The Three E's

EACH OF THE "THREE E'S" also has broad applicability to metropolitan regions throughout the industrialized world. Virtually every North American metropolitan region, both large and small, faces similar concerns—among them are shifting employment prospects created by global competition, industry restructuring, and immigration; growing disparities between poor central cities and inner suburbs and rich outer suburbs; and sprawl and gridlock as a result of decentered, automobile-based growth. It has become clear that the "Three E's" now provide a universal context for discussing regional issues.

Economy

With national governments less able to regulate economic activity, regions have a growing need to develop their own strategies. They must focus on their particular advantages in the global marketplace—the clusters of related industries that anchor their economy, the talents of their population, and the character of their communities and environment—to move beyond policies that rely solely on tax cuts, business incentives, and promotional campaigns. The right mix of investments in advanced infrastructure, workforce skills, and quality of life improvements are crucial to long-term success, and this will require collaborative relationships between business, government, and labor to succeed.

The strategies outlined in this plan—maintaining a diverse, high-skill workforce, investing in an extensive but aging transit system, and energizing people's entrepreneurial talents with more efficient, flexible systems of governance—emerge from the particular strengths and industry profile of the Tri-State region.

Equity

Every world center faces daunting challenges to reverse the divisive trends resulting from economic transformation and global resettlement patterns. Global competition, technological change, and corporate restructuring have resulted in widening income disparities between the affluent and the poor, exacerbating long-standing racial and class divisions. Simultaneously, a handful of regions—including New York, Chicago, Miami, and Toronto—are attracting most of the vast number of immigrants flocking to North America, creating a truly multicultural society. Declining numbers of low-skill jobs, stagnant incomes for the middle-class, and increasing numbers of newcomers are creating larger concentrations of poor residents in metropolitan areas at a time when economic conditions are particularly fluid.

New residents bring with them enormous talent and cultural diversity—New York City, for one, could never have come into being without them. However, accommodating new residents requires new investments in schools, in workforce training, and in housing and public services. Federal funding has not been provided for these purposes. Localities have been left to deal with these new demands while conditions for many native-born residents are worsening, particularly for those in low-skill jobs. The benefits of immigration are certainly worth the effort to address its short-term costs, but it is equally important to ensure that people already here have the same kind of amenities and opportunities that we extend to newcomers.

In the metropolitan context, these forces have also had an impact on the gap between cities and suburbs. The movement of middle-class residents of all racial and ethnic groups from cities to the outer suburbs has left central cities for the poorest residents. And in many regions, inner suburbs now have more in common with center cities than they do with outer suburbs. Most regions continue to develop new rings of suburban growth, threatening to further isolate downtowns and center-city neighborhoods and diminish their tax base at the same time that urban welfare, police, education, and other costs continue to escalate. At the same time, middle-income whites continue to migrate out of this region—and from metropolitan Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and similar places—to smaller communities. Continuation of this trend could lead to even deeper racial and social polarization for the entire country.

Environment

The extreme deconcentration of North America's metropolitan regions has played havoc with the green infrastructure of watersheds, farmland, estuaries, woodlands, and other resources that make life in these places possible and desirable. While open "greenfields" are increasingly prone to development, vast areas of our cities have become desolate "brownfields"—contaminated urban lands abandoned by both business and government. Conventional solid waste management and pollution control facilities seem to have only limited success in protecting the environment. And they are expensive because they rely on "end of the pipe" treatment and focus on cleaning up toxic materials after they have already been made rather than redesigning industries so that they process only benign materials. Many taxes and regulations designed to protect the environment have the perverse effect of discouraging both traditional and neo-traditional compact development, which generates far less pollution than sprawl.

Toward Solutions: Five Campaigns

IN MANY AREAS of post-modern and post-industrial life, changes are accelerating beyond anyone's ability to see more than a few years ahead. Places, on the other hand, have qualities that can endure and gather strength, age after age. And this region, by simply anchoring itself firmly to its own superb natural abundance and extraordinary human achievements and talents, can create a permanent quality of life and structure for living that can both accommodate and weather all the changes that may come its way.

RPA has identified five crosscutting campaigns designed to respond in a comprehensive way to the issues defined by the "Three E's." Most of these initiatives could be adapted to the needs of other large and small North American metropolitan regions. In the Tri-State Metropolitan Region, the continuing "Three E" strengths of the place—our ecosystems, our centers, our transportation systems, our people, and our...