John Logie,
Mayor, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Q: What's your definition of sprawl, and what do you think its basic characteristics are?
A: Well, as the mayor of the second largest city in the state I probably have a slightly different definition than people on the other side of this equation, but as an older urban core center, sprawl around my city is unplanned and largely unwanted growth that leapfrogs over open space and is developer driven to create new developments that they want to develop whether or not there is any real need for that in the metropolitan area or if its needed there or somewhere else. It creates all kinds of problems. In the two hours that this program airs we will swallow up another 20 acres in Michigan because there disappearing at ten acres an hour 24 hours a day seven days a week every day of the year to unplanned, unorganized and largely unwanted development. The antidote helps define sprawl because if there is planned regional development and if density is preserved in toward the core before you build out than yes, you will get planned growth that can be done positively that can respond with all the necessary infrastructure and respond with planned traffic lanes to get people to and from work and home and things that are not done when sprawl just bounces around topsy-turvy.
Q: What are its (sprawl's) main components?
A: Well, let me talk a little bit about my region. Grand Rapids is at the heart of 47 local units of government that collectively spend 625 million dollars a year, in fact more than that now. That figure is somewhat dated. Beyond that it has an interesting figure. There are 637 elected officials that make up metropolitan Grand Rapids. That's a very interesting figure, Chris, because that's exactly 100 more elected officials than run the entire United States. We have 435 congressmen, 100 senators, a president and a vice president all elected by the people to run the entire country. That's 537 people. So one aspect of sprawl that people need to come to grips with and understand is this multiplicity of government creating little fiefdoms, little bastions of this and that that oftentimes don't want to work together. Now, what I've been doing in the nine years that I've been mayor is attempting to attack that kind of challenge on a cooperative basis. There are other cities that, if you take a snapshot ten years ago, in the case of Jacksonville, of 20 years ago in the case of Indianapolis, maybe a dozen years ago in the case of Charlotte, North Carolina, at that time they looked a lot like we look now. We're a city of 200,000 in a metro area of about 675. Jacksonville is probably a good comparison.

Now fast forward to today. Jacksonville is a city of 750,000 people. Why? Because the state government told the county and the city that they were just going to blend together and make a mega government. That's not going to happen in Michigan. It's not going to happen to Michigan for one very simple reason: townships. Townships are a 212 year old anachronism that are going to keep functioning because people like them, people want them and because the MTA is one of the strongest lobbyists in Lansing. So, I've embraced townships. I said, fine, let's use that form of government, but let's begin to make decisions regionally while preserving that local decision making power at the local level.

Grand Rapids, ten years ago, took advantage of a then new statute to create the first and only metropolitan council in the state. We now have 31 member units of government in a seven county area and they sprinkle around with wide open spaces, in some cases, between them, but all of them occupying, as I say, mostly Kent County and the eastern third of Ottawa, but then pieces of Muskegon, Mont Calm, Newaygo, Berry, Allegan, all add into that equation. They want to be part of this cooperative metropolitan planning organization and we've been able to do some things there like our new regional GIS which is called REGIS for a global information system that's going to make land use identifiable in the entire region and the governments that want to be part of that are being part of that.

The city has created a whole new paradigm for delivering water and sewer services. We have the old one. We had 15 customers and we basically controlled the system and they bought from us and a rate methodology was set and periodically changed. Now, we have a brand new water and sewer system with an urban or utility advisory board and the first urban growth boundary in the state of Michigan. We call it an urban utility boundary, but it attacks sprawl head on because what all of the participating units of government have decided to do is, in fact, commit themselves to close in development first on a formula basis before you can develop beyond the boundary. Now the boundary itself can move over time and the individual unit of government set that boundary for themselves in connecting up the dots between units of government as part of the job we're doing.

What we're seeing is that if we develop on a planned basis regionally it will healthier. It will be better. What the city did to make that go is it released some of its power because the make up of the utility advisory board is five from the city and six from the customer community. So, if you think that everything is going to be decided on that basis the customers can now really control the system. I've never seen that happen.

