Transcript
ALSO AVAILABLE: Full Transcript of Vice President Gore's Speech
MODERATOR: Our honored guest is the Vice President of the United States, Al Gore. Mr. Gore will be addressing today the problems that our metropolitan centers face as they encounter sprawling growth and a myriad of uncoordinated policies and programs that often result in a crippling effect on our city centers and their surrounding suburbs.
Bruce Katz, who is the director of our new Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, is with us today, and I can think of no better person to begin our program than Bruce. In part, because of Bruce's work here at Brookings, these issues are very much in the forefront of our work, and we take great pride in our new center. Bruce has spent a good portion of his career working on the problems of cities, most recently as chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
So, let me thank you for coming, and turn the podium over to Bruce.
(Applause.)
MR. KATZ: Thanks Bailey.
I want to reiterate her welcome to all of you, particularly for those folks who came from out of town. The gold medal goes to State Senator Myron Orfield from Minnesota who, because of the Northwest Airlines strike, actually had to drive three-and-a-half hours to Des Moines, Iowa, to catch a flight. So, Myron, take a bow.
(Applause.)
It's nothing to do with sprawl, it's just the airline strike. It is a privilege and honor for Brookings today to host Vice President Al Gore's address on one of our major domestic challenges: unsustainable growth in our metropolitan areas. As all of you know, because you work on it, or you write about it, or you drive through it, we are experiencing a fundamental transformation of the American landscape. Visit any metropolitan area in the United States, and you will see the same development patterns over and over again: hyper-growth at the fringe, that place we used to call the countryside, coupled with slower growth or even decline in our central cities and our older suburbs.
For years, a handful of scholars and civic leaders have been warning us that this kind of growth does not come without costs. Now, a wide cross-section of local, regional, and state leaders — corporate, civic, community, political, environmental — are forming new metropolitan coalitions to respond to some brutal realities.
Our central cities look better than they have for decades, but they are harboring more and more of the nation's poor, particularly the minority poor, who are now isolated from new jobs and the best schools. Our older suburbs are increasingly having central city-like problems without any of the benefits, like waterfront areas, central business districts, and cultural attractions. The countryside is disappearing. What was open space is now the development frontier, and the outer suburbs, even those areas that are enjoying the benefit of growth, are swamped with congestion, and overcrowded schools.
The new metropolitan coalitions come at this issue with varied backgrounds and for different reasons. But what they have in common is the realization that our growth patterns are not sustainable, nor are they inevitable. This is not just the marketplace working its will. Governments, be they local, county, state, or federal, also shape and subsidize how and where we grow. Today, we will hear from four speakers, a farm preservation advocate, a community leader, a county executive, and a mayor, who are working to change the way their communities are growing.
But, most importantly, we will hear from the Vice President, who will discuss how the administration is prepared to engage on this issue.
I would now like the other speakers to come up to the stage. Ralph Grossi, Jacky Grimshaw, Claude Ramsey, and Jon Kinsey. They will be speaking in just a minute. But now I would like you to join me in welcoming the Vice President of the United States, Al Gore.
(Applause.)
Our first speaker will be Ralph Grossi. Ralph has served as president of the American Farmland Trust since 1985. As a third-generation farmer and rancher, Ralph knows first-hand about the connections between urban growth and rural America. Ralph is one of the key voices in the country today talking about the impact of the loss of farmland on the economy, on the environment, on our national quality of life.
MR. GROSSI: Good afternoon. My father and I farm just a stone's throw from the nearest subdivision north of San Francisco. I know first-hand about urban sprawl and its consequences for agriculture, the environment, and the economy. As a farmer and a taxpayer, who also enjoys hunting, fishing, and the great outdoors, I have a stake in how my community grows, particularly if development gets out of control and impacts upon productive farmland.
This is the very reason I volunteered my services as a board member when the American Farmland Trust was formed 18 years ago. Most people don't appreciate the challenges of farming in the shadows of suburbia, nor do they realize that three-quarters of the fruit, vegetables, and dairy products grown in this country are produced on farms near our cities. That's because our ancestors were pretty smart people. They settled where the best land was. But those small farm towns have now become sizeable cities, consuming land at an alarming rate.
While protecting locally grown food supplies is important in our community, so too are the other products that farms provide. On our farm everything from majestic redwoods to a wide variety of wildlife, from valley quail to mountain lions shares its scenic open space with our cattle. Like most farmers and ranchers, we try to be good stewards by protecting and improving the habitat that so many plant and animal species can call it home. And we use best management practices to safeguard the watershed. Everyone downstream benefits because our greenfields haven't turned into acres of pavement.
Land owners often refer to their last crop as being houses. But when that results in inefficient, land-consuming subdivisions, strip malls, and freeways, wildlife and water quality decline. And so, too, does the value of our tax dollars as scattered development increases the cost of providing public services like water and sewer systems, police, fire protection, and schools. Cows, on the other hand, don't go to school.
