Another lesson from Caro: the importance of robust local news coverage

One less obvious lesson of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (which I wrote about last week) is about the value of old-fashioned, shoe-leather local reporting in exposing corruption. Several of his most powerful sections recounted the neighborhood deterioration caused by the Gowanus Expressway and the blatantly destruction to families and the Bronx from the Cross-Bronx Expressway. His anger at the lack of on-the-ground news reporting from the multiple New York newspapers of the time seemed to leap off the pages at me.

Today, in my city of Charlotte, local news reporting is a fading art, because of the destruction of the revenue base for city newspapers all over the country.  Worry, if you want, about the New York Times (which back in the day appears to have ignored most of what Caro was writing about), but I worry a lot more about the hundreds of newspapers in cities like Charlotte, Raleigh, Portland, Charleston (which just won a Pulitzer), Kansas City, Fort Worth, Biloxi, Cleveland and so forth. If you live in one of those places, it’s your local newspaper that has aspired to cover the community well and in-depth. (Are they perfect? Of course not. But who else is better positioned to noticing what is happening on the ground, and following a story that takes months or years to ooze along and that includes no murders or car wrecks? TV reporters? Please.)

Digital news significantly lowers the entry-cost for a news operation. No presses, no paper, no delivery. For years now, conventional wisdom among the chattering classes who observe the news media has been that hyper-local news sites have a built in audience and a built-in revenue base, if they can offer good content and their community is affluent enough.

Last week, a couple of excellent hyper-local, online news operations near Charlotte folded. Davidsonnews.net and its sister Corneliusnews.net covered their communities with serious, well-reported journalism. The community of Davidson, home to Davidson College, predates its surrounding suburban communities and possesses a historic and specific sense of itself as a “place,” not just a suburb. The founder and editor, David Boraks, knew his communities and knew his business.  They are affluent places with plenty of disposable income. But online advertising was not sufficient to pay reporters — even reporters of the species so familiar to journalism: young, inexperienced, smart and energetic. He did not pay himself much, if anything.

If a freeway were destroying a neighborhood in Davidson, Boraks and his staff would have been write there, chronicling it.

He folded. Online advertising and reader donations (he never put up a pay-wall) did not bring in enough money, even after nine years.

Traditional in-print newspapers have seen serious declines in advertising revenue, which has been their major income stream.  Online advertising has not picked up the slack. The Charlotte Observer has seen round after round of layoffs and buyouts, as have most newspapers in the nation.

If he were alive today, I’m fairly sure Robert Moses would be delighted at this turn of events. 

More lanes in Houston, and longer traffic times

Here’s a great example to buttress the point I made earlier today, in “Highways, congestion and a power broker’s lessons.” Which was this: Since at least the 1930s planners have known that adding highway lanes does not reduce congestion, but rather – counter-intuitively – seems to increase it.

As reported by Thursday by Angie Schmitt in Streetsblog.net,  a Houston Tomorrow analysis of driving time on the I-10 Katy Freeway found it took 51 percent more time to get from downtown to Pin Oak on the newly expanded, 23-lane freeway than it did in 2011 right after the new lanes opened. An expansion project that ended in 2010 cost $2.8 billion-with-a-B – which was $1.17 billion-with-a-B more than its original price tag.

Coincidence: The Federal Highway Administration’s 2012 list of projects that details the cost of the Katy Freeway also lists the Monroe Bypass, with a due date of 2016. Better get hopping on that one, guys. Or better yet, don’t.

Jay Crossley of Houston Tomorrow concludes: “Traveling out I-10 is now 33% worse – almost 18 more minutes of your time – than it was before we spent $2.8 billion to subsidize land speculation and encourage more driving.”

Highways, congestion and a power broker’s lessons

Frontispiece of The Power Broker maps Moses’ roads, bridges, parks and playgrounds. 

