“We are a metro nation,” says Bruce Katz of the
Brookings Institution. “It’s time we started acting like it.”
Katz is vice president and director of the
Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings in Washington, D.C., and architect of the new initiative,
Blueprint for American Prosperity: Unleashing the Potential of a Metropolitan Nation.
The premise is basically this: To compete in the new global economy, the U.S. must leverage four key assets: innovation, infrastructure, human capital and quality places.
And those assets are concentrated—and this is the key part—in our nation’s metropolitan areas.
The problem? According to Katz and crew, the federal government has not kept up with global changes, and is impeding rather than promoting progress in metro areas.
“We’re going to attempt to re-imagine and redevelop a partnership with a national government that’s been adrift for decades,” he says.
A Chat with KatzKatz recently sat down to talk about the
Blueprint project. Here’s what
Capital Gains learned:
Q: Of the four key assets you say are critical to leverage—innovation, infrastructure, human capital and quality places—is there
any one that’s more critical than the other?
Katz: They’re all critical in their own right. Success has to be productive growth, inclusive growth, sustainable growth.
You can have a very sustainable place, but not be very inclusive—with big disparities in income or education. You can be very sustainable but not compete globally. You’ve got to be thinking about all four of these things.
Q: What kind of buy-in are you seeking and how’s it going to work?
A: It’s at three levels. The first level is we want people to buy the paradigm of the metro nation. A large portion of Americans think we live in small towns and when you say metro, they think you mean city. Even though they’re living in a town or suburb and they’re commuting into cities or using the amenities of a city, they don’t regard themselves as living in a broader metro. Two-thirds of the population are in metros, with three-fourths of the GDP.
[Second], we have a whole series of concrete legislatable ideas on innovation, on infrastructure, on quality of place, and climate. We would like those to be enacted.
And the last piece, we are building a network of corporate, civic, and political leaders—[people] who say, “We agree with the principals of this.” They may not agree with every single policy reform that is being advocated but fundamentally agree with the notion that we’re a metro nation, but we’re not acting like one.
Q: Why hasn’t the federal government kept pace with the changes in the world today?
Katz: I think there’s been a philosophy in play since the 1980s that we should be pushing out responsibility from the federal government. It may be aligned with Reagan, but a lot of Democratic leaders have aligned with this as well. This notion that power should be pushed out of Washington crossed party lines and ideological lines.
The problem is the world has change a bit since 1980: the Internet, globalization, global warming, wage stagnation. We need to rethink the national government.
We believe we’re not going to return to the federal government of the 1970s—top down, hierarchical command-control—nor should we. We need to have a more balanced vision of federalism. The Federal government leads where it must, sets the frame for big success on climate, wages, and competitiveness, but also empowers metros to push the envelope further.
Q: How does a city today work on an issue like transportation in conjunction with the
Blueprint for Prosperity? How would it work?
Katz: A lot of this is about making choices. There are infrastructure dollars raised by the federal and state government that are more flexible than people think that allows for shifts between highway and transit.
The question is what’s your vision for yourself? In many metros we tend to be on autopilot. We still tend to make investments in infrastructure that serves the 1970s economy as opposed to this economy.
Using state and federal dollars in advance of visions that are more likely to have high returns on investment that’s competitive and sustainable—that’s A.
B [is] leveraging our private sector. And C [is] leveraging our prospective tax and revenue enhancements.
Because you build these corridors, you can do your land use, you’re going to have some real revenue enhancements, and you can bank those right now. That’s a smart use of tax increment financing.
Where We StandWe at Capital Gains sat down to decode some of Brookings' wonky data for the Blueprint project, and here’s how we think the Lansing-East Lansing Metro (population about 450,000) stacks up in Katz’s prosperity world-view:
(Not Very) Productive Growth. Based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per job, metropolitan Lansing landed down at
81 on the list of 100. Our GDP per job increased 9.4 percent between 2001 and 2005, landing us humbly in
the middle of the pack at 43.
On the plus side, 31.7 percent of us have bachelor’s degrees, meaning we narrowly
cracked the Top 25.
(Sort of) Inclusive Growth. Like most of the largest metros, we’re losing our share of families that would be considered middle class—our percentage fell by 9.3 percentage points between 1970 and 2005, putting us in the
middle of the pack again at 47. It's a problem of losing the middle income jobs, and in comparing the wage gap between the upper and lower earners, Lansing ranked
down at 71.
But here’s a bright spot, and something to brag about: The share of adults in metro Lansing who finished high school was 91.3 percent in 2006—meaning we’re
4th on the top 100 list, right up there with Madison (1st), Minneapolis-St. Paul (2nd), and Colorado Springs (3rd).
(Definitely Not) Sustainable Growth. We drive a lot. We use up a lot of land. Both are New Economy no-no’s, according to Brookings.
The average resident in metropolitan Lansing emitted 2.754 metric tons of carbon from residential and transportation energy consumption in 2005—a climate-altering, per-capita carbon footprint that
landed us down at 71 on the list of 100. Our metro area’s total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) amounted to 11,224 miles per person in 2005,
putting us at 74.
And, between 1980 and 2000, we consumed 5.28 acres of rural land for every new housing unit built—meaning we suburban-sprawled ourselves into the exurbs more extensively than everyone except Scranton, PA and Youngstown, OH. That’s right: we
pulled up the rear at 97th out of 100 on this one.
To see more data and all the
Blueprint policy papers, click
here.
Bruce Katz interview courtesy of Tracy Certo with our Issue Media Group sister- publication,
Pop City in Pittsburgh. The rest was Brad Garmon, Editor-in-Chief of
Capital Gains.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography.
Photos:
Bruce Katz photograph copyright Jim Harrison
City of Lansing Photographs © Dave Trumpie