How to cover city hall

How to Read a Flawed Book About Cities

April 1, 2015 By Otis White

A little more than 10 years ago, I read one of the most wonderful—and deeply flawed—books about cities I’ve ever picked up. It was called, “City: Urbanism and Its End.” If you can get your hands on this book, I recommend it. My own copy is coffee-stained, dog-eared, highlighted across its 432-page expanse (not counting notes, bibliography, and index), and marked up with scribblings in the margins. Good luck doing that on your e-reader.

The backstory of the book is fascinating. The author, Douglas W. Rae, was a professor at Yale and chair of its political science department in 1990 when New Haven, Connecticut, Yale’s hometown, elected its first African-American mayor. The new mayor asked Rae to be his chief administrative officer, and Rae accepted. This, then, is a Cinderella story in reverse: where the ivory tower professor descends to city hall and finds . . . a god-awful mess. Exactly how awful isn’t explained. (He says the city was in the grips of “its worst fiscal crisis since the 1930s.”) It couldn’t have been much fun because, in less than two years’ time, Rae resigned and went back to Yale to ponder his experience.

The result isn’t a memoir but a dissertation on New Haven’s troubles. And not just troubles in the 1990s but over the past century, beginning in 1910 when, as Rae explains, urbanism was at its peak in New Haven. What followed, in his telling, was a long and more or less steady decline in population, economic vitality, housing stock, civic involvement, political health, and neighborliness. Along the way, some tried to halt the decline (one mayor became a national leader in urban renewal). But in the end the city was overwhelmed.

If this sounds depressing, surprisingly it is not. The book reads like a mystery that opens with a murder. After examining the crime scene, Rae leads us through the victim’s promising early years, through a series of bad decisions mixed with circumstances beyond the poor fellow’s control, and then on to his demise—in search of a good mystery’s two most important questions: Who did this, and why?

Three things help carry the book along. First, as serious academics go, Rae is a good writer. When he drops you into different periods of New Haven’s history, you understand them.

Second, Rae tells his story with a clever structure. It consists of doing what I just said: Dropping you into several periods, starting with New Haven of a century ago, where he introduces you to the mayor, a well-meaning small-business man and civic booster named Frank Rice. Then he skips to the 1950s and 1960s, when New Haven was in steep economic and social decline and, hoping for a revival, elected the visionary Richard C. Lee as mayor. (More on him later.) The remaining chapters are about the succession of . . . OK, let’s be blunt . . . hacks who followed Lee.

Finally, the book is helped along by Rae’s interest in decision making and his sympathy for those making decisions. So while he doesn’t think much of Rice, whose tenure was untroubled in a way no mayor could imagine today, he explains in an evenhanded way why this mayor’s highest priorities were . . . building sidewalks.

Of Dick Lee, who directed a flood of federal money into reshaping New Haven—to disastrous ends—Rae is similarly sympathetic. Given the problems New Haven faced in the early 1960s, who wouldn’t have done the same? In fact, as I read the book, it occurred to me that Lee’s greatest problem might have been his own ambition, intelligence, and political talents. A lesser mayor (say, Frank Rice) might not have found all that federal money and figured out how use it in leveling entire neighborhoods.

As for those who followed, Rae offers a shrug. Urbanism is over. What could any mayor do?

Well.

As I read the “City: Urbanism and Its End” in 2004, its first flaw was as apparent as its subtitle. Urbanism’s end? Somebody forgot to tell the cities.

As Rae was writing, cities were in fact in the middle of a great revival—a reversal of fortunes no one could have foreseen in the brief period Rae was in city hall and apparently he missed on return to the ivory tower. (Well, not entirely. On page 421, he has a small section titled “Another Urbanism?” that hints something may be going on, though he never says what it is.)

