Poverty, Planning & Politics

If anything is a good indicator that a major city doesn't have enough homeless shelters (or better yet, low-skill jobs and low-income housing zoned near each other so that not as many people would have to be homeless in the first place), it's that an estimated thirty homeless people in LA choose to live in a place called "the Cave" under the 10 Freeway.

Though this may come as no surprise to most people, the poverty rate is very high in Iraq. According to the results of a survey released nine days ago by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation, the poverty rate is about 23%. These results were not necessarily surprising, considering that the UN and World Bank both released earlier surveys estimating the poverty rate at about 22%. The recent survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation defined poverty as living on 76,896 dinars (about $66) a month, or about $2.20 per day.

Yes, this post is about the same Indian company that makes the Tata Nano, the sweet new ride for only $2,000. In case you haven't had the opportunity of seeing this funny-looking car yet, I've included a picture for you. You can see a variety of other Tata vehicles all over Indian cities serving a number of different purposes, such as buses, box trucks, pickups, dump trucks, many passenger cars, and even armored military vehicles.

I know, I know, another book list. And I only posted the second one about four days ago. But you can never have too many resources, right? I just got an e-mail from the American Planning Association (APA) about a great list of books that they recommend to people in the planning field. So, in the spirit of sharing, I've included the list below:

So I was browsing Planetizen when I came across a very interesting article about a recent survey that was conducted by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. Out of a sample of 1400 downtown San Francisco shoppers, only 17% of them drove to get there. The survey was conducted in three areas around downtown San Francisco that would be equally likely to sample both drivers and transit users. I included a pie graph displaying the results of the survey, courtesy of the Transportation Authority.

Though I do not personally agree with many of Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas about the ideal city plan, it is undeniable that he had incredible impact on the urban planning field in the United States.

I have a little transportation planning scenario for everyone tonight who hasn't heard about this already. KFC has sent letters to the mayors of every major city in America offering to fix the potholes in the cities for free. Well, free-ish.

The recent post about Mike Davis inspired me to post another list of great books for planners. Mike Davis has written a lot of great books pertaining to urban planning, and a lot of other authors have written books about subjects similar to that of Mike Davis's "Fortress L.A." which are great for up and coming urban planners to read. If any of you plan on working in Los Angeles, then this list is even better for you. Here's the list:

So Liberty University just banned the Liberty College Democrats from organizing on campus and from being officially recognized as a Liberty club. Here is part of the message that Liberty University sent to the students in an e-mail:

A self-proclaimed socialist, Mike Davis has been and is continuing to be very influential in the fields of planning, urban studies, urban design and civil rights. His background is a little different than that of most scholars. Before Mike Davis became a well-known urban scholar, he worked as a meat cutter and a long-distance truck driver.

Though Davis has focused on a lot of different issues, one of the issues that he is perhaps most famous for is the design of urban areas and its relation to class differences. Davis is a harsh critic of the way that cities tend to separate the poor and keep them trapped in areas where the blights of poverty are guaranteed to become worse.

In "Fortress L.A.," a well-known piece from his book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), Davis talks about a number of different ways that the affluent fortify themselves from the poor. Whether it was through the use of private police, "Armed Response!" signs, security systems, natural barriers, or large walls and police barricades, Davis finds the obsession with security in rich areas of L.A. very problematic, to put it lightly.

He goes on to talk about the very costly move of the renewed downtown area to where the old Bunker Hill residential area used to be. Why was this extremely expensive move of the renewed downtown area in L.A. so significant to Davis? Because after moving the new downtown area, urban planners in L.A. got rid of every single pedestrian link to the area, including a railroad. Planners decided that the surrounding area was plagued with low property values that could not be helped, and that it would be best to separate these areas from the new downtown area through any means necessary to preserve property values within their new downtown.

Aside from huge projects like this to separate the poor from the rich, urban planners in L.A. have also done little things to ensure that the poor do not hurt the image of the city. Little crevices next to stairs in subway stations were filled in with cement so that homeless people could not seek shelter in them, and classic benches were replaced with either rounded benches or benches with bars in the middle of them so that homeless people could not sleep on them.

