Competitive Communities are embracing regional strategies. It is easy to agree that there is benefit to a region working together. Understanding how regionalism should work and the obstacles that exist to implementing an effective regional strategy is more complicated. Concentrated poverty is perhaps the biggest among a long list of obstacles. Incentives that encourage these pockets of community disinvestments work against regional cooperation including: tax policies, infrastructure investment strategies and fragmented local governments. Current regional efforts encourage competing local governments to waste shrinking public resources. Finding ways to efficiently develop thoughtful plans for regions operating in this distrustful working environment is no small challenge.

Tax reform, land use reform and metropolitan governance reform are categories of recommendations from Myron Orfield in a 2003 Ameregis book summary publication, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality . This research utilizes cluster analysis and GIS mapping of the 25 largest metropolitan areas to group suburban areas by several fiscal characteristics. Two significant factors are "needs" as defined by school populations and "resources" measured by tax capacity. The analysis identified six types of suburban communities, three of which are considered at risk:

·At risk, segregated (high poverty, lowest tax capacity, slowest or negative growth, aging physical conditions, higher densities and highest percentage of minorities in schools)
·At risk, older (low tax capacity, slow or no growth, higher density, aging physical conditions and low poverty)
·At risk, low density (low tax capacity, high poverty and increasing growth - transitional from rural or farmland to suburban; low resources stretched by increasing infrastructure demands)
·Bedroom developing (rapidly growing affluent white population with average or below average tax capacity resources - moderately at risk)
·Affluent job centers and Very affluent job centers (affluent residents, more than 2 to 5 times the average tax base, low poverty and more office space per household than central city with intense traffic congestion and little open space)

More and more communities are attempting to improve the efficiency of their economic development efforts by organizing regional strategies. One of the keys to successful regional initiatives is to understand how regions work by identifying inefficiencies and inequities. Agreeing on the problems is the first step in building consensus for solutions. The following are several instructive statements from the summary document text that support the case for regional change:

"Regions where population density in the urbanized areas declined the most tend to show the greatest degrees of racial segregation and tax-base inequality."

"A strong, accountable regional governing body is an essential part of a comprehensive regional reform plan...Whether an MPO with expanded authority or some other regional body."

At-Risk Developed Suburbs
"The residential resources of at-risk developed suburbs are often deteriorating or threatened by rapid change on their borders. A strong, well-implemented housing plan that requires newer suburbs to take more responsibility for affordable housing is the only way to avoid this downward transition. Such a plan takes pressure off the older suburbs and prevents the concentration of poverty and decline in these places. Once older declining suburbs understand that they already have more than their fair share of affordable housing, they can use a good regional housing plan as a powerful defensive strategy to maintain their communities' stability."

The Developing Suburbs
"While bedroom-developing communities are places of comparatively low poverty and diversity, their children- per-household ratio is very high. Throughout the country, at-risk low-density suburbs spend less per pupil than districts in other types of metropolitan communities...In chasing after development to make up for the lack of a local tax base, developing communities tend to neglect the provision of infrastructure that will eventually be needed but will be more costly to provide retroactively once development is in place...Sprawl is another problem of particular concern to residents of bedroom-developing suburbs. Most of the local initiatives to curb growth have been in these places. But a single community can have little effect on the growth of a region. Acting alone, a community is not only unlikely to solve its own growth-related problems but is likely to impose higher costs on the region when it tries."

Affluent Job Centers
"Despite their low poverty rates and high fiscal capacities, affluent job centers are not immune from problems caused by the prevailing pattern of regional development. Because they are intense centers of job growth, these communities are often troubled by higher rates of congestion than other suburban areas, particularly in the country's fast-growth regions. Open space is harder to preserve in these communities, because land becomes very valuable. In the most extreme cases, suburban "edge cities" can become as densely urban and congested as city business districts."

"A new metropolitics must understand the diversity of U.S. suburbs and build a broad bipartisan movement for greater regional cooperation. If metropolitics does not succeed, our metropolitan regions will continue to become more unequal, and more energy will be spent growing against ourselves."

Also check out the web site for Myron Orfield's research companies, Metropolitan Area Research Corporation and Ameregis. You can order Orfield books American Metropolitics or Metropolitics from the Brookings Institute.

Do City Income Sources affect Growth Policies? and Smart Money Invests in "Competitive Communities" are related entries on Competitive Communities.