But the deeper flaw is sometime I’ve noticed in the years since I first read it. It is Professor Rae’s analysis of how city governments steer their cities. And let me be as sympathetic to him as he was toward New Haven’s mayors. This may be an area where being a political scientist is a liability, not an asset. That’s because political scientists have trouble making sense of local government since they are naturally more attuned to state and federal government. As I’ve written elsewhere, if you try to understand city hall the way you do state capitols and the federal government, you’ll miss the mark. They are fundamentally different creatures.

That may explain Rae’s belief that city governments were always “weak players” in the realm of power who became steadily weaker as urbanism waned. “Focused on the city of 1990,” he wrote, ” . . . the end of urbanism meant the end of thinking about city government as a pivotal and more or less autonomous power system.” And it’s not just city governments that were weak and slow-moving, in Professor Rae’s eyes. So were cities themselves. “Most American cities,” he writes, “are sitting ducks, unable to move out of the way when change comes roaring at them.”

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Given their weakness and slow ways, how could city after city have staged amazing economic, social, and physical revivals in the past 20 or 30 years? How could New York have come from its “Bronx is burning” chaos in the late 1970s to the safe, vibrant, seriously overpriced city we know today? Or San Francisco? Or Minneapolis? Or Seattle? Or Houston? Or even my own city of Atlanta, where neighborhoods that were all but abandoned in the 1980s are filled today with loft apartments, brew pubs, boutique charcuteries, and tattooed hipsters on bikes and motor scooters? In fact, I’ll bet that not far from Professor Rae’s office, there might be signs of urbanism’s comeback even in New Haven.

That’s because urbanism never really ended in America. For a host of reasons, it receded for a while but eventually was revived because we needed it . . . for artistic and economic creativity and even (hello, Yale!) to produce a certain kind of education, one that teaches people to live and work amongst diversity.

And perhaps because he’s wrong about urbanism’s death, Professor Rae is wrong as well about local government and how it works. It isn’t so much a forum for decision making as it is an important part of the assembly line of change in cities. Mayors may help plan great civic projects and city councils certainly have to contribute some of the parts. But they do so with the knowledge that, for anything of consequence to succeed, others in the community must add their parts—including the business community, nonprofits, volunteers, charitable foundations, and neighborhood groups. This collaborative approach isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a unique strength of cities. In fact, that may be why it was such a disaster in the 1960s to give Dick Lee all that federal urban renewal money. It allowed him to stop working with neighborhoods and start working on them. And as it turned out, he didn’t know better than they what they needed.

Having said all that, let me repeat. I like Douglas Rae’s book. In a way unlike any other, it takes you inside city hall at different periods and into the life of a city that has always struggled with great economic, political, and social forces. It helps you understand how different mayors saw the city and why they acted as they did. Finally, Professor Rae makes a convincing case for what cities have lost in the past century, although I would add that there’s much we’ve gained in those years in health, prosperity, and social justice.

But read it with the knowledge that political scientists, even those who’ve spent a while in city hall, have trouble understanding cities. And keep in mind, too, that there’s a missing chapter, the one where New Haven and other cities rediscover urbanism and find incredible new opportunities buried in old streets.

Oh, and please ignore that subtitle.

Lesson Seven: Process and Results

October 2, 2014 By Otis White

The final lesson is not so much about local government as it is about you, as a reporter or blogger: Will you report on results or just on process?

By process I mean the most public parts of government: city council meetings, press conferences, city hall events, public hearings, campaigns and elections. If you are invited to it or are legally entitled to witness it through open meetings or open records laws, then that’s process.

Now, please don’t misunderstand. Process is important, and you really should cover it. After all, elections hold governments accountable, open meetings cause them to be more inclusive and thoughtful, and fair processes keep them honest. But these things aren’t the sum total of government; they’re more like the visible tip. Most of government lies beneath. If these essays on covering city hall have done anything, I hope they’ve encouraged you to go below from time to time and give things a look.

Before doing so, though, let me ask a question: Why do reporters spend so much time on the process parts of government and so little examining results? Well, let’s be honest: It’s easy. When a council member goes on a rant at a city council meeting or a protest march is staged outside city hall, the stories practically write themselves. (I know. I wrote a lot of these stories myself.) Tracing ideas as they move through local government, mapping the compromises made and collaborations created, and measuring their impact on land use and city services? That’s hard.

And, too, city hall reporting has long suffered from the poor examples set by reporters in Washington and in state capitals. In those places, public policy is often treated as if it were a performance and not a series of decisions with lasting impacts on states and the nation.

Am I being too hard on your colleagues? Well, think back to the torrent of reporting on health care reform in 2009 and 2010, the vast majority of which was about political maneuvers. Far less attention was paid to the reforms themselves: the ideas behind President Obama’s plans, where they originated, and their likelihood of success. Since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, there has been even less attention paid to how the reforms are working. No wonder we were so surprised in 2013 when the health care website crashed. Once the political drama had moved on, few reporters were still paying attention.

You can do better than this—and you should. For one thing, local government isn’t nearly as large in scale or ambitions as federal or state governments. Want to meet the people implementing your city’s projects and policies? That’s easy. The results, too, can be seen and measured without much trouble. If you want to know how the downtown is doing, start with the business improvement district director, interview merchants and shoppers along Main Street, talk with a developer or two, and check a few statistics at the city planning department. You can do all of this in a day or two.

Not sure you know enough to judge a city’s performance? The things local government is concerned with aren’t hard to understand. (In fairness to those covering the Affordable Care Act, health care economics is harder.) Keep in mind the difference between strategy and services. As I’ve written, the big decisions in local government are about land use. But this is a subject you can master with a little reading and some time spent with city planners and urban studies professors. The other part of local government is service delivery. This, too, can be mastered by asking simple questions: What is the problem or need in this area? How have you tried to solve the problem or answer the need? What have been the results?

Whether it’s public safety, sanitation, transportation, or water supply, those questions will usually get you started. Check what you hear with independent observers and experts (take advantage of a nearby university), find citizens affected by the issue, and then ask to see the numbers. You can do this.

Here’s a final reason for taking the harder path of focusing on results. Process journalism, the kind that skims the surface of public policy, is rapidly becoming a commodity. Reporting that digs deeper and looks for results is, I believe, the journalism of the future. If you want a preview, check out news websites like Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and Slate’s Metropolis. These sites don’t just report what politicians say is going on; they use data and other indicators to show us what’s actually happening. At the local level, you can find similar results-focused reporting on websites in San Diego, St. Louis, Denver, and Washington, D.C.

To repeat: Please continue covering city council meetings. That’s important. But don’t stop there. Examine how government works and what it produces. If you pay attention, it’ll make for better government and a better city. And who knows? It might also make you a better reporter with a brighter future.

This is the last in a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Thomas Claveirole licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Six: The Secret of Government Success

September 16, 2014 By Otis White

It is often said that Americans don’t like government. While that may be true in the singular, we certainly like it in the plural. That is, we like governments—and lots of them. There are more than 90,000 local governments in the United States: 38,910 “general purpose” governments (cities, counties, towns), 12,880 school districts, and 38,266 “special purpose” governments.

If you dig around in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Census of Governments, you’ll find some interesting trends. After World War II, the number of local governments declined, due mostly to school-district consolidations. (Believe it or not, we have one-fifth the number of school districts we had in the early 1950s.) Then, in the 1970s, the trend reversed itself and the number of local governments grew, slowly but steadily. The largest number of new governments were special purpose governments (things like sewer, parks, and transit districts), but there was also growth in municipalities.

I’ve seen it in Atlanta, where I live, which in recently years has sprouted cities in unincorporated suburban areas, brand new cities with names like Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Peachtree Corners, and so on. Atlanta has a lot of governments, but we are by no means the most fragmented region in the country. That title belongs to St. Louis, where there are 90 municipal governments in St. Louis County alone—not including the actual city of St. Louis. These are mostly small places, anonymous even to those a short distance away. One, the town of Champ, has somewhere between 12 and 14 residents, depending on who’s counting. Not kidding.

