Love thy neighbor, not thy neighboring county

Last night I found out that my parents have bought a new house and in a few short weeks, they are moving. They are moving 20 minutes further Southwest of the town center, and just across the county line, which puts them outside of the city limits of our metropolitan government. While I mustered the acting chops to appear happy for them, beneath the surface I was seething. And I begin to wonder why exactly I was so upset by it. I realized that at its core, moving out of the city feels to me like turning your back on a community of people.

Leave the city for those McMansions over the county line and never again will you pay taxes in your city. Never again will you have a vote in how the city is run. What you will do is take from the city — take money, your salary — and give little of it back. You will take your city’s good name and give nothing in return. You will tell people “I live in Nashville” but those of us who do live in Nashville and are committed to improving the community we live in will think “no, you do not live in Nashville, you have turned your back on us”.

In our recent city elections much was made of the large number of our city employees who do not reside in the city. Policemen, firemen, staff members of all stripes. When the local police union endorses a candidate, it means nothing, because nearly none of its members are Davidson County voters. By the same measure, when a Nashville police officer is paid by this city with tax revenue, he goes home and spends it in another county.

We are, as a city, shipping tax revenue out of our city in bulk each year. How can we stop this? How can we make sure that people who work in Nashville and profit from our city, also give back to it? It seems like an important problem to solve at a time when our city and so many other cities like it are suffering budget crises, when there is little opportunity to raise taxes thanks to the growing maladies of the middle class.

Cities like New Orleans and Detroit have long had residency requirements or “domicile laws”. In some places these laws apply only to public safety workers such as firemen and police officers. In other places the requirements extend to teachers as well. And yet other cities require all employees to reside within the city. In Nashville and in most American cities we require none of this. We require only that our elected officials reside here. That seems not only dead wrong, but stupid, foolish, absurd, and irresponsible. We should, as a city, demand that we recoup some of the tax revenue we pay our public employees. We should demand that the police officers protecting our city have a vested interest in making it safer. We should demand that our teachers and school administrators send their kids to the same schools that they work for. We should stop the outflow of our limited city resources to the surrounding counties and we should stop it now. Cities all over America should be doing the same thing.

But how do you make the implementation of such a law fair? After all, these people already own houses in the surrounding counties. Well to start with you grandfather in existing employees. You pass a law requiring that all new city employees must move to your city within six months of their start date. From there you pass a law saying that within 5 years from the date of passage you will begin to promote only employees who reside in your city. New Orleans has done this with great success. You do not take away anyone’s job or force anyone to move, unless they want a promotion, which can be argued is like applying for a new job and can even be treated that way by the city government if necessary. You will encounter resistance from the city employees, but the rest of the voters should overwhelm that resistance. After all, nobody has a right to hold a cushy government job. It’s not unreasonable to ask those who do to live within a certain very large geographic boundary. If they’re unwilling to do that, there are plenty of jobs in the private sector for them.

Now I’m not unsympathetic to the reasons that city employees choose to live in outlying areas. In many cases it’s simply cheaper for them. I think the city can do one better here though. At the same time you require all city employees to live within the city, you can mandate that all city employees are eligible for housing assistance, regardless of income. Your reward for working for our city is that we are going to make the local housing authority help you find affordable housing. When we are determining quotas and goals for building new affordable housing in the city, we are going to take your numbers and needs into account. We can also give public employees free access to the public transit system. It doesn’t cost the city in real dollars, increases ridership, and makes a nice additional benefit for working for the city.

So that takes care of the public employees, but what about all of the private citizens who leave our cities? How do we get them giving back to the city? After all, these people want to commute on our roads and our transit systems. They want to work at our jobs and collect paychecks from our city. It seems reasonable to ask them to give something back. Cincinatti and certain other cities have an answer: a municipal income tax. In Cincinnati it’s 2.1% and levied on anyone who lives and/or works in the city of Cincinnati. Employers who conduct business in the city are required to withhold the income tax of all employees who work within the city limits regardless of where they reside. I think there’s a smarter way to use municipal income tax. I think you can use it as an incentive to keep people in the county, by levying the income tax only on those who work in your city but do not live there. It’s a reasonable tax. Want to work here but don’t want to pay property taxes to maintain the road and transit infrastructure? We’ll collect a little income tax from you. If you don’t want to pay income tax, move back to the city.

