The Big Stories :::

These are some civic issues that are in the news in the nation’s top metro areas today.

What About the Airport?
The problem with U.S. airports is quite simple. After a decline a few years ago (the result of recession and 9/11 security fears), there are once again too many travelers on too many airplanes for many major airports to handle. Result: Flight delays everywhere. Easy answer: Expand the airports and add runways, which would increase capacity. Problem is, nearby neighborhoods are fiercely opposed because of noise and pollution concerns, and with few exceptions, airport expansion programs have been stalemated. Worse, some cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston) put their airport expansion efforts on hold during the air travel downturn. Two cities (Atlanta and Chicago) pressed on. Atlanta's humongous fifth runway addition is completed and will give Hartsfield-Jackson Airport a major competitive edge in the years ahead. (Still, though, there's talk of a second airport, as federal aviation officials look to the decades ahead.) Chicago's O'Hare is further behind with its runway expansion plans (it's still working its way through the maze of approvals needed for these things) but seems likely to break ground in a few years. Forecast: Hartsfield-Jackson and O'Hare, already the number-one and number-two airports in the country, will get bigger yet. As they do, their cities will become known as smart places to locate a company, while Boston and San Francisco wonder why they keep losing their corporate headquarters and professional service firms.

Mayors vs. the Schools
In years past, big-city mayors were thankful for one thing: At least they didn’t have to worry about the schools, which had their own boards and financing. But now mayors are demanding a say in how the schools are run. In some cities (Boston, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Detroit), mayors now either appoint the superintendent or have a say in selecting school board members. In others (Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.), mayors are trying to wrest control. In yet others, mayors have run their own slates of candidates for school board (Los Angeles, Dallas). Cheering the mayors on are business leaders. Why the sudden interest in schools? Mayors have decided that, until the schools improve, the chances of luring middle-class families back to the cities will fail. Business leaders are desperate for skilled workers.

Where Will the Teachers Live?
Every silver lining has its dark cloud. The silver lining for cities in the 1990s and the first half of the current decade was the resurgence of the central city, a result of economic changes (high tech), demographic shifts, the decline of crime and the increasing horror of suburban commuting. Suddenly, long-abandoned inner-city neighborhoods blossomed again with freshly renovated houses and trendy stores and restaurants. What’s wrong with this picture? A sudden surge in rents is chasing out middle-class families, minorities and even arts groups, which depended on the cheap lodgings of the 1980s. In many cities, affordable housing is a now major issue. San Francisco’s school district even considered building rent-subsidized apartments just for teachers. The poster boy for the affordable housing problem may be David Buckmaster, who had to move out of his hometown, San Carlos, near San Francisco, because he couldn't afford it anymore. The irony: Buckmaster was the mayor. The problem is greatest in cities that had healthy downtowns before the 1990s (San Francisco, Boston, Seattle), but it can been seen in most other big cities.

The Long Drive Home
Commuting has become a nightmare in every major metro area, including those, like Detroit, which are not growing fast. There appear to be three reasons: the rising cost of living in-town, which encourages people to live ever farther from work; “big box” retailers, which locate along interstate highways and add to congestion; and a decline in highway construction. The result is gridlock everywhere. Especially striking are the lengths people commute today. Amtrak runs daily trains from Sacramento to the San Francisco, 90 miles away, for commuters willing to spend five hours a day getting to and from work. Another Bay Area phenomenon: a “second car” that is permanently parked near your place of employment, so you can drive to the commuter train, catch the train to a location near where you work, then hop in your second car and drive the last few miles. Places where commuting is among the top concerns include San Francisco, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas. In most places, public transit is adding riders, but not enough to offset the nightmare on the highways.

Help Wanted
As mentioned above, mayors are taking on school districts because they see poor schools as a major barrier to luring families back to the city. But mayors, county commissioners, chambers of commerce and others are taking on a related metro problem: Getting companies the skilled workers they need. What cities are recognizing is that they compete for educated workers – especially young workers – as much as they compete for corporate locations. In fact, the two are directly linked: No workers, no companies. In the dot-com heyday Atlanta was especially active in this area, with its chamber of commerce running radio ads in Boston and Chicago urging high-tech workers to move south. The Tampa Bay Partnership, an economic development group in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., area mounted a similar ad program aimed at engineers in California. But other cities are awakening to the need to compete for young workers. In Pittsburgh, the city and county governments sponsored job training “summits” to address shortages in key industries.  

Quality Is Job One
How do you get techies and yuppies and other desirables to move to your city? Advertising and other marketing efforts help, as Atlanta and Tampa-St. Petersburg are learning. But that only gets people interested. For them to actually move – and, once moved, stay– takes more. This is why so many cities are involved in improving “quality of life,” a nebulous term that includes everything from removing graffiti to restoring parks, lowering crime rates and supporting the arts. Almost every city is involved in some kind of quality of life initiative – Boston with improving its waterfront, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh with supporting the arts, New York with making its streets more civil – but Chicago is most deeply committed to making itself a kinder, gentler place. Mayor Richard M. Daley has launched dozens of initiatives, from planting rooftop gardens to landscaping highway medians. His most inspired idea: a 1999 festival of street art called “Cows on Parade,” which featured 300 cow sculptures placed around the city. More than a million people came to see the cows, and probably a few stayed to work in the wacky Windy City. 

Something in the Air
Another dark cloud behind the silver lining: The places that grew fastest and sprawled most in the 1990s are wrestling with air pollution problems so great that the federal government has cut off – or is threatening to cut off – highway construction funds. Most affected: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Washington, D.C. This is a case where life isn’t necessarily fair. Having a lot of sprawl won’t necessarily cause your area to be in “non-compliance” (violation) of clean air laws. Geography plays a role. Hence, many seaside cities are spared, since the ocean breezes keep the pollution dispersed. But for those with both sprawl and unfortunate geography, the problem is severe. Solutions include rigorous emissions tests for cars, speed limit reductions, cleaner and more expensive gasoline and diesel fuels, a clampdown on factory emissions and efforts to push as many as possible out of cars and into public transit.

Sports Mania
Big cities, it seems, are divided into two groups: those that have built expensive new professional sports stadiums (Baltimore, Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit) and those that want to build them (New York, Minneapolis, San Diego, Miami). There may still be doubts about whether cities ought to be subsidizing these breathtakingly expensive monuments, but no matter. All cities are doing it. Leaders are so committed to keeping their professional teams that no impediment, it seems, can’t be overcome. In Pittsburgh voters rejected a referendum to float bonds for football and baseball stadiums, so leaders went to the state instead – and got the money. In Houston, anti-stadium forces raised such a ruckus about a basketball arena that public officials put it to a referendum. Business leaders mounted a professionally managed campaign and won the vote. Where stadium builders have been checked, it has usually been by neighborhood groups protesting a particular site. Boston was unable to locate a proposed new baseball stadium (new team owners finally settled on making creaky old Fenway Park a little larger and a lot nicer) and citizen opposition to public subsidies has stymied Minneapolis and San Diego. Seattle may lose its basketball team, the Sonics, because of similar opposition.