Industry and the Smart City

Industry and the smart city

ZELDA BRONSTEIN

These days, U.S. city planning exudes an funded the Smart Growth Network. The net- audacious air. The suburban sprawl that has work’s nearly forty partners include environ- dominated U.S. development since the Second mental groups; historic preservation organiza- World War is under assault from a multitude of tions; professional associations; developers; real policy makers and activists bent on protecting estate interests; and local, state, and govern- the environment and revitalizing city life. Rally- ment entities. One partner, Smart Growth ing to varied watchwords—smart growth, new America, is itself a coalition of more than one urbanism, sustainable development, green de- hundred national, state, and local organizations, velopment, livable communities, traditional including the Sierra Club, the Congress for the neighborhood development—the insurgent ur- New Urbanism, the American Farmland Trust, banists share key goals: mixing land uses, rais- the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and ing density, and ramping up public transit. In the American Planning Association. Working place of auto-centric, single-use districts both together and independently, these groups reached only via traffic-choked roads, they put sponsor numerous conferences, tours, exposi- housing, shops, and offices close to each other tions, focus groups, forums, publications, and and to ample transit options. Given such op- research projects. They vigorously lobby every tions, they contend, people readily abandon level of government. A copious literature rang- their cars and walk or bike to and from work or ing from books to blogs disseminates smart to the bus, train, trolley, ferry, or light or heavy growth’s principles, showcases its success sto- rail that will carry them to and from work. Only ries, critiques its opponents, and publicizes its “densification” and “infill”—building at higher latest undertakings. Smart growth is now a cur- densities, preferably in already settled areas— ricular staple at the nation’s best planning can provide mass transit with the substantial schools. Most important, in the past two number of riders it needs to be financially feasi- decades thousands of development projects that ble. The widespread realization of this scenario, meet smart growth specifications have been say its proponents, will not only revive urban completed. America; it will benefit the environment at For a movement that’s just twenty years old, large. By drawing people out of their private ve- smart growth has compiled an impressive ré- hicles, compact, transit-oriented development sumé. That résumé, however, is not as impres- will reduce traffic congestion, cut down air pol- sive as its adherents would like. What others re- lution, and diminish global warming; by con- gard as a profound achievement—say, the pas- centrating new construction in city centers, it sage in September 2008 of California’s will protect farmland and open space from first-in-the-nation law to reduce greenhouse gas being further devoured by suburbia. emissions by curbing sprawl—they’re likely to Of all the constituencies embracing this vi- deem a mere step, albeit a big one, in the right sion, smart growth has the highest visibility, the direction. Appraising the new law, prominent broadest agenda, the farthest institutional reach, planner and smart growth advocate William and the greatest political leverage. Since 1996, Fulton notes that, at bottom, it’s about control- the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ling air pollution, not mandating comprehen- Urban Economic Development Division has sive growth management or land use reform.

