5 Ways Federal Infrastructure Spending Makes Cities Poorer
At the end of each year, when our audience is more distracted with the season (as am I) and we find ourselves in a more reflective state of mind, we take a couple of weeks to examine some of our best work from the year. Over the next two weeks, we're going to give you new content each day, but we're also going to share some of the 2017 posts we're most proud of. And since nearly half of you are new readers this year, this will be the first time you're seeing some of these pieces. (You can view all our best of content from the past several years here.)
We ended 2016 like many of you: with a degree of apprehension and uncertainty over what was going to happen in the coming months.. We spent the election season digging deep into the nation's infrastructure crisis and our flawed cultural consensus for trying to spend our way out of it. It seemed nearly certain that, if there was nothing else our federal government was going to agree on, at the very least, they were going to agree to spend an enormous sum of money on infrastructure.
It has been a bizarre year for national politics and I know I certainly would not have predicted total inaction on such a key issue. That being said, I'm not disappointed; we seemed poised to spend money on some pretty awful stuff without making any changes to the systems that are weakening our cities. On the plus side, we see the Strong Towns message popping up in more and more policy discussions around the country. Although I'm not fond of delay as a policy strategy, it seems like our ally in this instance. This article from earlier in the year is a good reminder of why. - Charles Marohn
The United States Congress seems poised to spend a trillion dollars or more on infrastructure in a bipartisan consensus to stimulate the economy. Without major changes in our approach, this spending is going to make our cities poorer, weaken our country and — once the temporary stimulus has passed — leave America in worse financial shape.
Here are five ways a federal infrastructure program will make our cities, towns and neighborhoods poorer.
1. The national economy might grow today, but cities take on the long-term liabilities.
This data from Lafayette, LA could apply to most American cities. Since World War II, cities have added far more liabilities than people ‚— and that means far more expense that needs to be covered by a smaller tax base. (Source: Strong Towns and Urban3)
Policymakers generally believe that infrastructure spending is a common sense way to create economic growth. The federal government invests in infrastructure and this creates jobs during the construction phase that then helps the private sector be more competitive. All of this grows the economy and improves the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It’s simple. What’s not to love?
Since World War II, what we’ve seen time and again is that the federal government will pay to build things and then leave state and local governments to maintain them. The transactions create GDP growth, but they stick cities with long term promises that they cannot keep. Those promises don't come due for decades, which makes the ribbon cuttings all the more seductive to local officials.
John Maynard Keynes suggested that, in a depressed economy, the government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them back up. If the federal government just did that, we'd finish where we started. When a federal program instead pays to build a new bridge, we now have another bridge to maintain.
Our cities are drowning in unproductive liabilities. The last thing they need is more.
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2. Federal infrastructure spending goes primarily to the least financially productive parts of the American development pattern.
(Source: Strong Towns and Urban3)
Productivity is a measure of outputs to inputs. For infrastructure, how much do we get back for each dollar spent?
In the early days of constructing the interstate highway system, the return on our national infrastructure investments was very high. We were connecting remote places to each other and transforming the entire economy in the process. Those returns have steadily diminished, for obvious reasons: a community's fifth interchange, sixth mile of frontage road or seventh river crossing cannot possibly be as transformative as the first, despite costing magnitudes more.
Joe Minicozzi and the team at Urban3 have done the most thorough job today of documenting the productive parts of the American development pattern. In hundreds of cities across the country that Urban3 has studied, the trend is clear: the newer the development the higher the cost and the lower the financial productivity.
Control of both houses of Congress is now aligned with suburban and exurban development interests, areas with the highest cost and lowest returning infrastructure investments. Small towns and urban areas — particularly when they are making better use of existing infrastructure — present far higher returning alternatives.
Related Reading:
- The Cost of Auto Orientation
- Walmart or Smallmart?
- The Nature of Productivity
- A Conversation with Joe Minicozzi (podcast)
3. Federal infrastructure spending prioritizes new construction. What cities need most is maintenance.
The Minnesota State Transportation Budget. (Source: Star Tribune)
Gresham's law states that bad money drives out good. This is clear in local infrastructure spending decisions.
