REGIONAL CHALLENGES; REGIONAL SOLUTIONS

Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities

2003 National Conference Keynote Address

April 8, 2003

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Rip Rapson

President, The McKnight Foundation

‍

Introduction

It’s a pleasure to have you here. I would like to do three things this morning.

• First, sketch out the challenges facing the Twin Cities region as it grows and ages.  

• Second, describe the struggles we at McKnight have had in developing a regional portfolio.

• Third, offer some advice about building a robust national smart growth movement.

So first, some perspective on the Twin Cities region.

I. The Twin Cities Region

In the 1970’s and 80’s, the national view was that Minneapolis-St. Paul had little in common with other metropolitan areas struggling with growth pressures. We seemed set apart by our progressive, reform-minded politics, diversified and prosperous economy, natural amenities, and homogenous northern European pedigree. And, ultimately, a place with winters like ours couldn’t really be taken seriously.

That all changed in the last decade, during which:

• We consumed land with dizzying speed, to the point where we now digest a chunk the size of the Mall of America every day.

• Our urban population diversified, with new immigrants from Southeast Asia, eastern Africa, Mexico and Latin America more than offsetting any population loss due to middle class flight from core cities.

• We created a quarter million jobs over the last decade, but 75% of them were in outer-ring suburbs.

• Poverty concentrated in the core cities and older suburbs, leaving us the fourth most segregated metro area in the country.

• Traffic congestion worsened at an annual rate matched only by Atlanta.

• We began a five-year trajectory to become a non-attainment area for national air quality standards.

• And we moved from having the most affordable housing stock among the nation’s 25 largest metropolitan areas to a position in the bottom half.

So, perhaps we really aren’t so different from the rest of you. I hope the next few days will introduce some approaches that may indeed have relevance to your own experiences.  My job is to get that process started. Let me begin by describing the dynamics that have led to the changes I just noted.

Growth Patterns

The Twin Cities pattern of growth is a familiar tale.

Postwar freeways spawned far-flung housing developments and invited employers and retailers to follow. With cheap land on the edge and uncrowded, high-speed highways to get them there, people could build their dream homes at increasing distances from the urban core and travel easily to work or shop. Tax code provisions, local zoning regulations, and public sector investments in sewers, schools, roads, and bridges all dramatically tilted the public policy table toward low-density, large-lot residential developments and industrial parks in suburban areas, siphoning redevelopment investment from the region’s older communities.

These circumstances reflect our region’s almost fanatical belief in local control. There are nearly 200 cities in the seven county metropolitan area—each fiercely protective of its autonomy. That’s understandable, but also terribly balkanizing.

An edge-city may try to preserve a certain look and feel by requiring minimum lot-sizes, but in the process it will squeeze out affordable multifamily homes that bring workers within striking distance of jobs in the new high tech cluster down the road. An aging working-class suburb may offer tax breaks to lure an employer from the other side of the metropolitan area, but it has simply moved the spoils from Town A to Town B, failing to advance the region one iota.  

The result in the Twin Cities has been controlled chaos. No integrated road planning.  No comprehensive open space system. No clustering of commercial investment in key transportation nodes. The list could go on.

One of the casualties has been what may be the region’s defining characteristic: its glorious natural environment. Wal-Marts and subdivisions have taken the place of many of our most productive soils, pristine prairies and wetlands, and treasured forests. Indeed, less than 6% of the landscape found here by settlers in the 1800s remains today. And as we have laid down acres of asphalt, we’ve compromised the absorption of rainwater into the region’s aquifer and intensified the drainage of modern life’s chemical habits into the surface water system.

Perhaps most importantly from McKnight’s perspective, this growth pattern has polarized community wealth, has concentrated poverty, and has created barriers to opportunity. There are too few public transportation routes to get inner city residents to job growth centers. There is too little affordable housing in communities where jobs are, or were, booming. There is too slim a tax base in those older suburban communities most in need of reinvestment. There are too many holes in the human service safety net.

So how about that for a cheery welcome to our fair city?

The Metropolitan Council

In fairness to our region, we diagnosed some of these illnesses early on. Not only did we create a regional planning agency, the Metropolitan Council, way back in the 1960’s, we gave it real teeth a decade ago by investing it with operational authority for the region’s sewer, transportation, recreation, and landuse systems. It also reviews the comprehensive plans of local government to make sure they mesh with regional plans.

