Conscious Choice: How We Can Fall in Love With Our Hometowns

January 2001 | Citizen at Large

How We Can Fall in Love With Our Hometowns

by Jay Walljasper

My infatuation with cities began on a youthful visit to Montreal, where I was enchanted by picturesque squares, sleek subway trains, and the intoxicating urbaneness all around. Sitting up most of the night in sidewalk cafés along Rue St. Denis, I marveled how different it was from the farm country of Iowa and Illinois where I grew up.

But it was later, appropriately enough on my honeymoon, that I fell in love with cities. My wife, Julie, and I toured Paris, Venice, and Milan along with lesser known gems like Luxembourg City and Freiburg, Germany, and we came home wondering why American cities didn’t instill in us the same sense of wonder. At first, we accepted the conventional wisdom that it was because European cities are so much older, with street plans locked in place before the arrival of the automobile. Yet on subsequent trips abroad, we came to realize that something more than transportation planning was at work. What explains the fact that most European cities gracefully give way to green countryside at their edges, unlike the endless miles of sprawl in America? How is it that their public life and street culture seem so much richer? Why do you seldom see slums?

A 1990 reporting assignment to Germany and the Netherlands answered these questions. In dozens of interviews with urban planners, transportation authorities, politicians, activists, and everyday citizens, I discovered that a clear set of public policies account for the different spirit of European metropolitan centers. It’s not just the antiquity of the towns, but also the way they think about urban life.

In fact, many of the people I talked to on that trip worried about the impact of creeping suburbanization and increasing auto traffic on the health of their cities. But rather than just accept these changes as the inevitable march of modernity, as many Americans do, they were taking action to maintain the vitality of their hometowns. Urban decay was being reversed, historic neighborhoods protected, pedestrian zones expanded, transit systems improved, green spaces preserved, bike lanes added, traffic calming devices installed, and development guidelines enacted to head off sprawl. I came home all charged up at the idea of promoting innovations like these in American cities. When public officials unveiled a proposal to widen a street in my neighborhood, I helped organize opposition that led eventually to plans for narrowing the street. The more I researched these issues, the more I realized that many people across America were coming to the same conclusions.

Folks in Portland, Oregon, I discovered, are ahead of most everyone else. As early as the 1970s, they followed the lead of European cities by marking an urban growth boundary beyond which suburban development could not sprawl. This has had the happy result not only of preserving forest and farmland but also of redirecting some investment back toward the inner city. Downtown Portland, once down on its luck, now bustles with energy. Light rail trains glide along the streets, and a parking garage and a highway have been torn down to create a public square and riverfront park. Many neighborhoods are also blossoming because developers, constrained from plopping strip malls and subdivisions at the edge of town, are figuring out ways to weave new homes, shops, and offices into the existing urban fabric.

Portland is one of several places helping to pioneer a new regional perspective in which a metropolitan area is looked on as a unified economic and social community. This is how Europeans have long viewed their cities, with taxpayers in the wealthy northern suburbs of Copenhagen, for instance, accepting that they must help fund fix-up programs in the inner city and poorer southern suburbs.

Minnesota state senator Myron Orfield, one of the movers behind this emerging regionalist movement, points out that upscale suburbs on the fringes of metropolitan areas often prosper at the expense of city neighborhoods and older suburbs. These booming communities capture the lion’s share of public investment in new roads and sewers (paid for by everyone in the region), which boosts their chances of attracting new businesses and well-to-do developments. At the same time, they usually adopt restrictive zoning codes, limiting or outlawing affordable apartments, town homes, and houses on small lots. Poor people, then, are kept out and forced to live in increasingly concentrated numbers in other parts of the metropolitan region. Middle-class people in these areas begin to worry about the future of their neighborhoods and flee for the greener pastures of new suburbs, thereby heightening urban decline in the areas they leave behind.

This is an old story in American cities, but Orfield notes that today it has a new twist. "Many suburbs are actually much more fragile than center cities," he told me in an interview for a Nation article (Nov. 20, 2000). "You always have certain people who want to live in the city: young people, gays and lesbians, and artistic types as well as many middle-class people with an affection for urban living and old architecture. There’s an aesthetic appeal to older, walkable neighborhoods. But no one wants to live in many of these inner suburbs once they start to decline. You won’t find yuppies moving into neighborhoods of 1950s and 1960s houses with no woodwork, no hardwood floors."

In the Chicago area, Orfield, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, notes, fifty-nine suburbs already have a lower tax-base per capita than the city itself.

To revive the prospects of older suburbs as well as struggling inner-city neighborhoods, Orfield proposes four regionalist solutions, already proven to work in various parts of the country: 1) An urban growth boundary, like the one in Portland. 2) Elected regional government (in place in Portland since 1979), which allows important decisions to be made on a unified regional level rather than scattered among many municipalities. 3) Fair share housing measures, which require all communities in a region to provide some low-income housing. Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., has enacted policies that have spurred the construction of 10,000 affordable housing units in upscale subdivisions since 1977. 4) Tax base sharing, which involves communities pooling at least some of their local tax revenues. This has been done in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area since 1976, providing a financial boost that helps poorer suburbs and cities maintain good public services.

Ideas like these, along with imaginative urban planning and smarter transportation policies, will help us fall in love with our cities the way so many people have with Paris, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague, and Amsterdam.

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