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“It’s an incremental change,” he writes, “not a bunk the myth that U.S. manufacturing is obso- revolution.” Indeed, to accomplish its goals, the lete. smart growth movement must overcome formi- In depicting industry as basically irrelevant to dable obstacles: the huge extent of existing twenty-first-century urban America, smart sprawl, the political clout of the highway lobby, growth perpetuates a common misconception. the recalcitrance of unreconstructed builders Yes, the nation’s older cities are littered with va- and lenders, the local opposition often elicited cant or underutilized old factory buildings, by the prospect of increased density, and the many in need of remediation. Their presence abiding desire of many Americans to live in a testifies to a very real, decades-long decline. In single-family house with a yard and a garage. 1979 nearly twenty million Americans worked In the name of urban revitalization and envi- in manufacturing; as of February 2009 that ronmental protection, smart growth defies pow- number had fallen to 12.5 million. In the same erful interests and entrenched attitudes. But it period, manufacturing as a share of national scarcely challenges the status quo across the employment plummeted from 22 percent to 9 board. On the contrary, smart growth abets one percent. Brownfields are just one troublesome of the most debilitating phenomena to have legacy of this staggering loss. The disappearance beset American cities in the past half-century: of seven-and-a-half million jobs in a generation deindustrialization. This move is never openly has shuttered downtowns, blighted neighbor- avowed; “postindustrial” is not in the smart hoods, depleted public coffers, and devastated growth lexicon. The contents of that lexicon, lives. however, indicate that the renovated American But, as we have been hearing lately, though metropolis envisioned by its authors has little U.S. manufacturing is down, it’s far from out. need of, and thus scant room for, industry. By Twelve million five hundred thousand jobs is industry, I mean the production, distribution, still a lot of jobs. Add the numbers from other repair, and recycling of manufactured goods. industrial occupations—wholesale trade (5.8 None of these activities figures in smart million), transportation and warehousing (4.3 growth’s standard inventory of desirable urban million), waste management and remediation land uses. At most, working industrial enter- (361,000), repair and maintenance (1.2 mil- prise merits an occasional passing reference. lion)—and you have 24.1 million jobs amount- ing to almost one-fifth of the nation’s employment. But industry does have a role in the These jobs are valuable for their quality as smart growth tableau: it’s cast as a relic, if not a well as their quantity. Dollar for dollar, manu- ruin. At best it takes the form of an empty facturing generates more economic growth—job warehouse suitable for adaptive reuse. More creation, investment, and innovation in direct often it appears as a “brownfield,” a site that’s production and elsewhere—than other sectors not only abandoned or “underutilized” but also of the economy. It also does more for social eq- contaminated and in need of detoxification. In uity. While manufacturing and other industrial any case, for smart growth advocates, the desig- jobs increasingly demand technical skills, they nated future of an industrial site is redevelop- rarely require an advanced degree; they thereby ment with a mix of housing, retail, and offices. offer Americans an unusually accessible career The reindustrialization of the American city path into the middle class—no small thing in a ought to have a place on the smart growth country where less than 30 percent of the pop- agenda—and a place near the top at that—if ulation has graduated from college. (In the only because sustaining urban industry fends inner city, that figure is about 12 percent.) off sprawl. Sprawl busting aside, a vital industri- Workers with less education can obtain higher al sector fosters social equity, supports the serv- wages, better benefits, and readier advancement ice economy, propels innovation, and builds in industry than in retail or office employment. economic resilience. Smart growth should be “The average manufacturing worker,” writes safeguarding urban industry; instead, its land economist Susan Helper in a 2008 report to the use policies facilitate industrial displacement. Economic Policy Institute, “earns a weekly The first step in reversing that strategy is to de- wage of $725, 20% higher than the national average.”

