An Assessment of the Commercial Club's Metropolis 2020 Plan
With goals to improve education, child care, transportation, land use, the environment, neighborhoods, housing, governance, and the economy in the six county region, the document, Metropolis 2020: Preparing Metropolitan Chicago for the21st Century (Chicago: The Commercial Club of Chicago, January 1999), hopes to recast the city along regional lines.
The plan originated with members of the Commercial Club of Chicago. This is the same organization that sponsored the famous 1909 Plan of Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham and others eight decades ago. The Burnham plan focused on the aesthetics of the city, including street layouts around parks and Boulevards. It was a landmark of "physical planning." The Metropolis 2020 plan is largely a regional economic development plan. It is less concerned about the exactitudes of physical planning, and more concerned with larger planning issues such as governance, transportation and housing development, as well as some of the social and economic issues that plague the region, especially the city of Chicago.
To its credit, the program recognizes that the Chicago Metropolitan Region cannot be segmented or stratified between suburban municipalities and the city. It rightly challenges the propensity of municipalities to compete with each other for development dollars and revenues. While we support the regional character of the plan, we have some questions about governance and how these issues will be resolved. While some Mayors accuse the author of the plan as being too "socialistic" in advocating some form of revenue sharing among suburban municipalities, other Mayors sound a virtually religious support of a regional concept. According to Dean Koldenhoven, Mayor of Palos Heights, Illinois:
Even so, the plan assumes the preeminent place of big business in determining the future of the Region. Writes Elmer W. Johnson, principle author of the plan. "No functions should be performed by government that can better be performed in the private sector; and no functions should be carried out by federal, state, or regional government if those functions can be well performed by local government" (Metropolis 2020, 11). This bias is suspicious of the central planning role of local government, and it ignores features of democratic participation from the standpoint of neighborhood organizations or other civic communities in the region. In short, it is a corporate-sponsored plan designed to protect business interests regionally, especially those of the East-West Tollway corridor.
The Metropolis 2020 plan seeks to address a wide range of interconnected issues facing the Chicago Metropolitan area. Members of the Commercial Club who helped shape the Plan include Chairman John Madigan, CEO of the Tribune Company; Richard Thomas, former Chairman of First Chicago Corporation; Michael Moskow, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; Adele Smith Simmons, outgoing President of the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation; Charles Shaw, The Charles W. Shaw Company, developer; James Kackley, Arthur Anderson Worldwide; Jerry Perlman, former CEO of Zenith Electronics Corp.; Hyatt Hotels tycoon, Nicholas J. Pritzker; Lisle Village President, Ronald S. Ghilardi; George Ranney, Jr., former President of Inland Steel; and Elmer W. Johnson, writer of the report, former partner in the law firm, Kirkland and Ellis, and now president of the Washington D.C.-based Aspen Institute (Crain's Chicago Business, June 7, 1999).
Ranney, Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Metropolis project, states that the central problem connected with the Region is that it is too fragmented politically, making it impossible to develop an interregional plan with teeth to get much done. There is much concurrence on this. Political scientist Dick Simpson of the University of Illinois at Chicago has argued that governmental fragmentation is the largest impediment to regional governance (Future of Chicago,1993). In a recent study by the Civic Federation, it was noted that Cook County alone suffers from inefficient governance due to its having 517 separate governments that imposed taxes on residents, as of the 1996 tax year, up from 510 governmental units in 1986. This includes 149 municipalities, 216 special districts, and 152 school districts. Regionwide there are some 270 municipalities. Statewide, there are 6,722 units of governance, more than any state in the union (Crain's Chicago Business, June 14, 1999).
George Ranney, Jr., who helped create the Regional Transportation Authority in 1974, insists that some form of regional governance is essential. Among political scientists, there is much to be said for some form of regional consolidation as described by Myron Orfield's Metro Politics. Ranney acknowledges that regional bodies such as the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS), the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), and the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) have served important roles, but have not really done the job in terms of pressing for substantive change on a regional basis. There is a need for "coordinated regional planning," states Ranney. The problem is that "the state has mandated that almost all functions related to land use, environmental and some transportation planning be separated among hundreds of different entities in our region" (Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1999).