If you look around your own region and start counting the governments, you may be surprised by how many you find. Keep in mind: It isn’t just cities and counties, but those rapidly multiplying special districts as well. And don’t forget the federal and state governments. Almost any big issue—transportation, economic development, public safety—will involve multiple governments. As a test, next time your district attorney announces the results of a major drug bust, count the federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies represented on the podium behind her. You’ll need a tally sheet to keep track.

Point is, we live in a country that believes power is best exercised by a herd and not a shepherd. And while your city may be the largest member of the herd, it is still dependent on others—and most likely lots of others—if it wants to do anything important. The word we use for this cooperation by interests not compelled to cooperate is collaboration. If you want to take your reporting to a higher level, try seeing this cooperation (or its absence) and reporting on it. In doing so, you’ll find yourself at the heart of what makes governments successful, which is their ability to work together.

Caution: I’m not talking about, well, talk. Government leaders are good at praising cooperation. After all, most of us have had it drilled into our heads since kindergarten that we should play well together. Words, though, are one thing, actions another, and your job is to find where your city hall is doing important things with others, where it should be working with others but isn’t, how the effective collaborations work, and who’s behind them.

To understand the mechanics of collaboration, you might begin with a couple of things I’ve written. One is on how collaborations get started (and, yes, talk is a first step but only a step); the other is about the central skill involved in putting collaborations together. (You have to ask the right way.)

Then just start looking around. You may be surprised by the number of collaborations at work in your region and their importance in getting things done. I wrote a book a few years ago about how one civic project changed a city; what I discovered was it was created by a web of collaborations involving state and local governments, a public university, a host of elected officials, and numerous interests outside of government. My challenge in writing the book was to figure out who put these collaborations together and how they did it.

That’s yours, as well: See the collaboration, then figure out why it works and who made it happen. The result, I promise you, will be some of the most insightful reporting of your career—and probably the first of its kind for your news organization.

So, how do you find collaborations? I suggest two ways. First is the way I suggested in Lessons Two, Three, and Four (on where civic ideas come from, the role of city councils, and the art of compromise): Identify some big civic improvements of the last few years and reverse engineer them. This time, instead of looking for the idea path, the deal brokers, and the key compromises, ask: Who was involved in this effort? Why did they cooperate? And how were they persuaded to join in? To make the reporting interesting, look for those who did the persuading and ask: What did they say and why did it work?

This will work for big civic projects, but you’ll also learn there are everyday collaborations in your region. To find these, you’ll have to ask around. Start with the city planner’s office (planners have a good eye for these things). If your city has a downtown business improvement district, ask the BID’s director. (Like planners, BIDs are usually good at collaboration.) And, of course, pay a visit to your region’s council of governments. (Don’t know what that is? Read this.)

Then just look in some likely places for collaboration. Does your school system work with the local government on issues like pedestrian safety or recreation? Does your mayor ever meet with mayors from nearby cities? What comes from these meetings? If your region has more than one transit system, how do they manage transfers, and how do they manage fare-sharing? As you ask around, you may find that there are organizations that help with collaborations. The most obvious are the councils of governments, but you may find that civic leagues, professional organizations, and municipal associations also help introduce government leaders to one another.

Then ask this question: Where should governments be working together—but aren’t? You can interview public administration professors at a nearby university for their suggestions, but the answers may be obvious as you look around. Transit systems, for example, need to work with city planners so they can anticipate demand. Well . . . does yours? If so, how? As children walk to schools, they need safe passages. How does your school system work with the city to be sure they have them? How do your city’s public works officials coordinate with nearby cities on things like snow removal and street resurfacing projects? What kinds of mutual-assistance agreements are there between your city’s police and fire departments and those in cities nearby? How well have these worked in crises?

As you get into these stories, you’ll see the hidden structure of government, the way things actually work day to day, for better or worse. What you’ll discover is that this world is different from what is discussed at city council meetings—and radically different from what is talked about in campaigns. And during the next election cycle this will present you with a challenge: Do you bring this new understanding to your political coverage? And if so, how?