This year we've done a second model that I think can be used elsewhere. The six inner core cities that make up metropolitan Grand Rapids, this is the city of Grand Rapids, the cities of Walker, Grandville, Wyoming, Kentwood and East Grand Rapids, for the first time ever, got together and created a common property tax mileage - one number in every jurisdiction even though it produces different numbers because of different mileage rates - for the first ever area wide mass transit mileage. It passed overwhelmingly in April. As we are sitting here taping this program it is actually implemented into second shift for the first time since trolley cars where we will now be able to get people who don't have cars to second shift jobs in the entire region. It's a huge cooperative step forward. Again, one of the keys was the city ceded some control. There's a 15 member board. We appoint five. So, if the theory is that the suburbs are always going to vote against the city I've already given - it doesn't happen. Sure, we have divided votes on these boards, but it's divided on the individual merits of an individual issue and this is one of the keys, it seems to me, that we have to get to to control sprawl.

I'll give you another smaller definition. The East Belt Line runs north and south on the east side of Grand Rapids. It has grown up from a dirt road when I was a youngster to a two-lane to now a divided, but open access highway. Nine jurisdictions own pieces of that in terms of inside their various municipal boundaries and we had a turf war with Grand Rapids Township a few years ago. What happened was Meijer, Inc., the big one stop shopping center, wanted to build one of their big 237,000 square foot stores out in the township. The township residents didn't want it. Eight years after fighting with each other Meijer came across the street to Grand Rapids where our zoning and land use permitted that building and built it right across the street from the township hall. Now that wasn't an in your face development. It was because there was no regional planning. What was all right in Grand Rapids wasn't all right in the township. So, I went to the township supervisor and I said, Madam Supervisor, whatever else it is, it isn't regional planning.

So now we two units of government township in Plainfield, the next one to the north, are regionally planning our common areas with a design plan to permit uses in one place, but not in another on a cooperative basis. This is the direction that we literally have to go. There's another feature of that water and sewer agreement that you need to know about. In addition to having the utilities advisory board run by the whole membership, there's an urban cooperation board and we have assigned ourselves a one dollar, currently, per capita levy which will raise over $300,000 in the first year and over the next five years creep up to two dollars per capita and that is designed for cooperative regional projects and needs in the area. It's subgroup well below the metropolitan council, but it is designed to regionalize our thinking because if we do not create regional land use patterns we will get the reverse. We will get little islands. We will get vulcanization. We will get what I call playing castle. Castle is played this way from some suburb back toward the core. We're in the castle. You're not. We're going to keep the drawbridge up and we aren't going to feed the alligators in the mote. If that kind of thinking prevails in a rising population and our projections are significantly rising, this is the only major metropolitan area in the state that has never stopped growing in the last 25 years and we could easily have 300,000 more people here by 2015. If that is true and if we do not learn to think regionally and then act cooperatively the quality of life that I've enjoyed for my now 61 years is not going to be there for my children and grandchildren. So the anti sprawl movement in Grand Rapids is alive and well and we have some things here that we think we can use to help other communities.

