D.C. think tank focuses on urban design

Politicians and policy makers are rediscovering how government affects growth patterns and the form of development. ruce Katz, chief of staff for Henry Cisneros when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, now directs the $3.5 million Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. The Center, created in December, 1996, is examining the impact of large government programs on the health and physical form of metropolitan areas and their neighborhoods. Mr. Katz was recently interviewed by New Urban News. In recent decades, according to Katz, urban policy at the federal level has been relegated to small, marginal initiatives to stimulate business investment, such as empowerment zones. “Policy makers and opinion leaders have lost the discipline of looking at how large federal programs affect urban areas, and relating these programs to major demographic and urban trends,” he says. Examples of federal programs that stimulate growth are federal highway and mass transit funding (the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act is funded with $175 billion over five years), and $65 billion to $75 billion spent annually in home ownership subsidies, Katz explains. Also included are environmental, banking and utility regulations. “What we find is that federal and state governments are right smack in the middle of growth patterns,” Katz says. “Perhaps not fueling them, but certainly facilitating them with large investments of transportation, infrastructure and home ownership expenditures, and the deleterious effect of regulation in land use, environment and governance.” The interest in containing sprawl and promoting more compact, incremental development, i.e. “smart growth,” has “ increased exponentially in the last year and a half,” contends Katz. “Growth patterns, sprawl, the fiscal inequities between cities and suburbs, the growing separation by race and class were not even on the radar screen two years ago,” he says. “This is a conversation that is breaking through, and this is just the beginning. In the next few years I think you will see fundamental reforms at the state level, and the federal government will follow suit.” Sprawl and smart growth are nonpartisan issues, he believes. The states will take the lead in smart growth legislation and initiatives, says Katz. “The federal government is often the last to get it, because they are the most distant. And the states set the rules of the game with regard to land use, governance and taxation.” He maintains that the federal government can make the problem worse, however, by disproportionately funding new road construction and new communities at the expense of older communities and neighborhoods. The U.S. Department of Urban Development (HUD) stands alone among federal agencies in that it is plugged into concepts of the New Urbanism. “Henry Cisneros and Andrew Cuomo recognized that design matters,” Katz says, “and that a lot of public housing projects of the past were designed in such a way as to be harmful to residents and the surrounding neighborhoods.” He describes the incorporation of new urbanist principles in HUD projects as a “breakthrough. There has been a fundamental shift in thinking in how to design a public housing project and integrate it into the surrounding neighborhood.” “People like Andres Duany, Ray Gindroz, Peter Katz and Peter Calthorpe made that happen,” Katz says. “Cisneros and Cuomo are the type of leaders that cultivate change and embrace it, but the movement had to be there in the first place.” At the same time that the New Urbanism was growing as a design philosophy, HUD was embarking on a program to tear down and redevelop tens of thousands of public housing units nationwide, Katz points out. That was an “alignment of the stars.” Other organizations in Washington, D.C. are looking at spatial aspects of urban issues — including the League of Cities, Surface Transportation Policy Project, National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Urban interest groups, dealing with issues like transit, housing, welfare and the environment, historically have been “balkanized, concentrating on their own area of interest,” Katz says. “But these groups have an enormous amount in common. Smart growth brings them together.”