"Of course, metropolitan-area leaders have no alternative but to try to
succeed, and many are working creatively and energetically to tackle big
problems and augment their regions’ stocks of crucial assets. In Denver, the
metropolitan mayors’ caucus spearheaded a $5 billion bond issue for transit
and changed local zoning laws to create the density that makes transit
successful."
"Though our economic development policies don’t reflect it, America doesn’t
really possess a national economy, or even a collection of 50 state economies.
Instead, America’s long-term prosperity stands or falls on the more local
prosperity of its 363 distinct, varied, clustered, and interlinked metropolitan
economies, dominated by the 100 largest metros—many of which cross county and
state jurisdictions and incorporate multiple city centers, suburbs, exurbs, and
downtowns in a way that the old hub-and-spoke model of urban geography never
did. In that sense, America is quite literally a “MetroNation,” utterly
dependent on the success of its metropolitan hubs.
From the hundreds of square miles that constitute contemporary London to
the sprawling Brazilian city-states of Sao Paulo and Rio, metros are the new
norm in global economic development, shaped by twenty-first-century forces of
globalization, innovation, and cultural diversity. These forces assign enormous
value to a relatively small number of factors—infrastructure networks,
industrial innovation, human capital, the quality of place—and then reward those
nations and places that are best able to marshal and align those assets. And
those places are, increasingly, metros—pulsating zones of urban, suburban, and
exurban synergies and exchange that revolve around cities. Metros—and not only
their constituent individual cities, suburbs, or isolated municipalities—are
therefore one of the most critical places where federal policymakers should
focus their attention and resources as they seek to restore prosperity to our
nation.
Yet here is the problem: While America is more metropolitan than ever, the
nation’s policies and structures rarely match economic reality. As a nation, we
remain fixed in old arrangements, established decades ago and kept in place by
bureaucratic inertia and entrenched political interests. Such a misunderstanding
of contemporary urban structures inevitably leads to bad public policy
decisions. Take as an example the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, now finally
in the public eye. We should be spending money on metropolitan infrastructure,
such as new transit lines or the maintenance and upgrade of existing roads and
bridges, because it gives the best return on investment, the most bang for the
buck. And yet the federal government sends the overwhelming bulk of national
infrastructure funds to states, not metros. Given the vagaries of state
politics, state departments of transportation in turn tend to scant metro
investments in favor of building brand-new roads in far-flung places. Money that
could be fueling the metro economic engine ends up widening a rural highway.
We can no longer afford this mismatch. As the nation gathers its energies
to emerge from the current rattling recession, President Barack Obama and
Congress need to re-imagine the relationships between the federal government,
states, and localities to more fully realize the potential of metropolitan
America. Washington must lead in areas that transcend the reach of local action
and require national vision, direction, and purpose—areas such as the provision
of world class interstate road and rail links, investments in science and basic
research, immigration reform, and the creation of a framework for controlling
greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, Washington needs to get past its
focus on states and empower metro areas—often made up of dozens of independent
governments— to work closer together and begin asserting themselves as coherent,
if widespread, entities. And finally, Washington and all levels of government
need to maximize their performance by deploying information, standards-setting,
and data to improve decision-making and problem-solving.
America can no longer pretend that it is a single economy, nor can it
imagine that it is a nation of independent, small towns, punctuated by large but
isolated urban centers. It must embrace its metropolitan future—and all the
wrenching change that entails."
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