New Geography

Tag: Environment

  • Architecture in an Age of Austerity

    “Architectural publication, criticism and even education are now focused relentlessly on the enticing visual image. The longing for singular, memorable imagery subordinates other aspects of buildings, isolating architecture in disembodied vision.” – Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, from his essay “Toward an Architecture of Humility”

    Anyone paying even remote attention to the domain of high architectural design in the past decade will surely recognize the name Frank Gehry. The celebrity architect (or if you prefer to use the portmanteau word used to describe such practitioners: starchitect) is best known for his unconventional creations-buildings that billow, swoop and shimmer. Whether the project is a concert hall, museum, or university building, the clientele hiring Gehry is paying for a brand name product. In this sense, a ‘Gehry-designed building’ is akin to a piece of fashion – with the value of the building based primarily on the name of the designer and not on how well it operates for end users as a work of architecture.

    Gehry was not alone in this respect. Real estate developers were quick to jump on the trend toward ‘signature’ buildings. Hiring other marquee architects such as Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Santiago Calatrava, high-end condo developers everywhere from Manhattan to Dubai were willing to deal with paying exorbitant design fees for the assumed marketing advantages of associating with such big names.

    But now the obsession with starchitecture may now itself be outdated. Thanks to the financial meltdown, the party may be ending both for starchitects and their credit wielding developer patrons. Not surprisingly, ambitious projects like the Gehry designed Grand Avenue development in Los Angeles and the Calatrava designed Chicago Spire have been put on hold and perhaps consigned to oblivion.

    These are just some of the most visible examples of the construction slowdown as it relates to high architectural design. Less renown figures in the architectural profession, both sole practitioners and those working in corporate firms, also find themselves struggling to retain projects. The imagined career trajectories of wannabe starchitects may be yet another casualty of the financial slowdown.

    Ironically, the economic crisis relates back to the very thing architects are entrusted with – the built environment. Of course, architects had a hand in only a very small percentage of what is actually built in the United States. During the most recent boom cycle of construction – at least until the last year or two – the single family detached housing developments in the suburbs and urban fringes dominated the market. These developments were often promoted in a manner that made the house as an investment vehicle paramount to it being a place of long-term inhabitance and raising a family.

    The subprime mortgage crisis has since debunked the commonly accepted strategy that real estate is always a ‘safe’ investment for the average American. But this is not only a suburban phenomenon, despite the claims by many in the architecture and urban planning professions that the real estate meltdown represented the triumph of the city over the suburbs. In reality the city development scene is also collapsing, a bit later perhaps, but largely because it took a while for the financial fallout to reach large urban projects.

    Ironically the starchitecture so celebrated by the popular media may have contributed to this. The fact that the majority of architecturally revered high-rise housing developments built in the past decade are geared toward the ‘luxury market’ may have slowed the potential market for in-city living. In too many cases, developers in the urban luxury condo market have relied on cash-wealthy individuals to purchase their units as second homes, a market that is certain to crash as the asset bubble bursts.

    The current recession is a trying time for most Americans, and as such, it could prove a pivotal time for architects, planners and those who care about the built environment to reassess their roles in a democratic culture. Great or monumental architecture – from imperial Rome to Napoleon III’s Paris and Dubai today – has often been built at the discretion of powerful religious institutions, monarchies or omnipotent dictatorships. Democratic architecture, in contrast, tends more to the functional and efficient, whether in the form of William Levitt’s suburbia or the high-rise towers that accommodated corporations.

    The future of urban development in the United States is likely to follow a different trajectory. For one thing environmental sustainability is likely to frame the decisions made in regards to urban planning in the coming years. In this context, metallic structures like those favored by Gehry and his acolytes do not represent a very energy-efficient form; in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix or Dubai they reflect sunlight and heat up the surrounding environment. The next era of American architecture will have to deal with such issues and also with the restrictions of a strapped fiscal environment.

    With funding for flashy and iconic buildings screeching to a halt, the era of the architect as detached genius and artiste appears to be coming to a close. In order to retain relevance at this crucial point in time, architects would be wise to come out from their ivory towers and shift their focus to becoming more civically engaged and oriented towards the needs of the middle class.

    At the dawn of the 21st Century, as the definitions of traditional urban centers, suburbs and metropolitan regions become more blurred, so does the role of the architect and planner. After the chaos of the current economic recession is settled, most construction is likely to be focused on updating existing infrastructure and building new ‘green’ infrastructure. What America needs most right now from the architectural profession is not more Frank Gehrys but a new commitment to build an environment that is both sustainable and affordable.

    Adam Nathaniel Mayer is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised in the town of Los Gatos, on the edge of Silicon Valley, Adam developed a keen interest in the importance of place within the framework of a highly globalized economy. He currently lives in San Francisco where he works in the architecture profession.

  • Up Next: The War of the Regions?

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    It’s time to throw away red, blue and purple, left and right, and get to the real and traditional crux of American politics: the battle for resources between the country’s many diverse regions. How President-elect Barack Obama balances these divergent geographic interests may have more to do with his long-term success than his ideological stance or media image. Personal charm is transitory; the struggle for money and jobs has a more permanent character.

    To succeed as president, Obama must find a way to transcend his own very specific geography – university dominated, liberal de-industrialized Chicago – and address the needs of regions whose economies still depend on agriculture, energy and industry. In the primaries, most of these went to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    The geographic concentration of manufacturing prepared by Praxis Strategy Group presents a particular complex roadmap for the new president. Although Indiana and Wisconsin top our list of states most dependant on manufacturing employment, the next four are either in the Great Plains, Iowa, or in the south, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi. In fact eight of the top 13 industrial states on a per capita basis are located in the South; only one of these manufacturing hotbeds, North Carolina, supported the new president.

