Myron Orfield,
Director, The Metropolitan Area Research Corporation, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Q: How do you define sprawl?
A: Well, I would say it's wasteful development pattern. I think that people like me believe that regions ought to get bigger to accommodate population and believe that newcomers into a region ought to have housing that they like, but you have a place like Detroit that's losing metropolitan population and it's gaining land area. That's sprawl. You have a place, you know, Detroit - I can't remember - I think it lost 7% or 8% of its population and it grew 30% land area. That's sprawl. Cleveland between 1970 and 1990 lost 11% of its population and it grew 40% of land area. Those places built two or three new rings of cities to accommodate no new people.

Another thing that's sprawl is when you waste land - when you are threatening the ground water. You know, if you build 100,000 houses without any planning on septic lots and the ground water becomes unswimmable or the ground water becomes polluted or the lakes become unswimmable. Like in northern Macomb County you can't swim in many of the lakes there anymore. That's sprawl, but just growth is good. America is based on growth and growth is good. Sprawl is wasteful growth.
Q: Take that Macomb story one step further and tell me what some of the consequences are in a place like Macomb County.
A: Well, I mean, places when the lakes become unswimmable like that you have the ground water problems. You have to remediate. Either children start to get sick and the lakes become unusable or you have to remediate and when you have to remediate you need some planning and planning means building sewers and it's five to ten times as expensive to do it after the fact as it was to do it right. It will cost hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars, to solve that problem and if you would have had some planning that wouldn't have happened.
Q: Traffic in that same area - we're dwelling on Macomb since we're on it right now, there are patterns there that are very difficult to decipher and figure out where the future as more of this sprawl comes in there.
A: When you develop without planning you develop on a bunch of country roads that handle country traffic. You get 100,000 houses on country roads and nobody can move anymore. If you had some planning that wouldn't have happened. I mean everybody says planning is horrible. Planning is communistic. How do you think Rockefeller got rich? He planned it? How does somebody retire with some money? They plan it. That's what we're talking about is getting in front of these trends, not letting them get in front of you. Growth is good, but it ought to be planned. You ought to plan your growth just like you plan your retirement and I think that's all anybody like me is talking about.
Q: Let's go back and explore a little bit of the roots of sprawl and how they directed it - how they came about. Isn't sprawl really a definition of what's beautiful and what's ugly in certain people's terms?
A: I'm not an aesthetic person so I don't know what's beautiful and what's ugly. I think if it wastes money it's ugly. If it wastes land it's ugly. If it pollutes the groundwater it's ugly. You know, I don't care whether you live in a rambler or a split level three car garage thing. I don't have any aesthetic values about that because I don't know any better, but if it wrecks the groundwater it's a bad decision. If it costs fives times or ten times as much to fix it it's a bad decision. If it creates traffic patterns where nobody can move it's a bad decision. I don't care what it looks like - some people do.
Q: What has happened in the way that we have designed suburbs that has made them so unlivable?
A: Well, I think some suburbs are beautifully designed. You know, if you think about Oak Park in Chicago it's one of the most beautiful communities in the country--Shaker Heights in Cleveland. You know many of these places - Birmingham, I think is a pretty nice place in Michigan - a pretty nice looking place, I think. So, suburbs aren't necessarily ugly. Some of them are - I don't have any values about beauty, but I mean, some of them aren't necessarily so bad. You know some of the first suburban communities that were designed in New York and Philadelphia are some of the most beautiful places to live in America. There's a book about - Kenneth Jackson's book - I mean, they're some of the nicest, most well planned communities there are. I think one of the things that they commonly share is an orientation where you can walk in the neighborhood, you know, whether you can have a car and use a car to get to work and drive a car and/or take a streetcar, but you have a choice. You know, the streetcar suburb is a pretty functional form. You get a nice big yard, not a huge yard, but a nice yard. You can walk to the store to do what you want to do. You can walk to see your neighbors. I grew up in a streetcar/suburban type neighborhood. I could take the bus to see my friends. I didn't have to have my parents drive me everywhere. It wasn't such a bad thing to be able to have that kind of a choice and also to walk you don't have to use your car to do everything. You don't have to fight traffic to get to the drycleaner. I'm talking on a tangent, but I think that some of these suburbs are some of the nicest places to live in America. Some of them where everybody lives on three acres and you have to drive to see your next door neighbor - I don't know if that is so sustainable or desirable in the long term.
Q: What is it that we have done to ourselves, though, when it gets to be third ring suburbs with huge plots? There's sort of a disconnect. How is it that we have created this disconnection by living on properties that are designed in a particular way where we don't connect with our neighbors anymore, where people need to be shuttled around. What are the consequences that we've created by living in that manner?
A: Well, vehicle miles traveled go up every year. You know, people commute further distances every year and more and more they're spending more time in their just to live their lives to go to the drycleaner, to go to the grocery store. You know, if you look at the vehicle miles traveled in a community that's like that they're just going off the charts. You know, a lot of these people are driving sports utility vehicles. I mean you're starting to see some pretty bad air pollution effects from these things. They're not subject to the limits. So, we're polluting our air, threatening our environment, threatening the temperature in terms of the country and all that kind of stuff. There's a nice quality about being able to interact personally with your neighbors, to have some contact on the street and the sidewalk. There's a sense of community about that.

