Can cities like Pittsburgh continue their progressive ways in Republican-controlled waters?

The day after the election that swept Republican Donald Trump into the White House, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto threw his speech into the trash. Peduto was set to address more than 3,000 city-government workers and elected officials during the National League of Cities conference taking place in Downtown Pittsburgh. With the surprising election result, he knew he needed a whole new angle. 

So, on Nov. 17, at the NLC conference, Peduto spoke about transition. “Pittsburgh has gone through a major transition, just like most cities are going through transitions,” said Peduto, referencing the nearly 20 percent unemployment rate that plagued the city after the steel industry collapsed in the 1980s. “We lost more people than were displaced by Hurricane Katrina and they never came back, but people started planting seeds. Thirty years later, we are back.”

Since the collapse, Pittsburgh’s economy has diversified, and the city has become a national leader in innovative fields like health care and robotics. Pittsburgh has started championing new-wave progressive ideas like protected bike lanes, welcoming programs for immigrants and green-infrastructure projects. 

And Pittsburgh is not alone. Many cities across the country have done what Pittsburgh is doing and more. Some have raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour; others have turned parking spots into micro public parks. And it seems the bigger the city, the more progressive it is. Of the nation’s 75 largest cities, about 80 percent of them have Democratic mayors, many of whom are promoting these ideas.

But in two months, the White House will be held by a man who won the presidency thanks to a surge of Republican rural and suburban voters, many of whom argued their rights have been imposed on by the progressive ideals now flourishing in cities. The GOP will control the White House, the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. Additionally, Republicans control two-thirds of the country’s state legislatures, and many have approved legislation attacking cities that pass progressive legislation.

Can cities survive the potential new Republican agenda?

Some municipal leaders believe they can. Pittsburgh City Paper spoke with a handful of mayors and city councilors from across the country at the NLC conference in Pittsburgh last week to assess their feelings about the incoming GOP-dominated government. Municipal leaders think cities should unite with each other and focus on working for their residents. Meanwhile, experts believe that cities, suburban and rural areas can find common ground. But each of these strategies is contingent on the whims of the federal and state governments, which can be slow to act.

The National League of Cities is a consortium of 19,000 cities, towns and villages across the U.S. that lobbies the federal government on their behalf. While the group represents many big cities, incoming NLC President Matt Zone, who spoke to CP at the NLC conference, said the majority of its organization’s members hail from smaller towns.

Some of these members expressed concern about the incoming Trump administration in interviews with CP, including Kathy Ehley, mayor of Wauwatosa, Wis. (a Milwaukee suburb). “We are wondering [about the future],” she said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s unsettling.”

Chris Roberts, mayor of Shoreline, Wash. (a suburb north of Seattle), believes the federal government could cut off funding for a light-rail extension to his town. “I’m worried, worried that the administration will not invest in public transit,” said Roberts. 

Trump spoke during the campaign about supporting public transportation, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has said infrastructure spending is low on the list of Senate priorities.  

Zack Reed, a city councilor from Cleveland, is also anxious that his large city district will not see the help it needs. (Reed’s district, which CP visited during the RNC, is filled with blight and is one of the poorer districts in Cleveland). “Trump said he would go into the inner city and give us change,” said Reed. “Is he going to step up?” 

But of all the city leaders CP spoke with, none were as worried about President-elect Trump as they were about a GOP-controlled Congress. And some cities are even more worried about attacks from their own state legislatures.

Over the last several years, for instance, the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania assembly has sponsored bills to limit governing in cities and towns. In 2014, a law allowing the National Rifle Association to sue local municipalities over gun-control efforts passed It was struck down in court, but thanks to a technicality, the law is now back in the assembly. For several years, state Republican legislators have worked to prevent cities from passing legislation aimed at helping undocumented immigrants. And state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Cranberry) once said tax dollars shouldn’t go to cities that “promote immoral behaviors” in response to a Philadelphia marketing appeal to gay tourists. 

All this worries Peduto. He spoke to CP on Nov. 9, and said it’s going to be harder for cities to pass progressively minded laws for the next two years. “It’s going to be much more difficult, just to be blunt about it,” he said. “There have been a lot of bills in the state trying to limit the role of municipalities, but Gov. Wolf has been protective. Now with a veto-proof [state] senate, that is also under question.”

And Pennsylvania is not alone in this situation. North Carolina famously passed a law this year prohibiting local municipalities from expanding protections to the LGBT community. Zone, of the NLC, said it’s discouraging when state governments overrule cities when local governments are merely trying to accommodate their residents. 