    In terms of industry, the auto industry represents the most difficult challenge. Great Lakes political leaders, like Michigan’s clueless Gov. Jennifer Granholm, now a top Obama advisor, will twist the new president’s arm to bail out the crippled U.S.-based auto manufacturers, essentially socializing the industry. Yet in bailing out Detroit, Obama could undermine a thriving, growing auto complex developing in the old Confederacy and along the southern rim of Midwest.

    Although also hit by the recession, companies like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes and BMW have brought unprecedented prosperity to these areas, which include some of historically poorest regions of the country. This is also where many of the most fuel-efficient “green” vehicles in America are being produced. The workers they employ may not belong to the unions so influential among liberals, but their interests matter mightily to Democrats as well as Republicans who represent them.

    Energy issues may be even more challenging from a regional perspective. The nation’s fossil fuel resources are heavily concentrated in the west and South, led by Wyoming, Alaska, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, North Dakota and Kentucky. Sen. Obama only took one of these states, New Mexico. The new president’s statements against coal and other fossil fuels were not popular in areas where these provide not only reliable low cost energy but also well-paying jobs.

    Not just oil-riggers, heartland miners and coal companies have an interest in an expansive approach to energy policy. If enacted, Obama’s “cap and trade” proposals could raise the cost of Midwestern energy, largely coal-based, by between 20 to 40 percent, according to a recent study by Bernstein Research. This would create yet another disadvantage for U.S. manufacturers, particularly against largely unregulated competitors in developing countries.

    In contrast, reliable and affordable domestic energy supplies from all sources – including from nuclear facilities – would be a major boon manufacturers across the country. Obama must recognize that many states with coal and oil reserves also possess strong wind and bioenergy potential. He should favor expansion of both. The resulting lower cost electrical power could boost an incipient electric car industry that may be the last, best hope for hard-pressed General Motors.

    Here’s another case where regional politics could prove sticky for Obama. Any attempt to boost non-renewable energy supplies would run into opposition from the largely coastally-centered green lobby. These groups generally oppose virtually any fossil fuel development, and most remain hostile to nuclear power. While well-intentioned, increasingly restrictive environmental regulations on manufacturing could push production to parts of the world with dirtier industries and over reliance on shipping long distances. The net reduction in carbon emissions, as a result would seem somewhat ephemeral.

    The current recession and falling energy prices could provide political cover for Obama to shift his energy policies. Hard times have already eroded support for strict curbs on greenhouse gases in Europe and strong advocacy for carbon taxes clearly hurt the Liberals in the recent Canadian elections. A similar reaction could also emerge in this country, excepting the deepest blue coastal enclaves.

    Finally there remains one other regional constituency that must be addressed, that of the financial community. Our analysis shows securities and commodity trading industries to be regionally concentrated, with the largest clusters in greater New York, vice President-elect Biden’s home state of Delaware, followed by New Hampshire and Illinois. They are all now bedrock “blue states” and backed Obama generally by large margins.

    Yet this presents yet another regional dilemma. Simply put, the rest of the country detests Wall Street. They see the bailout benefiting big players in cities like New York or Chicago, but doing little for smaller banks who do much of the lending outside the big money centers. This sentiment cuts across party lines, particularly in the West and South, as the initial anti-bailout votes in the House show.

    All presidents face such regional challenges in governing this vast and diverse country. The weak politicians, like George W. Bush, tend to fall back on an ever-narrower band of regional alliances that, once threatened, easily break apart.

    Transformative leaders, like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, learn to extend their appeal to as many industries and regions as possible. In the next four years, we will get to see what kind of leader Barack Obama intends to be.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.com

    Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of NewGeography.com. Mark Schill, a strategy consultant at the Praxis Strategy Group, is the site’s managing editor.

  • The Change We Need – Part II: Will We Sustain The Current Economy, Or Create A Sustainable Economy?

    Yesterday, Rick Cole discussed the theoretical basis for the most effective kinds of economic change. Today, he provides specific suggestions. – The Editors

    No brief outline can do justice to weaving together the potentially convergent strands that compose the key elements of the remaking of the American economy. None of the policy prescriptions here are original, but it is important to see them as complimentary parts of a larger whole:

    •GREEN BUSINESS: This means shifting from thinking of “green jobs” as being generated by alternative energy to an understanding that, in the decade ahead, every single job in the American economy will be “green”, as we ruthlessly pursue less wasteful, more sustainable and more productive business practices. This is primarily the domain of the private sector, but Federal policies that deal with taxes, regulations, research, purchasing and grant-making must all be tweaked to actively promote green practices, rather than inadvertently hinder them.

    •SMART GROWTH: The suburban, auto-dominated landscape of the past fifty years is not only unsustainable on a world-scale, it won’t work for a post peak oil, post carbon America. Alternate fuels are not enough, nor will public transit work in sprawled suburbs. Chicago is the headquarters for the Congress for the New Urbanism, a largely apolitical movement of architects, planners, developers and activists promoting a revival of traditional town and city building that emphasizes mixed-use, transit-oriented design at every scale of development from neighborhood to metropolis. While catching on in cities and states across the country, the movement remains largely marginalized in Washington. One exception is Congressman Earl Blumenauer, an early Obama backer from Portland, Oregon. Former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist has also laid out a program for reversing the Federal government’s half century of counter-productive policies.

