NewGeography.com blogs

Many of you might know I am a bit of a Houston fan. It's not that they don't have zoning --- I am neutral on that issue --- but because they have heart. I was privileged to see Houstonians open themselves to 250,000 or more mostly poor and minority evacuees from Louisiana after Katrina. It was an inspiring effort and very ecumenical, led largely by evangelical Christians but including Jews, Muslims, Catholics and anyone else who gave down.

Now, after Ike, they are taking care of their own, as we can see from a message from Elliot Gershenson to Jeff Mosley (listed at the bottom) at the Greater Houston partnership.

A lot of cities may be prettier or have better weather than Houston, but in terms of helping neighbors, no big city is better. As Davis Henderson, CEO of the Greater Houston Chapter of the American Red Cross, told me after Katrina, “Who else would have adopted another city like we adopted New Orleans?” Henderson previously oversaw Red Cross operations in Tampa and Chicago. ”In Houston,” he adds, “a neighbor is a neighbor --- not a competitor.”

Urban greatness has many facets, but if I was to pick one, the kind of generosity of spirit Houston has showed would be at the top of my list.

Here's the full letter:

Like so many non-profits, IM has been out of power but still kept going, serving the community. It's hard to believe that it is possible to serve so many seniors and refugees without computer power and phone service, but somehow we have done so. Just as so many other first-responder organizations like the Red Cross, Salvation Army and government agencies like the City of Houston, Harris County and FEMA have stepped up. We'll likely hear stories about failed efforts, but the true heart and guts of our city needs to be recognized. There are so many stories of bravery, dedication and pure visionary action that are worthy of telling.

There's the story of dozens of churches and other faith groups who have been housing evacuees from Galveston and other places in their gyms and sanctuaries - providing food, shelter and clothing. Much of these expenses will be borne by them. Certainly the time and talent of their core volunteers and staff is being diverted from other programs - all because the people of Houston are heroes.

There's the story about crime - not the one we would expect - but how low the crime statistics have been.

People in Houston have learned how to drive! Somehow, with all those lights out, people have slowed down and let the other guy take a turn.

I keep hearing that people connected with their neighbors, many for the first time. And now as the electricity is coming back on and the garage openers begin working again, it feels like we're losing something very special.

I learned about one church's senior pastor who received a phone call from someone he didn't know living back east. The caller said they could not find their elderly parents and were desperate to find out if they were ok. So this pastor got in his car late that night, with a load of food, water and ice and drove across town to find the parents. He drove up to the house and knocked on the door. They were fine, but without electricity or phone, so he called their kids on his cell phone and said "here, someone wants to talk to you." After the call the parents said they didn't need anything but across the street there was someone who really looked like he did. So the pastor gave all of his food, water and ice to the neighbor. The next day he came back with more food and water only to find that the neighbor had distributed what he received the night before to his neighbors. The church volunteers returned each day until the electricity came back.

The president of my synagogue bought Sabbath dinner for 1,250 families who he thought might need a kosher meal. In the end a number of synagogues and the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston backed him up so that he did not need to take this financial burden on his own. Only about 500 families came forward to receive these meals, so in the end he and my synagogue donated enough food to the Houston Food Bank and the Jewish Community Center to feed 700 families and seniors.

I could go on - but I think you already know what I am talking about. You've likely witnessed this yourself and have been amazed by the grace that has been shown by Houston and all of our leadership.

On that note (about leadership), please let me make a special appeal. Normally this would have been the Tuesday Memo when I showcase the annual United Way campaign which just began. IM is proud to be a significant recipient of United Way funding and we use these funds to serve well over 1,000,000 meals to seniors each year, to make the resettlement of hundreds of refugees the best we know how, and to support our Ready Houston! disaster preparedness and response activities (which has been in full swing these past two weeks).

My focus always is on the community building elements of the campaign. I have been quoted as saying that if someone gave Houston $1 billion dollars NOT to run an annual campaign, if I were the United Way Board Chair I would turn it down. Not because I am foolish, but because I believe, as important as the money raised is, it is equal䁥

There is no city I am aware of that seems to have the amount of parks and green space it wants. This paucity is particularly glaring when it comes to parks for children and most prevalent in large, dense urban areas. And this is why non-profits like San Francisco's City Fields Foundation are stepping in to upgrade existing parks because public funds are not available in the quantities demanded by the public.

On Saturday in San Francisco, the group held a ribbon-cutting for three refurbished soccer fields in the Crocker-Amazon neighborhood. The new fields will add approximately 12,358 hours of playtime on the soccer fields per year.

In Great Britain, the National Playing Fields Association has been doing this for over 70 years. Just goes to remind you, that when it comes to building any sort of infrastructure, there seems to be a great organizational advantage to having some sort of centralized body.

America, the world's most advanced continental nation, could be on the verge of a great resurgence, much of it based in regions largely unacknowledged by many pundits, academics and the media. What is needed now is an infrastructure strategy to make it happen.

So say New Geography contributors Delore Zimmerman and Joel Kotkin in recently released white paper proposing a new method of infrastructure financing for the heartland of America: a Heartland Development Bank.

In order to capitalize on emerging economic opportunities and to rebuild America's productive capacity in energy, agriculture and manufacturing enterprises we propose the creation of the Heartland Development Bank. The Bank is envisioned as a $10 to $25 billion source of financing for infrastructure development projects. The Bank would serve as a lead lender on projects of economic significance in the Heartland and leverage considerable co-investment from the private and public sectors.

