That's a little bit of a copout. Part of the difference, from my point of view, is the ease with which you can change. You don't see a lot of incorporation and disincorporation and mergers of municipalities. With a homeowners association, if it's not adapting well, somebody goes bankrupt. That gives you an opportunity to reorganize that governments don't have. If a lot of struggling cities and school systems were private operations they would already be bankrupt.
The reason I have to say that I don't know yet is because so much of the private association activity is new construction. We don't know how they're going to respond when they hit a downturn. Or when what was constructed for the demographics and preferences of 2006 has to respond to the population of 2036. Until we get there, we don't know.
And again, it's not clear to what extent these associations are going to be held to the same constitutional restrictions that municipal governments are held to. If they're regulated the same, then my guess is they'll have the same difficulties in being flexible.
reason: Your book also criticizes the ideas of metropolitan regionalism and tax-base sharing.
Bogart: One reason to be against tax-base sharing is that it's not that much money that's being distributed. As a result, it can't really change anything.
Another reason is, if you look at places that have metropolitan government, they essentially have tax-base sharing built in. To my eye, I don't see the difference in internal disparities in those places relative to places that don't have tax-base sharing or metropolitan government.
Let me come at it at a slightly different, practical angle. I live an hour north of Baltimore. If we were to going to do a regional government, my county should be part of the Baltimore regional government. But I'm in Pennsylvania, and Baltimore's in Maryland. If the regional government people are serious, they'd be talking about multi-state regional governments, and I have yet to hear one of them address that seriously.
Also, you're essentially just changing the level of inflexibility. One of the nice things about small municipal governments is that as a place changes from being rural to being urban, it can join a voluntary set of regional contractual agreements. Where I live we have regional police departments, where multiple municipalities participate. But if you draw a metropolitan boundary, what happens when the town right outside the boundary becomes economically part of the metropolis? Are you changing the boundary every time? What happens in a situation like Youngstown, where the metropolitan area is shrinking? How do you release a piece of the city that maybe should be farms again?
If metropolitan regional government is the answer, that's another argument for why everybody should be copying Houston. The city of Houston is huge. The city limits of Houston are over 600 square miles. That's unimaginably large, relative to what most regions are looking at. Yet I don't hear [prominent regionalist] David Rusk advocating, "Look at Houston! That's what we're trying to accomplish."
reason: You write that "people in Cleveland didn't know they were living in a new world until after the fact." How is "sprawl" -- the idea, not the actual sprawl -- constructed in popular discourse?
Bogart: There is some type of dramatic public event. A well-known local area gets developed, and all of the sudden people realize, "We're not what we thought we were before."
I mention in the book -- and there's some nice research on this -- that most people live in places that are, depending on how you measure it, about 50 percent developed. About half open space, half development. And over time, the peak of what gets developed is about 50 percent open space. So you have a huge fraction of people thinking, "That was that other farm, and now there's houses there." They incorrectly extrapolate that every farm in America has been turned into houses, and there's a public outcry.
Some of it is also self-serving. People move into an area and then attempt to change the rules under which they were allowed to move in.
reason: Last question: What does Italo Calvino have to tell us about metropolitan structure?
Bogart: The reason I used so many literary references is to evoke that metropolitan structure includes a lot of connections across disciplines and even across literature. I open with an excerpt from Calvino's Invisible Cities in which Marco Polo and Kublai Khan talk about the stones that make up the arch of a bridge. Marco Polo describes the stones, and Khan says, "Which one's most important?" Marco Polo says, "Well, none of them. It's the arch that holds up the bridge." Kublai Khan says, "So why are you telling me about the stones?" And Marco Polo says, "Without the stones there is no arch."
We have to focus on the individual, but we have to focus on that individual in the context of the complete relationship. For me, that's why it's so important to focus both on the individual trading places and on the relationships among them. Both are necessary for a thriving metropolitan area.
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