    •REGIONALISM: Obama’s speech to the US Conference of Mayors embraced this powerful focus on metro regions as the engines of global growth. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution has been one of its leading theoreticians, and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros one of its most eloquent champions. Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Portland, Chattanooga and St. Louis have emerged as models for metro/suburban collaboration to promote infrastructure investment, economic development and land use planning. Europe has pioneered this kind of regional collaboration to stay competitive in the global economy. There is also a powerful social equity dimension to this movement, which ensures that inner cities will not be left of out the regional efforts to improve education, reinvest in older communities, and focus on the creation of high-wage, high-value jobs.

    •TRANSPORTATION: In 1991, Senator Pat Moynihan spearheaded the least-heralded major domestic policy shift of that decade, the landmark ISTEA omnibus transportation bill. Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration failed to follow up on it, and left highway expansion as the continuing Federal policy direction, instead of investing in matching the investment by all other advanced economies in both high-speed rail and public transit. This has been compounded by the Bush Administration’s embrace of libertarian market mechanisms for funding future transportation investment. This failure has fueled sprawl and its appetite for oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The new administration will need to start where ISTEA left off to rebuild our goods- and people-moving capacity 0n an environmentally and economically sustainable model.

    •HUMAN CAPITAL: Obama’s education program needs to be place-based in a way that directly ties into the drive to restore American competitiveness. Mayors around the country have followed the lead of Chicago’s Richard Daly in seeing the revival of K-12 schools as fundamental to restoring America’s great cities as engines of new wealth creation, and not just gentrified havens for young professionals amongst crime-ridden slums. One of Obama’s successes as an organizer was to establish a job training program in the projects. But without a national commitment to human capital, we won’t reduce the underclass, assimilate immigrants, and provide the workforce that can outperform the hard-working offshore workforce clamoring for what were once American jobs.

    •INNOVATION: Obama’s popularity in Silicon Valley mirrors his embrace of venture capital investment in American jobs. The Japanese failed to shake off their decade-long slump because they remained tied to “pork barrel” public works stimulation of their economy. Harnessing private investment and entrepreneurship to rebuild America’s cities, older suburbs and essential infrastructure is essential not only to economic success, but to political success as well. We must find a way to redeploy the huge brainpower and speculative investment that has gone into financing consumer debt and exotic credit mechanisms into rebuilding America’s cities and productive economy.

    •NEW ORLEANS: Of all of George Bush’s public relations stunts and policy failures, none is crueler than his broken promise to rebuild that city. Nothing would be a more powerful counter-point to those wasted years than to use the New Orleans region as a model for a rebuilt, muscular economy that puts people back to work in high-wage, high-value jobs. Of course, the default choice is tourism, gambling, and decay. But great cities are not primarily sinkholes for consumption. They’re centers of enterprise, trade and the generation of wealth.

    This is simply a superficial survey of the shape of a fundamental reshaping of the American landscape and economy that could emerge from the wrenching changes ahead. “Change we can believe in” will need to look beyond Washington and its sound bite pre-occupations and stale wedge issues. It will need to harness local movements, as well as Mayors, Council members, Governors, and State Legislators to experiment with and implement a new model throughout our federalist system. Obama carries the unique advantage of having been a community organizer and a state legislator. He can be the model and the inspiration for a broad-based movement for change that is not solely reliant on Washington politics or policy.

    The first 100 and the first 1000 days of the new administration will be a time of harsh testing, for Washington, and for the country. We are too big and complex a nation for any administration to chart a single course for our gargantuan economy and our diverse geography.

    But a clear course that favors investment in capacity over spending on consumption, and a commitment to sustainability over business as usual could have a profound impact on the shape of American metropolitan regions and the communities they contain. That is “the change we need”.

    Read: The Change We Need: Will We Sustain The Current Economy, Or Create A Sustainable Economy? Part I

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • The Change We Need: Will We Sustain The Current Economy, Or Create A Sustainable Economy? Part I

    The Change We Need will run in two parts. In Part I, Rick Cole lays out the kinds of changes we need, and why. Part II outlines his specific policy prescriptions.- The Editors

    Will this historic election alter the American physical landscape as well as the electoral one? Much will depend on whether the Obama Administration will focus on trying to revive the economy or move to reshape it.

    Bold leadership sounds great in the abstract, but embarking on profound changes in the economy is both politically risky and economically daunting. Government, especially the one the new president will inherit, is severely limited in its competence and capacity to reshape the American share of the global economy.

    The easier option is to minimize the “change we need,” and aim for a “kinder, gentler, greener and more regulated” version of the Enron economy bequeathed by President Bush. We may be facing the most profound economic crisis since Franklin Roosevelt took office, but so far, instead of investing in a more sustainable economy, the Democrats seem to be focused on a “stimulus” response to boost spending.

    This is essentially the path followed over the past two decades without success by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democrats. In reaction to the Japanese real estate and financial meltdown in 1989, the party essentially opted to “bail-out” the status quo. The cost has been nearly twenty years of economic anemia and political gridlock.

    As Japan found, a broken economy can’t be successfully “stimulated.” A patchwork of single-issue nostrums (alternative energy, public works spending, health care reform) will not put Americans back to work and America back on track.

    Why not? Why isn’t it possible to revive the Clinton formula for a soaring stock market, nearly full employment and low interest rates? The answer, of course, is that neither the global economic crisis nor America’s vulnerability are sudden or surprising. The problems are deep-seated and structural, and both Clinton and Bush steered around them by postponing difficult, but necessary sacrifices.

