Published: September 01, 2008 04:12 pm            

Urban living needs mass transit

Neal Pierce is an author and columnist who writes about trends in American states and localities. In his most recent columns for the Washington Post he has written about two trends currently visible throughout the nation.

“Return to the City” was the title of Pierce’s recent column in which he likened Atlanta and Washington to Vienna and Paris as cities in which the affluent tend to live in the center of the city. The columnist documents that middle class and affluent Americans increasingly are returning to the cities that their parents and grandparents left in the latter half of the 20th century.

The author asserts that while more than a generation ago more than 50 percent of households in America had children in them, it is probable that close to 80 percent of American households will be childless in the not too distant future. Pierce wrote that the residents of those households often prefer to live in areas where there are cultural amenities and stores in fairly close proximity to their homes. He also cites a study that found many young people today prefer urban living to the suburban life they experienced as children. He also points out that this trend was in place before the recent dramatic rise in the price of gasoline.

This national return to urban life is visible in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, where formerly vacant warehouses and office buildings have been converted into residences, stores and art galleries. In some of the smaller communities in Oklahoma such as Ardmore, Claremore, Mangum, Perry and Sapulpa, second-floor lofts in the downtown areas have been converted into condominiums and apartments while street-level structures now house new restaurants and stores, said Ron Frantz of the Main Street Program.

Pierce also has seen fit to write about how cities and suburbs throughout the nation have begun to work together to fund mass transit systems. He lists cities such as Seattle, Houston, Denver, Dallas and Minneapolis-St. Paul as places where transit systems have been put in place that allow people from the suburbs to travel into the city center without using a car.

While much of the start-up costs for those transit systems was received from the federal government in the form of funding grants, the columnist points out that expansions of those systems are increasingly funded by sales taxes. In December the city of Phoenix will open a light rail transit system that will connect its downtown area to the suburbs of Mesa and Tempe. The system will be funded by a sales tax that was approved by the voters in those three communities. Pierce praises those locales in which the city and its suburbs have agreed to the imposition of sales taxes for mass transit systems, and believes that it may herald future joint undertakings in other areas such as environmental protection.

He also asserts that while state legislatures are reluctant to fund transit projects of that type, they often are willing to create regional transit authorities that can ask voters to approve such projects.

There has been some discussion of the possibility of mass transit in Oklahoma City. The Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce has called for the creation of a light rail system that would link Will Rogers Airport to the downtown area and the Cowboy Hall of Fame. And several local governments in the metropolitan Oklahoma City area have expressed interest in the creation of a multimodal transit plan that would include a light rail system. It is possible that the citizenry would be willing to approve new taxes to finance such an undertaking. But it remains to be seen if Oklahoma City will take the steps necessary to create a mass transit system.



WILLIAM F. O’BRIEN is an Oklahoma City attorney.

        

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