The headline in this morning’s newspaper could not have been more appropriate for the day I have to, at long last and reluctantly, return to the UNC Charlotte library my copy of Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

I checked it out in September 2013. It’s roughly the size of a cinder block and just as heavy, and the librarians graciously let me keep renewing it, since apparently no one else wanted the tome. Which is sad. Published in 1974, it should be required reading for anyone studying public administration, transportation, planning, urban studies, political science, sociology and journalism. I finally finished it a few months ago but after so long it felt almost like a family pet and I didn’t want to part with it.

The headline today: N.C. DOT says Monroe Bypass construction has started. The article by Steve Harrison notes a lawsuit over the project is still active, and it could well be stopped for a second time.

As it happens, one of Robert Moses’ faithful techniques for getting money for his projects was to start work on them
with only part of the funds he needed – having promised, of course, that the funds in hand would fully cover the cost. Then, when the money well ran dry, he’d successfully argue that so much money had already been spent it would be a waste not to finish the project, and he’d get more millions from the city or the state.  I suspect someone at N.C. DOT has read The Power Broker, or at least absorbed some of its lessons about how Moses extracted public money for his projects.

The Monroe bypass will be a state-funded toll road intended to “relieve congestion” on Monroe’s existing U.S. 74 bypass, a highway built to keep traffic congestion out of downtown Monroe. Today, of course, downtown Monroe has no traffic congestion to speak of, since the city and county allowed so much congestion-generating development on U.S. 74 that it successfully sucked all the economic energy out of downtown and into a now-fading enclosed shopping mall and a series of strip centers, fast-food restaurants and chain businesses – each with its own separate, congestion-generating driveway. Monroe’s old bypass is like virtually every other bypass built in America in the past 50 years: clotted with traffic and deteriorating, cheaply built structures.

The sad irony of the Monroe Bypass proposal – not to mention Charlotte’s own Interstate 485 outer loop bypass highway (which will finally be completed in about a week), its own version of U.S. 74 a.k.a. Independence Boulevard, Gaston County’s proposed Garden Parkway, and a dozen other projects I could mention in North Carolina alone – is that planners figured out as early as the 1930s that building highways was not relieving traffic congestion.

Consider this passage from The Power Broker. Reminder: It was written in 1974. Caro is writing here about the 1930s. From page 515:

“The Grand Central, Interborough and Laurelton parkways opened early in the summer of 1936, bringing to an even one hundred the number of miles of parkway constructed by Moses on Long Island and in New York City since he had conceived his great parkway plan in 1924. … One editorial opined that the new parkways would, by relieving the traffic load on the Southern and Northern State parkways, solve the problem of access to Moses’ Long Island parks ‘for generations.’

“The new parkways solved the problem for about three weeks. … Some city planners noticed that the traffic pattern on Long Island had fallen into a set pattern: every time a new parkway was built, it quickly became jammed with traffic, but the load on the old parkways was not significantly relieved.

“If this had been the pattern for the first hundred miles of parkways, they wondered, might it not be the pattern for the next forty-five also? Perhaps consideration should be given to trying to ease Long Island’s traffic problem by other means…”

Caro describes throughout the book Moses’ staunch opposition to mass transit, his blatant racial discrimination, and the illegal, politically infused methods he used – all while Moses was hailed nationally and internationally as “the man who got things done,” the honest “non-politician” and so on.

It’s one of the most persuasive works I’ve ever encountered for the importance to our democracy of expert journalists who look deep into local and state governments and pay attention to what is really happening in their city’s neighborhoods.

I acquired The Power Broker a few weeks before I heard Caro speak in September 2013 to a roomful of journalists gathered for a Nieman Fellows reunion. He recounted the advice his editor at Newsday gave him, when he asked how to be an investigative reporter. The advice: “Turn every page.” Indeed.

——– 

N.C. transportation funding: ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’

A Charlotte light rail station

If you were at the Charlotte Chamber’s 2015 Transportation Infrastructure Summit this morning, you got two pointed lectures. The first, from N.C. Rep. Bill Brawley, R-Mecklenburg, was about dealing effectively with the N.C. General Assembly.

