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Mayor Christopher A. Doherty

Scranton, PA / Pop. 72,861 / Elected 2001

“The strength of a city is the combustion engineering that takes place inside it.”

— Mayor Christopher A. Doherty

Comments

Alon Levy on 04.21.08

Sure cities are coming back - just not Scranton. The Northeast has three productive city regions: New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Washington and Baltimore look productive, but actually live off of federal subsidies. For example, the New York CSA paid $93 billion in taxes more than it got back in spending in 2004. For the Washington-Baltimore CSA, it was $67 billion in the other direction.

Outside New York and Chicago, the cities that are coming back in the US tend to be suburbs. Washington D.C. keeps losing population; the growth is in the edge cities in Arlington and Fairfax County. Philadelphia proper is more like Brooklyn than like Manhattan in its importance to the region.

That's why I like the program espoused by the Mayors of Trenton and Jersey City... it comes off as something that could promote real deslumming and prevent sprawl, as opposed to gentrification, which merely relocates the problem elsewhere.

Harry Moroz on 04.21.08

Thanks for the comment, Alon.

Despite its past struggles (which include being declared a "distressed city"), Scranton remains an important city in Pennsylvania. Scranton generates the sixth largest share of GDP in the state and contains the fifth largest share of the state's jobs (4.5%). That said, Scranton's population, as measured by the Census Bureau has continued to decrease. However, arrival of Hispanic immigrants to Scranton might have mitigated some of these population losses and Mayor Doherty told us that he expects the Hispanic population to rise to as much as 20% of Scranton's total. Scranton can quite plausibly be thought of as a suburb of New York City. (See here for a Brookings report on Pennsylvania's cities.)

I think that your points, as well as Mayor Doherty's, demonstrate the need for a broader discussion of urban issues. The question remains: how do we encourage policymakers to focus on cities - including medium-sized ones and especially postindustrial ones - as solutions to problems associated with climate change, globalization, and economic ferment. Scranton has benefited from outside investment and from its own investment in infrastructure; that is to say, the city is not "going away" any time soon. So, how do we encourage Scranton to be (or become) an economically, demographically, and environmentally stable suburb of New York City?

Alon Levy on 04.21.08

I don't think Scranton is yet a suburb of New York. Lackawanna County's commuting ties with the New York metro area are weak. The Census Bureau has a data sheet about commuting ties between each pair of counties. Lackawanna County had 94,532 commuters in 2000; of these, 642, or 0.68%, work in the New York MSA. That's not much stronger a commute tie than Connecticut's Hartford County's to New York; if Fairfield County were included in the New York MSA, Hartford County would have a stronger commute tie.

Although the exurbs of New York are beginning to encroach on Scranton's suburbs, there's little chance Scranton will ever become a suburb of New York. The distance between the two cities is 200 kilometers, which even without traffic is too long for a car commute. The range of a rail commute is very short: the Tokyo metro area, which is based entirely on heavy rail, extends about 50 kilometers from its central ward, Chiyoda. 50 kilometers from Lower Manhattan gets you about as far as Hicksville, White Plains, Edison, and Morristown. Beyond that distance, taking the train is possible, but the commute will become too long to be feasible.

Besides, don't we want people living closer to where they work rather than farther away?

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So Many Presidential Debates, So Little Concern Shown for Cities

By Clyde Haberman, New York Times

In mid-October, I noted that the Democrats and Republicans had held 17 or so presidential debates (the number can vary, depending on who’s counting), but that with all the gabbing they managed not to focus on America’s cities.

Well, two months have passed, and that observation is no longer valid.

The candidates have now held 25 or so debates without talking about urban issues.

Someone ought to alert the Guinness people. For sidestepping matters of direct concern to more than 80 percent of the population — people living in urban and suburban areas — this has to be some kind of record.

The grievance is hardly new. But it is glaring this time around because of the large number of candidates who you’d think would have cities and their suburbs high in their minds. Look at them: former mayors of New York City and Cleveland, a senator from New York, a former community organizer out of Chicago.

Sure, they have discussed terrorism, health care, the economy, immigration and other matters that affect cities as much as the rest of the country. But what about basic urban and suburban concerns like housing, transportation, crime, education, Medicaid costs, homelessness, crumbling infrastructure?

There has been barely a word, though blame no doubt lies not only with the candidates but also with debate M.C.’s who ignore these topics.

The silence has not gone unnoticed by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a nonpartisan, though decidedly liberal, New York think tank. (Its name, in case you wondered, is rooted in a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said two months before his assassination in 1968 that he wanted to be remembered as “a drum major for justice.”)

Over the last few weeks, together with The Nation magazine, the institute asked mayors from Miami to Boston, from Baltimore to Los Angeles, for the issues they thought should be on the candidates’ plates.

Ten mayors were interviewed — Atlanta, Buffalo, Denver, Minneapolis, Rochester and Salt Lake City round out the list — and the number may grow. Their comments were videotaped and excerpts posted on a Web site, www.mayortv.com, which the institute hopes to have up and running on Friday.

“Instead of writing a report or issuing a critique or counting the number of times that the presidential candidates have talked about cities, we decided that the voices that really need to be heard are the mayors’ themselves,” said Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Drum Major’s executive director.

All 10 mayors are Democrats or independents, reflecting political realities in many cities. Republican mayors were approached, too, and some expressed interest, Ms. Schlesinger said, but the timing didn’t work out. Maybe later.

One obvious choice would have been Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, a man for all parties (Democrat, born-again Republican, reborn-again independent). “But alas,” Ms. Schlesinger said, his possible involvement “fell through some kind of scheduling black hole.”

Not surprisingly, the mayors’ issues are essentially those mentioned above: housing, infrastructure, economic development, public safety and so on. Loud and clear is their frustration with what they perceive as Washington’s lack of interest in their troubles.

Read the full article at The New York Times >