James Cocks
thinking about planning. For me, on the housing side, the question of land use is the one that has the most potential to change the pattern of development that we’re seeing and to deal with a lot of the underlying issues that have created basic urban problems, like poverty.
Dodge City, Kansas. It’s things like that that might shift greater focus onto urban issues, along with the sub-prime housing crisis that has gotten people looking at housing and finance in a new light.
Speaking of the next administration, there’s a campaign going on now…I think McCain brought up eminent domain once… I don’t think you’re going to get all the presidential candidates to do a debate on urban policy because at least 50 percent of viewers are going to say, “Oh, they’re not talking about me,” as opposed to a whole set of issues like education and health care that apply to the population as a whole. I think one of the big challenges to those of us who are interested in urban issues is that there is such geographical polarization around them.
As a planning student, I hear the following question every so often: “But hasn’t New York been all planned out? What’s left to do?” I’m running out of patient answers. Can you help me out? Think about it in a different way. I grew up in New York City and went to the World Series in 1977 when Howard Cosell proclaimed that the Bronx was burning. One of the big reasons I do this work is because I grew up in New York at that time. But New York hasn’t planned for the future in a generation. We were planning for the past, wanting just to get back to where we were, and stop the future from coming. For example, we were building Levittowns in the Bronx because we never thought we’d get the population back. But now we’re planning again, with the resources to actually address the challenges we’re facing. So I think it’s an incredibly interesting time to be doing this type of work in New York, but also in other places around the country where people are feeling the importance of planning issues. When I worked in Washington, someone told me that all politics is felt need. I think we’ve reached a point where my counterparts in other cities will tell you that housing and transportation are top-tier issues for their mayor. I’ve always felt that if you want to do interesting things at a large scale and you want to change the world, like I think all planning students do, government is absolutely the best place to do it. It’s not the easiest place to do it, but it’s the best place.
You basically have the coasts and maybe a few other places that are experiencing population growth, increasing diversity, extremely high housing costs – basically all of the things that helped to create a focus on the issues in the first place, but you also have large parts of the country that are rural, are losing population, and are experiencing low housing costs. They have the fundamentally opposite set of challenges. I’m not sure we’re ever going to overcome that challenge. Instead, a lot of the attention is coming from state and members of Congress in whose constituencies they’ve seen enough of a growth in housing costs, traffic, and other issues. I read a very interesting article, which said that the highest growth in housing costs relative to income anywhere in the country was
54 • Minna Ninova • ShaunDonovan
ShaunDonovan • Minna Ninova • 55