Brookings: Topics - Kentucky

Despite College Basketball Rivalry, Kentucky Metros Collaborate on Economy

Amy Liu and Richard Shearer — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 10:20:00 -0400

Saturday night's NCAA Final Four showdown between Louisville and Kentucky was hard-fought between two rival schools and two rival coaches. But their historic on-court competition stands in stark contrast to a new partnership being forged by their home metro areas. Led by mayors Jim Gray and Greg Fischer, Lexington and Louisville are collaborating to compete economically so they can prosper in the global economy.

Fischer and Gray are two former-businessmen-turned-mayors who took office right at the tail of the recession. Both inherently understood that rising competition abroad required them to act boldly to innovate and grow jobs at home. It didn’t take long for these two entrepreneurial mayors to look across Interstate 64 and recognize the opportunity to bring their metro areas together in ways that will put their combined region – and assets – on the global map.

Last summer, these mayors, with their high-caliber private and public sector partners, launched the Bluegrass Economic Advancement Movement (BEAM), an effort to create a metro business plan for growth that will unify and leverage their common markets assets – such as manufacturing, university innovation, transportation/logistics – to boost the economic prospects of their two metros. To demonstrate their commitment to an historic alliance, the mayors jointly appointed Jim Host as chairman of BEAM, an influential statesman and Lexington businessman who chaired the Louisville Arena Authority.

Lexington, Louisville, and the surrounding counties represent a mega region of over 1.9 million people, roughly the size of Las Vegas, NV. Encompassing 22 counties, including the four southern Indiana counties in the Louisville metro, the BEAM region comprises roughly half of the commonwealth’s population, jobs, and economy. This makes the BEAM effort of vital importance not only to the economic prosperity of the two metros but the entire commonwealth.

To date, the region has been hard at work undertaking a rigorous market analysis of the strengths and opportunities facing their two metro areas and adjoining counties. The Bluegrass region boasts over 100,000 manufacturing jobs, anchored by global giants like GE, Ford, and Toyota. Both metro areas benefit from the UPS Air headquarters in Louisville, which provides an easy port of entry to the world for area firms and travelers. Both these assets may explain why both Louisville and Lexington are major exporters, besting the nation on their share of economic output generated by exports. And the presence of both University of Kentucky and University of Louisville helps the region attract talent, especially among skilled immigrants.

But the challenges are clear: Despite these assets, the Bluegrass region has been lagging the nation in economic output and productivity growth, and median household incomes have fallen faster than the national average. This is the right time for a forward-leaning vision and plan of action for making the Louisville-Lexington super region a true hub of manufacturing innovation and growth. Mayor Gray and Mayor Fisher, with their rare leadership and genuine friendship, are the right CEOs to drive this plan forward.

With Louisville and Lexington teaming up, the state will be the big winner, as it was in this year's tournament.

Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated from its original version, published on March 31.

Authors

Amy Liu
Richard Shearer

Publication: The Avenue, The New Republic

Image Source: © John Sommers II / Reuters

A Restoring Prosperity Case Study: Louisville Kentucky

Edward Bennett and Carolyn Gatz — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Louisville/Jefferson County is the principal city of America’s 42nd largest metropolitan area, a 13-county, bi-state region with a 2006 population estimated at 1.2 million. It is the largest city by far in Kentucky, but it is neither Kentucky’s capital nor its center of political power.

The consolidated city, authorized by voter referendum in 2000 and implemented in 2003, is home to 701,500 residents within its 399 square miles, with a population density of 4,124.8 per square mile.² It is either the nation’s 16th or its 26th largest incorporated place, depending on whether the residents of smaller municipalities within its borders, who are eligible to vote in its elections, are counted (as local officials desire and U.S. Census Bureau officials resist). The remainder of the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) population is split between four Indiana counties (241,193) and eight Kentucky counties (279,523). Although several of those counties are growing rapidly, the new Louisville metro area remains the MSA's central hub, with 57 percent of the population and almost 70 percent of the job base.

