Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [70]
Any proper urban marketing analysis must also include families with children, the market segment that is hardest for the city to serve. Bringing families downtown is possible only with good schools, and good city schools rarely occur without a consolidated regional school district. Only if city schools are able to share the resources of those in the wealthier suburbs can large numbers of parents be convinced to locate their families downtown.cm When a consolidated school district is not a realistic possibility, cities should take measures to encourage parochial and charter schools downtown, giving them land and other special incentives. It is important to be realistic: revitalization efforts should not focus unduly on bringing families back to the inner city. In truth, many urban neighborhoods do quite well in the absence of children. Of course, the long-term health and diversity of a city is ultimately tied closely to the quality of its schools.
A more difficult issue to tackle is gentrification. At the macroscopic level, activists are justified in their fight against gentrification if it is likely to result in the displacement of tenants. But at the microscopic level of the neighborhood, fighting gentrification is tantamount to fighting improvement; revitalization will not occur without it. Indeed, the challenge faced by most center cities today is not to provide affordable housing—which they typically supply at alarming ratios, thanks to public subsidies—but to create a market for middle-class housing. Cities, after all, cannot flourish without taxpaying residents. For this reason, city planners charged with the task of revitalizing a downtown have little choice but to encourage gentrification or resign from their job. It is sometimes helpful to investigate the source of the complaint: the cry of “gentrification” is less often sounded by citizens who fear displacement than by politicians who suspect that racial and economic integration will undermine their power base.
One technique that has been used to stop gentrification is to limit the rise in tax assessments. But keeping real estate assessments down can be a real problem, as this can prevent home and business owners from obtaining building improvement loans. Once again, fighting gentrification proves counterproductive to the improvement efforts of existing residents. For this reason, governments and activists must turn their attention from stopping gentrification to mitigating its negative impact. Gentrification became a dirty word because it used to occur in the absence of a safety net, and many a displaced tenant in the sixties had nowhere to go. Nowadays, that need not be the case. cn
The above discussion of urban marketing and development implies something that many might find surprising: a proactive municipal government acting in the role of the developer. Rather than waiting for Gerald Hines or Hyatt to come to town, civic leaders must develop a physical vision for their city which they commit to and then actively promote. Rather than being victimized by the self-interests of the private sector, they must determine the type, scale, and quality of new growth and then act as the lead booster for that growth.
This approach seems inescapable when one considers the greater expense and difficulty that developers face when they try to work downtown. As the developer Henry Turley puts it, “It costs $1.25