Governing the Fragmented Metropolis: Planning for Regional Sustainability

By Christina D. Rosan

Today the challenges facing our nation's metropolitan regions are enormous: demographic change, aging infrastructure, climate change mitigation and adaptation, urban sprawl, spatial segregation, gentrification, education, housing affordability, regional equity, and more. Unfortunately, local governments do not have the capacity to respond to the interlocking set of problems facing metropolitan regions, and future challenges such as population growth and climate change will not make it easier. But will we ever have a more effective and sustainable approach to developing the metropolitan region? The answer may depend on our ability to develop a means to govern a metropolitan region that promotes population density, regional public transit systems, and the equitable development of city and suburbs within a system of land use and planning that is by and large a local one. If we want to plan for sustainable regions we need to understand and strengthen existing metropolitan planning arrangements.

Christina D. Rosan observes that policy-makers and scholars have long agreed that we need metropolitan governance, but they have debated the best approach. She argues that we need to have a more nuanced understanding of both metropolitan development and local land use planning. She interviews over ninety local and regional policy-makers in Portland, Denver, and Boston, and compares the uses of collaboration and authority in their varying metropolitan planning processes. At one end of the spectrum is Portland's approach, which leverages its authority and mandates local land use; at the other end is Boston's, which offers capacity building and financial incentives in the hopes of garnering voluntary cooperation. Rosan contends that most regions lie somewhere in between and only by understanding our current hybrid system of local land use planning and metropolitan governance will we be able to think critically about what political arrangements and tools are necessary to support the development of environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable metropolitan regions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9780812293258

Book preview

Governing the Fragmented Metropolis

THE CITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, Series Editors

Governing the Fragmented Metropolis

Planning for Regional Sustainability

Christina D. Rosan

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4855-5

To Mom and Dad, Karl, Owen, Anya, and Eli

In loving memory of Judy Layzer

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Planning for a Metropolitan Future

Chapter 2. Planning Without Authority in Boston

Chapter 3. Becoming a Regional Player in Denver

Chapter 4. A Nested System in Transition in Portland

Chapter 5. Lessons for Metropolitan Planning

Chapter 6. Governing More Effective Regions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER 1

Planning for a Metropolitan Future

There are estimates that the population of the United States could increase to 438 million by 2050.¹ Where will we house these new residents? What kind of metropolitan regions will they live in? Will these regions be sustainable or equitable or even livable? If past sprawling land use patterns are any indication, we should be concerned about protecting our nation’s farmland, forests, water resources, and open spaces. With the prospect of climate change, we should be actively rethinking the way we manage our metropolitan areas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make our cities more resilient. By 2050, will we have a more sustainable metropolitan approach that promotes density, develops regional public transit systems, and equitably redevelops the city and inner-ring suburbs? Or will we continue to sprawl? A lot depends on our ability to develop more effective metropolitan governance that encourages local governments to plan sustainably.

While other countries have consolidated power at the metropolitan scale through annexation and the creation of metropolitan government, the United States has a hybrid metropolitan governance approach that is limited by a lack of authority and depends primarily on collaboration. Metropolitan governance in the United States is typically made in a two-tiered system in which local governments still maintain ultimate control over their land use decisions, but also work in a collaborative manner to plan for and make regional decisions. Most metropolitan regions have made some attempt to develop institutions responsible for planning and governance—whether through a metropolitan planning organization (MPO) that coordinates state and federal transportation funding, a council of governments (COG), a regional planning authority, a metropolitan transportation authority, or a combination of these; metropolitan agencies serve primarily as advisors to local governments. One exception stands out. Portland, Oregon, has been granted more authority by state government to insist on coordination of land use planning and development. However, Portland is largely viewed as an anomaly—not replicable and not reflective of broader trends in U.S. politics.

If we want to govern our metropolitan regions more effectively, we first need to understand how our current hybrid system of land use planning and metropolitan governance either supports or hinders cooperation and the development of more sustainable regions (environmentally, economically, and socially). This book is a start. It tells the story of metropolitan governance in three U.S. metropolitan areas (Boston, Massachusetts, Portland, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado) that vary in their use of collaboration and authority. By comparing metropolitan planning processes in Boston, Denver, and Portland, the book critiques how having more authority (moving from capacity building to providing financial incentives to mandating local land use) changes decision making and whether agencies with more authority are more effective at getting local land use planning to take account of the spillover effects of development within their borders. The hope is that by understanding the impact that various metropolitan governance arrangements have on regional land use decisions, we can start to think more critically about what political arrangements and tools are necessary to govern more sustainable metropolitan regions.