A postscript: Every region needs collaboration, even places like North Carolina and Texas where city governments tend to be big and powerful. After all, there are multiple governments even in those places, from school systems and transit authorities to state and federal agencies. But in places with lots of smaller governments, as in the Atlanta and St. Louis areas, collaboration isn’t just a good thing, it’s critical.

Because it is so fragmented, St. Louis has worried about its government structure for more than a half-century. Over that period, it has made numerous attempts at doing something about it, including full-scale government consolidation referendums. In fact, it’s still at it, through an organization called Better Together, which appears to be mounting yet another attempt at municipal merger. Good luck, since every other effort has failed, usually overwhelmingly.

If I could advise St. Louis leaders, I’d tell them to stop putting so much effort into consolidation and invest instead in collaboration. There are two reasons: First, this is likely to be much more successful in the short run. Second, in the long run, collaboration may be the best route to consolidation. That’s because as long as local leaders don’t know one another or the strengths and weaknesses of the city next door, they’re going to resist combining anything. But if their police and fire departments start coordinating activities and their planning departments work together, they’ll build the familiarity and trust that opens the door to combining services. And when there are enough combined services, who knows? The voters may decide it’s time to take the final step and just merge the cities.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Vu Nguyen licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Five: Vision and Demographics

August 5, 2014 By Otis White

My aim in these postings is to help you, as a reporter or blogger, understand local government and avoid some of the problems I had as a city hall reporter. As I said in the introduction, I never truly “got” local government when I covered city hall. I kept looking for what I’d learned in college political science classes—that government decision making was about interests clashing over public policy. I was disappointed to find city councils focused instead on things that seemed smaller and less interesting: arbitrating zoning disputes, moving small amounts of money among city departments, listening to neighborhood complaints, voting on construction projects. Where were the interest groups, I wondered, the lobbyists, the committee hearings, the position papers, the public policies?

It wasn’t until much later that I understood local governments weren’t smaller versions of federal and state governments; they were focused on something different—not public policy but people and places, how these elements interact, and how they could be made to interact better. Land use, I learned, was the central concern of city and county governments, and it is local governments’ ability to place infrastructure and regulate land uses (not only on public streets and spaces but private property) that gives them power and importance.

A city council’s debate, then, about locating a civic center isn’t a boring discussion about another construction project—it’s a bet on where and how the city will grow. Guess right, and the area around it could be transformed. Guess wrong, and it could be a drain on government revenues and a huge missed opportunity.

And you can go down the list: Where transit stops are placed, sidewalks built, parks located, schools situated; whether to build a performing arts center, start a bike-sharing program, or help the local college expand; how to regulate food trucks and ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft; whether to give economic development incentives to businesses or help a small-business incubator get off the ground. These decisions don’t look like much close up, but collectively they add up to a vision of the city, with each a step toward that vision.

One of your most important jobs as city hall reporter, then, should be to figure out the vision. If your city has been through a full-scale planning process recently, this may be easy. Many will know the city’s intended destination and how it aims to get there. Your task is to put these things into words and explain what they mean, why they are important, and what alternative visions were considered.

If the city hasn’t been through a visioning process or comprehensive planning effort, the vision could be known only to a few. So your first task is to piece together the vision by interviewing those with a say in city decisions and comparing it with the decisions they’ve made and the plans that guide them. (Hint: Talk to the city planning director and the local chamber of commerce president before interviewing the mayor and council members.)

It’s possible, of course, that there is no broadly shared vision, that the city council is feeling its way through important decisions. But trust me on this: Having no direction doesn’t mean the city isn’t going somewhere. It just isn’t going there by design. In these cases, your job is to see where the drift is taking the city, tell your readers what that place is likely to be, and ask leaders if they’re comfortable with the destination.

All of this brings up some questions: What does a vision look like? How would you know if your city is achieving it? And if the city is just drifting along, how can you see where it’s headed?

