City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation.

• Author: Davidson, Nestor M.
• Position: Book review

CITY BOUND: How STATES STIFLE URBAN INNOVATION. By Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2008. Pp. xvii, 260. $35.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine how stunted our understanding of the federal government would be without any detailed scholarly examination of the U.S. Constitution itself. As remarkable as that sounds, that is essentially the problem that Gerald Frug (1) and David Barron (2) have set out to remedy for local governments in their superb City Bound. In the book, Frug and Barron take a comprehensive, empirical look at the legal frameworks under which cities and other local governments operate, providing an invaluable roadmap for understanding the hidden architecture of legal constraints that--largely without notice--are shaping America's urban future.

Why this kind of analysis has rarely been attempted may have something to do with the fact that there are nearly twenty thousand municipalities and nearly ninety thousand local governments all told in the United States today. (3) It likely has even more to do with the fact that, by comparison to the federal or state constitutions, divining the precise nature of local legal power is not as simple as reviewing a municipal charter. As Frug and Barron note, the precise contours of what they call "city structures" must be culled from a detailed examination of the bewildering "mix of grants of, and restrictions on, local power" (p. 3) through which states shape the authority of their localities.

Frug and Barron tackle this daunting task through a comparative analysis of the legal structures that bind seven large, relatively successful central cities. In their study, Frug and Barron examine not only the contours of home rule--the default scope of local authority to act and resist state preemption--but also plumb the particular empowerment and disempowerment of those seven cities in matters of revenue and expenditure, land use and development, and education policy.

Frug and Barron's foray into the mottled reality of contemporary home rule serves as a springboard for their larger ambition of reforming the oversight of local authority. They acknowledge, and do not shy away from, the reality that states will always play a central role in structuring the terms of local power. They argue nonetheless that states can be much more thoughtful and deliberate in how they create and manage these structures to empower local governments to address urban issues, particularly on a cooperative and regional basis. To flame this advocacy, Frug and Barron outline a series of what they call "city futures"--possible paths of development and identity toward which cities might strive--and convincingly argue that cities face an odd array of state-created enticements and barriers in trying to chart their own democratically accountable destinies.

Frug and Barron's analysis of the unfortunate incentive effects that city structures place on potential urban futures is persuasive. As compelling as their portrait of home rule is, however, it paints an image of local governments that might be overly static in terms of the reaction those governments have to the incentives they face. Frug and Barron hint at the practical challenges to change that the political economy of state oversight poses, and suggest that local governments--even the thriving central cities they highlight--often acquiesce to that oversight as a practical matter. Although it is no doubt true in many instances that local governments react to the legal-structural constraints they face in an inert, rather than dynamic, fashion, emphasizing those constraints risks obscuring the many ways in which local governments struggle to change and transcend the legal playing field on which they operate.

Accordingly, this Review, after describing Frug and Barron's central claims, seeks to add a layer to their conception of local authority by exploring ways in which local governments engage as active agents within the framework of that authority. Many local governments--from Frug and Barron's big cities to far-flung micropolitan rural towns--work to change the state laws that bind them, forge partnerships with other public and private sources of authority, apply traditional legal tools in novel ways when barred from responding to problems more directly, and undertake similar activities that represent a collective refusal to take the scope of their legal authority as a given.

This kind of agentic, entrepreneurial approach to legal authority is unlikely to fundamentally solve the very real structural problems facing local governments that Frug and Barron so ably highlight. It does suggest, however, that some city officials have managed to take pragmatic steps to recalibrate their own power. Encouraging these kinds of leaps by cities and other local governments may be a more promising avenue of reform than hoping for change from the very states that have, intentionally or unintentionally, so often bound their localities.

1. A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF LOCAL AUTHORITY

   In City Bound and the previous work on which it builds, (4) Frug and Barron aim to move conceptions of local power away from a stale dichotomy between plenary state authority over their so-called "creatures" (surely not the most flattering way to describe any entity) and the equally unrealistic image of absolute local autonomy. (5) As they argue throughout, local power must be understood not as a monolithic grant of authority or as a blanket denial of local autonomy by the state. Rather, current legal structures unevenly supply and withhold power in a variety of important areas. This legal landscape has the "key feature" of "direct[ing] the substantive ways in which local power is exercised through the complex mix of grants and limits that it establishes" (p. 35).

   To bolster this argument, Frug and Barron tapped a group of leading local-government scholars to help them produce detailed comparative examinations of the city structures of Boston, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. (6) In area after area of substantive authority, Frug and Barron unpack the range of alternating empowerment and disempowerment under which these cities operate. Beginning with home rule, they show how pervasive is the structuring and interference that flows from the state level: the city charters of several of their case-study cities were drafted by state legislatures (p. 64); seemingly sweeping grants of home rule--statutory or constitutional--both give and take power (and leave to the courts the task of confronting almost metaphysical questions of the line between "local" and "state" interest) (pp. 66-69); and, depending on the issue and the state, an almost random pattern of state preemption of local law and conversely local preemption of state law prevails (p. 72).

   Likewise in the area of revenue and expenditures, Frug and Barron examine the ubiquitous control that states exert over local fiscal decisions. State law allows and disallows various tax options (pp. 76-87); determines which fees may be assessed and how (pp. 87-90); grants aid generally with strings attached (pp. 90-92); and oddly intrudes into a variety of expenditure decisions (pp. 92-95). The same general pattern holds true in the exercise of the quintessential local power to regulate land use and development. Here, again, cities are both empowered and disempowered in ways that create incentives for acting that local communities might not otherwise choose (pp. 99-120). And, finally, state law sets the terms of much of the actual decision making of local school districts, constraining local choice even when not directly supplanting it (pp. 121-40).

   In all of these areas, and others, (7) Frug and Barron rightly argue that states structure local power not only directly, but through a myriad of indirect institutions and policy choices. Thus, for example, the fact that Massachusetts and entities under its purview control Logan Airport, the Tobin Memorial Bridge, the tunnels that connect the city to its east end, and much other important property creates a gaping hole in Boston's land-use authority (pp. 105-07). Similarly, the way that Massachusetts fosters charter schools, sets local school district boundaries, and empowers suburbs to veto interdistrict options creates a set of structures and relationships that significantly affects the ability of the Boston public schools to achieve their goals (pp. 128-34). These indirect state-level choices, as with direct mixing of powers and disabilities, warp the decisions that local governments can make. (8)

   In the broad sweep of their argument, Frug and Barron's primary normative concern is the problem of democratic deficits that arise from state intervention, with decisions made or controlled at the state level undermining participation and accountability. Frug and Barron do not seem instrumental about this in the main--they are not arguing that local governments will necessarily make better decisions than their state counterparts. Rather, they argue that cities should be allowed to try in a classic experimentalist mode, possibly fail, learn from the experience, and develop the confidence to chart their own destiny. (9)

   City Bound's theoretical construct and empirical investigation allow Frug and Barron to insert themselves into major debates in urban theory and also to outline a reform agenda. On the former, they show that argument after argument among theorists about the nature of cities proceeds without a clear sense of, or even much engagement with, the ways in which states structure local authority. Urban theorists have long debated, for example, whether local politics is dominated by elites or pluralist interest-group jockeying; (10) whether cities have the ability to transcend the external limitations they face; (11) and how to shift toward a paradigm of local governance that privileges coalition building to achieve pragmatic...