The writings of Mike Davis suggest that these architectural decisions and differences between rich and poor areas (private upper-class communities don't have to put up with round benches) is very telling of the attitudes of the rich toward the poor in L.A.

As Mike Davis wrote, "...the totalitarian semiotics of ramparts and battlements, reflective glass and elevated pedways, rebukes any affinity or sympathy between different architectural or human orders. As in Otis's fortress Times building, this is the archisemiotics of class war."

Thanks for reading.

(Photo courtesy of the University of California, Irvine, where Mike Davis now teaches)

- David

This blog is called poverty, planning & politics, and I realize that I've written a lot about poverty and planning so far. So today, I'm going to make up for the lack of politics on the blog by writing about my thoughts on the recent attempt by the Republican Party to officially change the name of the Democratic Party to the "Democratic Socialist Party."

Now I can see this being something that a Republican Senator might think up while drunk one night in their hot tub. Like a "hey, wouldn't it be funny if..." sort of thing. But no, this was a full-on proposal added to a resolution at a completely serious national party meeting to try and address the problem of their losses in 2006 and 2008.

Maybe this is part of the GOP's problem. Maybe if the GOP spent more time researching and debating solutions to important national problems instead of whether or not to try and officially change the names of their opponents then maybe, just maybe, more people would vote for them.

In the end, the Republican Party decided not to include the name change of the Democratic Party in their resolution. On the side of the Republican Party opposing the name change proposal, Florida GOP Chairman James Greer called the idea "stupid" and Colorado Chairman Dick Wadhams called it "absurd." However, on the side supporting the name change proposal, a committeeman from New Jersey named David Norcross said it was an attempt to raise awareness of the Democratic agenda so that Americans can be "properly fearful."

It's good to know that instead of trying to actually help Americans, many Republican elected officials are still just trying to scare people into voting for them.

My thoughts? I think that for this being one of the worst economic downturns America has seen in a very long time, Republican elected officials, who are supposed to be working on the problems, have way too much free time on their hands.

- David

This is also sometimes referred to as metropolitan tax base sharing. Fiscal regionalism is a type of fiscal stretching strategy, which allow local governments to retain their current structure while shifting fiscal resources between municipality borders.

Fiscal regionalism basically is the redistribution of revenues among local governments in a metropolitan area, with local governments contributing some portion of their tax base or tax base growth into a metropolitan fund, which is then reallocated among the local governments according to need-related criteria. The purpose is to both reduce the fiscal disparities among local governments in the metropolitan area and to reduce the incentive for local governments to engage in nonproductive competition with each other to attract property-tax-paying economic activity within their borders.

These types of activities typically lead municipalities to zone out low-income housing and apartment complexes. When this happens, all of these low-income residential zones end up either in the same portions of large cities or within a smaller, separated municipality altogether. When poverty pockets like these form within a metropolitan area, residents living in these areas have a much harder time escaping poverty compared to residents of similar financial situations living in mixed-income areas.

Think check-cashing depot (large fees) vs a bank, that sort of thing. When living in a poverty pocket, acquiring almost any good or service is much more costly in terms of the resident's time or money.

One of the most well known examples of a system using fiscal regionalism techniques is in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. All local governments in the seven-county metropolitan area are required to pay into an area-wide pool an amount equal to 40 percent of the growth in their commercial and industrial tax base since 1971. This amount includes growth from any source, including new construction, inflation, revaluation, and appreciation. The tax base is redistributed from the pool back to local governments on the basis of a fiscal capacity measure, so that jurisdictions with lower fiscal capacity receive relatively higher amounts of per capita tax base. The redistributed portion of the tax base is then taxed at the average area-wide rate.

