In a recent column
in The Wichita Eagle, I talked about
how, much more than any particular candidate being elected to the city council
or as mayor in next week’s election, my fondest hopes are tied to whether or
not any of those candidates might read a book, and take seriously the message
inside it. The book is Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity.
Why this book? Let me explain.
First, the big picture. Over half of all the people on Earth live in cities. In the United States, over 80% of the population counts as “urban”; in Kansas that number is a little smaller: only 68%. And to be sure, much of that urban territory is suburban or exurban. But still, it represents a concentration of population that allows America’s cities to socially and economically outclass all their surrounding areas. (Remember that the voting majority which put Laura Kelly in the governor’s mansion is concentrated in exactly 9 of Kansas’s 105 counties.) This, of course, is nothing new–the movement from the countryside to the city has been slowly but steadily increasing for over 150 years, and scholars and politicians of every stripe have been talking about the consequences of urbanization on everyday life for nearly as long.
But for all those changes,
municipalities are still very much dependent bodies. In the U.S., like in most
of the world, cities are generally not legally empowered as communities that
can govern themselves; their laws, their economies, and so much more are
instead restricted by higher levels of government (in our case, state and
federal). The result is that the financial tools available to them are limited.
Thus as cities grow, create more opportunities, attract more diverse
populations, and are consequently invested with more responsibilities by those
who flock to them, they find themselves pressured to commit to, and even often
treat as perfectly ordinary business, what are, in actual fact, highly
unsustainable practices.
Specifically, most cities in
America–absent a major source of federal revenue or a powerful tourist-based
local economy—end up dependent upon the promise of new sales and property tax
revenue from a never-ending series of debt-driven development schemes. These
development schemes invariably carry with them enormous infrastructure
liabilities–the cost of the roads, sewer pipes, and electric grid which must be
extended with almost any extensive construction project–which, even if the
promised tax revenue arrives (and if often doesn’t), cities will never be able
to pay off. These looming, budget-busting costs, unfortunately, tend to just
make most cities even more desperate to expand, creating ever-more financial
incentives and entanglements, all in the hopes of attracting enough businesses
capable of paying just enough taxes on their new developments so as to persuade
investors to purchase more municipal bonds, thus keeping the cycle going.
This is a reductive portrait of
America’s cities, to be sure; there are many aspects to the above pattern, and
many exceptions to it as well. Still, one of the great values of Marohn’s book
is how clearly he demonstrates the pervasiveness of this particular kind of
Ponzi scheme. Surely anyone attentive to Wichita’s built environment can think
of examples that it arguably encapsulates, or at least is relevant to: the reconstruction
of Naftzger Park, the relocation
of Cargill’s headquarters, the building
of the new baseball stadium, and more. This isn’t to say that all
tax-increment financing, corporate partnerships, and land deals which went into
any of the above need to be condemned; Marohn doesn’t believe that, and neither
do I. But it is the case that such
arrangements are, when all the hidden costs are added in, pretty fragile, with
consequences that an already overbuilt, slow-growth city like Wichita-whatever
our growth-obsessed
mayor may insist, there is every reason to assume that Wichita’s population
and wealth is going to increase at no
more than 1% to 3% a year for a long time to come-needs to wrestle with.
Hence, my recommendation of the book.
It’s not as though there aren’t
individuals in our city government and elsewhere who recognize this and are
working hard to incrementally introduce greater fiscal and environmental
sustainability into Wichita’s development pattern. You can see their efforts in
every bike
path (the more people ride bikes, the less they drive, and the slower those
who do drive will do, all of which leads to roads that last longer) and every farmers
market (the more people can buy healthy food in the city, the more they’ll
stay in their neighborhoods, leading to greater density and fewer costly edge
developments). Even on our city council, there are those who will occasionally
push against the usual way of thinking about the problem of growth. For
example, councilman James Clendenin used the resources
of the city to help preserve, make financially viable, and protect from new
construction the Starlite Drive-In, a beloved Wichita institution, and
councilwoman Becky Tuttle, before her election, was essential to bringing Chuck
Marohn and his
message to city leaders just last year. For all that, though, the pressure
of what Marohn rightly calls the “Infrastructure Cult” is hard to resist; as we
all know, when developers put the promise of “economic engines” that
“apartments, office space, retail and hotels” will supposedly
provide, well, the default pattern often rears its head. When a
small-scale, low-revenue, but successful community operation in a historic
building downtown—I mean the much-missed Mead’s Corner, of course—stands in the
way of developers promising a shiny new building (with some necessarily upgraded
and expensive additional infrastructure, of course), our city council’s vote in
favor of the latter is, unfortunately, predictable.
And really, I can understand
city leaders thinking that our city has no alternative but to craft financing
deals this way. Their assumption might be that, on the one hand, we’re not
small and self-sufficient enough to break away from these patterns and chart
our own collective path, and on the other hand, we’re not large and wealthy
enough to launch alternative funding approaches within our own footprint. Sure,
Oklahoma City took the time and built the political support necessary to pay
for their new stadium and riverfront developments with taxes, without any
outstanding bonds or debt–but we’re not as blessed with generous oil companies
as they are, and the last proposed sales tax here was strongly rejected back in
2014. So Wichita, to keep itself growing, just needs to keep finagling whatever
financial inducements it can, right?
I don’t have a good response to that, and I don’t demand that all the candidates for mayor or city council all come up with complete responses either. But it’s pretty clear that at least some of them are more willing to at least keep the hard questions which Marohn poses in mind. Those are the candidates which deserve our support, I think. Moreover, whoever is elected, as voters who care about Wichita’s long-term future, we have the responsibility to remind them of those questions when they seem to forget about them. Which means, of course, that we should all read Marohn’s book too.
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