Tags: planning | world class | leadership
Tags: planning | world class | leadership
February 5, 2009
Up Front
Let’s start with the bad news: we can’t have their airport.
The single best business decision Atlanta ever made was to lay a runway on an abandoned racetrack in the hopes of grabbing a few government mail contracts. Who knew in 1926 that the jet age was just around the corner? Today, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the engine room of the sprawling powerhouse that metro Atlanta has become. Philadelphia International would have to triple its customers and quadruple its flights to match it. That would be great, but we just don’t have the space, either on the ground or in the air. And we’re unlikely to get Atlanta’s population growth, either. Metro Atlanta has added 100,000 people a year for twenty years. A city can do that when it’s surrounded by acres and acres of developable greenfield. We have room to grow, but not at that rate.
But there’s another way to think about these things: it’s not that Philadelphia will never have them; it’s that we already got them. Our regional population doubled once - between 1850 and 1860. We were a global transportation hub once – when railroads were king. We captured the world’s attention as a can-do economic power once – with our 1876 Centennial.
So we’ve been through Atlanta’s growth, and we’ve been through its growing pains too. Obsolete, overused infrastructure creating new costs? Check. Congested roads and insufficient public transit choking growth? Check. Booming new immigrant populations forcing new political calculations? Check. Fragmented regional governance, shortage of regional planning, and competition between city, suburbs, and state? Check, check, and check.
In fact, over the three days of the Greater Philadelphia Leadership Exchange visit to Atlanta, it was easy for a listener to whipsaw between two very different reactions: envy and relief. Envy that we cannot match Atlanta’s astonishing growth or replicate the conditions that created it. Relief that when dealing with the problems growth creates, we have the resources and experience they’re still developing.
This is not to say that Greater Philadelphia has nothing to learn from metro Atlanta. The capital of the New South pairs an infectious optimism with an admirable culture of civic inclusion. Its faith in low taxes and limited government is matched by a commitment to personal service and charitable giving (the head of the local United Way told us that Atlantans give twice as much per capita as do Bostonians). Civic responsibility is deeply ingrained in their private sector leadership and is expressed in any number of successful projects and partnerships. And, the Atlanta Housing Authority pioneered the master-planned, mixed-finance, mixed-income residential development model now used by the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But more than anything, a visit to Atlanta is a reminder of what it’s like to aspire. Its leaders go for world class. They are into permanent problem-solving. They understand their strengths and build on them.
In this region, we would do well to remember ours. Our renowned cluster of universities, research centers, and healthcare institutions. Our irreplaceable web of roads and rails. Our variety of communities, from small towns to suburbs to downtowns. Our access to 24-hour cities to beaches to mountains. Our abundance of water. Our food. Our history. Our people. These are what make us world class.
We hope this issue of Insight lives up to its name. Metro Atlanta has much to teach us, not only about what we could be, but about what we are. We’ll never have their airport, we’ve already had their growth, and we have more than enough to build a world class future of our own.
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