America's State of Urban Development: Recommendations for the Biden Administration

Urban planning and development in America has historically lacked ideological rigor. While the United States is predominantly urban—and there now exists a growing cohort of urban planners responsible for managing this urban demographic—urban planning remains obscure for most Americans. This is problematic, given that, with few exceptions, almost everything has been planned, from the siting of residential neighborhoods and businesses to economic development and transportation. The ones who truly understand the power of planning have historically been victims of planning injustices, or sought to minimize its effects.

Urban planning has failed to capture the popular imagination of Americans, and the federal government's treatment of urban development as a narrow issue scattered across multiple agencies and workstreams reflects this lack of prioritization. But with a new administration—one that appears more aware of urban-centric issues than most, with a number of Cabinet members serving previously as mayors or city legislators—comes new hope.

At Oxford Urbanists, we call on the Biden administration to stand up a White House Urban Policy Council to serve as a unifying sub-component of the National Economic Council, Domestic Policy Council, Climate Council and National Security Council in order to effectively coordinate all of the federal government's urban programs and assets with an overarching strategy. This working group would promote greater understanding among principals that urban development is a cross-cutting issue carrying significant weight and impact, especially in terms of meeting economic, rural development, regional planning, and foreign policy goals. In addition, there are institutional fixes that could promote a more unified agenda. The following article will delve into each of these issue areas in turn. It is not intended to address every single policy issue across the urban spectrum—a task the new Urban Policy Council would be well-positioned to do—but, rather, highlight a few notable opportunities for policy action in the next four years.

Here’s what they are:

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Institutional Alignment

The Biden administration would do well to corral the wide array of federal resources into a comprehensive urban development strategy underpinned by key values. While many people first think of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for urban work, urban-centered programming abounds across the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Interior, Defense, Energy, Transportation, Treasury, and State, to name just a few; all fund various components of urban, regional, and community development at scale. This list doesn't even consider funding from the Education and Labor Departments that shape the enabling environments for how mobility and human capital advancements can occur within urban spaces.

The Obama White House established an Urban Policy Working Group, under a White House Office of Urban Affairs with inter-governmental authority, to tackle these issues in a unified manner and with significant stakeholder engagement, along with Members of Congress and Congressional committees. The Trump Administration largely let the initiative die, but the incoming Biden team should reinstate it immediately. While the Biden-Harris campaign platform featured a significant focus on housing, the drive to enable more widespread wealth creation will be more successful if implemented in tandem with related initiatives as part of a broader, cohesive urban agenda.

The reality is that urban development is a cross-cutting set of intertwined phenomena touching all areas of contemporary life in the US and beyond. Making significant progress in similar cross-cutting priorities of climate change, racial justice, and pandemic relief and recovery will benefit from greater institutional cohesion moving forward.

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Economic Goals

Facilitating economic growth has been a cornerstone of urban planning. Planners are responsible for ensuring that there are adequate employment opportunities and services to reflect various demographic changes in the short- and long-term future. While cities have various methods to encourage economic growth, we focus on one urgent federal program that can induce economic growth: welfare.

“Acknowledging current deficiencies in how the United States promotes welfare is needed before improving growth in and around cities.”

Urban development’s position within a policy framework can be used to further economic welfare, and it would be a sorely missed opportunity for the next administration to not balance economic welfare with personal well-being. Welfare is a multi-faceted condition, where nutrition, housing, and financial mobility exist together as components, especially in urban environments. This acknowledgement is a departure from previous administrations’ disposition towards welfare and urban well-being, which have been historically treated as separate entities in a vacuum. Acknowledging current deficiencies in how the United States promotes welfare is needed before improving growth in and around cities. Primitive and arguably hostile qualifications need to be replaced by reconfigured eligibility standards for nutrition and housing assistance programs, as well as targeting different households in the urban area as federal beneficiaries.