You know, people say these new urbanist communities are not what people want, but they seem to be selling like hotcakes. You know, I live in a neighborhood in Minneapolis which is a streetcar suburb and it's a mixed bag of housing stock and apartment buildings, but it's walkable and it's one of the fastest appreciating neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. So, the market said it's desirable. So, we're cutting off our options by what we're doing and we're cutting off ourselves from each other. We're forcing ourselves to spend a lot more time in the car. If we build these houses on septic lots we pollute the groundwater. I think we're threatening the environment and I don't know if we're getting a higher quality of life or not.
Q: Talk about the inner city a little bit and what happened to it. Discuss the type of federal loan projects for housing going back to the 1920's and 1930's and so on and then the interstate highway system. Sort of paint the picture of how we emptied our cities.
A: Well, you know, some of our cities didn't get emptied, some of them did, but one of the things that we did was we started to underwrite the cost of mortgages and it used to be that you had to put half of the cost of a house down and after the second World War particularly we provided low interest loans to people and we made it cheaper to live in a new house in the suburbs than to rent in the city. And we also said that we were only going to direct that loan toward quote/unquote racially harmonious neighborhoods. So, racially harmonious means all white. So, it pretty much means that you have to move to an all white neighborhood to get a mortgage and it was cheaper to have a mortgage in that new neighborhood than it was to rent an apartment in the city. So, it didn't take many brains to take advantage of that low cost money and move to a neighborhood that was all white whether than was your feeling or not. You'd rather have a house that you owned with a lower monthly payment than your rent. You'd have to be crazy not to do it and that was a big part of it.

Now, black people didn't get those mortgages very often and an all black neighborhood wasn't racially harmonious. A mixed neighborhood didn't get any of that loan money. Only a white neighborhood did. So that had a big effect. It had a big powerful effect on the country and then we built massive - you know people talk about the sprawl that we're building at the edge of these regions or the development that's occurring there is the freehand of the market. Well, we invested hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure to eliminate the distance from the central city to the edge.

