Christopher Leo: What's wrong with the way our communities are governed Archives

August 29, 2010

THE MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE OF URBAN GROWTH: A CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISON

Last May, I sketched out an idea for a research project that would look at what senior governments could do to ensure that those who make decisions about the growth of North American cities do a better job of respecting the environment. That idea has now matured into a research proposal. In this entry, I'll summarize the proposal and provide a link to the full proposal.

Here's the summary:

My proposed research will shed new light on a major, but much-neglected question: What can we learn from Europe and each other about how best to achieve sustainable growth in North American cities?

Most students of city development agree that the way our cities grow and change has a major impact on the environment. An environmentally friendly city is one that is relatively compact, with ready access to fast and convenient public transportation, and with houses, shopping and public facilities located so that that residents and workers can get around easily without having to rely mainly on automobiles.

The priorities of land developers and consumers often fail to reflect these concerns. In North America, the job of balancing environmental considerations against the demands of land developers and consumers falls largely to municipal councils and most councils find it very difficult to achieve a balance that is favourable to the environment.

Many fail repeatedly because local councils are not, in general, able effectively to resist development interests. Finding an approach to urban growth that more effectively balances the interests of development companies and immediate consumer demands against a wider, longer-term public interest in a sustainable environment will be a major policy challenge in the decades to come.

If local governments cannot control land use, the only alternative is a meaningful degree of land use regulation at another level of government. Although economic and consumer pressures favouring urban sprawl are world-wide, Europe has, in general, been more successful in planning compact cities, well-served by public transportation, than North America. One of the reasons, as I learned in a previous study - the first one listed below - is that land development interests exercise a great deal of influence in local politics, but are relatively small players at the national level. The sustainability of European cities benefits from the fact that many urban development regulations are laid down by national governments.

Though planning scholars are aware that there are significant differences between European and North American urban planning practices, there have been few careful, comparative studies. Political scientists understand the value of such studies, as witness the large political science literature on comparative European, North American and developing-world national politics, and another significant literature embodying cross-national comparisons of other aspects of city politics.

Though the management of urban growth offers similar opportunities to learn by comparing and contrasting the planning and development practices of European and North American cities, scholars concerned with urban development politics and policy have done little to develop those fields of study. My research will address that gap, with a three-city comparative case study of the multilevel governance of urban growth in three jurisdictions that have tried, to some degree, to centralize the management of urban growth: Metropolitan Portland, Oregon; the Greater Toronto Area, and Greater Hamburg.

I will focus my research on three questions: How is the development of new subdivisions managed? What is the overall condition of municipal infrastructure? How well served by public transit is the urban area? Answers to these seemingly simple questions will throw up a wealth of political and administrative complexities, but they are sufficiently focused to keep the overall comparison both meaningful and manageable.

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The study in which I pointed out the advantages of having more urban planning authority at higher levels of government was:

Christopher Leo, "City politics in an era of globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing urban regime theory: Regulating local government in a global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

The study that focused my attention on the significance for urban planning of state government intervention was:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

To look at the full proposal and the references click here and here.

Posted by leo-c at 12:27 PM

July 27, 2010

THE AGE OF GOVERNANCE: SOME PROPOSED PRINCIPLES OF DEEP FEDERALISM

In my most recent blog entry, I pointed out that the way we govern ourselves has changed fundamentally in the last 20 years or so, and yet we've given little thought to the principles by which we should pursue governance - the new name for what we used to call government. The governance revolution that swept over us while we slept...

...has taken a growing number of government programs away from the direct control of government departments and, through such measures as privatization, contracting out, downloading, or provision of funding, has delegated them to companies, community or religious organizations, and non-profit or for-profit agencies.

I suggested in my previous discussion that this is not necessarily all bad. For example, the delegation of government responsibilities to a community-based organization might place a share of decision-making in the hands of people who are better-placed than any government bureaucracy to determine how best to realize, in each local context, the good intentions of government programs. Accomplishing this is what I have called deep federalism. But governance may also raise troubling questions about the private agendas of organizations acting on behalf of government, their accountability, and their responsiveness to community concerns.

These are very real concerns, that, in an age of governance, affect us all, but we not only have not established principles, we haven't really worked out a coherent way of thinking about the problems. As it happens, I have been able, courtesy of the University of Winnipeg, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to devote a significant amount of my time in the last few years to thinking about these problems.

Here's what I've come up with. I suggest we consider the following principles as possible guides for decision-making about governance. I put them forward for discussion, knowing that neither I nor anyone else has all the answers.

By preference, fund community coalitions rather than individual organizations. This proposal responds to a concern that was drawn sharply to my attention in a study of the federal government's aboriginal policies in Winnipeg. One of my findings was that the way the federal government funded aboriginal governance amounted, intentionally or otherwise, to a divide-and-conquer strategy, much, I concluded, to the detriment of the aboriginal community. (For a draft of the article, click here.)

But this is not just about aboriginal policy. The residents of any community include many whose interests are at odds. If a single organization, presumably representing a particular approach to the community's problems, gets funding to implement its policies, these may well do a disservice to others.

From the viewpoint of good governance, it makes sense to minimize community in-fighting, and provide incentives for getting different groups to work together to achieve objectives that have a broader base of community support. Making funding conditional upon program proposals that represent as broad a base of support as possible would move governance in that direction.

Set broad objectives and use a performance rather than a prescriptive approach to setting program conditions. If federal government programs are conditional upon the achievement of very specific objectives, the result is likely to force communities to dance to the government's tune. It is the exact opposite of deep federalism: Instead of programs being adapted to community circumstances, communities are forced to adapt to opinions in Ottawa.

In one of my studies, I suggested, as a remedy, the application of a performance, rather than a prescriptive, approach to the formulation of program conditions. What this spiky bit of jargon means can be easily explained with an example.

The federal government decided in the late 1990s that urban homelessness was getting out of hand, and committed itself to a program to address the problem. Responding to conditions in Toronto, the feds offered funding to community groups for such initiatives as homeless shelters and services to street people.

Those program conditions may have been defensible in Toronto, but, for reasons I discuss elsewhere, they were exactly the wrong approach for Winnipeg, where the crying need was for renovation and development of housing in older neighbourhoods. However the prescriptive conditions of the National Homelessness Initiative did not allow such programs to be funded.

The proposal I arrived at in my study of the homelessness initiative in Winnipeg was this: If the objective is to address homelessness, why not set that (performance) standard as the condition for funding and let service providers for homeless people in each community make a case for their best approach to dealing with it? The government chose instead to make detailed rules (set prescriptive standards) with the result that service providers in Winnipeg scrambled to invent programs that met government standards, instead of applying resources where they would do the most good.

(The spectacle of a homelessness program that forbids the funding of housing raises the question: What were they thinking? For an answer check out the article on Winnipeg listed at the end of this entry.)

By preference, fund programs for at least five years, conditional upon satisfactory reporting annually, and don't impose heavy administrative burdens. One of the curses of community-based organizations in the age of governance is paperwork. This became particularly evident in a study of immigration and settlement in Vancouver (see article listed below), where organizations delivering settlement services to new Canadians faced masses of paperwork in applying for funding, and near-punitive reporting requirements.

If government is serious about devolving some of its functions to community-based organizations, it must respect the fact that some of the best of these organizations rely heavily on volunteers and operate on a shoestring. If they are subject to conditions that can only be met by corporations or other large organizations, the most likely outcome is not community-based governance, but the demise of smaller community-based organizations.

Fund facilities, as opposed to programs, only when the facilities are publicly owned and controlled for the life of the facility. Here my best example is one I cited in my previous blog entry: the case of the Youth For Christ (YFC) community centre in Winnipeg. Substantial government funding is being given to this organization to develop a community centre to serve the inner city. The facility will be government-funded, but owned and operated by YFC.

Even if we take the charitable view and assume that the YFC centre will truly serve the inner city, and that the people in charge of it today have no intention of using the delivery of community services as a lever for proselytization, who is to say how that organization will behave in a decade, or two or three, when it will still be operating a community centre partly funded by taxpayers, but controlled only by its own constituency?

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For a discussion of the National Homelessness Initiative in Winnipeg, see:

Christopher Leo and Martine August, “National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow Growth City.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15 (1) (supplement) 2006, pp. 1-21.

For more on settlement services in Vancouver, see:

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns, “Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (1), 2009, 93-116.

For a discussion of deep federalism, see:

Leo, C. (2006). Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 39 (03) DOI: 10.1017/S0008423906060240

Posted by leo-c at 6:53 PM | Comments (1)

May 19, 2010

IF CITIES CAN'T REGULATE URBAN GROWTH, WHO CAN? A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

In both Canada and the United States, we have largely left urban growth issues to local governments, and many local governments have failed to manage them. Many will never succeed because local councils are not, in general, able effectively to resist development interests.

As a result, the growth of our cities is, in practice, primarily responsive to the interests of developers. These interests are frequently at odds with the considerations that bear on preservation of the environment, maintenance of agriculture, an efficient infrastructure network and a transportation system that serves the population as a whole.

Therefore, in a series of posts on the multi-level governance of land use I've argued that:

• In urban growth policy, unlike many other policy domains, too much local control is a recipe for bad policy.

• This applies to major metropolitan areas and semi-rural, urbanizing communities alike.

• The reduction of local control over urban growth - in other words, centralization of power - is entirely justifiable because urban growth is every bit as much a national and global issue as it is a local one.

If local governments can't control land use, the only alternative is a meaningful degree of land use regulation at another level of government. Despite a lot of loose talk in the literature about sprawl being a global phenomenon, Europe has, in general, been more successful at land use planning than North America, and, as I argued in the first of this series of posts, a major reason is that national land use regulations lay down rules that are not as easily revoked by the political clout of developers.

Centralized land use regulation along the lines of the British Planning Policy Guidance Notes and Statements, or the German Raumordnungsgesetz (see article by Andreas Schultze Baing, listed below), are not likely to be an option in North America, but there have been serious attempts at provincial or state government intervention, and this could be a reasonable substitute for European-style national planning. In addition, both senior levels of government can and do attack land use issues in a more piecemeal manner, through such measures as environmental regulations, or conditional funding of transportation facilities.

As a result of these reflections, I am hoping to fund a three-city, international comparative case study to take a closer look at the alternatives that might be available to governments wishing, at long last, to address the issue of urban growth in a serious way. The three cities I have chosen are Portland, Oregon; the Greater Toronto Area, and Hamburg. Here's why:

Portland. The best-known, and probably most vigorously pursued, senior-government intervention in the US is that of Oregon, which is usually identified with Portland's growth boundary, but which in fact goes well beyond the establishment of an urban growth limit line, encompassing a panoply of rules governing urban growth and development. I learned a lot about how the Oregon system works when I did a case study of the politics of growth management in Portland in 1995, but since then there's been a lot of water under Portland's Burnside Bridge, so it's time for another look.

The Greater Toronto Area. In 2005, in Canada, Ontario legislated a greenbelt designed to hem in the expansion of the Greater Toronto Area, to preserve agriculture, and to conserve natural areas. In Toronto, meanwhile, a variety of measures have been undertaken to promote densification of the city; the reversal of some of the separation of residential from commercial development that has been such a troubled legacy of modernist planning; and the development of the transit system. In practice, therefore, the Greater Toronto Area is governed by a growth management regime that has much in common with Oregon's system.

Hamburg. The European case in my three-city comparison will be Hamburg, which I have chosen because it exhibits some of the complexities that have made growth management in North American metropolitan regions complicated: multiple municipalities, sprawling across three Länder: Hamburg itself, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony.

A systematic comparison of how the growth of cities is managed, considering both political and administrative dimensions of the problem, in Europe, in the Greater Toronto Area and in Portland should make it possible to gain an overview of problems and possible solutions to them.

Specifically, the objective of my research will be a cross-national comparison of different systems of land use regulation. The topic is potentially vast, so it is very important to limit the research in such a way as to keep it manageable and truly comparative. At the same time it has to be broad enough to permit a meaningful look at the question of whether growth is being managed effectively. I propose the following research questions, one of which bears on procedure, with the other two addressing results:

1. What political and administrative steps are taken, and what rules are applied, in deciding on the location and structure of new subdivisions?

2. What is the condition of infrastructure (roads, public transportation facilities and underground municipal services) throughout the urban area?

3. How well-served by public transit is the urban area?

Answers to these questions, with all the complexities they will bring to the surface, should provide a reasonable test of the effectiveness of growth management in these three regions. At the same time they will provide insights into the political, administrative, and regulatory sources of success and failure.

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A brief, useful comparison of British and German land use regulatory regimes can be found in:

Andreas Schultze Baing, "Containing Urban Sprawl? Comparing Brownfield Reuse Policies in England and Germany". International Planning Studies 15 (1), 25–35.

The article in which I originally argued that centralized city planning reduces the clout of developers is:

Christopher Leo, "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

The major publication recording the results of my 1995 research in Portland, Oregon, was:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

Here are some other articles I have published on multi-level governance:

Christopher Leo, “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy”. Canadian Journal of Political Science 39:3, 2006, 481-506.

Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth.” Journal of Urban Affairs. 28:2, 2006, 169-89.

Christopher Leo and Mike Pyl, “Multi-level Governance: Getting the Job Done and Respecting Community Difference.” Canadian Political Science Review, 1 (2) 2007, September. Accessable at http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/issue/view/2/showToc.

Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510.

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns, “Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (1), 2009.

Richard Lennon and Christopher Leo, “Metropolitan Growth and Municipal Boundaries: Problems and Proposed Solutions.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, 24 (Fall), 2001, 77-104.

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy.” Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, 193-213.

Christopher Leo, with Mary Ann Beavis, Andrew Carver and Robyne Turner, “Is Urban Sprawl Back on the Political Agenda? Local Growth Control, Regional Growth Management and Politics.” Urban Affairs Review, 34 (2) 1998, 179-212.

Christopher Leo, "Global Change and Local Politics: Economic Decline and the Local Regime in Edmonton." Journal of Urban Affairs, 17 (3), 1995, 277-99.

Christopher Leo and Robert Fenton, "'Mediated Enforcement' and the Evolution of the State: Development Corporations in Canadian City Centres". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14 (2) 1990, 185-206.

Posted by leo-c at 2:45 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2010

CASE STUDIES CAN PRODUCE THEORETICAL ADVANCES: HERE'S AN EXAMPLE

Case studies have unjustifiably acquired a reputation for being semi-anecdotal investigations of the small details of individual circumstances, research that is incapable of generating significant empirical or theoretical advances in knowledge. It is argued that the case study is, at best, a preliminary step, in that it may generate hypotheses that can later be tested using such “more reliable” methods as standardized questionnaires or statistical data. In the study of politics, however, that sequence of research initiatives may well work better in reverse.

