Governing Magazine/June 1998

FEATURE: CITY AND SUBURB: REGIONS

THE QUEST FOR COMMON GROUND

Communities that haven't gotten along too well are beginning to
realize they share an enemy: sprawl.

By Rob Gurwitt

It's not that Ken Montlack is bitter, or even especially angry. But
from his perch on the city council in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, he has
been watching his town struggle to maintain its housing standards and
fix its roads and keep its apartments filled and spruce up the facades
of tottering commercial strips, and he confesses himself vexed.
 Cleveland Heights, which sits just to the east of the city whose name
it bears, was once one of the crown jewels in the ring of suburbs that
immediately surround Cleveland. If you lived on Cleveland's east side,
it was one of the places that you dreamed of moving to someday. Now,
although it is still a respected-enough address, it is just like older
suburbs everywhere, striving to keep up appearances as money and
people leapfrog outward in search of greener surroundings, better
schools and more space. Montlack has come to the depressing conclusion
that, try as it might to remain attractive, Cleveland Heights is
heading for failure.
 He isn't worried just because Cleveland Heights' housing stock is
old, the lots small and the space for new development gone, although
all of this is true. What irritates him is that when he looks around,
he sees all the external cards stacked against his town.
 Federal and state subsidies for communities trying to stave off
decay? "The government's policies have been that if you want monies,
you must be slummy and blighty," he says. "If your central city looks
like Hiroshima, then they'll give you money." Road maintenance? Don't
even get him started on the Ohio Department of Transportation and its
priorities. "You can't reform ODOT," he says wearily, "you can only
drive a stake through its heart." Zoning in the rich outer suburbs?
"If you have no poor people, then you've eliminated your social costs
while increasing your tax base, and you've stuck the cities and inner
suburbs with the job of taking care of them. You can't really take on
the outer ring's restrictive zoning," he admits. "All you can do," and
he says this with a friendly smile, "is make their life miserable."
 Well, maybe not miserable. Cleveland's booming outer suburbs seem to
be doing quite well for themselves at the moment, and some of them
barely acknowledge that places like Cleveland Heights exist. But can
they be made a bit nervous, their confidence shaken a bit? They can,
and Ken Montlack is dedicating much of his energy to doing it.
 About two years ago, he and other elected officials from Cleveland's
older, inner-ring communities--upper-end towns such as Shaker Heights
and Lakewood, blue-collar towns such as Euclid and Garfield Heights--
began meeting monthly to compare notes and see if, in combination,
they could begin rewriting some of the rules of the metropolitan
economic and political game. They named themselves the "First Suburbs
Consortium," complete with letterhead and a set of advisers, including
Cleveland State University Professor Tom Bier, who is the best known
analyst of local development trends.
 So far, the group's tangible victories have been modest: an agreement
with HUD that the federal agency will no longer foreclose on inner-
ring properties and then let them deteriorate; a compromise on a state
highway-widening proposal out on the suburban fringe; better inner-
ring representation on boards that make regional spending decisions.
The First Suburbs have been busy, but no one, least of all the
politicians who belong to their coalition, would argue that they have
become metropolitan power brokers. Even the city of Cleveland itself,
which clearly has some interests in common with its older suburbs, has
for the most part remained aloof from their efforts, although City
Council President Jay Westbrook does send a representative to the
consortium's meetings.
 Yet, there is also no doubt that the First Suburbs have begun to
unsettle the region's politics, and it is no stretch at all to suggest
that, over the next few years, they will unsettle it a good deal more.
That is because they are zeroing in on the issue of suburban sprawl,
and in Cleveland, as in a growing number of places all over the
country, sprawl is the issue around which the politics of regional
development is being remade.
 From Chicago to St. Louis to Philadelphia, and in Maryland, Michigan
and California, coalitions are taking shape that would have been
unthinkable a few years ago--between central cities and their close-in
suburbs; among inner-ring communities whose officials have for decades
ignored each other; between communities in the metropolitan core and
rural officials concerned about the loss of farmland.
 These developments are being propelled by a growing conviction that,
as Paul Oyaski, the mayor of Euclid, puts it, "there is a direct
cause-and-effect relationship between outer-belt strength and inner-
belt weakness." Oyaski, Montlack and their allies believe central
cities and older suburbs are unfairly burdened by policies at every
level that steer resources to new development rather than
redevelopment, with congestion and rising taxes the ultimate result.
They are winning converts, giving the debate over regional growth and
decline a heft it has never had before.
 "I'm sensing that this issue means something to people all across the
state," says Gene Krebs, a conservative Republican from a rural
district who has emerged as the most forceful proponent of farmland
preservation in the Ohio House. "It's urban sprawl in the cities,
farmland preservation in rural counties, and in the suburbs it's that
it used to take 45 minutes to drive home from work, and now it takes
an hour and 45 minutes."
 For years, there have been only two real examples of regional
approaches to the sprawl issue: the decades-old tax-base sharing
system around Minneapolis and St. Paul, which was designed to get at
the fiscal inequities that evolve when one community develops much
faster than another, and the urban growth boundary and elected
metropolitan board in Portland, Oregon. Now, not only are there a
passel of approaches being discussed, from statewide growth management
plans to targeted infrastructure investment to giving more teeth to
regional planning bodies, but a fundamental strategic split is
developing, between those who favor a direct confrontation with the
outer edge over who gets more resources and those who believe that
only regional cooperation will ultimately benefit both core and outer
communities.
 What is indisputable is that, as the stunning rates of outer suburban
growth continue unabated, ferment on these matters is growing. In the
year since Maryland passed its "smart growth" initiative, directing
state infrastructure funding largely to older areas, more than half
the states in the country have gotten in touch with its planning
office. Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently decided--after much public
debate--to shift a chunk of its regional transportation funding away
from exurban road expansion toward downtown road repair. The St. Louis
region is embroiled in a bitter debate over whether to build a bridge
over the Missouri River from St. Louis County to fast-growing St.
Charles County. And in Fresno, California, an unprecedented coalition
of farming interests, homebuilders and business leaders, fed up with
governmental inaction, has just called on the county to promote
compact, rather than sprawling, development patterns.
 "What we're seeing," says Bruce Katz, who directs the Brookings
Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, "is a sort of
in-out movement built around equity, and an out-in movement built
around the preservation of open space or farmland. One or the other
might arise first or have more weight in a given region, but what is
striking is that this stuff wasn't even on the map two years ago."