The background: North Carolina’s transportation dollars aren’t keeping up with needs. This is true whether you’d prefer new light rail and no roads, or new roads and no light rail, or whether you’re thinking about ports, aviation and ferries. (Wonkish but important point: North Carolina doesn’t have “county roads.” Roads are either state- or city-maintained (or private).The state has a larger role in road-building and maintenance than in some other states.)

The gas tax, intended to support state transportation needs, is not keeping up, because people are driving less and driving more fuel-efficient cars, and transportation projects today are more expensive than in decades past.

For cities like Charlotte, growth and congestion mean more voters and businesses want mass transit as well as expanded roads. But the General Assembly today is dominated by Republicans who are more likely to represent rural or suburban districts. Here’s Brawley’s advice:

“Whenever you do anything to raise money for transportation … you make people mad,” he said. In that atmosphere, it’s important to try to build a statewide consensus on funding before you even approach politicians. But when Charlotte comes to Raleigh seeking money for transportation projects, he said, “Charlotte comes with Charlotte-specific projects.They don’t talk about the state as a whole. They don’t work on building support with the state as a whole.” In other words — and this is my wording here — act like you care about more than Charlotte.

His final words: “In Raleigh, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

The second lecture was even stronger. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (whose successor is former Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx) would have pounded the table if he’d had a table to pound. “Transportation infrastructure is at a crossroads. It’s at a standstill,” he said. “It’s at a crisis.”

“The long rich history of our country … is about being No. 1 in transportation and infrastructure,” he said. “We’re not No. 1 in infrastructure any more. We’re No. 16.”

 “America is one big pothole!” he all but shouted. “Because we haven’t invested. We haven’t fixed up our roads.”

As he’s done for months — years, really — LaHood, a Republican from Peoria, Ill., pushed the idea of raising the federal gas tax 10 cents a gallon, and indexing it to the cost of living. The tax has not been raised since 1993.

“We need to bit the bullet,” he said. “Voters are not going to vote you out of office if you fix a big problem”

The Burnham backlash: Make some ‘small plans’

You can barely attend any conference of architects, planners or even local town planning boards without seeing, at some spot in the PowerPoint presentation, the famous quote from Chicago architect and town planner, Daniel: “Make no little plans,” he said. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

But, as Alan Ehrenhalt points out in an essay in Governing magazine, “Urban Acupuncture Is Coming to America,” that view of city building helped promote a lot of what went terribly wrong in U.S. cities in the 20th century. Urban renewal is just Exhibit No. 1. So here’s Ehrenhalt’s suggestion:
“For the next century, it might be helpful if someone came along who could offer urban practitioners a dose of Burnham in reverse. Something akin to, ‘Be careful about making huge plans, because they take forever, cost too much and generate myriad unintended consequences. Make small changes that improve everyday life for ordinary people; make them right away and build on small successes to try something a little more ambitious.’ ”
Ehrenhalt recounts the work of Jaime Lerner, a Brazilian architect who became mayor of Curitiba, a city of 1.7 million, and later governor of the state of Parana. It’s pegged to the fall 2014 release of an English translation of Lerner’s book, Urban Acupuncture: Celebrating Pinpricks of Change That Enrich City Life.  (Disclosure: I’m a board member of the nonprofit Center for the Living City, which found funding for the publication of the English translation.)
The overall point, of Lerner’s book and Ehrenhalt’s essay, is simple but too often overlooked by urban planners, city administrators and elected officials: Sometimes a small change is better than a huge project. 

The mayor’s view: Transit funding (the dilemma), a more diverse city, and more

Local dignitaries at a 2012 ceremony for the Blue Line Extension. Then-Mayor Anthony Foxx, now U.S. Transportation Secretary, is at right. (Photo: Mary Newsom)

Charlotte Magazine’s Greg Lacour has posted a meaty Q-and-A interview with Charlotte Mayor Dan Clodfelter, in which the mayor discusses the city’s dilemma on transit funding, what’s different about being mayor vs. being in the N.C. Senate (where Clodfelter served 1998-2014) and what’s different about Charlotte compared to when he was on City Council (1987-93).