Centrally located on the southern banks of the Ohio River, amid an agriculturally productive, mineral rich, and energy producing region, Louisville is commonly described as the northernmost city of the American South. Closer to Toronto than to New Orleans, and even slightly closer to Chicago than to Atlanta, it remains within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the American population living east of the Rocky Mountains.

This location has been the dominant influence on Louisville’s history as a regional center of trade, commerce and manufacture. The city, now the all-points international hub of United Parcel Service (UPS), consistently ranks among the nation’s top logistics centers. Its manufacturing sector, though much diminished, still ranks among the strongest in the Southeast. The many cultural assets developed during the city’s reign as a regional economic center rank it highly in various measures of quality of life and “best places.”

Despite these strengths, Louisville’s competitiveness and regional prominence declined during much of the last half of the 20th Century, and precipitously so during the economic upheavals of the 1970s and ‘80s. Not only did it lose tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs and many of its historic businesses to deindustrialization and corporate consolidation, it also confronted significant barriers to entry into the growing knowledge-based economy because of its poorly-educated workforce, lack of R&D capacity, and risk-averse business culture.

In response, Louisville began a turbulent, two-decade process of civic and economic renewal, during which it succeeded both in restoring growth in its traditional areas of strength, most notably from the large impact of the UPS hub, and in laying groundwork for 21st century competitiveness, most notably by substantially ramping up university-based research and entrepreneurship supports. Doing so required it to overhaul nearly every aspect of its outmoded economic development strategies, civic relationships, and habits of mind, creating a new culture of collaboration.

Each of the three major partners in economic development radically transformed themselves and their relationships with one another. The often-paralyzing city-suburban divide of local governance yielded to consolidation. The business community reconstituted itself as a credible champion of broad-based regional progress, and it joined with the public sector to create a new chamber of commerce that is the region’s full-service, public-private economic development agency recognized as among the best in the nation. The Commonwealth of Kentucky embraced sweeping education reforms, including major support for expanded research at the University of Louisville, and a “New Economy” agenda emphasizing the commercialization of research-generated knowledge. Creative public-private partnerships have become the norm, propelling, for instance, the dramatic resurgence of downtown.

The initial successes of all these efforts have been encouraging, but not yet sufficient for the transformation to innovation-based prosperity that is the goal. This report details those successes, and the leadership, partnerships, and strategies that helped create them. It begins by describing Louisville’s history and development and the factors that made its economy grow and thrive. It then explains why the city faltered during the latter part of the 20th century and how it has begun to reverse course. In doing so, the study offers important lessons for other cities that are striving to compete in a very new economic era.

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Authors

Edward Bennett
Carolyn Gatz

State of the Presidential Campaign

E.J. Dionne, Jr., Tod Lindberg and Susan Page — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:00:00 -0400

E.J. Dionne joins The Diane Rehm Show with guest host Susan Page to discuss what the Kentucky and Oregon primaries mean for the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and examine the state of the McCain candidacy.

Susan Page, host: Thanks for joining us, I’m Susan Page of USA Today sitting in for Diane Rehm. She’s visiting New Hampshire public radio. Senator Hillary Clinton crushed Senator Barack Obama by 35 points in the Kentucky Primary yesterday. But the bigger victory celebration was Obama’s. He told voters in Iowa that he was now within reach of the Democratic Presidential Nomination. Here to discuss the state of the race and look ahead to the general election campaign, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution. Welcome E.J.

E.J. Dionne: Good to be here.

Susan Page: And Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution. Welcome back.

Tod Lindberg: Hi Susan.

Susan Page: We should note that Tod Lindberg is an informal foreign policy advisor to Senator McCain. We are going to talk about the race, we are going to take your questions and comments later this hour…

Listen to the entire interview

Authors

E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Tod Lindberg
Susan Page

Publication: The Diane Rehm Show

In Kentucky, Being Poor is Costly

Dr. Terry I. Brooks, Matt Fellowes and Mia Mabanta — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

What do western Louisville and the Appalachian region have in common besides being two of the poorest areas in Kentucky? Not much one would think. And, yet, they each are also among the most expensive places to live in the state.