Actually, it’s pretty simple. Look at the demographics.

Go back to the central issue for cities: People and places, how they interact, and how they can be made to interact better. The tools that a city has are the “places” part of that statement—how it develops public places, regulates private ones, and serves all with infrastructure. The results are the people and what they do with those places. Remember the famous Watergate adage, “follow the money”? If you want to know where your city is headed, follow the demographics.

A vision, then, is an effort to picture who will live in, work in, and visit your city in the future, what they will do for entertainment, how they will relate to one another and the city’s physical assets, how they will move around, and what impressions newcomers will form. And behind the vision should be a plan: In order to make this ideal future become a reality, here are the things we must do.

Describing the vision is important, but you need to know more. Is the vision obtainable? Can the city truly attract those it wants and needs in order to be successful? To answer this, you’ll have to take a deep dive into demographics, starting with where the city is today and how it is changing.

Here are some questions to begin with: Who lives in your city by age, income, educational attainment, and ethnicity? How are these numbers changing over, say, the last 10 years? How do these changes compare with cities of similar size and type? How do they compare with nearby jurisdictions, such as suburbs? (You can find these things from U.S. Census data but call your regional planning agency. It may have additional data and even projections.)

Now drill down a bit: Where in your city are the greatest changes taking place today? If the city is investing in some areas or services (such as transit), how is that affecting the demographics in those neighborhoods? (Again, look not just at population numbers in those tracts but age, income, and education.)

All of this will give you some idea of how realistic your city’s vision is. If the city is aging rapidly and wants to attract more young people and you can’t find a single neighborhood where young people are replacing older families, it’ll be a tough slog—and you can say so. If, though, there are several neighborhoods that millennials are moving to, then there’s your lede. Interview the newcomers, explain the neighborhood’s attraction, and give readers a glimpse of the future.

As you’re getting used to demographics, don’t forget that cities serve more than residents. They’re also centers for work, entertainment, and tourism. Employee demographics aren’t as easily obtained as residential demographics, but governments do track the types of jobs being created as well as the number. I suggest starting with a federal database called County Business Patterns. Be patient: You’ll have to immerse yourself in things like NAICS codes and learn some basic spreadsheet techniques, but pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out how employment is changing in your city. And the same guidelines apply: If your city wants to be a center of technology and can’t show any growth in that area, then you can be properly skeptical.

Tourism and entertainment statistics will be harder still to come by; they’re kept locally and some are sketchy. But it’s worth the effort to learn who comes to your city and for what purposes. You may, for instance, be able to track restaurant sales figures over time, which will tell you whether city efforts to build an entertainment economy are working. If your city has invested in a convention center, the statistics on its use should be revealing.

Armed with a little curiosity and a few spreadsheet skills, then, you’ll quickly master the changing demographics of your city and turn out some great stories. But remember: You’re a city hall reporter, so your aim isn’t just to report what’s happening but to compare the government’s intentions and actions to the results. If there’s a vision, is it obtainable? If the city is drifting, where is it headed? If the city is making investments, are they working? Demographics will give you the answers.

Three cautions about fairness. First, be aware of the lag effect. Depending on economic conditions, a city can wait years after opening a transit station before developers start building transit-oriented buildings, and even more time before it’s reflected in the population changes. Ask independent experts, like academics and consultants, how long the lag should be.

Be aware too that government census reports are backward looking. They can tell you what happened but not what’s happening right now or what is yet to come. That was a big reason so many were surprised by the great urban turnaround of the 1990s. It had been underway for years before the 2000 Census awoke us to it. So if the demographics don’t reflect what you’re seeing in the neighborhoods, it may be because no one has collected the statistics or run the numbers yet.

