This article in the Washington Post titled The High Rise of the First Metropolitan Candidate is another of the few that really jump out to me, and speak to me as a proponent of urban development in a major US metropolitan area. Anyone who lives in Central Ohio, should give this a read. Here are a few choice snippets:
Is Obama’s ascent a further sign — on top of volatile gas prices, plummeting home values in the exurbs and recent population upticks even in Baltimore and Newark — that our cities are back and that the country is making peace with its non-agrarian side? And would a big-city president address as never before the problems of our urban cores — blighted housing, shoddy public transit, dismal schools?
Obama partisans answer both questions in the affirmative — with a key qualifier. The Democratic nominee, they say, should be viewed less as the first urban candidate in a long time than as the first metropolitan candidate — a semantic distinction suggesting that the urban resurgence has a ways to go.
His style is as urbane as American politics get — blazers with no tie, the slow stride across the stage. His political base is even more urban than is typical for a Democrat, while he struggles with rural voters despite playing up his mother’s Kansas roots. One of the first interest groups he met with after securing the Democratic nomination in June was an alliance of bicycling advocates. Yet Obama has hardly adopted the sort of agenda we’ve come to expect from urban candidates — much to the consternation of some of his supporters. With his organizer background, he could have cast himself as a knight riding to the rescue of cities neglected by Republican administrations. Instead, he has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types — promoting America’s cities based on their strengths, not their failings. Cities, he argues, are now melded to their suburbs, and, taken as a whole, America’s metro areas are the “backbone of regional growth,” as he put it in a June speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Washington remains trapped in an earlier era,” he said, “wedded to an outdated ‘urban’ agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas, an agenda that confuses anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy, and ends up hurting both.”
Obama’s emphasis on the metro instead of the city is based in reality: The old lines are blurring as employment patterns have scattered across regions, poverty is growing faster in many suburbs than it is downtown, and more immigrants are settling in the ‘burbs. A recent report by the Brookings Institution found that the top 100 metro areas generate three-quarters of the country’s economic output while covering 12 percent of its land area.
But casting Obama’s urban agenda in metropolitan terms also has political benefits. Although the country has re-embraced the city, its political battleground remains the suburbs, said Robert Lang, a demographer at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute. If elected, he says, Obama should find ways to address urban problems in a suburban context — focusing not just on West Baltimore or North Philadelphia, say, but also on suburban North Las Vegas, which has more concentrated poverty than Las Vegas proper. The same goes for spending on public transit. “If he frames something like that as being about metro competitiveness, he can do a lot,” Lang said. “It should be, ‘Hey, suburban guy sitting in traffic, would you like transit?’ instead of ‘I’m going to take your money and spend it in places you don’t visit.’”