The State of the Cities

Cities formed within counties whenever powerful special interests wanted more attention.  Cities were usually formed to serve the business district.  Police were hired to protect the businesses.  Public transportation was created to get shoppers to the downtown stores.  Parks were created. Public schools were built for city residents. 

When cities were abandoned for the suburbs, the suburbs also created cities for the same reasons. Suburban counties have constructed their own civic centers and big city civic centers struggle for patrons and close. Manufacturing companies have left the big cities to settle in suburban county office parks and if they come back to the US they are likely to settle back into these office parks.

When Shopping Malls replaced the downtown business districts they created Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) to collect taxes to maintain these Malls. Now that malls are being evacuated and replaced by on-line shopping we are left with all of these taxing entities. These abandoned Malls are likely to be redeveloped with high-rise office buildings if they can find companies to move in to these. The CIDs will expect the Cities and Counties to pony up the bribe money to attract these companies.

Cities have changed their focus to increase property values in order to increase city revenue.  We are now building things that may not have much of a future. Malls are open to redevelopment with office buildings and apartments, but new apartment units are expensive and it is unclear who will rent them. Strip malls have included office space, but this is still retracting, so these properties are redeveloped as single-family townhomes.

Cities preside over zoning for this redevelopment and are giving large tax holidays to large businesses to get them to move their jobs to their city. Some cities like Dunwoody are overbuilt, not well planned and have chronic traffic gridlock around the mall. Cities like Dunwoody are promoting community events, but attendance is likely to decline as gridlock worsens.  

Regional Commissions that had been planning groups, but Agenda 21 implementation included Land Use Plans and regional planning was imposed. To comply, cities adopted Agenda 21 imposed “Character Areas”.  This encourages “in-fill” development to increase property values, but the lack of space shrinks roads and increases gridlock. State governments created these problems by imposing Agenda 21 on counties and cities.  This introduced cronyism to the bidding process for contractors and cities hire incompetent contractors who overcharge for their work.  Agenda 21 also imposed additional costs for “road design” that had previously been done routinely by contractors who knew what they were doing.  Designs are required to be performed by “urban planners”, trained by schools using curriculum from the American Planning Association, another Agenda 21 agency.  We now have unnecessary and very expensive “roundabouts”, oversized intersections, unused on-street bike lanes and “greenspace”. 

Agenda 21 also promoted “transit villages” and public transit commuter train systems to model European systems, but the current US infrastructure was built for suburban living requiring automobiles and this is not likely to change. Ridership on public transit in the US in most cities is low and doesn’t allow these systems to be self-supporting and tax dollars for public transit is an obvious waste of money. Uber has arrived on the scene and is taking riders away from public transit.

The “high density”- “big gridlock” fad may have helped high-rise developers, but it is killing the big cities. These cities will continue to shrink until they fix their road and highway systems to make it a “pleasure” to drive downtown.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader