http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2007/05metropolitanpolicy_vey/20070529.pdf

 

Restoring Prosperity:

The State Role in Revitalizing Ohio’s Older Industrial Cities

 

Keynote Address by Bruce Katz

 

City Club: Cleveland, Ohio

May 29, 2007

 

Introduction

 

I want to thank you for the invitation to speak today and for the privilege of sharing this

platform with Lee Fisher, whose work on behalf of children and families and communities

I have long admired.

 

Today, I want to review the key findings of a report released just last week by the

Brookings Institution entitled Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing Older

Industrial Cities.

 

This report confirms what most of you here today already know. Many of Ohio’s older

industrial cities, including Cleveland, continue to struggle economically and socially,

battered by deindustrialization, the legacy costs associated with the prior economy,

patterns of racial segregation and the urban undermining tilt of past and current state and

federal policies.

Young people who are experimenting with urban lifestyles popularized on

television shows like Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and Friends.

 

This quote is funny to me on so many different levels.

You mean - someone can't just be a column writer and buy $500 stilettos every week? But, but but... :lol:

^ I was referring less to Carrie's $40,000 worth of shoes (by her own estimate, mind you) and more about the fact that it's seen as "experimenting". Have we become such a suburban nation that it's actually unusual enough for someone to choose to live in an urban setting that it warrants being called experimentation?

 

I also thought it was rather funny that all of the shows he used as examples of pop culture steering young people toward cities have been off the air for a number of years (Friends and SATC only since 2004, but Seinfeld since 1998!) ... are we sure those crazy kids aren't moving to the city because they're watching the Mary Tyler Show or Fame?

^

Well, the Brookings is sort of wonky but their heart is in the right place. 

 

This statement:

 

Have we become such a suburban nation that it's actually unusual enough for someone to choose to live in an urban setting that it warrants being called experimentation?

 

...is probably true.  It took me awhile to realize that much of the under-40 and certainly the under 30 cohorts are generations removed from urban life.  They grew up in the suburbs, and their parents grew up in the suburbs.  In some cases even their grandparents (if they are the kids or teens in the first generation to move en-masse to suburbia in the late 1940s thru 1950s) grew up in the suburbs.

 

So "city" is pretty foreign to a lot of people in this country...particularly younger people.

 

 

 

Just found this. It's a little shorter than what Evergrey posted...

_____________________

 

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2007/0629cities_katz.aspx

 

The Goal for Ohio Metros: 43,000 residents

 

Bruce Katz, Vice President and Director, Metropolitan Policy

Jennifer S. Vey, Senior Research Associate

 

June 29, 2007 —

 

We studied 302 cities and found Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Mansfield, Springfield, Warren and Youngstown among 65 cities that are underperforming compared to their peers nationwide. Most of these cities - and their metropolitan areas - are struggling to make a successful transition from an economy based on routine manufacturing to one based on more knowledge-oriented activities.

 

Nothing new, right? Well, not quite.

 

The new Brookings Institution study, "Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America's Older Industrial Cities," also found that broad demographic and market forces are repositioning the economies of urban areas and revaluing their assets for a wide range of consumers, businesses and cultural institutions. Diversity, authenticity, institutions of knowledge, waterfronts, downtowns and the urban form - "cityness" in a word - matter again to a growing and diverse set of families and firms. Urban densities and the transportation alternatives that come with them are also increasingly being recognized as important antidotes to climate change.

Experts say it's time government investments see Ohio as a state of cities

BY LUCY MAY | CINCINNATI BUSINESS COURIER

November 9, 2007

 

It's called the "peanut butter approach," the way Ohio politicians spread funding thin to cover as many communities and constituents as possible with a smooth layer of state money.

 

Everyone - the cities, the suburbs and the state's rural areas - gets something with that strategy. But economic development insiders argue it also ignores a basic fact: Some Ohio communities - including Greater Cincinnati - are simply better investments than others.

 

The same could be said for the nation, and a report released by the Brookings Institution Nov. 6 makes the case that government should offer much greater support to the country's metro areas if it is to thrive in the face of tougher global competition, continued domestic restructuring and the nation's insatiable appetite for energy.

Brookings is talking about metropolitan areas.

 

If one looks a population trends Husted is correct, populations has redistributed out to suburban and exurban areas, which are still considered metropolitan.

 

For example, along I-75, investment has went to interchanges at Union Center, that Hamilton connector highway, and will be going to reworking the Monroe interchange and building a new one at Austin Road.

 

All these interchanges are within either the Cincinnati or Dayton metropolitan areas and support growing parts of these areas. 

^I bet a woman named Sarah Williams Goldhagen was a major contributor to this Brookings report.  I read an article by her in a recent issue of The New Republic where she discusses the need for the federal government to interact directly with metro regions to address the nations infrastructure needs.

Arrgh! The article lays out how the feds and states encourage suburbanization and then Husted says that those things have nothing to do with it and it is all about schools. I'm calling BS. If the middle classes had stayed in the cities the schools would be just fine. See middle class neighborhoods in Cincinnati. It almost makes me want to start a new political party.

agreed. seems like what they are really saying here is that ohio is a state of suburbs and the 'burbs should get more notice and loot for their infrastructure needs. bah!

 

 

So glad to come across this article. Thanks for posting.