On one hand, the Met Council can be viewed as a model of regional management. Its authorities are extensive, and its accomplishments over the last four years under the leadership of Ted Mondale have been substantial, including:

• construction of the region’s first light rail line;

• adoption of a comprehensive regional policy framework called Blueprint 2030;

• pursuit of a public dialogue about alternative growth strategies; and

• implementation of the “Livable Communities Act,” which has provided $45 million since 1996 for projects reflecting smart growth principles.

On the other hand, the council’s critics contend that it hasn’t fully used its authorities. They complain that the Council too frequently rubber-stamps local comprehensive plans, that the Blueprint has no teeth to guarantee implementation of the principles, and that the council inclines toward middle-ground strategies in order to avoid political confrontation.

There is truth to both of these positions. The point is, however, that the machinery of a regional authority is an important touchstone in any debate about the future of our region. You’ll hear this point punctuated this afternoon.

II. Five Philanthropic Challenges

I’ve flown over the landscape quickly knowing that what you will see and hear in the next days will reveal a more fine-grained texture of this place. Let me turn, then, to how these regional issues are translated into a foundation portfolio.

Although I’m using the McKnight portfolio as a point of departure, it goes without saying that regionalism is not one-size-fits-all work. It must respond to the moment, requiring creative exploration and continual course correction. It necessarily grows out of a particular region’s history and political culture.  

Our experience at McKnight suggests, nevertheless, that foundations striking out along this path face at least five challenges.

Challenge 1 is looking beyond the urban fence-line.

It took time for us at McKnight to get comfortable with the notion that we could, or should, make grants that affected suburbs. Old preconceptions die hard—were these not, after all, places of wealth and privilege where families thrived, streets were safe, and communities all of one kind? We would be better advised to stay focused on our traditional areas and topics of need.

But a couple of early research grants opened the door—and our eyes—a bit.

First and foremost, was our support for Myron Orfield’s seminal research, captured in his first book Metropolitics. Myron’s 27 really scary maps demonstrated beyond question that poverty and blight were making their way into older, working class suburbs with low tax capacity and few amenities to put the brake on their decline.

The second was a grant to the University of Minnesota’s Design Center for the American Urban Landscape to look more closely at our “first-ring” suburbs. The Center showed that within the short span of 50 years, our region’s post-war, first-ring cities had become buried within sprawl—their homes out of date, their residents isolated from economic growth, and their families increasingly living one paycheck away from disaster.  

This research prodded us into thinking more broadly about our grantmaking. But it was one thing to recognize regional interdependence and quite another to articulate—both to our staff and our board—what it meant to a grantmaking portfolio centered on urban communities. Many at McKnight equated smart growth with slowing the growth of edge cities— implicating issues such as land consumption, land-use management, and transportation investments, which seemed far from our mission of helping poor people. We had to make that connection clear. We started by reaffirming a few long-held, guiding principles that applied both in inner cities and aging suburbs. For example:

• improving the choices of people isolated from economic and social opportunity;

• reversing the flight of private capital markets from low-income neighborhoods and aging commercial centers;

• ensuring the availability of affordable, safe housing; and

• building broad-based citizen engagement in civic affairs.  

Then, by sorting through a few big questions, we tried to describe how grantmaking that promoted regional vitality would be different from our current practice.

The first big question was the issue of scale. The size, cost, and complexity of regional systems would require careful thought about our purposes and entry points. We would likely, for example, focus less on “projects” and more on funding that strengthened connections among cities and communities, and among sectors.

Second, there was the sticky matter of politics. The often politically-charged nature of smart growth would require that we anticipate heightened visibility and, potentially, controversy. Were we prepared to be the subject of talk radio shows? Was the board comfortable having its actions dissected in newspaper editorials? Both of these possibilities materialized, and neither was something to which we were accustomed.  

Third, there was a question of advocacy. Given the embryonic nature of smart growth advocacy in our region, McKnight would have to take a very long-term, very proactive leadership role in building the field.

Keeping in mind these principles and questions, we bridged into the new regime from the old with three grants, all of which linked urban and suburban interests.

The first was a six-year effort to help community partnerships throughout Minnesota implement welfare reform; we found, naturally enough, that there was no appreciable difference between urban and suburban residents struggling to get the training, find the transportation, or locate the childcare they needed to enter the workforce.