The questions hit heavily on the problem the city and county face in funding any expansion of the Charlotte Area Transit System. (For more background, see this PlanCharlotte.org article about remarks Clodfelter made in  September, “Mayor: Transit sales tax funding may be at risk.“)

Among his other remarks to Lacour, Clodfelter had an interesting analysis of state transit funding — or the lack thereof. He suggested that the state would be disinclined to pay any more for mass transit projects (for the first two legs of Charlotte’s light rail, the state paid 25 percent of the cost) regardless of which party is controlling state government. Why? Because statewide transportation needs are great, and gas tax revenue is lagging. Add that up and it’s difficult to fund anything, he said.

On a more political note, although Clodfelter isn’t saying for sure he’s running for mayor, he also recently gave an interview to Qcitymetro.com. Here’s that interview. 

(At-large Charlotte City Council member Michael Barnes this week hopped into the mayor’s race, joining Democrats Jennifer Watson Roberts and fellow at-large City Council member David Howard. To date, no Republican has emerged as a likely candidate. But filing isn’t until this summer, with the primary in September.)

Why slow-growing light rail ridership should not surprise anyone

A bus in uptown Charlotte, where most bus routes begin and end. Photo: Claire Apaliski

Today’s Charlotte Observer brings an article from Steve Harrison noting that ridership on Charlotte’s light rail line, the LYNX Blue Line, has finally rebounded to its pre-recession levels but has not increased dramatically despite rapid growth in apartments along part of its route. See “Lynx light rail ridership back to 2008 levels.”

Some background: Charlotte’s first and only light rail line opened in late 2007, just in time for the massive 2008-09 recession that had Charlotte unemployment lingering in double-digits or near it for months. The northern couple of miles of the 9-mile route, closest to uptown, have seen massive apartment development in the past several years. The southern part of the route? Nada.

But the South End neighborhood – an area of old industrial buildings dating from the 1960s back to the late 1800s – is popping with hundreds of new apartments, and hopping with new microbreweries and trendy restaurants.

Car-free in Charlotte? It isn’t easy by Carolyn Reid, published last June at the PlanCharlotte.org website I run, helps explain why ridership may not be growing as quickly as you’d think.

Even in South End there’s little easy or walkable access to routine shopping needs like grocery and drug stores, no easily accessed, widely connected network of bike routes, nor robust bus service with headways under 10 minutes that spreads cross town. Because of lack of funding, the city’s bus service – while much improved over 1990s levels – still focuses on  delivering workers to uptown rather than building a widely connected network.

South End remains a place with better transit, bike and pedestrian connections than almost any other Charlotte neighborhood. But it’s still not a place where living without a car is going to be easy. Unless you’re trying to go uptown, the light rail can’t deliver you where you want to go.

My prediction: Ridership will zoom when the Blue Line Extension opens in 2017, taking riders to the 27,000-student UNC Charlotte campus about 10 miles northeast of uptown. 

Tax code uber alles

A recent piece in Smithsonian magazine, The Death and Rebirth of the Mall, points to a 1996 article by Tom Hanchett, staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South, that I read almost 20 years ago. As always, Hanchett’s thinking and research were impressive. But this article opened my eyes to a reality: Our cities and our neighborhoods are shaped less by city planners or the wishes of the people than by intricacies in tax laws and financing strategies.

It’s like the time I realized (because David Walters told me) that the reason suburban sprawl didn’t happen in Britain and Europe the way it does in the U.S. is because the laws there don’t allow developers to build outside of the urban growth boundary. Until then I thought it was because Europeans were somehow more in tune with the beauties of nature and the importance of farms. Nope. It’s what their laws say.

Hanchett’s 1996 article, “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom,” in the American Historical Review, describes how a small change in the U.S. tax code in 1954 – creating something called accelerated depreciation – “fundamentally altered the economics of real-estate development in the United States.”

