Back to the Future

"...Homes like these,  at the ugly edges of urban sprawl, the search for a home nestled in nature, often ends in the empty repetition and tasteless sterility of a suburban tract development. Instead of delighting in natural beauty, urban sprawl defiles it. ..What is the future of the single family home?  'There’s no future to that, because the cost of services to the house is growing by such leaps and bounds, that the taxes on it can no where near pay for the services that the town has to put there, the water, the sewer, the roads…what is interesting is, the push to the city.'” 

The conclusions of a Vibrant NEO 2040 forum of the NEOSCC? Nope. Try the 30 year forecast of renowned architect Phillip Johnson, talking with Walter Cronkite, in 1967.

Watch the entire video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__MGYrcapdk if you have the time. Many of the predictions are laughable, as these usually are from the safe distance of nearly half a century.  Even the ones that are almost dead on miss the mark because they fail to take other future developments into account (see the part about the home office for a good example.) 

The point is that straight line projections based on past performance are always flawed, especially when human nature and technological developments are involved.

I'm not advocating that we not look forward - just that we not selectively use  the past as our only predictor for the future.  That's  why work like NEOSCC/Sasaki's is lazy and politics driven.  Like architect Johnson in the video promoting his ugly high rises of the future (pictured below) or the other guy with his cold concrete adobe bunkers from Expo '67,  they are promoting their visions of the way things ought to be, and then making the facts fit that outcome.
 

They have been predicting the decline of the single family home, the unsustainability of suburbs from an environmental and economic perspective while forecasting the rise of the cities for almost fifty years!

They can't predict it with any more certainty now than they could then. The only difference is a political agenda that is creating the "urgency" now. 

If you don't have time for the entire video, the money quotes are at 2:00 and 23:00. 

Johnson gives us a candid assessment of the urban future he saw for us as shown: "you spend all your days working in a labyrinth, you see, you're going to spend all your nights there, too. We're just going to make it as tolerable as possible."

Onward, to a "tolerable" future!

Twin Cities Regionalism has more lessons for NE Ohio

A once prosperous suburban shopping mall, mired in a declining neighborhood, loses one its last anchor tenants and faces the prospect of closing down. Randall Park in Cleveland or Rolling Acres in Akron? No, it’s Brookdale Shopping Center in Brooklyn Center, MN, once one of Minneapolis’ premier indoor malls, now whipsawed between newer malls developed farther out from the city, and a reputation as being in a poor, unsafe part of the Twin Cities metro.

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, per capita income in Brooklyn Center fell from 87% of the metro area average in 1990, to 75% in 2000, to 64% in the most recent Census survey. This is critical, the paper reports, because this puts Brooklyn Center close to Detroit’s 60% mark --the nation’s worst city to suburb income ratio.

Why is this troubled inner ring suburb 10 miles from downtown Minneapolis significant to regionalism discussions in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio? Because according to the urban planning experts behind the Regional Prosperity Initiative, it shouldn’t be that way. The Regional Prosperity Initiative, or RPI, is a plan for a Northeast Ohio 16 county regional revenue sharing and land use planning organization patterned after the Twin Cities Met Council.

The RPI is advocating this form of Regionalism in large part due to the success they hold out in the 7 county Minneapolis-St. Paul Twin Cities region. The RPI-Twin Cities model shares new growth tax revenues from more prosperous, growing areas to restore the deteriorating urban core and inner ring suburbs. Applying “equity” to tax revenues is designed to help the worst areas of the region by channeling dollars where they are needed most, restoring the vitality of cities.

What is significant about the plight of Brooklyn Center is not that there is poverty; there is poverty in every city. The critical point is that despite an almost 20 year diversion of tax revenues to inner core suburbs like Brooklyn Center, the gap as seen in the Twin Cities between the prospering areas and those that are failing is among the worst in the nation. There are statistics beyond Brooklyn Center’s anecdotal evidence showing that revenue sharing does not always work as planned. The Twin Cities has had its RPI model in place for decades, yet the most recent Census reports their urban poverty rate among African-Americans is higher than Cleveland’s.

The Regional Prosperity Initiative’s land use planning would direct and manage new growth areas throughout the region, which stretches out to Ashtabula, south to East Liverpool on the Ohio River, west to Mansfield, and north again to Vermillion. It would serve a dual purpose of preserving open spaces from urban sprawl, while encouraging growth back in the cities where infrastructure exists, awaiting development.

Again, Twin Cities/RPI regionalism fails to deliver as promised. Research released by the Brookings Institution: "Job Sprawl Revisited", the movement of employment in a region, shows that for the period 1998-2006, the Twin Cities areas under a regionalism plan actually lost a greater percentage of downtown jobs and sprawled jobs outside the downtown area at twice the rate of Cleveland.

Another benefit advocated by the RPI brand of regionalism is the cost savings that results from consolidating government resources. The Met Council alone has 3,700 employees, taking on consolidated functions of transit, parks, and libraries among others. Nevertheless, the per capita cost for Municipal Government is 25% higher in the Twin Cities than our region, according to 2002 figures in Cost of Government Study for Northeastern Ohio, funded in part by the Gund Foundation.

The rush to put the RPI plan in place by 2010 is predicated on large part on the “success” of their model in the Twin Cities. This “success” may prove illusory or insignificant in a discussion about seriously redesigning the way Northeastern Ohioans live and work.

The inconclusive economic benefits of regionalism from the Twin Cities in terms of cost savings, controlling sprawl, and reinvigorating our urban cores should cause our community leaders to reconsider the RPI plans alongside other regionalism plans with measured success. Denver’s Mile High Compact replaces the RPI’s state-mandated involvement with a voluntary plan, allowing each community the chance to be sold on the benefits. Kalamazoo has a successful regionalism plan that is business-driven, and Baltimore’s focuses on collaborative efforts to reduce government costs. Even our own home-grown solutions as evidenced by the Fund for Our Economic Future show that we can collaborate without the heavy hand of another layer of government.