Category: Charlotte metro region

High growth city = poorer city?

I came across an intriguing new study, courtesy of the HoustonTomorrow website, which headlined it, “Fast metro growth =lower incomes: Study links poverty, growth.” The study itself, “Relationship between Growth and Prosperity in 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” by consulting firm Fodor & Associates, looked at the fastest-growing and slowest-growing U.S. metro areas 2000-2009, and looked at per capita income, unemployment rate, and poverty rate. It found that faster growth rates were associated with lower incomes, greater income declines, and higher poverty rates.

Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord and Raleigh-Cary were among the fastest-growing metros the study looked at – no surprise. The report’s writers say it throws some cold water on the often-stated belief on the part of many elected and business officials that growing fast is an automatic route to prosperity.

One caveat: In a quick skim of the report I didn’t see enough data to tell me whether it had taken into account the fact that many of the fastest-growing cities in the South and the West were poorer to start with, and the slower-growing cities in the North and Midwest were places with higher pay (manufacturing, unions, etc.) but less economic growth, hence less population growth. In other words, does the study show causality or just correlation? If any academics or others have time to pore through the report and offer an analysis, it would be welcome.

Megaregions: Next big thing? Or just nutty?

Alan Ehrenhalt, respected editor of Governing magazine, has weighed in on the issue of “megaregions,” wherein he questions this decades-old theory that metro regions (e.g. CharLanta( need to be treated as one entity. Hence the term, CharLanta.

I don’t intend to be on a Richard Florida kick (See my posting about “The Ruse of the Creative Class”) but Ehrenhalt does quote Florida as hopping on the au courant megaregions trend. But he goes on to note that transportation is one area in which planning regionally, or more to the point, megaregionally, makes sense.

Megaregionally? Charlotte can’t even come up with transportation planning that recognizes that Cabarrus, Iredell and York counties have anything to do with traffic in Mecklenburg! As a certain editorial writer on the Observer’s editorial board who is also a blogger opined Jan. 3 (you folks in the Charlotte region probably slept late and missed this):

Plan Transportation Regionally

It sounds like a bizarre camaraderie of dwarfs: MUMPO, GUAMPO, CRMPO, GHMPO and RFATS (in the Disney version he’d be the chubby, clumsy one). Let us not forget LNRPO and RRRPO (the small but snarling pirate dwarf?).
As if the names aren’t funny enough, here’s a thigh-slapper: All seven are transportation planning agencies for greater Charlotte.
Even if you toss out GHMPO (Greater Hickory Metropolitan Planning Organization) you still have an insane number of separate agencies ostensibly planning transportation in one metro region. And if you don’t think transportation planning in Rock Hill-Fort Mill (RFATS) and LNRPO (Lake Norman Rural Planning Organization) doesn’t affect transportation throughout the greater Charlotte region, well, you haven’t traveled on Interstate 77.
Ask most planners and they’ll tell you – off the record of course, so as not to tick off politicians – that sane transportation planning is mere fantasy until all six or seven MPOs and RPOs merge into one true metropolitan planning organization.
MPOs are federally mandated to plan “regionally.” Indeed, Title 23 of the U.S. Code says an MPO should cover a whole metro area. However, smaller cities such as Gastonia or Concord have little interest in joining with the Mecklenburg behemoth, fearing their share of state and federal transportation money would shrink.
If the region’s governments won’t do the right thing, the state should force it. At least two men in Raleigh get it. N.C. Department of Transportation Secretary Gene Conti is savvy about transportation policy, politics and about true regional planning. So is Sen. Dan Clodfelter, a Charlotte Democrat whose seniority and smarts have given him significant clout in Raleigh.
And both states must figure out how an MPO can cross state lines, so York County, S.C., can join the region’s transportation planning. Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., all have multi-state MPOs. It can’t be rocket science.

To read all six of the editorial board’s Agenda 2010 items, visit this link.