BLC Forum

In the fight for livability, sometimes advocates can forget about those who are happily living in environments that others would deem “unlivable”: sprawling, car-dependent suburbs. If it’s all about making our lives more livable, “shouldn’t we be able to choose the sprawling suburbs if we want to?” asked a participant at the Partners’ “Building Livable Communities” Forum in September 2010. Well, yes, replied the panelists, but it’s not that easy. “Choosing” sprawl is not always the free choice that many believe it to be.

Columnist Neal Pierce reports on the success of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the new federal collaboration of DOT, EPA, and HUD that has awarded a series of grants to communities "for roads and housing and environmental protection."

On September 22, 2010, at the Building Livable Communities forum , Beth Osborne, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation Policy at USDOT and James Lopez, Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary at HUD, answered some questions about the new HUD-DOT-EPA Partnership for Sustainable Communities.  The Partnership should be seen as a model or case study for other government agencies. The Partnership for Sustainable Communities does not need to be the only interagency government partnership focused on the development of livable communities.

Osborne and Lopez explained why only HUD, DOT, and EPA were involved and pointed to some of the logistical problems that have arisen in the developing of the Partnership. Simple communication between agencies is made difficult with modern email firewalls and other cyber security screening processes. Also, when you have too many people working on the same issue, efficiencies break down and it becomes difficult to please everyone. There is a saying, “too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup.” In other words, too many people working on a single project can ruin it. Minimizing these difficulties improves the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the collaboration.

“When you start with everything, you start with nothing,” Beth Osborne, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Policy at the US Department of Transportation (DOT), stated of the importance to narrow the focus of a livability agenda in order to be effective.

At Partners’ recent forum on September 22, “Building Livable Communities: Creating a Common Agenda”, many discussed livability’s ubiquitous nature on both macro and micro levels. The panelists spoke of the need for access and affordability to the many factors that serve as part of a system to create livable communities: transportation, housing, and education, to name a few. But when does a boundless agenda for livability, incorporating all relatable factors that serve to shape a livable community, become unproductive? In brief,  what is the ‘tipping point’ for livability?

How does a city aspire to be livable when the outside public seemingly brands it as ‘dying?’ How does the city grow when it is told that is 'shrinking’? With eyes that are turning away from the core industrial cities and onto the technological hubs of the twenty-first century: can the city sustain itself?

For Mayor Jay Williams of Youngstown, OH, hearing his city being labeled by Forbes Magazine as one of  Americas 10 Fastest-Dying Cities, inspired him to take the city in a new direction; one that leveraged successful development upon its own definition.

At the “Building Livable Communities” forum held at Washington, DC's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on September 22, 2010, Mayor Williams held a detailed discussion on how civic institutions in Youngstown redefined their role to promote dynamic change as amenity rich centers.