In fact, prices in the Bluegrass state for everything from a tube of toothpaste to a home mortgage are often the steepest where neighborhood incomes are the lowest.

That's not news to folks who live in these areas. Poor Louisvillians derisively call these higher prices the "ghetto tax" or the "black tax." Residents of the Cumberland Plateau scornfully call it the "hillbilly tax." Same tax—just a different name.

Yet neither community has ever been able to muster the evidence that policymakers and business leaders need to act. Until now.

Working with Kentucky Youth Advocates, the Brookings Institution recently released a report entitled "The High Cost of Being Poor in Kentucky." That report documents the extent to which lower-income families pay higher prices for basic necessities through-out the state. Turns out these higher prices can add from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in annual extra costs for lower-income, working families in the state.

Take basic financial services like cashing a check. Of the Kentuckians who use a checking account to cash a check, the majority of who pay nothing to do so. In contrast, one out of every five low-income Kentuckians uses a high-cost check cashing establishment instead, which charges anywhere from 1 to 10 percent of the face value of each check.

That may not sound like a lot of money until you do the math. Someone earning the minimum wage in Kentucky would be sacrificing about half of their annual income within 10 years—just to cash checks!

Steepest mortgages

Even more worrisome, tens of thousands of hard-working Kentuckians who have done the Herculean work of squeezing savings out of a low income and investing in a house are now paying the steepest mortgage prices in Kentucky. According to Federal Reserve data, over 40 percent of Kentucky's low-income homebuyers in 2005 bought what they define as a "high cost" mortgage, compared to just 16 percent of high-income homebuyers.

For someone who bought a median-valued house in Kentucky, that difference would add up to an average of over $70,000 in extra interest costs over the loan's lifetime for these low-income homebuyers that a high-income homebuyer in the state does not have to pay.

That's serious money, adding up to a serious obstacle for low-income families trying to climb up the economic ladder in the commonwealth.

What to do?

Unfortunately, there's not one silver bullet solution to bring down these higher prices.

First, public and private leaders need to work together to lower business costs so that they can responsibly and, yes, profitably sell goods and services in low-income markets at lower, more competitive prices.

Pennsylvania, for instance, has opened up nearly two dozen mid- to large-sized grocery stores over the last two years in mostly low-income neighborhoods by subsidizing their startup costs. These bigger stores offer lower prices, and a wider selection, than the convenience stores currently serving these neighborhoods.

New York has also used subsidies to help banks better meet demand in lower-income markets. By strategically depositing state revenue into branches that open up in low-income neighborhoods, and working with banks to develop and market appropriate products to low-income consumers, New York has helped thousands of these consumers lower prices they pay for basic financial services.

High-cost products

Secondly, there are clearly unnecessarily high-cost products being sold to low-income consumers, driving up the prices they pay for necessities. Economists at Freddie Mac, for instance, estimate that about one out of every five buyers of a high-cost mortgage actually qualified for a normal priced mortgage.

Similarly, Kentucky is one of the few states in the country that does not cap rates that check cashers can charge for this basic service, adding hundreds of dollars onto the annual costs of living for low-income workers.

Those kinds of practices must be stopped.

Finally, there's clear evidence that low-income consumers in Kentucky need more information to make savvy decisions with their scarce resources. Fewer than one-half of those surveyed for our report had a good understanding of credit reports, and most homebuyers did not shop around and compare prices before buying a mortgage.

There are good reasons to explain these choices. For instance, over 60 percent of Kentucky's lower-income population does not have Internet access, limiting their ability to gather key price-lowering information. Historically low interest rates and new technology have also opened up access to homeownership among low-income families, often without a corresponding increase in home-buying skills most higher-income families now take for granted.

