New Geography

Category: Politics

  • Olympics the Chicago Way

    Most American cities chose not to bid on the 2016 summer Olympics and with good reason. With the exception of the 1984 Los Angeles games, the Olympics has proved a big time money loser in city after city. More often than not, it has been staged more for the prestige – think of Berlin in 1936 or China in 2008 – it brings to regimes, particularly autocratic ones.

    In Chicago, prestige is important, but graft is the real king. In Chicago, one of the most corrupt big cities, the Olympics represents, more than anything, a grand chance for a giant heist.

    Economists have a technical term for profiting from the political process: it’s called rent-seeking. Chicago’s politically favored businesses, unions, and insiders with ties to Mayor Daley and Alderman Burke have perfected this activity. The Olympics just provide another opportunity to clean up at the public expense.

    This is how it works. On Chicago public works projects, those on the inside hope to get overpaid at the expense of Illinois and federal taxpayers. Now throw in the Olympics where opportunities for such activities have long been rife with corruption and you can understand the glee in the Chicago machine’s eyes.

    Right now there isn’t any financial guarantee from the federal government. But Chicago’s power elite hopes Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and others can convince the Congress at some point to help with Chicago’s Olympic sized costs if they get the 2016 games. They can always call it a “stimulus”!

    Yet is the average Chicagoan thrilled at this prospect to get reamed? A recent Chicago Tribune/WGN poll shows a slide in public support:

    Nearly as many city residents oppose Mayor Richard Daley’s Olympic plans, 45 percent, as support them, 47 percent. And residents increasingly and overwhelmingly oppose using tax dollars to cover any financial shortfalls for the Games, with 84 percent disapproving of the use of public money.

    The poll comes a month before the International Olympic Committee selects the host city for the 2016 Olympics. Chicago is competing against Tokyo, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro.

    The new results show slippage from the 2-to-1 support found in a Tribune poll in February, and experts said the findings could hurt Chicago’s chances.

    But fading public support in Chicago could be overwhelmed by political factors. With 107 votes on the International Olympic Committee(IOC), the African votes are considered the swing votes. President Obama made a special appeal to the African IOC voters. WLS TV reported:

    European IOC members may be inclined to support Madrid. Asian members may back Tokyo. There is one continent whose members are not aligned: Africa. Chicago’s bid team traveled to Abuja, Nigeria, to meet with Africa’s 16 IOC members, who may hold the swing votes.

    The fear of cost overruns, a history of bloated union contracts, and fraud has tempered enthusiasm for the Olympics. Mayor Daley has had to promise tighter oversight on the whole Olympics process. Yet this has not prevented an effective grass roots opposition organization from springing up. No Games Chicago has been instrumental at raising questions of money and accountability, dampening public support for the games. No Games Chicago spokesman Thomas Tesser explains:

    The City Council voted to give oversight of the City’s Olympic commitments to Ald. Ed Burke, chairman of the Finance Committee. This is the final cruel joke played by the Council on the taxpayers. Burke has become a millionaire doing deals with firms that have business with the city and has collected millions in campaign contributions from firms doing business with the city. Pat Ryan, the chairman of the 2016 effort, contributed $3,000 to Burke. Burke didn’t mention that he has ten clients who are major donors to the 2016 Committee, giving a total of at least $1 million in cash and services, and likely much, much more.

    But, Alderman Burke isn’t the only insider benefiting from the Olympics. Real Estate developer Michael Scott also stands to gain. The Chicago Tribune reports of Scott: “A member of Mayor Richard Daley’s team working to bring the Olympics to Chicago has quietly arranged to develop city-owned land near a park that would be transformed for the 2016 Summer Games, potentially positioning himself to cash in if the Games come here.”

    Michael Scott is also President of the Chicago Public School board. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Scott

    has been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury investigating how students are chosen for admission to some of the city’s most elite public schools.

    This new scandal might put in to question Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s leadership as CEO of the Chicago Public School system.

    All the recent skepticism of the cost of the games couldn’t stop Chicago insiders from getting the stunning vote of support from Chicago’s City Council. This is still a one-party, all-machine, all-the-time town. In a vote of 49-0, the City Council showed that there is not a single vote to back the nearly fifty percent who oppose Mayor Daley’s plans.

    Michelle Obama will lead a Chicago delegation for the last pitch for the games in Copenhagen next month. Some speculate that President Obama will make a dramatic last minute appearance to make Chicago’s case in front of the International Olympic Committee. No one knows for sure whether Chicago will get the 2016 games but if it does, it will be a grand feeding time at the trough for the insiders and ever bigger burdens on the less well-connected businesses and individuals who inhabit Chicago.

    Steve Bartin is a resident of Cook County and native who blogs regularly about urban affairs at http://nalert.blogspot.com. He works in Internet sales.

  • Smart Growth Must Not Ignore Drivers

    For the time being, battles over health care and energy seem likely to occupy the attention of both the Obama administration and its critics. Yet although now barely on the radar, there may be another, equally critical conflict developing over how Americans live and travel.

    Right now this potential flash point has been relegated to the back burner, as Congress is likely to put any major transportation spending initiative on hold for at least a year, and perhaps longer. This also may be a symptom of mounting concerns over the deficit. Financing major changes in transportation, for example, would probably require higher federal fuel taxes, which would not fly amid a weak economy.

    These delays could prove a blessing to the administration, providing a pause from indulging in yet another policy lurch that might thrill the “progressive” urban left but infuriate much of the country. Initial House proposals on transportation have sought to cut dramatically the share of federal gas taxes — paid by drivers — going to roads while sending more to already heavily subsidized transit. Another large chunk of transport spending would go to a very expensive, and geographically limited, high-speed-rail network.

    This kind of radical shift reflects the preferences of ideologues within the administration. President Barack Obama has clustered an impressive array of “smart growth” devotees around him, including Housing and Urban Development Undersecretary Ron Sims, an early climate change “evangelist,” Transportation Undersecretary for Policy Roy Kienitz and the Environmental Protection Agency’s John Frece. Their priority is not better roads for suburbanites but, as Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood put it, to “coerce” Americans out of their cars and into a denser, more transit-dominated future.

    This approach can expect strong support from the influential “green team” in the administration, including climate czar Carol Browner and science adviser John Holdren. Browner’s hand was shown during the Clinton years when as head of the Environmental Protection Agency she threatened to cut transportation funds for the Atlanta region unless it adopted a smart-growth policy. The threats became moot after the change of administration in 2001.

    It is not difficult to imagine such bureaucrats intruding on how communities and families function on the most basic levels. Traditions governing local land use that have existed since the beginning of the republic would be overturned. The preferred lifestyles of most Americans would come under siege.

    This agenda has been widely promoted for decades, first by the Carter administration and, more recently, by both environmentalists and new urbanists. The recent concerns over global warming have provided an additional raison d’être for a policy promoting both higher transit use and denser housing patterns. The president himself has embraced this agenda, declaring in February that “the days of building sprawl” were, in his words, “over.”

    The administration can expect strong support for such policies in the mainstream media concentrated in New York and Washington. These areas boast both the highest proportion of transit riders and the largest percentages working in the central core. Many among the young, single and childless couples working in media in these communities see no reason why other Americans should not live similarly.