Not everyone realizes it, but any discussion of regional "growth" in
the Cleveland area obscures the fundamental point: The area is not
gaining people, it is just shuffling them around. While each of the
four counties that fringe Cleveland and its inner suburbs grew in
population by as much as 50 percent between 1970 and 1994, the five-
county region as a whole actually declined slightly. During those
years, Cleveland lost 34 percent of its residents, and the inner
suburbs were not far behind: Euclid saw a 26 percent drop, Garfield
Heights 25 percent, Lakewood 19 percent, Shaker Heights 16 percent.
 The dynamics of metropolitan dispersal are complex, and there are
those who argue that cities and inner suburbs are victims only of the
marketplace and their own shortcomings--that what is at work is not
urban "sprawl" but urban "choice," as homebuyers and employers opt for
better schools, lower crime, better housing values, lower taxes and an
escape from the density and decay afflicting the metropolitan core. By
focusing on regional imbalance, the argument goes, urban activists are
sidestepping their own responsibility for failing to address crime,
education and other problems head-on.
 But these arguments do not strike much of a chord with officials like
Ken Montlack, who for years have been engaged in a determined battle
to stave off decay. They have raised taxes to support their schools,
they have subsidized homebuyers, they have refurbished storefronts,
they have given tax breaks to retailers tempted to move out, they have
bought up commercial strips and sold them cheap to developers, they
have given loans and grants to employers, they have even launched
public relations campaigns to appeal to young families. But the thrust
of all this is unmistakable: It is upkeep, not development. "We
realize we have to be aggressive and proactive to retain people and
grow jobs," says Madeline Cain, the mayor of Lakewood, which sits on
Lake Michigan just to the west of Cleveland. "At the same time, we see
millions and millions being drawn from our citizens and being used to
provide incentives for people not only to flee the inner suburbs but
Cuyahoga County."
 It's not just that money that might have gone to already-developed
communities is being spent on new development; it's that public policy
encourages new development. As Cleveland State's Tom Bier argues,
public policies made at all levels of government "have made it more
expensive to redevelop than to build on farms. Government has
structured the marketplace by deciding where the road goes, by how it
zones, by where money for water and sewer lines gets spent."
 The example he likes to use is a recent federal grant to build a new
road in one of the suburbs beyond the Cuyahoga County line, designed
to open 200 acres for new industrial development. That grant was an
outright gift. A few months before that, the state established a loan
fund to promote the development of "brownfields"--vacant, usually
polluted industrial land in the inner ring. Communities will have to
pay it back, with interest. "Here's public money saying that it is
good and proper to give money away for the development of farmland,"
Bier points out, "but that it is somehow tainted to give it away for
brownfields. This is the mindset."
 State and local spending on water and sewer lines, state funding of
new schools, state-subsidized enterprise zones and economic
development policies all shape the way development happens. So, too,
do less obvious things, such as federal housing policy. The way the
inner-ring leaders see it, Washington has been holding them to the
most rigorous standards of social equity, while placing little or no
pressure on the outer suburbs, which have been able to avoid
involvement in social issues altogether. "The inner-ring suburbs,
every one of them has been responsible in terms of open housing,
accepting housing for the mentally retarded and the like, and we see
no pressure on other communities to do the same," says Madeline Cain.
 But what galls Cain and her colleagues most is the extent to which
road spending on the periphery is subsidized by urban tax dollars. New
roads, and especially new highway interchanges, open up new areas for
development, or at least promote it. In Ohio, much of this
construction is paid for through gas-tax money, the bulk of which,
Euclid's Paul Oyaski argues, comes from cities and older communities.
"When Strongsville, out at the edge of Cuyahoga County, puts in a new
mall, that's a local zoning decision," he says. "So why the hell
should the people of Ohio subsidize building interchanges for it? They
put in industrial parks and shopping malls and then come to ODOT for
these improvements, but that money is generated in the densely
populated areas of Cuyahoga County. We're subsidizing building yuppie
enclaves, and we can't afford to fix our sewers."