So far, the Twin Cities plan seems to be working to address the problem of metropolitan poverty pockets. The amount of fiscal disparities across the region has lowered, especially when looking at the millage rate. However, due to the very small number of metropolitan areas putting these types of regional-based strategies into effect, it is hard to truly know the effects of a fiscal regionalism plan.

(Picture of Minneapolis courtesy of Twin Cities Daily Photo)

- David

From the late 1970s, a model of New Public Management (NPM) has been propped up as an idea for government on all levels to follow. It started trickling in during Carter's administration, and Reagan's administration brought it full-force to the forefront of American politics. Only very recently have some of the ideas of the NPM model been denounced and voted down.

These ideas included deregulation, privatization, low taxes for the wealthy, running government like a business, and (almost paradoxically if you believed in the effects of the NPM model) a constantly imbalanced budget with a fair amount of debt. This is, of course, with the exception of Clinton by 1998 until he left office, which was fairly impressive considering the amount of debt that he was left with by Bush Sr.

Though these ideas left us teetering on the edge of an economic cliff, and though some politicians thought they had found a niche by taking these same old NPM ideas to the extreme and steering us over the cliff altogether (yes, I'm talking about Ron Paul), this fortunately did not happen. The Obama administration is carefully backing us away from the cliff, and people are finally beginning to question the NPM model after all of these years.

However, during this time when the NPM model influenced the decisions of many our public officials, urban planning took a backseat to other interests. Why is that? Because urban planning is, in many ways and covering many different aspects, the regulation of a city or region. So, naturally, the NPM model which calls for deregulation and the regulation of a city by urban planners working for the government did not mix well.

Did this mean that planning departments disappeared? Not usually. Sometimes planning departments would disappear if they were merged with another department in order to decrease their influence, but one way or another their influence did decrease. Some urban planners adapted to the change. They would fill a new role as an economic advisor who just happened to have in-depth knowledge of the transportation, housing, land use/development, environmental (or many other, depending on the type of planner) characteristics of the city or region. In summary, the best interests of big business represented by big business overruled the best interests of the entirety of the city or region represented by urban planners as long as the politician in charge followed the belief system that the NPM model prescribed. All of the economic benefits would just trickle down anyway, right?

Oh well, so far it looks like brighter times are ahead, and that's what matters most. Cheers.

- David

I know what you're probably thinking. Marco Polo?

Yes indeed. Though Marco Polo didn't do a whole lot in terms of coming up with new strategies on his own, he was a very important figure when it came to transferring many ideas about the layout of cities from Asia to Europe.

The very high density of cities was something that Marco Polo was particularly astonished by. Density affected the ease of patrolling the city for the sparse military presence, the speed at which goods were unloaded off of boats and sold, and the relative prosperity of the shops in almost every section of the city. And the ideal average density of the city is still something that professionals in the planning field argue about today.

This density also affected many other features of the layout of cities, such as the great number of canals for commerce as well as for sewage and garbage, the huge market squares separated by intervals of a few miles along the main road, large town squares for the generation of social capital and public baths, etc.

However, one of the greatest benefits of reading works by Marco Polo such as "Of the Noble and Magnificent City of Kin-sai" from his book published in 1299 is that Marco Polo is a feel good read. No, really. For what he sacrifices in accuracy and academic usefulness through his excessive and constant exaggerations, he makes up for it in general pleasantness. As far as Marco Polo is concerned, everything is either perfect, handsome, abundant or magnificent.

So if life ever gets you down, curl up with a translated version of The Book of Marco Polo.

(Picture courtesy of Buzzle.com)

- David

In the middle of an economic recession, many governments are attempting to ensure that their citizens do not hit rock bottom for moral or obvious economic reasons. In Pinellas County, a county in western Florida where I am from, however, things are done a little differently.

Pinellas County has to deal with budget cuts, a lot like almost every other county in the United States. However, Pinellas County seems to deal with budget cuts by first scraping every penny out of programs to help the poor and homeless, and then moving on to delicately trim programs that the majority of voters might notice.