Lastly, I created a group seven years ago called the Urban Core Mayors. This is not the largest cities in Michigan. In fact three of them are under 40,000. Dennis Archer, the mayor of Detroit and I co-chair this group. It is Flint, Pontiac, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Jackson, Lansing, Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Muskegon, Bay City and Saginaw, but these are the older urban core centers. We're the heart of the industrial side of Michigan's life and a lot of that was going to hell in a hand basket, but what we've done is we've gotten Lansing to rewrite the environmental law to give us a shot at reusing core city sights to create a new renaissance zone law that we helped write that creates tax free zones in these older communities and now to create tech zones. You've got to have both. You've got to have planned development. You've got to have growth and then you've got to have positive economic development planning. If you put those ingredients into your stew and you stir them up at the right temperature you're going to have a successful community.
Q: How important are residential areas to the downtown and to its vitality in the future, and what are you doing to approach that?
A: Interestingly enough in the dark old days of downtown urban renewal the city fathers thought it was prudent to write housing out of downtown. I mean it disappeared in the code, in the zoning code, crazy as that sounds. In 1995 I gave a speech, my State of the City Address, where I challenged this community. I said I want 5000 more residential units, low, moderate, medium, high by the year 2005. Now we're about halfway through that timeline and there are close to 3000 of those units either developed or being developed right now. That is they're under construction being finished. So that is becoming a reality. Jane Jacobs said it best, forty years ago in the death and life of great American cities, nobody was listening, just like nobody was listening to Rachel Carson about the environment five years earlier. She said you've got to have people living in downtown if you're going to have a successful downtown. But there was a time here when I'd come back from college in the late 1950s - you could take a bowling ball and roll it down any sidewalk in downtown at almost anytime after 5:00 of any day and all day on the weekend secure in the knowledge you'd never hit the leg of anybody. There was nobody there. Now it's vibrant. We've got the new arena. We're building a new convention center. We've got 17 new restaurants in downtown. I've got six old warehouses that are come back to life with both entertainment features on the first floor and offices on the second. I've got a new downtown campus for Grand Valley State University, the huge DeMoss Center across the river and Stuckey Hall, the new dormitory, all open, all operational. There's a lot of life in downtown, but you've got to have housing.
Q: What traditionally has been the relationship between the city and its neighbors? You mentioned the Meijer and town hall, but has it been like it has in other areas? Has there been great friction the way that Detroit and Coleman Young and Brooks went at it?
A: Nothing compared to Coleman Young in his heyday and what he said and thought about his suburbs and he pretty much said what he thought about his suburbs. I mean, I was here practicing law which I've been doing for more than 30 years, and still do under our 84-year-old charter and watched that from a distance and it was simply dazzling, but we had some historic problems. I said I had five contiguous cities on the west and south with at least only one exception, maybe two, all of them became cities with an anti city land grab device where the city was out - this was 40 years ago - and next thing clumps of Paris Township. Paris Township became the city of Kentwood in 1960 so they didn't have to deal with that any more. That was an unplanned metropolitan development. But over the years I think there are still some old memories, but we've gotten over that. I get very good cooperation with the mayors of these cities. They know that the whole is greater than the some of the parts. One of them said, publicly, when I go abroad and people ask me where I'm from I tell them I'm from Grand Rapids. I don't say I'm from that suburb. That's a very positive feeling among the elected officials. Now they're smart enough to know that they can't get too far in front of their constituents because I've seen the other side of that. I've seen the person in the suburb say look, you're exactly what I wanted to get away from. I don't want anything to do with you and that mentality is out there. It's part of what we call castle. They're inside the castle. They've got the drawbridge up. They don't feed those alligators and that feeling is out there.

I think the wiser half is the people that realize the future of this region is tied to our ability to keep those barriers as low as we can. Now, the real challenge of that, and one that is still in front of this community and in every community in this state, is how do we build housing that by its nature and by its cost throughout the region encourages a spread of people, low, moderate and high, so that we do not have a concentration of poverty in the core city. My friend, David Rusk, has done a statistical sampling based on the 1990 U.S. Census that shows unequivocally that you get to certain points of no return and what that means, and he uses that phrase, is that that is now a city and a metropolitan community that cannot improve itself unless they cooperate. It will only get worse and some of our major American cities fit into that mold and are in deep trouble.
Q: Did sprawl do to Grand Rapids in the end what it did to other cities? Elaborate a little bit on this.
A: Absolutely, because while the city has enjoyed unimpeded population growth, between 1980 and 1990, the last official figures that we have, those two censuses, we grew at 5%. Now the county of Kent which we are the largest community of, grew by over 12 %. So, you can do the math and figure out that the suburbs have got to be growing three times, maybe as much as some of them four times as fast as the core city. That fact alone is not necessarily good or bad, but you can do things with growth that you cannot do without it. In other communities around the state, and I'm not interested in naming names, they are exhibiting what I call the donut effect. You know what a donut is, Chris. It's a hole in the middle with the meat all around it--where the population in the core city is actually declining and the suburb numbers are growing fat and the biggest problem of that is the public schools where those declining enrollments in the core cities - the core city public school systems are in trouble and the suburban systems, growing leaps and bounds, have no trouble at all passing new mileages. Four of them were passed last Tuesday in this suburban area all for new buildings, all for new capital projects, all for new schools. We've lost some balance there and it is a dagger pointed at the heart of the core cities.
Q: What needs to be done about that? Because that is a problem that is not unique to Grand Rapids. Talk a little bit about schools and the issue of regional schools, centralized schools.
A: Well, ultimately I think we're going to have to move in some of those directions. We're going to have to create opportunities for those children to filter out of the core city school system and into other ones and that means housing patterns have to be changed. In Montgomery County down around near Washington when they permit a new development project, residential project of more than 50 units to go forward 5% has to be subsidized, 10% has to be low or moderate and 85% can be market rate and what they have done is they have moved that population out into the wider regions of the county and what that has done is not what all the nay-sayers say. They say, oh my gosh, if these kids come out into our schools the quality of our education will go down and our kids will suffer. It doesn't work that way. It's rising tide that raises all boats. The kids from the inner city get into those schools and they do just fine. They play catch up. They aren't the brightest except on occasion, but they don't hold anybody back and we've got to start to develop some land use patterns.

