Members include environmental activists, advocates of equity and civil rights, grassroots community organizations, progressive churches, businesses pursuing enlightened self-interest and visionary public officials. Notable models of metropolitan coalitions have appeared in two regions already known for visionary innovations in metro-scale planning and government, the Twin Cities of Minnesota and Portland, Oregon. An organization connected to efforts in both areas, the National Growth Management Leadership Project, is working to spread the idea nationwide. Henry Richmond, who founded the Leadership Project in 1990, sees metropolitan sustainability coalitions as potential building blocks for a politics that changes national priorities. It really can be the foundation for a new kind of politics in this country.
Metropolitan coalitions begin from two basic understandings.
The deck is stacked against the older areas, with business and people fleeing their costs for fresh, unpolluted land made accessible by publicly financed highways. New areas hold an unfair price advantage that older areas have a hard time outcompeting. In cities, the number of people living in neighborhoods with high poverty rates climbed from 8 to 18 percent. Poor neighborhoods spread over 54 percent more urban landscape. Such concentrations of poverty could only spell increased crime and lower-performing schools, which further increased the flight of employers and middle class families.