Category Archives: Elections

Who Gets the Favors?

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The Virginian-Pilot
Monday, July 19, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

New ways of looking how we grow and develop are rare. But I think I’ve found one. It’s the “favored quarter” theory.

Myron Orfield, a state representative from Minneapolis, talks about it in his book, Metropolitics, (Brookings 1998).

In every metropolitan area, Orfield says, there is usually one chunk of the region that is receiving the lion’s share of private investment. Here is where the expensive new homes are going, the new offices and the new shopping centers.

Orfield calls it “The Favored Quarter.”

Now here’s the kicker . Not only is this favored quarter getting most of the private investment, it’s also getting most of the public investment. Here is where is going the lion’s share of new roads, sewers, schools and libraries.

Does Hampton Roads have “a favored quarter?” I think so, although perhaps it’s more like a favored edge. On the Southside, it starts in Sandbridge around Pungo, goes up by the Municipal center, past Stumpy Lake into Chesapeake, and then on into Suffolk.

Here is where the fat McMansions are being built in spanking new subdivisions, here is where the state and city are spending millions of dollars widening two lane roads into four and six-lanes with medians and turn lanes. This is where the Chesapeake City Council is debating whether to extend sewer service — after just spending millions on the Oak Grove Connector.

It would be interesting to see just how many dollars The Edge is receiving in public dollars, compared to the rest of South Hampton Roads. How much public investment have places like Bayside and Norview seen in past decades?

Well, so what, you might ask? You naturally spend public money to try to catch up with all that private growth, right?

Actually, it’s just the opposite. Everything we spend on new roads, sewers and services promotes the very growth we are trying to “catch up” to. In actuality, we are subsidizing growth in one area, at the expense of all the rest of the region. It’s as if the favored quarter has managed to rig up the game at everyone else’s expense, Orfield says.

“These (favored) quarters are developing suburban areas that have mastered the art of skimming off the cream of metropolitan growth, while accepting as few metropolitan responsibilities as possible,” Orfield said in an article in Two Cities magazine.

In an interview from his home in Minneapolis, Orfield said that every metropolitan area has a favored quarter. The King of Prussia suburbs outside Philadelphia, for example, represents 20 percent of the households but is get 80 percent of the growth, he said.

It goes beyond just roads and sewers. Favored quarters, Orfield said, tend to keep out lower-income people with large-lot zoning and other measures. Only the richest gain entrance. With such policies, the favored quarters are able to actually decrease their social costs and while their tax bases increase.

Take a step back, and we can see that favoring one quarter over others is the wrong way to plan growth. It encourages metropolitan areas to develop “new rings” of growth, causing “old rings” to decline, Orfield says.

Others are focusing on the same dynamic. A study in Baltimore showed that the number of new schools built in the outer suburbs were equal to the number torn down in the inner city, a Sierra club official said at the Smart Growth meeting last week.

The alternative to a favored quarter is to spend your infrastructure dollars where people already live.

Private investment follows public investment. Build big roads in the middle of nowhere, and pretty soon you’ll have shopping malls and subdivisions. Build rail lines, bike paths, recreation centers and maintain what you already have, and pretty soon you’ll have renovated strip shopping centers and young couples adding additions onto old homes.

In this light, we can see why the proposed Southeastern Parkway between Chesapeake and Virginia Beach is such a bad idea. Right in the middle of the Edge, our “Favored Quarter,” we would plant a massive highway, thus greatly expanding the growth that already exists.

From this light, we can see why the light rail line between Virginia Beach and Norfolk is such a good thing. It spends our tax dollars where people already live, and so stabilizes and lifts up an area that might otherwise decay. Not to mention making the resort’s July 4 planning a lot easier.

Do we have a “favored quarter?” And how do we start passing the favors around more evenly?


Making Elections Matter

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During the six presidential races in my adult lifetime, I’ve lived in three states – Virginia, Massachusetts and New York – that collectively have 31 million people and 58 electoral votes.

But despite all this political muscle, I can’t recall ever seeing a campaign ad by Reagan, a local appearance by Carter or a policy spin by Dukakis. No, each presidential race has been like a distant battle, watched with interest but not something I was a part of.

Why is this the case, given the populous, wealthy states I have lived in? Because our nation has something called the Electoral College, an antiquated system designed in the 18th century for reasons immaterial to our goals now. During the last election, we heard the machinery of this system grind and spark for more than a month, before it crankily spat out a “winner.”

Just days ago, we saw this “winner” — George W. Bush — put his hand on a bible and take the oath of office even though he lost the national election by more than a half million votes. That’s a good reason to scrap the Electoral College and replace it with a direct election.

But it’s not the only reason. The other reason is that, even if the system produces a clear winner, it usually causes candidates of both parties to ignore most of the states in the country, and the concerns of their voters.

The Electoral College, in most states, awards the all-important electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Consequently, if a state is solidly in one column or another, neither candidate pays it any mind.

Virginia has always been one of those states – voting solidly Republican for most presidential elections since World War II. Consequently, candidates largely ignore it, because they have little chance of changing the outcome, and thus winning additional votes.

During the presidential campaign last summer and fall, I lived in Massachusetts and New York. These states were solidly for Al Gore – so both Gore and Bush ignored them too. Which meant they ignored me!

I’m tired of this. I’m tired, I realized, of presidential candidates not caring whether or not I vote for them. My situation, and I expect my sentiments, are shared by millions if not most voters in the country.

In this last campaign, Bush and Gore directed their money, time and ads at voters in a half dozen or so “swing” states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Most importantly, they altered their positions on the issues to affect the vote in these key states

Because Pennsylvania has a lot of hunters, Gore softened his position on gun control, even though most Americans favor it. Gore won Pennsylvania, so he probably made the right choice – for himself. But the country lost.

It seems unlikely that we will get rid of the Electoral College completely. Like our system of allocating senators, the Electoral College gives disproportionate power to less populated rural states. Wyoming, which has about the same population as Virginia Beach, has two senators and a congressman, and three electoral votes. These rural states are unlikely to support switching to a system that decreases their power.

But we can change the system for the better, even if we keep the Electoral College itself. We can change it in such a way that would decrease the chance of producing a president that has lost the popular vote, while prompting candidates to pay attention to more areas of the country.

This change would be for every state to copy Maine and Nebraska, which right now allocate their electoral votes by congressional district, rather than on a winner-take all basis. In Maine and Nebraska, a presidential candidate gets one vote for each congressional district he wins, and two electoral votes for winning the state as a whole.

If every state did this, it would turn presidential races into a race of congressional districts, rather than state against state. This would produce a more finely grained campaign. Bush and Gore would not have ignored California, New York and Virginia, as they did in the last campaign, because there are too many congressional districts where the race is relatively close. Under such a system, you would have seen a big state like California break up into a patch-quilt of votes for either Bush or Gore.

Indeed, given the diversity of different regions around the country, you might start seeing true national campaigns, rather than the pseudo ones we have now.

One possible objection is that such a revised system might make it even more likely to have tie votes, because you could have as many close elections as there are congressional districts and states: 485. But we can still improve the machinery of voting. And if counting the votes takes a bit longer, well, we saw no real harm come to the nation, even though the last election was not over for a month.

A merit of this type of electoral reform is that you do not have to amend the U.S. Constitution Each state has the power to alter its own system. The federal government could provide some sort of incentive, as it does with so many programs from highways to health care.

Virginia should act now. I bet residents would enjoy being a part of presidential campaigns, rather than distant spectators