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• PROTECT OPEN SPACE, REBUILD URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS — Michigan State University this year launched the largest regional growth management project in state history. The $186,000-a-year project, supported by the Frey, Dyer-Ives, and Steelcase foundations, calls for assisting rural townships in farmland and open space preservation and helping urban residents improve their neighborhoods through economic redevelopment.
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• HIGHWAY TUNNEL VISION — While $420 million is being invested in the South Beltline, a 20-mile long bypass around Grand Rapids linking two interstate highways, the region's mass transit agency, GRATA, is operating with limited service and a deficit. Though the new highway is supported by most businesses and local governments, transit advocates say it will accelerate sprawl and make traffic congestion worse in the suburbs. Sticking to the 1994 regional "Blueprint" plan and investing in compact business centers and neighborhoods served by mass transit, they say, is a more practical, useful, and less expensive way to curb sprawl and rejuvenate the city.
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•UNFOUNDED SKEPTICISM — In 1992 the city of Wyoming, a founding member of the Metro Council, decided to leave the organization. City officials said publicly that they believed collective decision-making would harm the ability of citizens to become involved. Privately, they criticized the Council as a socialist-inspired experiment in big government. Such misguided thinking remains influential in some quarters of the Grand Rapids business and local government communities, and has limited the pace of change advocated by the 29 members of the Metro Council.
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• LITTLE PUBLIC AWARENESS — Too many Grand Rapids residents never have heard of Metro Council, nor are they aware of the magnitude of the changes proposed and the significance of the progress that has been made. One reason is that the Council has been uncomfortable actively promoting its achievements or engaging in a concerted program to inform citizens about sprawl, land use, economic development, and the new governing strategies it is developing.
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•RACE AND POVERTY — More than 40% of the residents of central city Grand Rapids live below the federal poverty line. Most of them are African Americans who are suffering the effects of "white flight" and the loss of economic investment to the suburbs. Like other hollowed-out cities across America, Grand Rapids must surmount racial intolerance and the false belief among former urbanites that they can escape city problems in greener pastures somewhere "out there." The magnet will be a city renewed by public investment and community spirit that concentrates neighborhoods, schools, housing, jobs, transit services, and cultural opportunities into a lively and attractive mix. ~ K . S .
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