Citiwire.net: Neal Peirce on Self-Taxing and Neighborhood Centers

Georgia’s Metro Breakthrough: Self-Tax Power, Region by Region

By Neal Peirce

For Release Sunday, May 30, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

Atlanta — “Sodom and Gomorrah,” Biblical cities destroyed by God for the sins of their inhabitants, is a term the rural politicos used to apply to villify Atlanta. At county barbecues, they’d rail against the alleged debauchery of Georgia’s lead city.

Habits persist: Even today, the state of Georgia does little for the city that put it on the world economic map. The story’s not totally unique: there’s perennial suspicion, especially in rural and small town areas, of America’s top cities and metropolitan regions — even as these “citistates” become the engines of creative activity that drive entire statewide and U.S. economies.
But in Georgia, the ice has started to melt. With strong bipartisan support from a conservative Republican governor and a liberal Democratic mayor, and with a determined chamber of commerce president leading the campaign, the Georgia Legislature has finally agreed to let the Atlanta region — and in the process others around the state — to vote on whether they want to add a penny sales tax for transportation improvements.

For the Atlanta region, this is close to a make-or-break move. With its spectacular economic growth of recent decades, the area has been convulsed by world-class traffic gridlock. The region’s roadway and anemic public transportation systems lag so seriously that Metropolitan Atlanta is becoming three or four “truncated” labor markets, very difficult to commute in or among. The situation threats to trigger some corporate move-outs and represents a red flag for potential new employers.

Supermarkets as Neighborhood Centers: Vision For a More Walkable America

By Neal Peirce

For Release Sunday, April 18, 2010 (Reprinted May 30)
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

Supermarkets surrounded by acres of asphalt. Push-wagons heavily loaded with groceries wheeled out, the haul stashed in car trunks. Always a drive — often several miles — to get food.

We perfected the buy-and-drive model from the post-World War II expansion onward. But is it necessarily the future?

No, asserts my Seattle friend and urban design planner, Mark Hinshaw. He sees a dramatically transformed role for supermarkets. They’ll actually become the anchors of new and walkable neighborhoods, he predicts in a Planning magazine article co-authored with markets analyst Brian Vanneman.

Why the shift? Americans’ high personal consumption levels were starting to wind down even before the Great Recession. Households have shrunk in size and the population is aging, with more taste for close-by shops and facilities. Many young people are eschewing the scattered suburban pattern in favor of denser urban living. Buying a house on the urban fringe, once seen as a ticket to wealth-building, now looks to be a big risk. Walking for health and weight loss has begun, for many Americans, to outshine the sedentary lifestyle of using an auto for every conceivable errand. And many people are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint.

But are those shifts big enough to let neighborhood-based supermarkets compete with and maybe outpace the drive-only suburban locations? You’ll wonder, as I did.