The challenges—and opportunities—facing America's smaller, older industrial cities took center stage this month at a PolicyLink gathering of nearly 50 state, regional, and local leaders. The convening was part of an ongoing effort by PolicyLink to highlight and address unique issues faced by these smaller cities.

Cities that were once the economic and cultural hubs of the Northeast and Midwest—cities like Syracuse, New York, Kalamazoo, Michigan, and dozens more in between— have struggled to find their place in the new global economy.  PolicyLink, in cooperation with elected officials, nonprofit leaders, foundation executives, and other advocates, is looking to build national momentum to both recognize the assets these cities offer and spark the policy changes necessary for a brighter future.

The convening, held at the Rockefeller Foundation, also served as a key phase in developing and honing a policy and research paper PolicyLink plans to release in the fall.

Smaller cities share many common challenges: how to grow a strong and stable middle class; how to deal with an influx of immigrants; how to find a city’s “right size”; how to encourage private sector investment in long-since disinvested communities.  Another obstacle for many of these cities is their reputation for blight and crime—a perception many leaders said is woefully inaccurate, but nonetheless discourages the investors, businesses and young college graduates essential to building a stronger, more vibrant local economy and community.  Mayors Chris Doherty of Scranton, Pennsylvania; Scott Lang of New Bedford, Massachusetts; Jay Williams of Youngstown, Ohio; Ed Pawlowski of Allentown, Pennsylvania; and Thomas McMahon of Reading, Pennsylvania agreed that finding a way to overcome a negative public image is key. “As a mayor, your number one job is to sell your city,” Doherty said.

But a change of perception is only a first step. In order to ensure a long-term, viable, and equitable revival, these cities must enact policies that address underlying inequities and leverage unique assets like waterfronts, historic neighborhoods, nature and recreational resources, and the untapped potential of existing residents.  For too long, many of these cities looked for “get-rich-quick” schemes that sought to rush the downtowns back to their former glory.  Youngstown’s Williams noted that a proposed blimp factory was once hailed as that region’s economic savior.  “I don’t think the blimp sector is doing too well right now. We’re always looking for the silver bullet…but it isn’t going to happen,” Williams said; the smaller cities that succeed in the long term will be those that take risks, think regionally and strategically and chart a vision that is both competitive and inclusive.

Stay tuned for more information on the forthcoming PolicyLink paper offering policy prescriptions to help strengthen smaller cities.

By Brad Lander, Guest Contributor

When he was elected mayor of New York City in 2001, neither affordable housing nor sustainability was high on Michael Bloomberg’s list.  Thanks to a mix of community organizing, farsightedness, and perhaps a hint of national ambition, these issues have become hallmarks of his tenure.  Now, housing advocates worry about whether the city’s remarkable stock of more than 1 million low- and moderately-priced units can be preserved.

Housing was a low priority in Rudy Giuliani’s reign.  So community groups, housing advocates and developers, financial, and religious institutions organized Housing First, a broad coalition seeking to address the growing housing crisis.  With housing prices and homelessness rising to new highs within a year of his election, Mayor Bloomberg announced the New Housing Marketplace—initially a commitment of $3 billion, later (after a re-election campaign pledge) doubled to $7.5 billion to build or preserve 165,000 affordable units over 10 years.

Advocates were pleased with the financial commitment and new energy.  But residents of working-class communities facing enormous development pressure were worried that their neighborhoods would become unaffordable to longtime residents.  Thousands of residents of Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Manhattan’s West Side, and citywide organizations like ACORN, ANHD, Housing Here and Now, and Habitat for Humanity mobilized to call for a requirement that 20, 30, even 40 percent of new housing be affordable.

The Bloomberg Administration responded with a mix of new zoning, tax, and land policies.  While they did not agree to a mandatory program, their mix of voluntary inclusionary zoning, updating the city’s tax break for new construction to better encourage affordability, and committing publicly-owned land for mixed-income development led to ambitious plans for the creation of tens of thousands of affordable units in rapidly-developing areas.

Those plans formed the basis for the “smart growth” sections of the mayor’s PlaNYC 2030 initiative, announced on Earth Day 2007.  While attention has focused on the most controversial element of the plan, “congestion pricing” (charging drivers to enter Manhattan during peak hours, a proposal supported by the Pratt Center and most advocates of sustainable development and environmental justice), PlaNYC seeks to confront the city’s projected growth by one million people in the decades to come.  Bloomberg proposes that the city facilitate high-density development of several hundred thousand new units, using the policies pioneered in earlier efforts to insure that new developments serve a range of incomes.

But advocates are increasingly worried that the focus on promoting and leveraging market-rate development to create some affordable units does too little to preserve affordability for millions of existing New Yorkers.  Prices in New York have continued to skyrocket even as the national housing market has cooled.  From 2002 to 2005, the percentage of low-income families paying more than half their income for rent grew from 43 percent to 50 percent. 