Ranney and members of the project call for the establishment of a Regional Coordinating Council (RCC) by the State of Illinois that would replace the functions of NIPC, CATS and the RTA. This Council would have the authority to shape policy regionally around some critical issues. First, land use powers would be coordinated in order to curtail excessive low-density development. Second, the Council would explore ways to increase funding for education regionwide, which would mean some form of revenue sharing among municipalities. Third, the Council would explore ways to raise the cost of operating motor vehicles in the region, to better approximate the actual costs of automobile usage which are heavily subsidized (Copley's News Service, March 1, 1999).
A fifteen member Executive Council would implement the plan over the next 20 years. This of course raises questions as to how the Executive Council would be developed? Would it be voted in or appointed? The planners opt for a hybrid, a "confederation approach" whereby each of the 270 municipalities would vote according to its relative population. However, the process seems less than democratic in that "an appointed blue-ribbon nominating commission would select 45 candidates for the 15 offices, taking into account the distribution of the population across the region" (Metropolis 2020, 100). This process seems to this writer as cumbersome at best.
Ranney is also a collaborator with the East-West Corporate Association, which represents businesses and corporations along the East-West Tollway (Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1999). Much in the plan is designed to address some of the principle issues facing corporate business in the Western suburbs. To the credit of these businesses, they now recognize that environmental and development policies are negatively impacting the region's.
In particular, problems of suburban sprawl, low-density development, infrastructure costs, and transportation gridlock must be addressed if the region is going to remain globally competitive in the near future.
Elmer Johnson, the primary writer of the report, is the author of a previous book, Avoiding the Collision of Cities and Cars (1993), which argues that our policy heavily subsidizes individual automobile usage. Johnson argues for "tough love" that seeks to reduce congestion and promote cleaner air. He recognizes that Americans have a deep-seated cultural pattern, which needs to be addressed. Americans have a
Johnson represents the convergence of thinking with regard to what some are now calling as "smart growth." To combat congestion in the Western Suburbs and elsewhere, he proposes a variety of measures that lay at the heart of the Metropolis 2020 plan with regard to mass transit. First, he calls for a rethinking of intermodal transit to develop it especially in connection with high-density settlements. This would mean discouraging low-density development in outlying areas, and calling for industry and corporate headquarters and their plants to locate only where there exists a ready infrastructure. Low-density development forces commuters to use the private automobile, and this is already a critical problem.
At issue is how to move workers to where the jobs are. This means building affordable housing regionwide and providing necessary mass transit for commuting workers. He proposes extensions for the Blue Line Elevated train along the East-West Tollway and out to Schaumburg. In order to curtail the use of the private automobile, Johnson suggests that we tax the use of roads; increase parking, toll and registration fees; increase gasoline taxes; and instill "calming measures" such as road bumps on roads adjacent to Expressways to discourage automobile use. Of course, this would have to be accompanied by the development of alternative forms of public transportation, and the development of high-density residential communities as pointed out above. For Johnson, HOV lanes have not worked, and he proposes converting such lanes for mass transit usage. Plans for a new airport and for high-speed rail need careful scrutiny and more citizen input to assess the costs and benefits to taxpayers.
If governance and transportation are critical to a new way of thinking regionally, the Metropolis 2020 plan also seeks to address some of the pressing social conditions of the region, especially in the central city, including education, workforce development, racial and spatial segregation, child care and the environment. On education, the plan celebrates the efforts of the Mayor since 1995 when the 15 member School Board was dissolved and replaced by a five-member Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees appointed by the Mayor (seven members beginning July 1, 1999).
Most reform organizations in the city would argue that much of the improvement has to do with parental involvement and the activism of Local School Councils (LSCs). However, to the credit of the Mayor, a system-wide authority to place on probation schools that were not doing the job has contributed to a mechanism that supports higher achievement. In the process, the Teacher's Union has been "constrained" and the control of financing is shifting away from the LSCs to more centralized control by the "Chicago School Reform Board." Still, necessary resources are scarce, and the scores for most of the pupils in the system are still well below the nation's average. Yes, there is a smoother bureaucracy, but how effective the system is in terms of educational achievement is questionable.