So, we intervened in two very massive ways into the marketplace to help create this. One is we gave virtually no cost money to white people to move to white only suburbs and the second thing we did was we built a velvet highway so that they could live as far away as they could possibly drive and we opened up a lot of land that heretofore people wouldn't have moved to because it would have been too hard to commute and eventually the critical mass of jobs in places like Detroit and the Midwest moved out there, too. So, I mean that was the three pieces too - there's a lot more to it, too. I mean there's a lot more to it than just that, but that's a part of it.
Q: What was the thinking behind creating the interstate highway system? Also, wasn't there a plan to move plants out, and therefore business left cities?
A: Well, I think that the creation of it was sort of an evolving process. I mean part of it was moving goods by truck with greater flexibility around the country. It was a national defense highway system to begin with. I mean it pretty soon became a very desirable thing when you could have a very affordable house in the suburbs and you needed to get back and forth and the traffic demanded that that be extended and whenever a road got congested we spent public money to widen it. When we widened it there was more development at the other end of the road and when it got more congested we widened it again. I mean it kind of spiraled on itself and continues to this day. You know, if you take a look at Kennedy in Chicago, congested highway, they added a billion dollars or more to expand its capacity. It reached its 20/20 congested levels within six months of the time it was opened.

In this region we spent 500 or 600 billion dollars expanding highway 394 to the western suburbs. It reached its 20/20 congestion levels within six months of the time it was open. Atlanta - no city in the country has spent more on arterial highways to support development in the suburbs and it's one of the places that has the fastest growing congestion and one of the fastest growing pollution problems in the country. So, I mean it's a problem that's spiraled from itself from the beginning and what it was intended to do and what its accomplished I think have been a moving target.
Q: What has happened to inner cities in terms of chronic poverty and the increasing patterns of people leaving now?
A: Well, I think that you have a variable outcome in cities a little bit. You have places like San Francisco and Seattle on the one extreme that have some neighborhoods of concentrated poverty but are relatively small and a lot of those neighborhoods are facing the pressure of gentrification and redevelopment. That's one extreme in the country. The other extreme you have places like Detroit and Milwaukee where a majority of the city neighborhoods are distressed and segregated. So, there's a spectrum. Some cities revitalize and push poor people out into the older suburbs. In some cities the cities carry a lot of the weight. So, cities have a variable outcome.

In America, though, in our studies of the 25 largest regions every one of these regions has troubled older suburbs. And as poverty and social instability cross from the city into the older suburbs they have a tendency to accelerate and intensify. Cities have some building blocks that they can build around. They have downtown tax base that can help them. They have parks and amenities and beautiful old housing that can gentrify. These older post World War II suburbs were not so well built housing, 1960's affordable housing, the stuff that people were moving to to get the low monthly payments. Sheet rock construction often on a grid pattern, no parks, no amenities, no downtown tax base, no real centers of culture and as poverty hits these places it hits them like a freight train. They're dry tinder. The schools change more rapidly. They don't have any resurgence that we see in the country right now except for in Portland, Oregon. They tend to just collapse and the largest story for the last 20 years hasn't been the depopulation of inner cities. It's been the changing nature of older suburban communities that surround central cities. They're about 25% of the U.S. population and they are powerfully effected and in a time of enormous prosperity in the country they have probably have been the places that have been left behind the most and have continued to see the most downward trends during this period.