    The Republicans, of course, are most immediately and egregiously culpable. Their foreign wars, their reckless deficit spending, their unconscionable tax cuts, their laissez faire dismantling of so much of the middle class safety net, their disastrous energy policies, and their injection of cheap money into a housing/consumer spending bubble are all proximate causes of the stunning decline of American economic prowess. But the long-term, Democratic failure to chart a different course leaves the next president unprepared to offer a comprehensive alternative that makes sense in the global economy in which we now find ourselves.

    The inescapable mathematics of our situation is that America runs on $2 billion a day of money borrowed from abroad. That long-running profligacy has made us into the world’s largest debtor nation by far. For the first time in our history, we are in a position where we cannot reflate our way back to prosperity.

    The retooling of America we face will require a president with an approach as bold and flexible as the New Deal, and a re-investment in real places , instead of the exotic and deracinated instruments that Warren Buffett has derided as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

    The magnitude of the unfolding crisis offers glaring dangers and remarkable opportunities for embarking on a long-term rebuilding of our economy on a far more solid and sustainable foundation.

    One quickly forgotten episode in the campaign gives particular “hope” that Obama may ultimately choose the more difficult, but more promising, path. At a crucial juncture during his primary battle with Hillary Clinton, he bucked both her and John McCain and their blatant pander of a “gas tax holiday” to offset skyrocketing prices at the pump.

    “This is what passes for leadership in Washington,” he responded right before the important Indiana primary. “Phony ideas, calculated to win elections instead of actually solving problems.”

    He went on to acknowledge, “I wish I could stand up here and tell you that we could fix our energy problems with a holiday. I wish I could tell you that we can take a time-out from trade and bring back the jobs that have gone overseas. I wish I could promise that on day one of my presidency, I could pass every plan and proposal I’ve outlined in this campaign. But my guess is that you’ve heard those promises before. You hear them every year, in every election.”

    Such courageous “straight talk” must also acknowledge that we can’t work our way out of unprecedented levels of consumer and public debt by borrowing money. That way lies Argentina. President Obama is going to have to deliver big time on the somewhat hazy promise of rebuilding our economy with green jobs, but at a scale and scope that few have dared even suggest so far. He is going to have to do that in the face of almost irresistible political clamor to go the other direction: to somehow keep the casino economy going by cutting taxes, propping up banks, stimulating consumer spending, and keeping the American people on the job doing things that make our problems worse, from building freeways to financing more suburban subdivisions so we can continue to export a trillion dollars a year to oil exporting nations.

    Building a sustainable economy is such a huge, complicated, politically challenging endeavor, that it will take every bit of Obama’s personal charisma, and leadership abilities, and the backing of an unprecedented movement of support.

    Fortunately, however, there is a vast untapped source of innovative and promising ideas and practitioners working off the radar screen of the national political class in Washington and its small-minded media annex. They have laid out a framework for restoring American competitiveness that is based on investment rather than consumption – on sustainability rather than short-term fixes.

    Read: The Change We Need – Part II: Will We Sustain The Current Economy, Or Create A Sustainable Economy?

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • Two-Timing Telecommute Taxes

    Telecommuting — or telework — is a critical tool that can help employees, businesses and communities weather the current financial crisis, and thrive afterward. However, right now, the nation is burdened with a powerful threat to the growth of telework: the telecommuter tax. This tax is a state penalty imposed on Americans who work for employers outside their home states and sometimes telecommute.

    Proposed bi-partisan federal legislation called the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act would abolish the telecommuter tax. To help assure that the nation can take full advantage of the economic relief telework offers, Congress must pass this bill – either as stand-alone legislation or as part of a new economic stimulus package.

    Relief for Employees

    Working from home (or alternative sites close to home) can save struggling families money on gasoline, parking, train and bus fares, dry cleaning, business wardrobes and work-week meals. They can save on dependent care by providing some of the necessary care themselves during the time they previously spent commuting.

    Telework can also relieve the considerable strain on Americans nearing retirement who have unexpectedly lost their pensions and must now continue working. Working indefinitely may be a hardship for many older employees. Some may not be able, physically, to continue making a daily round-trip commute. Some may need to move closer to their adult children who live out-of-state, either to receive physical help from them, or to help them with child-care costs by baby-sitting. If Americans who have been robbed of their retirements can work from home at least some of the time, they can stay on the job without having to travel as often or live as close to their offices.

    Relief for Employers

    Employers (both public and private) can use telework to slash real estate and energy expenses. When fewer employees work on-site every day, employers need to rent, heat, cool and light less office space.

    Implementing telework can also reduce recruitment and turnover costs: Employers offering flexibility can attract top-tier candidates from a wide geographic area, and generate loyalty among valued employees.

    Telework can reduce business interruption costs when an emergency or other major disruption occurs near the main office. If, for example, a severe storm, fire, bomb threat or transit strike affects the employer’s area, a staff trained to work remotely can keep operations running smoothly.

    And organizations adopting telework can become more productive. Employees can replace commute time with work time; concentrate better because they are less exposed to the frequent interruptions typical in busy offices; reduce absenteeism by completing tasks at home instead of taking whole days off when they have to meet non-work responsibilities, like caring for sick children, and reduce “presenteeism”, the phenomenon of employees showing up at the office when they are too sick to be productive and are likely to compromise the health and productivity of co-workers.

    Relief for Communities

    Telework can bring new Internet-based jobs to rural areas with sagging economies. It can also bring new home buyers to such regions: Americans who want to maintain their high paced, big-city careers in a slower paced, more scenic environment. A significant growth in the population of home-based workers in these communities can also produce growth in businesses catering to their needs, such as home office supply stores and business service providers.

    The Telecommuter Penalty Tax

    Despite the important help telework can provide during and after the financial meltdown, states may punish nonresident teleworkers by subjecting them to a telecommuter tax. New York has been particularly aggressive on this front.

    Under the “convenience of the employer” rule, when a nonresident of New York and his New York employer agree that the employee may sometimes work from home, New York will tax him on his entire income, both the income he earns when he works in New York, and the income he earns when he works at home, in a different state. Because telecommuters’ home states can also tax the wages telecommuters earn at home, they are taxed twice on those wages.

    In some cases, a telecommuter’s home state may give him a credit for the taxes he pays New York on the income he earns at home. However, even in such cases, the employee may be penalized for telecommuting. When New York taxes income at a higher rate than the home state, the telecommuter must pay taxes on his home state income at the higher rate.

    By subjecting nonresident employees to double or excessive taxation if they telecommute, a state like New York needlessly limits the strategies available for coping with our ailing economy.

    Harm to Employers

    By deterring telework, the telecommuter tax frustrates businesses trying to decentralize their workers and prevents them from exploiting telework’s business benefits.

    In addition, the hefty payroll obligations the telecommuter tax imposes on businesses can force companies to relocate. Indeed, The New York Times reported this year on a small business that planned to leave New York because tackling the state’s claims under the convenience of the employer rule proved too draining. (See David S. Joachim, “Telecommuters Cry ‘Ouch’ to the Tax Gods,” The New York Times, Special Section on Small Business, Feb. 20, 2008.)

    Further, by thwarting the growth of telework, the telecommuter tax encourages traffic congestion, a menace to productivity. Excessive traffic can, for example, cause employees to arrive late for work and delay customer deliveries.

    Harm to States

    In addition to employees and employers, telecommuters’ states of residence also suffer under the telecommuter tax. Consider a Virginia resident who telecommutes most of the time to his New York employer. If Virginia grants the telecommuter a credit for taxes paid to New York on his home state income, Virginia forfeits its tax revenue to New York. In so doing, Virginia effectively subsidizes public services in New York (like transportation, police, fire and other emergency services) while it makes the same services available to its resident who is working in Virginia. States currently struggling with steep budgetary shortfalls cannot afford to cede their own revenue to other states. The employee who telecommutes, meanwhile, suffers under a reduced budget for home state spending.

    Even the state imposing the tax loses. In addition to driving business away, New York’s telework tax policy can drive part-time telecommuters away. Because the convenience of the employer rule applies only to nonresidents who spend time working in New York, nonresidents can avoid the rule by avoiding the state: They can increase their telecommuting from part-time to full-time, or take jobs in their home states. When nonresidents stop traveling to New York for work, New York gives up the opportunity to tax any of their wages, and New York restaurants, hotels and other businesses lose the income these teleworkers would have generated on their commuting days.

    The Remedy

    The Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act would eliminate these ills, prohibiting states like New York from taxing the income nonresidents earn at home in other states.

    The bill has bi-partisan support in both Houses of Congress, including the support of lawmakers from Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi and Virginia. Outside Congress, the measure has been endorsed by advocates for telecommuters, taxpayers, homeowners and small businesses.

    To help assure that the greatest number of employees and businesses can maximize telework’s economic benefits – during the current crisis and afterward – Congress should pass the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act. Whether as an addition to a new stimulus package or in a separate measure, Washington must see to it that telecommuter tax fairness becomes the law.

  • Appalachia and Energy

    When I think of the energy crisis, I cannot help but think of the poignant story of Martin Toler. A victim of the Sago Mine disaster, he was found sitting alongside his 12 fellow miners in darkness. Deep in the heart of the earth he wrote a note to his family as air and time was running out: “Tell all that I’ll see them on the other side,” read the note found lying beside his body. “It wasn’t bad. I just went to sleep. I love you.”

    Toler’s incredible courage to care for family first in the face of certain death reflects some of the Appalachian culture. Yet the region has struggled from the beginning of its settlement. It has almost always been poor. The world of small towns in Appalachia stands light years from the “flat” world of Friedman or the green certainties of elite urbanites.

    Not surprisingly, we find it hard to simply dismiss coal and other fossil fuels with such aplomb. Inez, Kentucky, the birthplace of LBJ’s War on Poverty in 1964, has struggled over the years with the boom and bust of the coal business. And, despite the news media insistence that it isn’t doing well, its unemployment rate is well below that of other more “successful” communities.

    We look at the revival of coal as a potential source of economic sustenance for our communities. This does not mean we have to abandon the environment or the strict safety standards that might have saved Martin Toler. But neither do people there want to abandon their towns and the ability to make a good living for their families.

    Marvin Toler and his fellow miners lived through the boom and bust of the energy cycles. They lived through bitter debates over mine safety, unscrupulous and/or absentee owners, black lung, mine disasters brought on by lax standards, slurry spills and mountaintop removal. Yet mining has also provided a good living for people and a way to keep the towns we love alive.

    Our hope is that energy could revive our communities. Perhaps we can rewrite the story of coal through standards that make mining safer and technology that can make it cleaner. Our greatest hope is that, with American ingenuity and Appalachian persistence, we can think up new and alternative sources of energy right in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains.

