We Could Solve a Lot of Our Problems if We Just Built the Way We Used To
This article was originally published by the Local Conversation group Strong Towns Norman. It is shared here with permission.
Many of our problems in Norman, Oklahoma, come down to a shortage in the budget. How many times has a good solution to something been shot down with “we don’t have the budget for it”?
We should question why that is. Norman has seen nothing but growth: it is a booming town where land is highly sought after by developers in a competitive market. We are not seeing economic decline in any sense like some smaller towns in Oklahoma. If that is the case, why do we struggle to pay for basic city amenities?
Our roads are not exactly in pristine condition. There are impoverished neighborhoods around Norman that could use a little TLC. We just raised property taxes because we fell behind on maintaining our bridges. Water rates have also increased this year. Housing prices are rising and homelessness is increasing. There are other needs in Norman everywhere that we simply don’t have the funds for. We could have better parks, more parks, safer streets for kids to walk to school, complete sidewalk networks, better funding for multi-modal transportation, tree-lined streets, more wellness centers, community centers, and other places that create community and cultivate relationships among neighbors.
But we don’t have the budget for that. How can we see so much growth, and still struggle to provide basic maintenance and amenities? It all comes down to how we grow.
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Most people would be surprised if someone said that a restaurant like Fuzzy’s Taco Shop on Campus Corner is more productive, and more of an asset to our city’s budget, than Target on 24th Avenue in University North Park. Every city in Oklahoma relies on sales tax, so if any big box store like Target—or perhaps Costco—were flirting with city leadership about the idea of settling down here, we would probably do anything we could to make it happen.
I’ve seen folks disregard the Strong Towns “value per acre” metric on the basis that we are a sales tax state, and value per acre is based on property tax. Well, one can still measure it in sales tax, we just have to find a way. For a larger chain business like Fuzzy’s and Target, you can usually find the average revenue each store gets.
I quote that line from The Dark Knight often for seemingly uninteresting things just to humor myself. But it is beautiful, isn’t it. A single Target brings in about 36 times more revenue than a Fuzzy’s Taco Shop, but the humble Fuzzy’s Taco Shop is around four times more productive to Norman than Target, because Target consumes so much of the city’s land when compared to Fuzzy’s.
This makes sense. Hypothetically, if a large business comes to town and will bring in millions in tax revenue, but they require half of Norman’s land, would we really want that for our town? How would we measure whether or not it will be a productive use of all that valuable land, and actually contribute positively to our budget? This is why we should give more weight to the efficiency of developments patterns more than the profit it brings in.
I hear people talk about bringing in stores like Target or a Costco when we think of good economic development. Why is that? Because it is big. It is exciting. It has things people might like, different shopping experiences to offer. But, none of that matters if it is actually the very thing that is bankrupting our town. We spend our time arguing about which business we need, or whose fault it is that we didn’t get Costco when they went to Moore. Meanwhile, Fuzzy’s is over here putting in the work and carrying the team.
Consider this: If the land that was used up by Target was replaced with a productive development pattern—i.e., it had the efficiency of Fuzzy’s Taco Shop—it would look something like this:
Norman lost out on an annual $6 million. And we could have created 38 times more jobs on the same amount of land as Target currently does. Think about the implications of this knowing that the city has essentially developed in a way that is identical to Target in 90% of Norman’s urbanized area.
If we’re focused on economic development, this is all we should care about: How do we get more productive developments like this? Fuzzy’s isn’t productive because they make great tacos (though it helps, and I do really like Fuzzy’s), they are productive because they are small, and operating on the traditional development pattern of Campus Corner. Every business on Campus Corner is small, dense, and efficient. They require very small amounts of land for their operation, and thus the city gets more out of the deal. With the traditional development pattern, we get a city that is granular where there are more businesses to choose from. We are not putting all of our eggs in one basket, rather, we have more businesses and smaller buildings which are more hospitable to local businesses.
If Target were to ever go out of business, it would be difficult to put something else there. That massive building is not easily adaptable into another use, and so this would leave a scar on Norman, probably for years. Contrast that with the smaller Fuzzy’s Taco Shop. If Fuzzy’s ever went under, we would likely see it replaced with another operation in no time.
Not included in this math is the cost of infrastructure. How much infrastructure does the city pay for to support Target, compared to Fuzzy’s? University North Park is suburban, so it is spread out. It becomes infeasible to reach it without a car, so everyone drives to get there, so they need lots of parking. But this also leads to even more expensive infrastructure. Wide arterial roads, traffic signals, road widenings, and lots more pipeline, since everything is more spread out. There are huge maintenance costs associated with University North Park, compared to Campus Corner. Auto-oriented development cannot survive without being subsidized by the taxpayers through road widenings and other projects. We are seeing this play out right now, as residents in northwest Norman are desperate to see 36th Avenue Northwest widened, and the city cannot afford it unless the state or federal government helps us.
This is the main issue at hand. We build as inefficiently as possible in Norman. We use the most infrastructure possible, on the most amount of land possible, for the least efficient developments as possible. This makes us poor. This is why we can’t afford anything, because the costs of this are so huge, and there is very little tax base to cover them.
Norman could be so much wealthier. We could have much better maintenance for our roads. Perhaps we could have cheaper water rates, because there was less water infrastructure to pay for to begin with. Maybe we wouldn’t have had to raise our property taxes this year to pay for bridges, because we just had the funds actually available instead. Maybe every one of our city departments could be better funded, and they wouldn’t be overburdened and underpaid. We could have more fire stations for more neighborhoods. We could spend more money to make our streets safer. We could implement a street outreach team to help end homelessness. Just think of what project your neighborhood is in need of.
Until we make these changes, we will be stuck with “we don’t have the budget for it.” This is how we get more bang for our buck, and how Norman becomes a stronger town.
Sources:
Fuzzy’s revenue:
Target Revenue:
Adam Ross is a civil engineer from Norman, Oklahoma, who is passionate for cultivating stronger communities through the built environment. He started the Local Conversation Strong Towns Norman in an effort to build a stronger town for his family and his neighbors around him.