U.S. metropolitan regions grow because of thousands of incremental development decisions made by people deciding where they want to live, work, and/or invest. Individual land use choices made by millions of people in separate municipalities have a cumulative effect of creating serious local and metropolitan problems: little affordable housing, insufficient open space, stress on water supplies, unhealthy levels of air pollution, increased greenhouse gas emissions, severe traffic congestion, a loss of mobility and economic opportunity, traffic fatalities, poor health, crumbling regional infrastructure, and questions about regional equity and sustainability.² These social, economic, and environmental costs of our current metropolitan development patterns are often ignored, but when they are quantified we see how serious they are.

Unfortunately, local governments do not have the capacity to respond to the interlocking set of problems facing metropolitan regions, and future challenges such as population growth and climate change will not make it easier. Just when we need to be reducing our ecological footprints and carbon dioxide emissions to mitigate climate change, our sprawling metropolitan development patterns continue to drive them up.³ However, there is reason to be optimistic about the future of America’s metropolitan regions. First, most regions in the United States already have a system of metropolitan governance in place, albeit weak, that could be strengthened. Second, as a nation, we are starting to appreciate a choice in how we develop land: there is a recognition that sprawl is inefficient and causes a number of environmental, social, and economic problems. Millennials and empty-nesters are also demanding more compact and urban living. Even people who prefer a suburban lifestyle are recognizing that walkable streets, public transit, smart growth, and mixed-use development are beneficial. Under the Obama administration, we have also seen an interest in sustainability and regional planning. We can be hopeful that this sea change in the way we think about urban and suburban space may carry over into how we govern the region; however, making metropolitan governance work better will require us to first better understand our current approach and then to make necessary reforms.

Living in Fragmented and Sprawling Regions

Today American regions are governed by hundreds of individual jurisdictions, but many people may be surprised by just how fragmented metropolitan governance is. According to the Committee on Improving the Future of U.S. Cities Through Improved Metropolitan Area Governance, The average metropolitan area consisted of 114 local governments: 2 counties, 42 municipalities or towns, and 70 special districts, of which 21 were school districts. There were 18 local governments for every 100,000 people in metropolitan areas.⁴ In a typical U.S. metropolitan region, local governments will make independent decisions about land use without much regard for how it impacts neighboring communities or what the externalities are. The resulting trend has been urban sprawl—low-density development on greenfields in the outer fringes of metropolitan regions. Without metropolitan planning, one town approves a subdivision on a greenfield. Then another town does the same. Soon we have a sprawling development pattern in the metropolitan region and cities and towns are scrambling to find the revenue to support the new infrastructure to maintain these unsustainable planning decisions.⁵

We have known about the consequences of suburban sprawl development for decades, but U.S. land use and fiscal policy and weak forms of metropolitan governance continue to promote it nonetheless. Writing in 1972, David Mckee and Gerald Smith describe urban sprawl as an inefficient allocation of resources for society.⁶ They argue that sprawl suggests urban areas which are larger than necessary which may mean that transportation, communication, utility services, and local public services all become ‘unnecessarily inefficient and uneconomical.’⁷ The Real Estate Research Corporation’s 1974 Costs of Sprawl study describes the phenomenon as the most expensive form of residential development in terms of economic costs, environmental costs, natural resource consumption and many types of personal costs.⁸ Lower density development exacts more per person to service than higher density development. As Arthur C. Nelson writes, It costs twice as much per unit of development to fully service two homes per acre as it does to serve four homes per acre.⁹ According to the American Farmland Trust, For every tax dollar collected from newly developed suburban residential property, about $1.25 in services must be paid—a loss of 25 cents.¹⁰ Robert Burchell’s studies on the cost of sprawl in Florida, New Jersey, Kentucky, South Carolina, and the Delaware Estuary find the duplication of public services.¹¹ In order to accommodate new development, each municipality is forced to provide new infrastructure investment: schools, roads, sewer, police, fire protection, and so on.¹² However, many of these smaller and previously rural jurisdictions are not prepared financially or structurally to provide the type of suburban services necessary. Some of the services would also be best offered at a metropolitan scale, but because of jurisdictional boundaries and current systems of municipal finance, they are provided at the local level without economies of scale. Two towns right next to each other have to finance their own school systems, planning directors, fire departments, and police officers.

