Bus Riders Union of Austin, Texas | El Sindicato de Pasajeros

Growth in the Citistate

By Roger Baker
Austin Chronicle
May 20, 1994

Those who went through Austin's last growth boom of the mid-1980s may recall that a sort of religious faith in the city's continuing high rate of growth was provided by John Naisbett and his book Megatrends, promoted by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

This second time around, Mayor Bruce Todd, with other local elite, has invited the new prophet of growth, Neal Pierce, author of the 1993 book Citistates, to the Austin Convention Center June 15. Pierce's speech is titled "Conference on Regional Issues: The Future of Austin and Its Surrounding Region," and addresses a brand new party line advocating a cooperative growth policy - metropolitan regionalism. Chosen members of the public, those considered to be local opinion leaders spanning the political spectrum, are invited.

The political problem facing Austin's movers and shakers is to try to peddle aggressive growth policies to the public in a flashy new bottle labeled "citistate regionalism". But although "no-growther" has become a pejorative, and even progressives are now likely to admit that growth is inevitable and potentially beneficial, there is mounting evidence that, in fact, this growth will bring few benefits to existing residents, whether they be the poor seeking jobs in the inner city or affluent professionals living in the suburbs who have to commute over congested highways.

The idea behind the upcoming conference is to reach a new consensus on growth sponsored by a blue ribbon assortment of Austin's leaders who recently formed into the Austin District Council of the Urban Land Institute . (ADC/ULI), a local franchise of what is perhaps Washington's most prominent urban developer lobby. ADC/ULI members include State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, Austin Mayor Bruce Todd, Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire, University of Texas president Robert Berdahl, Glenn West of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, Pike Powers of AARO (Austin Area Research Organization, a business think tank which helped plan the event), and Austin American-Statesman editor Roger Kintzel, also an AARO member.

The ULI is supported by banks, real estate interests, shopping center developers, and in general by those with a strong interest in the profitability of metropolitan real estate. The ULI folks thrive on profits generated by metropolitan growth. Accordingly, its newsletters pass investment advice on to their members.

For example, the February 1994 issue of Land Use, the Urban Land Institute newsletter, offers the following advice on Austin real estate: "Research by the Prudential Insurance company, which controls $45 billion in U.S. real estate, has identified the potential winners and losers in the 1990s among the country's Edge Cities... that may offer good returns in the 1990s... In Texas [these include] the northwest area of Austin... "

As the vanguard of urban development groups like the ADC/ULI, Pierce's main argument gives authority to the hard growth pattern set by our local leaders. The predominant part of the U.S. economy, says Pierce, is effectively clustering into sprawling metropolises called "citistates", i.e. "the true city of our time, the closely interrelated, geographic, economic, environmental entity that chiefly defines late 20th century civilization." This pattern is shaped by economic factors such as specialized branches of trade, banking, or manufacturing.

There are 30 or so such domestic metropolises blending city and suburb that compete both as domestic and global entities through foreign trade. Together, they now incorporate half the U.S. population. Our own citistate is approximately the turf claimed by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce (an area which grows greater with each year), but is formally defined by our federal planning organization, the Austin Transportation Study Policy Advisory Committee (ATS), as a North-South metropolis centered in Austin along the I-35 corridor from Hays County north to Williamson County and Georgetown.

The ATS Connection

The 17-member ATS group is responsible for directing transportation planning for the Austin metropolitan area, using state and federal funds. The current ATS committee is monopolized by state and Williamson County sprawl beneficiary politicians who greatly outnumber the Austin representatives seated on the committee. The three politicians, who are also on the ADC/ULI - Sen. Barrientos, Mayor Todd, and Judge Aleshire - have all remained silent or supportive as their fellow ATS members move ahead with computer-generated projections of inner Austin stagnation ringed by booming suburbs. From his disengaged response to ATS planning (he has missed four of the seven most recent ATS meetings), it would seem Mayor Bruce Todd's rhetorical support for a compact city would kick in, at best, only after the proposed highways are built.

As evidence to the ATS penchant for promoting and sustaining growth, the latest ATS Transportation Improvement Plan for the years 1995-7 includes $123.6 million approved funds for transportation projects - 98% of those funds are for highway and other roadway expansions. Only 2% was slated for alternative transit or enhancement projects. Over $43 million has already been approved from the previous transportation plan for additions to Highways 183 and 290. $37 million for the Williamson County section of the infamous Outer Loop is up for ATS approval this year.

