A Level Playing Field

What if federal, state and county governments were to end the cycle of sprawl by coming up with a system that is more fair... one that charges appropriate impact fees to developers who choose to tear down trees and build new housing developments that require more roads and infrastructure.  Perhaps some of those fees could go to rewarding developers who choose to undertake the often more expensive and challenging task of rehabbing current building stock in older and more established urban (and closer-in suburb) neighborhoods and districts that already have existing infrastructure in place.  This might provide a more level playing field between struggling city neighborhoods and the endless sprawl that continues to suck life out of our urban core.

The following is an article from the Boston Globe that we found on Richard Florida's blog (who found it on The Economist's View blog).

What do you think?

A level playing field for cities
By Edward L. Glaeser
The Boston Globe
February 29, 2008

FROM ATHENIAN philosophers to Florentine painters to Chicago architects, cities have long been wellsprings of collaborative invention. In the past, urban creativity was an interesting sideshow, not the main economic event, but today, the rebirth of Boston and New York and London has been built on the increasingly important urban edge in connecting innovative people. The same economic forces that did so much to harm industrial cities in the 1970s - globalization and technological progress - also increased the returns to being smart and you become smart by being around other smart people. We are in a great urban age, because urban connections forge human capital and create innovation.

Does the special role that cities play in the economy and society mean that cities need special treatment from state and national governments? No. Cities are strong. Give them a level playing field and they can compete robustly. However, cities shouldn't have to face a policy deck stacked against urban living. Urban firms and residents shouldn't have to pay a disproportionate share of the taxes needed to care for disadvantaged Americans. Suburbanites shouldn't get a free pass on the environmental damage created by a car-based lifestyle.

How are city residents unfairly taxed? For centuries, cities have disproportionately attracted the poor. In the 2000 Census, 19.9 percent of city residents were poor; only 7.5 percent of suburban residents lived in poverty.

Urban poverty does not reflect urban failure, but rather the enduring appeal of cities to the less fortunate. Poor people come to cities because urban areas offer economic opportunity, better social services, and the chance to get by without an automobile. Yet the sheer numbers of urban poor make it more costly to provide basic city services, like education and safety, and those costs are borne by the city's more prosperous residents. Taking care of America's poor should be the responsibility of all Americans. When we ask urban residents to pick up the tab for educating the urban poor, then we are imposing an unfair tax on those residents. That tax artificially restricts the growth of our dynamic cities.

Cities also face an uneven playing field because suburban residents do not pay for the full environmental costs of low-density living. Henry David Thoreau was right about caring for our environment, but wrong about how to achieve that end. People who live surrounded by green space often do much more harm to that green space than people who live in dense cities. In 1844, Thoreau's outdoor lifestyle was itself responsible for destroying 300 acres of Concord woods, which caught fire as a result of the great naturalist's attempt to cook chowder outdoors.

Next week, a conference jointly sponsored by the Harvard Center for the Environment, Rappaport Institute, and Mayor Thomas Menino's office will explore the phenomenon of green cities. As we face the prospect of climate change encouraged by vast quantities of man-made greenhouse gases, we should rethink those decisions that lead to more energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Is it wise for American development to be so concentrated in low-density, car-oriented, energy-intensive suburbs?

According to the National Household Travel Survey, suburban households in Greater Boston buy 85 percent more gas at the pump than households living within 5 miles of downtown. That amounts to about 6 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year. Suburban households in Greater Boston also consume about 20 percent more electricity than city dwellers. This is responsible for an extra 2 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per household per year.

While we should be encouraging development in dense, urban areas that use less energy, many of our policies work exactly in the wrong direction. Our land use restrictions push development away from dense areas, with plenty of NIMBY-ist neighbors, toward empty spaces with fewer noisy abutters. Our transportation policies fail to charge people for the full social costs of driving long distances on crowded highways. Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty. Just think of how the 1974 Supreme Court decision that limited busing to within city boundaries encouraged mass suburbanization to get beyond those city borders.

No region should receive special favors from the federal government; no city should get special treatment from Beacon Hill. But our cities deserve a level playing field. A level playing field requires that urbanites should not bear an undue burden of caring for the poor and that suburbanites should pay for the environmental costs of energy-intensive lifestyles.

