Transcript

ROBERT PUENTES:  Professor Chris Nelson of the University of Utah estimates that between now and 2030, we will develop another 213 billion square feet of homes, retail, office and other structures. That’s two-thirds of the amount of build space that exists in the United States today. So how do we accommodate and support this growing population? Whether we break this pattern of sprawl as usual will significantly influence whether we can secure our energy independence and forge solutions to global warming and climate change. Yet how and where we build also has far-reaching implications for economic recovery and will continue to impact our metropolitan area’s success and America’s ability to compete globally.

The world might be flat, as Thomas Friedman has famously concluded, but the spatial reality of modern economy is their intense concentration in a relative small number of places. The nation’s 363 metropolitan areas house some 83 percent of our population and drive more than 90 percent of our gross domestic product. The top 100 metropolitan areas alone constitute two-thirds of our nation’s population, they concentrate the workers and firms that fuel the economy, and they make an outsized contribution on indicators such as innovation, human capital, infrastructure, and quality places.

In short, these metropolitan areas are not the same economies as 50 or 75 years ago. They constitute a new spatial geography, enveloping city and suburb, township and rural area, and a seamlessly integrated and economic environmental landscape. The problem is at the scale of these issues, the ones we’re going to talk about today, housing, transportation, economic vitality, environmental quality is mismatched with our political boundaries and our institutions. And efforts to link up these areas of policy, one of the countless road blocks and headaches as we fail to seize opportunities and improve outcomes through integrated problem solving.

In order for us to accommodate the nation’s projected metropolitan growth in ways that grow our economy and also protect our environment, we need to understand that yesterday’s solutions are not going to address tomorrow’s challenges, and that’s really what we’re here to discuss I think today.

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