, the state legislature adopted a system of sewer financing by which the core of the metro region subsidized the construction and operation of new sewer capacity in the most exclusive suburban areas. By 1992, the central cities were paying more than $6 million a year to help move their middle-class households and businesses to the edge of the region.
But not all the communities on the periphery are doing so well. Opposite the favored quarter lie blue-collar developing suburbs. They too tried to win the fiscal zoning battle. But instead of expensive housing and commercial industrial properties, they had to settle for modest homes, apartment buildings, and trailer parks, and few businesses. The patterns of metropolitan polarization played a cruel joke on these middle-income families. Fleeing the breakdown of the central cities and inner suburbs, they arrived in rapidly growing school districts with small tax bases. The results are poorly planned, badly functioning communities. Their schools, for example, have some of the highest drop-out and lowest college attendance rates in the Twin Cities region.
A Regional Agenda
The forces of metropolitan polarization exact immense costs in terms of human and governmental waste, an overtaxed and overregulated business climate, environmental destruction through poor land use, and balkanization of political life. Although polarization takes its toll on cities as a whole, the spotlight most often shines on the havoc wreaked on the inner cities.
Traditionally both Democratic and Republican policymakers have tried—the former through government-aided empowerment, the latter through private strategies to impose discipline—to solve the problems of America's inner cities in place by turning their disadvantaged residents into more successful, more middle-class people. Most people agree that a strong middle-class presence is indeed necessary for healthy, stable communities. But transforming dense clusters of poor people into middle-class people is extraordinarily hard. The difficulty is not poor people themselves, but the unnatural concentration of poverty and the attendant flight, disinvestment, and crime. Only by deconcentrating poverty can these other problems be addressed.
Deconcentration helps solve the problems of poverty on two levels. For individuals, it opens access to opportunity in the form of jobs, unstressed schools, and adequate local services. For a community, it breaks poverty down into more manageable pieces. By alleviating overwhelming social and fiscal stress on cities and older suburbs, it stabilizes community decline and creates metropolitan stability.
Most of the nation's urbanologists know what needs to be done to deconcentrate poverty. Regional reform in fair housing is the first step. The regulatory barriers to affordable housing in prosperous edge suburbs must come down. Once affordable housing is built at the metropolitan periphery, the expansion of the urban and suburban distressed areas will slow and ultimately stop. And a little "pull" in terms of affordable housing continually achieved at the edge of a metropolitan area can make a huge difference. In a study of 40 of the nation's largest cities, Brookings's Anthony Downs found that if 5 percent of the new development in the 1980s had been set aside for subsidized housing, it would have allowed almost 13 percent of the inner-city households in distressed neighborhoods to move to developing, job-rich communities. Over several decades, progress could be considerable.
A second, and complementary, step is property tax-base sharing. For example, a certain portion of commercial, industrial, or residential property taxes on high valued homes could be shared regionwide. As long as basic local services are dependent on local property wealth, property tax-base sharing is a critical component of metropolitan stability. Its purposes, all interrelated, are fivefold. Property tax-base sharing: (1) creates equity in the provision of public services, (2) breaks the intensifying metropolitan mismatch between social needs and property taxþbased resources, (3) undermines local fiscal incentives supporting exclusive zoning, (4) undermines local fiscal incentives supporting sprawl, and (5) ends intra-metropolitan competition for tax base.
A Map is Worth a Thousand Words
Early in the 1990s I began collecting statistics on the Twin Cities region. Everything I saw told me that the city core, the inner suburbs, and blue-collar suburbs on the periphery were in decline, losing jobs and property tax base to the developing suburbs to the south and west. To make matters worse, conversations with planners revealed that the poorer urbabn areas were subsidizing the building of new highways and sewage systems in the developing suburbs. I knew what I was talking about, but no one wanted to hear me.
In late 1992, with $750 of my own money, I invested in Datanet Mapping, a primative piece of geographic information system software. The Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Dee Long, assigned me a staff member one day concerning regional school enrollment, property taxes, and infrastructure spending. By early 1993, I had developed a series of color maps that illustrated the region's changing demographics, particularly the inner-suburban decline and regional polarization. Suddenly I had an audience. I gave more than 70 speeches based on my maps in 1993, more that 100 in 1994. I was so busy talking to people that I could not keep up with requests for my maps and gave them to the State Planning Agency to be reproduced and distributed. As of 1994, the state of Minnesota had sold more than 4,000 sets of regional demographic maps.
Part of the revenue could go into a redevelopment fund to increase housing opportunities in the suburbs and help the market rebuild the core. The fund would be a self-correcting solution to the problem of regional investment skewed disproportionately to the wealthiest suburbs, for the wealthy communities that have gained the most from recent regional infrastructure investment would be the largest contributors to the fund.