    Marvin Toler didn’t have to go far to convince me of the strong stock and strength of him and his forebears. As the American dream undergoes renovation, I need go no further than Toler’s last words, scribbled in darkness but full of hope, strength, resilience and love – all qualities that remain true even in our bewildering world. His words transcend the YouTube culture and go to the heart of the matter. Perhaps that mountain fortitude of his is the perfect quality for starting a new energy revolution.

    Appalachia will always be about the rugged sorts who settled there. Those who worked the mines and tilled the soil did not ask for much. They worked hard and didn’t count the cost or avoid taking risks. Coal could be part of that future, but the spirit of this place could also extend to other tasks that need smart, tough and risk-taking folks. We don’t need to become more dependent on the coal mines, but we think they can be part of creating a new wave of opportunity for our communities – if we can find the will.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents.

  • Global Warming Cooling?

    Back when the media was more obsessed with the state of global warming than the state of global lending, the environmental movement appeared completely ascendant. But with economic concerns in both Europe and North America on rise, their premier issue of global warming seems to be losing some of its political cache.

    A good account of what’s happening both in Canada and Europe can be found in the green blog, Breakthrough. There’s even some advanced thinking here about the need to make something like a “carbon tax” a spur to economic growth. On target for the most part, Greens seem to have a problem thinking about the economy. Like John McCain, it’s not their strong point.

    These shifts in popular concerns, as well as the real estate downturn, create an odd atmosphere for the kind of restrictive legislation discussed in Wendell Cox’s timely article. Still there remains a great temptation – justified or not by the facts – to use global warming as a means of imposing the perennial anti-suburban agenda of some planners, large urban developers, smart growth advocates and urbanists.

    Perhaps it is a good strategy for density advocates to push their case now when it all seems so theoretical and builders are still walking around in shock. It may take years to absorb vacant condo towers as well as newly foreclosed single family houses. Only when the economy turns around will the conflict over what actually is greenest – as well as most market friendly – intensify again.

  • Regulating People or Regulating Greenhouse Gases?

    It seems very likely that a national greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction standard will be established by legislation in the next year. Interest groups are lining up with various proposals, some fairly benign and others potentially devastating.

    One of the most frequently mentioned strategies – mandatory vehicle miles reductions – is also among the most destructive. It is predictably supported by the same interests that have pushed the anti-automobile (and anti-suburban) agenda for years, often under the moniker of “smart growth.”

    Regrettably, these interests have never understood the economic importance of rapid travel – mobility – throughout the nation’s urban areas. Indeed, one of the factors that makes American metropolitan areas so competitive is that, judging by work trips, travel times are the best in the world for their population. The secret to that success is the ubiquitous mobility of the automobile, which allows people to travel from virtually any point to any other in an urban area in a relatively short period of time. It also helps that automobile travel has become so inexpensive that it is available to more than 90 percent of the nation’s households. Restrictions on driving would change that.

    At this point, it is unclear exactly how any attempt to restrict driving might be implemented. It is clear, however, that the consequences will weigh most heavily on the nation’s lower-income, disproportionately-minority households. Any price mechanism would put limits first on the low income households who cannot afford the higher prices. At the same time, attempts to reduce the demand for automobile use by forcing more new development into existing urban footprints (urban areas) would make traffic congestion more severe, increase travel times and intensify air pollution. This approach would fall more harshly on low income households simply because housing prices (and rents) would rise disproportionately in urban areas as the option of opening new suburban developments on inexpensive land is removed or severely restricted.

    Mobility is crucial to the economic viability of urban areas and to their citizens, rich and poor. It does no good to claim that alternative transit services will be provided, because they generally cannot compete. According to data from the 2007 American Community Survey, the average transit work trip takes twice as long as the average single-occupant automobile work trip. This means that the average commuter would spend at least an additional eight hours traveling to and from work in a week.

    For low income households, this could mean the difference between employment and unemployment. How will a low-income single parent, for example, drop children off at day care centers and continue to work by transit? It might be considered a fortunate case if this could be accomplished in triple the time of the automobile commute.

    These dynamics were further demonstrated when University of California Berkeley researchers concluded that African-American unemployment could be substantially reduced if cars were available to non-car households. Brookings researchers put it more directly: “Given the strong connection between cars and employment outcomes, auto ownership programs may be one of the more promising options.” Or, as a Progressive Policy Institute report suggested, “In most cases, the shortest distance between a poor person and a job is along a line driven in a car.”

    There is good reason to believe that technological solutions will make it possible for us – including low income households – to continue to live our lives as we do now while substantially reducing GHG emissions. People are already driving less and shifting to more fuel-efficient cars. Volkswagen plans to market 1,000 prototype 235 mile per gallon cars in 2010. They are only two-seaters but could be used for a large share of travel. If, in 2030, one-quarter of US car travel was by such cars, the average fuel economy would be about 75 miles per gallon and concern about cars as a source of GHG emissions would be a thing of the past. And this does not even consider the alternative fuel advances – electric cars, natural gas, hydrogen – that are on the horizon.

    There is a broader problem with the idea of restricting driving. This strategy is less about the environment and more about regulating people’s behavior. It is not people that require regulation, it is GHG emissions. There is a subtle but important difference.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Old Manhattan Had a Farm

    Old Manhattan had a farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O

    As a child of the early Sixties, I fondly remember the days when colossal albeit stupid technological projects were fashionable. I remember in particular a cartoon that showed a subway running from the U.S. to China right through the center of the earth. Of course, this brings to mind Thoreau’s quip that, while the telegraph might connect Maine to Texas, would Maine and Texas have anything to say to each other? But the very point of the trans-core subway was its pointlessness. If titanic, useless engineering projects like the Hoover Dam are impressive, then how much more impressive are titanic, useless engineering projects!