When political action generates new policies, or creates new states of affairs, these changes invariably come complete with a set of justifications, with or without a claim that the justifications are founded in scientific investigation or well-established social theory. Often, a very effective way of testing such claims, and the social science backing them, is to do a case study of the policy, or the changed state of affairs, enquiring into its causes and the effects it has produced, in order to test the validity of the original justification. A series of such case studies may, in turn, generate insights that are capable of producing theoretical advances.

Immigration and homelessness studies

A case in point is a series of case studies I've undertaken, now nearing completion, that were designed to test the efficacy of government immigration and homelessness policies, and, as well, to test some theoretical propositions I had earlier formulated - on the basis of other case studies - about the much-underestimated policy significance urban population growth rates.

In order to produce theory, studies must be grounded in theory. The starting-point for my case study series was the widely held recognition that globalization has moved cities to centre-stage in societies everywhere. Our collective well-being, both economic and social, depends on the prosperity and well-being of our cities, because, although we need food, minerals and other products of the countryside, it is cities that are our primary centres of creativity, decision-making, and ultimately of wealth-generation.

Globalization has sharpened our awareness of this reality because free trade agreements have reduced the capacity of national governments to protect urban regions from international competition, and modern communications have reduced the importance of location, plunging cities everywhere into direct competition with each other. Accordingly, we need to think carefully about how our political decision-making affects our cities. Governments everywhere, including the Canadian government, are doing that, by trying to find ways of ensuring that national policies contribute to the economic viability and social health of cities and communities.

This task is complicated by the fact that each community is as unique as each human individual. Therefore, although it is possible to set national objectives and standards that apply to all communities, complete uniformity of policy making and implementation is probably not achievable and is, in any event, undesirable, because what works in one city may not work in another. The Canadian government has addressed this reality by trying to ensure that the implementation of national policies can be tailored to the particularities of different communities.

My study focused on two examples of policies designed in this way: the National Homelessness Initiative and Immigration and Settlement. My research assistants and I looked at the implementation of these policies in three very different cities - Vancouver, Winnipeg and Saint John, New Brunswick - in order to test whether these policies were successfully adapted to a range of very different local conditions.

Findings

Here are some of our most interesting findings:

The rate of a city's population growth plays a critical, and widely overlooked role in determining the appropriateness of different policy choices. Policies that may be appropriate for rapidly growing cities are different from those that are appropriate for slow-growth cities. There is a strong tendency, however, for decision-makers in slow-growth cities to pretend that they will be able to increase their rates of growth, and premise their policies on future rapid growth - growth that rarely materializes.

The National Homelessness Initiative (NHI) contained provisions for consultation with local service providers to determine how NHI funding would be allocated. However, the NHI was created to address conditions in rapid-growth cities, and federal government policy in this area was not sufficiently flexible to allow for adaptation to the very different circumstances in slow-growth cities. As a result, NHI policies that were reasonably responsive to conditions in Vancouver proved ill adapted to the circumstances of Winnipeg and Saint John.

Federal immigration and settlement policies were adapted to local circumstances via federal-provincial agreements that devolved some responsibilities to provincial governments. In Vancouver, a famously effective network of settlement service providers suffered setbacks stemming from the British Columbia government's rigidly ideological approach to service provision. In Saint John, immigration and settlement objectives were thwarted by a local culture that proved relatively unreceptive to immigration. In Winnipeg, the provincial government implemented a set of immigration and settlement policies that have been recognized as a model, thanks to extensive consultation with service providers and flexible, thoughtful administration of a provincial nominee program.

Conclusion

The theory about the surprising importance of growth rates in setting the conditions for a wide range of policies first occurred to me because I had done case studies on a variety of subjects in such rapidly growing centres as Toronto, Vancouver and Portland, Oregon; and such slow-growth centres as Winnipeg and Edmonton, when the latter was a slow-growth centre. Because I was doing case studies, I was not narrowly focused on my particular research questions because case studies require the researcher to look broadly at the context of the question being investigated. As a result, I could not help noticing the striking differences among the cities I studied, and the way in which those differences corresponded to differences in rates of population growth.

In my comparative case studies of immigration and homelessness policies, growth rates were one of the criteria I had in mind in selecting research sites. The findings of those studies gave insights into the two policy areas and into some of the problems and possibilities of multi-level governance. But they also confirmed that policy and implementation problems were different in different cities, and that those differences were strongly influenced by population growth rates.

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For more about slow growth, see:

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy". Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, pp. 193-213.

Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth”. Journal of Urban Affairs. 28 (2), 2006, pp. 169-89.

For more about the findings regarding homelessness and immigration, see:

Leo, C. (2006). Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 39 (03) DOI: 10.1017/S0008423906060240

Christopher Leo, “National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow Growth City”. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 15 (1) (supplement) 2006, pp. 1-21.

Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work”. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510.

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns, “Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism". Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (1), 2009, 93-116.

Posted by leo-c at 1:49 PM

December 1, 2009

LOCAL POLITICIANS CAN'T CONTROL SPRAWL. SO WHY IS IT THEIR JOB ALONE?

Few things are more important than the way we use our land, and yet, in North America, few things are more neglected. Among my urbanist colleagues, there are precious few who think that urban sprawl is a good thing, and even fewer who believe anything can be done about it. Why?

Among those who know city politics, it's well understood that the process of urban development is largely driven, not by the public interest in using our land efficiently and sustainably, but by the very different calculations development companies use to decide where their best business opportunities lie. In previous posts I have given examples of how that process plays out, both in large urban areas and in the smaller political arena of semi-rural, urbanizing municipalities.

Although there has been much agonizing over the apparent inability of most local governments to take meaningful control of urban development, there has been little or no discussion, in the academic literature, of alternatives to local control. And yet there are very good reasons for questioning the assumption that land use is primarily a concern for municipal councils and local planning authorities, indeed for seeing urban growth as an issue that is both national and global in its significance. Let's take a look at three of them.

The environment

It is now widely agreed that the health of the environment is a global issue. We usually think of such problems as climate change, and soil, air and water pollution as being related to economic growth, population growth and energy consumption, and rightly so, but we rarely consider the environmental significance of urban growth.

We all know that petroleum-driven transportation is a major emitter of greenhouse gases and a variety of other pollutants, but we're very likely to forget that urban land use is an important determinant of petroleum consumption. Standard-issue North American development, featuring generally low densities and strict separation of residential, commercial and industrial areas from each other, privileges the automobile as the primary mode of transportation, often eliminates other means of transportation as viable alternatives, and even forces automobile use when one might prefer a different way of getting around. (The next time you're in a suburban home, try figuring out a way to fetch a litre of milk without using petroleum.)

And that's not even mentioning how vast expanses of pavement produce run-off that pollutes our waterways, or the impact of residential septic tanks on underground water resources. In short, a very significant proportion of the global environmental problems we struggle with are driven by urban land use patterns. Urban land use, therefore, is a global issue.

Agriculture...

...is an issue that's national in scope, for a number of reasons. Low-density urban development that straggles out across agricultural areas undermines the viability of adjacent agriculture, to a degree that's more serious than most people realize. In order to impair the viability of agriculture, you don't have to pave over farmland. All you have to do is locate a few urbanites in the area, and before you know it, you get conflicts between the farmers and the space-seeking urbanites. Urban-style development may drive up the price of land, forcing farmers to pay more property taxes. Urbanites complain about livestock smells and heavy machinery on the roads, their septic tanks pollute the water table, and their pets harass farm animals. Such conflicts are well known, by both land use planners and agronomists, to undermine the viability of commercial agriculture. This concern is even more important in Canada than the United States because a very substantial proportion of Canada's limited supply of prime agricultural land is located in urbanizing areas.

Infrastructure

In short, agriculture is a national resource that is threatened by urban sprawl. Another national problem that originates in large part from urban land use decisions is the seemingly never-ending "infrastructure crisis". Since the 1990s, both Canadian and American governments have been allocating funds to address this problem, while the rhetoric surrounding it has escalated from "crumbling roads" to "collapsing bridges". The problem is becoming more serious even as money continues to be poured into addressing it.

An important source of that problem is difficult to identify from national statistics, but clearly visible at the local level. A case I have investigated is that of Winnipeg, where, for decades, money has been readily available to extend roads, bridges, and sewer and water lines - often across the bald prairie - but spending on infrastructure maintenance has consistently fallen short of needs. In other words, the city's expansion of infrastructure is out-pacing its ability to maintain existing infrastructure.

The degree to which maintenance is falling short varies from city to city, with some cities in more serious straits than others. We need much more research to gain an overview of the local sources of the infrastructure deficit. What is clear already, however, is that federal and provincial funds are being spent to address infrastructure deficits that originate, to a significant extent, in local land use decisions. The problems that stem from this local decision-making are sufficiently regional and national in scope to make out a serious case that there is a legitimate regional and national interest in the setting of urban growth policies.

In Europe, there are national and European Union rules governing land use. In North America, Oregon is notable for having enforced state regulations governing urban land use for some time, and Ontario has recently promulgated rules governing the growth of the Greater Toronto Area. It's time for other jurisdictions to assess these examples, and see what can be done better, and what can be done elsewhere.

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There is a vast literature on urban sprawl, smart growth and related questions, but there has been very little done in North America to treat it as a problem that is national in scope. Two recent exceptions are:

Bruce Babbitt, Cities in the wilderness: A new vision of land use in America. Washington: Island Press, 2007.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

Earlier publications of my own that form part of the basis for this entry are:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

Christopher Leo with Mary Ann Beavis, Andrew Carver and Robyne Turner, “Is urban sprawl back on the political agenda? Local growth control, regional growth management and politics.” Urban Affairs Review, 34 (2) 1998, 179-212.

Posted by leo-c at 7:01 AM

September 16, 2009

IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT IN MANITOBA: MAKING DEEP FEDERALISM WORK

This is the second in a series of two posts about the findings I'll be presenting next week in Toronto at the IPAC-PPM Cities and Public Policy conference. The previous post dealt with the mismanagement of homelessness in Winnipeg. This one focuses on the achievement of deep federalism in the administration of immigration and settlement in Winnipeg. In both entries, the overarching theme is that slow-growth cities have policy problems that are very different from those of cities that are growing rapidly, and that these differences are not being given the attention they deserve.

Vancouver and Toronto, like many rapidly-growing cities, are inundated in immigrants. Their biggest problem is providing adequate settlement and integration services. Winnipeg, like many slow-growth communities, gets few immigrants and suffers from labour shortages. Its challenge is to figure out how to use immigration as a means of addressing the labour shortages.

The Manitoba government began pursuing immigration as early as the 1970s, partly because of a consensus, at least among elite groups, which would be considered remarkable in many other jurisdictions. Because of labour shortages, and because of slow growth, in Manitoba as a whole and in Winnipeg in particular, the business community wanted immigration to address the shortages and the City of Winnipeg wanted to expand its tax base and population, and to revitalize decaying neighbourhoods with new residents. The right wanted economic growth and more workers, and the left wanted to meet humanitarian goals while building a more diverse society.

In the Canada-Manitoba Agreement on immigration and settlement, the provincial government won the right to nominate immigrants and oversee their integration. The government has done the kind of listening to the community in this case that the federal government failed to do in the case of the National Homelessness Initiative, and has, in the process, made deep federalism work. It established relationships with community groups that were interested in promoting immigration, such as the Société franco-manitobaine, which was looking for French-speakers to come to St. Boniface, the French Quarter; and the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, which, initially, wanted to rescue Jewish Argentinians from the economic collapse there and later sought to bring in Jewish immigrants from other countries.

Thanks to a plethora of community alliances, the provincial government was able, first to lobby for a provincial nominee program for Manitoba and then, with the help of feedback from the community, to develop a workable set of programs for bringing immigrants to Manitoba, connecting them with jobs, and ensuring they had the services they needed to integrate. The program is widely recognized as a model, and it demonstrates that, in a number of policy areas – not all policy areas by any means – there is available knowledge and wisdom at the community level that can be tapped by governments at all levels to produce better policy.

Governments need to work harder at figuring out ways of drawing on the skills and knowledge that are available in communities everywhere, to help achieve governance that respects community difference in national policy, and in policy at all levels of government.

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For more detail on immigration and settlement in Winnipeg, look up:

Christopher Leo and Martine August. “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510. To look at a draft of the article click here.

Posted by leo-c at 7:35 PM

September 15, 2009

MISMANAGING HOMELESSNESS IN A SLOW-GROWTH CITY

I'll be at the IPAC-PPM Cities and Public Policy conference next week in Toronto, reporting on some of the things I've learned about the impact of federal government policies on Winnipeg. My overall theme will be that slow-growth cities have policy problems that are very different from those of cities that are growing rapidly, and that these differences are not being given the attention they deserve.

Rapid growth generally pushes up the price of housing and multiplies the numbers of homeless people living on the street. Slow growth often depresses the price of housing and produces decayed housing, because the value of houses is not high enough to produce the necessary incentive for home renovations. People are less likely to be living on the street and more likely to be living in unsafe or inadequate housing. Two entirely different problems, and clearly different solutions are indicated.

The federal government’s National Homelessness Initiative was a response to an incident in the late 1990s, in which a homeless man froze to death on the streets of Toronto. The federal government resolved to mount a program, but having vacated the housing field some years earlier, it was determined not to get back into providing funding for housing.

The result was SCPI, the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative, which, over a period of three years - our study ended in 2006 - made $23.5 million available in Winnipeg for funding such things as emergency shelters and services to street people. Winnipeg service providers argued that Winnipeg, like most slow-growth cities, had relatively small numbers of people living on the streets, but large numbers of people living in precarious housing.

They pleaded with the government to make some of its funding available for home renovation programs, and for the development of low-cost housing, but to no avail. Their only recourse was to invent programs that met federal government funding conditions, programs that they knew were not the best way to spend $23.5 million dollars.

As a result, Winnipeg service providers were forced to develop programs that might have been money well spent in Vancouver or Toronto, but that were less than optimum for Winnipeg.

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For full details on this case, take a look at:

Christopher Leo and Martine August. National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow-Growth City. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 15 (1) (supplement) 2006, pp. 1-21. To view a draft of the paper, click here.

Posted by leo-c at 5:12 PM

July 9, 2009

RAPID TRANSIT: COST OR OPPORTUNITY? IT’S UP TO US

With Jonah Levine

It’s taken Winnipeg a generation to get around to building the first leg of a rapid transit system. You might think that settles the matter, and that now we are down to inconsequential details. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that many important decisions remain, decisions that could make the difference between a successful rapid transit system and a white elephant.

As members of the Winnipeg Rapid Transit Coalition, Jonah and I have been involved in discussions with transit officials and city politicians about the central issue of the system’s accessibility. The discussions have been cordial, but so far we have been unable to reach agreement on the question of whether the first leg of the southwest rapid transit corridor will be built in such a way as to enable cyclists and pedestrians to move safely back and forth between the South Osborne neighbourhood and downtown.

