The central-local relationship.

• Author: Frug, Gerald E.
• Position: City-state-federal relations

There are three common ideas about how to organize the city-state-federal relationship. All three, I think, are misguided. The first seeks to consolidate power in a centralized government--sometimes at the national level, but more often at the state or regional level. The second is the opposite idea: it seeks to empower city governments by giving them autonomy to make their own decisions about the policies that shape their future. The third seeks a middle course, dividing the functions of government into different categories, with each level of government having jurisdiction over some, but not all, of the categories. After sketching what is wrong with these three ideas, I will offer a different approach.

The temptation of centralized governmental power should be familiar to everyone. It is based on the notion that government, like every other institution, needs an ultimate decision-maker who can direct the organization. This attitude generates a suspicion of local power. Local government is seen as too parochial, too small to grapple with the scale of urban problems, sometimes even corrupt. By moving power to some form of centralized government, it is thought, the self-interested competition among localities can be overcome. In urban studies circles, this argument has led to a call for either increased state power or a national urban policy. (1) More frequently, it has embraced a particular version of the idea of regionalism. Under this definition, increasing regional power means diminishing local power. The local is seen as the problem, and centralization is the solution. (2)

Even those who argue for centralization, however, recognize its problems. The history of centralized power in the world is not a happy one. One doesn't need simply to think about the centralized tyrannies of the twentieth century, although they come to mind. In the United States, the history of urban renewal and of the racial discrimination built into the federal government's mortgage policy are prime examples. (3) When mistakes are made by a central government, they affect everyone. Local decisions are more limited; others can learn from their failures. Besides, localities are different from each other, not just across the country but even within one metropolitan region. It's absurd to treat New York City and New Rochelle as if they were the same. (4) Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of centralization is its diminishment

of the possibilities of democracy. On a local level, democracy can be a lived experience--it enables engagement in public issues that goes far beyond voting. In a state or metropolitan region where millions of people live, popular control of public policy becomes more rhetorical than real. The gap between this rhetoric and people's sense of what's happening in their own community has helped generate the contemporary loss of faith in democratic governance.

But the answer to these defects of centralization cannot be local autonomy. No one can trust a single city, let alone a single neighborhood, to make decisions unchecked by the larger society. One reason for this is that local parochialism is real. Localities protect themselves by shifting problems to outsiders. The most familiar example of this is exclusionary zoning. The point of exclusionary zoning is to ensure that neighboring jurisdictions--rather than your city--have to deal with the people you want to exclude. There are countless other examples as well, such as attracting a shopping center so that you, rather than your neighbor, get its tax benefits, or excluding undesirable land uses so that someone else has to take them. The problem with local autonomy is not just its impact on outsiders. Local governments can be, and often are, hostile to minorities who live within their own borders. Hostility to recent immigrants is a current and troublesome example of this; racial discrimination is another. Local autonomy can threaten human rights, and there must be a check on this threat. Besides, the idea of a general grant of local autonomy is problematic. Consider two cities, side by side. The first wants to protect itself from pollution, and the second generates pollution. Given this setup, would a central government's regulation of pollution levels undermine local autonomy? The answer is yes and no. (5) It would undermine the autonomy of the polluter, but it would increase the ability of the green city to control its own destiny, something that it could not do by itself. Centralized control is not the opposite of local power. Sometimes a restriction of one kind of local power enables another.

These two arguments--one...