Perspectives

The View from Next Street

A sharing of ideas and policy perspectives.

 

America’s metropolitan areas are increasingly the drivers of our national economy. As a nation, however, our vision, plans, and priorities fail to reflect that reality: efforts to support urban growth are piecemeal, and large-scale policy-making and planning are virtually nonexistent. Infrastructure reflects the way things were, rather than the new dynamics of an evolving economy.

A new approach to supporting urban revitalization is in development under the aegis of THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION METROPOLITAN POLICY PROGRAM. Created in 1996, the Metropolitan Policy Program provides decision-makers with cutting-edge research and policy ideas for improving the health and prosperity of cities and metropolitan areas. Next Street’s founding partners, Tim Ferguson and Ron Walker, sit on the Program’s Leadership Council.

The Blueprint for American Prosperity is a broad-based effort of the Metropolitan Policy Program to advance public policies central to U.S. competitiveness. It provides independent and powerful ideas to shape the 2008 election-season debate and the work of the next Administration, with a special focus on urban revitalization.

Our guest editor, Bruce Katz, is Brookings vice president and founding director of the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, and is leading development of the Blueprint, which is scheduled for release in November.

Tim Ferguson

printUnleashing the Potential of Metropolitan America

by Bruce Katz, The Brookings Institution

 

With a little more than a year to go before the 2008 election, the presidential campaign has disappointedly conformed to convention: candidates down on the farm, adopting “aw, shucks” personas, or out at the fair eating deep fried anything and everything on a stick.

Though the farm as hustings was and remains a central trope of our political theater, it hasn’t reflected the American reality in decades.

America does not live on the farm anymore and hasn’t for a long time.

Far from it: The vast majority of Americans today live, work, play and shop in cities, suburbs, and exurbs, unconstrained by political boundaries.

Fully 83 percent of our population now lives in metropolitan areas which contain 86 percent of American jobs, driving the economy with their concentrations of knowledge workers, financial services, research and innovation, transportation infrastructure and immigrant strivers.

And despite the longstanding complaint that the early Iowa and New Hampshire contests are not reflective of America, in one way they are: both are majority metropolitan. To truly reflect the lives of the residents of the early primary states, candidates might better spend a day at an insurance office in suburban Des Moines or at a high-tech manufacturing facility in New Hampshire.

The battleground states are even more solidly metropolitan. Florida’s population is 93.7 percent metropolitan. In Ohio, 81 percent live in metropolitan areas. Most of the population of the Intermountain West states is similarly metro-centric. Think Boise or Phoenix and the way those metropolitan areas serve as the engines of their states.

And electoral vote prize, California, is nearly a whopping 98 percent metropolitan.

However, our campaigns reflect an America of yesteryear, as if Britain’s Gordon Brown were to don a powdered wig for an electioneering fox hunt with the media in tow.

Certainly, though we continue to treasure America’s bountiful agrarian legacy, it can’t be the basis for governing all of America today.

But sometimes it seems it is.

In the United States, as abroad, globally competitive firms and high-value economic activity are clustered in major metro areas home to specialized skills, supportive institutions and productivity boosting knowledge creation and diffusion.

Despite concerns about globalization, metros in other countries will find it difficult to compete on price with American clusters like Silicon Valley in information technology, San Diego in biotechnology or New York in finance.

Even though talented workers today can go anywhere, they tend to flock to amenity-rich and job-rich metro areas like Seattle or Boston or Austin so they can meet and work with others similarly skilled.

Yet these advantages of proximity are not by any means locked in.

In recent years the United States has slipped from third to eighth in the world in per capita GDP, largely due to the rapid growth of smaller industrialized nations in Europe. However, on the horizon loom the dynamos of China and India, both investing heavily, through national efforts, in their mega-economic centers like Shanghai and Mumbai.

Unlike our European and Asian competitors, the United States does not act on the ever-intensifying primacy of metropolitan regions as the building blocks of global competition, productivity and competitive advantage.