    Politically, such a remaking of America may prove difficult to pull off. Overall less than 6 percent of Americans ride public transit, a percentage that has barely changed for decades. In many states, the transit share is only 1 percent. It’s difficult to imagine a policy that disses roads, small towns and suburbs could pass Congress, 80 percent or so of whose constituents don’t live in the favored dense urban environments. And what about the 95 percent or so of Americans who get around by car? More likely, any spate of new transit and land-use regulations will be enforced through the apparat. In one scenario, administrators at the EPA could simply oppose any transport project — for example, new roads — on the basis of carbon emissions and potential pollution. States and cities with projects not deemed “smart” enough by administrators at the Department of Transportation or HUD might be threatened with loss of funding.

    Yet even this approach risks engendering a backlash. Once again, the administration could be seen as imposing a true-blue policy on a largely red, or at least purple, nation. To be successful, the administration needs to address the needs of suburban, small-city and rural residents as well as those of big-city denizens.

    This is not to say the administration should not address pollution and congestion concerns head-on. But this needs to be done in ways that make both political and practical sense. Mileage requirements on cars are an excellent first step that follows this playbook, getting results without trying to remake a car-driving electorate.

    In addition, the government could develop incentives for increased telecommuting and more flexible work schedules in order to reduce unnecessary driving to work. There is also room for expanded, more economical bus and jitney services that could work in some suburban and small-town locations. Instead of building light rail systems that will never get large ridership, mass transit funding should flow to successful existing systems or to a handful of dense corridors emerging in places like Houston.

    All this speaks to a kind of pragmatism that may not please either the road-building zealots or the smart-growth aficionados. Such an approach would be far preferable — and more politically sustainable — than the current attempt to drive a 21st-century country back to a transportation model more appropriate for the 19th.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin Press early next year.

  • The Curse of my.barackobama.com

    President Obama’s campaign was indeed a revolution, not one of policy, but rather a dramatic change in how candidates communicate with voters. It is a reality that helped make Barack Obama our chief executive, but now threatens his ascendancy as well.

    It all started with Obama’s hiring of Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, as part of his campaign team. Hughes’ job was to develop an online community for the campaign. He was largely dismissed by seasoned political operatives more comfortable with conventional media and campaign tactics.

    David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, gave an honest assessment saying, “Technology has always been used as a net to capture people in a campaign or cause, but not to organize. Chris saw what was possible before anyone else. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around it.”

    Hughes built for the Obama campaign the ability to create and manage content and conversations with vast numbers of people in mere seconds. With an entry into Facebook, video download, or link to information the Obama campaign could shape the opinions of millions of people across America, answer criticisms, and organize campaign events.

    The results of Hughes work was reported on Fastcompany.com: “By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.”

    Hughes had given Obama the ability to do things in real time. He showed the inherent weakness of newspapers as they were reporting what seemed like yesterday’s news. He was out in front of network nightly news programming. He made the Obama campaign a source of news that rivaled networks like never before in history. In short, he was shaping opinion at its source.

    In some ways this was a departure from the ways campaigns were waged in the past: staging huge armies and fighting battles on defined battlefields. The Obama campaign was more like a guerrilla force whose battlefield was at the time and place of their choosing. It bypassed staging. It ran lean. It organized by word of mouth and “buzz” among a new breed of political “activist” who understood the potential of new technology. Obama provided the opportunity to take the new political technology for a “test drive”.

    Fast forward nine months and the same technology that helped Obama win his election is now serving to undermine his policy initiatives. The ability to go viral was not proprietary of MyBO.com.

    People showed how to take marketing viral, like Mark Hughes in his book “Buzzmarketing”. Hughes engineered the successful takeover of Half.com using “buzz” generated from renaming a town in Oregon. He made ads specifically for YouTube rather than networks. One ad, for the “duckbill” dust mask, went viral and sales shot through the roof. You can still find the ad on YouTube. Hughes understood how conversations were changing. He knew that sending content to someone online could quickly go viral when inserted into that person’s social networks. This is the foundation of “buzz.”

    President Obama won several quick and decisive victories early in his presidency with stimulus, omnibus budget, and “cap and trade” legislation. The President’s goodwill ran high in the early months. His resounding campaign victory using new tactics to reach voters held Members of Congress in awe of both his political and fund raising abilities.

    But, the same technology that Obama developed to win an election just nine months ago is now being successfully used to organize grassroots opposition to his policies. What stated as “Tea Parties” across America has developed into a broad based uprising opposing Obama’s health care initiative. The opposition has found its voice and it is spreading its word virally. These communications are quickly outpacing our political leader’s ability to spin issues.

    John McCain recently commented that there was a “peaceful revolution taking place.” He went on to amplify this point by saying, “There is a grass-roots uprising the likes of which I have never seen. There’s anger; there’s concern about the future. There’s concern about the generational theft that we’ve committed by running up unconscionable and unsustainable deficits.”

    The usual tactics to stem the latest grassroots tide are not working. The more politicians talk down the protesters defining them as “un-American” the more energy it provides. Sarah Palin’s post on her blog that the health care bill contained “death panels” worked virally through networks with resounding speed. The result was the Senate removed the provision (end of life counseling) from its bills rather than risk a protracted fight in cyberspace.

    How is this happening? People are organizing around information in real time. Visit Drudge Report, Huffington Post and Politico every day and you can read and see politics happening in every corner of America. With YouTube you can be there at a town hall meeting hosted by Barney Frank on the left or Michelle Bachman on the right. You can take this content and send it into your social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace or hundreds of other platforms. Ordinary Americans can now instigate discussions, mold and change opinion and do it all under the radar. This is fundamentally changing our politics.

    President Obama and Congress both now have to deal with the curse of MyBO.com. Social networking has enabled Americans to organize in new ways. Grassroots and community organizing are no longer the sole domain of the political left. In real time every misstep and piece of misinformation works its way into public dialogue on blogs, YouTube and websites where political thought is collected, dispersed and refined.

    The days of politics as usual are over. The Obama team will have to play the game under a set of rules that have not all been written yet. This new era in politics will be much more open and subject to more public scrutiny than at any time in history.

    The same communications tactics that won President Obama an election in 2008 may prove to be his greatest challenge in building public consensus for action going forward. In the age of “buzz” our young President will face challenges like none other. His greatest challenge may be in learning how to tame and control the inherently unruly politics of the information age.

    Dennis M. Powell is president and CEO of Massey Powell, an issues management consulting company located in Plymouth Meeting, PA.

  • The Costs of Climate Change Strategies, Who Will Tell People?

    Not for the first time, reality and politics may be on a collision course. This time it’s in respect to the costs of strategies intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill still awaits consideration by the US Senate, interest groups – mainly rapid transit, green groups and urban land owners – epitomized by the “Moving Cooler” coalition but they are already “low-balling” the costs of implementation.

