Request to the Obama Administration about the Great Lakes Region

http://www.gluespace.org/blog/?p=508

Below is a letter sent today to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, requesting a meeting and making broad recommendations based on the consensus that emerged during the Great Lakes Metros and the New Opportunity Summit last month. We plan to continue releasing more detailed recommendations over the summer. I think this letter begins to summarize the themes and consensus that I witness around the region, in formal and informal conversations about the future of our cities.

————————–

July 9, 2009

Secretary Shaun Donovan
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
451 7th Street S.W.
Washington, DC 20410

Dear Secretary Donovan:

In June, more than 200 practitioners, policy-makers and analysts from cities around the Great Lakes region came together in Buffalo, hosted by our four organizations, to discuss how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) can drive transformative change in distressed Great Lakes metros.

While the participants represented a diversity of backgrounds, disciplines, and perspectives, they agreed that ARRA can be most effective if:

1. Community-based non-governmental organizations participate in coordinating ARRA investments, and thus become more effective partners with federal policy-makers;

2. The federal government and the states together use Metropolitan Planning Organizations to manage and oversee ARRA investments, and where MPOs do not exist, that the federal government itself uses metro-wide management in its own agencies, so that ARRA investments in infrastructure, housing and energy-efficiency measures are effective across municipal boundaries; and also if

3. The federal government understands the urgency of the distinctive challenges of Great Lakes metros – specifically,

* a 40-year history of depopulation, large-scale housing abandonment, persistent poverty and tax-base erosion in our urban cores,
* fractured intra-regional governance that has led to low-density sprawl without regional growth,
* under-funded brownfield remediation,
* federal transportation subsidies that undermine existing communities,
* federal housing policy that has both spurred sprawl and concentrated poverty, and
* insufficient investment in watershed-wide water-quality infrastructure.

Mr. Secretary, we respectfully request that the Obama Administration consider the following recommendations:

1. Move ARRA funds as quickly as possible into job-creating projects that address the following policy objectives:

a. Achieving energy efficiency in existing housing stock, and doing so in coordination with existing repair, rehabilitation and lead-abatement programs;
b. Completing wastewater-remediation projects that address critical CSO and watershed-runoff that pose an immediate and ongoing threat to Great Lakes water quality;
c. Focusing transportation infrastructure investment to enable and enhance population density;
d. Providing funding for green deconstruction of abandoned structures;
e. Providing funding for remediation and re-purposing vacant lots for use in urban agriculture and environmental sustainability projects.

2. Govern ARRA investments by metro-wide criteria:

d. Empower, by Presidential Order if necessary, the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, and Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies to require that State governments report on the metropolitan economic impact of ARRA investments they oversee;
b. Through HUD, incentivize state governments to empower existing or to create new Metropolitan Planning Organizations that will coordinate federal housing, transportation, clean-water and economic-development funds from ARRA;
c. Also through HUD, create or support regional land-banking that applies to the federal definition of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, such that our rapidly-depopulating urban regions do not see federal housing dollars continue to subsidize low-density residential development.

3. Enact and implement legislative initiatives, or take Executive action such that these initiatives become part of the ARRA implementation, specifically:

a. The Community Regeneration, Sustainability, and Innovation Act (HR 932)
b. The Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009

Furthermore, despite the demand for decision-making that supports “shovel ready” projects, we urge the Administration to consider how the ARRA can contribute to the achievement of specific, long-term, national goals in the areas of sustainability and poverty reduction. Defining ambitious goals and holding recipients accountable for meeting those marks will empower the innovation—in both partnerships and methods—that our metros require.

We are preparing a more detailed set of recommendations and a compilation of the presentations made at the Buffalo conference, which we will forward to you upon completion.

A specific concern of conferees is that the Obama Administration understand both the scale and the urgency of Great Lakes metros’ challenges. Brownfields in our older, mainly small- and mid-sized metros are probably never going to become the destinations for housing development, because our metros, unlike larger metros elsewhere in America, suffer from an over-stock of housing. Other opportunities to use these sites exist. Preference should be given whenever possible to programs and projects that re-use these brownfields, so that the federal government does not continue to encourage greenfield development and perpetuate sprawl.

Yet precisely because our Great Lakes metros have the unique wealth of Great Lakes proximity, relatively small ARRA investments–if implemented by metro region and not by city, town or village–hold the promise of tremendous long-term economic benefit.

In sum, Mr. Secretary, the conferees see ARRA as a tool that can achieve the short-term economic stimulus the President seeks as well as a much longer-term goal: economic sustainability for our distressed metros. We believe that ARRA can begin to reverse decades of counter-productive federal policy and thus spur the re-migration of people and investment to our metros. Sound policy in implementing ARRA will long outlive the immediate crisis ARRA was designed to address, and can set the stage for a federal policy that is much more responsive to our chronically distressed communities.

We would greatly appreciate the opportunity to discuss the conference findings and the above recommendations with you at your earliest convenience, either in a Great Lakes metro of your choice or in Washington, D.C. We believe that these recommendations apply not only to the ongoing implementation of the ARRA, but also to future federal policy, as yet unshaped. If you are open to such a meeting, please contact Sarah Szurpicki at sarah@gluespace.org to inform us of your availability.

Sincerely,

Aaron Bartley
Partnership for the Public Good

Diane Devaul
Northeast-Midwest Institute
Bruce Fisher
Buffalo State College Center for Economic and Policy Studies

Sarah Szurpicki
Great Lakes Urban Exchange