In many ways they are a pivotal point in American politics, too. There are a lot of swing voters and swing districts in these places. Macomb County, Michigan is a very classic example. So, in many ways they're the most powerful, most pivotal, least well treated people in America.
Q: Give me an example of how that pattern would evolve from Detroit. Do we get somebody who has a job and suddenly has an opportunity, for instance, to move out. What happens?
A: Well, I think what happens, is you know Detroit neighborhoods become densely poor. As they reach a critical threshold of poverty they get 60%, 70% or 80% of the people in poverty they depopulate and a wave moves out. It's sort of like a bomb went off and waves of people move away from that very dense core. You can see that they look for the affordable housing options that exist in the region and most of the alternatives outside the cities are in the first ring of suburbs. They're adjacent. They're available. You can see racial change in the older suburbs, racial and social change in the inner older suburbs of Detroit and it is a part and parcel of the same process that tore apart city neighborhoods in Detroit in the 1920's and 1930's and the 1940's and the 1950's and the 1960is. It's an unending event that continues to move into these older places. Arguably these older places have less horsepower to deal with it.
Q: Let's talk about Minneapolis a little bit and then I want to frame the difference between Detroit here. Talk a little bit about regional government and how the system came about that exists here involving tax based sharing.
A: Well, a lot of it was accomplished by a bunch of Republicans. In the 1960's and 1970's they set the framework and I mean I think it was a good government movement to try to be efficient in terms of money, to be efficient in terms of land, to organize things well. It was part and parcel of a lot of things that were happening in Michigan at the same time under Governor Milliken. Governor Milliken placed it in the framework of Michigan law a lot of the things that we actually enacted. It was a start to do a lot of this in Michigan. Governor Milliken was instrumental in terms of your aid system and general revenue sharing and some of the things that are there. He was a progressive force on all these issues. We had governors like that name Lavender who are moderate Republicans. Your Governor Romney was a leader on a lot of these issues in the country. You never got it done in Michigan. We got more of it done. We pushed it further at that time in history. Part of the thing is we had a problem with septic lots in our northern suburbs. We couldn't swim in our lakes or drink our water any more and we had to come to terms with it together and we started to have to remediate it because we were having the same problems you're now having and what we had to do was do some planning. We had to start to plan together so that we wouldn't have to have all these septic sewer problems. We built a regional sewer system and we created the Regional Land Use Planning Act.

Now, the northern suburbs, the Macomb county suburbs said you're starting to restrict our growth here and you're starting to restrict our option. A lot of times bedroom communities like Macomb and developing areas want to build anything that moves because they need cash flow. They don't really have much tax base and they build anything that moves. So they need cash flow. They don't want any restrictions on what they build. One of the reasons they build all these septic lots is for cash flow. They don't really think about the long term.

Now, these northern suburbs, we had a man named Charlie Weaver, Senior, who didn't like land use planning very much and didn't like anything that was limiting the ability of Anoka County which is our pivotal blue collar area that elected Jesse Ventura and Paul Wellstone and Rod Grahams, a democrat - very liberal, a republican - very conservative, and an independent. They voted for all of them and they didn't want any restrictions, but we enacted tax sharing to give them a little bit of money and they took the money and they thought it was a pretty good deal. So, we planned for development. We avoided ground water pollution. We made them whole. We gave them some cash flow which they needed to pay for their rapidly growing schools which they needed to pay for their infrastructure to handle traffic and it was a quid pro quo that worked together and it was led by republicans - republicans like Governor Milliken in Michigan and Governor Romney in Michigan.
Q: How was tax sharing established here (Minneapolis)? It must not have been an easy thing. Whatever community has Mall of America would surely want to hang on to that.
A: Right, it was a terrible battle and again, I'm a Democrat, but it was led by a bunch of Republicans and they fought a terrible battle on the Minnesota Legislature. It took them three sessions. They passed it by a narrow margin. Communities that didn't like it brought lawsuits all the way up to the United States Supreme Court against it which the Supreme Court upheld. You know, in a percarium (sic) opinion they upheld our system. And since that time it's been in place for 25 years and its reduced disparities between our communities from twelve to one to four to one and one of the largest beneficiaries has been places like Macomb that have lower taxes and better services. It helped the central city of Minneapolis. It helped the central city of St. Paul. It also helped bedroom developing communities, communities that were developing with just housing.
Q: When you look at a city like Detroit, how key is regional planning to its survival and to the well being of those inner suburbs? What can come of it? Does it make transportation possible? Does it make other things - sharing possible?
A: Well, if you think about your alternative - if you just have these 100 cities just at war with each other forever I think you're going to get - the central city is probably as poor as it's going to be and it seems to be a little bit on the rebound. It's still one of the more stressed out cities in America. The older suburbs, if you don't start to cooperate, are going to get a lot poorer - the inner Macombs, the inner Waynes - they're going to get a lot poorer. You're going to have sprawl that reaches out further and further from the rest of the region and you're going to have creeping difficulties that reach further and further in the first, second and third tier inner ring suburbs. They're the places that are really vulnerable unless you start to cooperate. These older places, inner Macomb and inner Wayne say, businesses and middle class families please come here. We have rapidly increasing poverty in our schools so we can tax you at a comparatively high rate and not spend very much on you. That's what they're competing against - against the farm fields would say. We have no poverty. We have no overhead. We can tax you at a lower rate and spend a lot on you and I think it's harder and harder for those places to compete and they're the ones that are going to be ratcheted downward unless there's some cooperation.

