Metropolitan Resilience in a Time of Economic Turmoil

What Now?

what now? The authors of the white papers (and the chapters in this book), the discussants at the UIC Urban Forum panels, and the moderators identified, debated, and discussed a broad range of possible policy experiments for the future resilience of the metropolitan region. Drawing on suggestions and recommendations , we offer the following synopsis of possible policy experiments determine how to build the local social safety net in an era of Fiscal Constraint • Strategies for strengthening the social safety net include improving take-up of federal social benefits, especially in immigrant communities ; • building coherent regional systems for delivering services; • strengthening the role of metropolitan planning organizations and community development financial institutions in creating regional systems for services; • devising new federal programs to work with regional nonprofits and philanthropy to address the special problems of highly distressed suburbs and cities; • reengaging local governments as advocates for federal programs that support low-income residents, such as the TANF Emergency Fund, which allowed states to create subsidized jobs for TANF recipients . • Enhance data collection on municipal activities that can be analyzed and shared with others. 176 policy experiments • Support “family-supporting wages” or livable wages. • States should invest more in workforce development, social services, better safety nets. determine what Constitutes resilient economic development: Challenges and opportunities • Identify and devote resources to develop a sober assessment of the prevailing landscape, with a focus on weaknesses and opportunities. • Establish a small committee of leaders tasked with identifying organizations with adequate capacity to take a leadership role in the execution of the on-going economic development strategy. • Encourage regular bilateral and multilateral meetings between “unnatural ” bedfellows. • Cities can be leaders of a region’s renaissance. • Reduce municipal reliance on business incentives. • Invest in basic infrastructure that benefits the entire community today and in the future. • Better design community college and high school curricula to target opportunities for employment. • Economic investment activities must be created with the understanding that the city and region are connected to the broader global economy. Identify how Cities Collaborate while Competing in the new economy • Local government officials need to be sensitive not just to economies of scale, but also to possible positive and negative spillovers across governments and functional areas that may first appear to be unrelated to each other. • The choices for addressing regional governance issues go beyond conventional comparisons of political markets and regional institutions. • Local actors design collaborative mechanisms to reduce collaboration risks and to make commitments more credible and binding. • Local policy makers and administrators need to create new venues and take advantage of existing venues that provide opportunities for face-to-face interactions with both competitors and collaborators in order to build knowledge and social capital that can advance their collective interest. what now? 177 • Decision makers need to be aware that the efficiency advantages of self-organizing mechanisms may come at the cost of increased service inequality across jurisdictions. • City size matters in creating partnerships, and formal or informal arrangements may be pursued, depending on city size. • Some issues cannot be resolved by bilateral negotiations; instead, regional solutions to intractable issues (e.g., sprawl) are warranted. determine the legacy Costs of earlier decisions • Create a new deputy directorship and office at CBO for state and local finance that would be the center point for a consortium of federal offices and agencies that disseminate the types of data, research, and analysis that are needed as inputs to a system of regular online, userfriendly reports and studies on state-local finance. • The consortium should lead in these ways and others to provide comparative across-the-board data and analysis. It should also conduct and sponsor special studies in major functional areas of government. • Any public-private partnership to support infrastructure development must be transparent and subject to public debate and consideration ; there must be adequate oversight; and the regulation of the private partner must be in the public’s interest. • Design better means for assessing the long-term planning and fiscal implications of public-private partnerships. • Consider developing a national infrastructure bank. • Infrastructure may be overbuilt due to the opportunity to postpone payments for repair to another generation of users and payers, which may require downsizing. • Better design and target federal and state grants for infrastructure such that overbuilding is not stimulated but right-size building is. • Responsibly fund state and local pensions. Each city and metropolitan region is unique. Its demographics, employment structure, the...