The Citistates Group

PLANetizen released this week its “Top Ten Planning Issues of 2002” with a look back at controversies of the year. Running a risk only slightly lower than picking the Oscar winners or end-of-year DOW numbers, the Citistates Group looks ahead and suggests the likely dominating issues in American regions for 2003. Read our picks and make fast use of our “Comments” button. Are we on the mark or not?

Zoning and Codes — Deciding the Community DNA
Growth issues are attracting more national coalitions and a fair number of new governors are grabbing the issue by its many horns, even while grappling with huge fiscal problems. But the most interesting and productive 2003 action on growth may lie at the local level as more and more people identify encrusted zoning and building codes as the single biggest barrier to building neighborhoods and communities people say they want. New “form-based” codes presume we can plan the form of our communities without dictating every variety of use. Will this be the next big thing?

Scramble for the Creatives
Richard Florida’s 2002 book, with its tracking statistics, may have made it official. A large proportion of the nation’s knowledge-workers — from techy graphic artists to the high-altitude intellects of the bioscience world — are settling in relatively few American regions. They’re picky and know they have choices. Economic development executives are cracking the code that drives these desirables in an effort to capture a share for every aspiring community. If this realignment is not all pre-determined, what does a smart region do to get its share?

No Cure for Congestion
It now appears that a cure for cancer is more likely than eliminating the mounting congestion in today’s growing regions. With the federal transportation law — TEA-3 — up for reauthorization, 2003 may be the year that the many splintered factions of the transportation world settle on a new consensus, a new balance between roads and transit on the one hand, choices between “vehicle throughput” and local “quality of life” on the other.

Smart Growth Grows Up
At first a fad among planners and architects, then a movement of sorts stimulated by a few politicos and the emergence of the Congress for the New Urbanism, smart growth as an idea is now poised for a mature position in the nation’s politics. As it turns out, many builders are fed up with the same old product. Seniors are looking to stay in or move to neighborhoods where services and shops and good restaurants (and people who aren’t old) are within walking distances. Boomers are looking for choices. The Center for Disease Control says we’d all better walk more and weigh less. Organized labor sees a better future for its members in smart growth. The hottest regional real estate trend is retrofitting town centers into older suburbs — putting a there there. Some of the “Big Box” guys — Home Depot, for example — are putting in smaller stores at street-fronts with sidewalks. Plus, it’s finally started to dawn on many suburbs: without reasonable amounts of affordable housing, where will their teachers and clerks and cops ever live? Employers are starting to ask the same questions. Is smart growth moving from the protest position at the edge to something looking like mainstream thinking? It may be.

No School Reformer Left Behind
The “Leave No Child Behind” law will fracture the school establishment like no recent mandate — suggesting that an alarming number of schools are not as good as previously thought — and that the definitions of the new federal legislation overstress tests and cause grotesque consequences. Meanwhile the menu of efforts to make schools better goes on — from business-led (Chicago, Seattle) pushes for better performance to more liberal choices for kids in poor schools (Milwaukee, Cleveland), to a scaling up of efforts to create a parallel system of schools (Los Angeles) where nothing else seems to work. Where are regionalists to look if they’re convinced the quality of schools and young peoples education is the key to citistate futures?

Homeland Security Comes Home
National defense now reaches to what local officials can do to protect people and property from organized terrorism. Knowing there is a cabinet level department somehow doesn’t matter as much as believing you can go to your local mall or town center or sports stadium without worrying about being blown up. This will require federal recognition that security against sophisticated threats has to embrace hometown homelands. And there’s a big home region challenge, too: local officials agreeing they cannot do what they are expected to do without a level of regional cooperation and synchronization of actions that’s foreign to the historic politics of most towns and cities and counties. The nation’s defense may create more regionalism than anything that’s come before.