Delore and Joel recently led a round table discussion on financing heartland infrastructure. The discussion is available on Youtube, or check out the case laid out in the policy paper.

Michael Lind of the New America Foundation has just published an excellent and inspiring article in Democracy Journal about the need for a new financial and physical infrastructure.

"One of the goals of reforming and regulating finance is to ensure that American industry and American infrastructure have access to the private and public investment they need," Lind writes. "Industry, infrastructure, and finance form a system—an American System. And a new American system, well-designed and well-implemented, will be crucial in revitalizing American economic prosperity in the twenty-first century."

Lind talks about previous "American systems" of finance and organization that were adopted over time to adjust to the economic realities of the age and how today, we are in dire need of creating a new system that reacts to the new realities we face.

Some of these ideas include the creation of a National Investment Corporation and a National Research & Development Bank and the creation of a Department of Infrastructure that merges some of the transportation agencies together. These are bold ideas explained in clear prose with illuminating historical examples.

Many of his ideas lend themselves towards centralization and thus remind me of the New Deal a bit. The existence of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration was one of the rare times in American history when infrastructure finance was centralized. It was also one of the most prolific times in our history for the construction of vital and long lasting public infrastructure that still stands today.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, native Kansan Thomas Frank isn't too complimentary on the state of affairs:

...you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.

While the windshield tour may yield an array of sorry small towns, much of the mostly rural Heartland has beaten the national job growth rate since the early 1970s. Like the rest of the nation, the heartland of America is urbanizing -- producing many small growth nodes of prosperity.

While many of the small prairie towns are dying on the vine, the biggest reason is not "electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town's mortal enemies," as Frank suggests, but rather a combination of larger factors including the re-balancing of 100-year old settlement patterns and the macro effects of automating the ag industry.

So what's the prevailing politics in small towns? Here's the Iowa Independent's Douglas Burns writing about Obama's "bitter" rural American's gaffe:

...does any thinking person believe Obama’s brief and failed turn as a rural anthropologist will hurt him more than what Republican presidential candidate John McCain said today in Alabama?

“We must reduce barriers to imports, to things like ethanol from Brazil, and we’ve got to stop subsidizing ethanol in my view,” Senator McCain said.

If the ivory-towered urban elites hawking their tiresome flyover views on cable television each night want to see what a bitter small-town American looks like, they can come to western Iowa during the second year of what we have every reason to expect would be a decidedly anti-rural John McCain presidency.

Barack Obama misspoke. John McCain didn’t.

Rural Americans know the difference.

Burns also correctly predicted Palin's Vice Presidential nomination. What all three of us can agree on is that many rural voters seem to elect candidates who enact policies contrary to their interests. Can Obama make any real inroads with Great Plains rural voters?

Dark, narrow and usually neglected, the alleyway is not one of the more beloved landscapes of the American city. Out of sight and mind, the "dark alley" is the unseemly home to noir nightmares and urban misdeeds in the popular imagination - the sort of place where Batman surprises his criminal victims.

And yet, planners across the nation are beginning to rethink the alley, re-imagining it as urban parkland. The LA Times ran a piece today about the attempts of academics and planners to recreate trash-and-graffiti strewn alleys as green space. The slide show from the article shows this better than the prose.

In Baltimore, where alleys and murder are more plentiful, gating alleys to decrease crime and increase public space has won public money. Groups like Community Greens are helping to lead the charge.

An interesting union of groups here: gardeners, academics and neighborhood activists.

The Milken Institute just released its report about the country's top-performing cities. The list is heavy with the names of small and mid-size cities and also has a good deal in common with Inc.'s Best Cities list which came out a few months prior. The list of the top ten with last year's ranking is below:

1. Provo-Orem, Utah (8)
2. Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina (10)
3. Salt Lake City, Utah (18)
4. Austin-Round Rock, Texas (20)
5. Huntsville, Alabama (16)
6. Wilmington, North Carolina (2)
7. McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas (7)
8. Tacoma, Washington (50)
9. Olympia, Washington (37 in the 2007 ranking of small metros)
10. Charleston-North Charleston, South Carolina (12)

Newgeography has run several articles about the advantages of small cities. "Why Small Cities Rock" and "Sprawl Beyond Sprawl: America Moves to Smaller Metropolitan Areas" are two of them. For an entire list click on the "Small Cities" tab on the home page.

Here's an article from the Indianapolis Business Journal that discusses how the city attracts young, educated married couples but not singles.

Never known for edgy culture, "Cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Denver trounce Indianapolis on attracting young singles." However, it's the shorter commutes and housing affordability that separate Indiana's metropolis from the crowd. “I’ve got a house and a yard and a 10-minute commute. Try that in Chicago. You can’t,” says one recent Indy transplant.

A good article to see how young people change when they get married and how their preferences on place change as well.

There's a very pretty slide show in this recent article in the New York Times showing different backyards throughout the city's boroughs. No matter how small the area, there resides an amazing level of appreciation for having one's own area of greenery.

Though many planners call for increased density, many neighborhoods are in favor of "down-zoning." You flip through this slide show and it's easy to see why.

With 84 homicides, Los Angeles just recorded its lowest number of summer homicides since 1967. Overall, numbers are down this year compared to last year - which saw the fewest homicides in the city in 40 years. Made infamous by Rodney King just over 15 years ago, the LAPD is rising to the task of stemming violent crime.

Contrast this with Chicago, a city with a million fewer people than LA, which saw 123 murders this summer. What gives?