More on Ruston

Karen at Ruston Home, who has been a great and active crusader for her community, brings up the annexation question again. Apparently Tacoma Councilmember Connie Ladenburg brought it up in the contract negotiations with Ruston for Tacoma municipal services.

Karen, and many of the comments on the post, are opposed to Ruston annexation into Tacoma because they want to keep their identity, which is very much tied in with the town.

Now, annexation of suburbs into Tacoma is a very popular thing over here at ErikEmery.com (follow the link to read my arguments for annexation of the suburbs into their central cities). And I would question whether that identity would truly suffer from annexation.

I would point Karen and others to Proctor. It's possible that the community pride, the civic engagement, and the identity of place is just as strong in Proctor as it is in Ruston, if not more so. I know I'm painting with a large brush, but the people I know who work or live in Proctor are quite fierce about their devotion to the neighborhood. They absolutely love it.

If Ruston were a "neighborhood," instead of a town, I would think that they would feel the same way about their community as the Proctor people do. In fact, their dedication might go up, in that now they work to distinguish their neighborhood from the rest of Tacoma.

All that said, I do believe that annexation policies can be done poorly and can be done badly. If Ruston were going to be annexed into Tacoma, I would want it to be a "model annexation" so that it wouldn't scare off Fife, Fircrest, or UP from considering the same thing.

Properly annexing Ruston into Tacoma would require:

• The creation of a strong volunteer neighborhood council. The council, in coordination with Tacoma city planners, would have the ability to help establish design standards for their community.
• The ability for residents continue using Ruston, WA for mailings (in the same way that an address in Brooklyn can be both Brooklyn, NY and New York, New York).
• A free election by the citizens of Ruston in favor of annexation (note: I'm in favor of this for incorporated towns, but I am not as strictly dedicated to it in the case of unincorporated areas).
  

I'm probably missing a few qualifications, but those would be the three most important I can think of right now that would probably be essential for moving forward on the annexation discussion.

New York vs. New York

The congestion pricing plan for New York City that would have helped reform the City's and the region's transportation is basically dead now that the New York State legislature has said there's no way they will do it. Apparently one of the state senators even said it was "morally unconscionable."

Congestion pricing has worked well in London and other cities that have implemented it. Over at The Atlantic, Reihan Salam argues that this battle is grounds to once again start fighting for New York to consider secession from the state. Apparently, secession from the state has been considered for years, dating back to the civil war.

Maybe when DC becomes a state New York City will too ...

U.P. Town Center

Now that University Place has scrapped it's third town center developer, I read that they are holding a Town Hall (but where will they hold it? ... just kidding) to talk about it.
I know a lot of residents are opposed to the project. Here's one in the Tribune yesterday:

“We’re a bedroom community,” said Brian Stemp. “Do we need a large-scale Town Center?”

If you don't want your city to go broke, then yes. Because of our increased reliance on sales tax after the loss of funding to municipalities following I-695, cities are desperate to build more retail within their borders.

So once again, I'll make the point: if UP wants to keep its suburban identity, the best thing for them to do is to be annexed into Tacoma. As I mentioned in discussing St. Paul, there are ways to give UP a very strong district council that has the ability to rule on land-use questions in the UP District (perhaps even UP borough, if we want to borrow from the terms of the most successful annexation in history--New York, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, and The Bronx?).

Of course, more UP residents currently oppose annexation into UP than they do a town center. But if they like the suburban feel they have right now and don't want an urbanized core, they have three options:

1. Move, because UP needs the sales tax revenue.
2. Change Washington State tax policy.
3. Get annexed into Tacoma.

Am I missing an option?

Erik's favorite hot button: annexation

While I was away, there were a few items of note on the annexation front.

First, Auburn successfully passed two expansions of its boundaries, while Federal Way's annexation proposition failed.

Second, there's an interesting fight going on in Puyallup about annexation and services.

Puyallup wants to annex North Puyallup into its boundaries. Some of the businesses, namely a putt-putt/go kart operator in that area, don't want to be annexed, because they feel (perhaps rightly) that Puyallup would zone them as residential, which would prevent them from expanding their business.

Neither side is acting well here. I understand the city's reasoning: they don't want to add services on an a la carte basis to its outlying residents. This gives them no incentive to ever want to join in with the city and actually pay their "fair share" of taxes in relation to the benefit they're receiving.

On the other hand, the City should not be attempting to contract to supply water to the go-kart operator with the clause that the owner can't oppose future annexation bids. That's a bad way to go about things.

It's an interesting fight. And one we might see repeated again in the future with other cities and businesses.