Too often, cities that have more infrastructure than they have tax base to sustain it are induced into moving money from maintenance and into new construction as a local match for federal infrastructure programs. The good money (maintenance) is chased out by the bad money (new construction) accelerating declines in existing systems while perversely adding even more infrastructure to maintain.
It would be really easy to say that politicians love ribbon cuttings and, since there are no good photo opportunities for filling potholes and replacing leaky pipes, politicians prefer new construction to maintenance.
There is some truth to this, but what we are truly seeing is the inertia of an economy that doesn't quite have the incentives to pivot from the old, failing model. Our economy is based on growth. All of our pension promises, public debt payments and entitlement spending rely on aggressive levels of future growth. We used to be able to create this growth through infrastructure investments: build an interchange and a frontage road and get the big box stores, strip malls and housing subdivisions that result. Our entire economy — from local zoning codes to bank financing programs to insurance underwriting to auto sales and on and on — is oriented around repeating this simple formula, despite the diminishing returns.
What we have not figured out — and what we won't figure out with another flood of federal infrastructure spending — is how to translate maintenance into growth. How do we go out and fill potholes or fix leaking pipes and have that result in additional wealth in our neighborhoods? This is a daunting challenge that requires us to rethink — from bottom to top — how we develop our places. We need to modernize our zoning codes, building standards, housing incentives, insurance programs, and other financial mechanisms. There are a lot of people trying to do this, but they get cast aside every time the federal gravy train rolls into town.
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4. Federal infrastructure spending induces local governments to take on unproductive debt.
Local government debt. (Source: usgovernmentdebt.us)
The Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program is one of the most popular federal infrastructure spending programs ever. These discretionary grants are awarded based on competitive criteria, one of the most important aspects being the following:
Jurisdictional and Stakeholder Collaboration. DOT will consider the extent to which projects involve multiple partners in project development and funding, such as State and local governments, other public entities, and/or private or nonprofit entities.
In other words: Who else is stepping up with money? Local governments — already strapped for cash and weighed down by liabilities — must frequently agree to take on additional debt as their local contribution. This happens with TIGER and nearly all other federal infrastructure programs.
Productive debt is debt that can be paid back with the proceeds collected from the project. Local governments generally rely on property and sales tax, but federal projects rarely add enough to the local tax base to extinguish the debt while sales tax revenue from a project, if there is any, ends with the project. It's really hard for local governments to turn down large dollar amounts, but it is comparatively simple to increase the local debt burden.
Related Reading:
- The TIGER Sleeps Tonight (in Staples)
- Investing Cheap Money
- Roads and Debt
- The Economic Implications of More Infrastructure Spending (podcast)
5. Federal infrastructure spending blinds local governments to better projects they could do themselves right now.
A simple low-cost local action made Burlington, Vermont a stronger town. We need more of these actions in our communities and less federal intervention.
One of the primary lessons of the Great Depression and World War II was that, if we focus our resources and energy on a task, Americans can do amazing things. We put this lesson to work after the war building the interstates and suburbia. When the two 70-year-old presidential candidates in our most recent election spoke nostalgically about what America used to be, this is the time period they were speaking of.
America is a very different and more complex country today, but the inertia of those post-war systems is overwhelming. We're still trying to fund highways, bridges and interchanges in a country that really needs better sidewalks, crosswalks and street trees. When we look for the highest returning investments, they are almost all small. We desperately need to make better use of the infrastructure we've already built. That is fine-grained work, not well-suited for a federal program.
In the American governmental system, cities sit at the bottom of the food chain. Their bureaucracies are oriented up that chain, looking to the programs of state and federal governments for solutions. Instead, they need to be reoriented to the neighborhoods in their own communities. Local officials must humble themselves to ask one simple question day after day after day: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to make this place better? If local governments did that, the result would transform America. The allure of federal programs is the biggest obstacle to making this critical shift and having the needs of cities, towns and neighborhoods drive our national agenda.
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(Top image from Wikipedia)
Charles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.