The best demonstration of what these arguments can do is on display in
Minnesota, where Myron Orfield, a Democratic state representative from
Minneapolis, has built a bipartisan coalition of legislators from the
central cities and older and poorer suburbs aimed at redressing the
regional imbalance. Three years ago, Orfield's forces pushed through
legislation to give the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council, the board
that oversees regional development and transportation, more leverage
in deciding where roads and sewer improvements might go. More
recently, they have been pushing to have the members of the council
elected rather than appointed by the governor--a move that would give
the whole regional movement more political weight. The coalition has
passed bills extending the reach of the region's tax-base sharing
system, requiring newer suburbs to accept far more affordable housing
units than they now do, and refiguring the area's entire land-use
planning structure. All have been vetoed by Republican Governor Arne
Carlson, and blocked from becoming law. But the issues reemerge in
every legislative session, and this is Carlson's last year in office.
 Similar political constellations have been appearing elsewhere,
although in more piecemeal fashion. In Illinois last year, a group of
urban and inner-suburban legislators--backed by a heavy lobbying
effort from a network of churches in Chicago and its suburbs--worked
with Republican Governor Jim Edgar to shift reliance for school
funding out of property taxes and onto the state treasury; they
succeeded in the House, but failed in the Senate. In Missouri, a group
of St. Louis and St. Louis County legislators introduced a measure
last year to create an urban growth boundary modeled on Portland's; it
died in committee. This year, they are trying a different approach.
They are pushing to allow the region's metropolitan planning
organization, the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council--until now
largely restricted to transportation planning--to begin addressing
sprawl.
 Meanwhile, in Michigan, a new, determinedly bipartisan Urban Caucus
has formed in the legislature, inspired in no small part by Orfield
and David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque who has also become a
national analyst of urban decline. The group has been meeting to look
closely at state policies affecting urban disinvestment and sprawl,
and is in the process of drawing up a legislative package for next
year.
 One of the Michigan caucus's most active members is a Republican
named Bill Bobier, who represents a district just below Traverse City,
in the heart of Michigan's fruit belt. He is the group's only rural
member, and his presence hints at the potential strength that urban
anti-sprawl forces may be able to build statewide by allying with
farmland preservationists. Most new suburban subdivisions, after all,
are built in the countryside, and these days, more often than not,
they are built on what had been productive farmland. Michigan lost
854,000 acres of farmland between 1982 and 1992--roughly 10 acres an
hour--and Bobier and many of his constituents are alarmed.
 "Once a year," he says, "I meet with the same group of apple growers
from my district, and it's always a freewheeling couple of hours--
about deer and deer damage, pesticide management, stuff like that. But
the last time, half the discussion was about land use and farmland
preservation. It's clear these guys are really worried about the
future now. They're seeing subdivisions and homes built where
previously they could spray or grow whatever they wanted. Well,
somewhere along the way it became apparent to me that the problems of
urban sprawl--and the problems of rural areas that come with that--
were really the result of the fact that we were suffering this urban
degradation. It was clear to me that you aren't going to save the
countryside or preserve farmland without saving the cities."
 He's got company. The Michigan Farm Bureau has decided that sprawl
and farmland preservation are among its most important issues, and in
April it sent off two busloads of farmers, local officials, planning
commission members, real estate brokers, business people and state
legislators to tour parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania and study local
farmland preservation and growth-control initiatives.
 In Ohio, a farmland preservation task force appointed last year by
Republican Governor George V. Voinovich rapidly came to the conclusion
that urban sprawl and disinvestment in core urban areas were a crucial
piece of what they were looking at--to the apparent discomfort of
Voinovich and his proxy on the panel, Lieutenant Governor Nancy
Hollister. An initial proposal by members of the task force to mandate
regional planning for Ohio was, after much politicking, watered down
to a suggestion that counties consider undertaking planning on their
own. "This was a farmland task force, and we didn't want to get bogged
down in trying to have a full-blown discussion of urban issues,"
explains Howard Wise, Hollister's executive assistant.