The rapid transit line will run parallel to a rail line, and, in the absence of a safe route over the rail line, there will be a gap in the first phase of the active transportation corridor which is to run parallel to the rapid transit line - a gap that will pose formidable obstacles, not only to pedestrians and cyclists, but to anyone trying to reach the rapid transit line from the other side of the rail line. The gap is illustrated and explained in detail in posters available by clicking on:

The Gap, part 1.

The Gap, part 2.

The response of city officials to our representations has been that the city cannot afford an overpass, which will cost $14 million, according to one estimate. The WRTC argues, and I agree, that $14 million, though it is indeed a lot of money, is not a great deal in comparison with the cost of a rapid transit system that falls short of its potential.

At the heart of our disagreement is a question that's both simple and fraught with significance: Is rapid transit just a cost or is it also an opportunity? Unquestionably it is a cost. The transit line, and the associated active transportation corridor offer:

•Improved mobility for many Winnipeggers who cannot afford cars, or prefer not to use them unnecessarily

•Reduced pollution and greenhouse gas generation

•A beachhead in the battle against sprawl, and against Winnipeggers’ currently all-but-total dependence on cars for much of their transportation

These are public benefits that cost money, but that make Winnipeg, in many ways, a better city. In all of this, there is no serious disagreement between the WRTC and the city. Our disagreement with the overall direction of city policy is in the degree to which we see rapid transit, not only as the price of civility and environmental sanity, but also as a major development opportunity. Our argument is that a properly constructed rapid transit system yields development opportunities that can generate enough revenue to dwarf the costs of the access on which that revenue will depend.

To a degree, city leaders understand this, but so far they fail to grasp its full significance. Their comprehension of the concept of a rapid transit system as a development opportunity is evident in the fact that the first leg of the system will be financed by a tif, short for tax increment financing - financing out of future revenues. The transit line will be paid for out of the revenue that will be generated by the Fort Rouge Yards neighbourhood, a new neighbourhood on currently empty land that will be served by the rapid transit system.

In other words, the transit line produces development opportunities, and the tax revenues that those opportunities generate will pay off the money borrowed to build the line. What the city seems not to have grasped fully is that the primarily residential South Osborne neighbourhood is only the tip of the potential development iceberg.

If the city provided for access across the rail line, a world of additional development opportunities would open up along the adjacent east side of Pembina Highway. Currently, that stretch of land is home to a strip of relatively low-density commercial development, a lot of surface parking and, apparently, a significant proportion of empty land. The character of this area is suburban rather than urban, and as Winnipeg develops, it becomes increasingly inappropriate to a location so near the city centre, and the quintessentially urban neighbourhoods of Osborne Village, Corydon Village and the South Osborne neighbourhood.

With ready access to a rapid transit line, well connected to the centre of the city and the University of Winnipeg, and later to the University of Manitoba as well, that land could be redeveloped into a much higher density commercial development, or some mix of commercial and residential development. The revenues that could be generated by such development would dwarf the cost of overpasses. As a bonus, the additional riders transit would get would improve the viability of the transit system as a whole.

My central point is really very simple: It’s crazy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a rapid transit line and then to slash its potential benefits in order to save a few millions.

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This entry is an expanded version of a recently-published newspaper article:

Christopher Leo and Jonah Levine, Let's Not Skimp on Rapid Transit. Winnipeg Free Press, 5 July 2009. Accessible at http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/lets-not-skimp-on-rapid-transit-49971382.html, down-loaded 5 July 2009.

Scholarly research on transit-oriented development:

A veritable gold mine of information is available at the web site of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

May 19, 2009

IS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DIVIDING ABORIGINAL PEOPLE? CAN IT STOP?

I'll be at the Canadian Political Science Association conference in Ottawa next week delivering a paper originally entitled "Building cohesion, aggravating division", with an even more obscure, academic-sounding subtitle. But I've changed the title and the new one is the one I'm using for this blog entry. My article grows out of studies I did recently in Winnipeg of aboriginal policy and policy regarding immigration and settlement. Originally, these studies had nothing to do with each other, but when they were finished, I was struck by the contrast between them.

I found that immigration and settlement, which is a responsibility of the Manitoba government, was intelligently administered and scored some notable successes, mainly thanks to the provincial government's close consultation with community groups that provided settlement services, and productive working relationships with them. Not so with aboriginal community groups.

It is the federal government that bears primary responsibility for aboriginal policy, and it spent a considerable amount of money on aboriginal programs in Winnipeg, but instead of consulting with the leaders of aboriginal groups on the shape of that policy, it set program conditions and then let community groups apply for funding. As a result, aboriginal community groups, already deeply divided, competed with each other for money.

That was bound to deepen the divisions among them. In the meantime, instead of being able to work with the government in shaping policy objectives - as the settlement service provider groups did - aboriginal organizations were forced to shape their own objectives in such a way as to meet federal government program conditions.

The result: A patchwork of fragmented programs instead of a co-ordinated approach to the big issues, and a great deal of resentment among the aboriginal leadership about the federal government's failure to consult meaningfully. In my paper, I suggest how the federal government might take a leaf out of the Manitoba government's book and change its approach.

If you'd like to take a look at my paper, click here. It's a work in progress, and I'm looking for feedback, so please feel free to comment.

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For a more detailed account of the immigration and settlement program affecting Winnipeg, see Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 42 (2), 2009.

A comparative look federal government policies in Winnipeg (including aboriginal policy, immigration and settlement, federal lands and emergency planning) will be published as part of a volume funded by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada project on Multilevel Governance and Public Policy in Canadian Municipalities.

April 10, 2009

IF CITIES CAN'T REGULATE URBAN GROWTH, URBANIZING MUNICIPALITIES CERTAINLY CAN'T

It is becoming more evident with each passing year that urban growth is a matter national concern. The growing ease and speed of the global movement of money, goods, people and ideas has made it more and more clear that the prosperity of nations is heavily dependent on the prosperity of cities. At the same time, poorly managed urban growth is a major contributor to the global-scale environmental problems we face. For both environmental and economic reasons, therefore, we need to think of urban growth as a national and global issue, not a purely local one.

In my previous post, I showed how, in North America, city councils are entrusted with many of the decisions that determine the growth of our cities. Since these councils frequently lack the political will to resist the blandishments of developers, in practice, we are allowing the cost accounting of individual development companies to play a major role in determining the growth of cities.

The question of whether the location and design of a new development responds to environmental concerns, and maximizes the city's ability to maintain the viability of its network of infrastructure and services, is unlikely to be high on an individual developer's list of concerns. The developer's responsibility is to shareholders, not the city as a whole. In other words, far from being responsive to national and global concerns, the growth of cities, typically, is not even responsive to the best interests of the city as a whole.

It gets worse. Most North American cities, or metropolitan areas, are actually loose agglomerations of municipalities. In those metropolitan areas, a significant amount of the growth is taking place in municipalities that are partly or largely rural. In such communities, control over growth may be even looser than it is in major cities.

I gained an insight into growth at the urban fringe a few years ago, when I attended two sessions of a Manitoba Municipal Board panel that was deciding whether to recommend approval of the proposed official plan of the Springfield Municipality, an agricultural area and bedroom community immediately east of Winnipeg. The municipality’s proposed new official municipal plan defined four land forms in the municipality:

•Two high-potential agricultural areas,

•An area near a provincial park that is the prime source of ground water for the municipality and

•An area that is defined as having lower agricultural potential.

In defining objectives for development of the municipality, the plan stressed the high priority placed on:

•Preserving agricultural viability and natural resources and

•Preventing proliferation of residential development.

A substantial scholarly literature cites a variety of ways that residential development in farming areas damages the viability of agriculture: complaints from urban residents about smells, heavy machinery on roads and other perceived nuisances resulting from agriculture; residential activities that interfere with farming operations such as commuter traffic, harassment of farm animals by pets; and escalation of land prices that inflate the cost of farming.

The proposed Springfield official plan itself stated that the growth potential of livestock husbandry had already been limited by past residential development. To this point in the plan, therefore, an analysis of land forms indicated the location of good agricultural areas and important water resources, while statements of objectives stressed the determination to preserve these assets in the face of urbanization.

However, the proposed zoning categories set out in later chapters of the plan appeared to have been established by someone who did not read the chapters containing planning principles. Most of the residential development was planned for the larger of the two prime agricultural areas and in the area where the major resource of ground water is located. All the residential development on top of the prime water resource relies on septic tanks for sewage disposal, which invariably poses a greater risk to ground water than a community sewage system.

There was a cluster of residential development planned as well in the community of Anola, which is located in the low-potential agricultural area and would therefore seem to be the natural area for urban development if harm to agriculture were to be minimized, but that community was slated to receive only a limited amount of development because it was not to be provided with the water and sewer services needed for higher concentrations of development.

Nor were there any plans for providing Anola with services, even though the plan stated that there was a demand for residential development there. Meanwhile, two urban communities in the middle of the prime agricultural area, Oakbank and Dugald, had been provided with the services required for higher concentrations of urban development. In short, everything possible was done to encourage urban development in those areas which the plan claimed a determination to protect, and almost nothing done to encourage development in the area that the plan designated as unsuitable for other purposes: a good line of talk, but no action to back it up.

Attendance at two hearings of the municipal board panel provided insights into the sources of this exercise in appearing to plan without actually doing so. From a variety of statements that were made, it became clear that numerous residents of the municipality had been able to improve their fortunes by subdividing farmland in the past, in order to sell it for residential development, and that others wished to do so in future. When witnesses at the hearing called attention to the gap in the plan between objectives and proposed outcomes the argument was repeatedly made that, since some had been allowed to subdivide their land, it was not fair to restrict others from doing so.

In short, the municipality was meeting its legal obligations by providing something that resembled a plan, but political pressures from constituents in a community small enough to allow almost anyone to have a personal relationship with her or his representative on council prevented the municipality from adhering to the principles stated in the plan. In a community as small as this one, it is not necessary to imagine cases of rye or thousands of dollars changing hands in order to understand what is happening. In the absence of clear provincial planning guidelines, pressures on council are too immediate and too personal to permit genuine planning.

The situation in Springfield is very different from that in the Greater Toronto Area, described in my previous post, but the outcome is the same: it is those who stand to gain from development that largely determine the way the community will develop. Environmental concerns, and even the question of the long-term viability of a municipality's network of infrastructure and services, is likely to take a back seat.

Elsewhere I have made the case that cities and communities ought to be more involved in decision-making about social assistance, social housing and immigrant settlement. In those policy areas, there is room for more local involvement in decision-making. Land use planning is a different matter. There is too much leverage available to those who are most likely to subvert good governance. Since the growth of our cities is critically important to the national economy and the global environment, it is everyone's business. Although local interests need to be considered in land use decision-making, local decisions should be circumscribed by rules that reflect the needs of society at large.

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You can look further into the arguments in this blog entry by checking out:

Rural Municipality of Springfield. Development Plan (By-Law 98-22). Oakbank, MB: Ruraland Consulting Ltd, June, 1998.

Christopher Leo, “Urban Development: Planning Aspirations and Political Realities.” In Edmund P Fowler and David Siegel, eds., Urban Policy Issues (second edition.) Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Posted by leo-c at 5:02 PM | Comments (4)

WHY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS CAN'T BE TRUSTED TO REGULATE CITY GROWTH

Last October I sketched out my argument that local and metropolitan governments can't meaningfully regulate urban land use because developers swing too much political weight at the local level. I pointed out, on the basis of European case studies and my own analytical work, that the position of developers is markedly different in countries where a significant amount of city planning takes place at the national level than it is in the typical North American case. We can verify that by considering the concrete reality of how land use decisions are made in Canada and the United States.

This is not easily done, because it's impossible to trace the influences that determine complicated land use decisions without careful and persistent research. The results of one such piece of research some time ago offer a revealing example. A 10-month investigation in the late 1980s by two Globe and Mail reporters deals with land development in the area north of Toronto, part of what is now known as the Greater Toronto Area - a wide ring of suburban communities that are the primary focus of growth in the region.

The investigation concluded that the provincial government adopted a hands-off stance toward a lack of urban planning that allowed private developers to control the growth of communities in the area and that the “role of citizens in the planning of their communities has been trivialized to the point where it is ignored by many municipal councils.” Specifically, the investigation found that “A small group of powerful developers... Have a near monopoly on developable land in the... area [north of Toronto] and are a factor in rising house prices.”

The Globe and Mail documented a “loan” of $80,000 that was not repaid from a developer to a company owned by an official in the region, which was followed by approval of an industrial development proposal that had been filed by the company that gave the “loan”. There were also stories of a cheque for $4,000 from a developer to a “senior municipal official” and at least two cases of envelopes containing several thousand dollars in cash delivered on behalf of a developer to a councillor.

While such stories are rarely told in as much detail as this one was, the story comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the conventions of growth politics in major metropolitan areas. In fact, it's not necessary to point to apparent corruption to see why there is very little meaningful regulation of urban growth in most North American cities. The urban studies literature is rife with examples of city councils being overawed and bamboozled or bullied and sweet-talked into decisions that can endanger both the environment and the viability of cities.

It's important to stress that there is more at stake here than conventional shock stories about influence pedalling, graft, or lack of political will. Urban growth is a critical economic issue and will necessarily play a central role in any realistic attempt to address the economic challenges and environmental problems our societies face, as I will argue in subsequent blog entries. How much longer can we afford the luxury of allowing the growth of our cities to be determined primarily by the private economic interests of those who control the development of urban land?

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You can look further into the arguments in this blog entry by checking out:

Ferguson, Jock and Dawn King. 1988. Hidden money fuelling regional growth. Toronto: Globe and Mail, 2 November 1988, 1, 11.

Posted by leo-c at 4:37 PM | Comments (4)

February 16, 2009

UN-CITYING OUR CITIES

It started as a sensible idea: workers' housing shouldn't be located next to smoke-belching heavy industry. But it has turned into an obsession with separating everything and everyone from everything and everyone else, a denial, on a massive scale, of community and of the bedrock urban reality of mutual interdependence.

Today we find ourselves with, not only separate neighbourhoods for the rich and the poor, but a fetish for spatial segregation that defies rational explanation: One area for $250,000 houses, another one for $350,000 houses, a third for $450,000 houses. Housing for old people where young people aren't welcome, family neighbourhoods where housing for the elderly isn't welcome. No housing where there is commerce, no factories (even clean ones) and no offices where there is either housing or retail trade, wide swaths of wasted land to ensure that everything is well and truly separated from everything else.

All these different forms of separation create many problems of isolation and dependency: old people who are trapped in their apartments, having to wait for rides before they can go anywhere; children who are trapped in their back yards except when their parents drive them somewhere else; parents who are forced to waste countless hours acting as chauffeurs for their children, and for workers, punishingly long commutes, often to low-wage jobs.

