Traditional Development is a Municipal Goldmine
My latest piece in The American Conservative. Please share with all your red-state politicos and their supporters (along with everyone else).
In the United States, cities have spent the past 60 years reconfiguring public spaces to be oriented around the automobile. When new places are built, regulations require that they be similarly designed. The largely unchallenged assumption behind this approach, especially when it comes to commercial property, is that the more cars driving by, the more successful a place will be. Is this true?
If we look at it from the perspective of a local government, that assumption becomes highly suspect. Auto-oriented development costs more to maintain and provide service to than walkable alternatives. At the extreme, Detroit’s fiscal problems are a symptom of having too much stuff–too many miles of streets, pipes, curbs, and walks–and not enough people. If the city were half its current size but had the same population and tax base, its financial problems would be much more manageable. That is intuitively obvious.
It is the other side of the equation–a city’s revenues–where things are not as clear. Cities seek the Wal-Mart out on the edge of town not because it is cheap and efficient to provide services to–it clearly is not–but because they believe it produces such great returns, such tremendous wealth for the community. Wal-Mart pays a lot of taxes. What city wouldn’t want that?
Such a simple thought process does great injustice to our cities and the taxpayers forced to support their operations. It isn’t raw size that matters but productivity: how much revenue is produced per increment of cost? In that prism, the auto-oriented approach to building fails miserably.