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Housing

Progress towards improved public urban policy requires acknowledging urbanization’s relationship with tenure and tenancy both inside and outside of city limits. Urban densities are typically defined as areas with more than 1,000 people per square mile, or 1.6 people per acre. 38 million acres were settled at urban densities, but nearly ten times that much land was settled for exurban densities. The prevalence of low-to-high exurban densities (1 house per 40 acres, to 1 house per 10 acres) has steadily increased from 1960 to 2010, demonstrating a growth in American land usage both inside and outside of cities, per Census figures.

According to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, 3.6 million eviction cases on average are filed each year in the United States. Between 2000 and 2016, the number of evictions recorded increased by 25 percent, which may be attributed to the 27 percent rise in rented households. Evictions have been found in concentrations around large cities, including “high poverty areas.” The most concerning relationship eviction rates have is with the Black population, as evictions increase alongside related demographic increases.

The rise in rented households is most prominent in younger Americans. A deeper examination in the United States Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey reveals that more than 50 percent of owners in both urban and urbanized areas are over the age of 44, and that urban homeownership is most commonly attributed to a household income greater than $100,000. Rural home ownership is more affordable, with larger representation in household income brackets less than $100,000 than urban and urbanized households.

Exurban densities are attributed to sprawl. Trailing cheaper rents, lower-earning income households settle proportionally away from metropolitan and urban centers. These households that spend a majority of their workday within an urban municipality will return to their household outside of the urban and metropolitan boundaries, which are still prey to evictions and above-market value rent.

The demographics behind who contributes to production in a city, who lives in a city, and who travels to a city are fluid. However, racial bias and generational gaps in ownership are static reminders that the United States has overlooked a growing problem. Younger households have a higher median income in rural areas, but lose out to more mature, higher-earning individuals in the race for city property. Income disparity grows not just between different geographic areas, but in age groups as well, amplifying the racial divide in income and household ownership.

Mitigating the lost opportunity in not owning urban property may require housing assistance based on race and age for first-time home ownership. While intense cohabitation is incentivized by programs like SNAP (or food assistance), it would be a healthier consequence of a housing finance program that offers assistance based on a fixed income and fixed density that grew as the household grew.

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Environmental Justice

Rising sea levels are threatening much of America’s coastal cities. However, the threat of climate change extends far beyond America’s coasts. Warming climates is projected to lead to increased flooding and longer and stronger droughts in America’s midwest. The effect on urban livelihoods are also worsened with declining nutrition resulting from less fertile land and decreasing biodiversity. These challenges have already marshaled a host of cities to recruit ‘resiliency planners’ who specialize in minimizing urban risks and negative externalities.

Entrepreneurial solutions to climate adaptation are growing, though their implementation has been spatially uneven. Recent studies suggest that higher-income areas are more likely to receive risk mitigation measures, while poorer neighborhoods are excluded from these benefits. This is not entirely surprising, since POC and low-income residents have historically been victims to environmental hazards. An influential report in 1987 found that, independent of class, race was the strongest factor in establishing proximity to hazardous commercial sites. A study using the most recent 2010 census data shows that in areas where hazardous wastes have been removed, an environmental form of gentrification is occurring.

Efforts towards curbing environmental hazards and others engendered by climate change must be cognizant of spatial and racial inequalities. This could involve integrating the urban poor and other communities stakeholders meaningfully in key roles. The federal government can make resource allocation contingent on the degree of spatial or racial inequities that are addressed through climate adaptation projects.

“But equity can’t just be a slogan.”

Infrastructure—particularly as it relates to transportation—could be the best frontier to make that happen. The Biden administration has a window of opportunity unlike any in recent memory to make good on revamping America’s broken state of infrastructure: rail; road; freight; metro; energy grids; etc. The president-elect helped write the last major infrastructure spending in America—the Obama administration’s 2009 stimulus package—and holds a slim Democratic majority to make it happen. He has also arranged a potential Cabinet of legislators with substantial urban backgrounds, namely Rep. Marcia Fudge (at HUD) and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (at USDOT).

