Posts tagged Regionalism
Apologies and Ramblings
Feb 25th
We have a lot of potential here, but for some reason, our leaders won’t make the best of it. Portland looked just like Norfolk in the 70s. They had blocks of vacant parking lots. New construction was taking place in the Portland suburbs and the central city was decaying. This is where our regions split. Hampton Roads kept spending money on new highways and infrastructure designed to facilitate new suburban construction. Portland, however, fought the idea that unrestrained growth was good for the region. Their biggest concern? That this new growth was destroying vital farmland, forestland, and other open space. They took their concerns to their legislatures and, after much debate, enacted some of the most comprehensive growth control regulations in the country. This accomplished their goal: protecting open spaces. It also had an unintended consequence. It forced growth back into the city. All of the money that would have been spent on suburbs was then available for the city. They opposed new highways and even fought to get some torn down. They used the savings from that to build a first class public transit system. One of the most important aspects of the new Portland was that they came up with a real comprehensive plan and stuck to it. For this reason, Portland is a well run, well designed city.
Back to Hampton Roads. While Portland was engineering a new city, Norfolk decided the best course of action was to tear ours down. Hampton Roads as a whole, spent a fortune building new highways to allow for quick driving to and from the suburbs. While Portland worked and grew as a region, Hampton Roads cities decided to compete against one another. Each city had to fight for its share of new development, for is share of tourists, even for its share of defense dollars. For this reason, we live in a region with a half-dozen “downtowns,” each of them only a fraction of what they could be if they were built as one. We now live in a region with no pattern of employment or housing centers but rather a sprawling mass of congestion. While cities like Portland are the places-to-be amongst todays young people, Hampton Roads is not. Without finding some way to attract new younger residents, our problems will only get worse.
We need to get more forward thinking people in our elected offices from local to state levels. We need to learn from places like Portland and act accordingly. They aren’t perfect, but they still have alot to teach us. Projects like the Southeastern Parkway are a waste of money. New highways only serve to promote new suburbs at the expense of the rest of the region. Positive investments would include a true all-encompassing master plan for the region. This plan would include a well thought out fixed guideway mass transit system like light rail. It would also work to rezone the areas around transit stops to encourage high-density developments. An emphasis should also be put on expanding freight rail to take more trucks off the roads. Above all, Hampton Roads needs to formulate a plan to share revenue between cities, preferably by merging into one jurisdiction. People should not be afraid of a merger. They will still live in the same place. Taxes can even stay the same for each segment of the new city. The goal, however, is to create a region where growth in one part is good for the whole region. It won’t matter if a new tower is but in Downtown Norfolk or at Town Center. The increased tax base will pay for both areas. Once we have a region that can function as a region, we should split our collective economic development money between attracting the relocation of large companies and creating new businesses, preferably start-ups owned by recent graduates of local colleges and universities. The opportunity presented to graduates will encourage them to stay in the area. If they stay, their friends are more likely to stay and/or move to the area.
Hampton Roads can do this. We have to make our leaders know we will accept no less.
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Cities Without Suburbs – A Book Review
Jan 14th
Cities Without Suburbs - By: David Rusk
I recently finished reading a book by David Rusk called “Cities without Suburbs.” I highly recommend this book to everyone. The book argues in support of regional cooperation and/or consolidation of suburbs with their historically central cities. Going beyond your typical benefits of regional cooperation, this book explains, with evidence, that there are many benefits for regional consolidation of services. He thoroughly identifies the problems facing inner cities today including, increasing poverty rates, decreasing tax revenues, and the inherent problems with solving complicated social, transportation, housing, economic, and budgetary problems when cooperating with a number of municipalities. Using census data, he explains why cities that have expanded their boundaries to encompass their own suburbs have historically done much better than cities that are unable to expand their boundaries.These locked-in cities lose revenue, resources, and opportunities in the long run to their independent suburbs. This same reason is also why suburbanites fight consolidation/annexation. They believe that their suburbs are doing well and that they don’t want to take on the inner city’s problems. There are a couple of problems with this philosophy, however. First, history and statistics have shown that suburbs that are independent from their central city do not grow as fast as suburbs that are connected to their city. In fact, the average income for the entire region is lower for regions that are segmented versus those that are not. Second, when connected to their suburbs, central cities have fewer problems and the region as a whole has a lower crime rate and a better quality of life.
While I have always felt that a regional Hampton Roads would be a good thing, this book got me thinking that it should go further than that. It is certainly a step in a positive direction to have regional organizations. Certainly don’t get me wrong. Our current institutions such as HRT, SPSA, HRPDC, HRTPO etc all have their problems but when it comes down to it, they make certain things simpler for our area. Imagine if each city had to run its own bus service. You would have to transfer to another bus every time you crossed a city boundary. What if each city had to compete individually for transportation money from the state and federal government? You think we get shorted our share now? Despite current and planned or possible future regional entities, we still need to go further.
Let’s look at one thing that our region does. It may seem minor but think about it. Tourism. Our region has many great tourist attractions. From the Virginia Beach Oceanfront and Ocean Breeze to Colonial Williamsburg and Busch Gardens/Water Country and everything in between such as Nauticus and the Wisconsin, Hampton Roads has a lot to offer. Each city spends millions a year in tourism advertising money to attempt to attract visitors to patronize their respective city. While places like Virginia Beach and Williamsburg spend money to directly advertise their attractions, other places such as Chesapeake advertise to attract visitors to stay in their hotels, hoping to capture tourists’ shopping dollars at Greenbrier, etc. The reason this has to be done is because otherwise, Chesapeake makes no money off of Virginia Beach’s tourists. If our cities were one jurisdiction, however, things would be much different. We could combine our money to advertise for our regional attractions and the whole area would benefit. The area of Chesapeake would benefit just as much from tourists that came to Greenbrier as from those that never shopped west of Lynnhaven.