Since new suburban development does not pay for the infrastructure that it requires, in order to generate more income, municipalities compete with each other to attract taxable development (retail development in sales tax states and industrial or commercial development that is taxed at a higher rate than residential development in non-sales tax states). Drier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom argue that communities compete for favored residents and investments, and each jurisdiction has a strong incentive to adopt zoning and development policies that exclude potential residents with incomes below the median for their jurisdiction or who require more costly services.¹³ Their research raises important questions about how equitable our metropolitan development patterns are, particularly those that are designed to attract high-tax and low-service residents and facilities.¹⁴ In addition, this tax-dependent approach to planning may not be sustainable in the long term, even for bringing in more revenue. Tax deals offered by municipalities to attract commercial and industrial development may serve as a temporary response to revenue shortfalls, but these developments can change the character of the area (e.g., creating a car-oriented environment that undercuts existing downtown economies). Developers who have learned how to game the system can leapfrog to a new location just when their last tax break runs out and the commercial development finally produces a positive cash flow for the municipality.

Unfortunately, our institutional and political arrangements prevent us from recognizing the problems of metropolitan fragmentation or taking action to reform it. Paul Lewis argues that political fragmentation gives suburbanites the institutional ammunition to preserve land-use advantages, and provides little incentive for local politicians to consider the externality costs of their land-use decisions.¹⁵ Municipalities may prevent affordable housing from being built because they do not want to pay for the construction of new schools when more children move to the community. One way to do this is to zone out certain types of developments or to require large lot zoning. Fulton et al. found evidence of this practice: regions with more fragmented governance are more likely to have less dense development.¹⁶ Zoning out people and certain unfavorable uses also has negative environmental implications. When lot sizes increase, the amount of land converted from open space to residential use increases. The effect is dramatic. Between 1982 and 2007, the U.S. population increased by 30 percent while land consumption increased 57 percent.¹⁷ The Sierra Club estimates that we lose 400,000 acres of open space to development every year (about 1,100 acres per day).¹⁸ According to the 2012 USDA’s Natural Resources Inventory, 44 million acres of land were newly developed between 1982 and 2012.¹⁹ As Robert Burchell and Sahan Mukherji highlight, the costs are real: Sprawl produces a 21% increase in amount of undeveloped land converted to developed land (2.4 million acres) and approximately a 10% increase in local road lane-miles (188 300). Furthermore, sprawl causes about 10% more annual public service (fiscal) deficits ($4.2 billion) and 8% higher housing occupancy costs ($13 000 per dwelling unit).²⁰

Suburban lifestyles can also impose negative externalities on individual communities and an entire region because of a significant increase in resource consumption. Matthew Kahn found that suburban residents drive 31 percent more and consume twice as much land as their urban counterparts.²¹ This is troubling considering that the average American spends the equivalent of fifty-five eight-hour workdays driving every year.²² According to the Texas Transportation Institute, traffic congestion in 439 U.S. urban regions in 2010 resulted in 4.8 billion hours spent in traffic, an added cost of 1.9 billion gallons of fuel, and associated air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.²³ Many Americans (about 138.5 million of them) might also be unpleasantly surprised to learn that that they live in metropolitan regions with unacceptable levels of air pollution and long-term health impacts.²⁴