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If the green economy envisioned by Barack indispensable support. This crucial function is Obama comes to pass, industry will also provide overlooked in the effusive tributes paid by millions of American workers with good jobs Richard Florida and others to the “new econo- that improve the environment. According to my” and its amenity-rich “consumer cities.” economist Robert Pollin, the president’s eco- Granted, no such encomiums are to be found in nomic stimulus plan, passed by Congress in the discourse of smart growth, where the February, directs between $50 billion and $140 phrase “new economy” is almost as scarce as billion to clean energy investments, “depending the word “postindustrial.” But insofar as the on how one counts the patchwork of direct smart metropolis is conceived as a place of resi- public spending and private-sector initiatives.” dences, offices, and shops with no essential ties Five hundred million dollars have been desig- to industrial activity, its economy is arguably nated for training workers for careers in energy new. In real cities, however, the old and the efficiency and renewable energy fields. Pollin new are deeply intertwined. marks the modesty of this effort: “[B]uilding a clean-energy economy,” he writes, “is the work of a generation and takes only its first baby Their mutual dependency in one exem- steps within the two-year Obama stimulus pro- plary new economy town is graphically illus- gram.” At the same time, he hails the measure trated by a 2007 report prepared by the City of for defying conventional wisdom and coupling San Francisco’s Back Streets Businesses Adviso- environmental protection with economic op- ry Board. The report includes linkage maps that portunity. trace connections between three kinds of serv- Obama’s proposal for a “green recovery” over- ice business associated with San Francisco—a laps with the agenda of the Apollo Alliance, a na- sourdough bakery (Boudin), a popular high-end tional coalition of labor, business, environmental, restaurant (Delfina), and a major brokerage and social justice leaders. Taking its name from (Schwab)—and an array of “back streets” firms. the U.S. space initiative of the 1960s and hoping Back street businesses are defined as “small to to emulate the inspiration, investment, and inno- medium-size industrial or commercial business- vation engendered by that project, the Alliance’s es that create products or provide services in New Apollo Program calls for a $500 billion, ten- manufacturing, wholesale, commercial, logis- year investment in a clean-energy economy and tics, construction, repairs and food processing.” the creation of five million “high quality green- The restaurant, for example, gets the ingredi- collar jobs.” “High quality” means jobs that sig- ents for its dishes from a variety of food whole- nificantly broaden vocational opportunity. “[A] salers. The components of its table setting—the job that improves the environment but doesn’t tables, chairs, utensils, glasses, napkins, menus, provide a family-supporting wage or a career lad- lights, flowers, to-go bags—come from an der to move low-income workers into higher- equally wide-ranging group of local suppliers, skilled occupations,” says one Alliance report, producers, and merchants. Similar back streets- “…is not a green-collar job.” A transformed and Main Street relationships are replicated in reinvigorated American manufacturing sector is urban economies around the country. central to the New Apollo strategy, which looks Domestic manufacturing also powers the to U.S. manufacturers to design and deliver high- “knowledge-based” economy. It’s no accident efficiency vehicles, world-class transit systems, a that, as economist Robert Scott observes, “scien- modern power grid, solar panels, wind turbines, tists and engineers make up 9 percent of the and sophisticated cooling and heating systems— manufacturing labor force, a share that is nearly and to do all this in ways that are safe and clean. twice as large as in the rest of the economy,” or Last November, the New York Times reported that that manufacturing accounts for almost two- laid-off industrial workers in the rustbelt are be- thirds of all private research and development ginning to find good jobs with manufacturers of in the United States. These figures bear witness solar panels and wind turbines, some operating to the close ties between inventiveness and fab- out of retooled factories, others out of new rication, an intimacy that economists Stephen plants. Cohen and John Zysman highlighted more than Meanwhile, industrial businesses already fur- two decades ago in Manufacturing Matters: The nish the nation’s dominant service sector with Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy. New proto-

DISSENT Summer 2009 29 THE NEW AMERICAN CITY types do not spring full-blown from labs; they ened or eliminated altogether, they may well need to be tested by users, refined, and tested hold their property off the market until after again. The efficiency and fruitfulness of this the zoning has been revised and then sell it to process is enhanced by the geographic proximi- developers of offices, housing, and retail. This is ty of researchers and designers to users. That what happened in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, the benefit, says geographer Lifang Chiang, helps Bay Area, and other metropolitan areas that explain one striking confluence of the old and until recently had strong economies and intense new economies: the persistence of hundreds of competition for space: extensive conversion of independent machine shops in the San Francis- industrial lands paved the way for a profusion co Bay Area. Manufacturers’ proximity to their of new high-end offices, fancy condominiums, customers and their customers’ suppliers en- fashionable cafés, and boutiques—which is to larges the “spillovers” of knowledge, networks, say, for rampant