If you read the whole article you’ll get a clear explanation of things like 200 percent declining balance and sum-of-the-years’-digits accelerated depreciation. If you’re a real estate finance expert, you already know that stuff.  But here’s the key information: This tax incentive applied fully only to new construction, not to renovating existing buildings.

“Suddenly, all over the United States, shopping plazas sprouted like well-fertilized weeds,” Hanchett wrote. The
amount of shopping center square footage shot up from an average of 6 million square feet yearly in the early 1950s to an average 30 million a year starting in 1956.

The tax incentive encouraged quick turnover, selling the property after six or seven years when the tax deduction was about to end. It was a disincentive to upkeep, and by 1970 this one tax break equaled a fourth of the total federal annual budget deficit, Hanchett wrote. And like so many federal provisions starting in the 1930s, it did not assist those who would have preferred to renovate older buildings in cities, and instead helped people building new construction in the suburbs. (See “Yet another way the feds promote sprawl.”)

Exurban living can exacerbate joblessness, study finds

The general belief that people living in American suburbs are better off economically than those in cities has been shaken in recent years, as desirable downtown neighborhoods have risen in price and have pushed poverty out into first- and second-ring suburbs. Here’s another crack in that once monolithic belief.

Writer F. Kaid Benfield reports in Huffington Post on a new U.S. Census study that found recently laid-off workers who live far from job centers take longer to find replacement employment than do residents of neighborhoods more convenient to jobs by public transit or car.

The study itself is from the US Census bureau. Read it here. 

Benfield, who writes for the Natural Resources Defense Council, explains how exurban living can hurt, not help, household and government financial health:

“More hidden [than the problems of auto emissions contributing to carbon emissions], though, are the economic consequences of sprawl, such as rising costs for the construction and maintenance of extended infrastructure and the burdens of increased transportation costs on household budgets.

“More hidden still are the economic consequences of households being located at long distances, inadequately served by public transit, from job centers. For the employed, it means longer and more inconvenient commutes. But, for the unemployed, in too many cases it means you can’t get to the job you need at all because you can’t afford the costs of car ownership and inadequate public transit simply doesn’t connect you to where you need to go.”

Fact many Americans are unaware of: For the average U.S. household, the second-biggest chunk of the household budget, after housing, is not health care or food. It’s transportation.

Benfield links to an article in The Economist about the jobs-housing spatial mismatch, which notes: “The typical American city dweller can reach just 30 percent of jobs in their city within 90 minutes on public transport. That is a recipe for unemployment.”

Read Benfield’s full article here.

 

Yet another way the feds promote sprawl

Another new subdivision for Union County, N.C., just south of Charlotte. Photo: Nancy Pierce


Feds promoting sprawl? That might surprise people who believe (wrongly, let me state) that the government is trying to push everyone, kicking and screaming, into high-rise apartments. But this article from Governing magazine last month shows that, in fact, the feds incentivize single-family housing at the expense of more dense development. The result is that some multifamily and mixed-use developments are pricier than they should be to buyers.

“Since its 1934 inception,” writes Scott Beyer, “the FHA [Federal Housing Administration] has insured mortgages for more than 34 million properties, facilitating mass homeownership over several generations. But only 47,205 of these plans have been for multifamily projects. This is due to longtime provisions that make it harder for condos to get FHA certification. As late as 2012, 90 percent of a condo’s units had to be owner-occupied and only 25 percent of its space could be for businesses.”

The FHA has eased that rule a bit in the past two years, Beyer reports, but even so: “These policies mean that, although practically every single-family home can be FHA-insured, only 10 percent of condo projects nationwide qualify. This makes condos less affordable, since prospective buyers seeking private financing without FHA backing face higher borrowing costs and typically must make 20 percent down payments rather than the 3.5 percent typically required of FHA-backed mortgages.”

Click here to read his full report, “FHA Policies Discourage Density.”