From the Atlantic: How America’s Coastal Cities Left the Heartland Behind St. Louis and other Midwestern hubs prospered for much of the 20th century. Then lawmakers in Washington quietly changed the rules of the economy.

Here's a look at how seemingly unrelated laws passed by the national government can have an impact on the viability of cities. They help some, hurt others. Helps explain why cities lobby the national government.

The article highlights a variety of laws, each is worth a look. The article wraps its analysis around the advertising business that once thrived in St. Louis.

- Click here for the article.

The relative decline of St. Louis—along with that of other similarly endowed heartland cities—is therefore not simply, or even primarily, a story of deindustrialization. The larger explanation involves how presidents and lawmakers in both parties, influenced by a handful of economists and legal scholars, quietly altered federal competition policies, antitrust laws, and enforcement measures over a period of 30 years. These changes, which enabled the same kind of predatory corporate behavior that took the Rams away from St. Louis, also robbed the metro area of a vibrant economy, and of hundreds of locally based companies. This economic uprooting, still all but unaddressed by today’s politicians or presidential candidates, accounts for much of the relative stagnation of other Middle American communities, and for much of the anger roiling voters this election cycle. The rise and fall of St. Louis’s advertising industry stands as a cautionary tale for what ails so many of America’s once vigorous and innovative cities.

. . . While these diverse companies were homegrown and locally based, they often owed their existence as independent entities to government policy, especially in Washington. As all students of high-school history will recall, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries powerful “trusts” run by financiers like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould grabbed monopoly control of railroads, steel production, meatpacking, electrical utilities, and other industries. Their actions often thwarted local economies—St. Louis a prime example. In 1881, for instance, Gould won control of St. Louis’s famous Eads Bridge, a major crossing point for rail over the Mississippi. The high tariffs Gould charged led rail companies to re-route through Chicago, leading the Windy City to emerge as the Midwest’s dominant industrial center.

The behavior of the trusts ignited the Populist and Progressive movements, which in turn led to a series of laws that safeguarded independent businesses in cities like St. Louis from the predations of monopolists, and encouraged regional equity.

From the Houston Chronicle: Don't blame Mother Nature for flooding. Blame City Council. The disasters are predictable. Why aren't we preventing them?

Rain doesn't necessarily lead to flooding, unless there is nowhere for water to go due to careless development. That seems to be the point of this opinion piece.

- Click here for it.

Man-made, preventable flooding has surged dirty, sewage-ridden water through Houston living rooms three times now in seven years, yet city government fails to prevent these recurring emergencies.

Really? If losing homes, livelihoods, retirement savings, health and sanity (and at least one life) aren't reasons enough to make emergency detention and drainage improvements, what in the world does it take?

Right now, too many real-estate developments do not detain storm water run-off from their new construction, and instead allow it to flow downstream into other neighborhoods, into people's homes. This new development is responsible for unnecessary flooding of neighborhoods that previously weren't flood plains, weren't prone to flooding. That new development is also responsible for flood insurance rising 100 to 200 percent (before the Tax Day flood) in these non-flood plains.

City government is allowing this to happen. Developers use loopholes and grandfathering to avoid doing what the city's laws require them to do. Is it ethical to allow a new office building to flood an entire neighborhood even if a loophole makes it legal?

And why on earth would a developer be allowed to use tax money (yours and mine) to build the stormwater detention required by law as part of a profit-making project? New development on the north side of I-10 and Gessner is using the already-stressed Conrad Sauer detention basin for a spiffy retail/residential complex under construction. The deal is an interesting card trick: They are making a few improvements to the basin, adding a little drainage near it and — especially important — are going to make the basin look pretty with trails and landscape for their future tenants/residents. They'll get paid back $23 million (taxpayer dollars) for doing this. So they really didn't pay for anything.

For seven years Houston homeowners have begged and pleaded with the mayor (previous and present) and City Council members to treat man-made flooding as urgent, as if it were a deadly fire to put out in a hurry. Yet despite hundreds of emails, calls, meetings, petitions from homeowners' associations (at least 18), Super Neighborhoods, civic associations, and person-after-exhausted-person speaking at City Hall, there is more talk about bike trails and recycling than critical, focused action to address our flooding.