The second was a grant to the Family Housing Fund, our state’s leading housing intermediary, to expand its work into the suburbs; it spurred the Fund to focus more on engaging suburban counties in project developments, on developing public information campaigns, and on assessing the importance of a project’s proximity to support services.

The third was a grant to a coalition of seven suburbs seeking to coordinate their responses to housing, economic development, environmental, and transportation challenges. This subregional coalition, called the I35W Corridor Coalition, began by simply sharing information and moved into progressively more intricate levels of municipal cooperation. You will see the results of their effort in the mobile workshop on “Linking Transportation and Landuse.”

Although these grants opened the door for McKnight to construct a more comprehensive regional program, they also helped us realize that moving beyond the urban fence was only the first in a series of challenges we would face.

The second challenge is figuring out how to integrate the issues.

Agreeing on the need to become involved beyond urban boundaries didn’t illuminate very clearly what we meant by “regionalism” or how we would carry out this work. Our board had the good judgment to push us for more clarity—how was regionalism different from simply grafting our traditional grantmaking onto the suburbs?

Good question. We got by for a while muttering phrases like “integrated approaches,” something like – the housing’s connected to the transportation, which is connected to the open space, which is connected back to the housing. But we hadn’t answered, and the board wanted to know, what funding for that kind of integrated approach would look like. Somehow, we needed to develop a coherent approach that moved beyond simply laying the distinct fields side-by-side.

After a lot of discussion and a little exploratory grantmaking, we ended up adopting five interdisciplinary strategies for this work:

1. Learning: Strengthening our connections to local and national organizations to expand our knowledge of the field.

2. Public Education: Increasing public understanding of the importance of smart growth for the future of the region and strengthening public will to do something about it;

3. Networks: Creating a strong network of smart growth organizations,

4. Public Policy: Promoting private and public sector policies that favor smart growth and discourage sprawl; and

5. Models: Encouraging partnerships among public, private, and philanthropic organizations that create models of smart growth development.

Not exactly a definition, but at least an approach. We would try to strengthen the connective tissue at the heart of the smart growth idea. But working across disciplines was still a stretch for us. Ultimately, it forced us to organize ourselves differently.

We asked Dan Bartholomay from our human services group to pull together our communications director, arts program officers, environment program officers, vice president, and—despite his shortcomings—the president, to form a regional team. The hope was to cross-fertilize expertise. We’ve worked in that configuration for more than two years, meeting every two weeks, reviewing proposals from each topic area, and identifying opportunities to fund across disciplines.

I want to emphasize how difficult and rare truly integrative planning is. Despite the fact that we’ve been pursuing it in our regional portfolio for a couple of years, it still regularly surprises and befuddles us. But I’m absolutely certain of two things: that it’s almost always more energizing for staff, and the product it yields is invariably of a much higher quality.

Challenge number 3 is keeping the human element front and center.

It was not self-evident to our staff how this regional lens would keep living, breathing people directly in focus. Protecting a wetland, starting a safe routes to school project, or encouraging better suburban landuse all have a human dimension, of course. But each skirted the question of how the foundation’s long-standing commitment to disadvantaged people would be reflected in the regional group’s efforts.

Fortunately, we were privileged to have as grantees and advisers Myron Orfield and jon powell of the Institute of Race and Poverty—neither of whom shied from helping us understand sprawl as an equity issue.

We’ve talked about Myron’s work. I can’t emphasize enough the degree to which our foundation—and I would argue the field as a whole—has been enriched by his unrelenting drive to promote balanced and fair regional policies and practices.

jon powell has traveled a related path, underscoring how sprawl, by limiting access to opportunity, undermines racial and economic equity. He has, much like Angela Blackwell and her colleagues at PolicyLink, urged the smart growth movement to pursue an equity-centered regionalism, anchored in social justice.

This will be possible only when considerations of equity serve to tie together regional systems—affordable housing must be located near employment opportunities, people have to be able to ride public transportation to their childcare and health facilities.

The Funder’s Network has made this case consistently and effectively. Last November’s summit on promoting regional equity suggested powerfully that new regional political coalitions can emerge to alter the rules of the game. I’m delighted that this energy carried forward into yesterday’s regional equity gathering and into the Regional and Neighborhood Equity Project Committee’s meeting this morning.

At McKnight, promoting regional equity has meant a number of things.

First, it has reinforced the link to our traditional portfolio, which focuses on the basic supports that families and children need to get ahead—housing, education, and access to economic opportunity.