Instead, the unleveraged assets of American metropolitan economies—the universities, the health care facilities, and the intellectual and physical infrastructure—remain just that, unleveraged.

Transportation, for example, is critical to connecting workers to jobs, and goods to suppliers and firms. Yet federal transportation policy is an undisciplined free-for-all, geared more to building bridges to nowhere than maintaining the ones we have, developing world class transit or unblocking the movement of freight at our ports.

Federal spending on human capital and economic development is also fragmented across 14 separate federal agencies and rarely serve the drivers of regional economies.

To achieve success in a globally competitive world, our metropolitan areas can’t go it alone and need a focused, accountable (and smarter) federal partner.

Campaign political theater aside, as we approach the 2008 presidential election the United States needs a Blueprint for American Prosperity, a new federal partnership with state, local and private sector leaders to strengthen metropolitan economies, build a strong and diverse middle class and grow in environmentally sustainable and fiscally responsible ways.

For our metropolitan nation to prosper in a metropolitan world, our federal government must value and strengthen these economic juggernauts that drive and dominate our economy.

Only by organizing our currently fragmented policies in such critical areas as innovation, human capital, small business, and infrastructure—and targeting them where they will provide the greatest return, metropolitan America—will America continue not only to compete, but to lead.

We are, in short, a full-fledged "Metro Nation"; it is high time to start acting like one.

Bruce Katz is Brookings vice president and founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program.

 
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In the United States, as abroad, globally competitive firms and high-value economic activity are clustered in major metro areas home to specialized skills, supportive institutions and productivity boosting knowledge creation and diffusion.

Despite concerns about globalization, metros in other countries will find it difficult to compete on price with American clusters like Silicon Valley in information technology, San Diego in biotechnology or New York in finance.

Even though talented workers today can go anywhere, they tend to flock to amenity-rich and job-rich metro areas like Seattle or Boston or Austin so they can meet and work with others similarly skilled.

Yet these advantages of proximity are not by any means locked in.

In recent years the United States has slipped from third to eighth in the world in per capita GDP, largely due to the rapid growth of smaller industrialized nations in Europe. However, on the horizon loom the dynamos of China and India, both investing heavily, through national efforts, in their mega-economic centers like Shanghai and Mumbai.

Unlike our European and Asian competitors, the United States does not act on the ever-intensifying primacy of metropolitan regions as the building blocks of global competition, productivity and competitive advantage.

Instead, the unleveraged assets of American metropolitan economies—the universities, the health care facilities, and the intellectual and physical infrastructure—remain just that, unleveraged.

Transportation, for example, is critical to connecting workers to jobs, and goods to suppliers and firms. Yet federal transportation policy is an undisciplined free-for-all, geared more to building bridges to nowhere than maintaining the ones we have, developing world class transit or unblocking the movement of freight at our ports.

Federal spending on human capital and economic development is also fragmented across 14 separate federal agencies and rarely serve the drivers of regional economies.

To achieve success in a globally competitive world, our metropolitan areas can’t go it alone and need a focused, accountable (and smarter) federal partner.

Campaign political theater aside, as we approach the 2008 presidential election the United States needs a Blueprint for American Prosperity, a new federal partnership with state, local and private sector leaders to strengthen metropolitan economies, build a strong and diverse middle class and grow in environmentally sustainable and fiscally responsible ways.

For our metropolitan nation to prosper in a metropolitan world, our federal government must value and strengthen these economic juggernauts that drive and dominate our economy.

Only by organizing our currently fragmented policies in such critical areas as innovation, human capital, small business, and infrastructure—and targeting them where they will provide the greatest return, metropolitan America—will America continue not only to compete, but to lead.

We are, in short, a full-fledged "Metro Nation"; it is high time to start acting like one.

Bruce Katz is Brookings vice president and founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program.

Printed on Thursday, February 23, 2012
http://www.nextstreet.com/public_sector_initiatives/ideas_and_policy_perspective/unleashing_the_potential_of_metropolitan_america