In response, some states are building financial literacy for the future through incorporating financial education into K-12 curriculum, which is a distinct gap in the current state system. Other states have created new state Offices of Financial Education, dedicated to promoting financial management information and skills.

Kentucky has set the stage to do even more by announcing a broad-based High Cost Commission to develop policy recommendations to the state's business and political leaders in response to the report's findings. The commission is the first of its kind in the nation and is a model that other states will be watching carefully.

It's clear that those with the least in Kentucky are too often spending the most to simply get by. That's a major, overlooked problem for leaders in the state, but a major opportunity, too. The poor do not need to pay more.

Authors

Dr. Terry I. Brooks
Matt Fellowes
Mia Mabanta

Publication: The Louisville Courier-Journal

The High Price of Being Poor in Kentucky

Dr. Terry I. Brooks and Matt Fellowes — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Kentucky's working families frequently pay a premium for everyday necessities. Lower-income workers in Kentucky are more likely to pay double-digit interest rates for auto loans; more likely to pay hundreds of dollars more for car insurance; and more likely to pay a higher sticker price for their car compared to their higher income counterparts.

Read the Executive Summary

Additionally, lower-income workers are twice as likely to have purchased a high-cost mortgage compared to their higher income neighbors and are more likely to use alternative financial service providers, costing untold extra dollars for basic financial transactions and the purchase of home goods.

However, new innovative and practical initiatives are being implemented and improving the prices of key necessities for lower-income families around the country. Public and private leaders in Kentucky can follow suit and also reduce these higher costs of living, and do so in ways that defy the substantial budgetary, economic, and partisan pressures that limit so many efforts to grow the middle class. Through a combination of initiatives that bring down business costs, curb unscrupulous behavior, and boost consumer knowledge, public and private leaders can bring down these prices, creating up to thousands of dollars in extra family spending power.

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Authors

Dr. Terry I. Brooks
Matt Fellowes

Louisville and New Orleans

Alan Berube and Bruce Katz — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Pictures of Hurricane Katrina's devastating aftermath for New Orleans' most vulnerable residents shocked and dismayed most Americans.

As well they should have. Poor blacks, including many children and elderly individuals from the city's most distressed neighborhoods, were left behind amid the fast-rising waters with little information or means to escape.

For Louisville, these images should resonate close to home.

That's because the conditions that exacerbated the New Orleans disaster—deep, segregated urban poverty—still exist in Louisville, and in most major American cities today.

Findings from a new Brookings analysis underscore the problem. As of 2000, the old city of Louisville ranked third among the nation's 50 largest cities in the degree to which its poor residents were confined to the city's very poorest neighborhoods. That placed it right behind-you guessed it-New Orleans.

The picture looks somewhat less bleak after the merger. More of Louisville Metro's low-income families now live outside the city's very poorest neighborhoods, ranking the consolidated city 14th instead of third. Even so, the new regional city ranks fifth in the degree to which its poor African Americans reside in the most distressed neighborhoods.

Why should Louisville be concerned? The dams and levees along the Ohio River constructed after the devastating flood of 1937 provide some assurance that the River City is unlikely to suffer a Katrina-sized natural disaster.

But extremely poor neighborhoods like some of those in West Louisville embody a slower-moving humanitarian disaster. Research shows how these communities limit job prospects and aspirations. Homeowners live in properties with low and declining values. High crime rates and poor housing conditions debilitate residents mentally and physically. In the end, the economic and civic health of the surrounding city suffers.

Fortunately, Louisville Metro government has acted boldly to break up the city's worst concentrations of poverty, and to give low-income families access to better living environments. Under Metro Mayor Abramson, Louisville has used the federal HOPE VI program to transform the once highly impoverished Park DuValle neighborhood into a healthy, mixed-income community. Similar revitalization is underway in the former Clarksdale development just east of downtown. And successive administrations have used market-oriented community development finance to stimulate business investment in the city's distressed corridors.