    In the Seventies, thanks to environmentalism, grand engineering projects fell out of favor. E. F. Schumacher and J. R. Tolkein were the new gods. Skyscrapers and dams were passe. Utopia was a sod-roofed hobbit hole designed by Amory Lovins. But human fascination with large-scale projects could not be satisfied by designing high-tech composting bins in the backyard. So now we have the arrival of something new: It’s the gee-whiz engineering boondoggle of yesteryear resurrected with a thin veneer of greenwash turning it into… Call it a greendoggle.

    Inside a high-rise was that farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O

    Scientific American, a once-sober magazine that seems to be going down-market along with National Geographic, has just published its own flashy Earth 3.0 issue, with stories like “MisLEEDING? When Green Architecture isn’t Green” and “China’s Eco-City.” On page 74 you will find “GROWING VERTICAL”: Cultivating crops in downtown skyscrapers might save bushels of energy and provide city dwellers with distinctively fresh food.” The hero of the article is Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist at Columbia University, who proposes growing food downtown in glass-walled buildings.

    Scientific American, of course, gushes over the idea as a way to plan “more sustainable cities,“ sustainability being the ultimate planning buzzword of the moment. A brief internet search reveals widespread discussion of vertical farming—not only Professor Despommier’s vertical farms and feedlots, but proposals for raising produce on green roofs downtown.

    At first sight, the idea seems plausible. True, vertical farming would be a non-starter if urban rents were higher than rural rents. But we all know that land is just as cheap in downtown Manhattan as it is in rural Nebraska, right? One wonders, though, why farming moved off the island a more than a century ago.

    Professor Despommier claims that food grown indoors would be pesticide-free, unlike that dirty outdoor produce. Once again, totally plausible. Big American cities are as free of rats and roaches as Ireland is of snakes. The Museum of Natural History has a glass case containing the last rat found in New York City, way back before World War I. (Just don’t look down at the tracks when you are waiting for a subway).

    But then if we admit there are millions of rats and billions of roaches, then the crops growing in vertical farms would have to be protected by enough rat and roach poison to kill Xerxes’ army. Fortunately, in rat- and roach-free urban America, that is not a consideration. And even if it were, we would not need to worry that health inspectors would be bribed to overlook the rodent droppings and roach eggs in our tenth-story grown arugula. The civil servants in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia are known worldwide for their incorruptibility.

    With some algae here
    And some chickens there

    Still, I do worry about the urban politicians. It’s bad enough that a mayor can pressure landlords to provide a girlfriend with an apartment for a discount. What will happen when members of the City Council start twisting the arms of realtors to give them discounts on eight-storey vertical ranchettes on Central Park West? Who needs to go to the Hamptons, when you can have your own rent-control winery on the penthouse floor?

    And then there’s the matter of competition for housing downtown. For a decade, would-be homeowners in big cities have seen prices driven up by speculators, who buy condos and then keep them empty until they can flip them. Will would-be condo owners now have to compete for airy downtown lofts with Archer Daniels Midland?

    Here a cell
    There a cell
    Everywhere a solar cell

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m for the industrialization of agriculture. I don’t doubt that, a century or two from now, much of the human diet will come from in vitro meat and fruit and vegetables, grown indoors in clean laboratory conditions and laced with the appropriate vitamins and amino acids. Back in the 1920s, before they led their nations, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt both predicted laboratory-grown food in their popular writings, and it’s coming. But, for the most part, the food labs of the twenty-second century like the robot factories will be located where land is cheap, in distant rural areas or in the outer exurban expanses of the metropolis.

    Oops, I forgot, acreage is cheap in downtown Manhattan. Never mind.

    Old Manhattan had a farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O

    Professor Despommier’s skyscraper farms, and the community gardens on top of the Sears Tower, solve two worrisome non-problems which together create an urgent un-crisis. The first non-problem is the alleged lack of fresh produce in present-day supermarkets, a problem that doesn’t exist in any grocery store I’ve patronized anywhere in this country. The second non-problem is the alleged loss of wilderness to agriculture. In fact, thanks to the increasing efficiency of American agriculture, more food is grown on less land all the time. Some retired farmland goes to suburbs and exurbs, but the majority of it is being reforested. The wilderness is devouring farmland in North America, not vice versa.

    But that’s the nature of a boondoggle, and the coming thing, the greendoggle. It’s an overly-elaborate technological answer to a nonexistent problem.

    Why do such ideas get such attention in the prestige press? I think the answer lies in the psychology of America’s urban overclass. Deep down the urban trust-funders and professionals want the “urban archipelago” to secede from the rest of the United States. The sooner they become self-sufficient in terms of food, the sooner they can build walls around their post-American city-states. Then, when peak oil leads to the apocalyptic crash of automobile civilization, the urbanites can pull up the draw-bridges. From the safety of their hydroponic penthouses they can look through telescopes at the besieging mob of working-class hinterlanders with potbellies and bad hairdos. Who in that day of reckoning would not rather be downtown? After all, the hinterlanders will control only the farms, factories, mines and working population, but the urbanites will have…will have…worthless pieces of paper….

    Hmmm. Back to the drawing board.

    Old Manhattan had a farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O
    Inside a high-rise was that farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O
    With some algae here
    And a koi pond there
    Here a cell
    There a cell
    Everywhere a solar cell
    Old Manhattan had a farm
    Ee-yi ee-yi O

    Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author, with Ted Halstead, of “The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics” (Doubleday, 2001). He is also the author of “Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics” (New America Books/Basic, 2003) and “What Lincoln Believed” (Doubleday, 2005). Mr. Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic. From 1991 to 1994, he was executive editor of The National Interest.

