From the Ground Up

As my final blog for the semester, I would like to draw attention to this article that I found today from the Christian Science Monitor. I don't normally read this publication, but its message is hard to ignore given the topic of our last paper. The mostly Latino residents of East L.A. are working from the ground up to establish their community as its own city. Consider this:

"We're gathering signatures to make East L.A. into a city of its own," he tells one woman at a small house just off Cesar Chavez Blvd., named for the leader of the Chicano rights movement of the early 1960s. "We don't have a mayor or city council, so when the community goes to the state capital or Washington to bring back money, nobody is out there fighting for us."

Sound familiar? Of course, they are not taking an us vs. them approach to reaching their goal.

"Latinos are finding they need to rethink city and regional government because they finally have a seat at the table and have realized the table only has three legs," says Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, an L.A.-based Latino policy think tank, and of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. "California is the test tube of America at the leading edge of demographic change. It's like a teaching college for the rest of the country."

By working with policy makers that have an eye for their interests, the East L.A. residents finally feel that their time is due. But they aren't trying to do it alone.

"If East L.A. decides to go ahead and incorporate, it would be a great model for many historically underserved communities," says Phoebe Seaton, program director of the Community Equity Initiative of California Rural Legal Assistance, a project examining infrastructure inequality among 220 unincorporated Latino communities in the state's Central Valley.

"More than 33 years after the last attempt, the political path for East Los Angeles cityhood appears to be more favorable," says Hogen-Esch. "It may be that this time around, widespread community and political support will finally trump economic fears. If so, look out Harlem – here comes East L.A."

It's a great model for showing that change can be effected from the ground up. And for the first time, community residents don't feel like federal policy is holding them back. Power to the people!

Learning from the World

US leaders would do well to check out what's happening across the globe. I came across this article today from Singapore discussing how Regional Governance can help countries overcome financial crisis. Singapore's Foreign Affairs Minister George Yeo stated his beliefs that this is true in a speech at the Bali Democracy Forum on Wednesday.

The article states that he used Singapore as an example to illustrate how the government takes a pragmatic approach when it comes to democracy and things like protecting minority rights, and the rule of law. He also called on countries to make realistic adjustments to improve global governance.

He went on to say that The Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN is improving regional governance through adoption of the ASEAN Charter, which will begin its implementation next week when foreign ministers meet in Jakarta.

From what I could best tell from the document, the most direct language in the Charter is this, located in the "preamble":

"Committed to intensifying community building through enhanced regional cooperation and integration..."

Ever think we might see charters such as this pop up among states? What about counties... or even cities for that matter? Supposedly we shouldn't need them, but how else can we expect to effect change through regional governance without them? Or at least without some federal mandate calling for them? I think we have a long ways to go...

Regional Governance on the horizon?

Stumbled across this article today from the Wall Street Journal. It seems as though President-elect Obama has a different way of viewing things than his predecessors.

Tom Cochran, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said the next administration has signaled that it will coordinate financing for projects for an entire metropolitan area instead of dealing with cities and suburbs separately.

"I am of the opinion, based on our conversations with President-elect Obama, that he gets it," said Mr. Cochran. "You can't just have a transportation system that stops at the city line."

What a concept! City mayors from across the US are heading to Washington to lobby for funds to come directly to them, rather than state government. I need to do some more research, but I wonder what the spending restrictions will be - if there are any at all.

Anyway... here was the next cool part of the article:

"Mr. Obama's transition office is drawing up plans to create a White House office on urban policy, which would report directly to the president, to coordinate funding for cities from different federal agencies. Mr. Obama has pledged to provide new funding for job training, education and grants for local governments and organizations."

So cool, huh? In the arts sector we've been pushing for a White House office on the arts for years. Finally urban policy is getting its due. I don't think it's too late, but they certainly have their work cut out for them.

Too much faith in the free market?!?!?!

What an interesting article!

"A humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending...On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken."