Our Austin citistate is ultimately doomed to inner-city decline, according to ATS population projections. The latest ATS figures reflect enormous growth outside the city with only 78 new jobs created in the whole inner city of Austin over the next 25 years. (See ATS population map.) Most of the growth, says ATS staff leader Mike Aulick, will be in Williamson County and in southeast Austin near Bergstrom. Aulick says Austin is "in a suburban sprawl trend. If we want to reduce that trend and cut down on roadway expansion, the cities [Austin, Round Rock, Georgetown] have to implement a compact city plan where it's a lot easier to move people around with bicycles, carpooling, and mass transit."

Aulick believes the ATS projections of 1.3-1.5 million population in Austin's regional area by the year 2020 to be right on target and says that any transportation planning should reflect those projections. "With a doubling of our population, we're getting ready to be a big metropolitan area."

The Domino Effect

Pierce's message, which our local ADC/ULI will promote in the June 15 conference, is that we should all work toward common regional interests because the individual citistates tend to rise or fall as a whole. Thus we need a one-big-happy-family type of planning designed to attract more total growth to the Austin metropolitan area. For example, to have geographical partners like Austin and Round Rock fighting over Dell or to have Apple Computer fighting Williamson county commissioners over gay rights generates bad PR that reaches Silicon Valley and does Austin no good in attracting semiconductor company spin-offs and their often young, liberal engineers.

Somehow then, the incorporated central core city of Austin should learn to live in harmony with the likes of Round Rock, and ignore the fact that Round Rock will end up with most of the benefits until finally, it, too, gets overdeveloped. Another edge city would likely be the metroplex sprawling along US183 between MoPac and 620. (Austin's famous Outer Loop, SH45, is being built along 620, as is the portion that intersects MoPac next to Gary Bradley's Circle C development in southwest Austin. The eastern part of the Outer Loop has now been blended into MoKan, a proposed bypass to I-35.)

Pierce and his followers argue that citistates should be encouraged to establish a type of regional cooperation to help other rival citistates in global capitalist competition. Pierce admits in Citistates that there may not be very many good examples to show, but since regional cooperation already occurs in many places to some degree, it is possible at least in theory for edge cities and all the sprawling areas between to cooperate with the center city to max out total regional growth.

Former Austin City Manager Camille Barnett was apparently on board the regionalism bandwagon, too. Last year Barnett released two executive summary-style reports titled Strategic Choices and Strategic Partnerships. These reports strongly promote regional cooperation and revival of the inner city as a means of stimulating the Austin area's regional growth potential. In fact, Strategic Partnerships opens with a quote from Neal Pierce: "The skill and foresight individual citistates bring to laying the groundwork for their future will determine how well they fare in the harsh, exposed new global economy."

In these documents, rapid growth driven by the free market is an assumed goal in the equation of city management - sort of like a weight lifter adding muscle. This goal is to be combined with aggressive annexation, a city manager's equivalent of a miracle drug for urban health, without much attempt at a cost analysis of the final result.

The director of the city's Planning & Development department, Jim Smith, was asked during an April 11 Sierra Club-sponsored meeting if the departure of Camille Barnett would indicate a shift in planning policy. Smith said that probably it would not, because planners still with the city actually wrote major parts of Strategic Partnerships. He also noted that Austin officials had begun to hold meetings with outlying communities like Round Rock to discuss common policies.

A Working Policy?

Can regionalism work to sustain high growth? Probably not, because regionalism fails to deal with important underlying problems. U.S. citistates have a determined life cycle. Small metropolitan areas boom in their early stages when taxes and city service costs are low. Under the prevailing economic and political conditions, overbuilt citistates like Silicon Valley in Santa Clara County, California, become problem-infested over time, bum out, and turn their lead over to fresher areas with lower costs or property taxes. There is a serious growth penalty as citistates increase in size.

Dennis R. Judd has written a book entitled The Politics of American Cities: Private power and Public Policy. He describes what is now a classic American syndrome related to the universal trend toward suburbanization and the concurrent problems of higher taxes and decline in the inner city. "The private institutions of the economy have contributed to the financial problems of the cities. Over the years, private capital has gravitated to the suburban and exurban rings that encircle the cities... This movement of capital has been accompanied by active disinvestment in the old central cities."

This syndrome of metropolitan decline is caused by the unsustainable social and economic side effects of the short-term extraction of profits from real estate investment. Attempts to revitalize the inner city, an oft-repeated campaign issue for Austin's current city council candidates, generally tend to increase public spending and the use of deficit spending to provide city services.