Now, we've been able to create the new water and sewer agreements an the Utility Advisory Board and the Urban Cooperation Board under existing state law without going to Lansing and asking for new state laws. But if we're going to attack this problem of schools then I think it's going to need a state solution and we're going to need some statesmanship at the state level to pass laws and I favor incentives rather than clubs over the head that create positive incentives to get people to move in what the society deems and what our elected officials deem in socially desirable ways and I think there are ways to do that, to propose benefits that would not otherwise be there to make sure that these educational opportunities are going to occur. If we don't do that, if we do not create those kinds of housing and educational opportunities than we will be creating ghettos and ghetto schools.
Q: I want to dwell, for a moment, on our state government and what has happened here because it turns out this is not a political issue. This issue is sprawl and land use. If you look at Oregon alone a Republican governor, a Republican legislature created their laws there which are very restrictive and Portland is sort of this idealized system.
A: Well, it's consistent with what Fiorello LaGuardia of New York said 50 years ago that there's neither a Republican or a Democratic way to clean the streets and basically what he was saying is that local issues are not easily identified, much less captured by the Republicans or the Democrats. I work very hard to build bipartisan coalitions when the Urban Core Mayors Group has gone to Lansing with the need for some legislation. And for example, the environmental bill that gave us a chance to reuse core city industrial sights passed something like 78 to something in the House, clearly a bipartisan number, passed 30 to 8 or something like that in the Senate, clearly a bipartisan number and that's the way it often is if you can take an objective look at what cities and local government need.
Q: How would you rate our Legislature and the Governor on capturing this issue of sprawl?
A: Well, I don't think that they have. You know, the Governor and the Legislature have done the core cities in the last nine years a lot of good and it really has benefited us. We had older industrial sights going begging because the cleanup standard was so high and the liability was - any new owner, you and I, if we decided to create the Cook Logie Company and go after a piece of property and bought it and there was contamination we would become fully liable for that historic cleanup and not only cleanup, but cleanup so that babies could sit in it and play in it even if we were going to make an industrial sight out of it. Now, we don't have to do that, but they haven't touched the issue of sprawl and they haven't touched it because it's a bogeyman to a lot of people, a lot of people that live in townships, and remember I said that's an effective lobby, with a lot of clout. There's another group that's out there that's pretty effective with a lot of causes called the Michigan Counties Association. The MTA and the MCA oftentimes look at the things that we are talking about the way a mongoose looks at a cobra. They seem deathly afraid that something bad is going to happen. They are also very property rights oriented. If they want in their township that the only thing that can be built are great big mansions on ten acre pieces of property than that's the way they want it and they will resist, to the core, anybody coming in and telling them, you know that's really not good land use planning. So there are real problems there why state government hasn't moved forward on this because there are a lot of forces aligned that have strong voices in Lansing that say basically, we want to play castle. Leave us alone.
Q: What do you think is at the core of that? As I'm listening to you speak about what happened to so many cities, and I don't know that it happened this way, but the interstate highway system that came along was not necessarily a good thing for all cities. Added to that was a racial component causing a lot of friction within cities. Are any of those issues still lying behind this as we move outward?
A: Well, I think it's more the haves and the have-nots because there are minorities who get to be haves from an economic center and they move out of the city and into the suburbs, find a place and a way to do that and many times our just is reactionary to looking back where they came from and working cooperatively with them as white folks are. You know, Grand Rapids has had good race relations for the last 30 plus years, but we had our own version of the race riots that hit Detroit back in the 1960's, smaller to be sure, much more contained, but real, but anybody that doesn't think that race and racism is a problem in this society today is simply fooling themselves. The late tennis star Arthur Ashe who became wealthy and famous and respected for what he could and did do as a U.S. Open and Wimbledon champion, top of his sport anywhere in the world, and he wrote in his autobiography that as a black man when he got up in the morning and was shaving in the mirror he had to confront - he'd say, what am I going to do with the racism that I confront today because he knew that it was going to hit him head on right in the face even with money to insulate him, even with prestige and position to insulate him.

