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"Land Use and Cool Cities"

Granholm Initiatives Link Sprawl, Racism, and Public Awareness

By Brian McKenna
October/November Issue, 2003

Part I

--- Also see Part II

A pair of black sunglasses in a leatherette eyeglass case, on it a picture of a scantily clad woman. That was Governor Jennifer Granholm’s gift to about 400 attendees of the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Policy Council conference last May at Mackinac Island. The purpose was to announce the governor’s new “Bright Future/Cool Cities” initiative, intended to attract hip, well-educated professionals to live in Michigan cities.

Regarding the female imagery, Granholm spokeswoman Liz Boyd later told the Lansing State Journal, “[The governor] said it was a good thing she wasn’t doing the artwork. That’s not what she would have chosen.” The glasses were donated by two Detroit-area advertising firms.

One wonders what artwork might go best with the campaign.

Seventy years ago the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera painted spellbinding portraits of factory workers on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was a time before the Great Sprawl era, when Detroit’s working class families – despite their difficult lives – enjoyed closely-knit communities where home, work, shopping and social life were much more easily accessible by foot or mass transit than they are today. It was a time of worker solidarity and civic pride when “mixed-use neighborhoods” were more common. Rivera’s murals here hip and cool then and remain so today, being one of the most popular attractions in the city.

Maybe a Rivera fresco would be a better “Cool Cities” choice.

Discos & Clean Air

Governor Granholm welcomes your thoughts on these matters. In September, she asked the mayors of more than 250 Michigan cities to help her focus on ways to make cities “more attractive for new jobs and new citizens.” Granholm wants cities to convene local advisory groups to generate ideas.

In Lansing, Mayor Tony Benavides told City Pulse that he wants to create “a five-star restaurant ... and a disco for the youth.” But Pat Hudson, the director of East Lansing’s Urban Options, an environmental group, has a different idea. He told the Pulse that “it would be a very cool thing to market, if the city could prove that the air is getting cleaner,” perhaps marketing a child who suffered less frequent asthma problems.

Disco fever or clean air.
Cool is in the eyes of the beholder.

“Michigan’s Land, Michigan’s Future”

Beneath the entertaining discussion of cool cities is a more obscure debate – a nuts and bolts analysis about what is actually going on with Michigan’s land use. On August 18, just six months after its formation by the Governor, a bipartisan, 26-member Michigan Land Use Leadership Council – co-chaired by former Republican Governor William Milliken and former Democratic Attorney General Frank Kelly – released its final report, “Michigan’s Land, Michigan’s Future.”

The council provided more than 150 recommendations to the governor and the legislature “designed to minimize the impact of current land use trends on Michigan’s environment and economy.” Cool and hip cities were just one topic of many in a study that also identified education, racism, and particularly, sprawl, as important land use issues.

#006699

We’ll get to the report in a second. First we turn to another artist, a cinematic muralist of our times, whose imagery delivers a message about land use without pictures of scantily clad women. The artist is Flint native Michael Moore. In his hip and cool 2002 Academy Award winning film, “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore tells the story of Tamarla Owens, an African-American woman forced by the State of Michigan to travel by bus 80 miles a day as part of its welfare-to-work program. Owens worked 70 hours a week at two minimum wage jobs to support herself and her 6-year-old son, but that wasn’t enough money to cover living expenses and she was evicted from her Flint home. She moved in with her brother, and her son found a gun in the house, took it to Buell Elementary School and shot a 6-year-old girl to death. Moore argued that if Ms. Owens had kept her own home or had been able to work closer to home, this tragedy would probably have never happened.

Moore, like Rivera, believes that it’s important to capture the underlying – and often ignored – themes from within contemporary history as subjects for art. They use the power of art to educate, knowing that art can reveal to us new modes of perception and feeling which can jolt us out of our habitual ways.

There are thousands of upsets and tragedies like the Tamarla Owens story occurring daily across Michigan. The state’s economic portrait is not pretty. Michigan lost 170,000 manufacturing jobs over the past two years. It has a 7.4% unemployment rate and its poverty rate just shot up to 10.5%. During President Bush’s tenure, the number of Michigan families on welfare has increased by 10,000 and food stamp requests have gone up by 125,000.

Will Cool Cities and the Land Use initiative alter the tide? It might, if we do some hard work and actually study and debate the issue. Let’s take a closer look at the Milliken/Kelly report.

Granholm’s 2003 Land Use Council: A Way Out?

The council members were not simply the usual suspects, but represented a wide gamut of institutional perspectives. Among the organizations participating were the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, West Michigan Strategic Alliance, New Designs for Growth, Michigan Municipal League, Michigan Home Builders Association, Crystal Mountain Resort, Michigan Townships Association, Westvaco Papers Group, Michigan Environmental Council, The Nature Conservancy, M.O.S.E.S., Michigan Land Use Institute, Wolverine Power, the Detroit NAACP, Michigan Association of Realtors, the Michigan Farm Bureau, and four state legislators.

As noted above, the report refreshingly identified racism as an important sprawl-related issue. “While not necessarily the primary force leading to sprawl in Michigan, [it] can be an impediment to revitalizing Michigan cities unless it is forthrightly addressed in the development of government policies and programs. Whether expressed subtly through exclusionary zoning practices, or more explicitly through attacks on our cities and those who live there, it is wrong. Efforts to divide Michigan by race or class hinder our progress.”