Our Neighbors to the North Want to Grow

Interesting to see that both Auburn and Federal Way are considering annexation options and have sent ballots. The Tribune has the story.

Telling perhaps that this quote is in there:

Kurt Triplett, chief of staff to King County Executive Ron Sims, said the Legislature will be watching the program and the money next session.
The alternative to annexation, he said, is a continual slide in county services.

Although I labored long and hard about annexing UP and Ruston into Tacoma it is very difficult to get an incorporated city into another and would get the Legislature involved.

Far easier would be if Tacoma attempted to annex the unincorporated parts of the county down to 512 or so. City of Tacoma officials may not want to do because there's not a whole lot of money in the area. But it would significantly help Tacoma control its own growth.

More on Annexation

"Tom in UP" had many good challenges to my annexation post on Monday. He basically asks, "Why should anyone want to merge into Tacoma, especially when they are doing quite well in UP?"

(Tom, you can correct me if I got the spirit of your comment wrong.)

The point of view, though, is completely understandable, and backed up by data. Let’s compare UP and Tacoma from the 2000 census and see how poorly Tacoma stacks up.

Tacoma Vs UP: The Data

The median price of a home in Tacoma is $45,000 less than in UP. The average household income in Tacoma is $12,500 less than in UP. The percentage of people living below the poverty line in Tacoma is more than double the percentage in UP.

Sure, Tacoma’s gotten much better since 2000, but these numbers are nothing to sneeze at.

Let’s make the comparison even more apparent with more recent data.

According to the Washington State School Report Card for the 05-06 school year, Tacoma had about 62% of 10th graders pass the reading requirements. In UP it was about 82%.

In math, about 36% of Tacoma’s 10th graders passed. In UP, 56% passed.

10th Grade Writing in Tacoma: 62% passed. In UP: 84% passed.

So, Tom, I have won you over for annexation yet? : )

The problem is that Tacoma’s failure is everyone’s failure, while the successes of UP, Fircrest, and other suburbs are their own. My core argument is pretty simple: the current set up is unfair and it hurts everyone.

How it’s unfair

Let's take a commuter who lives in UP and works in Tacoma. This is not necessarily a problem in any way except when it comes to taxes. When we look at it through taxes, we see that the worker is taking the wealth he has earned in one city and is investing it in another through property taxes, school levies, etc. Tacoma provided the job but he is building the infrastructure of UP with his earnings.

You might say that it wasn't "Tacoma" that gave him the job, but central cities do serve as job catalysts. Some better than others, of course, by virtue of history, location, or policies, but cities create jobs.

The difficulty lies in that Tacoma's infrastructure that creates business is not being supported by the people who use it but live elsewhere. For those who work in Tacoma and live in UP, they are taking wealth they earn in one city and invest it in another. This is unfair to Tacoma.

The problem gets worse when you consider that many of the suburban cities around Tacoma have enacted moratoriums on building additional apartments within their boundary and—in some cases—have had the moratorium for some time.

This keeps a heavy amount of the lower-middle and lower class in Tacoma and encourages the economic disparity between suburbs and city. The severe stratification between Tacoma and UP is not an accident, it’s the result of a rich suburb closing its gates to non-homeowners.

UP has created an artificial wall on 19th Street that essentially says: let Tacoma deal with their problems, we’re doing just fine.

(Here’s another example of what I’m getting at, although the situation is reversed. Fife is rolling in money. The town has about 5,000 residents but because of its income from the car dealers on I-5, they have cash galore. A significant portion of that tax collection is from Tacoma residents. Fife has a city full of customers 40 times bigger than its own right next door, so it clearly benefits from Tacoma, but Tacoma never gets any of the money. This is unfair to Tacoma. )

How this hurts everyone

Now, it might seem like there’s no reason to care about that stuff if you don’t live in Tacoma. But when suburban cities siphon money off a central city, it leaves the central city in a bind. They have a lot of infrastructure to create and maintain that helps everyone who has a job there, but it’s only the people who live there that have to pay.

The central city can't fight its social problems as well, and it will have more social problems that the suburbs, until eventually the problems spill into the suburbs. Police can fight them there, certainly, but the suburbs aren't doing their part to actually support and end to the problem, they just find the results of it.

Over time, we can see the results of what this kind of city/suburb relationship looks like by looking at older cities in the East. St. Louis and Detroit, for example, have become population donuts. The cities themselves have shrunk even though the metropolitan region has grown, because all of that growth has happened in the suburbs because the central cities have become so bad. The central keep having less and less resources to fight bigger and bigger problems that affect the entire metropolis. With a dead central city, transit doesn't work effectively, crime explodes, and the quality of life everywhere goes down.