The city also boasts one of the most successful municipal campaigns to connect low-income workers to benefits like the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, coordinated by the Louisville Asset Building Coalition. By boosting wages, the credit helps enable these families to afford better housing in lower-poverty neighborhoods.

What's more, the merger itself signals Louisville's commitment to address economic and social issues on a region-wide basis. Three years ago, we prepared a report entitled "Beyond Merger" that laid out a series of challenges for the new regional city. Today, the work of the Greater Louisville Project continues to guide the city's long-term strategies to create more inclusive neighborhoods.

Clearly, then, Louisville Metro is no New Orleans. Still, the city's leaders must not let merger mask the remaining challenges. Just as before the merger, more than 30,000 of the city's residents, including 8,400 poor children, live in extremely poor neighborhoods. To give those children and their parents better chances in life, Louisville must sustain focus on alleviating concentrated poverty.

Louisville is on the right course already. But achieving progress will be all the more difficult in an era of shrinking federal assistance.

Programs like HOPE VI, housing vouchers, and the Earned Income Tax Credit helped reduce concentrated poverty in the 1990s, but all face budget cuts or wholesale elimination in Washington today. Breaking the cycle of poverty will take more local effort than ever before.

In that respect, Louisville must first ensure that its own housing strategies do not reinforce concentrated poverty. For instance, since 2000 nearly 250 affordable units funded by the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit were placed in Louisville Metro's poorest neighborhoods.

To help lower-income families access better local environments, Louisville must ensure that housing investments like these are distributed more equitably. Confronting local interests who seek to keep affordable housing out of their neighborhoods has been, and will continue to be, difficult. But the city cannot afford to tolerate the sort of discrimination that has held back its lower-income residents and communities for so long.

None of this will be quick or easy. Smart policies rarely are. But in its quest to be a truly great city, Louisville owes its neediest citizens a shot at real economic mobility. Eradicating concentrated poverty represents the critical first step.

Authors

Publication: The Courier-Journal

Distinctive, Equitable, Competitive (Louisville)

Bruce Katz and Mark Muro — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So Louisville has pulled off the most significant municipal consolidation in 30 years.

What's next?

For some, no doubt, the impulse is to declare victory and sit back.

And that would be understandable, given that Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson and his team have in just two years now merged the city of Louisville and Jefferson County, combined their two police departments while improving service, and in the process touched off a national wave of governance reform zeal.

Satisfaction is absolutely in order.

And yet what has most impressed us, as authors of the 2003 Brookings Institution report, "Beyond Merger: A Competitive Vision for the Regional City of Louisville," has been the focus of many Louisvillians on the next step—a greater prize located far "beyond merger."

Highlighted in a new report by the Greater Louisville Project (GLP), this long-range vision of "raising the city's aspirations" is extraordinary among cities and absolutely essential, we believe.

In our report, we too looked "beyond merger." We too looked forward to a moment when the region—the merger completed—would make its bid to emerge as one of "the most distinctive, equitable and competitive of American cities."

Well, now that time has come. Two years after creation of the new metro government, it's time to remember that Louisville's merger has never been solely about combining the public works departments or even changing the emergency radio systems.

Instead, uniting the city of Louisville and Jefferson County has always been much more about Louisvillians' deep desire to marshal their best energies to reinvent their region as a truly great city.

And so, while Louisville Metro represents the culmination of a nearly 50-year saga, the real work, in our opinion, is only now beginning.

What does this mean? It means that, far from resting on their laurels, Louisvillians must now recommit themselves to a longer-term agenda of community betterment. It also means that the region must hold itself to a continuous evaluation of its progress through a series of benchmarkings, such as those now inaugurated by the GLP report.

But in any event, we believe Louisvillians must throw their region's current momentum into making progress on at least three major fronts, each of which we stressed in our original report.

Educate, educate, educate

First, we've become even more convinced in the past two-plus years that the region must renew its efforts to grow a high-road economy, and that the way to do that is by assembling an educated workforce—not by wooing firms with tax breaks or building new stadiums.