Now, you've done a lot of the things in Michigan that are the building blocks of this. You're equalized your school funding in 1994. A lot of states have never had the political wherewithal to do anything like that. You've got a system of general revenue sharing that you put in place many decades ago. A lot of states don't have that. So, Michigan has shown its ability to do things, to do very good and important things. It's got to start to think about how these suburbs in places like Detroit and Grand Rapids can start to cooperate a little bit with each other and compete in a world economy for their common good rather than stealing malls and housing developments from each other.
Q: Talk a little bit about what they have there and what the hope or the success is.
A: Well, Grand Rapids is very progressive leadership in the city. It's beginning to convene the metropolitan mayors to talk about these issues. They're planning together with some infrastructure issues. They're beginning to share a little bit of resources across the communities of the region. They're beginning to come together and focus on this. They're got really fine municipal leadership. They've got the support of a progressive philanthropy, the Frey Foundation that's been interested in helping them out with these things. You know, they're beginning to take steps toward it and again, it's interesting. It's a Republican place. A lot of these things are perceived as some sort of deep, profound, social engineering. Well, wherever they've occurred - you know in the twin cities where I'm from there's more Republicans in the Legislature in the metro area than there are Democrats and there always have been. In Portland, Oregon there's more Republicans in the metro area seats than there are democrats and I think that's been the case for a long time.

Business leadership supports these things. It's sensible. It's good planning and I think in Grand Rapids you have a kind of a conservative, pragmatic group of people that are beginning to say, hey, we can't just fight little tribal wars amongst each other. We've got to raise this whole region up to compete in the world economy.
Q: Let's talk about rural areas a little bit. Cheap gas and the automobile - what role has cheap gas played in development at this point would you say?
A: Well, I think it makes it a lot easier and makes traveling a lot more effortless and costless and people don't think about it. I think that's been a rule. I think cheap gas and a proliferation of roads and deciding that any place where anybody wants to live we'll build a big, expensive road and remediate the sewer system when it fails - I think all those things work together to sort of subsidize a lifestyle that we're all sort of paying for. I mean you don't think about it. If you're the individual homeowner you think you have a God-given right to develop on a three acre septic lot. Now, you know, do you want to pay the true cost of remediating that? No, everyone would say absolutely not. I won't pay $50,000, $60,000 or $70,000 to remediate my system and pay for the infrastructure that it costs. Do you have a right to a public highway that lets you get to work in ten minutes? People think they do, but it costs a lot of money. It takes a lot of money away from other programs in the society and what happens when the region becomes a nonattainment area? Who bears that cost? All the kids with asthma wherever they live bear that cost and eventually we all will. What happens when you can't swim in Lake St. Clair? Who bears that cost? Really everybody does. And I think you kind of think about that. Maybe it is desirable to live on three acres, but is desirable when 100,000 or 200,000 or 300,000 people live on three acres and nobody can swim in the lakes or drink the groundwater any more and the pollution becomes so bad that you can't be outside and enjoy the outside? Does it become, you know, when it has to be remediated it takes money away from public schools and from crime prevention and from investment in people's futures. I mean, is that a good cost? I don't think we think about the whole picture of this and I think if we did and were forced to think about the whole picture of this together I think we might make different decisions.
Q: Where is sprawl headed at this point in terms of its impact on rural areas? Is there a way of sort of projecting?
A: Well, I mean, you know, the projections of VMT, vehicle miles traveled, are going up way high. If you look at the transportation improvement plans in most metropolitan areas there's a ton of money that's being invested that's turning the edge of the region into urbanized territory. Take a look at Detroit's transportation improvement plan. There's a lot of highways that are being built at the very edge of the region. So, I mean we're doing everything we can do facilitate more sprawl. You know, we're doing it at a breakneck pace and we're not doing it in any systematized way. We're responding to pressures from 100 developers in 100 regions that want a new project out there and they want to buy land at the very edge that's cheap. They want the public to improve roads so that it's higher cost. They want the public to build sewers and they want to cash in on that. If we subsidize it people will go out there and it's very affordable.
Q: What is the relationship between inexpensive land, and I'm thinking of farmland, and its value versus that same acre when it becomes developable land? Is land an issue in all this?
A: I think so and in most parts of the country if you're a farmer at the edge of the region it's your retirement plan. You know, you look at the land and it's much more valuable as residential real estate than it is growing corn or soybeans. Now, I think one of the things in Oregon - they have some benefits there - they have some pretty highly productive agricultural land where the people that are growing grapes and pecans and peaches and whatever else, apricots, are making a good living and in lots of parts of the Midwest farming is not a good living. It's a struggle. So, I mean that helps slant the decision.
Q: Michigan and other states have started into these PDR programs, protection development ranks, but you're saying that you don't think that that is a long-term solution and it's very expensive. Talk about that a little bit.
A: Well, I think it's an improvement, you know, over the status quo certainly and I think it's a worthwhile thing, but in the long term, the notion of buying the land I don't think there's enough money to buy all the land that needs to be protected. I think people feel that you have to buy it all. Oregon has a wonderful land use law put in place by a republican governor, a republican legislature supported by large parts of the business community that changes the rules of the game and says that land outside the area that's designated for urban expansion is going to be farmland until we change the rules and we're going to change the rules when we need the land.

