The Citistates Group

CURT JOHNSON: In Boston last week, I ran into David Luberoff, who’s just been named to succeed Charles Euchner at Harvard’s Rappaport Center. Luberoff handed me a working paper entitled Civic Leadership and the Big Dig (PDF). My oxymoron meter must have flashed because he quickly said, “No, this is really worth looking at. It’s a niche approach for business, organizing around a particular project.” Luberoff was describing something called the Artery Business Committee (ABC) — a group of 60 business types who rode herd for 15 years on the project to put the I-93 interstate underground and release 27 acres of prime downtown land.

A day later I listened to Steve Adams, who in his role as head of the Boston’s Pioneer Institute, was sure to have a contrarian view of this. He did. “Does it occur to anyone that this is the last vestige of the old business civic model, mostly designed to keep the public from seeing the problems too closely?”

Ric Dimino heads the ABC . So I asked him, which is it? Is the ABC a leading edge of a new form of business in public affairs or a vestigial reminder of how things were once done? His answer: “It’s both.”
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ROBERT LANG: Humorist Will Rogers once famously observed that people should buy land because “they don’t make it anymore.” That message resonates with home buyers in some of the nation’s most land constrained metropolitan areas. The National Association of Realtors’ house price data for 2004 shows price spikes in places where land supplies are short (see USA Today for the data).

In Las Vegas the price of a median price home jumped over half (52.4 percent) in just one year (from mid 2003 to 2004), the biggest gain for any metro area in the nation. Ironically, Las Vegas would seem a place of vast open spaces with lots of land to develop, but most of that space is owned by the federal government which must transfer it to private developers. But the transfer has occurred to slowly to keep pace with the region’s rapid development and as a result lot prices have shot up.
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NEAL PEIRCE. Is the charter school movement — or its equivalent — really an international one, based partly on rebellion against unionized school systems, partly on developing modern technology?

The thought occurred to me after my recent column on how statistics dug out of federal sources by the American Federation of Teachers had seemed to give our nationwide charter school movement a black eye. A particularly interesting response came from Enrique Penalosa, the very progressive and inventive former mayor of Bogota, Colombia:
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