St. Louis, whose donut problem I wrote about here, and Detroit have it really bad but dying central cities is not uncommon and it hurts everyone in the suburbs.

Some cities have reversed the trend. Albuqurque has pursued aggressive annexation and is growing like mad. Anchorage expanded 12,000% (really!) and now can control its growth. Indianapolis actually convinced its outlying suburbs to come back to the city, which has created an incredibly healthy city from downtown all the way out. The Twin Cities, which are heavily divided in multiple suburbs have banded together to share tax from the Mall of America, even though it's built in Bloomington. Even Tacoma has made some steps -- there's a reason the Convention Center is the "Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center". It was funded from hotel/motel tax of multiple cities because it will fill rooms in multiple cities.

So we're on our way. But it would be better for everyone if we could just slip Ruston, UP, Fircrest, and Lakewood into Tacoma. The strength of that economic engine would give Seattle a run for its money.

Where I Got My Arguments

In many ways all of my thinking on this comes from what I learned reading the books of two mayors. David Rusk, a former Democratic mayor of Albuqurque whose book "Cities Without Suburbs" lays the problem out very clearly. And the other is Stephen Goldsmith, a Republican, and former mayor of Indianapolis who wrote "The Twenty First Century City."

I would cite more from there books but at some point it becomes plagiarism. The census statistics in David Rusk's book are compelling and it's hard not to be won over by them. I'm a big fan of this book, and the other is a good companion piece to see the conservative argument for the same approach.

UPDATE:

There's more annexation news in the Trib today about a piece of unincorporated Pierce County that is considering going in to either Steilacoom or Lakewood.

The Annexation Report

Last week there were two interesting stories in the Tribune about local annexations.

First, citizens of Ruston are upset that their Mayor had met with the Mayor of Tacoma to talk about annexing Ruston into Tacoma. Actually, they're mostly upset that they didn't know about the meeting, even after a Public Disclosure Request, but not a lot of them like the idea, either.

Ruston is fighting the same trouble as other suburban cities: without sales tax revenue, largely residential towns and cities don't have enough to support a city government. The move of Ruston in to Tacoma could make a lot of sense for both Tacoma and Ruston. For Tacoma, the tax revenue is certainly good, and for Ruston they can tap into better services.

The big sticking point: can Ruston keep its identity and autonomy if they are part of Tacoma? I would hope that if the city is pro-active and addresses the vital concern of residents' identity, Ruston could become a model for future annexation, including Fircrest and UP, both of which can project a long term fight of tax income vs. providing services.

Ruston could be given a strong neighborhood council which could vote on building standards, streetscapes, speed limits, and other local issues. I could see this working very well for cities that want to preserve their ability to address what their area looks like while being folded into the central city.

It looks like the issue might be dead for awhile, but it is a good one to continue discussing.

In other news, Puyallup is moving forward with their attempt to annex "North Puyallup" into Puyallup proper. Good for them. Of course, one of the benefits of aggressive annexation is controlling sprawl, and Puyallup is already the King of Sprawl. Witness Meridian.

Everyone's Doing It ... So Should Tacoma

Federal Way has put an annexation bid on the ballot for August. They could add as much as 20,000 residents.

Tacoma's got to step up to the plate. Let's go guys! Tacoma = "Point Defiance to 512!"

U.P.'s Town Center

University Place is getting ready to break ground this summer on their new, higher density "downtown" area off of Bridgeport.

It's a great project and I am all for increasing density wherever we can. As I've noted many times before, however, it wouldn't be necessary to build if UP were part of Tacoma and annexed into the city.

But since that isn't likely to happen anytime soon, big kudos to them for creating a pedestrian friendly core.

Why UP should merge into Tacoma

On Wednesday I posted that Councilmember Rick Talbert wanted to expand Tacoma's borders toward 512. I went on to suggest:

Fircrest, Ruston, and UP would also join Tacoma, but I believe that requires a vote of the State Legislature and I'm not sure those residents would be totally down with it.

One UP-ite wasn't. S/he commented on my blog anonymously:

Nothing against Tacoma, but why in the world would anyone in UP believe they would have anything to gain by being annexed by Tacoma? Is it Tacoma's stellar school system? Or perhaps its professional and world famous police force? Or maybe because UP residents are just dying to help pay for Tacoma's amazing municipal computer system...

Why indeed would someone in UP want to be part of Tacoma?

