11/03/07 Howard Husock , former director of case studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Excerpts: Breaking Up Cities More Promising Than Merger with Suburbs

By Howard Husock

 "Localism is popular, however, not because it promises a sweetheart deal for a few privileged suburbanites at the expense of the greater good, or because the unsophisticated fail to understand a demonstrably superior metropolitan approach. Voters' common sense tells them that the closer they are to government, the more it will respond to their demands.

They will see their hard-earned tax dollars spent on the kind of projects they prefer and will have a greater assurance that interest groups--such a public employee unions--will not usurp local government for the benefit of their own members, who may not even live in the city where they work.

In fact, there are good reasons to go one step further. To improve older neighborhoods in older cities requires not a single, bigger government but increased numbers of smaller ones. We should break cities up into an array of independent, neighborhood-based governments that would set their own property-tax rates, elect their own officials, and give city residents the same control and sense of community that their suburban counterparts take for granted.

City dwellers could direct public spending to the things they consider most important. They could ask the local public works director why their street went unplowed or unpaved, or push the local chief of police to deal with the rowdy playground gang before the things get out of hand.

Freed from centralized bureaucracies, these neighborhoods, including many of the older, poorer ones, would prosper. As for paying to maintain, or build, expensive regional infrastructure systems: for that purpose, these independent local governments could cooperate in a loose confederation, or "special purpose district."

Municipalities have differentiated themselves from one another for good reason. The formation of independent cities and towns fueled the explosive economic takeoff of the late 1800s; it defused tensions between immigrant and native-born; and it allowed the upwardly mobile to build communities that reflected their hard-won new social status.

Instead of promising more of the redistributionist machinery that has failed so roundly over the last generation, breaking up the cities holds out a different, more valuable promise to poor neighborhoods. It offers them the incentive and the means to encourage economic growth."