    But this approach belies a bigger consideration: Americans seem to have limits to how much they will pay for radical greenhouse emissions reduction schemes. According to a recent poll by Rasmussen, slightly more than one-third of respondents (who provided an answer) are willing to spend $100 or more per year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. About 2 percent would spend more than $1,000. Those may sound like big numbers, but they are a pittance compared to what is likely to be required to meet the more than 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that the Waxman-Markey bill would require. Even more worryingly for politicians relying on voters to return them to office, nearly two-thirds of the respondents would pay nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    If we do a rough, weighted average of the Rasmussen numbers, it appears that Americans are willing to spend about $100 per household per year (Note 1). This includes everyone, from the great majority, who would spend zero to the small percentage who would spend more than $1,000. At $100 per household, it appears that Americans are willing to spend on the order of $12 billion annually. This may look like a big number. But it is peanuts compared to market prices for greenhouse gas emissions. This is illustrated by the fact that the social engineers whose articles of faith requires building high speed rail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would spend $12 billion to construct just 150 miles of California’s proposed 800 mile system.

    Comparing Consumer Tolerance to Expected Costs: At $100 per household, Americans are prepared to pay just $2 per greenhouse gas ton removed. All of this is in a policy context in which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that $20-$50 per greenhouse gas ton is the maximum that should be spent per ton. The often quoted McKinsey/Conference Board study says that huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved at $50 or less, with an average cost per ton of $17. International markets now value a ton of greenhouse gas emissions at around $20. At $2 per ton, American households are simply not on the same “planet” with the radical climate change lobby as to how much they wish to spend on reducing greenhouse gases.

    International Comrades in Arms? This is not simply about Americans and their perceived differences from others who are so often considered more environmentally sensitive. France’s President Sarkozy has encountered serious opposition in proposing a carbon tax on consumers to discourage fossil fuel use. He is running into problems not only among members of the opposition, but concerns have also been expressed by members of his own party. It appears that many French consumers (like their American comrades) are more concerned about the economy than climate change at the moment.

    China, India and Beyond: If only a bit more than one-third of American households are willing to pay much of anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it seems fair to ask what percentage of households in China, India and other developing nations are prepared to pay anything? A possible answer was provided recently by India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, who released a report predicting that India’s greenhouse gas emissions would rise from the present 1.2 billion tons to between 4 and 7 billion tons in 2030. The minister said the “world should not worry about the threat posed by India’s carbon emissions, since its per-capita emissions would never exceed that of developed countries.” . At the higher end of the predicted range, India would add more greenhouse gas emissions than the United States would cut under even the proposed 80 percent reduction scheme. Suffice it to say that heroic actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions seem unlikely in developing countries so long as their citizens live below the comfort levels of Americans and Europeans.

    Lower Standard of Living not an Option: I have been giving presentations on this and similar subjects for some years. I have yet to discern any seething undercurrent of desire on the part of Americans (or the vast majority anywhere else) to return to the living standards of 1980, much less 1950 or 1750. Neither Washington’s politicians nor those in Paris or any other high income world capital are going to tell the people that they must accept a lower standard of living. Nor is there any movement in Washington to let the people know that their tolerance for higher prices could well be insufficient to the task.

    For Washington, the dilemma is that every penny of the higher costs will hit consumers (read voters), whether directly or indirectly. There could be trouble when the higher utility bills begin to arrive and it could mean difficulty in delivering on the primary policy objective of virtually all governments, which is to remain in power. This is not to mention the unintended consequences of higher prices on many key industries, notably agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation.

    There is an even larger concern, however, and that is the stability of society. Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth suggested from an economic review of history that economies that fail to grow lapse into instability.

    A Public Policy Collision Course? A potential collision between economic reality and public policy initiatives could be in the offing. Many “green” proposals are insufficiently sensitive – even disdainful – towards the concerns of everyday citizens. This suggests that politically there should be an emphasis only on the most cost effective strategies. In a democracy, you must confront to the reality that people are for the most part more concerned about the economy than about strategies meant to slow climate change.

    The imperative then is not to ignore the problem, but to focus on the most rational, low-cost and effective greenhouse gas emission reduction strategies. Regrettably, it does not appear that Washington is there yet. The special interests whose agendas are to cultivate and reap a bounteous harvest of “green” profits or to convert the “heathen” to behaviors – such as riding transit and living in densely packed neighborhoods – that they have been advocating long before the climate change issue emerged.

    Those concerned about the future of the environment also have to pay attention to reality. Reducing greenhouse gases is not a one-dimensional issue. Environmental sustainability cannot be achieved without both political and economic sustainability.

    Note 1: The Rasmussen question was asked of individuals. It is assumed here, however, that the answers related to households. One doubts, for example, that a queried mother answered with an assumption that she would pay $100, her husband would pay $100 and each of the kids would pay $100, but rather meant $100 for the household, since, to put it facetiously, few households devolve their budgeting to the individual members.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Alaska To Stimulus Funds: Yup, We’ll Take ‘Em

    Earlier this month the Alaska state legislature, in a special session, voted 44-14 to accept $28.6 million in stimulus funds that Sarah Palin had rejected in May. Sean Parnell, Alaska’s governor since Palin’s resignation, says the money will be used primarily for energy efficiency improvements in public buildings.

    The tale of the showdown between Palin, the state legislature, and the federal Department of Energy may ultimately reveal as much about state sovereignty under the current administration in Washington as it does about Alaska’s internal politics.

    Palin has more than once made her case for rejecting the stimulus money — or at least a portion of it — clear: her objection is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act calls for the adoption of the International Energy Conservation Code in exchange for the funds, which would set new standards for things like window fenestration and lighting equipment in new and remodeled commercial and residential buildings. Such codes, however, could be a logistical nightmare for some communities to adopt and for the state to enforce.

    Alaskan buildings are architecturally diverse, each constructed for a particular climate and geography. Homeowners in Ketchikan, for example, where it rains nearly every day of the year, have different concerns than those in Valdez, where the average yearly snowfall is 325 inches. Many communities in the state are only accessible by boat or plane, so the shipping of supplies is costly and inefficient. Economic hardship and subsistence are also the normal standard of living in many of the remote, rugged Alaskan towns and villages.

    Because of these circumstances, the state has always permitted local governments to set their own building codes. Most of the villages choose not to have building codes at all. All things considered, monitoring energy code compliance in perpetuity would easily cost the state more than $28.6 million. Palin also has noted that the state has hundreds of millions of dollars already budgeted for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, so the less than $30 million in stimulus funds really aren’t a substantial addition to the state’s effort.

    Her rejection of the funds sparked a debate that was carried out in press releases, official letters, and Anchorage Daily News editorials. A legislator from Anchorage claimed in an op-ed piece that Palin was “denying” Alaskans much needed funds, and that rejecting money from the stimulus package brings to mind the old saying, “two wrongs don’t make a right.” The co-chairs of the state senate resources committee wrote a letter urging Palin to consider Missouri’s proposal (accepted by the Department of Energy) which would fulfill the mandate with a 90% compliance rate on the local level, exempting communities with populations under 2,500 and structures without plumbing and electricity. There are enough major Alaska communities that have already adopted energy codes, they said, that the state either already meets or could easily meet the federal requirements in the necessary time frame.