Second, it has affirmed our commitment to citizen engagement. One infinite resource we have as a community is citizens well organized where they live. In all of our regional grants, we look for ways to encourage residents throughout the region to get involved in charting their own course.

Third, it has cast in high relief the importance of an urban revitalization agenda.

Which leads me to challenge number 4: tying the knot between sprawl and urban revitalization.

Some at McKnight were concerned that our new regional emphasis might marginalize inner cities—major beneficiaries of our past grantmaking. Assaulted by stories of lost wildlife habitat, cars stuck in traffic, and septic tank failures, they feared we might redirect our energies to areas where sprawl was advancing. We had to remind them—and ourselves—that it was equally important to focus on the place where sprawl begins: inner-city neighborhoods.

In the 80’s and 90’s, as in so many American cities, markets had abandoned certain parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Unemployment rates climbed as high as 30% in some neighborhoods, contrasted to 3.5% for the region. Key commercial corridors, long the backbone of neighborhood economies, were abandoned. Poverty deepened, ricocheting its effects into deteriorating public health, heightened crime rates, skyrocketing school dropout rates, and countless other symptoms of social, economic, and political despair.

Regional growth is propelled, of course, not only affirmatively by a dream of life behind a picket fence in a tranquil exurban village, but also negatively by an aversion to these kinds of ills. The combination of this pull from the outside and push from the inside, which author Tony Proscio terms “geographic centrifuge,”   is the essence of sprawl.

Our region has been staggeringly slow to comprehend this – indeed, despite all our progressive traditions and machinery of metropolitan governance, we still haven’t, at least not fully.

That’s why tying the knot tightly between sprawl and urban revitalization has been so important to the development of our foundation’s regional work.  David Rusk proposed years ago that sprawl could not be managed simply by the “inside game” of urban revitalization—it had to be matched with an “outside game” of regional strategies to control sprawl’s advance and overcome its effects.  He’s almost certainly correct. But I would heighten the emphasis on this inside game. We need centripetal energy, drawing people inward to attractive, safe, diverse inner-city neighborhoods that capitalize on an already-built environment.

In this region’s center cities, and scores of others across the country, community development corporations and neighborhood associations have made the inside game their reason for being—creating the kind of housing, commercial development, schools, and social service supports that will enable inner city neighborhoods to compete with the suburban dream. It is working. Just consider some recent book titles: Comeback Cities by Tony Proscio and Paul Grogan ; Cities on the Rebound, by William Hudnut ; The Living City, by Roberta Gratz ; and so on.

A cautionary note is certainly in order here. These successes can introduce their own distortion field, as increasing home values leave people at the lower end of the economic spectrum with fewer and fewer options. We’ve seen this here. In Minneapolis’ poorest neighborhood, for example, the median home price rose by 36% in 2001 alone. This requires that the inside game be practiced with enormous sensitivity and foresight. PolicyLink’s “Toolkit on Equitable Development” is an excellent guide to how that can be done.

Here in our town, we have to figure out how to spread the word to decision-makers at all levels that this inside work is not just a finger-in-the-dike response to local blight, but instead an essential piece of a healthy, prosperous region.  

We’ve concluded that one of the most important ways of doing this is to invest over the long-term in the community development movement—certainly locally, but also nationally. We have, for example, participated for a decade in the National Community Development Initiative, now known as Living Cities. Made up of the presidents and high-level staff of private foundations, financial-services corporations, and government agencies, the initiative has provided more than $250 million in direct financial support to CDC’s in 23 cities around the country. The successes have been remarkable. An acceleration of the maturation of local community development systems. The development of almost 20,000 units of affordable housing. The provision of high-risk predevelopment capital that other lenders and grantmakers are unwilling to ante up. And, most remarkably of all, the discovery that foundation and banking executives can actually be productive if locked in a room together twice a year.

Let me turn to the fifth and final challenge: working beyond grants.

Although regionalism work still involves getting checks into the hands of community workers, it employs other foundation tools such as research, communications, convening, network building, and public policy. A brief word about each.

First, research.  

Research permits us to work at the edges of our comfort zone, something we have to do regularly in a field like smart growth.

Last year, for example, we commissioned a thought paper on the role of the arts in the Twin Cities suburbs. We knew that role was changing, as new arts centers sprouted up throughout the region. What we didn’t know, however, was just how profound that change was. Our study, which turned into a small book called A New Angle, showed that slowly and subtly, the arts have helped create a sense of place and build connections within suburban communities. But it also called attention to the extent to which the arts’ contributions to the livability of suburban communities has not been openly acknowledged.