Here are a few examples:

• County Connection Centers ($749K): cut completely. These county connection centers filled many community outreach roles, such as providing hurricane preparedness outreach to mobile home parks, neighborhood clean-up programs, town hall meetings connecting the county to the citizens, and many other outreach roles.
• Housing Trust Fund ($5M): cut completely. This fund would have been put towards the development and preservation of affordable housing for the poor.
• Case Management Services for the Homeless ($192K): cut completely. This helped homeless employable adults with barriers to employment obtain jobs.
• Intervention Services ($99K): cut completely. This money was put towards beds in homeless shelters, basic life skills training, employment application assistance, etc.
• Pinellas Hope ($770K): cut completely. This money made up about 72% of the funding for a program run by the Diocese of St. Petersburg and volunteers which provided temporary food, shelter, running water and a safe place to store belongings to homeless adults in the county.

You can take a look at the full list of budget reductions here.

Not to mention that the county planning budget was cut by almost 20%. You may find yourself asking "oh, did they make county planning more efficient?" No, they just fired 25% of the planners, so they were the people making the least money anyway. Lord knows what would happen if we cut some of those multiple $100K+ administrative salaries in almost every single county department.

Anyway, if you would like to help keep Pinellas Hope running after Pinellas County stops funding it, then you can do so by donating food, materials or money here and then clicking on "donations" on the right-hand side.

If you would like to join me by letting the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners know what you think of their plans, you can do so by going here. We might even change some minds!

Thanks for reading everybody.

- David

Hey everyone,

Just a short and sweet post today. If you're thinking about going to graduate school to be an urban planner or city manager, your best bet would be to look at schools with accredited planning programs. A degree from one of these schools will be much more valuable than related degrees from schools with programs that aren't accredited by the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB). Also, if you'd like to learn more about any of these programs, there is contact information for department heads provided as well.

Here is the link, programs are organized alphabetically by state:
Accredited Planning Programs

Thanks for reading!

- David

Please be warned that this blog post covers racially charged issues in American history, and includes documents from the early 1900s which contain racist language.

There are several different specializations in the planning field that prospective students can choose from based on their interests. Though they are all intertwined in many ways and it would be pretty hard to be a successful planner if you were ignorant to all specializations other than your own, within a planner's specialization is really where you end up fine-tuning your knowledge. Here is a brief list of those specializations:

• Metropolitan and regional planning
• Housing
• Transportation planning
• Environmental and land use planning
• Urban design
• Economic development planning
• Social planning and management
• International planning
• Historic preservation

I'll be posting about each of these specializations in the future, so keep an eye out for them! As I complete each post, I'll turn the specialization names in this list into links so that you can easily access each post from one page.

If you know of any specializations that I've forgotten, please post a comment! Or, if you'd like to see a blog post about one particular specialization first, then please post that in a comment as well and I'll make sure I write about that specialization first. Thanks for reading!

- David

Urban planning is far from being a field in which everyone shares the same ideas. Many urban planners, city managers, and planning students approach issues in completely different ways according to their style. A planner's style is often influenced most by values and by the type of position he or she is holding (sometimes planners may be forced into a different type of style by their employer). Here are some of those styles:

1) The planner as a neutral public servant: this type of planner typically does not insert their own views into their profession at all. As a neutral public servant, the planner simply uses his or her skills to carry out the plans of the democratically elected administration. Most appointed planning positions are filled with these types of planners.

2) The planner as a builder of community consensus: this type of planner tries to bring conflicting parties or potentially conflicting parties to a consensus, and uses that consensus as a guide for each community plan.

3) The planner as an entrepreneur: this type of planner utilizes every resource they can in an attempt to run their particular jurisdiction like a business. Depending on the moral aptitude of the entrepreneurial planner, damages to areas or people outside of their jurisdiction may or may not be negligible.

4) The planner as an advocate: in this role the planner acts as a representative for certain groups or certain positions and chooses to advance particular interests. This is more common in larger cities where many different voices influence the planning process.