    Palin responded to these opponents with her own editorial and press releases, and an Anchorage architect agreed with her in another op-ed, suggesting that while Alaska has long built energy efficient buildings out of cold weather necessity, the two senators’ numbers for 90 percent compliance didn’t add up. The primary result of taking the money, he claimed, would be “a new regulatory requirement to verify compliance.”

    The disagreement hinged on everyone’s interpretation of the DOE’s language. The initial mandate required “assurances” from the governor that local communities with the authority to do so “will implement” the codes. Because there is no statewide energy code in Alaska and the state constitution supports local self-government, Palin took the stance that this requirement would put her outside of her jurisdiction as governor. She and her staff exchanged letters with the DOE in attempt to clarify the possibility of the Missouri option, and the degree to which the state would be required to oversee code implementation and compliance.

    The DOE admitted that the code mandate wasn’t appropriate for all states, but said the Missouri option was part of the Missouri governor’s “broader commitment” to “work proactively” with communities and the legislature to improve energy efficiency, implying, perhaps, that despite Alaska’s success in these areas, the governor’s personal involvement was non-negotiable. Revisions were offered, but Palin was still dissatisfied with the DOE’s language. Proponents of taking the money suggested that the DOE’s revisions required the governor to work “within the extent of her authority” to promote the building codes, not to actively enforce them. Palin didn’t agree with this interpretation, saying she didn’t want the role of dictating or influencing local policies.

    As a state with a cold climate and an economy vulnerable to volatile fuel prices, Alaska has indeed taken its own steps to improve energy efficiency in recent years. In addition to independently adopted energy codes in most of the major cities and hundreds of millions budgeted for state energy projects, there has been an admirable home energy rebate program in place for several years; homeowners can have their houses audited for energy efficiency and be reimbursed up to $10,000 for making recommended improvements.

    It’s hard to imagine, though, that the legislature’s motives in opposing Palin’s decision were entirely pure. Palin and the legislature had a combative relationship over budget issues for most of her tenure as governor, and this was an opportunity for them to demonstrate their clout. It’s telling, too, that the legislature rejected Parnell’s proposal to extend their special session (which was held primarily to overturn Palin’s veto) by one day in order to extend a year-long suspension of the state’s 8-cent gas tax, which will now be reinstated September 1. The legislature may choose to suspend the gas tax again when the regular session begins in January, but their lack of urgency to act on the issue undermines their claim that the stimulus funds are urgently necessary to help keep Alaskans’ energy costs down.

    Of course, Palin’s own stance has been calculated as well. She initially wanted to decline roughly half of Alaska’s $930 million allotment, and her vocal anti-stimulus statements garnered national attention, which helped establish her as a critic of the Obama administration in her own right, independent of her role in McCain’s presidential campaign. By the time the smoke cleared, however, she was rejecting only this $28.6 million. Critics have said that it looks like a token amount, chosen to make a strategic political statement.

    In her op-ed piece, she noted that during her time as a Wasilla city council member and then mayor, the city experienced a boom in growth that made building codes an issue of great contention. Wasilla is notably missing on the list of major communities that have independently adopted energy codes, which would suggest that it would be one of the key cities that would have problems with a statewide energy code.

    After the legislature’s vote, Sean Parnell wrote to the DOE accepting the funds, noting his own disapproval of the mandates. He quoted an August DOE statement that the state legislature “does not need to adopt, impose and enforce a statewide building code in order to qualify,” making clear that he was accepting the funds on the basis of that statement. He also provided the DOE with “assurances”, not that state or local codes would be adopted, but that the Regulatory Commission of Alaska “will seek to implement general policies to promote energy efficiency and maintain just and reasonable rates while protecting the public.”

    Ultimately, if Alaska holds its ground and does not adopt the IECC, Palin and the legislature may have unwittingly conspired to successfully challenge the federal government’s encroaching influence on the state’s affairs. Perhaps not coincidentally, the legislature unanimously passed a 10th amendment state sovereignty resolution while they were hashing out the stimulus funds controversy, and Palin signed it weeks before resigning as governor. It will be interesting to see how the DOE handles Alaska’s obstinance…and how the Alaska legislature responds if the DOE calls their bluff down the road and asks how the codes are coming along.

    Andrea Gregovich is a writer and translator living in Anchorage.

  • Millenial Generation Myths

    1. Young people think and behave the same at all times. One generation is just like the one before it and the one that follows. False: Each generation is different from the one before it and the one that follows. Today’s young people, the Millennials (born 1982-2003), are a “civic” generation. They were revered and protected by their parents and are becoming group-oriented, egalitarian institution builders as they emerge into adulthood. Millennials are sharply distinctive from the divided, moralistic Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) and the cynical, individualistic Gen-Xers (born 1965-1981), the two generations that preceded them and who are their parents.

    2. Millennials are narcissistic, self-indulgent kids who think they are entitled to everything. False: Millennials have a deep commitment to community and helping others, putting this belief into action with community service activities. Virtually all Millennial high school students (80%) participate in a community service activity. Two decades ago when all high school students were Gen-Xers, only a quarter (27%) did so.

    3. Millennials volunteer and serve because they are “forced” to or are trying to polish their college application resume. False: Millennials volunteer for community and public service in large numbers long after their “required” initial high school experiences. In 2006, more than a quarter (26%) of National Service volunteers were Millennials, at a time when Millennials comprised no more than 15% of the adult population. By contrast in 1989 when all young adults were members of Generation X, only 13% of National Service volunteers were in this age cohort.

    4. Millennials became Democrats and liberals because they are hero worshipers of Barack Obama. False: Millennials identified as Democrats and liberals well before Obama emerged as a major political force with significant name identification. In 2007, Millennials identified as Democrats over Republicans by 52% to 30% and as liberals over conservatives by 29% vs. 16% (the rest were moderate). At that time, Barack Obama’s name identification was barely 50%, well below that of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, his chief competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    5. Millennials will become more conservative as they age. False: Party identification and ideological orientation are formed when people are young and are retained as they age. Prior “civic” generations, with similar belief systems to Millennials, kept that philosophy throughout their lives. The only two generations that gave John Kerry a majority of their votes over George W. Bush in 2004 were the first sliver of Millennials eligible to vote and the last segment of members of the GI Generation, all of whom were at least 80 and many of whom were casting their final presidential vote.

    6. Millennials, like all young people, are apathetic and uninterested in voting. False: Young people’s proclivity to vote or not is not based upon their age but their generation’s belief in the efficacy of voting. Millennials are members of an activist and politically involved “civic” generation. They have voted heavily in the past and will continue to do so in the future. According to CIRCLE, an organization that examines youth political participation trends, 6.5 million people under 30 voted in presidential primaries and caucuses in 2008, double the youth participation rate of 2000. Fifty-three percent of Millennials voted in the 2008 general election (59% in the competitive battle ground states), up from 37% in 1996 when all young voters were member of Generation X.

    7. Like Boomers and Gen-Xers before them, Millennials are cynical and disillusioned by the problems facing them and America. False: In spite of the fact that they are far more likely to be unemployed and far less likely than older Americans to have health insurance, Millennials are more optimistic than older generations. A May 2009 Pew survey indicates that about three-quarters of Millennials in contrast to two-thirds of older generations are confident that America can solve the problems now facing our country.

