Urbanophile on the Brookings Institution’s “State of Metropolitan America”

The Urbanophile, always worth reading, has a post about The Brookings’ Institution’s report on the State of Metropolitan America. Cities within regions are diverse and don’t necessarily share the same problems simply because they’re geographically near one another. “Columbus is not Toledo.” Brookings recommends an approach where federal government deals with some national issues on its own but lets a lot of the detail work fall to cities themselves. One problem with this approach, that the Urbanophile notes, is that this effectively means putting policy in the hands of the states which have a tendency toward hostility toward municipalities:

Generally I’m a fan of devolution. However, in this case what we are really talking about is devolving de facto to the states. And as we’ve seen repeatedly, state governments are to varying degrees implicitly or explicitly hostile to cities. There are almost no effective or empowered regional entities in America and municipalities are often hamstrung by state laws that limit their ability to deal with their own problems. In a choice between federal vs. state government, I’m usually a state and local kind of guy, but when it comes to metro policy, I’d probably have to say the feds are more likely to get it right, alas.

In Indiana, local government is micromanaged to a large degree from Indianapolis. One popular tactic recently (and quite possibly for a long time) is to impose a list of requirements and severely limit the available methods for paying – all but mandating that local government officials vote for a particular funding option (e.g. raising local option income taxes to deal with property tax freezes coupled with the state mandated requirement of paying for various local services.)

Also of note, the Urbanophile points out that “healthy” cities in the area – Indianapolis and Pittsburgh – have experienced a good deal of increase in their immigrant population and have seen their population with educational degrees increase. One difference between Indy and Pittsburgh is the under-18 population. Indianapolis seems to have a healthy number of youngsters whereas Pittsburgh is aging.

(That ‘under-18’ statistic makes me think of a post for another day. I wonder how the ‘families make adults’ v. ‘adults make families’ culture war debates play out in terms of immigrant populations. A lot of the youthful vitality in American cities these days comes from immigrant populations with larger families; but these populations are more likely to vote “blue.”)