The long-term drawback of regional growth is the tendency for inner-city costs to grow more rapidly than population and tax revenues. This leads to a doomed life cycle for the regional competitiveness of citistates. Sprawling highways and lax state laws regulating growth ensure that urban and suburban real estate investments payoff quickly, but hasten the decline of the central city and soon the whole region.

"Even in the 1980s," Judd writes, "the suburbs still owe their status as viable communities to the central city's labor supply and economic markets. They cannot exist independently. They share a symbiotic relationship with the cities, in which cities too often are the hosts and the suburbs the parasites." Suburbanites, it has been said, live close enough to the city to enjoy its benefits, but not close enough to deal with its problems.

The Silicon Valley Connection

Our "sister" region, Silicon Valley, suffered economic contradictions that are aggravated by a high tech industry base. Austin, in its semiconductor infancy, is showing similar dichotomies. One underlying pattern that we can see in Austin is that the new high tech semiconductor industry being enticed to Austin is poorly matched to the available blue-collar industrial manufacturing skills. An influx of skilled workers is needed from other areas in the U.S., while the industrial worker languishes in underemployment.

According to Annalee Saxenian, from her book Sunbelt/Snowbelt: Urban Development and Regional Restructuring, the enormous growth in Silicon Valley produced a migration of a professional class from other U.S. regions into the suburbs. This generated inner-city traffic that aggravated the problems of poverty, crime, and central city decline. Silicon Valley is now unattractive for manufacturing due to a combination of traffic gridlock, pollution, high taxes, and expensive housing.

Saxenian noticed that the no-growth movement was gaining force and acceptance when the problems associated with Silicon Valley's urban sprawl became too much even for the newcomers. "Ironically, it appears that the no-growth movement in Silicon Valley will thus end up serving the long-run interests of growth. It is now advantageous for the large local firms to follow the exhortations of these no-growth activists - to stop the local growth of manufacturing and to devote ample resources to upgrading the urban environment - in the interest of promoting the future growth of a leaner, more elite sort in the region. Meanwhile, expansion of production is proceeding rapidly elsewhere in the country."

Saxenian even refers to our own fair city as a danger spot for the regional growth dilemma: "New centers of semiconductor production in Roseville, California, in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, in Salt Lake City, in Austin, Texas, and in Colorado Springs, are all experiencing economic booms. All also face dramatic inflation of land and housing values along with increasingly severe transportation congestion and environmental damage. As the industry constitutes its labor force in these new regions, by recruiting professionals and management personnel from afar and by hiring unskilled production workers locally, it is replicating the top-heavy and bifurcated class structure of Santa Clara County. And with it we can expect similar urban problems."

Growth: A Hard Sell

Austin still looks sufficiently good in comparison to Silicon Valley, but for how long?

ATS planners mapping out Austin's future roadways unapologetically assume that much of Austin's new population growth will come from in-migration lured from elsewhere in the country into Austin's suburbs and edge cities. Likewise, the patterns of land investment that the politicians wish to serve forecast that the inner city will stagnate in terms of both jobs and growth.

To shout down Austin's vocal no-growth activists, the local power structure is calling upon Neal Pierce to preach the glory of regional cooperation to attract growth that can be claimed to benefit everyone. The fact is that such growth benefits few existing residents who are not tied to land development. Forget the tree-huggers, Silicon Valley has already faced rapid expansion and the result is that even the corporations there no longer welcome growth. Rapid and uncontrolled growth is a hard sell when it is proven not to benefit the professional suburbanites who have jobs, and who have nothing to gain by seeing themselves surrounded by layers of sprawl. They receive few new benefits from growth to offset higher taxes, increased housing costs, crime, and traffic congestion.

Perhaps then, we should ask why we should encourage growth. If we are going to burn out our citistates on the installment plan, forced to operate under laws that use growth to destroy our regional competitiveness over a few decades, then why not fight to stretch this decline over 50 years, using well-calculated, slow-growth policies and hardball strategies that clearly favor Austin's interests? The citistate regionalists will persist and are primarily focused on maximizing profitable suburban growth as an end in itself, however predictably this policy might decrease the long-range attractiveness and hasten the economic decline of the whole Austin metropolitan area.

Those who wish to review the history of how the urban developers got political control in the Texas Legislature should read Harvey Katz's 1972 book Shadow on the Alamo: New Heroes Fight New Corruption in Texas Politics.