Are We a City or a Region?

[The text below was adapted from a speech I gave recently at the 2009 Taylor Symposium at IUPUI regarding the American Promise and its relation to housing]

Are we a City or a Region? The chart below shows that at the turn of the Twentieth Century, the counties surrounding Marion County had a population roughly equal to Marion County. But, as the region expanded, Marion County grew much faster and became an ever increasing share of the overall metropolitan area until roughly the 1950s. It has declined as a share of the total ever since. Building permit data through 2007 suggests that these percentage shares will likely stabilize in the 2010 census at roughly 55% of the total in Marion County and 45% in the surrounding counties. The good news is that there are no weak links in this data (i.e. no counties losing population). All of the counties show growth, all have something to add to the whole.

What does that mean for housing policy? Many civic initiatives other than housing recognize the story told by the figure below - while Indianapolis is still the center and focus of the Region, it is operating inside a larger metropolitan area. Other civic initiatives understand and function as though they operate within a region, not a city. For example, United Way is the United Way of Central Indiana. For businesses, it is the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership. Even Realtors recognize that it is the Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors. But look at our housing-related institutions, especially those that foster opportunities for low income and/or minority households (i.e. the Indianapolis Housing Agency, the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership and community development corporations, and the City's Abandoned Housing Initiative)- they are all focused on the traditional boundaries of the City.

In some ways, this city-centric focus is driven by how federal funds are allocated to specific municipalities. But in part, it is driven by the lack of an entity with a metropolitan focus that is seen as an honest broker to provide research, bring together decision makers for policy discussion, and show how housing related decisions in specific communities affect the metropolitan area as a whole. When households make housing related decisions, they typically do so in the context of the metropolitan area. For example, do I want to live in the north side or the south side? If on the west side, do I want to live close in, near I-465, or further out in Avon, Plainfield, or some more distant interstate exit.

If we are to truly foster housing opportunities in the coming decade, we must think about housing the same way households do - in the context of the metropolitan area, not just the city, and we need a non-partisan entity or institution (existing or newly formed) that can provide that kind of big picture overview of the metropolitan housing market through research, civic engagement, and policy making.