Month: April 2009

(More from “The Next City” conference last weekend in Cambridge, sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. I encountered blogus interruptus when my Mac laptop went on strike. I’m doing a series of notebook-dumping posts.)

Continuing the theme of quotable economists: Jeff Chapman, professor of applied public finance of Arizona State, who researches state and local government finance, gave a rundown of what he called “tax myths.” Herewith:

1. All states are the same.
2. Tax breaks for economic development are worthwhile. His position is that almost always the companies would locate there anyway and that taxes are a lesser consideration for those corporate decisions.
3. Property taxes are regressive. (A regressive tax disproportionatelys hurt lower-income people. Sales taxes are regressive. The income tax is progressive, as in wealthier people pay proportionately higher rates.) Chapman is a fan of the property tax because it’s stable, hard for people to evade, and promotes local government. ” …and it is really unpopular,” he concedes.
4. Not taxing e-commerce is good.
5. Housing impact fees are always shifted to the buyer. Most empirical evidence, he said, shows that isn’t true. And, he asks, if housing impact fees could be shifted so easily to the buyers, why are the plaintiffs in cases challenging them always the developers?

(More from “The Next City” conference last weekend in Cambridge. I encountered blogus interruptus when my Mac laptop went on strike. I’m doing a series of notebook-dumping posts.)

One more from Wellesley College economist Chip Case. Then, later today when my other opinion-writing duties are finished, I’ll dive into such topics as the myth that housing impact fees are always shifted to homebuyers.

Do you get the sense Case likes to skewer conventional wisdom? He opined on the belief, particularly dear to some political conservatives, that the Community Reinvestment Act is what caused all those mortgage companies to give mortgages to unqualified people.

Now before you go off on me, I’m not saying the Democrats were blameless. The ideal of homeownership has been up there with apple pie, motherhood and the American flag for many Americans for many years, nudged along by Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, social policymaker wonks and numerous homebuilder and Realtor associations. Everyone seemed to accept as given truth that homeownership is the ticket to wealth, stable neighborhoods and family values. Which is one reason — among many — that the out-of-control mortgages didn’t get nearly enough scrutiny from people who might have stopped it.

This is about the Community Reinvestment Act, a Carter-era federal banking law that applied to banks (not to hedge funds or mortgage brokers or insurance companies) and required them to make loans to qualified customers in poor and minority neighborhoods and to ensure banks were serving those neighborhoods. It clearly was not perfectly enforced, or you’d see a heckuva lot more Wachovias or BofA branches in Charlotte’s poorer neighborhoods. But I digress. If you were a bank looking at buying another bank, the feds would look to see if you were following the CRA, and if not, perhaps might not let you make that acquisition.

Justin, who commented on the previous post, hopes we (the country) are finally getting it together.

(To fill you in: I’m at a conference on “The Next City” in Cambridge, MA, sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Nieman Foundation and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.) We’re now listening to economist Chip Case of Wellesley University, creator of the Case-Shiller Index of real estate. More about him later.)

Keith Schneider — a Michigan-based writer and blogger (ModeShift.org) who free-lances for the New York Times and founded the Michigan Land Use Institute — opined that unless the country does get its act together, the whole country will be like Michigan. That is, suffering deeply.

By getting its act together, he means stronger transit and not jettisoning the already-built infrastructure in cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, and building in ways that aren’t as expensive for public infrastructure as the years of low-density sprawl growth has been.

He noted that the problems the whole country is now seeing, such as foreclosures and declining incomes, were first visible in the outer-outer suburbs of Detroit. (And, I should add, in the new starter home subdivisions ringing Charlotte.)

Leonard Pitts, the Miami Herald’s Pulitzer-winning columnist, is in town today. He spoke to a breakfast sponsored by the nonprofit group Mecklenburg Citizens for Public Education, or MeckEd (http://www.mecked.org/ ). This afternoon he’ll visit the staff at The Observer.

In 2007 Pitts wrote a series, “What Works,” in which he highlighted more than a dozen successful efforts around the country to help children and schools. One was from Gaston, N.C. (a town near Roanoke Rapids on northeastern North Carolina, not nearby Gaston County) and featured a KIPP Academy.