gentrification. and markets that, as economist Joel Popkin has Gentrifying development is often criticized noted, drive innovation in subtle and inimitable for making inner-city neighborhoods unafford- ways. The denser the geographic concentration able to the people who lived there before the of manufacturing plants, the greater the gentry arrived. It has the equally pernicious ef- spillovers. fect of undoing industrial districts. A successful industrial district requires a critical mass of business, and the existence of that critical mass de- In any fair portrait, U.S. industry’s vital con- pends on the availability of industrial land. Re- tributions to the nation’s economic and social zoning not only shrinks the amount of land well-being would overshadow scenes of indus- legally available for industry; it drives up prices trial dereliction. That said, the overall impres- in broad areas where industrial businesses are sion left by such a picture would still be trou- located, produces uncertainty about long-term bling, for it would also reflect the grave difficul- capital investments in industrial operations, and ties that confront American industry: invites conflict with nearby residential and retail competition from foreign firms using cheap uses. labor, some now operating on these very Smart growth’s devaluation of industry con- shores; the mobility of capital, enabled by tributes to this subversive process. Industry’s deregulation and new technologies; the over- low rents mean that industrial enterprise will valued dollar; the growing shortage of skilled never qualify as what people in the real estate industrial labor; the corresponding dearth of business call, in a cunning turn of phrase, a technical education; and the astounding ab- property’s “highest and best use,” meaning sence of a national industrial policy. I want to whatever yields the most profit. It follows that if discuss another, less familiar threat: inhospitable urban industry is to survive, not to say thrive, it land use policies. needs protection from market forces. What it In the United States, businesses that do pro- gets from smart growth—where it generally ap- duction, distribution, repair, or recycling are pears as a form of blight, when it appears at mostly small and medium-sized firms. Many all—is greater exposure, leading to a vicious rent their space and are thus highly vulnerable cycle: treating industry as a relic justifies the to market conditions. Industrially zoned land conversion of industrial land to other uses, yields substantially lower rents than land zoned thereby further weakening the possibility of in- for offices, housing, or retail; hence it sells for dustrial revitalization. And like farmland, once substantially less, making it extremely attractive lost, industrial land is gone forever. to nonindustrial developers. Landlords usually The irony is that displacing industry from the seek the most lucrative tenants they can get. In metropolitan core increases sprawl. Forced out principle, landlords whose property is zoned for of city centers or unable to locate there in the industry keep their rents at levels that industrial first place, industrial businesses migrate to the tenants can afford. But they’re likely to raise more affordable edges of a region. But the those rents if they know that a city does not en- trucks that carry the goods that those businesses force its industrial zoning laws and permits non- make, repair, recycle, store, and transport regu- industrial uses in an industrial zone. If they larly travel from the edges to the center and think the industrial zoning is going to be loos- back, worsening air quality and further congest-

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ing already crowded roads, as well as increasing tures against automobile-dominated urban the price of making goods. Industrial displace- transportation and her defense of mixed-use ment also makes it harder for city residents em- neighborhoods that are walkable, dense, and vi- ployed in industry to reach their jobs. Econo- brant. They seem not to have noticed that light mist Linda Hausrath has shown how a shrink- industry was an essential ingredient in her ing supply of industrial land in the Bay Area has recipe for a great city. In April 2005, as New led to the dispersion of goods-movement busi- York’s city council was deliberating the rezoning nesses, just as the demand for those businesses of the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront, Ja- is growing. Hausrath ties the diminishing cobs sent Mayor Michael Bloomberg a letter amount of centrally located industrial land to urging him to “do the right thing” and support local and regional smart growth strategies that the community-devised plan that, unlike the allow or even encourage new housing and retail city staff’s “ambush” in behalf of “visually tire- development at the expense of industrial space, some, unimaginative and imitative luxury proj- good jobs, compact development, and the envi- ect towers,” did not “destroy hundreds of man- ronment. ufacturing jobs, desperately needed by New York citizens and by the city’s stagnating and stunted manufacturing economy.” Her recom- That smart growth, declared enemy of mendation was ignored, as the Bloomberg ad- sprawl, permits or actually exacerbates sprawl- ministration proceeded to expedite what Susan inducing industrial dispersion is less surprising Fainstein has aptly dubbed “the return of urban than it may appear. American city planning renewal.” originated as a reaction against the industrial Smart growth’s name signals an intention to city. The constitutionality of traditional, so- take a different approach to development than called Euclidean zoning was established by a the planning profession’s habitual course. 