The same goes for transportation. Think of our major projects. The HRBT is a good example. As it stands, Hampton and Newport News want an expanded HRBT. Norfolk, however, is against it because the outcome on our side of the water would be destroyed properties. If we were one city, though, we would be much more likely to support it. An expanded HRBT would almost certainly be a catalyst for a better business climate on the Peninsula. Norfolk doesn’t really care about that. Hampton voters can’t vote for Norfolk’s City Council. As one city, the Peninsula’s economic climate would be Norfolk’s economic climate meaning that the expanded HRBT would benefit the city. Same goes for the Dominion Blvd. project. Peninsula, Norfolk and VB leaders can see how it is important to Chesapeake and the region overall. Secretly, though, they also know that Chesapeake residents are not their constituency. They can support Chesapeake’s project but at the same time they are obligated to do what is best for their constituency.
We can look at social issues. Public housing for example. First, current housing projects were built in Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News, and Hampton simply because the cities were there. Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Suffolk and the counties of Hampton Roads did not have the capacity to support large scale housing projects at the time. Current housing policy no longer supports concentrated ‘projects.’ Studies have shown that everyone does better when the poor are dispersed throughout the middle class housing areas. This dispersion keeps the poor from feeling hopeless about their situation. Their income rates increase as does the pass rate for their school children. College attendance and graduation rates increase. Despite the objections by some middle class areas, the property values do not decrease and crime does not increase. In cities that are serious about this policy, overall crime rates tend to decrease and overall income averages go up. In our area, however, due to our segmented cities and therefore our segmented housing authorities, the residents of the current projects cannot be transferred to other cities using funds from their home city to pay the rent. This condition severely limits the ability of our housing authorities to successfully assist the poor residents of the housing projects. As one city, the authority could move residents freely around the region to make sure that they have the best opportunity to advance their situations.
I think that this can be accomplished with the right amount of public support. This will not be easy, however, and will take careful consideration to make a thorough proposal to the General Assembly (required for consolidation in Virginia). This will require public education and public input to make sure that all issues are addressed. I know that not everyone will support this but that is typical of any major proposal. I also know that if we could consolidate our area so that the central cities encompasses 60-75 % of our regional population that we would be a force to be reckoned with at the state, federal, and economic levels.
Fairfax Gets It, Why Can’t We?
Dec 9th
My only question is why can Hampton Roads not come up with something this comprehensive. We did work on a plan for the future of transit but it seems to be viewed more as a dream and less of an actual this-is-what-we-need-to-work-for plan. Think about it. You see city after city create plans and actually follow them. Our area can do that too. Virginia Beach has been working on the Southeastern Parkway for 23 years now because it falls into their now-outdated plans to make the Corporate Landing office park successful. Why can’t we work this hard to make transit plans come through? If you ask any city, they will tell you that they want it to work, but nobody seems to be actually pushing for it.
In my opinion, the reason for the lack of drive for this issue is the lack of regional cooperation. Fairfax’s plan will work and has support because it only deals with one locality, Fairfax County. It ties into existing routes that go into other municipalities, but the plan itself, only expands service inside county lines. Here, however, our plan encompasses Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Newport News, Hampton, Williamsburg, James City County, and York County. In fact part of our Transit Vision Plan extends service toward Moyock, NC. How in the world do our leaders think that they can make something this expansive work if they can’t make simpler regional systems work. It is hard enough to get two cities to work on a bus route together let alone a system including both light rail and commuter rail. We need a functional regional government. If our localities could combine services and resources, we could actually overcome the problems that we face now. Look around. we are facing budget cuts all the time and money can no longer be guaranteed by the state. We have to help ourselves. Nobody else is coming to our rescue.
Light Rail in Chesapeake?
Dec 3rd
Finally, High Speed Progess
Nov 2nd
Source of Image: The Virginian-Pilot
Finally, with only months left before the deadline, the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization has voted to push for High Speed Rail to the Southside, terminating in Downtown Norfolk. The vote was unanimous among those in attendance. Nay-sayers might say that it doesn’t really mean that there is support, since four of the Peninsula cities went unrepresented but they had their chance. They obviously did not think that it was important enough for them to need to go. I have to say, however, that the Mayor of Hampton, Molly Ward, should get some sort of reward. Fhe was quoted as saying, “You do whats best for the region and the commonwealth. You don’t make any progress when you just say no.” That was definitely a show of regionalism. If only our other localities had mayors that were smart enough to speak out publicly and say that it wasn’t just about what was good for their city, but instead it was about what was good for the region. Good job Mayor Ward.
This move is not the final say, however. It will not be final until the Commonwealth Transportation Board votes on the issue. If it passed the Board, it opens the door to High Speed Rail to Hampton Roads. This new High Speed line will terminate near Harbor Park, where a proposed multi-modal station would be built where High Speed Rail, Light Rail, and local buses could meet. All is not lost for the Peninsula, however. Under this plan they would receive upgrades to their current rail service.
Please contact the CTB and urge their support of this option. You can email Carol Mathis, the Assistant Secretary to the Board with your comments.