In addition to its strong words denouncing racism, there were several other good ideas gracing its pages. These included support for mass transit, day care, job training, improved housing, homeownership projects (establishing a Michigan Housing and Community Development Trust Fund), better consumer protection laws, improved government services for new immigrants, government-sponsored low interest loans, biological diversity (including the interdepartmental coordination called for in The Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act, 451), local governments to adopt better aesthetic controls, control of billboards, and a public education campaign “to help citizens better understand the implications of continuation of land use trends.” But most of the 150-plus ideas were presented abstractly with no tangible objectives or identified funding sources.

Significantly the report noted that Michigan has “no state statutory authority for joint planning or joint zoning for those cities that wish to do so cooperatively.” It underscores that “there are no adopted state land use goals to guide state agency, regional, county, or local land use decisions as in other states.”

Historic Thunderbolt

The report is a historic thunderbolt in Michigan politics. Its rhetoric reminds one, in parts, of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, announcing its intent to fulfill “three fundamental goals: economic prosperity, stewardship of the environment and cultural and natural resources, and equitable distribution of benefits to all residents.”

“If it reads like that it’s because these are American values,” said Mark Wyckoff, president of the Planning and Zoning Center and a council staff member who contributed much to the final report.

“The world is intertwined,” said Wyckoff, “it is completely interconnected.” One land use issue necessarily overlaps with others because “what we’re dealing with is messy.” The initiative is a chance for citizens to gain a better appreciation of that. Wyckoff, who has spent more than a decade as a leader on land use issues, says that the success of the initiative “has a lot to do with how it’s presented.”

Wyckoff and the other report writers courageously assert that “achieving these goals, on which we measure the quality of our lives, necessarily requires hard work and facing up to broad, challenging, and controversial topics.” But was a central element of controversy prematurely excluded? Within the report were cautionary warnings from Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema who argued that any solutions must respect private property rights.

A great deal of council time was dedicated to paying homage to private property and citing legal frameworks that “acknowledged their importance.” Indeed, the report’s theoretical underpinnings were based, in part, on a 1999 report by Samuel Staley called, “Urban Sprawl and the Michigan Landscape: A Market-Oriented Approach.” Unfortunately, from a historical perspective, the United States has supported private property rights to the detriment of social equality and the environment.

Sprawlers or Dreamers?

Clearly the intent is to slowly build consensus for change among some of the major stakeholder groups, including those naturally opposed to “smart growth” planning. According to Conan Smith, Land Programs Director for the Michigan Environmental Council, the groups that would be expected to be against many of the recommendations are “the home builders, the Chamber of Commerce, the road builders and the realtors.” But he said, “They are not powerful enough to block this initiative.” He noted that Governor Granholm could establish policy goals by executive order, but it is unknown whether she will. Looking at similar processes across the nation, Smith said, “The homebuilders got on board in Maryland. I think because they realized they were going to lose. So it was just good politics there.”

“I hope 145 of 150 recommendations are acted upon,” said Wyckoff optimistically.

If they all were, questions would no doubt soon begin to emerge about the vast inequalities in Michigan. However, if only a few are acted upon, and if the class conflicts inherent in the 150-point package are not teased out, who is likely to gain the most from the initiative, the sprawlers or the dreamers?

Realpolitik: What’s Likely to Happen

One idea floating around the media is for a massive State of Michigan bond proposal – to raise anywhere from $250 million up to $1 billion – to enable the State of Michigan to purchase development rights from farmers and other parties to protect that land from being purchased by developers and adding to sprawl. Michigan lost 13.3% of its farmland between 1982 and 1997.

“In Pennsylvania, a PDR proposal is saving farmland at a 4, 5, 6 times greater rate” than previously, said Conan Smith, a supporter. Wyckoff cautioned: “I wouldn’t expect to see a bond proposal in 2004-2005 but maybe in 2006. It has everything to do with the economy.”

But the environmentalists I spoke with are not simply wedded to a PDR initiative. There are larger agendas. “I’d like to see three major things come out of this initiative,” said Smith, “statewide leadership, regional cooperation, and tools for local governments.” Wyckoff said that he prefers a series of small steps “to get people in the practice of voting” for land use proposals.

As noted already, Governor Granholm has begun a public “Cool Cities” campaign. On September 19, she asked 30 Michigan mayors, selected by Michigan State University’s Center for Urban Studies, to name one person from their city to sit on a statewide “Cool City” advisory panel to provide input to her and David Hollister, the Department of Labor and Economic Growth Director (and former mayor of Lansing). Panelists will brainstorm about tools and resources to improve their communities. Results will be reviewed by the governor and announced in December.

Environmental groups are taking their own approach. This fall the Michigan Environmental Council is mounting campaigns in four key areas. Taking some cues from the Milliken/Kelly report, they will: 1) encourage Governor Granholm’s office to make a detailed commitment to specific measurable targets, by issuing either a policy statement or executive order (which carries the weight of law); 2) work with the new Michigan Department of Transportation director Gloria Jeff to create “context sensitive design” systems for roads, to improve safety, mobility and the natural environment; 3) advance Senate Bill 524 that would create the Michigan Housing and Community Development Fund, with a portion helping the homeless and disabled; and 4) work with Senator Liz Brater on a Redevelopment Readiness initiative that would prioritize funding to the neediest citizens of Michigan.

These appear to be tangible, winnable battles. The last two are especially salutary as they prioritize the working class who suffer the most.

The Granholm initiative offers progressives a chance to be honest about the lie of the land. One could conceive of environmentalists taking the baton offered by the report and embarking on a comprehensive public education campaign to better stir citizens to action. Such a curriculum might squarely analyze the social conflicts over Michigan’s land use historically, holistically, and ecologically.

For more information about the Milliken/Kelly report, visit: www.michiganlanduse.org/finalreport.htm.

Also see Part II of this article.

Brian McKenna is a Lansing-based freelance writer.

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