The challenge here is stark. Skilled regions rise in the knowledge economy; less-skilled regions decline. And so Louisville must raise the educational attainment and skills of its workforce.

To be sure, progress has been made, since we first raised this challenge, as the region quickly embraced the call to lift educational achievement by devising the new Every1Reads collaboration of the region's civic leadership and the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS).

Yet much more needs to be done. As JCPS data shows, K-12 students' test scores are improving, but math scores are rising more slowly, and wide gaps still exist between high- and low-achieving schools and outcomes for various racial groups. Moreover, increases in the percentages of local students who obtained a high-school diploma and went on to garner a bachelor's degree cannot mask continued malaise. Enrollment in higher education institutions continues to fluctuate, too many freshmen are assigned to remedial courses, and retention and graduation rates at the University of Louisville remain troublesome. Partly as a result, Louisville's workers continue to lose ground in average wages.

The bottom line: Merger by itself won't do it. Louisville must get smarter if it wants to get richer.

Shape and balance growth

A second challenge is physical: Louisville needs to grow in more compact, focused and even creative ways.

Once again, the challenge is large. More and more evidence suggests that compact, convenient regions with flourishing vibrant downtowns and a high quality of life prevail in the competition for educated workers and quality job-creation. However, troubling signs warn that a relatively cohesive region is beginning to decentralize. To the east, especially, cookie-cutter sprawl is gobbling up land, fueling the demand for services, and further undercutting the centrality of downtown and the West End.

So what should the region do? To forestall the "hollowing out" that has unraveled so many peer regions, the new city should lock in once and for all the idea that great regions revolve around great downtowns—dense centers where large numbers of residents gather to walk, work, live, shop and amuse themselves.

In that vein, Louisville should pour on its efforts to attract to downtown 5,000 new residents in 10 years, and to create more livable, alluring and pedestrian-friendly core neighborhoods, especially in the West End.

And here's a thought: Shouldn't Louisville better showcase the amazing architectural assets downtown possesses? West Main Street, for starters, boasts the largest number of 19th Century cast-iron building fronts in the entire nation, outside New York City. And yet the street remains a roaring speedway with few places to sit or talk . So why not run a median down the middle, slow traffic down, and make those glorious façades the backdrop for a truly unique urban gathering place? Sure, traffic will need to be diverted, but the benefits outweigh the costs. Louisville must make sure there is a bustling, vibrant "there" at its center.

Unite around equity

Finally, Louisville needs to make unity real by ensuring the region grows in inclusive ways that ensure the benefits of prosperity and neighborhood revitalization reach all working families.

Strong families are a precondition for competitiveness. Stable, upwardly mobile neighborhoods bolster a community's productive capacity.

And yet, disturbing indications suggest that many families in Louisville—particularly African Americans in downtown or West End neighborhoods—continue to struggle.

In view of that, a clear imperative of the new regional city must be to continue and advance the neighborhood revitalization efforts in the inner city that were jumpstarted 10 years ago with the Park DuValle Revitalization and other efforts. In that sense, every neighborhood must become a "neighborhood of choice and connection," where families or individuals with a broad range of incomes are fully linked to the opportunities of the full metropolis.

But beyond that, why shouldn't Louisville aspire to build one of the strongest African-American middle-class communities in the country? To get there, the city should promote social mobility everywhere. To this end, Louisville should take additional steps to connect minority residents to jobs with the potential for advancement; make work pay for low-wage workers by enhancing access to federal work benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit; crack down on predatory lenders who prey on low-income minorities and the elderly; and expand financial education and counseling for all residents.

And again, goals—especially audacious goals—will be helpful. For that reason, Louisville should dedicate itself to a challenging set of benchmarks for the reduction of racial disparities (in the same way it has for downtown living). After all, providing quality neighborhoods and housing choices for every resident from the urban core to the new subdivision is a worthy goal.

In the end, the time has come for Louisville to elevate its gaze—once again. Already the region has distinguished itself by getting the nitty-gritty details of merger right.