Half of the city’s households make less than $40,000 per year.  Luckily (and remarkably) most of them currently have some sort of affordability protection—175,000 public housing units, about an equivalent number subsidized through city, state, or federal programs, and more than 1 million units protected by city rent regulations.

Unfortunately, all of these affordable housing resources are at risk.  Federal funding for public housing has not kept pace with rising costs, and state funding disappeared all together.  Publicly-subsidized housing developments from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s are converting to market prices at a rapid pace.

Perhaps most important for the long term, tenants fear the decline of New York City’s rent regulations.  Rent regulations guarantee tenants the right to renew their lease with a modest increase each year (so they don’t worry about being displaced with every market shift) without dampening new development (since the laws only apply to units built before 1974, or buildings where developers have accepted public subsidies).  Through the 12 years of Governor George Pataki, rent regulations were repeatedly weakened, making it far easier for landlords to “deregulate” their units, especially when a tenant moves out.  At least 170,000 units, and possibly more than 300,000, have been deregulated since 1994, and the rate of loss is growing— so even new affordable units created are at risk of being swallowed up by even faster losses.

Advocates hope that the election of Governor Eliot Spitzer last year, coupled with Mayor Bloomberg’s focus on the future, will help pass strong new efforts to preserve publicly-subsidized units and repeal “vacancy decontrol” to strengthen rent regulations.  But so far, strong action to preserve affordability has been stymied in Albany. 

For the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to leverage market-rate development, it was largely possible to build support between real estate interests on the one hand, and affordable housing and community groups on the other.  But in the fight to preserve existing affordable housing put at risk by those same market forces, several million New Yorkers may need to build more power still.

Brad Lander is the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development.

The healthy food access legislation formerly known as California Senate Bill 107 stalled in Senate Appropriations, but was revived under a new bill number, SB 48.  The legislation would create a Healthy Food Retail Innovations Fund to provide residents of underserved communities with retail food markets that offer high quality fruit, vegetables, and other healthy foods; and encourage local economic development in low-income, underserved communities.

In July, SB 48 moved to the Assembly, where it passed the Health Committee and will now move on to Assembly Appropriations.  Visit the PolicyLink Center for Health and Place website for a fact sheet with details on SB 48 and ongoing updates about the legislation.      

Lower-income workers often struggle with a jobs-housing spatial mismatch that prevents them from living near work or accessing job opportunities in distant suburbs.   Employers can and must play a role in developing job access policies that are good for working families, good for the community, and good for the economy. PolicyLink and the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition (GPUAC) have partnered to find and promote win-win strategies that increase opportunities for lower-wage workers and employers meet their workforce needs.

Working families face multiple obstacles to moving up the economic ladder: on the job they lack opportunities to build skills and advance to higher-paid positions; the costs of housing and transportation are increasing faster than wages; and they face stark tradeoffs  between living closer to the workplace and paying more for housing, or living further away, often in distressed neighborhoods, and paying high transportation costs. According to the Center for Housing Policy, Greater Philadelphia’s working families spend 27 percent of their income on housing and 29 percent of their income on transportation.    Working families struggling to simply make ends meet cannot save and build assets—crucial steps to long-term economic stability.

These challenges also affect employers, whose performance depends on the daily tasks performed by their entry-level and lower-wage workers. Stressful commutes and other work-life burdens can lead to underperformance, absenteeism, and frequent job changes; employers suffer the consequences of high turnover and high costs for the recruitment, orientation, and training of new workers and the retention of existing workers.  (Superb Staff Services estimates that the direct cost of replacing an entry-level customer relations employee at a call center, for example, can be equal to half of the employee’s annual wage, or $12,750 per employee.)

Developing a Policy and Action Agenda
On June 19th, PolicyLink and GPUAC convened two policy roundtables—one with employers and one with community service providers—to discuss these challenges, strategies, and policy solutions and begin to craft a policy and action agenda for the Philadelphia region. At the employer roundtable, executives including Pamela Crawley, senior vice president at Citizen’s Bank, and Rob Skomorucha, director of government and external relations at Widener University, described their institution’s commitments to strategies like employer-assisted housing, tuition reimbursement, and neighborhood revitalization. Discussions at both roundtables focused on the need to convince more corporate leaders that they share a stake in the success of working families and the importance of aligning the different systems—education, workforce development, community services—that often work at cross purpose with one another when it comes to promoting economic success for working families.

Emerging Double Bottom Line Solutions
Savvy employers are turning to initiatives that increase their ability to recruit and retain workers and also support working families, including:  

• Incumbent training/career ladder programs;
• Transportation benefits;
• Housing benefits; and
• Community revitalization partnerships.

In early fall, PolicyLink will release an issue brief that details how these promising strategies can be used to strengthen working families in Philadelphia and similar communities throughout the nation.