Equity is built into the president-elect’s ‘Build Back Better’ platform, and serious changes at these executive agencies—which have largely remained unchanged since they were created—could have significant impacts on the ground. The administration should learn from the previous mistakes of the 2009 bill, which overlooked climate equity and workforce development, and aim to use this opportunity to mark a new chapter forward for agencies that long perpetuated environmental injustices, whether directly or indirectly, through outdated policies.

Instead of highway-building, the USDOT should be centered around better, greener urban transport, and 21st century railway connections, ideally inter-urban and with rural America in mind. Big infrastructure projects, like the Gateway tunnel between New York and New Jersey, require an executive sign-off, but could double as a basis for new green skills training. HUD should rethink what public housing can be, mirroring the Green New Deal version for housing that has been introduced. And the Department of Agriculture could be a launchpad for carbon sequestration at scale. Real portfolio change could happen if fundamental shifts occur in these agencies’ mission statements. But equity can’t just be a slogan.

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Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide

Since the decline in manufacturing in the ‘Rust Belt,’ cities have experienced waves of growth and decline as a consequence of greater labor mobility and demographic shifts. A similar phenomenon can be observed in rural settings suffering from economic decline and population loss. However, not all cities experience similar issues, and not all rural areas encounter economic hardships.

In areas that have suffered economic decline or stagnation, migrants have become economic drivers, often supplying the necessary labor for manufacturing. In Nebraska, for example, rural towns often have higher demand than supply of labor and frequently struggle to fill seasonal and year-round agriculture jobs as well as higher-paid occupations such as health care workers. For rural states like Nebraska, continuing its refugee placement program and encouraging international migration should be a key priority. Attracting rural employment is one matter, but maintaining it becomes a consequent challenge.

The Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design has done exemplary work connecting small-town residents to generate actionable plans. Much of these have been placemaking initiatives intended to improve the identity and livability of communities. Here, opportunities exist between city and rural residents, including urban artists, to establish collective work. This extends to the possibility of new initiatives, such as small-scale urban farming, in which urban entrepreneurs can connect rural goods to niche urban markets.

“A sustainable future is dependent on the success of rural America and how it can effectively transform current economic practices.”

While there may be no shortage of entrepreneurship, resources are needed to bridge the urban-rural divide. This already exists in some form, such as the Rural Opportunity Zones and loans and grants furnished through USDA Rural Development. More recently, calls for a Green New Deal (GND)—an ambitious economic, social, political, and environmental agenda—has generated newfound enthusiasm. A coalition called US Ranchers and Farmers for the GND elaborated ways in which it can enhance rural economic growth. While the GND may not have been initially focused on rural areas, rural development is necessary to achieve much of the outlined goals, like clean air and water; climate and community resiliency; and healthy food. Even as skeptics are concerned with the GND’s potential ramifications on industrial processes, the envisaged Deal can encourage new farming innovations for a growing and diversifying consumer market. A sustainable future is dependent on the success of rural America and how it can effectively transform current economic practices.

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Regional and Territorial Planning

Even as the GND offers promises as a policy tool for economic development, the urban and rural divide still suffer from the friction of distance. Recent studies on the spatial distribution of populations across U.S. cities show that some cities may not be sufficiently sized given inefficient migration. An effective public transportation and infrastructure program may be one way to promote even development.

As cities have gained new attention as the battleground for sustainable development, cities are becoming increasingly connected given population growth, and could benefit from greater federal coordination. Successful application of regional planning can be observed in the metropolitan areas of New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New Orleans. However, regional planning remains an elusive goal since “regions” do not exist in the American policy discourse, nor are elections regional. Elections are instead run on a federal, state and local level, and the lack of regional representation results in hyper-competitive cities. Currently few incentives exist for regional collaboration, but the consequence of inaction is easily apparent.