“It’s frustrating for those of us serving in local government when we are pre-empted by state government or the federal government,” said Zone, who is also a Cleveland city councilor. “If a local government enacts a law that doesn’t conflict with state or federal law, they should be allowed and empowered to do that.”

And so to counterbalance these restrictive actions from states and the U.S. Congress, Peduto suggests that cities join forces.

“You can look at the map of Election Day now, and you see, in the sea of red, blue dots,” said Peduto. “And that is the political landscape, not just in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania, but all of America. … It will be a call to action to cities throughout this country to begin to put together a common agenda. Our problems are all the same, our solutions are common-sense.” 

At the NLC conference, Peduto urged the municipal leaders to join in the 100 Days of US campaign, where Pittsburgh’s Garfield-based nonprofit the Sprout Fund is providing $100,000 to fund selected ideas that improve civic life. Peduto also says mayors need to meet with other mayors to create a domestic-policy agenda to present to President-elect Trump the day after he’s inaugurated on Jan. 19, to ensure cities are an integral part of the federal government’s plans.

Zone agrees. He said the NLC has already reached out to Trump’s administration and will meet with it once Trump assumes power. And Zone thinks cities are ready to lead.

“Cities have been leading this country since its inception. Cities are where all the innovation is happening,” said Zone. “We always build consensus on issues that we have been advocating for. I would hope that Congress could act a little bit more like our organization.”

Zone said the NLC will continue to focus on public safety, infrastructure and the economy. And he added that no matter who is in charge of the White House, he will focus on creating policies that promote the growth of cities.

“Cities are evolving and changing. Young millennials are calling for creative communities that they can live in. They want to live in neighborhoods that they can live, work and play in,” Zone said. “Coming up with strategies to put that type of infrastructure in place is critical for the future success of cities. … I am not going to sit around and wait for the federal government to show me how [to plan for cities].”

The rural/urban divide is deeply entrenched in the U.S. But the fates of cities, suburbs and rural area are inextricably linked, and repairing the divide between them is integral to the future success of the country. 

Chris Sandvig, of the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group, who helps to create solutions for city problems, thinks fixing the relationship between cities and their suburbs is a good place to start minimizing the divide. He says suburbs were originally created because of the growth of cities; thus they are invested in the success of cities, too.

But Sandvig says political leanings between cities and their suburbs differ greatly. Surrounding suburbs tend to be more conservative than their core cities. But there are still issues where the two can find common ground.  

“The challenge of a city is how we become a region of inclusion, not just a city of inclusion,” says Sandvig. “We still have a strong city that populations migrate to for work. You can’t take the city of Pittsburgh out of the region, so we have to figure what that common ground is.” 

Kelly Conklin, a member of small-business advocacy group Main Street Alliance and a New Jersey small-business owner, says common ground already exists between cities, suburbs and rural areas. One example, he points out, is that big cities, like Newark, N.J., and rural towns, like Johnstown, Pa., both have declining business districts. 

Economic opportunity is something President-elect Trump talked about often during his campaign.  He pledged to create jobs by bringing back steel to Western Pennsylvania. Trump also promised to bring coal jobs back to West Virginia and manufacturing back to Michigan.

“I think Trump’s promise to bring back millions of high-paying jobs in an incredibly scary time was the straw that some people were willing to grasp,” says Conklin. 

But despite the possibility that small towns and big cities could unite under a common cause of job growth, Conklin believes Trump was giving people false promises. And, he worries, the president-elect doesn’t have the plans to back them up.

“Donald Trump spent this whole election looking backward, at another time and another place that we cannot retrieve,” says Conklin. “We have to create this bridge between the cities and rural areas … it requires leaders with vision that are looking forward, not backward.”

But ultimately, the impact Trump’s administration has on cities — even if they can’t unify with surrounding suburbs and rural areas — might be negligible, economically speaking.  

Gabe Klein, former head of Chicago’s transportation department and author of urban-planning book Start-Up City, says cities have mostly had to fend for themselves for the past eight years, due to gridlock in Congress.

“The blessing and the curse of the last eight years is that mayors and their teams have had to learn to do for themselves, often with little help at the federal and state levels,” wrote Klein in an email to CP. “They justify action because citizens and business are demanding action. … They can’t wait for the glacial pace at the federal level.”

Klein hopes Republicans in state and federal government let cities continue to progress, considering they generate most of the country’s revenue, which helps to subsidize rural and suburban areas. (According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the U.S.’s 40 largest cities generate half of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product.)

“My hope, in this new world we are moving towards, is that conservatives hold to their values and allow more local control of policy, budgets and so forth,” wrote Klein. “The cities in red and blue states are the economic drivers of our states and our country. … Cities are the new power base.”

This article appears in Nov 23-29, 2016.