Seizing City Assets: Ten Steps to Urban Land Reform

O ver the past few years, the policy discussion on urban development has shifted as conditions in cities have improved. The conversation about cities, which once focused on their problems and failures, is today centered on new markets, community capitalism, and the creation of healthy downtowns and neighborhoods. For the first time in several decades, urban leaders have an opportunity to build from strengths that in many cities had been largely overshadowed by fiscal crises and devastating social problems. The dominant reality of most metropolitan areas, however, continues to be the decentralization of population and employment. Many central cities and older suburbs are still struggling to compete with newer, outlying communities for jobs and residents. In fact, across the largest 100 U.S. metropolitan areas, only 22 percent of people, on average, work within three miles of the central city, while a third work ten or more miles away. This is not surprising, given that, in the aggregate, suburban population growth continued to outpace that of cities during the 1990s. Perhaps as a backlash to suburbanization, there appears to be a renewed interest in cities as a place to live and work. A 2001 study of 24 U.S. cities revealed that 18 saw a rise in their downtown population during the 1990s, and center cities throughout the country are experiencing a Seizing City Assets: Ten Steps to Urban Land Reform