Most troubling to this writer is the whole discussion with regard to school choice and the use of vouchers. While vouchers sound good in theory, meaning an increase in school choice, we have questions as to what might be the real impact of school vouchers. How will vouchers be financed? What transportation system will exist to help those who choose a school beyond their region? What will be the outcome for the neighborhood school, logically closest to where students live? And, what will happen once the most desirable schools are filled with the top students? Or what will the "voucher" actually purchase? Will $1000 be enough, or $5,000 or $10,000? It might be cheaper to address the needs of the neighborhood school, and eliminate transportation and other logistical nightmares. Further, 10-12 Charter Schools citywide are not nearly enough to address the scale of the problem for the city, even if they prove successful.
Another issue addressed briefly in the plan is that of workforce development. The report acknowledges that we must address issues of regional competitiveness in a global economy. While the rate of unemployment in the region is low, around 4.5-4.7%, there are still some significant problems. With the transformation of the local economy from a heavy manufacturing to a high-tech, information-based, service economy, a different set of skills is required of workers. There are several problems connected with the workforce. First, the education of the populace is low on the whole. Over 25% of adults in the region lack a high school education. We must be able to produce an educated workforce to contribute to the region's competitiveness. Second, if the pool of workers available, even if educated, cannot live close to where the new jobs are (affordable housing), or cannot get to those jobs (mass transit), then it will be hard for corporations to grow, or for the region to attract new businesses. The proposal to develop the workforce is a good one, but by whom? This would mean a substantial new infusion of funds to educate this population, build transit systems and to relocate this population to high-density residential communities with existing infrastructure.
Thomas Geoghegan, in his new book, The Secret Lives of Citizens (1998), points out that, in 1996, the city of Chicago was destroying two city blocks of private housing weekly. There is quite a stock of empty lots and abandoned dwellings in the city limits of the city. If tax issues can be addressed, such vacant land could be developed pretty close to that needed by industry today. There exists an extensive rail network for the movement of goods and products. Various forms of mass transit for commuters are already in place. And third, a ready workplace already resides in the city, though in need of training and education. Since the infrastructure is already in place, it might be cost effective to concentrate resources on workforce development and the development of affordable housing rather than building a new infrastructure and new transit options.
Government has a larger role to play as a partner with business than the plan allows. We are not convinced that private business is smarter than its government or the citizenry in assessing these core problems or coming up with workable solutions. Can the business community in an environment of high volatility, unbridled competitiveness, and merger mania really lead the region? Not exclusively! We advocate a partnership with the public and not for profit sectors for maximal effectiveness.
The same can be said for economic development strategies. Michael Porter, an urban economist cited in this report, has helped business and government leaders recognize the economic potential of urban, particularly inner city areas. However, Porter underestimates the activity, skill, vision, and even resources that are at work daily in all but the most destitute communities of Chicago. One may only travel to South Shore, to Eighteenth Street in Pilsen or 26th Street in Little Village, or Devon Street in Rogers Park, or 87th and 95th streets on the Far South Side, or any of the six corner neighborhoods in the city to note the intensity of business activity. And this activity includes a combination of anchor chain stores and local entrepreneurs.
While large multinational corporations play a critical role, we note that small business development is the larger creator of jobs and economic opportunity for the American population. It is arrogant to assume or to ignore the presence of these resources as they already exist in Chicago and other regional economies. Recently, Jeremy Rifkin, author of The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post Market Era (1995) argued that the future of the global economy would have to pay more attention to the critical role of the third sector, the so-called social sector in urban places. It is encouraging to see that the Commercial Club recognizes that issues such as workforce development, environmental protect, affordable housing, accessible mass transit and other issues are critical when considering the economic needs of the region.
The not for profit sector has built some 10,000 units of affordable housing in Chicagoland in the past few decades. With the bent toward profit maximization on the part of private developers, and the abdication of government in terms of developing and maintaining affordable housing, it is to the not for profits that we must turn for solutions to and resources for these problems. The corporate sector can do much to improve the region, but it will do it much better if the discussions connected with the Metropolis 2020 project more intentionally includes leaders from each of the other critical sectors of our society.