As usual, it is the most vulnerable who pay the heaviest price, the poor and the marginalized, who, in growing numbers, are relegated to those areas of the city that have been abandoned by everyone else. Being poor anywhere is a big problem, but it's a much bigger problem yet if you're living in a neighbourhood where there may be no good jobs, no opportunities for a good education, a neighbourhood that is likely to be terrorized by street gangs and assorted criminals. And, for good measure, the neighbourhood may be besieged by the threat of gentrification, facing residents with the prospect that they will be forced to trade their meagre refuge for absolute homelessness.

Last Saturday's Globe and Mail carried a series on one of the worst of such neighbourhoods, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The series is honest journalism that asks the right questions and doesn't shrink from the answers. Robert Matas calculates that Canadian taxpayers have paid out something on the order of $1.4 billion since 2000 without achieving any real improvements in the neighbourhood, and Gary Mason takes up the cudgels on behalf of Vancouverites who share an apparently growing determination to find a way of putting an end to the misery.

We can get some sense of the size of the challenge by reflecting on the depth of the problem. It began with a long-standing unwillingness of wealthy people to live near poor people, proceeded to a growing unwillingness of better-off people to share space with anyone less well off, and ended with a distaste for any kind of human diversity. If cities are anything, they are places where many different kinds of people live and work at close quarters and cannot avoid the reality of mutual interdependence.

We have tried to deny that reality, to un-city our cities, and blind karma has repaid us with places, like the Downtown Eastside, that are a devil's brew of abandonment, misfortune, drugs and crime. There have, of course, always been places in cities where marginalized people live, but the obsessiveness and relentlessness with which the fortunate separate themselves from those who need help is probably unique to our times.

There is no simple fix for such problems, though a stronger social housing policy could bring hope to many marginalized people, and, with changes in zoning rules, commercial areas could become excellent locations for the cost-effective creation of affordable housing. But in the long run, we all need to reflect on the folly of believing that we can, at one and the same time, enjoy the benefits of city life and separate ourselves from those who are different from us.
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Want to give some thought to this problem? Here are suggested readings:

Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

Peter Marcuse, "The Enclave, the Citadel and the Ghetto: What Has Changed in the Post-Fordist U.S. City". Urban Affairs Review 33 (2), pp. 233-43.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

For other discussions of land use issues, check out these links:

City Hall Take Note: Public-Private Partnerships Won't Fix This Problem

Stop Trashing Suburbs, Focus on Sprawl

Opposition to Sprawl Isn't Anti-Rural. It's Pro-Rural.

Posted by leo-c at 11:32 AM | Comments (1)

December 25, 2008

A FAUX PAS AND A LESSON IN INFRASTRUCTURE

I committed a faux pas in Tokyo last week. I was at a conference of the International Sociological Association, listening to a presentation by John Mock, an anthropologist at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. Professor Mock was explaining his findings from a study that showed how little provision there was for cyclists on the streets of Tokyo.

Cycle lanes are either absent altogether or inadequate. Some dead-end into barriers. As a result, pedestrians tend to ignore the cycling lanes, and cyclists ignore the rules, endangering pedestrians by riding on sidewalks, or riding on the wrong side of streets. I was amused by Professor Mock's presentation, and, from time to time, I laughed, a bit obtrusively, I'm afraid.

After the presentation, it occurred to me that my Japanese colleagues might well have well have thought me to be amusing myself at Tokyo's expense, laughing at the city's failures. In, fact, I was laughing in recognition of the fact that Professor Mock could have gone through his notes, substituting "Winnipeg" for almost every reference to Tokyo, without any loss of factual accuracy.

Tokyo's failure to make appropriate accommodation for cyclists has nothing to do with any peculiarities of either Tokyo or Japan. It is rooted in something I have observed everywhere I have gone, except parts of western Europe -- the prioritization of speed in the movement of automobiles over every other consideration, even the safety of pedestrians.

I have done a series of studies on the politics of urban transportation, and, if my experience is any guide, Tokyo's decision-makers may well have raised the issue of an unacceptably high level of deaths from bicycle accidents and been told by their civil engineers that any action leading to less freedom of movement for automobiles would cause unacceptably high levels of congestion and harm Tokyo's economy.

The idea that all other considerations should be swept aside in favour of freedom of movement for automobiles is deeply entrenched, not only in conventional wisdom, but also in the profession of civil engineering, which is supposed to serve science and the public good, not a narrow interest. Our apparent determination to favour the automobile over all else exacts a heavy price.

The old, the young, the poor and the disabled lose their independence, because they must wait for others to drive them wherever they wish to go. Parents, for their part, are forced to waste hours each week chauffeuring their children, because we have built an infrastructure that leaves most people solely dependent on automobiles for mobility.

And, of course, there is also the slaughter on the highways - which has become so routine that it isn't even considered a cost - and the damage to the environment, not to mention that, in many parts of the world, we don't have enough money to maintain all the roads we have built.

When the automobile first entered our lives, it opened up a new world of opportunity for mobility, but the dream has turned into a nightmare. As is so often the case with human behavour, we have got ourselves into a great mess by continuing unreflectively along a path that seemed reasonable at first. It will take some doing to change course and repair the damage.

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Professor Mock's paper:

John Mock, Contested Borders—Tolerated Mayhem: Contested Space on the Streets and Sidewalks of Tokyo. Paper presented at a conference of the Research Committee on Urban and Regional Development, International Sociological Association, Tokyo, 17-20 December, 2008.

An excellent source of intelligent and environmentally aware reflection on transportation issues is a journal entitled World Transport Policy and Practice, available for free on the internet.

Posted by leo-c at 2:57 PM

December 12, 2008

"THE TRUTH": EPISTEMOLOGICAL, PRACTICAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN CASE STUDY RESEARCH

I'll be in Tokyo next week, delivering a paper at a conference of the International Sociological Association. Drawing on examples of research I've done, in both Kenya and North America, the paper discusses issues faced by researchers who undertake critical investigations of the way political power is wielded. It looks at the problem of how to get at "the truth", as well as some obstacles posed by inappropriate research ethics protocols. Following is a brief summary of the paper, or, if you prefer, download the paper itself.

ABSTRACT

Case study research has unjustifiably acquired a reputation for being semi-anecdotal investigation of the small details of individual circumstances, research that is incapable of generating significant empirical or theoretical advances in knowledge. Drawing on a research methods literature, and on my own experience with case study research on two continents, I argue that case studies can serve as an indispensable tool, both for testing the validity of claims made for policy initiatives and political decisions, and occasionally for the generation of theoretically significant insights.

Case studies that involve critical assessments of the use of political power pose serious challenges for researchers because power holders may be in a position to exercise control over both the opinions of a researcher’s interview subjects and some of the contents of the documentary record. The challenge to the researcher is to evaluate the significance of various interviewees’ interpretations of the state of affairs or sequence of events under study, while separating out facts from interpretations, and testing the validity of factual accounts against the representation of those same facts in the documentary record. This study makes the case that power is unlikely to be so absolute as to withstand a scrutiny that includes careful cross-checking of the representation of facts in different, independent sources.

The study then turns to the problems posed by institutional ethics reviews, which, though well-intentioned, inhibit the kind of critical investigation that case study research requires, both by effectively legitimizing any efforts power-holders may make to conceal facts and obfuscate analysis, and by failing adequately to protect subordinates and ordinary people from reprisals for research findings that offend power-holders.

Posted by leo-c at 7:41 AM

November 13, 2008

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN UTICA TURNED WATER SERVICES OVER TO A REGIONAL AGENCY

Here's an excerpt from an article that ought to be required reading for anyone who is involved or interested in the proposal to turn Winnipeg's water and sewer services over to an independent regional water utility. It raises questions that require careful consideration. The complete article is available at http://strikeslip.blogspot.com/2008/11/wrong-regionalization-oneida-county.html

Thanks to Tom Christoffel for pointing this out to me.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Wrong Regionalization: The Oneida County Sewer District
[This article was originally published in the October 2008 "Utica Phoenix":]

Over 40 years ago Oneida County made the first "regionalization" effort in Greater Utica by forming the Oneida County Sewer District to serve 12 area municipalities. The goal was noble: build a system of sanitary sewer interceptors, pumping stations and a treatment plant to clean up water pollution in the Mohawk River, and make it affordable by spreading the cost over all system users by charges attached to water bills. The goal was accomplished, but flaws in the scheme have produced harmful results.

Dilution of representation: One flaw is that sewer district residents ceded control of the system to many disinterested parties, specifically, the county legislators from places untouched by the sewer district. This meant that decisions would not necessarily be made from the perspective of the customers receiving the service and paying the bills, but rather by many people who would not be held accountable for their actions - people who could use their controlling position to advance other agendas.

Uncoordinated decision-making: Another flaw is that decisions over sewers are made by people with no responsibility for other municipal services, making it unlikely that decision makers will be aware of how their decisions could adversely affect the supply of other services.

Diluted representation and uncoordinated-decision making have contributed to urban sprawl, the county's violation of water pollution laws, and the people of Utica subsidizing suburban growth.

Utica is geographically small, with most of its land previously developed. In an older age when people gravitated to cities for convenience, as structures aged and fell into disuse, they were replaced with something bigger and better. Utica was no different. With the automobile and improved highways, outlying areas also became convenient to reach. Since it usually is cheaper to build on undeveloped land ("green fields") than tearing down an old structure and rebuilding, both people and businesses started to migrate to the suburban areas as city structures aged, paying to extend the city's water and sewer services.

With the advent of the Part County Sewer District and its interceptor lines, far-flung localities were able to tap into the treatment plant located in Utica. These places could never have afforded on their own the level of service that they received. Since the vast bulk of the population lived in Utica, Utica residents paid for most of the cost of this system. In effect, Utica residents were financing suburban growth while encouraging the rotting of their city from within.

(Click here for the complete article from the Utica Phoenix.)

Posted by leo-c at 1:11 PM

November 8, 2008

A REGIONAL WATER UTILITY: BUSINESS-LIKE GOVERNANCE OR A WAY TO DODGE RESPONSIBILITY?

Mayor Sam Katz wants to create a regional water utility, to run Winnipeg's sewer and water systems, possibly taking over garbage disposal and recycling as well. The agency would operate independently of city council and, if it wished, market Winnipeg's water to adjacent municipalities.

The agency would set rates for the services it provides, applying to the provincial Public Utilities Board for permission to raise rates. Katz told the Winnipeg Free Press that "Handing this power over to the board would take politics out of the process." Good idea, eh? No more interference in these services from low-life politicians: just good, honest, business-like governance.

Wait a minute: It was a politician that proposed this. Why would a political leader want to hand over a substantial chunk of his responsibility to someone else? The answer can be found in the city's most recent six-year capital budget, which sets out the money that the city must invest in maintenance and improvement of its services.

Click here for capital budget summary.

The biggest liability on the list is $826 million for sewage disposal projects, a consequence of the provincial government's order to the city to clean up the water it dumps into the river system. Not far behind is $164 million for the water system. Imagine how much easier the mayor's life would be if future sewer and water rate increases, as well as sewage and water supply problems, could be blamed on the Public Utilities Board and the regional water agency.

Anyway, everyone seems to love the idea. The Winnipeg Free Press referred to it as "branching out". In a radio interview, a couple of political leaders in municipalities adjacent to Winnipeg voiced their strong support, and expressed their impatience with nonsensical arguments about sprawl.

Sprawl? Does this have something to do with sprawl? In trying to answer that question, it helps to bear in mind that industrial and commercial development requires the kind of generous and reliable water supply that only a municipal water system can deliver. Already all the municipalities surrounding Winnipeg are able to build their revenues by offering opportunities for residential development at substantially lower tax rates than the ones Winnipeg can offer.

Wouldn't it be nice if those municipalities could compete on similarly favourable terms for the Winnipeg region's industrial and commercial development? Indeed it would, for them. And for Winnipeg?

As it happens, I can draw you a picture of what the regional marketing of Winnipeg's water might hold in store for the city, because there is at least one precedent. After World War II, decision-makers in the thriving city of Detroit thought they had hit on a wonderful opportunity for revenue generation: Market their excellent municipal water supply regionally. In the years that followed, Detroit lost its mainstay, automobile manufacturing, in part to municipalities in the region. Residential and commercial development joined the exodus.

Detroit industrial buildings

A Detroit street

Detroit towers and homes

Today a visitor to Detroit can, if she ignores warnings from tourism advisors - as I did a few years ago - walk for hours through the empty streets, past the abandoned buildings of what remains of one of America's most dynamic cities. It's actually quite safe. The streets are so empty that, if you do meet someone, they'll probably stop and talk to you, and they may tell you stories about the grand hotels, and the tycoons, the jazz musicians and factory workers who used to jostle each other in the crowded streets of Detroit.

Of course, Winnipeg is not Detroit. No two city histories are identical. But what we can learn from Detroit is how rapidly and completely a city can be devastated by growth beyond its boundaries, even a major city like Detroit, never mind a medium-sized or smaller city like Winnipeg, Camden, N.J., East St. Louis, Illinois, and numerous others whose downtowns have been similarly ravaged. Given that potential, it makes no sense for Winnipeg voluntarily to give up one of the few development tools it controls, and turn it over to an agency that will have every incentive to meet its costs by promoting growth wherever possible, and no real incentive at all consider the city's ability to maintain its own viability.

It has been suggested that the sale of Winnipeg's water might be in the city's interest if adjacent municipalities were required to pay a substantial premium for the same service Winnipeg gets at a lower price, or that it might be all right if water were supplied on the stipulation that the adjacent municipalities could not use if for commercial or industrial development. The thing to remember is that, once water supply is turned over to an independent agency, such decisions will be out of the hands of either the citizens of Winnipeg or city council.

The independent water utility would be free to sell water to any municipality that wanted to buy it, and would have every incentive to do so at every opportunity. The setting of the price for the water service would be in the hands of the Public Utilities Board, also entirely beyond the control of Winnipeg's citizens or city council. The PUB would be unlikely to agree to differential rates for the same service.

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You can find a detailed account of the evolution of water policies in metropolitan Detroit in:

George M. Walker, Jr., and Norman Wengert, Urban water policies and decision-making in the Detroit metropolitan region. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1970.

Posted by leo-c at 6:32 AM | Comments (1)

October 12, 2008

ARE STRONGER LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS THE ANSWER?

In a recent issue of Plan Canada, a house organ for professional city planners, my colleague Andrew Sancton pointed out that, in the establishment of the Ontario Greenbelt, provincial government imposition produced a result that would have been much harder, or maybe impossible, to achieve through regional governance. Urban affairs columnist John Barber, writing in the Globe and Mail, cited Professor Sancton's findings to suggest that, perhaps, old-fashioned provincial oversight over municipal government makes more sense than all that fashionable piffle about multi-level governance.