Scholars and planners have long argued that planning at the metropolitan scale is the answer to the inefficiency, inequity, and unsustainability of our past development patterns. According to Myron Orfield, in the United States there is a pressing need for metropolitan reforms because outdated metropolitan political structures are an important part of the problem. Highly fragmented governance systems contribute to increasing sprawl and congestion, growing racial and economic segregation, and deepening disparities in the quality of local services. Reforming metropolitan governance is essential for fair and sustainable national growth.²⁵ The logic is that effective metropolitan governance will lead to communities working together to develop more compact regions that reduce urban sprawl, improve our regional quality of life, protect open space, promote regional equity, reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, and help us plan for more resilient regions. Reid Ewing and Shima Hamidi argue that promoting more compact and connected metropolitan regions will greatly improve people’s quality of life because people have greater economic opportunity in compact and connected metro areas, … spend less of their household income on the combined cost of housing and transportation in these areas, … have a greater number of transportation options available to them, … [and] in compact, connected metro areas tend to be safer, healthier and live longer than their peers in more sprawling metro areas.²⁶

While the benefits outlined by Ewing and Hamidi are desirable, changing our current planning processes to promote density and connectedness is another story. Scholars have tried to explain the resistance to metropolitan planning and governance. First, homeowners want to keep their home values high and perceive that local control is critical to this goal. Anthony Downs writes that many homeowners believe that their economic interest in their home must be protected by preventing or limiting the construction of lower-cost housing in their community, and homeowners dominate suburban politics.²⁷ Homeowners defend the autonomy of their jurisdictions as an important mechanism to influence who their neighbors are.²⁸ They feel threatened by attempts to remove decision making about planning and zoning from local control. Metropolitan coordination and planning are often viewed as efforts to limit property rights.

Also, since schools are primarily financed locally in many parts of the country, residents want to make sure that they maintain the highest quality school systems. Efforts at metropolitan governance are often perceived as threats to local autonomy and control over the local school districts. Citizens feel that if services are centralized they will not have the same type of influence over them. And localities that are doing well financially view efforts at metropolitanization as attempts to redistribute funding to poorer communities, which is not a welcome prospect. Initiatives to create more regional institutions threaten the order that exists in metropolitan America, which can only be characterized as segregation and inequity. In Cities Without Suburbs, David Rusk argues that this is the toughest issue in American society. It goes right to the heart of Americans’ fears about race and class. There will be no short-term, politically comfortable solutions.²⁹ Rusk points out that traditional efforts at regional cooperation have focused on service delivery: trash, water, transportation planning, sewage treatment, and air quality. Regional arrangements, according to Rusk, usually avoid policies and programs that share the burden of inner-city residents.³⁰ At the same time, it should be noted that not all city dwellers are supportive of metropolitan consolidation and control. John Powell finds that inner-city communities have also been reluctant to adopt more regional approaches for fear of losing cultural control, cultural identity, and political power within their communities.³¹ When both residents of suburban and urban areas view metropolitan governance as giving up their autonomy, it is no wonder that regional approaches are viewed with skepticism. Unsurprisingly, there is no mass movement for metropolitan governance.

The Historical Debate About Metropolitan Solutions

While the average person may not be too worried about designing effective metropolitan governance, American planners and scholars have been debating it for decades.³² They agree that jurisdictional boundaries in metropolitan regions serve more as historical artifacts than as a representation of current environmental, social, economic, and political conditions. What they disagree about is the best strategy to promote coordination. According to early reformers, the problems that metropolitan areas were facing were really inescapable housekeeping problems; as Scott Greer put it: The metropolitan household is in many respects one; but its housekeeping is organized in dozens or hundreds of families, each different (if not hostile) to the neighbors.³³ Robert Wood’s 1961 book 1,400 Governments argues that the political fragmentation of metropolitan regions makes governing them untenable as each of the 1,400 governments makes its own decisions.³⁴ In 1964, Matthew Holden described the metropolitan problem as a diplomacy problem in which each municipality is maximizing its own interest.³⁵ Writing in 1957, Luther Gulick stated, When it comes to zoning, land use regulation, and the system for circulation and traffic, the underlying problem becomes impossible of rational attack unless there is a single center for coordinated analysis, planning, and action.³⁶ Gulick advocated the creation of a new model of governance that takes into account the metropolitan nature of the problems and their solutions, but also respects local autonomy. His bottom-up and top-down model represents an idealized approach. Unfortunately, creating a model that is both coordinated at the metropolitan level and respects local autonomy turns out to be exceptionally difficult. Today scholars and policy makers still grapple with finding the right balance.