The redevelopment fund could be used to construct a variety of market-rate housing in affluent communities for households earning more than 50 percent of the metropolitan median income. For those earning less, the market will not, by itself, provide opportunities. Outside resources will be needed to underwrite low-income housing-based on a system of portable rental vouchers and scattered as broadly as possible to forestall mini-concentrations of poverty.
Finally, these steps toward deconcentration and revitalization should take place as part of a regional master plan approved by a regional governing agency or, in its absence, by the state legislature.
Metropolitics
In an ideal world, regional reform, as envisioned by the experts, would grow naturally out of popular consensus emerging from a broad regional perspective based on the common good. But the common good and the regional perspective, like truth, beauty, and justice, do not exist in some ideal form. In the end the closest approximation to a regional perspective comes from a fair contest of ideas, values, and perspectives among the elected representatives of the people. From these contests, real reform can emerge, but the process is always hard and often controversial.
Pundits have argued that regional reform of the nation's metropolitan areas is impossible because of the political dominance of the suburbs. While suburban dominance is as much in evidence in the Twin Cities as elsewhere, it is also true that the region's suburban communities are not a monolith with common experiences and political needs. Indeed, what prompted the building of the Twin Cities reform coalition was the discovery of the commonality of interests between the city core and the inner and low tax-base suburbs.
Americaþs working-class suburbs have been a loose cannon politically since Hubert Humphrey lost the White House in 1968—and since Archie Bunker became a Republican. As E. J. Dionne, Stanley Greenberg, Kevin Phillips and others have noted, these communities are central to holding and maintaining a ruling political coalition nationally. They also hold the balance of power on metropolitan issues.
On the merits, these blue-collar suburbs are the biggest prospective winners in regional reform. To them, regional fair housing policy means, over time, fewer units of subsidized housing crowding their doorstep. Property tax-base sharing means lower property taxes and better services, particularly better-funded schools. Once understood, this combination is unbeatable.
In 1993, after two years of constant cajoling and courting—and after constant reminders of the growing inequities among the suburbs—the Twin Cities' working-class suburbs joined the central cities and created a metro-majority coalition in the state legislature. In 1994, the coalition passed the Metropolitan Reorganization Act, which placed all regional sewer, transit, and land use planning under the operational authority of the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities. In doing so, it transformed the Met Council from a $40-million-a-year planning agency to an $600-million-a-year regional government. In both 1993 and 1994, the legislature passed sweeping fair housing bills. Both were vetoed by the Republican governor, but in 1995 a weakened version was finally signed. In 1995, the legislature also passed a bill that significantly increased the existing regional tax-sharing system known as "fiscal disparities." That bill too was vetoed.
The legislative road has been controversial and bumpy, but the reform movement is growing. In 1994, regional churches, environmental groups, communities of color, community development agencies, and other good-government groups formed the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability. As the alliance gains visibility and develops a common language and agenda, the potential for broad-based regional action increases.
The lessons learned in the Twin Cities are transferrable. Policymakers who face rapid polarization in metropolitan communities elsewhere can take advantage of them as well. The local coalitions that are beginning to take action in the Twin Cities can be built over and over again.
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© Copyright 1997 The Brookings Institution
Note: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and should not be attributed to the staff, officers or trustees of The Brookings Institution
Middle class FLIGHT! Now the middle class or WHITE FLIGHT is fleeing the suburbs and the inner City to far distant farm lands.
Take a ride in western Wisconsin and see the growth EVERY where and most these people are white who work in the City's.Go to distant Cambridge or Lakeville and you will see the flight.
Get a bunch of white shirt thoughtless no minds together to do a study with a predetermined outcome and this is what we get. A bigger mess than what we started with.Unfortunately our City's are run like corporations and the almighty dollar is the bottom line.
The City of St Paul has for years used their "Code Enforcement" powers to address behavior issues, and in doing so they have violoated a whole slew of people's Civil Rights, but who's going to do anything about it? City "Officials" know damn well that most people do not have the money to fight them so they act with impunity, and this is the reason they are so arrogant. For a long time now they have used "Code Enforcement" to create an enviornment that would cause the poorest among us to flee to other neighborhoods and cities, and the only ones that don't want to admit it is the city itself!
The middle class is going to continue to flee because they don't want a damn thing to do with the anti social behavior and crime all the poor souls looking for work are going to bring to their neighborhoods in the suburbs. Hell, if St Paul doesn't want them so bad that they are targeting landlords for renting to them, what makes them think the poeple int the suburbs want to have them come and infect their neighborhoods? St Paul and Minneapolis created this mess, let them live with it. If I wanted to live around the types of behavior encountered on the East Side of St Paul, I'd move there to live.