Annexation History - Planning and Development Department - City of Houston

Its dangerous to get in the way Houston

The Houston Chronicle has a fun photo spread on some old towns that were swallowed up by an ever expanding Houston.

It helps explain many of the names of neighborhoods and highways around the city.

It reminds me that one of the many aspects of municipal government that we did not get into this semester was extra territorial jurisdiction, which refers to the rules related to annexation - something Houston has done since its inception in 1836.

Some related stories:

- Annexation Plan - Houston.
- Control in the ETJ.
- Katy plans to talk with Houston about annexation.

World class skate park breaks ground in North Houston

In its ongoing effort to be seen as a world class city, as well as an international destination, Houston - the Mayor's office anyway - has recently announced the development of the nation's largest - and the world's second largest, skate park. Here is a previous press release about the project. It'll join an already completed one near downtown.



Click here for more press releases from Houston's mayor. You'll notice that many are focused on the same theme. We are world class!

But do skateparks really benefit cities?

- The Tony Hawk Foundation says yes they do (big surprise).
- Suburban Rails agrees.
- As does Stand up for Skateparks.

There appears to be quite the advocacy network in the nation promoting skateparks. I was unaware. Nothing that I've seen yet points to an actual study with empirical proof that they increase the local economy, but they look pretty cool. They also gives kids things to do. Cities are probably interested in luring kids to the parks because if they don't skate there, they'll shread up downtown. This is probably subtle social control.

The concrete industry probably likes these things too.

Street Level Politics

Literally.

From the Chron comes a claim that the cohesion of cities often comes down to street layouts, and that there is a conflict between what is good for the residents of a subdivision and the city at large:

Streets, with rare exceptions, aren't very sexy. Yet, they are the basic building blocks of cities, and if they don't work well, nothing else is likely to work well, either.

Blogger Andrew Burleson applies this principle to my colleague Bradley Olson's story about a controversial partial street closure. Burleson's pitch for an "urban network" illustrates how a desire for privacy (no cut-through traffic!) doesn't always promote healthy neighborhoods.

Manvel Candidates Forum

Last night we (ACC) co-hosted along with the Alvin-Manvel Chamber of Commerce a forum for the candidates for Manvel's mayor, two city council positions, two Alvin Independent School District positions and two positions in for the Brazoria Navigation District.

I have opinions on which candidates did better than others but will hold my tongue in order to stay friends with everyone. As a general rule of thumb though, it's a good idea to prepare and have things to say prior to arrival.

I've posted a link to a voice recording of the forum on my class home page. Any locals, or anyone else interested in the concerns of a small Texas town undergoing tremendous change might find it worthwhile. The tape cut out after an hour and a half for some reason though, so the last hour was not recorded.

For those unaware of Manvel's existence (you know who you are) it's small in population, huge in area, and strategically located at the crossroads of two under-developed, but developing, highways 20 miles south of Houston. Major national developers are streaming in because Houston's expansion has been mostly to the north and west, and is close to being tapped out. The east has not witnessed much growth because Galveston Bay, the Port of Houston, and/or the chemical plants are in the way. This leaves the south as the only option available, and the recent growth has been significant.

Manvel is either the beneficiary or the victim depending on your attitude towards growth, and its inevitability was the primary topic of the forum.

Decisions made now will condition the city's future. Seldom do people have the opportunity to have lasting impacts on their community's future, but that's what the current leadership of Manvel can do. How much leeway will the developers have? How large will the lot sizes be? How large must the street be? What impact will all this have on drainage? What tax rates will be assessed? How might the city's charter be altered to compensate for the increased size? What financing structure works best?

There's no going back once these decisions have been made. The current mayor, Delores Martin, stated that Manvel's population may triple in the next 5-10 years due to the subdivisions now being built and planned.

Heady days indeed. And a great case study of a community in transition.

More to come.