"While the hives buzz with talk of European-style 'subsidiarity', national urban policy and new 'governance structures'," Barber writes, "Prof. Sancton points out that the actual Ontario government has quietly implemented almost all the policies the quasi-constitutional reforms aim indirectly to achieve." As a long-time, and unrepentant, purveyor of multi-level governance piffle, I guess it's my turn to speak.

Readers who have taken a look at some of the things I've had to say about deep federalism and respect for community difference may be surprised that I believe Barber has a point. While multi-level governance has usually been taken as synonymous with devolution of power to local government, it makes a lot more sense to me to think of it in terms of doing whatever it takes to ensure that different local communities are governed in a manner appropriate to their widely varying circumstances.

From that point of view, genuine respect for community difference might lead to devolution in some cases, centralization in others, and more complex forms of intergovernmental co-operation in still others. And, since a very substantial portion of my research career has been devoted to urban growth issues, I came to the conclusion some time ago that any effective approach to urban growth in Canada and the United States would have to involve a significant centralization of power.

I got my first inkling of that conclusion when I did a study in 1995 of urban growth management in Portland, Oregon, where such a centralization has taken place, as I showed in an article cited below. Two years later, I published a comparison of European and North American approaches to urban development that solidified my thinking, and further research has continued to reinforce that view. In this and subsequent blog entries, I hope to support Professor Sancton's findings and Barber's arguments while placing them in a wider context. I'll start by very briefly laying out one of the main conclusions I reached in my 1997 assessment of research on continental European and North American approaches to urban development.

In France and Italy, in the cases I looked at, the national government played a much larger role in urban development decision-making than in the United States, with the result that, in the United States, developers were better-placed than in Europe to exert direct influence upon urban development. I found that the Canadian situation was similar to that of the United States.

Anyone who pays attention to local and national politics can confirm those findings by ordinary observation. Land developers, and others with a financial interest in land development, are in a good position to exert a great deal of influence on local decision-making, while, in national government, they are bit players on a stage dominated by the heights of national and international finance and industry. Therefore, when urban development decision-making is largely local, it is bound to conform much more closely to the interests of land developers than when it is national. And, as I have argued elsewhere, the interests of developers are far from synonymous with the requirements of environmental sustainability, as well as those associated with an efficiently managed network of urban infrastructure and services, and healthy commercial agriculture at the urban fringe.

In subsequent blog entries, I hope to support these findings, and add detail and nuance, by looking at other research.

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The 1997 article I refer to is:

Christopher Leo, "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

The 1995 study of Portland was published as:

Christopher Leo, “Regional Growth Management Regime: the Case of Portland, Oregon.” Journal of Urban Affairs 20 (4), 1998, 363-394.

John Barber's column appeared 2 October 2007.

Posted by leo-c at 6:34 PM

July 14, 2008

WHY WOULD THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CUT A MONEY-MAKER?

A couple of months ago, I told the extraordinary story of how a local government tore up the federalism rule book and initiated a very promising tri-level government program for getting welfare recipients placed in good jobs. In this entry, I'd like to reflect on a curious aspect of that story that I didn't stress in my other account: The program was a conspicuous success in its first year, but the federal government cut it even though it had actually made money on it.

Russ Simmonds, The City of Winnipeg's director of social services, proposed the program in 1992, when unemployment was high, and the city was responsible for short-term welfare. Simmonds saw an opportunity to offer welfare recipients on-the-job training through an investment by all three levels of government in the restructuring and resurfacing of city roads, back lanes and sidewalks.

In a city with an infrastructure deficit that, in the mid-1990s, ran to the hundreds of millions – a crisis so serious that vehicle-sized sink-holes were appearing in the streets – the case for renewal was easily made. Simmonds's idea called for welfare recipients to do infrastructure repairs, learning on the job to become construction workers, with much of the work paid for out of money saved on welfare payments. After the Liberals came to power federally in 1993, the government agreed to fund the program for two years, with the costs to be split three ways by the three levels of government.

Since the project was designed at the local level, in partnership with the City’s Public Works Department, it was informed by awareness of the needs of both the local community and participants in the program, and it worked. Over the course of the program's first year, each level of government spent $759,266 on wages for social assistance recipients participating in the program, as well as their supervisors.

The total amount spent on wages was approximately $2.3 million. However, when calculated against the savings in social assistance accrued at each level of government, the project garnered $2.3 million worth of wages for $550,000. In fact, the federal government actually saved more in welfare costs than it spent on infrastructure renewal.

Work on the first year of the program took place over the summer of 1994 and, at the same tine, Finance Minister Paul Martin was wrestling with a massive federal government deficit by looking for cuts. One of the victims was Winnipeg's Infrastructure Renewal Program. Come again? you say. In order to save money the government cut a program that had produced savings of more than $100,000 in a year?

Exactly. How could such a thing have happened? A search for the answer would make a good Ph.D thesis topic, but if we know a little bit about how government works, it's not hard to speculate. One possible scenario: In the process of preparing next year's budget, an order goes out to government departments to prepare draft budgets reflecting cuts of X per cent. Each department goes to work looking for cuts. What to do? Cut back our own department or eliminate a budget item that gets spent at another level of government?

From the department's viewpoint, the temptation is ever-present: Down-load the cuts and let your colleagues live to fight another day. When cabinet approved the budget, it was probably not their intention to cut a money-saver - assuming that it really was a money-saver - but a government scrambling desperately to find billions will not be worrying about what, from its perspective, looks like nickels and dimes. With so much money and so many details to worry about, a perverse cut might not have been noticed at all.

There are other ways it could have happened. The point is that it can happen and it apparently did, and it is more likely to happen the bigger and more distant the government is. At the local level, such a cut would be much less likely to go unnoticed. This is only one of a number of reasons why it is important for local communities to be much more involved than they are in governance.

I'm not arguing for local autonomy. We need the power and the resources of the federal government, and sometimes we need the feds to ensure that we remain a united country, and one that treats its citizens fairly, regardless of where they live and who they are. But when it comes to ensuring that our good intentions as a nation are carried out in a manner appropriate to the different circumstances in different communities, we need a great deal more local participation.

The irony is that governance has moved in the opposite direction. Since the mid-1990s, short-term welfare has been removed from local hands and placed under the purview of the provincial government. Today, good ideas like the infrastructure renewal project are the responsibility of a government that is less likely to think of them in the first place, and more likely than local government to cut them in the unlikely event that someone does think of them.

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The story of Winnpeg's infrastructure renewal project is discussed in detail and compared with other welfare-to-work and workfare schemes in Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

Posted by leo-c at 7:48 PM | Comments (3)

June 28, 2008

BEAUTIFUL STADIUM PROPOSAL? HEADS UP FOR THE BAIT AND SWITCH

The Creswin Properties proposal for a new stadium and waterfront development in Winnipeg's South Point Douglas neighbourhood looks beautiful, doesn't it? There's no denying that, but maybe now it's time to take a look at what happened in Edmonton, when Triple Five Corporation made an irresistible offer to obtain a massive commitment of public funds and then used local politicians' commitment to keep them on-side, even as the more attractive features of the original offer were withdrawn, and its price increased.

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be attracted to the beautiful images below, which appeared today in the Winnipeg Free Press. But as they admire the images, Winnipeg's citizens and decision-makers should bear a couple of other things in mind.

In the first place, don't lose sight of the fact that the Point Douglas neighbourhood, which has been through a lot of very hard times, has lately accomplished the difficult task of getting itself organized and attacking some of the problems that have plagued it. A massive public facility, with the inevitable multitudes of automobiles and crowds of people, leaving bottles, wrappers and chicken bones in their wake, is a huge liability to a residential neighbourhood.

Do the developers have anything better to offer the neighbourhood than rowdy football fans, broken glass and half-eaten corn dogs?

Citizens and decision-makers should also bear in mind that the pictures, by the developer's own admission, are just drawings, with no commitment behind them. If we're going to consider spending our hard-earned tax dollars to visit this development upon Point Douglas, we had better note what happened in Edmonton, - just one example of many such instances - and make sure that we learn from those mistakes.

Posted by leo-c at 5:03 PM

May 1, 2008

FEDERALISM DOESN'T HAVE TO BE TOP-DOWN

In Canada, the mention of federalism generally puts us in mind of federal government initiatives that are carried out in co-operation with provincial and territorial governments. Sometimes provincial initiative is also a factor, especially in recent years, since the creation of the Council of the Federation, an association of provincial and territorial premiers that aims "to play a leadership role in revitalizing the Canadian federation and building a more constructive and cooperative federal system."

We are less likely to think in terms of municipal or community initiative, but community initiative in intergovernmental relations is a current reality, in fact one that has been with us for some time, though it remains an exception to the rule of top-down government. In the late 1960s, in the most epic of Canada’s battles over plans for urban expressways, citizens opposing the Spadina Expressway made a strategic decision to bypass Metropolitan Toronto Council and take their case to the Ontario Municipal Board and the provincial cabinet, and it was the cabinet that gave them their victory.

Other examples could be cited, but the most striking today are the Toronto-based City Charter Movement, and the drive for a “new deal for cities”, originally spearheaded by former Winnipeg Mayor Glen Murray, which led to an undertaking by the federal government to share gasoline tax revenues with cities and communities. In Toronto, a mood of local activism that is associated with the Charter City Movement and the new deal has produced rhetoric that verges on dismissiveness toward other levels of government. For example, commenting on local initiatives in the area of immigration and settlement, Toronto Councillor Joe Mihevc said:

"The legislative framework that allows local government to exist is so broad you really have a lot of scope for whatever you want to do. Just pick a different piece of legislation or you just do it because there’s a legislative vacuum at the provincial level."

On the same topic, Toronto Councillor Kyle Rae suggested, "a city that wants to move into an uncharted sector will get away with it because I think the provincial government is inadequate or inept at managing their responsibility.”

These statements express a mood of local activism that contrasts sharply with a municipal tradition marked by submissiveness to senior governments and preoccupation with routine administrative matters. A similar mood has been evident in recent Vancouver politics, where a local initiative to establish North America’s first legal safe drug injection site drew funding from all three levels of government. In another Vancouver initiative, shrewd city politicians found a way of using an Olympic bid to extract social housing and downtown revitalization funding from an otherwise parsimonious provincial government.

In the March 2008 issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science, a colleague and I report on another municipal initiative, a rare case in which a municipal government formulated a proposal for a tri-level government programme and initiated negotiations that led to its implementation. To this day, the initiative stands as an example of opportunities we may be missing because so often we fail to draw on local knowledge in formulating and implementing national policy.

The Infrastructure Renewal Demonstration Project was a voluntary program, originally intended as a large-scale initiative that would have employed more than a thousand people, but fiscal pressures reduced the scope to that of a demonstration. Even the demonstration, however, provides evidence of the feasibility and potential effectiveness of the kind of tri-level initiative first proposed in 1992 by Winnipeg’s Social Services department.

Since the project was designed at the local level, in partnership with the City’s Public Works Department, it was informed by awareness of the needs of both the local community and participants in the program. In a city with an infrastructure deficit that, in the mid-1990s ran to the hundreds of millions – an infrastructure crisis so serious that vehicle-sized sink-holes were appearing in the streets – the case for infrastructure renewal was easy to make.

Simmonds presented his idea for the project in a meeting with the federal Liberal caucus before they came to power in 1993. In this meeting, he argued that all three levels of government could potentially save on social assistance by investing money, to be spent on wages and training, in the restructuring and resurfacing of city roads, back lanes and sidewalks. When the Liberals came to power, they expressed interest in financing the program. After securing provincial funding, Simmonds took the proposal to city council, and received approval to proceed.

Over the course of implementation, each level of government spent $759,266 on wages for social assistance recipients participating in the programme, as well as their supervisors. The gross amount spent on wages was approximately $2.3 million. However, when calculated against the savings in social assistance money accrued at each level of government, the project garnered $2.3 million worth of wages for $550,000. In fact, the federal government actually saved more in welfare costs than it spent on infrastructure renewal.

The reported outcomes of the project were surprisingly positive, perhaps in part because, in a time of high unemployment, a relatively large number of capable workers were receiving social benefits. The municipal government’s initiative targeted young household heads, people more likely to succeed than many welfare recipients, whose success would benefit whole families. The work took place over the summer of 1994, and, by the end of the summer, program participants were working at the speed of other city crews and producing a finished product that met regular city standards. Some reports suggested that the former welfare recipients, highly motivated to give the lie to stereotypes about welfare recipients, actually worked to a higher standard than city employees. As a result of the project, participants gained useful training, and were able to put recent employment on their resumes.

Participants earned union wages – $10.41 an hour, or $832.80 bi-weekly. The fact that the program strategically targeted heads of large households might have been thought an obstacle to success, since a family of four on welfare would have received the equivalent of approximately $9.50 an hour, and a family of five more than $11 an hour. Thus some of the workers were choosing jobs despite the fact that welfare would have paid approximately as well, even after taking into account a city income supplement designed to maintain low-wage workers’ incentive to secure and retain employment.

Here again high unemployment may have contributed to success because, especially in adverse labour market conditions, gaps in employment history look bad for future employment. Whatever the reasons, telephones at the City of Winnipeg were ringing incessantly with social assistance recipients doing everything possible to get into the program.

One of the main issues involved in securing funding for many of these programs was the fact that the City paid union wages. The Progressive Conservative provincial government took the view that this was too much to be paying social assistance recipients, despite the fact that it was actually saving them money. A city official reported that he and his colleagues explained repeatedly, but to no avail, that the province was saving money, not only on infrastructure and other needed projects, but also by reducing the financial and social costs of welfare dependency. The benefits of this programme went well beyond the easy-to-measure cost savings, city social services officials argued.

The decision to favour heads of households for the program was made in the knowledge that the whole family would benefit. A working parent becomes a positive role model for the children as they see him or her leaving for work in the morning. The self-confidence and self-respect of the whole family grows, replacing the feelings of desperation usually associated with receiving social assistance. Finally, because the programme was generated at the civic level, it responded to community priorities and provided training known to lead to prospects for continued employment in future.

In follow-up interviews with program participants, Simmonds discovered that their experiences with federal government employment programs connected with employment insurance (EI) had contrasted sharply with their favourable experience in the city’s infrastructure programme. Not one of them had been given any sort of opportunity for training while on EI. Those who inquired about academic upgrading or training activities were told to wait until they were contacted. Not one of them reported having been contacted. Almost all ended up back on welfare when their EI expired, indicating a serious problem with the nature of EI delivery.