After reading this article, I felt a little more secure in my belief that "free markets" are really not that free at all. Government regulation continues to influence capitalistic actions and the results, as history has repeatedly shown, are not pretty. Mr. Greenspan is basically blaming the "free market" and saying that the FED should have stepped in sooner to prevent the housing bust.

WHATEVER! By insuring sub-prime mortgages and establishing multi-trillion dollar credit default swaps, federal policy is to blame here... not the free market.

Now, I'm certainly no proponent of free market theory, but I do say let's place blame where blame is due. In a sense, we can applaud federal policy for trying new ways to get low-income/at-risk families into homes, but the methods they chose blew up in their face. Have we seen this before??

Until federal policy wonks figure out how to become involved, without creating unintended consequences, my opinion is that no action is the best action.

Obama and the "Crabgrass Frontier"

I mentioned in class the other night that I was saving up all my posts for the end because I wanted to take in a full semester's worth of knowledge before I started blogging. While I can't say that was entirely true... I will say that by doing so I have a much better perspective when I read pieces such as this. I honestly have NO IDEA what the "de Volkskrant" is... but when the article title "Obama Conquers the Crabgrass Frontier came across my RSS feed, I have to say I was more than a little intrigued.

The author, perhaps unintentionally, made reference to Kenneth T. Jackson's timely book while examining voting percentages in the Presidential election. Consider the following:

"What President-elect Obama accomplished Nov. 4 in the 'crabgrass frontier' was truly remarkable, not just statistically but for the multiracial coalition he formed among multicultural cities and their more segregated suburbs."

He goes on to say that Obama's success among city and suburban voters suggests the possibility of regional coalitions to solve mutual “metro” problems, like housing and transportation. And when it comes to race, his popularity in the nation’s suburbs is a positive sign of how far we’ve come.

Seems like I've heard that before (over the course of this class)! If anything, despite it's relative obscurity, the "de Volkskrant" just made one heck of a contemporary leap for this MPA student. Here's hoping that the "de Volkskrant" isn't alone in it's assessment of voter turnout, and that President-elect Obama can make serious strides in seeing that these regional coalitions come to fruition.

Down with Cars!

I love reading news from the UK. Despite how "Americanized" many of them say they are, you can always find an interesting perspective from someone fighting pretty hard to deny that claim.

I found this article today in the online version of The Guardian. It's old (almost three years), but still relevant to our class discussions about the effect of Transportation on suburban development and urban decline. The title of the article is (haha): "They Call Themselves Libertarians; I think they're antisocial bastards". The tag line states: "The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation that recognizes only the freedom to act."

The author rambles on about non-relevant issues for the majority of his rant, but this quote stood out:

It is strange to see how the car has been overlooked as an agent of political change. We know that the breaking of the unions, the dismantling of the welfare state and the sale of council houses that Margaret Thatcher pioneered made us more individualistic. But the way in which the transition from individualism to the next phase of neoliberalism - libertarianism - was assisted by her transport policies has been largely ignored. She knew what she was doing. She spoke of "the great car-owning democracy", and asserted that "a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure". Her road-building programme was an exercise in both civil and social engineering. "Economics are the method," she told us, "the object is to change the soul." The slowly shifting consciousness of the millions who spend much of their day sitting in traffic makes interventionist government ever harder. The difference between the age of Herbert Morrison and the age of Peter Mandelson can be accounted for, in part, by the motorcar.

Wow... seems as though the US wasn't the only country to have it's political leaders seemingly mandate the need for your own car. In class we talked about how the rise of the automobile effected settlement patterns. Citizens were no longer "constrained" at all by existing public transportation such as streetcars or railroads.

Now, we are at a time when citizens are clamoring for the re-establishment of public transportation. Unfortunately, when you have had past iconic leaders such as Margaret Thatcher publicly lobbying for the opposite, you have quite a mountain to overcome. I think it can be done, but the question now is how long will it take?

Welcome!

Thank you for visiting my blog for MPA 677 at UAB! I'll try to provide an entertaining view of Urban Policy as I see it. Perhaps we'll share common views, perhaps not. Either way, feel free to comment! Should be fun!