In 1959, Arthur Maass and his colleagues argued that the systematic functions of government could be metropolitanized. In Area and Power, Maass recommends that power be divided according to the process of governing, the functions of government, or constituency. Maass’s approach is consistent with the progressive reformers’ rational approach to metropolitan problems. To make metropolitan coordination work, the assignment of power must simply be spelled out carefully.³⁷ Raymond Vernon sums up the challenge of metropolitan governance, arguing that the familiar problem in government structure is that of creating a body of authority that is bigger than a breadbox but smaller than an elephant—more extensive in its scope than the localities but less extensive than the state.³⁸ To solve the metropolitan problem, Greer argues that functional areas that could address specific problems on a metropolitan level would take the garbage collection out of politics, and he was optimistic that metropolitan administration could create a highly rationalized system run by a perfected bureaucracy operated by professionally trained managers and judged as a business concern.³⁹ These proposed approaches would be highly rational and politically acceptable and might be modeled on examples of air and water boards that manage resources across jurisdictional lines.

Although rationalization and efficiency were held up as goals by scholars and policy makers, they also worried that new metropolitan governments would lack the political accountability of local jurisdictions.⁴⁰ In addition, the division into different functions might produce a metropolitan area that was fractured in yet another way, according to function rather than accountability.⁴¹ Writing in 1961, Anthony Downs warned against coordination by function, arguing that sooner or later the problem of coordinating the coordinators will also become acute.⁴² Downs highlighted the challenge of how to coordinate across various jurisdictions and sectors and levels of government.

Decades later, after numerous policy experiments and metropolitan reforms, scholars are still trying to sort out the most effective arrangement for metropolitan governance. They recognize that the current method of managing urban regions has led to urban sprawl, environmental degradation, and regional inequity. Peter Drier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom argue that fragmented planning at the local level—without regional cooperation—has encouraged unplanned, costly sprawl on the urban fringe.⁴³ Bruce Katz agrees, writing that

America’s metropolitan areas are experiencing remarkably similar development patterns—explosive growth at the exurban fringe coupled with decline and disinvestment in older established communities. Throughout the country, upper-income, residentially exclusive suburbs are capturing a disproportionate share of regional infrastructure spending and economic growth. At the same time, trends generally associated with inner-city neighborhoods—concentrated poverty, pervasive joblessness, failing schools, racial and social isolation—are becoming the norm in older suburbs surrounding the urban core.⁴⁴

Scholars interested in regional equity increasingly point to the need for metropolitan solutions. Myron Orfield suggests that regional governance reflects the reality of modern metropolitan challenges—challenges that are too large for any one government to address alone and that are often exacerbated by excessive fragmentation.⁴⁵ He argues that cities and suburbs need to learn to work together because the problems they each face are the same: his study of twenty-five metropolitan regions in the United States finds that more than half of suburban residents reside in suburbs with social or fiscal challenges severe enough to be considered ‘at risk.’⁴⁶ Since increasingly it is not just the central cities that are suffering, he argues that coalition-building efforts that emphasize the links between core cities and suburbs can bring about reforms to increase equity for an entire region.⁴⁷ The notion that coalitions could be built across metropolitan areas has been a focus of the new regionalists who, according to Allan Wallis, advocate for cooperation versus coordination, governance versus government, multisector versus public sector, and multiple versus single boundaries.⁴⁸ The new regionalists realize the limitations of top-down planning focusing on government reform and instead see more voluntary cooperation and governance rather than government as the way forward.

Arguments for Why Voluntary Regionalism Is Politically Feasible (and Better)

Although the conversation about the need for a metropolitan approach spans decades, the structure of local planning in the United States makes it difficult to create metropolitan institutions with any power. Early experiments with annexation and special districts demonstrated that it was possible to scale up to a higher level for urban service provision and administration. However, while special districts for water and transportation have worked relatively well, political integration at the metropolitan scale has been more complicated. Local municipalities are not accustomed to thinking of themselves as a part of a community of communities, and in many cases local officials view efforts at metropolitan coordination as a threat to their autonomy.⁴⁹ Most efforts at metropolitan government through consolidation have been abandoned in the United States in favor of more cooperative and often voluntary models of metropolitan governance. Scholars and policy makers argue that creating metropolitan governance with more authority is politically infeasible. Instead,