The report raised difficult, wide-ranging questions. If the two million people who live in the Twin Cities suburbs are increasingly unwilling to travel long distances to attend arts events in the urban core, will our urban arts infrastructure be supplanted over time by suburban alternatives? What will urban arts organizations do to adjust? How will suburban communities integrate the arts more fully into their development? A New Angle catapulted these kinds of questions onto the public stage—through newspaper articles, a first-ever State of the Arts meeting, and countless conversations among boards and staffs of cultural organizations.  I’m delighted that one of the mobile workshops will give you an opportunity to look at these questions yourselves.

The second tool is communications.

We felt from the onset that we should try to articulate publicly why philanthropy – at least from one foundation’s vantage point – would take an interest in regional growth issues and what roles it might play. We have accordingly penned a number of newspaper editorial articles, arranged quarterly conversations among Minnesota foundation representatives and national smart growth leaders, and devoted an extensive section of our website to regional issues.

But we also reflected about whether we might use the foundation’s communications to advance particular issues or efforts within the field. The experiences of other regions suggested that open space protection might be a useful place to start.

Our metropolitan area’s population is projected to grow by the equivalent of two St. Paul’s over the next two decades, boding a development “land rush” that could dramatically compromise our legacy of natural spaces. Yet, a majority of Minnesotans believes that the government and others are doing a pretty good job of land stewardship. Our challenge was, therefore, two-fold. First, to wake up citizens to the dramatic loss that’s already begun and that promises to escalate if communities continue doing business as usual. And second, to instill in those same citizens a belief that their voice matters in the public arena, that they can affect land use decisions in their locality.

The Embrace Open Space campaign we developed promoted all the ways citizens can influence the vast number of land protection decisions that are made daily at city council, township, watershed district, county board, or other local meetings.

This effort was more than McKnight’s solo flight; it was a joint project of nearly a dozen organizations, including 1000 Friends of Minnesota, Sierra Club, Trust for Public Land, and others. By designing an overarching, multidimensional campaign, we and our partners hoped that McKnight’s resources and credibility could help knit together the individual efforts of these organizations. We would create systematic and coherent media messages, direct interested individuals to our grassroots partners, and support our partners’ efforts to engage individuals in specific local land protection and restoration efforts.

We used a variety of communication tactics—direct mail, media stories, special events, publications, and a full-blown advocacy website. We ran newspaper ads for three months last year and are beginning a second wave of radio and newspaper ads this week. Maybe you’ll even hear them while you’re here, but if not, they’re on our website.

This is all quite ambitious. But we’ve already seen concrete benefits. Our board understands what we’re doing and cares about it. Three of the ten open spaces we identified as being most endangered have been protected. And our partners are collaborating in ways unthinkable a year ago and steadily building their own communications capacity. For example, we just ran a web design workshop to help them effectively engage internet users coming from the campaign website to their own website. Next month, we’ll offer a workshop for them and other open space nonprofits on public policy communication strategies.

The third tool is convening.

We trail other regions in involving our business leadership in smart growth. A number of business organizations have tried to move the needle on such topics as economic competitiveness, job readiness, and transportation investment. And 1000 Friends of Minnesota, the Metropolitan Council, and others have sought to corral business leaders in the cause of growth management. None has gained traction.

Over the past year, at the request of a number of prominent local business people, McKnight has pulled together these strands into a single business-led conversation about what a regional growth ethic should, and could, look like. McKinsey and Company, the national management consulting firm, has donated its time to prepare working papers, conduct more than 100 interviews, and choreograph a series of small business “summits” to this end. We hope this will lead to an enduring private-public-nonprofit forum that will champion a framework of principles and practices for thoughtful, sustainable, and equitable growth in the Twin Cities.

With people in the audience like George Ranney, who led the Chicago business community through its Chicago 2020 process, I’m embarrassed at the modesty of these efforts. But they do suggest the potential usefulness of foundations’ ability to convene and to help frame a broader civic agenda.

The fourth tool is network building.

When we began our regional work three years ago, we were struck with the extent to which the 30 or 40 organizations working in the field not only didn’t talk to each other, but also didn’t take the time to think about each other’s work. That made regional grantmaking difficult. It’s tough, for example, to support housing groups working in the suburbs if they’re oblivious to the broader context of open space protection or transportation linkages.