Now, it's been up for public referendum I think four times and the public has sustained it four times. So, the public thinks it's good public policy. The public has sustained it four times often in the face of enormous expenditures by people who are trying to pull it apart. They like it. They think it's good. The people in Oregon like their law and Oregon land use law has saved more land than all of the land trusts and all of the public buying in the history of the country has and every year it saves way more land than all of the buying. In Oregon a business connected republican leadership changed the rules and I think the response in many parts of the country is to buy the land. Well, you can't buy the land. There's not enough philanthropic money to buy the land and one of the things that it's good in the sense that people care about land and they're investing their time and energy not watching television, but participating in something that may save a little bit of land for the future. The sad part is that they are investing their time and effort in something that probably won't make a huge amount of difference or it is a small amount of difference compared to what they could do if they were trying to change the rules of the game.
Q: Do you have any ideas as to what the difference in cost is between doing it one way and doing it the other way by changing the rules?
A: Well, I know a large foundation in California recently granted $165,000,000 to buy land and they bought a nice medium sized park reserve out of the city - maybe 1000 acres or something like that. Well, the Oregon land use law doesn't cost anything and it saves multiples of that, ten times that much every year in terms of what would happen if there weren't development. So, it gives you a sense and another thing, the philanthropies become bigger - multiples of that. Ten times that much every year in terms of what would happen if there weren't development. So, I mean it gives you a sense and another thing, you know, the philanthropies become bidders in the private market and the land trust become bidders in the private market and oftentimes the real estate people that know that the land trust has a designated purpose to save a designated amount of land bid the price up in front of them. So, it's a valid purpose. It's a good thing for people to buy land, but it's not a solution to the problem of urban sprawl and in some ways it's occupying the philanthropic field. It's occupying the energy, the small amount of time and energy that people in America have to do reform. You know, so it's a positive thing, but I believe that we could make a great deal more difference if we tried to change the rules of the game the way they did in republican Oregon.
Q: Changing the rules of the game - I want you to tell me the story that you were telling me about the Ford Foundation putting money into Bedford Stuveysant and Martin Luther King - changing the rules.
A: Well, I was reading a book, David Rusk's book, "Inside Game Outside Game," and it talked about the tens of millions of dollars in the 1960's that were invested in Bedford Stuyvesant and then in lots of ways it improved lots of people's lives. You know lots of people had got trained and got empowered and participated in their community that never had before. A lot of those people, when that happened to them moved away. Bedford Stuyvesant after 30 years of investment was poorer than it was before and that's true in many communities and that's true in many communities. I've contrasted that in many ways with the tiny amounts of money that philanthropy gave to Martin Luther King, the Ford Foundation, the Connick Foundation invested in him in a tiny way and he changed the whole country. He changed the rules of the game. And I think that that's something important. I mean I'm not trying to say that the small scale projects shouldn't be done. I think they're God's work in lots of ways and I think that people who had got jobs from the investment in those poor neighborhoods, the people that got housing and didn't have to sleep on the streets, the people that got some training and some connection to some mentors and some hope that they wouldn't have otherwise - I mean those are invaluable things, but that community and many of those communities are poorer now than they've ever been. They're more segregated. There's less economic activity. If people had been empowered they moved to places that they feel are more stable.