5) The planner as an agent of radical change: in this role the planner uses their position more or less as a tool to put wheels on their agenda and set their particular jurisdiction on a much different path.

Each of these styles has their strengths and their weaknesses, and it is not at all uncommon for planners to mix these styles together to create the blended planning styles that suit them best. If you have other planning styles that you would like to add to the list, feel free to comment!

And if anyone was wondering, my personal planning style is probably going to be most closely linked with 4, mixed with a good deal of 2, with just a dash of 5 added in if I come across anything that is particularly screwed up.

- David

In New York City, homeless shelters have just begun charging people to stay. Yes, you heard me right. Homeless shelters are charging rent. Though state officials have stated that they are only charging working families, and that the rent will not exceed half of their income, the NY Times has already found a case to the contrary. Ms. Gonzalez, a homeless single mother living in a rundown homeless shelter in Brooklyn, just started being charged $1,099 out of her $1,700 monthly income to stay in the shelter.

Robert Hess, the Commissioner of Homeless Services, has already argued in favor of this new policy by stating that homeless families can contest the rent required through a state hearing if they can’t pay and don’t want to be kicked out of the homeless shelter.

Maybe Mr. Hess doesn’t understand the point of a homeless shelter. A homeless shelter is supposed to be a last resort to keep families off of the street. A homeless shelter is not an apartment complex or a funding mechanism, and homeless people should not have to seek a state hearing to stay in a shelter of last resort. There are plenty of other funding mechanisms that could be utilized to fund the shelters, and plenty of other policies that could be implemented to make sure that people capable of moving out of the shelter do.

The consequences of this new policy are pretty clear. Homeless people are going to end up stuck in homeless shelters. Before this new policy, the homeless shelter was a temporary safe place until the family could afford to move out and pay for their own housing. Now that shelters are charging homeless families half of their income (and sometimes more), it is going to be almost impossible for them to save up enough money to move out.

And then what happens when nobody can save up enough money to leave the homeless shelter? They fill up, and newly homeless families will have nowhere to go but the street.

Now picture this: the city is earning some income off of the homeless staying in these shelters. They have filled up, and a spot opens up in one of the shelters. Who do you think is going to be most likely to be let in? You guessed it, whichever homeless family is earning the most money.

If you feel like there is something morally wrong with this scenario, then I encourage you to join me in writing to Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Hess stating that this new policy is misguided, counterproductive, and wrong. I have included their contact information below, and I will be posting it on the left side of my blog until this policy is eliminated.

Robert Hess, Commissioner of Homeless Services:
212-361-8000
http://nyc.gov/html/mail/html/maildhs.html

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City:
212-639-9675
http://www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html

Please contact them; my voice alone is not enough to change anyone’s mind.

- David

Here is a great short list of books that I think could be helpful for planning students, planners or scholars looking to broaden their knowledge.

• The Regional Governing of Metropolitan America by David Y. Miller: one of the best books I've found concerning regional planning and metropolitan issues in the United States.
• Governance and Opportunity in Metropolitan America by the Committee on Improving the Future of U.S. Cities Through Improved Metropolitan Area Governance: a great book about disparities across metropolitan areas and what can be done about them.
• American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality by Myron Orfield: a very interesting look at how the suburbs have evolved with a new focus on the metropolitan regions they exist within, as well as the issues that face the suburbs currently.
• Experiments in Metropolitan Government by James F. Horan and G. Thomas Taylor, Jr.: features a number of interesting regional planning case studies from the past.
• Managing Urban America 6th edition by Morgan, England & Pelissero: this book provides a great introduction to all of the basics of urban planning. A great choice for anyone just starting to learn the field, or for someone who needs a recap on issues that haven't been their focus.
• The Suburb Reader, edited by Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese: this very interesting book provides many historical documents and more recent essays separated into chapters that each focus on a different aspect of the development of suburbs in the United States.
• The City Reader 4th edition, edited by Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout: another very interesting book made up of many of the most influential articles in the history of urban planning. A great book for people who want to learn about the landmark ideas and the big names in urban planning.