As a starting point, we hired an organization called Grassroots Solutions to survey smart growth organizations in the Twin Cities—to assess the focus of their activities, the extent to which they are collaborating with others, and their attitudes toward working together. We then gathered almost 40 organizations to discuss Grassroots’ insights and recommendations.

These organizations have met regularly over the last two years—first as a full group, then in working groups sorted by topic, and finally back as a full group. The result was a decision to create the Smart Growth Organizing Project. Now part of a local nonprofit, the project is governed by an interdisciplinary group from the housing, environmental, transportation, and land use advocacy communities. It will first focus on building the capacity of individual organizations to do more effective community organizing and policy research. It still has a steep learning curve—members could benefit a great deal, for example, from the experiences of the Vermont Smart Growth Collaborative. It’s nevertheless a big step forward for our local smart growth community.  

The fifth tool is promoting public policy change.

Public policy change is at the heart of the smart growth challenge. As former Governor Glendenning has shown so impressively, creating a statewide smart growth public policy framework can have profound effects. I’m delighted that he is forming the Smart Growth Leadership Institute to help carry that message to state and local officials.

And yet, public policy can be a daunting, murky business. Particularly when the public sector is engaged in wholesale pullbacks precipitated by the economic downturn. I would argue, nevertheless, that the philanthropic community is well-equipped to move us beyond the murk.

We have the privilege accorded few in society to view things as a whole, permitting us to build an enviable knowledge base. Although we can be ponderous and slow, we are also capable of great persistence, able to pursue social change over a long period of time, at considerable depth, and across a wide spectrum of issues. We have a long track record of thinking about what kind of public education and civic engagement strategies work best—think of the Carnegie Corporation’s formative work with educational television for children or the Ford Foundation’s efforts in the early 60’s to promote voting rights in the deep South. And we have the latitude to take risks and seed ideas. It’s a powerful mix.

In most places, these considerations would suggest applying philanthropic energies to state landuse policies. With the appointment of Ted Mondale to the Met Council in 1998, however, the public policy opportunity in Minnesota seemed clearly to rest at the regional level.

When he arrived at the Council, Mondale proposed re-casting the region’s growth policies. As you will hear him describe a bit later, he used a document and process called “Regional Blueprint 2030” to create a clear roadmap for how our region will grow over the next generation.

In Mondale’s mind, the model was the community-based decision-making process Peter Calthorpe and Associates had guided in Salt Lake City, Silicon Valley, and a number of other places. Mondale believed, though, that he couldn’t justify using public funds to bring in such a visible, expensive outside consultant.  McKnight seemed a logical partner.

We agreed. We provided the grant money for Calthorpe to play out the process of polling, stakeholder meetings, and community planning workshops he will describe to you shortly. Calthorpe and Mondale asked the simple question of how people want their communities to look and function in the future.  The results, generated over two years, were a series of development scenarios that became the backbone of the Council’s Blueprint, which the Council adopted two weeks before Mondale left office last December.

III. Building a Movement:

Bridging between the Local and National Environments

I’m sure I’ve told you more than you ever wished to know about the anatomy of one foundation’s regional portfolio. But I hope all of this suggests some of the difficulties foundations can encounter in developing a comprehensive approach to smart growth and livability.

I want to close with a few comments about the relationship between supporting local smart growth activities and participating in national smart growth debates.  

Despite the enormous good work of the Smart Growth Funder’s Network, Smart Growth America, PolicyLink, and other intensely intelligent and committed organizations at the national level, the truth is that we have yet to create a national smart growth movement. What we have now is more of an “idea virus”—something that has infected political leadership in key places and has worked its way into national and state media outlets. But that is not the same as creating a movement.  

A movement presupposes a stable infrastructure. A movement needs a vehicle to aggregate the parts. A movement must be able to steer the field intentionally. A movement must have the tools to be nimble and opportunistic, to shape and advance a policy agenda.

This is nothing the conference organizers don’t already know. In the description of Friday’s session on “New Strategies for Building and Sustaining a Smart Growth Movement,” they ask: “What else is needed to build and sustain a movement out of the good but largely unconnected work happening in communities and regions throughout the country?” Sounds like they have some ideas. Let me three of my own.

First, we need to reframe the issue to fit the times.