Inter-city competition has been a cornerstone of economic development strategies, yet has also committed municipalities into barely lucrative positions. Cities seek to provide better employment opportunities, local amenities, diverse services, and generous tax incentives to attract middle-to upper-class residents and businesses and strengthen the local revenue base. While conventional economic wisdom would suggest that competition would enable efficient outcomes, the recent commercial bid for the new Amazon HQ2 demonstrated how efficiency may not necessarily result in prosperity, just or equitable outcomes for urban residents.

A report from the Urban Institute argues that competition between municipalities can quickly become “a race to the bottom.” Furthermore, they say that hyper-competition can “undermine public resources and long-run regional economic competitiveness, with high costs to communities.” This would suggest that the purported economic gains and employment growth from a new Amazon headquarters may not be commensurate with the billions in tax deductions, nor the negative externalities branded as the “Amazon effect.” A White House Urban Policy Council can be the bridge that connects disparate but highly interconnected municipalities and their representatives.

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Urban-Led Foreign Policy

The United States is the largest bilateral donor country in the world, committing $47 billion across 12,000 projects in 2019. A diverse range of agencies manage different pockets of overseas aid, ranging from the Peace Corps to the US Department of Agriculture, though the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is the most prolific institution commonly associated with foreign aid. Notwithstanding the significant budget for overseas security operations managed by the Department of Defense, the US development budget has traditionally focused on key sectors: democracy and governance, health, education, and the environment.

The need to maintain global security, combat terrorism, and advance American interests abroad have been the justification for the the United States’ foreign assistance. While Congress establishes the budget and often influences priorities, USAID takes policy direction from the National Security Council. In practice, the overseas development agenda is forgiving and aspires to achieve much more normative and laudable goals of eradicating global poverty, achieving universal primary education, and promoting access to basic health services. Much of these investments concentrate in rural areas across multiple partner countries.

Those familiar with USAID would not deny that the agency has a longstanding rural bias to development. This focus on rural development is a legacy of the 1973 Foreign Assistance Act, in which Congress exerted pressure on the then-burgeoning agency to channel funding to the world’s ‘poor majority.’ USAID had interpreted this as the “rural majority,” since the majority of USAID’s presence had been in predominantly rural countries. As some scholars have argued, “USAID development efforts have for many years have been dominated by rural oriented agriculturalists... The continued emphasis in USAID was on moving efforts out of the cities into the countryside.” An assessment of the agency’s 2013 Urban Policy, which sought to enhance urban service delivery worldwide, revealed that it was the least adopted policy out of other policies and strategies introduced during the same time period between 2014-2018.

Since the introduction of the UN Sustainable Development Goals on “sustainable human settlements,” there has been renewed attention paid to cities, particularly mayors, as critical players in achieving sustainable development. But even while other major donors have intensified its development assistance in urban contexts, USAID has maintained its historical focus on rural development. This is due to a number of reasons: the lack of Congressional budgeting for urban development; limited agency experience in the urban sector; and the absence of leadership prioritization.

While cities can hardly be the single solution to global sustainability, it is clear that cities around the world are fraught with managerial crises that makes achieving global goals more elusive than a close reality. In countries ranging from Ethiopia to the Philippines, where local governments are a newer phenomenon than Microsoft, local development is complicated by managerial, planning and budgeting issues that are also common in domestic contexts. The difference is the speed and scale to which cities in emerging economies are growing and the urgency required necessary to accommodate a proliferating urban population. USAID’s historical presence and development experience can be leveraged for greater urban investments.

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Throughout the Biden administration’s first 100 days in office, the North American team at Oxford Urbanists intends to publish in-depth articles and analysis into specific issues raised in this outlook. We aim to heighten conversations around the immense challenges U.S. cities face, and potential solutions forward as a new day dawns in Washington. Stay tuned.

Oxford UrbanistsJanuary 15, 2021North AmericaComment