  • Guzzling BTUs: Problems with Public Transit in an Age of Expensive Gas

    As gas prices inch up toward $5 per gallon, many environmentalists and elected officials are looking to public transit as a solution to higher transportation costs and rising fuel consumption. A closer look at the numbers, however, warrants more than a little skepticism that public transit can fulfill the nation’s energy conservation goals.

    The US transportation sector is a voracious consumer of fuel, accounting for 28 percent of all energy use in 2006 according to the US Department of Transportation. Petroleum products account for 95 percent of this consumption. Naturally, those interested in conserving natural resources, fossil fuels in particular, would want to focus on reducing oil use. Moving people out of cars and onto public transit seems to make intuitive sense.

    It turns out, however, moving people to transit may not be the best strategy after all. According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, a typical transit bus uses 4,235 btu per passenger mile, 20 percent more energy per passenger mile than a passenger car. More interestingly, the amount of energy used by cars has fallen to 3,512 per passenger mile in 2006, an 18 percent drop since 1980. In contrast, the amount of energy used by transit buses increased by 50 percent over the same period, rising to 4,235 btus per passenger mile. Light trucks were not quite so energy friendly as energy use fell by nearly one third to 6,904 btus per passenger mile (although their energy efficiency has remained stable since the mid-1990s).

    The long term trend toward more fuel efficient private vehicles is likely to continue as more and more energy-frugal cars such as gasoline-electric hybrids and electric plug-in vehicles become more popular. The Toyota Prius sold its one millionth vehicle in 2008 as it achieved mass production status. Sixty-five hybrid models are expected to be on the US market by the 2010 model year, nearly tripling the current number available. Moreover, all-electric vehicles such as the Tesla sports car are expected to become more popular as consumers become more accepting of personal vehicles fueled by non-traditional technologies. (Notably, Toyota is experimenting with solar panels on new generations of the Prius.)

    These trends, of course, don’t imply that fuel consumption has declined overall. On the contrary, US motorists are consuming 75.4 million gallons of fuel each year, up 7.8 percent from 1980. Yet, this is remarkably stable trend given the fact vehicle mile traveled have increased by 49 percent since then. Travel demand has more than doubled for light trucks and similar vehicles while fuel consumption by these vehicles increased by just 59 percent. Efficiency gains, then, have effectively compensated for large shares of the increase in travel demand, dramatically reducing the amount of energy used for each mile driven.

    Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for public transit. While transit ridership has increased significantly over the past year, climbing to 10.3 billion trips during the first quarter of 2008 according to the American Public Transit Association, the overall effect on the travel market has been modest. Long-term, transit’s market share for all travel fell from 1.5 percent in 1980 to 1 percent in 2005. Transit’s market share for work trips has fallen to 5 percent overall. Meanwhile, the public transit infrastructure – buses, route miles, etc. – has remained largely intact. That means more buses are transporting fewer people, significantly curtailing public transit’s energy efficiency. Not surprisingly, the energy intensity for public transit increased on average by 1.5 percent per year from 1970 to 2006.

    The story is a little different for passenger rail, which carries about half of the nation’s public transit riders (although national data are dominated by ridership in New York City). Transportation consultant Wendell Cox has calculated the energy intensity for other modes of transit in 2005 and found that commuter, heavy, and light rail transit used significantly less energy per passenger mile (about 40%) than public bus or passenger cars.

    Yet, the prospect for reducing energy use significantly by improving rail transit’s market share of overall travel is slim. Despite double-digit increases, light rail ridership accounts for just 3.4 percent of transit passenger miles nationally . In contrast, commuter and heavy rail ridership growth was just 5.7 percent and 4.4 percent respectfully. Moreover, increased ridership for rail services depend on the availability of other transit services, most notably feeder bus routes as well as urban densities that are difficult to sustain outside a few major cities such as New York, Chicago, or Boston.

    Thus, as a practical matter, public transit is unlikely to provide a meaningful solution to reduced energy use in transportation. This becomes clear after looking at travel behavior in the wake of the increase in gas prices over the past year. Overall, public transit ridership increased just 3.3 percent. If we convert ridership into passenger miles traveled – a distance-based rather than trip-based measure – a 3.3 percent increase translates into 1.6 billion passenger miles over the course of a year. That may seem like a big number, until it’s compared to overall US travel.

    As gas prices went up, US automobile travelers eliminated 112 billion passenger miles from our roadways as vehicle miles traveled fell by 2.3 percent. Even if we assume all the increased transit ridership was accounted for by the migration of automobile travelers to public transit, buses and trains captured fewer than 2 percent of the reduction in automobile-based travel demand.

    Thus, in the end, those seeking ways to promote energy conservation are still relying on market forces to affect behavior and resource use. Higher-income consumers value mobility, and automobiles provide the flexibility and adaptability they demand. As energy prices rise, incentives to provide resource stingy alternatives such as hybrid and electric only vehicles increases, stimulating even further innovation that bring down costs over the long run. Meanwhile, contrary to public perception, as fewer segments of the population rely on fixed route transit systems, the relative energy efficiency of public transit declines.

    Samuel R. Staley, Ph.D., is director of urban and land use policy at Reason Foundation and co-author of “The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think and What We Can Do About It” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). He can be contacted at sam.staley@reason.org.