    8. Millennials care only about what happens in their own country, community, and lives and not on what goes on in the rest of the world. False: Most Millennials have visited foreign countries and through social networking technology, are connected to friends around the world. They are open to working with people in other countries to solve the problems of the world community. Millennials are far more likely than older generations to support free trade agreements like NAFTA (61% vs. 40%) and far less likely to believe in military solutions to international concerns (39% vs. 58%). Millennials are also about three times more likely than seniors to have opinions on major international concerns like Israeli/Palestinian relations.

    9. Millennials, like all generations, are rebels who are hostile to civic institutions and government. False: Millennials have significantly more positive attitudes toward government and its activities than older Americans. Millennials are much less likely to believe that if the government runs something, it is usually wasteful and inefficient (42% vs. 61%) or that the federal government controls too much of our daily lives (48% vs. 56%). They are much more likely to feel that government is run for the benefit of all (60% vs. 46%).

    10. Millennials are more focused on trivialities such as celebrities than on the big issues facing America. False: Unlike some previous generations, Millennial celebrities and musical tastes are more acceptable to and compatible with their parents’ values because they reflect the generation’s love of teamwork and service to the community rather than rebellion. For example, a recent Pew survey indicates that rock music is the preferred genre of Millennials, Gen-Xers, and Boomers. Rock, the music of rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s, is now mainstream. Moreover even as early as 2006, two years before Barack Obama’s candidacy, more than twice as many Millennials had voted for president than had voted on American Idol.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics published by Rutgers University Press.

  • High Cost of Living Leaves Some States Uncompetitive

    Late this spring, when voters in California emphatically rejected tax increases to close the state budget gap, they sent a clear message to state policymakers. They were tired of California’s high taxes, which according to the non-partisan Tax Foundation, consumed 10.5 percent of state per capita income last year. This compared with a national average of 9.7 percent, making California the sixth most heavily taxed state in the nation.

    But if Californians were tired of paying an additional 0.8 percent of their income in state and local taxes, what would they make of research by economists at the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis that estimated that the cost of living in California, based on 2006 data, was a whopping 29.1 percent above the national average? Obviously, from an economic point of view, the state’s high cost of living has a much greater impact on the average person’s standard of living than taxes do.

    Cost of living is not an issue that we typically think about, when it comes to voting and politics. That needs to change. Cost of living estimates provide a valuable tool for making accurate comparisons of economic performance. Moreover, they provide the best available, if indirect, measure of the costs imposed by regulation. And with Congress debating potentially dramatic changes in how we regulate energy and health care, costs of this kind clearly deserve close scrutiny.

    Let’s begin with economic performance, starting with California. According to 2006 census estimates from the American Community Survey, the median household income in California was $56,645. In terms of ranking, that made California the sixth most prosperous state in the nation. But how did California fare, once the cost of living was taken into account? The answer is not very well. The economists who published the 2006 data, Bettina Aten and Roger D’Souza, did not deflate income data by the full 29.1 percent when calculating the real effect of cost of living. Rather, they exempted certain components of income, such as government transfer payments. Using this attenuated calculation, real median household income in California in 2006 was $47,988. In terms of ranking, that dropped California down to 31st place. (Were the data deflated by the full 29.1 percent, the state would have fallen all the way to 48th place.)

    California is not the only state afflicted with an exorbitant cost of living. Bluer than blue New York State, according to the Aten and D’Souza data, had an even higher cost of living, estimated at 31.8 percent above the national average. And not surprisingly, it fared particularly badly, once the cost of living was taken into account. Again using an attenuated calculation, the median household income in New York dropped from $51,384 in nominal dollars down to $42,744 in cost of living adjusted dollars. In terms of rankings, this dropped New York from 17th place down to 49th place. (Were the data deflated by the full 31.8 percent, the state would have fallen to last place, almost 10 percent lower than the next poorest state, Mississippi.)

    What cost of living estimates taketh away from some, however, they also giveth to others. Consider, for example, Utah and Minnesota. In the case of Utah, median household income in 2006 stood at $51,309 in nominal terms. But according to the Aten and D’Souza estimates, the cost of living in Utah was 13.5 percent below the national average. Using the attenuated calculation, cost of living adjusted income in Utah was $57,147, the second highest in the nation.

    In the case of Minnesota, median household income in 2006 stood at $54,023 in nominal terms. But according to the Aten and D’Souza estimates, the cost of living was 7.4 percent below the national average. The attenuated calculation put the Minnesota a cost of living adjusted income at $57,140, third highest in the nation.

    As a general rule, the states with the lowest cost of living are states in the South and to a lesser degree the Mountain West. Among the states of the Old South, only Virginia had a cost of living above the national average. Dynamic states like North Carolina had a cost of living 13.1 percent below the national average. In Georgia, the figure was 12.1 percent. In the Mountain West, Idaho had a cost of living 17.3 percent below the national average. In New Mexico, the figure was 16.5 percent.


    Besides affecting the true measure of economic performance, cost of living differentials have other, important implications as well. Federal taxes are one example. Consider New York. For years, it has been recognized that New York State sends more in taxes to Washington, D.C. than it receives back in the form of federal outlays. Recently, there has been some disagreement about the size of this deficit, but in the past it was generally agreed that it amounted to approximately two percent of Gross State Product. If New Yorkers were truly rich, this would not be a great burden. But as shown already, that is not the case. By failing to control its cost of living, New York ends up subsidizing other states that in real terms are doing much better.

    Another implication of cost of living differentials has to do with population. All things being equal, people will live where they can maximize their standard of living. Not surprisingly, states that have seen the largest population growth in recent decades tend to be those with a low cost of living, notably in the South and in the Mountain West. On the other hand, states with a high cost of living have typically seen population growth lag. This is particularly true among certain Northeastern states that should have boomed, if nominal income were the best guide of how well a state is doing. Examples include Massachusetts, Connecticut and to a lesser degree, New Jersey, which has the second highest median household income in the nation.

    In sum, the cost of living says a great deal about a state, its politics and its future.

    Eamon Moynihan is the Director of the Cost of Living Project in New York. The purpose of the project is make New York City and State more competitive, with a particular focus on the costs imposed by regulation. A former government official at both the City and State level, he most recently served as Deputy Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Policy Development. An interactive website for the project can be accessed at thecostoflivingproject.org.

  • New Feudalism: Does Home Ownership Have a Future?

    In mid August, as we were beginning to feel a pulse in the nation’s housing market, an academician and housing expert from the University of Pennsylvania named Thomas J. Sugrue wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal proposing that, for many people, the new American Dream should be renting.

    Sugrue is writing a book on the history of real estate in America, a tome I cannot wait to read because it will apparently illustrate how epic events in our nation’s history have shaped and molded our real estate market, hence our lives. He quotes builder William Levitt, considered the father of affordable suburban mass housing, saying “no man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist.”

    That was said during the Cold War and McCarthy era: Levitt was marketing his wares, playing off the public’s fears like any good salesman. And for many politicians – from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – expanding ownership of homes remained critical to the nation’s identity.
    But is all this changing? The Obama Administration seems at best ambivalent about homeownership. It seems determined to put more resources into rental housing while promulgating policies that may coerce Americans out of the suburban single family homes and back into dense, multifamily urban housing.

    This would mark a major change in what we usually consider the American dream. Enabling home ownership is like crack cocaine for politicians: the impetus for the Great Recession of 2008 may well have been formed on the day President Bill Clinton launched National Homeownership Day in 1995. And I remember sitting terrified in front of the television post 9/11 when President George W. Bush reassured us that America was strong and would recover. Our housing market is strong, he said, a theme that would echo throughout his presidency. Seeing two by fours go up and mortar flying gave Americans a sense of calm, of rebuilding.

    The attacks of 9/11 almost brought down our economy. The housing market helped prop it up.

    Most of us still love our homes. Sugrue quotes a Pew survey that faintly echoes the national health care debate: nine out of ten homeowners view their homes as a comfort in their lives. He seems to argue we should change everything for ten percent. To be sure, as he suggests, for some home ownership has become a source of panic and despair: 53,000 people packing a Save the Dream fair at Atlanta’s World Congress Center. Georgia’s housing market has been hit hard – 338,411 homes went into foreclosure in May and June, 2009.

    But it’s not just Georgia. Since the second quarter of 2006, housing values across the nation have plummeted to values roughly equivalent to post 9/11. We are not immune even here in Texas, with one of the nation’s strongest large state economies: our prices are soft, down anywhere from five to 20%, and buyers want deals. Go north to Little Elm; you might think you are in Atlanta. Homes may not be selling for thirty cents on the dollar as they are in Phoenix, but a house in the trophy community of University Park listed for $999,000 recently, sold in the mid $800s. The owner of a Preston Hollow mansion not too far from George W. Bush turned down a $38 million dollar offer two years ago, insulted. He recently sold his nine-plus acre property for $28 million.

    And just one week ago I spoke with an Allen, Texas home builder who told me that current tough love lending standards were keeping a lot of people out of the jumbo market – that is, halting them from buying million dollar homes. When you have to put down 30%, he said, that’s $300,000 on a million dollar home. If homes are not appreciating, he said, smart people say, why do we want to tie up that much money in our homestead?

    Yet we have been here before. Half of all U.S. mortgages were in default during The Great Depression, although it’s true far fewer people owned homes. This is when Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt created government programs to help save homeowners from foreclosure. I remember my grandmother telling me how Mr. Roosevelt saved her home in 1932 – she voted Democratic in every election because of it until the day she died in 1966. In 1938, Fannie Mae was created to buy mortgages on the secondary market, an effort to stimulate credit.

    After World War II, when the government made home loans accessible for thousands of GIs returning from the wars, home ownership rates climbed like the staircases in a suburban colonial. Now more than two-thirds of Americans own their homes.

    The government’s role in shaping this industry has been pretty explicit. Government programs gave us those first FHA loans that got many of us on the housing track, out to the suburbs, allowing people to leave more congested, and often dangerous, inner cities. Government is the hand that keeps the mortgage industry in motion, like a giant conveyor belt of money. But the hand might be pushing us where we shouldn’t go.

    This is certainly true for many in the communities traditionally underserved in the housing market. The government tried to fix this through creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and by pushing Fannie Mae to underwrite loans to “riskier” buyers. The result: in 2006, Sugrue writes, almost 53% of blacks and more than 47% of Hispanics got sub-prime mortgages.

    Those were the loans that were packaged to spread the risk, and sold off as securities. Very lucrative for banks, who always make out like bandits either way, our federal government stood in the background as a silent backer. An appraiser I interviewed recently told me that Fannie Mae will now be ordering appraisals on loans before they buy them.

    You mean, I said, they weren’t doing this before?

    Then there’s the former sub-prime mortgage lender, now turned real estate agent. You, I scolded, how could you approve a school teacher for a loan on a $400,000 house? Shame on you. Well, he told me, if I would have denied her the loan, she could have come back at me for discrimination, or she would have just gone to someone else. So I made the loan and took my commission.

    Yet for all this, I am bullish on home ownership. I think it gives homeowners a sense of security, a blanket of protection that may or may not be a mirage. Economists, who see the world in a “cash nexus”, do not understand this; planners, believing they know a better way, don’t realize that a rental apartment in a dense development does not usually provide our peaceful havens from the cruel world like a single family home or a townhouse that we have a stake in.

    Homeownership may be precarious, but it does provide a greater sense of permanency for families and communities. Home ownership also stimulates the economy. Consumers never buy as much as they do the first few days in a new home – countless trips to Lowes, Home Depot, Bed, Bath & Beyond, the Container Store. A tenant or landlord may buy for their place, but perhaps never with the care and fervor that comes with homeownership. Apartments are built with, at the most, 30 year life spans. I’ve seen enough Section 8 housing to tell you – you don’t want to live in them at the end of their life-cycle. Apartments are considered temporary, places for people who are in transition or not really sure they are going to stay, one reason why they drive higher crime rates.

    Homes are more permanent. Children thrive with structure and feel more secure coming home to a familiar place day after day. Children who live in homes score higher on standardized tests. They may eventually move from one home to another, but will always come back to it and show a friend – that is the house where I grew up.

    Home ownership also forges financial security. Mortgages are like forced savings accounts. Pay your mortgage and in 30 years you’ll have an asset that could cushion your retirement. Either you will own your home outright, or you will have equity to supplement your income when you sell and downsize. The problems came when we started using our homes as slot machines or banks. Home equity lines of credit were illegal in Texas until 1997 as a consumer protection, and the banking industry led the charge to loosen that law with a constitutional amendment. In Texas, the total of all mortgage debt on your home (including HELOCs) is limited to 80% of the home’s fair market value, among other stipulations.

    What we need now is not to move against homeownership but return to more basic fundamentals that seemed to work just fine for 50-plus years. The cost of a house should reflect more of people’s ability to pay. But do we want to be a nation of renters? My bet is no.

    Candace Evans is the Editor of DallasDirt, a Dallas-based real estate blog for D Magazine Media Partners.

  • Taking the Fun Out of Fighting Global Warming

    It is a rare spectacle when broadly respected national organizations and analysts condemn an initiative by some of the most influential players in the Washington establishment. Yet that is exactly what has happened to the Moving Cooler report, authored by the consulting firm Cambridge Systematics, published by the Urban Land Institute and sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and others.

    Forcible Removal: Moving Cooler proposes a radical agenda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions pushing people out of their cars, whether forcibly or by making it so expensive they can no longer drive as much as they need to. Moving Cooler would employ such measures as charging home owners up to $400 annually to park in front of their own houses, placing tolls on now-free interstate highways (up to $0.05 per mile by next year) and pushing as much as 90 percent of future development into existing urban footprints, in the vain hope that cutting driving would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a similar amount. In fact, as traffic congestion increases in more densified urban areas, the one-to-one relationship between reduced driving and reduced greenhouse gas emissions is materially diminished.

    More Huddled Masses: If this plan, endorsed by at least some in the Administration, occurs densification policies would impose urban growth boundaries and other restrictive regulations. Planning decisions would be removed from counties, cities, towns and villages to regional planning organizations forced to implement federal mandates as a condition of receiving back federal funding, most of which had been taken from their own taxpayers.

    These restrictions would force up to 125,000,000 new residents into existing neighborhoods many of whose residents probably think are already crowded enough. Think of it as adding as many people as live and Mexico and Guatemala, without allowing urban areas to expand. All of this would worsen traffic congestion, lengthen travel times for those who can still afford to drive and severely intensify the unhealthful local air pollution that the nation has fought so successfully to reduce over the past four decades.

    Ignoring Productivity: Alan Pisarski, author of the acclaimed “Commuting in America” series and one of the most respected names in transportation policy issued a cutting indictment on these pages. For example, Pisarski notes that Moving Cooler does not count travel times, “so shifting from a 15 minute car trip to an hour on transit or walking has no penalty.” In a world where time and productivity are inextricably associated, lost time is lost time, whether in a car, in transit or walking. In the broader economy, lost time is lost jobs, lost income and lost economic productivity.

    Misleading Policymakers? C. Kenneth Orski, whose career has included assignments at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris and as Associate Administrator at the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration) reported in Innovation Briefs that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), an original member of the Moving Cooler coalition, walked away from the study, saying that Moving Cooler overstates the greenhouse gas emissions that can be realistically expected from its strategies, underestimates the potential of more fuel efficient cars and telecommuting and minimizes the returns from improved transportation operations and car pooling, which are already yielding “remarkable” results. AASHTO further charged that the Moving Cooler report “did not produce results upon which decision-makers can rely.” In the polite world (really) of Washington transportation policy, these are damning words indeed.

    According to Orski, researchers provided AASTHO with a litany of criticisms including findings that Moving Cooler relied on “assumptions that are not plausible,” analysis that was “flawed and incomplete” and an “invalid” peer review process. Costs were characterized as “incomplete and misleading,” greenhouse gas emission results were “not comparable or plausible” and “many assumptions are extreme, unrealistic and in some cases, downright impossible.” Moving Cooler was dismissed because of its “Heroic assumptions about land use and travel behavior and extraordinary pricing do not come close to the GHG reductions needed by 2050.”

    Orski himself characterized the report as containing “flawed analysis and unrealistic assumptions that could mislead policymakers and the public and raise unreasonable expectations about how much progress can be achieved using these strategies.”

    There is plenty of reason to be concerned. Already Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) had introduced legislation that would require annual reductions in how much Americans drive. The senators have confused reducing driving with reducing greenhouse gases. They are not the same thing. After all the federal government is dedicating literally billions of dollars to improving vehicle fuel efficiency. The President himself has promised 150 mile per gallon automobiles. There is significant potential for improving the carbon footprint of cars without forcing people to reduce their driving.

    Land Use & Transit: Meager Returns: Orski strikes a nerve, especially with respect to the Moving Cooler coalition’s favored policies of densification and transit expansion. Moving Cooler itself produces embarrassingly modest (and probably exaggerated) estimates of the potential for densification and transit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to Moving Cooler, these combined strategies would reduce greenhouse gas emissions no more than 7 percent from a 2050 base, and woefully short of any meaningful contribution. Not surprisingly, Moving Cooler ignores the fact that banning development on most suitable land around urban areas would raise land prices and thus home prices, a relationship noted by economists from the left, center and right of the spectrum and grudgingly admitted even in smart growth’s most influential advocacy document, The Costs of Sprawl — 2000.

    As the Tomas Rivera Institute said in a report decrying the barriers to home ownership that California’s similarly restrictive land use policies impose on Hispanic and Latino households: “While there is little agreement on the magnitude of the effect of growth controls on home prices, an increase is always the result.” (Note 1).

    Transit and High Speed Rail? Cross Them Off the List: Moving Cooler endorses significant expansion of transit service and establishment of high speed rail systems, but its own data speaks to the contrary. The maximum necessary cost for removing a ton of greenhouse gas emissions is $50, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Moving Cooler’s data puts transit expansion at more up to 20 times the $50 standard ($900) and high speed rail at 14 times the standard (more than $700). To put the matter in context, if the nation were to spend as much per ton to reach the Waxman-Markey “Cap and Trade” legislation’s greenhouse gas reduction target, the annual bill would be more than $5 trillion, more than one-third of the gross domestic product of the United States. With all of the talk in Washington about cost control and reducing the budget deficit, such extravagantly expensive strategies like transit expansion and high speed rail should be crossed off the public policy list.

    And, indicative of the implausible greenhouse gas results noted by the AASHTO researchers, Moving Cooler excludes the greenhouse gases emitted in construction. This leads one to wonder if there are “good” greenhouse gas emissions (like from building high speed rail) and bad greenhouse gas emissions (like from driving). Construction emissions can be very substantial. For example, it has been reported that construction emissions from proposed high speed rail lines in the United Kingdom would offset any reductions achieved in daily operations compared to airplanes.

    Incompatible Bedfellows: Pitifully, Moving Cooler attempts to associate itself with a highly respected study by McKinsey & Company and The Conference Board that concludes significant greenhouse gas reductions can be achieved by 2030 at less than $50 per ton. Moving Cooler cites itself as “companion piece” Yet, the McKinsey/Conference Board study specifically rejects the high-handed social engineering proposed by Moving Cooler, indicating that its strategies would involve “maintaining comparable levels of consumer utility,” which they defined as: “no change in thermostat settings or appliance use, no downsizing of vehicles, home or commercial space and traveling the same mileage annually relative to levels assumed in the government reference case” (Note 2).

    The Mantra: Moving Cooler chants a mantra about how automobile fuel efficiency will improve, but that continued growth in driving will largely cancel out those gains. However, to do so Moving Cooler lumps automobile and other light-duty vehicle data in with railroads, trucks and buses.

    In fact, the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy projects a 13 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from cars and other light-duty vehicles by 2030, and that is before accounting for the more stringent fuel economy standards adopted by the Obama Administration a few months ago. Further, Moving Cooler buries its laughingly ineffective and expensive policy favorites, smart growth, transit expansion and high speed rail, among a panoply of other strategies that would account for the “lion’s share” of the emission reductions it anticipates.

    The Real Agenda? As Pisarski indicated: Maybe the saddest part of it all, the authors appear not to take global warming or energy security very seriously at all. Rather these public concerns are just a convenient hook, the cause du jour, on which to hang their favorite solutions. Given this apparent reality, it is probably not surprising that two of the three Moving Cooler cover pictures are from Europe, which the smart growth movement has worshipped for years.

    The Moving Cooler strategies would not only force people to live in ways they would not voluntarily choose, and for scant gain and no reason. Moving Cooler’s radical measures need to be rejected forcefully. There are better, more effective and far less intrusive ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

    That would, however, probably take the fun out of fighting global warming for those whose real intent is telling others how to live.

    Note 1: “Growth controls” is a synonym for smart growth strategies, such as urban growth boundaries and development impact fees.