- David

The consolidation of the City of Jacksonville and Duval County is a very interesting event in the history of urban planning. In this particular case, there were many issues that both the city and the county were dealing with that made consolidation a very attractive solution. Whereas today, consolidation is rarely approved by voters due to the negative stigma associated with a government ceasing to exist.

In Jacksonville from about 1950 to 1967, people had to deal with a very confusing, decentralized form of government. There were many different departments, and all of them had separate jurisdictions and authorities. The government was laid out this way in the hopes that it would create a system of checks and balances, but all that it really ended up creating was a system perfect for machine politics, duplications of programs in separate departments which was obviously wasteful spending, and a trend of opportunistic department heads being elected from the Jacksonville political machine who cared more about their own interests and the interests of their elite supporters than fulfilling their department's responsibilities to Jacksonville's populace (see what may possibly be an artist's rendition of a Jacksonville department head on your right [thanks SuperStock]).

On the other hand, Duval County had a pretty traditional county government in place with five elected county commissioners who had almost no power without the approval of the Florida Senate on every single piece of legislation.

"So what could have possibly gone wrong?" You may find yourself asking. Well, when suburbanization started to kick in between 1950 and 1960 Duval County's population went from about 40,000 to about 320,000. The county simply could not deal with the increase in population. About 60% of properties in Duval County were not even included in the tax roles by 1965, and properties were being improperly appraised at only 20-30% of their true market value which lowered tax revenue even more. Because of this, Duval County had to rely on Jacksonville to provide basic utilities to many county residents even though the city was collecting no revenue from these residents.

Aside from being forced to pick up Duval County's slack, Jacksonville was losing a lot of money due to losing about 15% of its economically productive 20-64 age group from 1950 to 1965, losing many of its businesses that used to concentrate downtown, opportunistic department heads refusing to take steps necessary to work with other departments and eliminate spending on duplicate programs, and an overall decline in the city's tax base. This led to a lot of problems in Jacksonville. By 1964, every senior high school in the Jacksonville area had become disaccredited, infrastructure was being dangerously neglected, about 30% of housing in Jacksonville was considered in need of serious repair, and the city sewer system had completely broken down, forcing all of the raw sewage in Jacksonville to be dumped directly into the St. John's River (no this isn't a picture of the St. John's River in 1964, but it helps you along with your mental image).

Due to these problems, a group of Jacksonville business leaders led by Claude Yates put a petition together calling for the consolidation of the City of Jacksonville and Duval County. Though there was a good deal of opposition to the petition from the Jacksonville political machine and the Florida legislature, the resultant bill ended up passing with a nearly two to one vote.

Though there are still many problems in the consolidated Jacksonville and Duval County metropolitan area, many problems were solved. Government spending became many times more efficient due to the elimination of duplicate programs, centralized government spending, and consolidated efforts to provide utilities and disaster relief. Also, federal funding was beginning to flow to the metropolitan area due to the elimination of the Jacksonville political machine that was wary of federal involvement in their affairs, and all properties in Duval County were beginning to be taxed appropriately.

Oh, and yes, the sewer system in both the city and the county was rebuilt. The project involved the reconstruction of 133 miles of obsolete and collapsing sewers and the elimination of 72 outfalls pouring millions of gallons of raw sewage daily into the St. John's River.

- David

From now on this blog will be regularly updated. By regularly updated, I mean that the blog will be updated at least once a day every day from now on. Unless of course, circumstances that are beyond my control arise (extended power outage, internet company offended by me not paying bills, my sudden and extremely violent death).

This blog will be covering issues related to contemporary and historical planning, poverty in urban areas, the political issues related to poverty and planning, as well as a number of resources for planners and planning students. Hopefully this blog will, in time, become a small hub for urban planning discussion and ideas so that we may better understand how to tackle the problem of urban poverty and many other problems that plague urban areas.

Go ahead and leave a comment or contact me directly if you have any ideas or themes that you would like to see covered on the blog.

- David