Study after study shows that agriculture demands less in services than it pays in property taxes, and that smart growth, efficient, people-oriented development can save taxes. Unfortunately, agriculture is too often seen as a temporary use of the land, until it can be put to a higher and better use, ignoring the fact that it is a renewable, wealth-generator for the community year after year.
The American Farmland Trust has been working hard with communities across the country to help protect this nation's best farmland, an essential complement of any smart growth strategy. An example is Fresno County, California, the nation's top producing farm county. (Incidentally, the top producing farm county 40 years ago was Los Angeles County.) In Fresno, AFT brought together a partnership with the farm bureau, the chamber of commerce, the building industry association, and urban, suburban and rural interests, to analyze that region's growth, take a hard look at their development policies, and recommend changes that will protect the best land and benefit us all agriculturally, environmentally, and economically.
Every community in America needs to go through this process. They need to plan for the future of agriculture. And while these issues need to be worked out at the local level, we think the federal government must play a role, because smart growth is a national challenge. And for that we applaud Vice President Gore for calling attention to it. We also recognize that it will be much harder to save farmland with all of its benefits unless we also revitalize our cities, making them more attractive places to live.
Here to talk about that is Jackie Grimshaw. Jackie works for the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, where she coordinates transportation and air quality programs. She has been a community advocate for over 30 years, and is a nationally recognized expert on smart growth and low income community development. Please welcome Jacky Grimshaw.
(Applause.)
MS. GRIMSHAW: My thanks to Brookings and the Vice President for the chance to reflect on what's smart about smart growth. Will Rogers once said, "Stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?" It used to be that after housing, the number two family expense was food. And in the '70s, we even talked about the choice between heating and eating. But, while energy and food prices dropped, we spread out faster than we actually grew, and transportation became the number two household expense.
Why did this happen? From 1970 to 1990, Chicago's land use grew 55 percent, while its population grew only 4 percent, but daily travel increased 49 percent. Spreading out like this meant that the shopping wasn't local, the school wasn't across the street, the streetcar was gone, and there were fewer buses and trains. So we drove more. The more we drove, the more it cost. The more cost, the less we could pay for better homes and education for our kids. The more time stuck in traffic, the less time we had for family and neighborhood. Instead of riding, we were sliding economically, socially, environmentally.
Those of us who stayed in our hometowns knew that access counts. So, in the '70s, we convinced banks to reinvest, and it was smart business. In the '80s states and cities found that sprawl really cost, and cooperation was smart politics. In the '90s, businesses saw the competitive advantage of the inner city, and it was good. This year, after a six-year experiment with the fix-it-first policy called ISTEA, Congress resoundingly found that place really does matter for everyone. The Transportation Equity Act was not named by accident. So, how can we use it to help people and communities?
Mr. Vice President, in another 10 years or so, when you may be ready to leave Washington, we want you to consider moving to Chicago, where grassroots community groups in the city and suburbs work together, and where we use ISTEA to rebuild instead of tearing down an El line. We use the Internet to show the value of transit-based community. We use federal planning processes to put together a city, suburban, and rural coalition.
TEA-21 helps cities and suburbs work together to finance new transit projects. Better transit can make whole generations of new and existing Americans eligible for the American dream. And stopping unnecessary roads and utilities means more money for better schools and safer communities. Seven out of 10 job openings in the next 10 years will be replacement jobs. This means that most openings for people getting off welfare will be relatively convenient. Let's use TEA-21 to build smart networks for welfare-to-work without a car.
I used to be in politics, but I quit to show how empowered communities can lead to cleaner air. I'm tired of seeing kids grow up with reduced lung capacity and dying early. And I am not alone. If we're smart about how we grow, we can give our kids a healthy environment. If we build regional coalitions, we can find better solutions, and transportation equity can help communities bring home the benefits of sustainable development.
A people- and community-first strategy can help us set the goals we need to do things together, jobs and the environment, cities and suburbs, people and places. We applaud you today, Mr. Vice President, for your renewed commitment to these smart goals.
And to talk about how regional coalitions can work, I want to bring up for you Mr. Claude Ramsey, who is the Hamilton County, Tennessee, County Executive, who works closely with the Mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jon Kinsey, who has placed a high value on smart growth practices in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
(Applause.)
MR. RAMSEY: Mr. Vice President, distinguished visitors and guests, the good things that have happened in the Chattanooga-Hamilton County section of Southeast Tennessee in recent years resulted mainly from what I like to think of as an unlimited partnership. My definition of an unlimited partnership is one whose partners will not allow progress to be limited by a mindless adherence to policies and practices of the past. The key partner in our community's unlimited partnership has been the private sector. Our business and industrial leaders have acted boldly and decisively to coordinate their private objectives with the efforts and responsibilities of local government.