Now it's time to win the bigger fight—the one about moving an ambitious city "beyond merger" and onto a path that ensures consolidation truly does enhance the prosperity, quality of life, and opportunity available to all Louisvillians. Do that—sustain the focus to that length—and Louisville will truly set itself apart among American cities.

Authors

Publication: The Courier-Journal

Beyond Merger: A Competitive Vision for the Regional City of Louisville

Bruce Katz — Mon, 15 Jul 2002 00:00:00 -0400

This powerpoint presentation presents the major findings of the study commissioned by the City of Louisville in respect to its consolidation with Jefferson County. To read the full report, please visit our publications page.

View the complete Powerpoint Presentation—(2500 KB)

Authors

Bruce Katz

Beyond Merger: A Competitive Vision for the Regional City of Louisville

Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy — Mon, 01 Jul 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Preface

The City of Louisville and Jefferson County will consolidate to form the 16th largest city in America in less than six months. Starting now, a new leadership cadre will emerge from the ranks of the forthcoming Regional City of Louisville, and this cadre will guide a large new city into its inaugural era.

These leaders will require information, and they will need vision. Many of them will hail from the private and non-profit sectors and the neighborhoods—and may possess little formal government experience. All of them, including the professionals, will face a complicated array of challenges, some old and some very new, as they steer their freshly invented municipality forward. Louisville’s new leaders, in short, will need to think anew based on the best information available.

For this reason,The Community Foundation of Louisville organized a consortium of philanthropic foundations to create The Greater Louisville Project and underwrite an ambitious “research and development” project for the new consolidated government. Intended to make the most of the first major municipal consolidation in a generation,The Greater Louisville Project seeks to leverage this historic juncture by fostering a major new definition of the community’s needs and vision. Ultimately, the project is committed to ensuring that Louisville’s entry into the top tier of American cities truly does improve the quality of life and opportunities available to all residents of the new Regional City of Louisville.

"Beyond Merger" is the first component of the effort. Prepared by the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Beyond Merger uses text, charts and graphics to give the new Regional City of Louisville its first complete look at itself as it begins its journey into the 21st century.

The report begins with a comprehensive review of ongoing population, land-use, housing, workforce, social, and economic trends in the region. Frequently, the discussion gauges the health of the new city in the context of its larger metropolitan area. At other times the analysis adopts local researchers’ tradition of comparing the region’s progress to that of a number of similar competitor regions. Throughout these analyses, the assessment draws on a variety of federal data sources, including the invaluable 2000 Census. In addition, the discussion draws heavily on the guidance of dozens of business and community leaders who were interviewed for this project, as well as on the analyses of such outstanding local researchers as Paul Coomes, Ron Crouch, Michael Price, and the LOJIC staff at the Metropolitan Sewer District.

Ultimately, the report builds on this substantial synthesis of research to present a comprehensive policy vision for Louisville’s emergence among the nation’s most truly “competitive” cities. This vision presumes that the achievement of key economic growth and quality-of-life gains is inextricably related to the support of families and neighborhoods. A second phase of the project, organized by the National Academy of Public Administration, will present a more detailed survey of the best policy practices that the new Regional City can adopt to put this vision in place.

The pages that follow, in short, suggest an agenda of transformation to a changing community—one with a resilient economy and high quality of life that are increasingly imperiled by economic change, persistent racial divides, decentralization, and the relatively low education levels of its people. This agenda charts how a renewed Louisville can build on its assets, strengthen families, fix the basics, influence metropolitan growth, and sustain its neighborhoods in order to make itself a top-rank “competitive city.” In doing so, it takes a deliberately broad view of “competitiveness”—one that does not separate strategies to promote economic growth from those that enhance the overall health of the community in all its aspects. In the end, "Beyond Merger" offers nothing less than an integrated framework for thinking through what kind of city Louisvillians really want to live in as their hometown graduates from the 64th to the 16th largest municipality in America.

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Authors

Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy