Questions and Answers About Vision Council
Howard Husock is director of case studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. This article first appeared in the April 12, 1998, Detroit News, and was excerpted from the winter issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.
Breaking
Up Cities More Promising Than Merger with Suburbs
By Howard Husock
Today
prominent urbanists are urging a new wave of
consolidation, exhorting cities to merge with their
suburbs to form region-wide metropolitan governments. But
equally energetic advocates have mounted fierce political
campaigns to make exactly the opposite view prevail--to
form smaller, decentralized city governments for
neighborhoods that secede from a larger whole.
There are good reasons to believe the secessionists are
right.
The idea of metropolitan government--a benevolent, expert
central administration for urban areas--has tempted
efficiency-minded urban theorists for generations. Here,
they've argued, is a way of bringing order to the chaos
of central cities surrounded by a crazy quilt of
independent suburbs.
Though in the 1920s the movement saw metropolitanism as a
recipe for improved city services and non-corrupt
leadership, by the 1960s advocates added two more goals:
redistribution of wealth, with affluent suburbs
supporting public services in poorer inner cities; and
environmental protection, with enlightened planners
dictating the shape of future development, preventing
"urban sprawl" and keeping
"ticky-tacky" suburbs from devouring farmland.
Today's foremost champion of metropolitan government,
David Rusk, one-time mayor of Albuquerque and
self-described former civil rights and anti-poverty
worker, travels the lecture circuit spreading the gospel
of his 1993 book, "Cities Without Suburbs." A
unified metropolitan government, Rusk proclaims, can
"profoundly transform the long-term outlook for
failing central cities and help re-energize American
society."
Though big-city mayors and elite opinion makers like
Rusk's views and consider them mainstream, on the
political front lines these ideas don't carry much
weight. Across the country local activists have been
rejecting the push to create bigger jurisdictions. They
want to retain--or create--smaller governments, by
seceding from existing city government, by incorporating
new, smaller jurisdictions carved out of larger ones or
by resisting annexation by larger governments.
New Yorkers are familiar with this move toward the local:
Five years ago the Staten Island secession movement
blazed up fiercely, though the State Legislature
eventually snuffed it out. But similar efforts are
catching fire in many other locales.
¥ In Los Angeles, the Valley Vote movement, with Gov.
Pete Wilson's support, proposes to detach the San
Fernando Valley (population: 1.2 million) from the rest
of the city.
¥ In Florida four successful referenda since 1992 have
given birth to four new municipalities within Dade
County, the administrative district for 1.5 million
residents of the suburbs surrounding central Miami. Six
other new municipalities are in the works.
¥ Around Tucson, suburbs that have long resisted
annexation by the central city leaped at the chance state
legislation offered them last year to incorporate as
independent towns. Two have already done so; six others
have proposed or already scheduled votes.
To liberals like Rusk, localism reflects yet another
example of what journalist Robert Kuttner has called the
"revolt of the haves"; it is a greedy retreat
from the commonweal, sacrificing the city for for the
short-term improvement of the suburbs. But Rusk believes
the revolt of the haves is futile. It threatens the
suburbs themselves, as inner-city chaos overtakes the
surrounding communities.
Localism is popular, however, not because it promises a
sweetheart deal for a few privileged suburbanites at the
expense of the greater good, or because the
unsophisticated fail to understand a demonstrably
superior metropolitan approach. Voters' common sense
tells them that the closer they are to government, the
more it will respond to their demands.
They will see their hard-earned tax dollars spent on the
kind of projects they prefer and will have a greater
assurance that interest groups--such a public employee
unions--will not usurp local government for the benefit
of their own members, who may not even live in the city
where they work.
In fact, there are good reasons to go one step further.
To improve older neighborhoods in older cities requires
not a single, bigger government but increased numbers of
smaller ones. We should break cities up into an array of
independent, neighborhood-based governments that would
set their own property-tax rates, elect their own
officials,and give city residents the same control and
sense of community that their suburban counterparts take
for granted.
City dwellers could direct public spending to the things
they consider most important. They could ask the local
public works director why their street went unplowed or
unpaved, or push the local chief of police to deal with
the rowdy playground gang before the things get out of
hand.
Freed from centralized bureaucracies, these
neighborhoods, including many of the older, poorer ones,
would prosper. As for paying to maintain, or build,
expensive regional infrastructure systems: for that
purpose, these independent local governments could
cooperate in a loose confederation, or "special
purpose district."
Consolidation of formerly independent municipalities in
New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Boston, which
metropolitan advocate Rusk cites to buttress his case,
didn't arise from a Rusk-like belief that bigger was
better. Rather, newly developing areas saw consolidation
as the best means to plug into the services core cities
offered.
By the 1920s, as soon as suburbs discovered other means
short of consolidation to hook up to regional
infrastructure--typically special-purpose districts--they
stopped joining central cities.
Municipalities have differentiated themselves from one
another for good reason. The formation of independent
cities and towns fueled the explosive economic takeoff of
the late 1800s; it defused tensions between immigrant and
native-born; and it allowed the upwardly mobile to build
communities that reflected their hard-won new social
status.
Even as advocates (including the Department of Housing
and Urban Development) beat the drums for metropolitan
government, the number of local governments in the United
States kept rising. From 1952 to 1992, the number of
municipalities grew from 16,807 to 19,279. While a few
core cities--Indianapolis, Jacksonville, and
Nashville--have merged with their surrounding metro
governments in recent years, citizens have overwhelmingly
scorned the metro vision during the past half-century.
Champaign and Urbana in Illinois twice rejected
consolidation, even though they're often thought of as a
single college town. Voters in the Knoxville, Tenn., and
Richmond, Va., areas refused city-county consolidation,
as did voters in David Rusk's own Albuquerque (before
Rusk's tenure as mayor).
Instead of promising more of the redistributionist
machinery that has failed so roundly over the last
generation, breaking up the cities holds out a
different,more valuable promise to poor neighborhoods. It
offers them the incentive and the means to encourage
economic growth.
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This article is being submitted to the Gazette for possible reprinting on the opinion page..