Second, luck and circumstance play bigger roles in cities than we sometimes acknowledge. Local governments can do all the right things and yet see little return. Or they can do only a little and see huge changes. Williston, North Dakota, for example, was a sleepy little prairie town for most of its history. Then oil was discovered, its population doubled, and rents soared to levels approaching those in Manhattan. How much credit does the city government deserve for Williston’s growth? Probably not much. In the opposite way, we ought to give some credit to cities like Cleveland that have worked mightily to make themselves more appealing. Despite progress (it was named the site of the 2016 Republican National Convention and some of its neighborhoods are reviving) Cleveland hasn’t stemmed its population losses yet. Is it fair, then, to compare Cleveland to fast-growing cities like Miami or Houston—or would it be fairer to compare it to other cities trying to reverse a growth spiral? I think the latter is fairer.

Third, be smart as well as fair with demographics on ethnicity and income. These are politically sensitive subjects—for good reason. All cities that are successful over the long haul are diverse ones. So don’t let your reporting be an excuse for excluding some, as the city seeks others.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Corey Templeton licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Four: The Art of the Compromise

July 15, 2014 By Otis White

I’d like to persuade you to stop badmouthing the “c” word. The word I have in mind is “compromise.” Done right, a compromise is a way of opening the door to change by reducing the objections of interest groups. And it is the closest thing in politics to an art form.

That doesn’t mean all compromises are good, of course. Some satisfy interests but don’t create much change. In fact, some compromises are designed just to paper over problems. (In Washington, this is called “kicking the can down the road.”) Others appear at first to be ingenious solutions but come apart because they aren’t sustainable. And some look so ungainly that even participants call them “ugly babies.“

But just as you can admire the creative process while sometimes not liking the art, I encourage you to step back and look at how your city hall arrives at these deals. Yes, by all means write about the bad deals and car-wreck compromises. But also develop a little curiosity about why some compromises DO work. Look for patterns in the way they are arrived at in your city. Figure out who your city’s compromise artists are. And by all means, don’t denigrate the art form.

Before we begin, though, a little perspective: If you’ve read the introduction to this series and the first three installments, then you can see some themes developing. Projects and policy ideas tend to flow into city hall from the outside. The city council is at or near the center of decision making, sometimes in the lead role, sometimes in the mayor’s shadow. And the central issues of cities have to do with land and how it is used by people.

This lesson is about the most important work that mayors and city councils (and sometimes others) do, which is creating compromises that allow projects and big policy ideas to move forward.

Now, please don’t charge out the door looking for these things. Major civic projects and big policy changes don’t come along every day. Most of what mayors and city councils do is routine: creating and amending budgets, approving small policy changes, making appointments or approving personnel changes, reviewing contracts, and acting as quasi-judges on zoning matters and development decisions.

But that’s why you should sit up when one of these difficult decisions does come along. That’s when talented politicians do their best work, bringing the interests together, finding hidden areas of agreement, plotting the way forward, and figuring out how to present the results in ways acceptable to other politicians and the public.

And they do this in one of two basic ways, by personality or process. That is, they personally hammer out a compromise, or they send the dispute through some sort of process that the combatants and larger community feel is fair.

Here are two examples of the personality-driven compromise. First, a small but telling compromise authored by Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle allowing ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft to operate in his city while offering taxi owners just enough to quieten their opposition. (Why is it “telling”? Because a mayor who can knock out a compromise like this in his first six months in office demands our attention.) 2023 update: Ed Murray was, indeed, a talented mayor who was undone after three years in office by a sex scandal.

The second, more sweeping example is Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s 2012 plan for reforming his city’s schools, which required that he get state legislative approval and the governor’s support after reaching a series of compromises with local business interests, educators, reform advocates, and labor and ethnic leaders.

The personality-driven approach seems to be the way most compromises come about, and in cities with strong mayor forms of government that’s what you expect to find. (Story idea: If your city has a strong mayor system and there are big disputes not being resolved, why? Does the mayor not consider these things important, does he not consider fashioning compromises as part of his job, is he bad at this work, or is there some other reason? What do others in the city say?)

The other way of reaching compromises is with a process. San Diego’s “ugly baby” compromise on housing was a “locked-room” process. Basically, the city council president sent the interests to a room and told them to come back with something they could all support.