In fairness to EI officials, they lacked the resources of the City of Winnipeg, which was in a position, not only to identify available job opportunities, but to identify needs, secure funds for meeting them, and then make the jobs available, all with a view to producing training and job opportunities for people on the welfare rolls. In putting people on welfare together with job opportunities, a local government is clearly in a more advantageous position than a federal agency.

It is less remarkable that Simmonds was able to accomplish what he did – though obviously it was no mean feat – than that so little has been done to take advantage of the opportunity revealed by his pioneering work. Obviously, official recognition that local governments can play an important role in ensuring the effective delivery of federal and provincial programmes – and in the process, make an important contribution to community economic development – has been slow in coming.

Why did municipal government programs succeed so impressively, while both provincial and community-driven projects had a spottier record? The answer, apparently, is that no organization is better placed than a municipal government to identify both available job opportunities and community needs, secure funds for meeting them, and then make the jobs available. In addition, Winnipeg, in the 1980s and 1990s – because of its responsibility for short-term welfare – was also well placed to identify people who could benefit from the programs and match them with appropriate opportunities.

Despite those advantages, the municipal government did not act on its own. The infrastructure renewal program relied on funding from senior governments. Indeed, what Smith and Stewart call whole-of-government programming (see article listed below) is critical to the success of locally driven welfare-to-work because it is the senior levels of government that are garnering the savings on welfare payments. Winnipeg’s experience suggests that programs designed to provide on-the-job training for welfare recipients are feasible and can deliver important benefits to some proportion of social assistance recipients, to the wider community, and to the taxpayer, but that intergovernmental co-operation is essential to its success.

Can we learn from these successes today? Since the main trend in social welfare is its devolution upward from municipal government, the scope for a repetition of the experiences of the 1990s is narrowing, for the time being at least. But even if such municipal initiatives as those of the Winnipeg Department of Social Services are not repeated, the development of locally driven welfare-to-work schemes upon the initiative of the senior governments should still be an option. There is no obvious reason why it would not be possible for the federal government and provincial governments to conclude agreements to finance local initiatives that can be demonstrated to provide good jobs and useful job training. Senior governments could, if they wished, limit the amount of their funding to an amount equal to their savings on welfare.

The senior governments could put out calls for proposals from municipal governments, as well as community groups, and a federal-provincial secretariat could vet the proposals, funding the ones that provided decent jobs, useful job training and community benefits. Senior governments would be providing only an advance on money they would save and the community, welfare recipients, and their families would benefit immediately. Taxpayers would benefit as well, from the completion of projects at a discount, and from the longer-term savings as social service recipients attained financial independence. It is a policy idea with an already established record of success, and there is no reason to think that it could not work again, given the political will to make it happen.

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The Spadina Expressway battle is detailed in Christopher Leo, The Politics of Urban Development: Canadian Urban Expressway Disputes. Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 1977.

Kristin Good discusses local activism in Toronto in “Multicultural Democracy in the City: Explaining Municipal Responsiveness to Immigrants and Ethno-cultural Minorities.” PhD thesis. University of Toronto, 2006, chapter 4.

Patrick Smith and Kennedy Stewart look at Vancouver local activism in “Local Whole-of-Government Policymaking in Vancouver: Beavers, Cats and the Mushy Middle Thesis.” In Municipal-Federal-Provincial relations in Canada,, Robert Young and Christian Leuprecht, eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.

For more on recent trends in federalism and multi-level governance, see:

Christopher Leo, “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 39 (3) (September, 2006): 481-506.

Christopher Leo with Susan Mulligan, “City Politics: Globalization and Community Democracy”, in Joan Grace and Byron Sheldrick, Canadian Politics: Critical Reflections. Toronto: Pearson, 2006.

Posted by leo-c at 11:22 AM

December 3, 2007

A NEO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION FROM BELOW? WATCH OUT, CANADA

Winnipeg's Sam Katz, who has been mayor since shortly after Glen Murray resigned in 2004, is worth watching. It's not clear whether he is a fire-breathing neo-conservative or - as the Winnipeg Free Press's astute city hall observer, Bartley Kives insists - a moderate, but lately there have been some straws in the wind, and they may herald a new direction in Canadian urban politics, one that could be emulated in other cities.

Mayor Katz (rhymes with "dates") has set the objective of eliminating the business tax, leaving a $55 million budget hole that must be filled in ways not clearly specified. He is a shrewd, sophisticated political operator, who, so far, has commanded city council votes with apparent ease, and side-steps embarrassing questions with the finesse of a magician making a coin disappear. He is also a skilled practitioner of budget magic, as we will see.

So what does that have to do with a social revolution? Stay tuned.

In order to consider the question of how the $55 million budget hole will be filled, the mayor appointed the so-called Economic Opportunity Commission (EOC). The EOC claimed to have consulted widely before returning its recommendations last June, but most of those who made presentations were city councillors or city officials. Subsequently, the EOC report was made part of the budget process, without further public scrutiny.

The mayor and his supporters will bend every effort to avoid public debate about the policy directions involved in achieving the savings needed to abolish the business tax. Indeed, it would be naïve to suppose that a city council embarking on a plan to improve the fortunes of one group of citizens to the tune of $55 million a year will be particularly forthcoming with those who will carry the burden.

It is up to voters, therefore, to look out for themselves, to follow those coins, as they move from one budget category to another, and to try to understand the implications for Winnipeg's future. In doing so, it is important to take a critical look at some of the possible sources of savings. For starters, city council has approved a transit fare increase, from $2.00 to $2.25, which is expected to yield an additional $2.2 million annually in revenue. Some of that money, according to the mayor, will go to increased costs, but an undetermined amount will be put into a reserve fund for a future rapid transit system.

So, an undetermined portion of $2.2 million will go into a fund to pay for a transit system the cost of which Mayor Katz estimates at $300 million to $1 billion. Since the mayor has already demonstrated his unwillingness to consider funding rapid transit in the conventional way, one transit line at a time, it seems less than certain that there will ever be a rapid transit system. If so, what will happen to the reserve fund? Will the money slip quietly into general revenues, or go to lessening the cost of another reserve fund, and in the end help indirectly to pay for the tax cut, or future tax cuts? The question is worth asking.

Similar manipulations have been a regular feature of Winnipeg's budget process in the past, and Mayor Katz bids fair to be even better at it than his predecessors. For example, when federal gas tax funds were made available to municipalities, Winnipeg was required to put a minimum of 10% of the money into transit. Katz has recently gained favourable publicity by investing in bus shelters, hybrid buses, and diamond lanes.

However, when the draft capital budget was announced in late November, ongoing revenue from the transit-targeted gas tax funds were quietly shifted into the "Transit Building Replacement Reserve". In plain English, the transit improvement money was shifted into public works. And what has happened to the money previously allocated to transit buildings? Voters and skeptical councillors would be well advised to follow those coins.

City council has also passed an 11.6 per cent increase in water and sewer rates. The money is supposedly needed to help pay for a $300 million water treatment plant, but, at the same time, the transfer from water and sewer rate revenues into the general fund is to be increased by $11.1 million, bringing the total being diverted annually to $32.5 million. The money, it should be noted, is being diverted from sewerage improvements at a time when the city is under a legal obligation to invest heavily in a seriously deficient sewer system.

To be sure, under pressure from opposition Councillor Dan Vandal, Katz revived a broken election promise to end the practice of diverting water and sewer revenues into the general fund, but not this year. In any event, we are hardly likely to have seen the last of this kind of budget sleight of hand.

Other possible sources of savings are set out in the EOC report. Five million dollars was to come from selling off pools and fitness centres, turning them over to voluntary associations or contracting out the services. With regard to sell-offs or conveyance to voluntary associations, we need to ask ourselves whether we want these services to be viewed as businesses that have to turn a profit, or to keep them as a public service available to everyone, including those who can’t afford a fitness club membership.

Another $2 million in savings was to come from the library system. Here two recommendations are notable. One is to make more use of volunteers. This might work with a few marginal items like reading programs, but do we want volunteers to do any of the more technical jobs involved in library maintenance? The other notable recommendation is to partner with schools where library branches and schools are located close together. How would that work? Would school children have to go to the local library branch for their school library needs, or would library patrons have to go into schools?

Neither option seems feasible. A more likely outcome would be the closing down of library branches, with the justification that students using it would be able to use their school library instead. In fairness, Mayor Katz has provided a verbal assurance that savings from pools, fitness centres and libraries are “off the table”. But, in view of the fact that a total of $7 million in savings were anticipated, it is worth remembering that something taken off a table can be replaced.

Another recommendation of the EOC report reads: “Sell off or tender out the management of the city’s golf courses.” The report also recommends that the city consider off-loading the costs of various city services in commercial districts on the members of Business Improvement Zones. Included in the list of services the EOC feels BIZs might be asked to pay for are street and bus shelter cleaning and enforcement of panhandling and vagrancy by-laws. Golfers and small business people take note: the business tax reduction is a potential source of worry for a lot of people besides the usual suspects from the social activist community.

The EOC report further recommends that the city undertake a “pilot project” in off-loading the costs of some city services to neighbourhood associations. It claims that around the world such associations “raise billions of dollars every year in order to support local projects such as pools, play structures, park maintenance, street cleaning and a number of other services.”

If readers of the report are having difficulty imagining the residents of a suburban subdivision voluntarily agreeing to fund some of their own services in order to unburden the city, they may wish to reflect on the situation of homeowner or community associations, popularly known as gated communities, which supply some of their own services. This is common practice in many American jurisdictions. When the idea of community associations was first proposed, municipal officials were delighted at the potential savings.

The other side of the coin, however is that neighbourhoods supplying their own services thereby build a case for property tax cuts. This has become a major issue in the United States and, in at least one state, New Jersey, anti-double-taxation legislation requires municipal governments to refund the costs of services supplied by homeowner associations. The best-case outcome of this course of events is a city studded with barricaded enclaves of privilege. The worst case is a municipal government with an eroding tax base, struggling to maintain services in moderate and low-income neighbourhoods. Before we start down this road, we had better take a good look at where it leads.

These and similar items could be walked onto the city council floor one by one, and, if Katz is successful, there is no reason why similar events could not unfold in other cities. What we are looking at here is a potentially substantial agenda of social change from below. At one level, Mayor Katz's budget magic makes interesting political theatre. But in an overview of the actual issues involved, there are serious questions at stake: What value do we place on quality public services? How much do we care about a transit system's contribution to clean air and the role of sewerage in ensuring a pure water supply? Will we stand by while our community fragments into a series of enclaves of privilege and poverty ghettos?

Does a revolution from below, engineered by local government, sound far-fetched? Consider what happened when the Thatcher government in Britain gave local governments the right to sell council (public) housing. In a single stroke, newly-minted property owners became Tory voters, affordable housing became a much bigger problem than before, and fundamental social change was set in train. Roy Hattersley, author and former Labour cabinet minister, sets out very clearly and succinctly, in a 2002 Guardian article, how it happened.

Those of us who care about the Canadian society that has been bequeathed to us by the likes of Tommy Douglas and Mike Pearson - and all the rest of us - will be well advised to take an interest in the boring subject of municipal budgeting, and to think through the final implications of a municipal tax-cutting agenda. If we don’t, we may wake up one day to find ourselves living in very different cities, and a different country, than the one we know now.

Want to find out more? For a discussion of the political and social issues surrounding neighbourhood associations, take a look at:

Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner associations and the rise of residential private government. New Haven: Yale University, 1994.

There is a veritable library on the sale of British council houses, and the implications for Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and neo-conservatism. Here are three items, representing a variety of viewpoints:

Paul Pierson, Dismantling the welfare state? Reagan, Thatcher, and the politics of retrenchment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Cliff Hague, "The development and politics of tenant participation in British council housing". Housing Studies, 5 (4), October 1990 , 242-56.

David Marsh and R. A. W. Rhodes, "Implementing Thatcherism: Policy change in the 1980s". Parliamentary Affairs 45 (1), 33-50.

Posted by leo-c at 10:58 AM

June 12, 2007

THINKING A LITTLE HARDER ABOUT URBAN CRIME

Superficial research produces one-dimensional, sterile debate. A case in point is crime in North American cities. Much of the commentary we read and hear focuses on two opposing positions, neither of which resonates with common sense.

One side of the argument is represented by hard-nosed crime fighters. Their argument comes in two parts. First, they advocate cracking down on petty offenders - squeegee kids, panhandlers, vandals and the like - and maintain that the result will be a decrease in major crime. Secondly, they call for computer-assisted rapid response, whereby police descend upon an area where there has been a succession of offences in order to clamp down on the offenders. Winnipeg has lately adopted this strategy, referring to it as CrimeStat.

The crime-fighting approach is often associated with the name of Rudy Guiliani, the former mayor of New York City, who presided over the implementation of such tactics and was able to point to a substantial reduction in crime rates. The figures seem convincing, but common sense raises an antenna. How likely is it actually that cracking down on squeegee kids or scribblers of graffiti will stop future car theft rings, international drug cartels and murderers in their tracks?

As for the rapid response tactic, although speeding to the scene of previous crimes might help in going after neighbourhood-based gangs, one can't help but wonder how likely it is that, as a generality, a particular area of a city will be the scene of a number of attempted crimes in the next hour because it has been the scene of a number of crimes in the past hour. At best, the cause-and-effect connections here seem murky.

Unsatisfactory as that side of the argument seems, the rejoinder is not much better. Here we commonly encounter three lines of argument. The first questions the validity of crime statistics, pointing out, plausibly, that it is difficult to distinguish between changes in actual crime rates and changes in the frequency with which crimes are reported. A second line of argument relies on these allegedly unreliable statistics to argue that overall crime rates are decreasing throughout North America for demographic reasons: an aging population and an accompanying decline in average energy and testosterone levels, leading to a decline in lawlessness in general and violence in particular. In other words, we worry too much.

The third line of argument makes the indisputable point that prisons breed criminals, thus calling the effectiveness of enforcement itself into question. These arguments, like those of the crime-fighters, seem to carry a considerable amount of weight, but at the same time we know that declining crime rates are not quite the same thing as being safe in our homes and in the streets. As for the ineffectiveness of prison: Point taken, but what is the alternative? Are we to do nothing about crime?

In the matter of urban crime, my perspective is that of an informed amateur. I claim no special expertise, but it is part of my job to stay abreast of urban issues, and, after a lifetime of research, I think I can spot the symptoms of superficial research. I don't have better answers than the experts do, but I have suspected for some time that either the experts are not doing their homework, or their homework is not being reflected in the public debate.

The latter suspicion was reinforced by a fascinating and suggestive article in a recent issue of the Urban Affairs Review. The literature review that introduces the article makes it clear that there is quite a lot of good research that has not been reflected in the public debate. The article itself, by John Hagedorn and Brigid Rauch, is underpinned by superb, in-depth research of how crime rates are influenced by less obvious factors than those that are considered in the public debates. The study focuses on how the organization of criminal gangs and local public housing policies has interacted with crime rates.