“How do you change something many of us long ago learned to take for granted?” he asked the crowd. And, “If we know what works, why not just do it?”

He quoted an ancient Greek saying: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”

In other words, get involved where you can, doing what you can.

He’s not the first to note this, but it’s still true: A strong public education system is important for the local economy, for keeping businesses healthy and for the fiscally prudent goal of keeping local people engaged in productive lives and out of jail. It’s not just a feel-good thing, Pitts said, but a common-sense mathematical calculation.

Yet if you read the comments section of this blog or many online sites, anytime the public schools emerge as a topic, and they’re filled with hostility toward Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in particular and public schools in general. Which is, at bottom, incredibly counter-productive for the whole community. Nothing is perfect, but invective doesn’t help anyone improve anything and indeed, tends to have the opposite effect.

Has my kid had some bad teachers at CMS? You bet. Been in class with a few deeply troubled kids? Yep. Do CMS administrators make occasionally silly decisions? Of course. Why should they be different from managers everywhere? (I say that as a former department head, where made my share of dumb decisions.) None of those problems is specific to CMS or even to public schools.

Yet there’s a vein of what seems to approach hatred running through parts of Charlotte, toward its public schools that too often drowns out an equally strong vein of support.

MeckEd hopes to start a community discussion on public education. Here’s a link to their new discussion board, being run with help from the Crossroads Charlotte initiative.

And don’t forget DonorsChoose.org, where you can put your money to good use helping classroom teachers who really need the help.

The News & Observer reports that N.C. transportation officials are optimistic that the Charlotte-Raleigh-Washington route will fare well in snagging some of those $8 billion in stimulus money for high-speed rail, and that it’s one of six corridors feds have said are likely candidates for the first stimulus funds to be distributed later this year. (Associated Press report here.) If that’s the case, then kudos to North Carolina for having worked for years to try to keep alive the idea of high-speed inter-city rail travel, even during years when many taxpayers thought the idea was just a waste of money.

I’m just back from a week spent traveling by rail in and around New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC. Took commuter rail from NYC to Princeton. Took heavy rail (that would be the subway) around Manhattan. Took Amtrak from NYC to DC. It was easy. It was fast. It was environmentally prudent. It was more convenient than flying — downtown to downtown. And the whole time I was on the train I didn’t worry a bit about landing in the Hudson River.

Does inter-city rail cost money? You betcha. But so do our taxpayer-built airports (don’t forget the air traffic control system), as well as the interstate highway system, with which we are all busily polluting our atmosphere (possibly destroying the global environment as we do so, though I think I’ll be dead before we know whether that’s really what we’re doing) and enriching some Middle Eastern potentates I’d just as soon not enrich. Everything’s a trade-off.

UNCC’s planned uptown building (above)

Good news for N.C. architect Phil Freelon. His firm, the Freelon Group, has been named to a team that will design the Smithsonian’s new Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall. David Adjaye, an up-and-coming young architect from London, will be lead designer. The Freelon Group is also designing Charlotte’s now-under-construction Afro-American Cultural Center, to be named for architect and former Mayor Harvey Gantt.

Speaking of Gantt, he was one of the many glitterati (such as we have in Charlotte) at the UNC Charlotte groundbreaking on Monday for the 12-story building at 9th and Brevard streets uptown. Among the folks who spoke or whom I spotted in the crowd: UNC system president Erskine Bowles, UNCC trustees chair Ruth Shaw, Mayor Pat McCrory, City Council members Patsy Kinsey, Anthony Foxx and Andy Dulin, county commissioners’ chair Jennifer Roberts, ex-BofA exec Dennis Rash, former First Union CEO Cliff Cameron, retailers Al and Leon Levine, and a string of city staffers including City Manager Curt Walton.

And if the firepower assembled at that party tent makes any difference, you should put money on the northeast transit corridor — an extension of the existing Blue Line — being renamed the Green Line, after UNCC’s colors. References to the “green line” drew enthusiastic applause.