Where does sprawl fit during dreadful economic times? It seems to me that the message could not be more clear: stop wasting the public’s money. There are undoubtedly some folks in power who aren’t much interested in this line of reasoning. But that is exactly what the good guys thought when they began efforts three years ago to convince Congress that the Army Corps of Engineers’ plans to expand the nation’s locks and dams were not only misguided on the merits, but irresponsibly, foolishly expensive. It took a while, but ultimately the mantra of “stupid spending” took hold. The Corps is being reformed as we speak.

I don’t want to understate the intensity of the assaults that opponents of smart growth are making, and will make. These guys understand the power of slogans, names, and issue frames. It’s incredibly annoying. We just need to figure out how to do it better. For example, in last fall’s elections, the Michigan Land Use Institute fed opinion pieces to build support for smart growth in 50 of the nation’s largest newspapers and 40 national websites. An impressive effort. Many believe that the State of Michigan’s transformation into a pro-smart growth state can in large part be traced to the Land Institute’s media framing activities.

Second, we need to reconcile smart growth and the national community development movement.  

For quite some time, the community development movement wouldn’t, or couldn’t, take smart growth seriously. They’ve gotten over it. Witness the excellent piece released last November by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation entitled Smart Communities: Curbing Sprawl at its Core. That report observes:

[There is] a growing harmony between the interests of individual neighborhoods and large metropolitan areas, between resident-led community development groups and broad-based regional coalitions of government, business, and civic organizations. If that merging of interests seems belated or still tentative, it may be because each side has been slow to recognize the accomplishments and potential of the other, and to recalculate its own interests in light of the other’s progress.

Nonetheless, the logic of this partnership between small places and big regions is all but irrefutable. The collaborations, where they have occurred, have nearly always proven more powerful than either side could have hoped for on its own.

The smart growth network knows that. Now the national community development movement does as well. Let’s consummate the deal.

Third, we need to weigh in at a national level.

If we are to achieve payoffs relevant to the scale of the challenge, we have to ratchet up philanthropic commitment to building a national smart growth infrastructure. Easier said than done—just ask Ben Starrett, Paris Glendening, and Don Chen. You all are doing your parts, and that’s terrific. But now foundation leaders have to weigh in—both through increased funding and joint policy work.

That’s exactly what happened with community development through the Living Cities effort. Although I’m not sure my counterparts on the Living Cities board have the energy to replicate that experience for smart growth, then again, they may, or should. I hope this conference will begin in earnest to explore how to get onto the radar of foundation executives. The reception this evening for foundation trustees and senior staff is a good start.

Even if much of the action on smart growth policy is carried out at the state level—and let me emphasize that is a crucial first step, as Ben Starrett’s regional listening sessions made clear—there are occasions when concerted voice on national policy makes sense. We have one sitting on our doorsteps right now: the reauthorization of the federal surface transportation law.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance to regional growth patterns of federal transportation authorities and appropriations. The ISTEA legislation of 1991 and the TEA21 legislation of 1998 ushered in a new era of transportation policy by requiring public participation in transportation planning, by making funding available for new transportation solutions, and by giving states and metropolitan areas greater flexibility in developing transit systems. These authorities have enabled a small, but growing, number of states and metropolitan areas to chart a course of reform.

The challenge in this year’s reauthorization is both to hang onto recent reforms and to enlarge the toolbox available to urban areas that are expanding transit. It’s a critical moment for the smart growth movement. In the words of the Brookings Institution: “Enactment of the first major federal transportation bill of the 21st century should become the seminal moment when Washington truly gets transportation policy right for metropolitan America.”

So we should wade in. A number of your foundations already have, in particular by supporting the leading national advocacy group, the Surface Transportation Policy Project. The Ford, MacArthur, and McKnight Foundations have also underwritten a series of important policy papers on transportation reform coordinated by the Brookings Institution. It behooves us to think even more deliberately about how to enter our collective weight on the scales.

IV. Conclusion

Not exactly a modest agenda. It would be a whole lot easier just to sit back, be very smart, and dabble here and there. But that’s ultimately an exercise in self-congratulation and not much more. I am extraordinarily impressed with all that the Funders’ Network has accomplished in its relatively short lifespan. Those successes strongly affirm my belief that we can—individually and collectively—transform this idea virus into a full-fledged social movement.

I’m betting the next few days will give us plenty of ideas for how to go about that. We’re delighted that you’re here. We trust you’ll find the conference stimulating and useful. And we hope you have a good time.

Thanks very much.

‍