The article uses these data to try to explain why similar enforcement policies and similar social environments in Chicago and New York in the 1990s produced falling crime rates in New York and rising ones in Chicago. In the process the authors show how imaginative and assiduous research can shed new light on tiresome, one-dimensional old debates.

The first finding is that Chicago's criminal gangs were highly institutionalized, meaning that they had deep ties to the communities they were part of and organizational structures that survived generational change. New York gangs lacked similarly high levels of institutionalization. As a result, when New York police went after the gangs, they actually succeeded in breaking them up and halting many of their activities. In Chicago, the more highly institutionalized gangs, instead of being broken up by police enforcement, were fragmented and fell to fighting amongst themselves. The result was that police enforcement actually resulted in temporary increases in violence, rather than the decreases that occurred in New York.

The second finding has to do with different housing policies in Chicago and New York. In New York, in the wake of the devastating decay of the South Bronx - which, for a time, turned that area into a wasteland - the city chose to respond by pumping an unprecedented $5 billion into the development of 182,000 units of affordable housing. This enabled residents and former residents of the South Bronx to stay in or return to their old neighbourhoods, and presumably to maintain community ties that lent some stability to their lives.

In Chicago, meanwhile, rather than reconstructing housing in previously devastated neighbourhoods, the city "decided to demolish the high-rise housing projects that had been built in the 1960s. Demolishing these projects represented a massive displacement of people." (p. 447) These areas were gentrified, or commercialized, as Chicago's downtown Loop, the city's commercial heart, expanded to occupy the vacant land. Thus, while the residents of 182,000 housing units in New York were enabled to stay put, "in Chicago, demolition of public housing has resulted in the... displacement of more than a hundred thousand African-American public housing residents." (p. 448) For the most part, those displaced had no alternative other than to move to other distressed neighbourhoods. "These neighbourhoods," the authors observe "...are also the areas in Chicago of the highest rates of homicide." (p. 449)

Hagedorn's and Rauch's research not only pushes the investigation of the causes of urban crime into previously unexploited areas, but also shows that the contrast between Chicago and New York is not unique to those two communities. Throughout the article, the authors adduce examples of similar situations in other cities around the world. Their research does not, in any simplistic way, offer solutions to the problems posed by urban crime, but it does suggest that, if researchers put their imaginations to work and dig more deeply, we may well develop strategies far more sophisticated than those suggested by the sterile crime-and-punishment debate that has, up to now, limited our understanding of the problem.

Want to find out more?

The findings summarized in this blog entry are carefully documented in John Hagedorn and Brigid Rauch, "Housing, gangs and homicide: What we can learn from Chicago", Urban Affairs Review 42 (4) (March 2007), pp. 435-56.

Posted by leo-c at 4:07 PM

March 3, 2007

FIXING SPRAWL WOULD BE A LOT EASIER IF WE'D FOCUS ON THE PROBLEM

In a post entitled "Are You Tired of the Sprawl Game?", I argued that we miss the essentials of the problem of managing urban growth by focusing instead on images and ideologies - arguing, for example, about New Urbanism vs. modernism, or liberalism vs. conservatism, instead of doing what needs to be done. In this post, I follow that argument up with some practical suggestions for Winnipeg.

I focus on a particular city because that's really the only way growth problems can be addressed. Each city is unique, and there is no universal template. That said, each city displays many similarities with many other cities. My suggestions for Winnipeg will resonate with many who are familiar with the problems of other mid-size, slow-growth cities in North America.

In Winnipeg, as in many other slow-growth cities, the essence of the problem of sprawl is that we extend roads, sewers and water lines much farther than we need to to accommodate our slow population growth. As a result, the costs of these facilities spiral out of control for want of enough property owners to pay for them. There are a lot of simple, straightforward planning practices that we could be following to help bring our runaway infrastructure and servicing costs under control, while making the city a more interesting and pleasant place to live.

There are generally no very good reasons why we're not doing these things. The most important single reason is quite simply that North American cities have, over the past three-quarters of a century, been developed on principles that sounded good in theory but haven't worked in practice, and we've been slow to break the bad habits that developed during this period.

Here's my five-step program for getting a start on breaking those habits:

1. GET SERIOUS ABOUT DOING NEIGHBOURHOOD PLANS FOR THE SUBSTANTIAL AREAS WITHIN THE CITY THAT ARE AVAILABLE FOR CONVENTIONAL SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT.

The development industry and the city planning department talked City Council into opening up a vast new tract of farmland now called Waverley West, which will greatly increase the city's infrastructure and service delivery burdens. They won City Council approval for this ill-advised move by arguing that there was a critical lot shortage. What they didn't say was that the reason for the shortage is that the city has failed to do the planning work necessary to open up areas within the city that would be suitable for regular suburban development, but would not constitute sprawl, and would allow us to make more efficient use of existing infrastructure and service networks, instead of developing new ones. The city needs to hire more planners and put them to work on this critical task. (Go to Are you tired of the sprawl game? for more detail.)

2. SUPPORT THE TRANSIT SYSTEM BY PAYING ATTENTION TO THE LOCATION OF NEW MEDIUM AND HIGH-DENSITY DEVELOPMENT.

People living in apartments and row houses tend to be users of transit, if convenient transit is available. But if we permit the location of apartment buildings in the far reaches of such suburban areas as St James, or Island Lakes, as we have, we end up with apartment dwellers dependent on automobiles for almost all their transportation, because it's impossible provide a good transit service in those locations. An efficient transit system that draws a lot of passengers is essential to the development of a sustainable city.

3. GET BUSY ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF RAPID TRANSIT, A JOB THAT ALMOST EVERYONE NOW ACKNOWLEDGES NEEDS TO BE DONE.

Fifty years of talk and studies should provide an ample basis for decisions. The establishment of an efficient, modern transit system would be a critical step toward bringing the costs of services and infrastructure under control. In tandem with the development of rapid transit, land use measures need to be taken to allow so-called transit-oriented development along the transit lines.

4. MAINTAIN AND EXPAND THE GOOD INITIATIVES WE HAVE UNDERWAY FOR THE REVITALIZATION OF INNER CITY RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBOURHOODS AND THE COMMERCIAL CORE...

...and intensify the focus on the development of housing to support both the commercial heart of the city and low-income residents of nearby neighbourhoods, instead of abandoning those initiatives, as the city now seems to be doing. (A recent measure to provide tax incentives for multi-family and mixed commercial-residential development is a step in the right direction.) A lively, attractive downtown, where people from all walks of life can afford to live, is central to the achievement of all the other objectives I advocate.

5. PUT NEIGHBOURHOOD COMMERCE, SHOPPING-MALL-BASED BUSINESSES AND BIG BOX DEVELOPMENTS ON A LEVEL PLAYING-FIELD.

At the moment, such big box stores as those in the St. James Street strip enjoy hidden subsidies because they do not have to meet the same standards for building design or contributions to infrastructure maintenance as other businesses. The importance of giving all our business people an even break ought to be obvious to everyone, regardless of their political beliefs. For more information, read The Twilight Zone of City Zoning Regulations

We can get all these things done without arguing about New Urbanism vs. modernism, liberalism vs conservatism or capitalism vs. socialism. By all means, let's continue these debates. They're inherently interesting, and important in the long term. But they need not and should not distract us from pursuing straightforward planning measures that can help restore Winnipeg's ability to manage its resources within its budget, while making the city more attractive and more functional.

Want to find out more? Here are some useful sources:

A more detailed and comprehensive set of proposals for growth management in the Winnipeg region is presented in Richard Lennon and Christopher Leo. “Metropolitan Growth and Municipal Boundaries: Problems and Proposed Solutions.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, 24 (Fall), 2001, 77-104.

For land use measures that support the transit system, go to http://www.vtpi.org/, or just run a search on "TOD" or "Transit-oriented development". The internet is full of useful information about this important subject.

Posted by leo-c at 5:32 PM

January 7, 2007

HOW DEVELOPERS AND PUBLIC SERVANTS MANIPULATE CITY COUNCILS: INTRODUCTION

Canadian city councils are programmed to be weak. Unlike provincial legislatures or the House of Commons, city councils are not well-placed to write legislation that enables meaningful change, let alone implement it so that change actually takes place. In many cases they are not even well-positioned to exercise meaningful control over their own public servants. Nor do they exercise much clout over the all-important development industry. Generally, the only way our city governments are capable of being seriously influential at all is if there is a strong mayor. In that sense, our cities, like banana republics, face a bleak choice between autocracy and a weak state.

The weakness of our local legislatures - because that is what city councils are - is the result of a long, complex history that we can look at another time. The purpose of this series of blog entries is to provide case study evidence of how easy it is for land developers and municipal public servants to manipulate city councils and the public. The evidence is selected from a sizeable storehouse of research that I have assembled during many years of conducting interviews and unearthing and analysing documents.

The techniques I'll reveal are not news to municipal public servants and land developers. Most of them probably do not even think of them as manipulation, but simply consider them to be ordinary business practices. In fact, is not my intention to paint land developers and public servants as villains. They are only trying to do their jobs. As Shakespeare said,

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

In Canada, we live in a democracy, and we have consented to the governance of our cities and towns in a manner that makes fools of our representatives. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

I will continue this series with an examination of a tactic for the manipulation of city council that is a variation on a time-honoured sales tactic, the bait and switch. The case in question is that of the Eaton Centre, a case in which a land development company gained a city council commitment by offering the downtown revitalization equivalent of the moon and stars, but delivered much, much less. In a subsequent entry, I will set out how public servants got what they wanted from city council with the help of wildly inaccurate cost estimates for a new bridge.

Posted by leo-c at 6:32 PM

January 6, 2007

BAIT AND SWITCH: HOW A DEVELOPER CALLED THE TUNE FOR EDMONTON'S CITY COUNCIL

In my research, I've uncovered some classic illustrations of how smart developers can mislead the people North Americans elect to govern their cities and towns. In those cases, their pursuit of their business ensures that it is they, and not the representatives we have elected, who decide the futures of our communities. In this entry I present such a case from Edmonton. It happened in the 1980s, but it is worth understanding exactly what occurred because similar events take place every year in many communities, and awareness is the first step toward self-defence.

My research shows that developers found it easy to manipulate Edmonton's city council again and again, and to put taxpayers in the position of paying for a development over which their representatives exercised no meaningful control. They used a bait and switch tactic which, though blatantly obvious in retrospect, is not always easy to spot before it is too late. Edmonton's story is a cautionary tale. It ought to be required reading for city councillors throughout North America, and for anyone concerned with democratic control over the development of our cities.

As I said in the introduction to this series, we should not waste our outrage on the developers, who serve their investors - and therefore do their jobs - by exploiting weaknesses in our institutions of local governance. In our democratic system, we have collectively agreed to allow ourselves to be governed in this way. We need to think about how we can change this system, and I hope to address that question in future, but a good first step is to understand the problem, and a clear illustration is a good way to start.

In the 1970s, downtown Edmonton was the retail centre of the metropolitan area, and the city had a policy of sustaining that role by supporting the viability of residential neighbourhoods near the centre of the city and placing limits on the amount of permitted suburban shopping centre development. That policy was forgotten when the Triple Five Corporation offered to develop the West Edmonton Mall, then the largest shopping centre in the world.

The development of massive amounts of new suburban retail floor space, accompanied by free parking and such attractions as a wave pool and a carnival ride, dealt a crushing blow to the downtown and in the 1980s empty buildings sprouted. As the city government desperately sought some way to restore life to the city centre, the same Triple Five Corporation that had developed the West Edmonton Mall offered a solution to the problem it had created, the development of a downtown mall, to be called the Eaton Centre.

Triple Five's approach to dealings with the city was the time-honoured bait-and-switch tactic. It involved making an irresistible offer to obtain a massive commitment and then using local politicians' commitment to keep them on-side, even as the more attractive features of the original offer were withdrawn, and its price increased. The key decisions concerning the Eaton Centre development were taken during two rounds of negotiations, the first taking place in 1980 and the second in 1985-86.

In the 1980 negotiations, Triple Five Corporation, in partnership with T Eaton Co Ltd of Toronto, announced plans for a massive, $500 m residential and commercial development consisting of an Eaton's department store, a 31,500-square-metre shopping mall, three office towers of 39 to 40 storeys and two residential towers of 51 and 52 storeys, with 1,236 one- and two-bedroom rental or condominium units.

The development, taking in most of two square blocks of prime downtown land, would boast a roof-top restaurant and gardens and the residential part of the development would include a recreation centre with a gymnasium, swimming pool, exercise room, handball and squash courts and a social room. The Eaton's store was to be the second largest in western Canada, after the downtown Vancouver store.

For Edmonton City Council, the attractions were virtually irresistible: a massive boost to the economy of the inner city, including both commercial and retail elements, together with a formidable increase in housing to help rally the eroding inner city housing sector. A development agreement was signed on October 8th.

The bait was in place. Next came the switch. In December, Nader Ghermezian, managing director of Triple Five, appeared at a council meeting to demand a re-opening of the agreement and the addition of a series of concessions. He warned that if the concessions were not forthcoming that day, the entire project would be cancelled. He had a letter from a solicitor for the Triple Five Partner, T. Eaton, which was said to confirm the urgency of the need for concessions, but which only Mayor Cecil J. Purves and two councillors were allowed to see.

Among the demands were cancellation of a redevelopment levy that the developer was to pay, and of the plans for a roof top restaurant, agreement by the city to fund sidewalks and setbacks for the project and to relieve the developer of the costs of leaseholds covering encroachments upon city property. Estimates of the cost of these concessions ranged from $5 m to $15 m. City council, galvanized by the impending collapse of such a large project, agreed to the concessions.

Enquiries by journalists later established that the letter from an Eaton's lawyer had been a formality, designed to protect Eaton's position in case of a break-down in negotiations, and had not been intended as a sign of Eaton's dissatisfaction with the terms they had received, terms with which they in fact declared themselves satisfied. But the unkindest cut was yet to come. Nine months later, Eaton backed out of the deal despite the concessions, still denying it had sought them. In other words, the city had granted concessions, which it remained obligated to deliver, even as the rationale for them became moot.

With Eaton out of the picture, the development ground to a halt, but in time the bait and switch resumed. In 1983, a promised revival of Eaton Centre failed to materialize once an expansion of the West Edmonton Mall had been secured. In 1985, once again the project reappeared. Eaton declared it could proceed if the city offered further concessions and the negotiations resumed. In the course of those negotiations, the project changed substantially, first becoming grander in the "bait" phase of the negotiations and then contracting again in the "switch" phase, as final agreement neared.