Local, state, and federal governments have a long record of working well together in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, but the innovation and energy of the private sector have produced the special harmony. East Gate, a 30-year-old mall area in Chattanooga has suffered an 80 percent decline in tax revenues in recent years. The partnership was instrumental in bringing East Gate a new industry with 1,000 good jobs, helping to reverse the negative trend. The southern portion of downtown Chattanooga has been revitalized by a new sports stadium and the trade center's expansion. The project was initiated and strongly supported by the private sector. City, county, and state governments helped, along with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
We also have benefitted greatly from the Southeast Tennessee Development District, an agency funded largely by the federal government. That agency devised an innovative way to save a century-old downtown manufacturing company from bankruptcy, with the added benefit of cleaning up an unsightly brownfield for reuse.
The Chattanooga-Hamilton County partnership is currently reaching southward to Atlanta and northward to Oak Ridge. We're working with officials of those cities, and local and state and federal governments toward a high-speed railway between Chattanooga and Atlanta and for a technological corridor with Oak Ridge. Locally, our main project is development of a 7,000 acre tract of land, now owned by the federal government, that's inside the City of Chattanooga. The entire unlimited partnership, city, county, state, federal governments, and the private sector is cooperating and shifting the property to local governments and the private sector for commercial development. We believe the potential for that property is, like the partnership, unlimited.
MAYOR KINSEY: Mr. Vice President, my thanks to you, as well, for the leadership in this issue. And it is a real privilege for me to represent the city and the people of the City of Chattanooga here today. The cooperation between the local governments and the City of Chattanooga and Hamilton County have earned us this spot here today, and we're proud of our growing reputation as a community committed to smart growth. Getting all our citizens involved in collaboration has been critical to our success. But, we really can't talk about local cooperation without mentioning the level of cooperation we have received from the Clinton-Gore Administration and the important role they have played by articulating a sensible urban policy.
Smart growth starts with transportation, because transportation drives development. We have seen clear examples across the country of ways in which transportation decisions have impacted development, both positively and negatively. But, Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater and this administration are to be commended for embracing a philosophy that recognizes transportation is not about moving automobiles, it's about moving people.
Sadly, there are many in the transportation planning business who have not yet embraced this concept. Chattanoogans believe that smart growth will be enhanced if our community plans beyond the boundaries that have traditionally limited our thinking. Therefore, regionalism has become a dominant theme in our discussions. In large part because of our two-state metropolitan statistical area. Chattanooga's five-county MSA comprises two counties in Tennessee, and three in North Georgia. This has forced us to look beyond the once impenetrable state borders.
Our commitment to regional thinking has resulted in one of the boldest dreams that Chattanoogans and our neighbors to the south, Atlanta, and everyone in between have ever conceived: a high-speed rail system that will deliver significant numbers of people between and among our communities, a system that exemplifies the notion that transportation is about moving people rather than automobiles. Our vision will be driven by the people of Southeast Tennessee and North Georgia. In the next few months we will conduct a series of public planning meetings to let our citizens express their ideas and their concerns about this wonderful initiative. We're confident that it will prove once again that when you get the public involved good things happen.
Again, thank you for paying us the honor of being here today. And it is now my great pleasure to present to you a fellow Tennessean, the Vice President of the United States Al Gore, Jr.
(Applause.)
VICE PRESIDENT GORE: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much.
It's a real honor to be here at Brookings, and I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to Mayor Kinsey and County Executive Ramsey for letting me brag on them and some of their colleagues around the country. And thank you very much for your kind words of introduction, and your framing of this whole issue.
I want to thank Bruce Katz, Director and Senior Fellow on Urban and Metropolitan Policy here at Brookings. Bailey Morris-Eck, Vice President for Communications, thank you. And don't ever underestimate that vice president position in any organization. Ralph Grossi of the American Farmland Trust, thank you for your leadership on these topics. And I'm going to say some more about what we need to do to protect and preserve farmland here. Jackie Grimshaw, thank you, that was a very eloquent statement, and I've enjoyed working with you and many of your colleagues in Chicago, and Mayor Daley, and President John Stroger and others.
I want to acknowledge Congressman Paul Kanjorski, of Pennsylvania who is here. One of the things I'll be talking about a little bit later involves new information systems that can empower communities, and Paul's been a great leader on that, as on other matters. And the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, a great friend, Richard Rominger is here, and he's been a leader in these efforts. And I saw him nodding pretty vigorously, Ralph, when you talked about how Los Angeles County used to be the most productive agricultural county in the country. And actually, Rich has brought a wonderful California perspective to the Agriculture Department.
And I want to thank, in absentia, Secretary Glickman, and Secretary Babbit, and Secretary Slater, and really every member of the President's Cabinet in addition to them, all of whom have been involved in this effort to rethink how we approach this whole set of issues.
Mayor William Morrisette of Springfield, Oregon, is here somewhere. Mayor, thank you very much. And thank you for participating in the discussions yesterday. Many Americans have had Springfield in their prayers, and thank you for your leadership.
Adele Simmons, President of the MacArthur Foundation, and Scott Bernstein of the president's council on sustainable development, Barry Zigas of Fannie Mae, there are a lot of distinguished guests here. And I look around and see a lot of leaders in this field and I'm grateful for the chance to share some ideas with you.
ALSO AVAILABLE:
Full Transcript of Vice Preident Gore's Speech