1924 Supreme Court decision (Village of Euclid, “Growth” is code for the joint enlargement of Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co.) that affirmed a Cleve- capital and construction. Smart growth avowed- land suburb’s prohibition of industrial develop- ly seeks only such expansion as benefits cities ment on vacant land within its boundaries. and the environment, as opposed to whatever Moreover, from early on, American city investment yields the highest return. Insofar as planning has aligned itself with urban “growth it fights new highways and suburban McMan- coalitions” dedicated to maximizing real estate sions, smart growth lives up to its name. But values. The nation’s first regional comprehen- the movement’s marginalization of urban in- sive plan, the 1929 Regional Plan of New York and dustry shows planners’ continuing identification Its Environs, sought to rid lower Manhattan of with property capital and its inherent drive to- factory lofts and the tenements occupied by ward the most profitable development, even thousands of workers in the garment industry. when it’s “dumb.” The Plan was intended to eliminate real and Still, smart growth’s dismissive treatment of perceived squalor and at the same time to facili- industry can’t be laid entirely at the door of the tate the expansion of the city’s central business planning profession. The movement involves district. Its authors, notes Robert Fitch, “had the multiple constituencies. In fact, a few members tightest imaginable grip on actual Manhattan of the smart growth coalition—Urban Habitat; land prices,” manifest in the Plan’s sequentially the National Trust for Historic Preservation; and, arranged historical maps depicting the block-by- most notably, Good Jobs First—acknowledge block spread of higher priced land. the value of urban industry and the need to After the Second World War, industrial dis- protect industrial lands. If such recognition placement in New York and other American hasn’t made it onto the smart growth agenda, cities proceeded under the aegis of urban re- it’s because it’s not yet shared by the housing newal. Urban renewal’s foremost critic, Jane Ja- advocates, environmentalists, transportation ac- cobs, opened her 1961 masterwork, The Death tivists, and architects who, along with city plan- and Life of Great American Cities, by declaring, ners, dominate the smart growth movement. “This book is an attack on current city planning Two of smart growth’s leading environmentalist and rebuilding.” Jacobs is often invoked by supporters, the Sierra Club and the National Re- smart growthers, who admiringly cite her stric- sources Defense Council, also belong to the

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Apollo Alliance. But neither they nor the Apol- But if industry is regarded as obsolete, pro- lo Alliance have connected the greening of U.S. tecting buildings for its use is irrelevant. What’s manufacturing and employment to pro-indus- needed are zoning regulations that expedite trial urban land-use policy. At least industry has other uses. Form-based codes fit the bill. Writ- their attention, which can’t be said for smart ing in the National Association of Realtors’ growth’s cadres of housing advocates or trans- smart growth magazine, On Common Ground, portation activists. The housing advocates see Smart Growth America communications direc- industrial lands as potential sites for new resi- tor David Goldberg cites Sandy Sorlien, co-au- dential development. The transportation advo- thor of the SmartCode, a guide to the form- cates barely see industrial land at all; dedicated based zoning code created by Duany Plater-Zy- to getting commuters to take something other berk, the firm of Andres Duany and Elizabeth than their private cars to work, they rarely Plater-Zyberk, two of the founders of new ur- specify the nature of the work itself, much less banism. “Think of the warehouse districts that the value of metropolitan industrial enterprise have morphed into trendy arts districts with and employment. street-level shops and galleries and lofts above,” suggests Sorlien. Use-based zoning, she notes, would deem such changes “drastic, because the But it’s the architects, represented by land-use category has gone from industrial…to practitioners of the new urbanism, who provide residential, although to the average onlooker, the most striking evidence of industry’s margin- the place looks pretty much the same.” Gold- al position in the smart growth universe: the berg comments, “A form-based code could help form-based zoning they’ve devised as an alter- to encourage such adaptation by removing native to traditional regulatory codes. Whereas many of the regulatory hurdles to be cleared.” traditional zoning focuses on the uses of land, No doubt it could. And, given certain