In August, for example, the project's rhetorical status was elevated from the mediocrity of second place in western Canada to the pre-eminence of world renown. According to the Edmonton Journal, it was touted as including "a major recreation centre with tennis, racquetball and squash courts, an Olympic-size pool, diving tank, indoor jogging track and gymnasium for aerobics... There would be 20 theatres, a 3000-stall parkade, and more than 45,000 square metres of department store and retail space [in place of the 31,500 mooted earlier]. 'This will be the strongest magnet in the Province of Alberta,' Triple Five's Ghermezian said... 'It will attract tourists from all over the world...'" The two apartment buildings previously promised had been transformed into a 40-storey hotel-apartment. There would be 2,000 apartments [in place of the earlier 1,236 units], and 300 hotel rooms.

By late January, 1986, with negotiations well along but not complete, the project had lost some of that sheen, with the profit-making parts of the project expanding while the non-profit-making elements contracted. It was slightly bigger overall than before (3.9 m sq ft compared with 3.85 m sq ft), but the residential component had been almost halved, from 2.276 m sq ft to 1.269 m sq ft, while the office tower component increased from 850,000 sq ft to 1.536 m sq ft and additional retail space was added. And then the pressure was cranked up. Eaton's had said it would commit to the project provided excavation started by May 1st. In late February, with the development agreement not yet ready, city council was being asked to approve an excavation agreement in order "to maintain the timetables established by the partners in the project..." Council was becoming more and more deeply committed to the project without yet having had a chance to read the fine print.

Meanwhile, under a new Mayor, Laurence Decore, the city had committed itself to its own plan for the revival of the city's commercial heart. One of the key elements of its plan was the 102nd St Arcade, a glassed-in mall that would have cut through the centre of the Eaton development. Triple Five was not prepared to make provision for the arcade. Mayor Decore and others argued that Council was too willing to take Triple Five's claims at face value, that competing bids should be solicited for the development of the Eaton Centre project, that the project should be required to accommodate the 102nd St Arcade, and that the developer should be obligated to include actual housing, as opposed to promises of future housing, in the development.

As negotiations drew to a close, the main issues were the inclusion of residential units, provision for the 102nd St Mall, and the financial concessions demanded by Triple Five. Planners estimated the total cost of concessions at $30.4 m. In May, in a vote that overrode Mayor Decore and his supporters, Council agreed to the concessions, without guarantees of a residential component and without provision for the 102nd St Mall.

In the end, it proved to be Triple Five Corporation, not City Council, whose commitment to the viability of Eaton Centre was shaky. The assessment of a business publication offers some insight. By 1992, the Ghermezians had sold their share in the development to Confed Life for $1. That year, Canadian Business characterized Eaton Centre as a "money-losing mall" that, "In a city vastly overbuilt with malls..." was recovering only because new management had found "ways to steal shoppers from competing malls..." The sale of the property for $1 suggests, as does the other evidence on Eaton Centre, that it was the city that was assuming all the risk connected with the development and that Triple Five had little to lose, regardless of the outcome.

A review of the deal by Edmonton's Auditor-General concurred that the city was the loser. Projecting the financial consequences 40 years into the future. He concluded that "...the Eaton Centre package... does not result in a positive cash flow to the city until approximately the year 2004. The net present value of this concessions package for the 40-year period is negative." Even if someone thinks that is a good enough outcome for the public money expended, the lack of council control throughout the development process raises troubling questions about the way we govern our cities.

The facts cited in this entry are documented in detail in:

Christopher Leo. "Global Change and Local Politics: Economic Decline and the Local Regime in Edmonton." Journal of Urban Affairs 17 (3), 1995, 277-99.

A related article, comparing Edmonton's situation with the very different circumstances of Vancouver is:

Christopher Leo. “The Urban Economy and the Power of the Local State: The Politics of Planning in Edmonton and Vancouver." In Frances Frisken, ed, The Changing Canadian Metropolis: Contemporary Perspectives, vol 2. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California, 1994, 657-98.

Posted by leo-c at 6:33 PM

January 5, 2007

WHY AND HOW CITY POLITICIANS AND THE PUBLIC ARE MISLED BY OFFICIALS

This is the third in a series of articles about how poorly the public interest is represented by many Canadian municipal governments. In a previous entry, I showed how developers are able to bend our representatives to their will and in this entry I will provide an example of how public servants do it.

In both entries I use a careful examination of a particular case as my medium. These cases are not unusual events. On the contrary, I chose to examine them in detail, and nail down exactly what happened, because they seemed to be typical of situations I have observed repeatedly in case studies of urban development issues in Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver, Portland, Oregon and other cities.

The suggestion that developers could be motivated to promote their own interests over those of the public will come as no surprise. Their job is to make money and their responsibility is to their shareholders, not the public. But some readers may find the suggestion that public servants could also promote a narrow interest at the expense of that of the public harder to swallow. Therefore, let's look at what their motivations might be.

It's important to begin by remembering that no one is objective. We all carry our biases with us. Many of these are based on our professional or occupational training. The expression, "to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail", sums it up nicely. Similarly, to many road builders, speed and ease of automobile access is the primary urban development concern.

Most engineering designers and managers now at the peak of the profession were educated in engineering faculties where the dominant tendency was to think of road-building as a technical matter, in which road design involved the projection of traffic demands and the efficient accommodation of that traffic at a manageable cost. In that climate of thought, the suggestion that there is a social and an environmental dimension to road-bulding was not taken seriously and, when such suggestions came from politicians or members of the public, they were resented as “political interference” and as an assault on the engineers’ professional integrity. This belief-system is still very much in evidence, especially among the decision-makers in municipal public works departments.

The ideas about road systems that are being applied in North American cities typically have two sources that are important for our purposes: developer proposals and the traditional norms and conventions of civil engineering. The contribution of developers is that they decide on the parcels of land that they see as profitable spots for development and propose them to the city. In Winnipeg and many other cities they have good reason to expect a sympathetic hearing from local government.

It then becomes the obligation of the city to work out the development of the rest of the city’s transportation system to accommodate recent and expected future development. For example, a burgeoning of new subdivisions at Winnipeg’s southern edge in South St Vital and South St Boniface contributed to a city decision to build an expressway serving that part of the city - Bishop Grandin Boulevard - and occasioned the opening-up of an under-used and heavily subsidized bus line into Island Lakes, one of the new subdivisions. It also eventually stimulated the replacement of the Norwood and Main Street bridges with a massive new eight-lane structure. These bridges, located downtown, are part of the road system leading to the newer southern subdivisions.

While money was readily available for these extensions of the transportation infrastructure, as as well as a long list of other, similar extensions in all directions from the centre of the city, funds for the maintenance of existing infrastructure dwindled. A meticulous 1998 survey of the state of Winnipeg’s infrastructure found a massive disparity between the amount needed to maintain existing infrastructure and the amount actually being spent. Regional streets, for example were found to be $10.2 m a year short of the required amount. Even more drastic was the situation of residential streets, which were found to have benefited from an average annual budgeted expenditure of $2.5 m, compared with a requirement of $30 m, a disparity of $27.5 m. The overall infrastructure deficit was estimated at $1 billion or more.

In all of these respects, Winnipeg was following the conventions of modern North American city-building: developers decide where they want to locate new development and pay for some of the services immediately required by the new subdivisions. The city ensures that they become connected into the city-wide service network, and that the city-wide network is expanded as necessary to accommodate them. It is in deciding on the character of this expansion that long-established norms of the engineering profession take over.

“EASY DECISIONS”

Many examples could be found, but a recent case in point was that of the Norwood Bridge, an inner city-suburban link referred to above. When the plans for the Norwood Bridge reconstruction were being mooted, city officials presented four alternatives, including the following two: It would cost $78 m for a six-lane, divided bridge that was pictured as providing a “fair” level of safety, and “poor” traffic capacity, accommodation for transit and accommodation of traffic during construction. By contrast, an eight-lane, divided bridge that was rated “good” in all four categories would cost only $80 m. That was an easy decision: only $2 m extra for a vastly superior bridge.

Such “easy decisions” are standard items in the arsenal of public servants who have made up their minds about which course they wish their political masters and the public to pursue. Council chose an eight-lane bridge, and it soon became obvious - as it often does in such cases - that the “easy choice” was not so easy after all. By 1998, the cost of the new bridge had escalated to $102 m. And with only one of the two spans built - still less than the six-lane alternative that was portrayed as inadequate - traffic line-ups at rush hour had greatly eased. The final cost of eight-lane span was $113 million, $33 million more than originally promised.

Over-building of bridges and roads exacerbates the dilemmas Winnipeg will face in future. Increased road and bridge capacity has two consequences: First, an improved route draws traffic as it becomes the route of choice for drivers who previously favoured other routes. Sooner or later, this increases pressure on city council for further road works. For example, traffic line-ups on a bridge may be replaced by tie-ups on narrower roads leading to and from the bridge. Such consequences are not unanticipated by engineering staff, and resulting public demands for widening of the road leading away from the bridge may be seen by them as long-overdue recognition of necessities they understood to begin with.

A second consequence of increased bridge and road capacity is reduced travel time to the urban fringe, which leads to an increase in the economic viability of sprawl and leap-frog development. The upshot is intensified political pressure from developers for the approval of subdivisions that will be costly to serve. And once the new, typically low-density, auto-dependent subdivisions are built, they provide a fresh supply of citizens who have no convenient means of getting around other than the private automobile. It is a vicious cycle, in which each new attempt to solve the problem of allegedly inadequate road capacity has the ultimate effect of exacerbating it.

The high priority accorded road projects tends to crowd out alternatives. In Winnipeg, city council has readily agreed to one road project after another, heedless of the fact that each one exacerbates the sprawl dilemma. Meanwhile, transit facilities that could contribute to the amelioration of sprawl are postponed indefinitely. Since the mid-1970s, plans have been underway for the construction of the Southwest Transit Corridor, a rapid transit line consisting of cost-effective diesel buses running on a concrete strip dedicated exclusively to transit.

This line is considered viable because it connects two population concentrations - downtown and the University of Manitoba - along the relatively heavily-populated Pembina Highway corridor. It would ameliorate traffic congestion along Pembina Highway - the artery connecting the University of Manitoba with the inner city - and encourage cost-effective, compact development along the route, in contrast to road and bridge projects’ encouragement of sprawl. Estimated total cost for the entire facility would have been $70 million in 1997 - less than the lower-cost alternative for the Norwood Bridge, which was deemed inadequate. However, postponement of rapid transit has been a routine feature of City Council’s annual budget deliberations for at least two decades, and remains so in 2007.

ALTERNATIVES

In short, Winnipeg's city council, and many others, neglect their duty to the interest of the city as a whole when they accept the norms of traditionally-minded civil engineers as the final word on the extension of transportation infrastructure. As well, instead of, in effect, delegating to developers the right to decide where the city will expand, cities could exercise their authority to determine the location of new subdivisions. In theory, that power is being exercised now by city councils through their planning departments, but in practice the main influence over those decisions rests with developers and road-building specialists.

Winnipeg could have developed very differently. It seems very likely that the Norwood Bridge project could reasonably have been much more modest than it was. With a less auto-dependent, more compact form of development, the suburban road system - of which Bishop Grandin is only one example - could have been less extensive, and the transit system less of a drain on the treasury. In their development of roads, as well as the full range of other municipal services, Winnipeg, like other cities, is expanding rapidly, at ever lower densities, primarily in response to developers’ calculations about where the profit picture looks favourable for them, without serious consideration of how all of these developments will be tied together with infrastructure and serviced.

Winnipeg's suburbs sprawl, its inner city decays and the costs of servicing all of this uncontrolled development spiral out of control. As with any political discontent, the causes of this state of affairs are complex, but a very important cause is the inability of our local political institutions fully to address the complexities of the problems that face us.

•••••••••••••••••

Want to find out more? This article draws on research presented in Christopher Leo, “The North American Growth Fixation and the Inner City: Roads Of Excess.” World Transport Policy & Practice, 4 (4) 1998, 24-29. The article was reprinted in John Whitelegg and Gary Haq, eds, The Earthscan Reader on World Transport Policy and Practice. London: Earthscan Publications, 2003, ch 20.

A very useful source is Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck (New York: North Point Press, 2000), especially chapter 5.

Two books by Anthony Downs are helpful as well. The first (Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-hour Traffic Congestion. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1992) treats traffic congestion as a problem in its own right. In the second (New visions for Metropolitan America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994) Downs expands his field of view, placing traffic problems in the wider perspective of metropolitan development, and reaching some different conclusions.

Evidence that there are alternatives to the sad state of affairs in Winnipeg, and many other cities, may be found in the Oregon Department of Transportation's Western Bypass study: Alternatives Analysis (Portland, OR, 1995) and in 1000 Friends of Oregon's Making the Connections: A Summary of the LUTRAQ Project (Portland, Oregon, 1997).

Posted by leo-c at 7:16 PM

May 14, 2006

HOW TO MANIPULATE CITY COUNCIL AND THE PUBLIC

Canadian city councils are programmed to be weak. Unlike provincial legislatures or the House of Commons, city councils are not well-placed to write legislation that enables meaningful change, let alone implement it so that change actually takes place. Generally, the only way our city governments are capable of being seriously influential at all is if there is a strong mayor. In that sense, our cities, like banana republics, face a bleak choice between autocracy and a weak state.

The weakness of our local legislatures - because that is what city councils are - is the result of a long, complex and interesting history that we can look at another time. The purpose of this series of blogs is not to attempt the difficult task of explaining how our communities have been held to banana republic status, but only to offer some evidence that that is in fact their status. I'll do this by providing case study evidence of how easy it is for land developers and municipal public servants to manipulate city councils and the public. The evidence is selected from a sizeable storehouse of research that I have assembled during many years of conducting interviews and poring over documents.

Some readers may wonder why I am offering an instruction manual in the ways and means of fooling city council when obviously I disapprove of the way our democratic representatives are led around by the nose. My answer is that the techniques I will document are not news to municipal public servants and land developers. Most of them probably do not even think of the techniques as manipulation, but simply consider them to be ordinary business practices.

In fact, it is not my intention to paint land developers and public servants as villains. They are only trying to do their jobs. As Shakespeare said,

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

In Canada, we live in a democracy, and we have consented to the governance of our cities and towns in a manner that makes fools of our representatives. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

I will continue this series of blogs with two examples of a tactic for the manipulation of city council that I have dubbed the bait and switch. My first example, from Edmonton, deals with the Eaton Centre, a case in which a land development company led city council around by the nose. In a later blog, I will set out how public servants made fools of Winnipeg's city council, also through use of the bait and switch in the case of the Norwood Bridge. Finally, as time permits, I will look at the use of another tactic, intimidation, in the case of the Tegler Building in Edmonton.

Posted by leo-c at 11:34 AM

Christopher Leo

Research-based analysis and commentary http://uwwebpro.uwinnipeg.ca/faculty/politics/faculty home.htm

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