This is, of course, the difficulty with tackling sprawl. It's
controversial. Fast-growing areas, struggling to deal with the people
and businesses that are flocking in, need new roads, water and sewer
systems, new schools and industrial parks and office complexes. They
do not have much sympathy for suggestions that government money get
channeled into areas that are not growing. As Tom Bier says, "The most
emotional battleground in America is race, and the second most
emotional is development and where it's located and why. It's a
political power struggle that involves allocating resources. So
someone is going to have to give up something to meet anyone else's
agenda, and they're not going to give it up with a smile."
 That is why, among the national figures who have been grappling with
sprawl and its consequences, there is some division over how to
proceed. Orfield and Rusk argue bluntly that core communities will be
able to redevelop only if money and attention are redirected inward
and the social costs of dealing with poverty are directed outward. And
they don't think the outer suburbs will go along with such a program
unless they are forced to do so by a show of superior political
strength. "I just have not seen instances in this country," Rusk
argues, "where voluntary agreements among local governments have
produced significant compacts."
 But some of the local leaders who are forced to deal with these
issues believe Rusk and Orfield are playing a dangerous game.
"Organizing it the way they think you should," says Curtis Johnson,
who heads the Twin Cities' Metropolitan Council, "is the political
equivalent of shooting at the bear in the forest. If you fail to take
him down with that first shot, you're gone.... These fast-growing
suburbs have lots of political clout. Which is why I think we're a lot
better off building bridges than throwing bombs. This is a good time
to sue for peace rather than pursue war."
 In its own way, the First Suburbs Consortium is mulling this question
over as well. To be sure, no one expects Ohio even to discuss anything
like tax-base sharing--"Frankly," says one consortium member, "Myron's
message bombs here." But the First Suburbs are trying to develop
political clout. "I want the policy makers to know we're out there,"
says Madeline Cain, "and when it comes to economic development
legislation, transportation legislation and tax legislation, I want
them to be cognizant of what impact those initiatives will have on
fully developed, aging cities."
 At the moment, this mostly involves small but significant steps. A
study of the boards that affect Cuyahoga County growth--such as the
local body that hands out state infrastructure money--revealed that
the inner suburbs were unrepresented. "We dropped the ball on that
one," says Cain. Now she, Oyaski and Pat Mearns, the mayor of Shaker
Heights, sit on the most important regional boards.
 The First Suburbs have a lot of sorting out to do as they try to
figure out where to go. There is, for instance, the knotty question of
their relations with Cleveland. On the one hand, the city's gradual
revival has been a boon to many of the neighboring communities. On the
other hand, some mayors are now worried that the city's free trade
zone, its empowerment zone and its economic rebuilding in general
could steal businesses from them just as surely as the outer suburbs
are stealing it with their green land and infrastructure subsidies. "I
fear we are being squeezed, and are last in the grand scheme of
things," says Cain.
 There is also the tricky business of whether to expand the coalition
into the range of suburbs just beyond the inner ring. Some of the
towns that thought of themselves as outer suburbia just a few years
ago are now seeing employers and residents pick up and move still
further into the hinterland. They are beginning to feel some of the
same pressures as Lakewood and Euclid and Cleveland Heights. But too
heavy an emphasis on urban issues could drive them into the political
arms of the outer ring. "If you're at a disadvantage to the inner
suburbs because they're building political power, and to the outlying
areas because they've got cheaper land costs, cheaper labor costs and
tax subsidies, then your communities are in danger," says John
Jelepis, the mayor of Bay Village, two towns beyond Lakewood. "So I
don't think it would take too long to make 15 calls to the outer-ring
communities and have a consortium there."
 It is this vision of warring rings that pushes some of those who are
sympathetic to the First Suburbs group to argue that ultimately, the
only answer lies in strong regional cooperation that takes in the
entire metropolitan area. One who feels this way is Sara Pavlovicz, a
county commissioner in Medina County, who is worried by Medina's
untrammeled growth. "You have communities," she says, "that are
literally stealing businesses and people back and forth. We're
duplicating infrastructure, we're duplicating roads, we're spending
money on expansion, but it's not good, true economic development. This
region needs to act as a region if we're going to actually attract
growth."
 Ken Montlack, from his inner-ring vantage point in Cleveland Heights,
listens to arguments like that and finds them interesting, but
premature. If communities such as his are to survive, he believes,
they need to build power now, not wait for anyone to share it with
them. "I believe in regionalism," he says. "Believe me, I want to
reach the Promised Land. But around here, you don't do it by just
having Jesus in your heart. You've got to do it through political
organizing. You've got to have a roomful of registered voters to get
people focused. All it is, is just good old class warfare."

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