condi- form-based codes emphasize what a building tions, turning a warehouse district into a beguil- looks like and how it relates to other structures, ing arts quarter might be a good idea. The trou- to the street, and to the overall design of a com- ble with the perspective articulated above is that munity. The new approach aims, among other it’s the only idea, unencumbered by any consid- things, to facilitate the dense, mixed-use devel- eration as to whether a functioning industrial opment that, its supporters say, Euclidean zon- neighborhood might be destroyed by the rent ing hampers or simply prohibits. Their assump- inflation that inevitably accompanies a shift to tion is that similar architectural forms can ac- “higher and better” uses of land. The sort of commodate the full range of contemporary work being done inside a building doesn’t urban land uses. “In today’s world of office, count; what matters is how a place appears “to light industrial and residential uses,” writes the average onlooker” and, it should be added, urban commentator Neal Peirce, traditional to the attending design professionals. In the zoning’s protection of residential areas “from new urbanism, observes architect Michael Pya- such blight as tanneries and industrial plants” is tok, labor is trumped by the market-driven aes- “an almost irrelevant concern.” thetics of consumer culture. It’s true that much of U.S. industry has con- That culture puts a premium on agreeable siderably lightened up, in part by having gone sensations and stimulating experiences. Offering high tech. But even absent tanneries, the pro- little in the way of sublime allurement, working duction, storage, distribution, repair, or recy- industry is held in low esteem by connoisseurs cling of tangible goods typically generates traf- of excitement. For one thing, it fails the visibili- fic, noise, or odors that may not be noxious but ty test, a crucial prerequisite of consumer inter- still annoy and inconvenience nonindustrial est. Not only does industrial enterprise now neighbors. Moreover, the low rents that indus- occur largely on our back streets, but the face it try can afford will not last long in neighbor- presents to the world is usually dull, if not hoods being utilized for new housing, retail, downright unattractive. Moreover, the work of and offices. In short, form-based codes can’t production, storage, distribution, and repair is provide industry with the protections it re- largely invisible to outsiders, taking place be- quires. hind the opaque walls of factories, warehouses, and garages. That’s one reason that active in-

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dustrial sites often appear blighted to the public Oakland—have restricted the conversion of at large. But what disqualifies working industry their functioning industrial lands to housing as an object of consumer desire is not only how and other uses. In so doing, they followed the it looks but also what it signifies. Virtuoso con- lead of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Portland, sumers savor the thrill of personal empower- and Seattle, and the former lead (see below) of ment that accompanies the act of consumption; my own city of Berkeley. At the same time, the felt affirmation of individuality, however these cities are all promoting dense infill devel- fleeting, underwrites the seductiveness of con- opment that mixes housing, retail, and offices in sumerism. By contrast, operative industry, par- locales that are convenient to mass transit. In ticularly manufacturing, evokes routinization other words, with one exception, they’re simul- and standardization. taneously pursuing industrial retention and The operative word here is “operative”: as smart growth. long as industrial enterprise is up and running, That joint pursuit makes sense. Keeping in- its physical setting connotes a stifling of choice dustry in the metropolitan core advances major that offends the consumer mentality. Once in- goals of smart growth: By countering sprawl, it dustrial labor has departed, however, its former reduces air pollution, traffic congestion and venue is susceptible to being invested with an greenhouse gas emissions. By supporting a re- aura of creative freedom and personal integrity. silient and diverse urban economy, industry “Loft living,” writes sociologist Sharon Zukin in makes cities more appealing places to live and a seminal study, “is part of a larger modern to work. From the other side, the density of quest for authenticity.” The sturdiness and age urban life fosters the synergies that are essential of old factory buildings offer a reassuring con- to industrial vitality and innovation. Abundant trast to the ephemerality of consumer culture. and accessible public transit makes it easier for Even more compelling is the association of such employees of industrial businesses to get to and buildings with artistic production. The artist’s from work, especially those who can’t afford to studio “becomes the place—perhaps the only own or drive a car. As Daniel Luria and Joel place in society—where the self is created.” Rogers point out, modern infrastructure and Tying this idealization/idolization of artistic pro- other “productive public goods” attract compa- duction to the appeal of loft living for the