I think these programs are vital to having the capital to make the kinds of improvements our city is going to need in the coming years to cope with the increasing cost of energy and commuting by automobile, to bolster our education system, and to increase public safety. It’s a wonder nobody trusts the police when they’re Johnny-Come-Lately in town rather than our neighbors and in our churches.

On urban planning, the oxymoron

The life of cities is my avocation, and I hope that someday my vocation will have something to do with helping cities to grow and prosper responsibly and sustainably.  But as I study the problems facing cities and the history of planning I find myself more and more disgusted by that word itself: planning.  It is a direct contradiction.  Cities, communities of people, cannot be planned.  They are dynamic organisms with emergent behaviors.  No planner, no matter how brilliant, can foresee which behaviors will emerge from a particular community or how future events will change that community and its goals and values.  The phrase urban planning rings in my ears too much like that old Soviet idea: central planning.

The field of urban planning gave rise to one of the most traumatic periods in the history of America’s cities: urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s.  A group of powerful and influential planners with a hard-on for Le Corbusier condemned many vibrant neighborhoods as blighted.  Blight was used as a euphemism for diverse, dense, black and in the way of the automobile.  The solution was to separate people.  They couldn’t be left alone to cohabitate so their neighborhoods were carved up by interstate highways and narrow, pedestrian friendly streets were replaced by wide avenues.  Mixed-use buildings were destroyed and replaced with single use housing projects.  And our cities have never been Great since.

Where once a neighborhood had 5 or more small grocers, there are now “food deserts” miles from the nearest supermarket.  Where there were laundries and diners and nightclubs there are now row after row of government houses.  Where there were sidewalks there are now extra traffic lanes and parking meters.  In most neighborhoods the churches were the only non-residential uses to survive.

Those neighborhoods that were destroyed?  They had been successful before because they had planned themselves, naturally, organically, around the needs of the community.  It is not too late to return control to the neighborhoods.  But a modern city has many challenges those early communities did not face.  It is necessary for the city to run the traffic system, and for the state to maintain the highways.   Legal protections are necessary to prevent developers from threatening public health and safety.

So what should the role of the city and of planners be today if we are to let neighborhoods dictate their own futures?  I think the city’s role should be to provide the infrastructure, the backbone along which neighborhoods can grow and prosper.  This means providing for public transit within and out of the neighborhood.  This means providing legal protection against development the neighborhood identifies as undesirable and incentives to encourage community approved development.  This does not include controlling the zoning regulations.  That is a task which should return to the neighborhood.  I propose an experiment where a city defines neighborhood boundaries based closely on city council districts or traditionally understood neighborhood boundaries.  Within each neighborhood turn over the zoning regulation to a council elected from within that neighborhood.  Allow neighborhoods to set their own priorities.  Why should city council members from the suburbs dictate what happens in inner city neighborhoods?  Most citizens are a far better judge of where the centers of activity and of business in their neighborhoods are and should be than central planners.  Citizens know which streets are full of families and where children play.  They know which streets can handle additional traffic, and where empty lots present dangers that should be filled in with new development.

It’s an old idea but a powerful one: power to the people.  It’s time for a radical shift in the way we govern our cities, because the old models just aren’t working and as the pace of development has picked up, too many places have fallen through the cracks.  Would suburbs have allowed McMansions to clog their feeder roads if those already living there had had a say in the area’s development?  Would single family homes in inner city neighborhoods be torn down and replaced with quadruplex tract mansions that stretch to the full dimensions of the lot if the neighbors had a direct voice?

Power to the people, man.