Now take all the people that aren't Arthur Ashe and try to put yourself in their position. Grand Rapids, according to the 1990 census is 27% minority 18% black, 7% Hispanic, 1% Native American, 1% oriental. That number will be up when the 2000 census comes down official in April of next year, significantly up. The school population is already significantly up, but let me give you another statistic to make the point I want to make. The city, based on the 1990 numbers, is 27% minority. We're in the county. We're about 40% of the county, as a whole. The county as a whole is only 6% minority. Where are all the minorities living? Right here in Grand Rapids. That's not a complaint. That's a numerical reality. Actually it's a rich stew of people that live in the city. I've lived here right in the center of the city for now more than 30 years and live in a very mixed neighborhood and it's very very dynamic, but try and tell that to somebody who is afraid to come downtown to the arena because he's afraid that something bad might happen to him even though downtown Grand Rapids is statistically, on all crimes, probably the safest area in the entire county - perception versus reality.
Q: Explain how regional cooperation helps with those issues in terms of creation of jobs, abilities to get to jobs.
A: Let me give you an example. I told you about the fact that we have a new inter urban transit partnership, in fact that's what it's called, ITP, among the six cities. A lot of those second shift jobs that we can now fill with people from the inner city who don't have cars are in the suburbs. The jobs are out in plants around the fringe that we have to get to across municipal boundaries and now with this new cooperative six city partnership, that's why it's called the Inter Urban Transit Partnership, we can move those people and we move those people, minority, majority people, whatever out into these regions. They get face time with the people out there. That's going to help break down those barriers because when you get to talking to people one on one you find out real fast that it doesn't matter whether they're black or brown or yellow or white. They have the same goals. They want a decent job. They want a decent home. They want their kids to be educated and to have a future and a better future than they had. It doesn't sound any different in any language in this country and it doesn't sound any different in any race, but you've got to get people face to face and one on one with each other before they start to realize that.
Q: When you look at cities that are nowhere near doing what you have done here, what is the consequence for regions like that down the road? And I ask this in terms of sprawl and what it's going to do to them.
A: Vulcanization. I have 47 local units of government. If they have 20 then you're going to have little 20 island pods each doing its own things. The ones that are residential wanting to stay residential. So now industrial has to go begging when we want to expand our industrial base because nobody wants it because it's unplanned and things like that - just quality of life that goes down, ultimately, not just for the core city. In fact its very interesting, as we get older our first line surrounding suburban neighbors begin to look more and more like us and it's the second line and the third line that's still out there saying, we don't think we want any of this. We don't think we want any of that. Slowly, however, and it's going to take a long time, I think we are getting to the hearts and minds of some of these people that see us in their own enlightened self interest to cooperate. If we can cross that bridge toward cooperation and beginning to define it on a cooperative basis - slowly however and it's going to take a long time. I think we are getting to the hearts and minds of some of these people that see us in their own enlightened self interest to cooperate. We can cross that bridge to our cooperation and are beginning to define it on a cooperative basis - not one group ordering the other group. You've got to do this. You're got to do that, but I think we have a future that will be bright and will as good or even better than we've enjoyed - the grownups of my generation. But if we don't do that, and that's your hypothetical, than I see them vulcanizing and the walls go up around each walled city and they don't want anything to do with anybody else. The core city will rot and once that's rotten it's like an apple with a rotten core. It starts to spread out.
Q: Myron Orfield talks about the potential creation of political power between cities of first ring suburbs and the agricultural sector. Is that a reality? I mean is there a way to form new politics in this state?
A: Absolutely, well as a matter of fact we already know that. That Urban Core Mayor's Group of mine of twelve mayors has had a couple of very important meetings at the top level of the Michigan Farm Bureau because here we are coming at it from two different directions. The core cities want planned development. They want density filled in close to the core and then build out from that and the Farm Bureau wants to preserve farm open space and farm acreage. That's the same goal. So that interestingly enough, the picture looks remarkably the same through the telescope from either end. It meets somewhere in the middle about balanced plan growth that retards sprawl, that preserves open space and we think that it a potential coalition.

Now, the twelve urban core cities, even though they're not the largest, they represent two and a half million of the nine and a half million people in the state of Michigan and if you take us at the center of our metropolitan areas and add that figure up we represent two-thirds of the people in Michigan. What we have to learn to do is to mobilize that force together on a positive basis because any time, and you've watched this, any time you get cities and villages and townships and counties all working together in Lansing, things get done.