    Note 2: The 2007 government reference case used by McKinsey and The Conference Board assumed that per capita driving would increase more than 50 percent between 2005 and 2030. Later estimates have reduced that figure.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Rome Vs. Gotham

    Urban politicians have widely embraced the current concentration of power in Washington, but they may soon regret the trend they now so actively champion. The great protean tradition of American urbanism – with scores of competing economic centers – is giving way to a new Romanism, in which all power and decisions devolve down to the imperial core.

    This is big stuff, perhaps even more important than the health care debate. The consequence could be a loss of local control, weakening the ability of cities to respond to new challenges in the coming decades.

    The Obama administration’s aggressive federal regulatory agenda, combined with the recession, has accelerated this process. As urban economies around the country lose jobs and revenues, the D.C. area is not merely experiencing “green shoots” but blossoming like lilies of the field.

    To be sure, the capital region has been growing fat on the rest of America for decades, but its staggering success amid the recession is remarkable. Take unemployment: Although the district itself has relatively high rates, unemployment in Virginia and Maryland – where most government-related workers live – has remained around 7% while the nation’s rate approaches 10%.

    The reason is obvious: an explosion of government amid a decline in the private sector. Factories may be closing in Michigan, tech jobs and farms may be disappearing in California, but the people who grease the skids of the ever-expanding federal machine seem to be doing just fine.

    This is most evident at the top of the job market. The capital region now boasts the healthiest technology employment picture in the nation. Virginia has the highest proportion of tech workers in the nation. Maryland ranks fifth, and the district itself is seventh.

    The area also continues to enjoy continued growth in the lucrative professional and business service jobs category. Over the past year, according to latest estimates by www.jobbait.com, the D.C. area was the only region in the nation to enjoy growth in this field.

    Signs of Washington’s ascent abound. The local real estate market appears to be on the mend even as others suffer continued strong declines in values and rising foreclosures. Hotel prices, dropping virtually everywhere else, look to be rising as well.

    Occupancy rates, falling in most places, actually increased during the first half of 2009, as did revenues, which have taken a nosedive elsewhere. In New York prices have plunged – even the mighty Waldorf has been slashing rates.

    In many ways, the economic disasters in New York and other cities have proved a boon for Washington. Wall Street’s demise, for example, has been D.C.’s gain as the locus of financial power leaves New York for the Treasury, Fed, White House and the finance-related congressional committees. K Street is the new Wall Street, where you play for the really big stakes.

    This shift may soon spread beyond the financial sector. Want to get into the energy business? You can bypass Houston and head to the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency – they are the ones handing out subsidies and grants to “deserving” applicants. Thinking of expanding your city to accommodate new middle-class families? The people at the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development have their own ideas on how your cities and regions should grow.

    Manufacturing might be important to your economy, but Washington – a region with virtually no history of productive industry – generally regards factories as polluters, greenhouse gas emitters and labor exploiters. If you have enough lobbyists you might be able to hang on, but don’t really expect much in the way of positive help.

    Some “progressives” may like this model – after all, it originated in Europe, the supposed fount of all that is enlightened. Since the 18th century, Europe’s urban history has been largely dominated by great imperial centers – London, Paris, Moscow and Berlin – that treat other cities like something akin to poor relations.

    Even today European cities and localities tend to have far less control over their destiny than in the U.S. Zoning, planning decisions and even economic strategy often originate from the center, as does the power to tax and spend. For decades, Europe’s legacy of ancient urban privilege – so critical in emerging out of the dark ages – has ebbed before the increasing power of the national capitals. More recently the super-capital of Brussels, like Washington, thrives in hard times that are decimating other European urban economies.

    The great European capitals rose largely because they also served as the domicile of princes, bureaucrats and, until recent times, the clerical establishment. Other cities might have enjoyed a boom – such as Manchester during the industrial revolution – but, ultimately, hierarchy served to concentrate power in the great capital cities.

    In contrast, American cities and communities traditionally have retained control over planning, development and other critical growth factors. Equally important, American cities, noted the great sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, were not dominated by aristocracy but were “heterogeneous from top to bottom.” Urban growth came primarily not by central design but as a result of the often ruthless schemes and lofty aspirations, often ruthlessly expressed, of local political and business leaders.

    For example, the quintessential American city, New York, started as a commercial venture. As early as the mid-17th century 18 languages were spoken on Manhattan Island (population of 1,000) and numerous faiths practiced. In early New Amsterdam, the counting house, not the church or any public building, stood as the most important civic building.

    Even after the Dutch were pushed out by the more powerful British military, the bustling island city – renamed New York – retained its fundamentally commercial character. It served briefly as the nation’s capital, but its power grew from its port and its immigrants. The city’s entrepreneurial spirit and social mobility startled many Europeans. As the French consul to New York complained in 1810, “The inhabitants…have in general no mind for anything but business. New York might be described as a permanent fair in which two-thirds of the population is constantly being replaced; where huge deals are being made, almost always with fictitious capital; and where luxury has reached alarming heights.”

    This entrepreneurial pattern also drove the growth of New York’s many competitors – first the great industrial cities such as Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit and, later, West Coast metropolises like Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area and Seattle. More recently, there has been a similar spectacular rise of formerly obscure places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Miami.

    Through much of this time Washington barely registered among the ranks of American urban centers. Despite early expectations that Washington would become “the Rome of the New World,” it lagged behind other American cities through much of the 19th century. The city was widely reviled as a fetid, swampy place with atrocious cuisine – hog and hominy grits were its staples – that offered little in the way of commerce, industry or culture. Even its great buildings were compared to “the ruins of Roman grandeur.”

    The First World War, the Depression and then the Second World War each boosted Washington’s status but hardly into the first rank of cities. Few entrepreneurs were attracted to a city dominated by regulators, clerks and lawyers. The cultural center lay in New York and Boston – and later Los Angeles. The Bay Area, Massachusetts and later Texas evolved into the primary technological centers.

    Not until the 1960s did Washington begin to emerge as something like a traditional national capital, with a large permanent population of well-educated and cultured citizens as well as a robust economy based on the defense industry and the expanding welfare state.

    But the financial crisis of 2008 has set the stage for an unprecedented growth of the region, with a Democratic president and majority seemingly determined to expand federal mandates into every crevice of community life. There is an eagerness to use federal authority in unprecedented ways that could bring federal influence into virtually every minute decision made in an urban area.

    This concentration of power is also bad news for urban economies, including New York’s. As New York University’s Mitchell Moss has observed, Gotham may be losing its perch as the true national financial center. But other cities also should take note of the trend. Polycentric sprawling cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta soon may find themselves forced to reorganize themselves along lines preferred by federal urban “experts.” Hard-pressed industrial cities may find new environmental restrictions on ports and other key infrastructures an impediment to a much-needed renaissance.

    American cities are at a critical moment. Our competitive, commercial urban tradition certainly has its flaws, but it also has produced the advanced world’s most dynamic roster of modern cities and regions. Ceding the power of urban planning to Washington will cripple the American city – except, of course, for the one that reigns as locale for imperial control.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin early next year.