Changing the rules of the game in terms of some of these issues, in terms of housing discrimination and in terms of the concentration of poverty, allowing people choices about where to live - Martin Luther King fought for a lawsuit in Chicago called the Control Lawsuit. He began a lawsuit shortly before he died about public housing. It allowed 1500 families from the inner city of Chicago to live in northern high performing school districts in the northern suburbs of Chicago, without any public aid, without any public money those people's lives opened up. They worked and had jobs that they wouldn't have had living in the older places. Their kids graduated from high school with a much higher frequency from high schools that were much more challenging. Those children went to college and they became part of the structure of American opportunity and that's an important part of this is - changing the rules of the game.

So, you know, Martin Luther King struggled for support from places like the Conic Foundation, the Ford Foundation and they helped him, but it was nothing like the kind of support that was directed toward poor neighborhoods and maybe a better balance in terms of the long term. He changed the rules of the game just like republican Governor Tom McCall changed the rules of the game and those things we've seen. We've seen powerful effects on our society. We've seen a new, in many ways Martin Luther King's legacy has been a strong black middle class that's beginning to appear in many metropolitan areas. A system and a structure has opened an opportunity that's made a huge difference and it was work that was not completed, but it was started in an important way.

Tom McCall's system of changing the rules of the game saves more land in one state than all the other states buy together combined every year and he's created a quality of life for most people in Oregon, a vitality in the central city and a vitality in the older suburbs that places dream about. Look at the economic growth of the people that have begun to change the rules of the game. Look at the economic growth of Portland or Seattle or San Francisco or, or even the twin cities where I'm from which is terribly cold and has an uncompetitive tax structure in lots of ways. We're prospering and it's because we've begun to work on changing the rules of the game and the market and everyone has given us a benefit by it. Places that aren't trying to change the rules of the game are suffering in every way for their insistence on a 19th century model to deal with 21st century economy.
Q: How do we go about changing that sort of "westward ho" mentality that started with Horace Greeley that the west is an open place, that land is constantly available, that you'll never chew it up, that it's all out there to be used? Isn't that part of what we need to do?
A: Well, I think that, you know, it's a free country and people have to decide what they want to do. It's a question of what does the government do to further it? Does the government build a whole new ring of cities every generation that the community doesn't need? You know, if people want to move out to the edge and build their own sewer systems and build their own roads that's one thing, but in a place like Detroit it lost a ring of suburbs and population in 20 years and built two new rings of them and taxed everybody in the Detroit region to pay for that. Might it have been good to reinvest in some of the existing communities? Maybe that might have been a better use of the money in some ways. You know, Cleveland lost two rings of suburban population in a decade and built three new rings of cities at the edge and neither of these places is prospering because of it. Most of these places on the economic statistics are seeing some gains, but nothing like the places that have changed the rules of the game and the question is people should do what they want to do. The government should spend the people's money wisely.