Other processes involve task forces, which involve broader community interests, and mediation. Mediation was how Minneapolis resolved a difficult dispute over a light-rail line. In this case, you see the importance of fairness in a process. The compromise was reached after the mediator proposed it, but it was pretty much the same set of ideas others had suggested. When it came this time from a neutral party, city officials took it to heart.

Finally, there are those compromises that are so complex they defy easy description. Detroit’s “grand bargain,” by which it will exit bankruptcy in the months ahead, is a web of compromises involving a federal bankruptcy judge, the governor, the city’s emergency manager, state legislative leaders, foundation leaders, the mayor, business executives, Wall Street interests, labor leaders, and a host of others. Which parts of the bargain were contributed by leaders and which came as a result of the bankruptcy process? Hard to say precisely, but the biggest elements (including the foundations stepping in to support the art museum) were clearly the work of creative leaders.

So, how can you report on compromises in your city in new ways? Well, you can start by reverse engineering them. That is, you can begin with the deal, which is almost always announced publicly, then ask who was involved at each step and how each element of the compromise fell into place. I promise you this will make a great narrative that will tell you and your readers much about how your city works.

Then you can ask not only how the compromise came about but why. People usually agree to things involving sacrifice only because they fear an alternative. So what were the alternatives? And how were they presented to the different interest groups? (This alone may be a fascinating story, as you may see that the alternatives presented to one side were the opposites of what was presented to the other.)

Finally, you can revisit some earlier compromises. Some likely will have failed. Why? Were they too ambitious, not ambitious enough—or were they designed (consciously or not) for failure? If they were designed for failure, what were the design flaws? For those compromises that succeeded, again . . . why? Did the interests find the alternatives so frightening that they stuck with the bargain through good times and bad? Did participants discover over time that there was hidden value in this new way of doing things? Or did the interests just move on to other issues?

What about the personalities and processes behind these compromises? What makes some leaders good at crafting deals? Do they use a standard way (some leaders use anger and threats, others tend toward calmness and reason) or does each situation demand a different approach? If they sent the dispute through a process, what was the process? Why did it work? Why did people accept it as a legitimate way of deciding these things?

This is the heart of civic decision making as it plays out inside city halls. And it’s what makes talented politicians so valuable. Perhaps the best comparison is to business leaders who see markets others can’t and ways of reaching those markets that don’t exist yet. A book ghostwritten for Donald Trump called this “the art of the deal.” (There’s little evidence Trump was much of a dealmaker, but others in business are.) In politics, the compromise that allows progress while sustaining itself is the work of art.

Footnote: So why do reporters denigrate compromises? I’ll let others do the full analysis, but let me offer one theory. It has to do with nonzero-sum contests.

Huh? Most city hall reporters also report on political campaigns, and elections are zero-sum contests. (Google the term.) That is, every vote I get is a vote you have to overcome and exceed in order to win. There aren’t that many zero-sum contests in our lives. Sports, conventional land wars, card games, a few others.

Most of our lives is spent in a nonzero-sum world, where both sides can gain from a transaction and, sometimes as a result of cooperating, the pie grows. I hope your newsroom is a nonzero-sum environment, along with your family life, your relationships with friends, even your dealings with merchants. (If you’re happy with the car you bought and the dealer is pleased with the money, then voila. Nonzero sum.)

The problem for some reporters and politicians is that they have trouble making the transition from the artificial world of zero-sum elections to the more common world of nonzero-sum government. Put another way, they can’t believe that a compromise where no one walks away with a clear win isn’t . . . well, fishy.

If that is so, then every successful marriage, enduring business, and long-term friendship is fishy. Because like good compromises at city hall, they too live in a nonzero-sum world.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Cabinet Office licensed under Creative Commons.

How to Read a Flawed Book About Cities

Lesson Seven: Process and Results

Lesson Six: The Secret of Government Success

Lesson Five: Vision and Demographics

Lesson Four: The Art of the Compromise

About Otis White

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