Comments

[Theresa Gasper]

What a great article and it makes so much sense on so many levels (no pun intended).

To add my perspective though, there is another issue - developers go where it's easiest to do business. The City of Dayton is not known for being easy to work with. While there are many good people working in various departments, there are just as many who are myopic and look for ways to block permits rather than approve them. I could give lots of specific examples, but the bottom line is basic customer service - if you don't make it easy for people to do business with you, they'll take their dollars elsewhere.

I have many contractors & their subs who make it a policy that if they do work that requires permits, the owner must pull them because they're tired of wasting their time. Obviously you need rules for consistency and fairness, but there's a difference between being part of the problem or being part of the solution. The City should strongly consider cleaning house because the culture isn't going to change otherwise.

However, to the City's defense, they're so desperate for any fee revenue they can generate, that it sometimes leads to unintended consequences. If there was a more level playing field, as the article suggests, things could improve. The City is struggling so their focus is going to be more about survival than "self-actualization".

Fortunately New Urbanism is a growing trend. People are coming around to the idea that there has to be a better way than spending hours commuting back & forth to work. They're coming around to the idea of being more green and earth friendly.

I asked a former educator once what it would take to turn around Dayton Public Schools and he said "middle class students". The middle class has aspirations. There is an excellent book by Dr Ruby Payne called Bridges Out of Poverty that I think everyone should read. Each class (upper, middle & lower) has its own rules. Middle class rules tend to dominate education and most areas of society. The problem is that, especially in inner city schools, more & more students live in poverty. And the rules that help then survive in poverty are counterproductive to thriving in school.

No matter what class you are in, you won't survive or thrive in a different one if you don't know the rules, or have someone to teach them to you. You can't make the leap from one class to the next without a mentor or a special skill that will help you rise and move forward. So if the majority of the students in a public school are in the lower class, how do they ever learn the rules of middle class? That's why it's critical to find ways to get all three classes to intermingle and teach each other. And you can't do that if those that can flee inner cities do and leave behind those that can't - because they have no around to show them a different way.

[Lisa Persons]

http://biz.yahoo.com/zacks/080227/11692.html?.v=1

I googled "Mcmansion Sales", and found the housing market report shown above. The sale of the "Mcmansion" has dropped 62.5%.

You can find article after article from cities across the country, that report the vast majority of these sprawl generating homes are sitting empty.

The trend is definitely new urbanism, but how much rural area are we going to lose until the builders realize their market is saturated? The industry needs a huge paradigm shift, if it is going to bounce back. They need to start looking back in to the city, instead of out.

[Alan Pippenger]

See this as well, from the NYT, regarding the uneven geographical distribution of declining home values: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/realestate/keymagazine/406Lede-t.html?_r=1&st=cse&sq=Spear+Street&scp=3&oref=slogin

These articles and posts raise a lot of issues.

Builders will build "McMansions" as long as the public demands them. Maybe higher energy costs and interest in greener homes will lead to more responsible construction. Regardless, as long as the playing field is not level, home buyers will find that most new homes - big and small - will be built in the suburbs and exurbs.

Level the playing field and I believe that home builders will be just as willing to put houses on urban infill lots. Not because they believe in new urbanism, but because people will want to live in cities again.

We lose a lot when we lose our cities, and not just the obvious problems of loss of farmland and increased dependence on fossil fuels. As the NYT piece points out, we are losing our competitive advantage:

"'The essence of cities is physical proximity,' explains Edward Glaeser, a Harvard professor who specializes in the economics of geography. 'They’ve always had the advantage of making the movement of people easier, the movement of goods easier and the movement of ideas easier.' What has changed over the last few decades, Glaeser says, is that good ideas — be they in finance, entertainment, technology — have become much more valuable. The best ones can be turned into products that are soon being sold all over the world, thanks to globalization, FedEx, the Internet and a host of other forces. But it’s still much easier to come up with a good idea when you are surrounded by a lot of other people working on the same problems as you are."

This is a hidden cost of sprawl in Ohio that a level playing field would do much to control in the short run and perhaps, in time, reverse.