mid- nies that might well go elsewhere, by making a dle class, Zukin charts a now-familiar story of metropolitan region a more efficient and thus a inner-city gentrification: starting in the late more profitable place to do business; their pres- 1960s, artists began converting former factory ence then increases the chances that such firms lofts in lower Manhattan into live-work quar- will stay. “[T]he immobility of these ters. Middle-class professionals followed the goods…serves to ground capital,” thereby bol- artists, leading to an upward spiral of rents that stering a place’s ability to “demand more of cap- displaced light industry and artists alike. Zukin ital—less pollution, higher wages, better labor emphasizes that the rise of the loft market owed relations, more investment in the community.” as much to “large shifts of investment capital to- Attaining these advantages involves more ward and within the service sector” as to the than zoning to limit the conversion of industrial tastes of “urban pioneers.” As she also makes lands or adding industry to the smart growth clear, that rise and the gentrification it entailed mix of urban land uses. Both these actions are could not have occurred without rezoning that predicated on shifts in attitude as profound as facilitated the conversion of manufacturing the rejection of auto-oriented sprawl in favor of space to residential uses. transit-oriented density. The modern American city needs to be reconceived as a site of production, a place where tangible goods are made, The fundamental protection that land and not just made, but invented and reinvent- use policy can offer industry is strong and reli- ed, repaired and recycled. For that expanded able use-based zoning. Mindful of that fact, view to gain currency, the value and viability of since December 2007 three of California’s such work has to be broadly acknowledged and largest cities—Los Angeles, which has the most widely publicized. And to that end, and most manufacturing jobs (434,000) of any metropoli- challenging of all, we need to affirm the power tan region in the United States; San Jose; and of human agency to shape our common life.

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economy than office or retail, or that increased I’m talking about the power of politics property taxes will be consumed by the addi- as well as labor. The widespread belief that tional services that new residential development manufacturing is fated to extinction in this requires. Such long-term considerations are country concedes all to the impersonal forces of hard to grasp if you’re a cash-strapped city offi- globalized capitalism and technological cial trying to balance the municipal budget or “progress.” But the restructuring that has driven figuring out how to fund your reelection cam- manufacturing out of the nation’s cities is large- paign. They’re even harder to grasp if you think ly the result of decisions made by powerful men domestic industry is passé. That said, the point and women acting in public capacities. It takes is that cities have choices. In Berkeley, a neolib- enlightened city officials to promote zoning for eral administration in thrall to developers is tak- industry and—crucial proviso—to enforce that ing the short view and doing its best to disman- zoning. Developers typically figure among suc- tle the city’s protections for its industrial sector. cessful local politicians’ biggest donors. Then By contrast, in Los Angeles, Oakland, and San there’s the matter of revenue, the lifeblood of Jose a commitment to industry has been en- local government: industry yields much less abled by the farsighted leadership of each city’s than the sales tax generated by retail or the mayor and conscientious city staffers, including property tax generated by housing and offices. city planners. Their actions are all the more It’s all very well to point out that industry’s commendable for having been taken in an era higher wages create more wealth within a local when cities are heavily dependent on private investment and at a moment when the building boom was still in full swing. Now the real estate bubble in California and just about everywhere else has burst amid the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depres- sion. With credit frozen and demand plummet- ing, many smart growth development projects have slowed, halted, or fallen through. Manu- facturing, too, has plunged around the globe. “Foundation of New World Order Is Uncertain- ty,” read a headline in the Wall Street Journal’s year-end review of 2008 markets and finance. In fact, it’s the breakdown of the fundamentally unstable old world order that has bewildered its adepts. The ensuing debacle has caused great hardship; it’s also created opportunities for major transformation. The revival of America’s manufacturing and construction sectors is central to Barack Obama’s recovery plan. Achieving that double renaissance, and realizing its full potential to benefit our cities, will require a concerted political effort. As American cities’ predominant advocates, the supporters of smart growth should join in and work for its success.

Zelda Bronstein is a writer and community ac- tivist. In 2006 she ran for mayor of Berkeley.

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