I have a couple ideas, which I mentioned in the comments of that post. The easiest reason to point out is that in a state where cities need sales tax to thrive, highly residential communities like UP are forced to try to increase sales tax revenue by creating a new urban center (a la, the UP Town Center). If UP were a part of Tacoma, they wouldn't need to do that (note that Federal Way and Fircrest have run into similar funding issues as UP).

I threw some others out that were kind of lame individually, but the truth is that they are all part of a bigger whole. And while I'm probably not going to sway my UP commenter, I'll lay it down on the line anyway. UP's success is dependent on Tacoma's.

Can I back that up?

Let me try. There was an interesting article this week about St. Louis in the New York Times. Like Tacoma, St. Louis is looking for a renaissance. Like Tacoma it has a rough and tumble image it would like to shed.

But unlike Tacoma, St. Louis has collapsed inward. At its peak population in 1950, St. Louis had 860,000 residents. By 2000, the city had dropped 500,000 of them.

What is interesting is that in 1876 the City of St. Louis (stupidly, it turns out) separated itself from St. Louis County, which now entirely surrounds the city in Missouri (Illinois is the other border for the city across the river). This created a dramatic city / suburbs division that has held until this day.

When the automobile and the freeway created new suburbs in the 50s and 60s, St. Louis lost all of its wealthy residents when they moved to the County. And it couldn't expand to get them back.

Flash forward a few decades now. At the time of the 2000 census, St. Louis residents made 2/3 of what those in the suburbs made. St. Louis is 51% black and 43% white while St. Louis County is 19% black and 77% white. A sharp line now separates the city from its suburbs, separating rich from poor, and white from black.

And it's not like everyone is just moving out of the area. From 1990 - 2000 Greater St. Louis (all the suburbs and the city) grew 4.5%. But St. Louis City lost 12.2%. A rich, white, populous donut of a city is growing around a poor, black, abandoned inner city.

That leads us to the question, are the residents in St. Louis County hurt by what is going on in the City of St. Louis? Things going on like:

In the past few months, the public schools were stripped of accreditation and taken over by the state; the city was designated the most dangerous in the country in a national crime survey ...

That's from the Times article.

So if you live in St. Louis County right now, the most dangerous city in the US is across an artificial border from you. Its residents are poorer, its students badly educated, and the cities are segregated by race. This is bad for you.

There are a million reasons why it is bad for the residents of St. Louis, but it is also bad for you. If you were part of St. Louis, it would only take a very very small portion of your money to solve what is a very bad problem. And it's not like it's someone else's problem. It's your problem, because it's just right across the freeway and social problems don't respect city lines.

Now, obviously, Tacoma and its suburbs are not at this point yet. But it's worth pointing out that Tacoma's problems are the problems of the entire metro area. A family can move to UP because they want to send their children to Curtis instead of Foss, but everyone would be doing better if they were both Curtis and Foss were in the same school system.

And if you think that merging UP, Fife, Fircrest, Lakewood, and Ruston into Tacoma would be impossible, witness Indianapolis.

Surrounded by suburb towns and a victim of white flight and urban blight, in the 1970 Indianapolis and its suburbs created Unigov, which united the governments of Indianpolis, the towns, and the county. The city has since grown by leaps and bounds. It has a lot more room to grow. It is not segregated. And its household median income is 43% larger than that of St. Louis. Everyone wins.

Annexation holds big potential for our region. If you're interested in the problem, I highly recommend the book Cities Without Suburbs by the former Mayor of Albuquerque, David Rusk, which lays out the case surprisingly well. Stephen Goldsmith, the former Indianapolis mayor, also has a book about his experience. Together the books make a compelling case, one from a Democrat and one from a Republican, one with Census statistics and one with anecdotes.

The Best News For Tacoma

Annexation has long been a hot button on this blog.

A central city surrounded by suburbs can't plan for growth. Downtowns languish because the richer suburbs keep all the money to themselves (in the case of schools, property taxes don't fund the full school system).

So Dan Voelpel's article today about Rick Talbert hoping to annex everything to 512 is a welcome sigh of relief. That unincorporated land should be a part of Tacoma.

Ideally, Fircrest, Ruston, and UP would also join Tacoma, but I believe that requires a vote of the State Legislature and I'm not sure those residents would be totally down with it. Maybe with a strong neighborhood council program and some other ways to promote their self-identity. I'm thinking we create 5 burroughs just like another city did when they annexed a few others.

When Brooklyn went into New York they were the 11th biggest city in the US at the time. And many credit that consolidation of New York as a reason for its unparalleled success in the 20th Century.

Let's hope Tacoma can do a little bit of growing in the coming years.