The time frame in which this gentleman is talking was during a period when the city leaders in St Paul were insisting that there WAS NOT a gang problem when everyone in certain areas knew that there was a gang problem indeed.
St Paul's behavior then was as it is now. The leaders were in denial, they blamed other things and causes, and they lied about current conditions.
Sound familiar so far?
After that, the report says it all.....people left the city.
History will repeat itself again I'm afraid.
For the record I posted the anonymous comment at 11:14.
The Brooking's Institute is linked on the front page by clicking onto the title of this post.
Look at the registered vacant homes on the east side and Frog Town. Affordable rental housing lost to a bunch of callous thinking bureaucrats. Trading one class of people for another.
And to think this stench goes all the way to the State Legislature.
Our elected officials are cruel barbaric individuals and I hope and pray they get what's coming to them.
I am one of the people that left the city but I felt forced out by the housing code dept. The differences when you are in an outer city is wonderful, I have neighbors that stop by to say hi and see how things are going, as I am still finishing up with building a home. They don't run to the phone and call the sheriffs for every move you make, instead they come by to be social and at the same time keep an on your place for you when your not there, isn't that what neighbors are suppose to be like...?
Bob is correct development is big up here by Cambridge and Isanti, but I think there are many reasons, its beautiful, safer, quiet and best of all friendly people, which includes city officials
Nancy
We left St Paul in 1983 after getting no satisfaction from St Paul Police regarding a neighbor shooting a gun at squirrels in a tree and also the social workers at Jackson Elementary School trying to tell us it was normal for our children to be stealing things at their young age. We found a community with Police that take guns seriously and a school who doesn't think stealing is normal. We have never regretted the move. St Paul made their own problems with their liberal policies adn the only I have to say is now they can choke on it!
We also left in the 80's and have been ever so happy since. We just don't have any of the problems St Paul always seems to have.
My husband and I just put our house up on the market a couple of weeks ago. We also plan to as you call it "flee St.Paul" the way we have seen the city operate in the past few years was enough for us to decide that St.Paul is not a place to raise children, also with opening up our own business, a restaurant, we felt St.Paul is not small business friendly so why not move and have our business where we are appreciated.
East side resident for now.
I am a renter and I promptly gave my landlord notice to move when he told that the city has taken it upon themselves to admit themselves to my apartment for an inpsection. I now live in the suburbs and I I don't have the threat of government agents violating my privacy. Apparantly the people of St Paul are not smart enough to know when something is wrong with their apartment and either get it fixed or move. I'm not one of them!
I see from my Google "PageRank" feature that your site is more popular than the city of St Paul's website. Way to go Bob!
From reading this, I would say some of the city officials are going to be takling a vacation when the landlords get done with them:
Title 42, U.S.C., Section 3631
Criminal Interference with Right to Fair Housing
This statute makes it unlawful for any individual(s), by the use of force or threatened use of force, to injure, intimidate, or interfere with (or attempt to injure, intimidate, or interfere with), any person's housing rights because of that person's race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin. Among those housing rights enumerated in the statute are:
The sale, purchase, or renting of a dwelling;
the occupation of a dwelling;
the financing of a dwelling;
contracting or negotiating for any of the rights enumerated above.
applying for or participating in any service, organization, or facility relating to the sale or rental of dwellings.
This statute also makes it unlawful by the use of force or threatened use of force, to injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person who is assisting an individual or class of persons in the exercise of their housing rights.
Punishment varies from a fine of up to $1,000 or imprisonment of up to one year, or both, and if bodily injury results, shall be fined up to $10,000 or imprisoned up to ten years, or both, and if death results, shall be subject to imprisonment for any term of years or for life.
How anyone can say that they haven't interfered with the minorities right to rent housing is beyond me, and maybe they didn't do it on purpose or they were just following orders, but the end result is people were injured and someone is going to pay!
I see Bobby Boy is starting to sensor and pull comments from A-Hole Democracy.Way to go Bob now your starting to be like E-Dem.
10:53, Are you the person that left the message stating a certain code enforcement officer is a murderer?
You want to leave stupid liable comments sign your name to it with a verifiable identity.
You would expect me to leave up a comment that could threaten the exsistance of this blog? Get a brain, who's side are you on?
Like I said put your name on dumb stuff and I'll leave it up for the world to see and you can be responsible for what you said.
Really sad you would expect me to be rsponsible for your trash talk.
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