Metropolitics:

A regional agenda for community + stability

Myron Orfield

Summary: Focused on the Twin Cities [Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN], Metropolitics offers a comprehensive case for regional policy reforms. Orfield examines an array of demographic, educational, economic, and fiscal trends by engaging each census tract across the seven counties and 187 municipalities that form the Twin Cities region. Orfield's examination ranges from poverty among children under age five to allocation of state highway funds. It is an awakening of critical concerns that add up to a comprehensive portrait of many disparities among communities in many metropolitan areas. Metropolitics serves as a tool for analyzing and understanding most urban regions in America. Metropolitics is not only a publication, but a continuing political process revealing lessons Orfield and his allies have learned for the rest of urban America. The first lesson being the choice of political arena: the state legislature. There is a vast number of Americans that do not fully understand how local governments are organized and what they are empowered to do, essentially determined by state legislatures. Orfield argues that local governance in urban America is not the constitutional province of the federal government. He further explains that the U.S. Constitution is silent on the ssue of local government; under the Tenth Amendment local governance is a power "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."Orfield further argues that in highly fragmented metro areas void the creation of an elected regional government like Oregon's Portland Metro, no local public body exists to speak for the interests of the entire region. It is only at the state level that a local citizen's interests are placed in a framework that addresses his or her specific interests as a citizen of the entire state or metropolitan region. State legislatures must serve as regional policy bodies because they are the only institutions t that can. Legislatures must establish new ground rules for how myriad local governments must share common responsibility and accountability for common issues. Through Metropolitics we also learn that making progress on hard, divisive issues is based rarely on friendly, consensual agreement, but more often on building political coalitions. Orfield argues that those coalitions are most effective when based on each member's political self-interest; the individual's perception of the interests of the constituencies he or she represents. Afterall, the glue that held the Minnesota legislative coalition together was underlying social, economic, and political self-interest. University of Minnesota geographer John S. Adams has shown that almost every large metro area is characterized by the "favored quarter",a slice of the region where most high-end commercial and residential development occurs. In Chicago the "favored quarter" is the northwestern suburbs around Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates. In Memphis it extends through east Memphis to Germantown and Collierville. In Atlanta it grows out through the Buckhead area of north Atlanta into Cobb County, and so forth.However, the existence of the "favored quarter" also means the existence of the unfavored three-quarters. The concept of "metropolitics" is built on uniting the political weight of the unfavored three-quarters.

Critique: Orfield presents an interesting body of work as it relates to public policy and the strategies concealed and revealed within. While political implications have always existed due to space's agency to ownership, power, and dominion, rarely are they presented in a political framework that kins Orfield's investigation. Orfield strategically prepares this body of work uniquely in that he was a pioneer in actually problematizing, coining, and even branding a significant urban process that has crippled inner city urban communities for decades. His body of work suggests governmental reform an tax equity investigation that suggests moments of clarity of the decline in property value of marginal communities and the increase in value of affluent communities. He indirectly exposes the plummeting value in marginalized communities as a strategy for future development at minimal costs to developers but at a crucial cost of displacing longtime residents. This displacement is often revealed as a product of ignorance of misinformed citizens in their rights and privileged of access to public documents that significantly affect development in their own backyard. Metropolitics celebrates the success of Portland's efficiency in organizing regional government, but I feel that it would be beneficial to introduce techniques of grassroot and community activated projects as precedent to ways in which residents can voice their concerns or issues. Introducing this most basic and accessible portal into public policy and advocation offers a clear solution into activism. What form would this publication take on if these strategies were introduced? An argument that developed against the publication is its reluctancy to address politically charged zoning and ordinance in relation to publicly funded education. When residents of a community refer to poor schools, it is not always a direct reflection of the financial position of an educational institution but of the school's students: poor students. One of the first indications of a declining community is the influx of students from below or at poverty into a school [public]. Significant increase in students in reduced to free lunch programs serve as omens of financial and economical hardship within respective households. In Orfield's investigation into disproportionate results on the lack of public knowledge of local ordinances, one of the most integral components to a communities social structure is the system in which it educates its people. Not only are the employment opportunities in this publication highlighted as disproportional catalysts but what becomes of the access to a decent education that every child has the right to? As suburbanization fuels the fleet from the city so does it take educational opportunities with it. Children dwelling in environments where parents, guardians, and other influences may have limited education tend to further perpetuate a cycle of socially and economically disenfranchised citizens. While the material is very organizationally savvy and crucially relevant, it carries heavy political content that may be foreign to readers outside the realm of public policy and legislation. Metropolitics shares vital nuggets of political and community organization that needs to be built in a framework for the public majority to engage with.