Growth & Justice Blog

Infrastructure investment could raise its sights

A recent commentary by Chip Halbeck, executive director of the Minnesota Housing Partnership, asks: what is infrastructure?

If it means the basic physical makeup that enables a community to function, I argue that housing fits the definition. Fortunately, for the most part the free market has provided communities with the needed housing component of infrastructure. But there is a sizable and growing segment of the population for which the market cannot provide homes that are both affordable and safe.

Halbeck's piece suggests a new federal stimulus package that would fund local government grants to make low-income housing safe and more energy-efficient. He argues that such rehab work would also provide more low-skilled and entry-level jobs in more places than would large scale infrastructure projects. (Architecture 2030 has proposed a similar national stimulus buy-down program for residential buildings and an accelerated-depreciation program for commercial buildings.)

Whatever you think of his proposal, the larger point is apt.

The nation's financial woes are rooted in a housing catastrophe that has dumped thousands of foreclosed homes on the Twin Cities market alone. Vacancies and abandonments threaten the fabric of neighborhoods. Yet, instead of recognizing this impact, there's a transportation-centric coloring to our view of infrastructure spending. Roads, bridges, transit and auto companies dominate the discussions.

Moving people and goods more efficiently from place to place is a worthy economic goal — but we cannot ignore the condition of those places. And we know that more lanes and extensions into exurbia  can ultimately increase energy use and environmental impact.

What's more, transportation only consumes 29 percent of the nation's energy, while more than 51 percent goes to electricity generation and residential and commercial heat and power. Increasing the energy efficiency of our building infrastructure could provide long-term paybacks for building owners, renters and the environment.

It can also provide long-term savings for the public.

One recent example is the recently built Schaar's Bluff Gathering Center in Dakota County’s Spring Lake Park Reserve. The structure is 90-95 percent more energy efficient than comparable parks facilities, and ranks within the top 1 percent of all sustainable structures as compared to the U.S. Green Building Council's registered buildings.

It generates its own power with an onsite wind turbine, reuses rainwater to flush its toilets, and incorporates wood reclaimed from a sawmill that park employees once operated on the site.

The building is designed to react to current weather conditions. Its HVAC system is linked to operable windows so that the two don’t work against each other; automated shading devices react to the sun’s path. It even feeds local animals with its edible landscaping.

[design: MS&R photos: Andrea Rugg]

The designer, Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, was the first Minnesota architecture firm to sign on to Architecture 2030's standards for meeting fossil fuel, greenhouse gas emission and energy consumption goals.

The project began as a conventional building, but evolved through a design process that tapped  an inspiring site, a parks manager's passion for sustainability and the County Board's openness to a non-traditional approach.

Conventional procurement would have focused on managing the design/build budget and been leery of innovation. The major difference at Schaar's Bluff was a county staff dedicated to the environment who felt secure enough to encourage the unconventional and take it to the public for their input.

Starting from a carbon neutral "energy budget" helped lead to a building that stayed within the fiscal limits while delivering a long-term a balance of economic, aesthetic, environmental and social values.

In the desire to create economic stimulus, we should not labor only to lay rebar and concrete. Dakota County has shown how visionary government can render enduring beauty and public utility in difficult times.

— Charlie Quimby

Safe bike travel offers lessons in infrastructure

The Star Tribune editorial, "Don't let thugs derail bike trail use," is right in spirit. But in response to a rash of muggings along the popular central bikeway, it makes an array of suggestions — better lighting, increased police presence, night-vision security cameras, citizen bike patrols and avoiding riding alone — that miss a larger point about safe infrastructure and its use by the public.

Safety strategies that rely on counter-measures and modified user behavior represent a design failure. And a purely engineering- or cost-driven approach to infrastructure almost guarantees we will end up with issues later.

The editorial notes that "portions of the greenway and Hiawatha trails are more dangerous because of the surrounding geography and inadequate lighting."

Another way of putting it would be: The danger comes from treating commuting purely as a problem of moving most efficiently from point-to-point. The trail fails to recognize its true connections to the surrounding city.

The trails are more dangerous because they were built like roadways and rail lines — for specialized vehicle use through a featureless trench or concrete wasteland — rather than as human-scaled outdoor passageways that naturally connect people and destinations. This problem "geography" along Hiawatha was created decades ago by scrubbing the landscape of trees, residences and commercial buildings so it could be remade as a transportation corridor. Then the entire area was neglected until recently.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Midtown Greenway and use it at all times and seasons. The designers and community advocates who championed the trail were well aware of its challenges, and they incorporated features to mitigate problems with the location. It will only get better as more community connections are made and more people discover it.

But here's what real safety looks like along a bike trail or city street.

We can design our infrastructure like parking ramps and equip them with cameras, emergency phones and occasional patrols. Or we can emulate our parks and most beloved commercial streets — places that encourage a mix of activities and promote gathering, visibility and access year-round.

Reaching our destination safely and efficiently is indeed important, but we ignore the quality of the journey at our peril.

— Charlie Quimby

Budget crisis should bring out the best thinking

This has been Think Tank Week on the Star Tribune's op/ed page. 

We could find something to agree with in the Center of the American Experiment's thoughts on Green JOBZ, which tracks pretty closely with what we wrote last month. And we're in accord with Mitch Pearlstein when he says the state budget crisis calls for smart solutions — and even being open to the possibility of a tax increase.

With Phil Krinkie and the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, though, we must vigorously disagree. His response to Dane Smith's recent opinion piece on the coming budget challenges reiterated the Taxpayers League's tried and not-so-true talking points.

Dane made three points. 

1. Our local and state governments already have been significantly downsized — as a share of the economy, as a percentage of our income, and relative to other states.
2. Top-earning Minnesotans pay a smaller percentage of income in state and local taxes than other income brackets, even as their share of wealth and income  has grown larger than ever.
3. Minnesota, in its new status as an average-tax state, is chronically underperforming the national economy for the first time in decades.

These points were backed up by comprehensive tax-and-spending measurements that Krinkie called "deceptive percentages."  He prefers to use what he calls "real dollars." In fact, Krinkie's tally of real dollars spent in Minnesota in fiscal 1998 does not appear to be real at all in the economic sense. Economists use "real dollars" to refer to inflation-adjusted amounts. He presents "nominal'' dollars, unadjusted for inflation or population growth, as a way to track the size of government.

Why do he and other anti-tax advocates reject percentages? Because then their argument about bloated government doesn't play very well. Using nominal dollars lets them inflate the bloat. Adjusting for population growth, size of the economy, individual incomes and the cost of the things government buys gives a much more realistic picture. And it's the kind of measurement most economists use when comparing nations and states, and then vs. now.

Here's an example. You might not like having a larger mortgage payment on your second house than on your first one, but if the payment takes the same or a smaller proportion of your growing income and the house is larger, it's pretty hard to argue you are paying more and are worse off.  

Never mind, says Krinkie:

The fact is, the price of government as a percentage of income is economically irrelevant. Validity of a POG index assumes that government is entitled to some arbitrary percentage of private production. You work hard, earn more, and government is entitled to more of your income.

The League's dissing of the POG might be taken as an insult to the state's business establishment, which was instrumental in installing the POG as a bottom-line defining measurement of government's size some two decades ago. If the business view is "economically irrelevant," then we're really in trouble!

Actually, a POG index simply shows us what we spent at different times in our history for a certain level of government services. It's a measure that allows taxpayers to compare now with then. If we don't like what's happening now, and we're funding public services at a lower level than at a time we liked better, we might consider raising taxes. And if we're spending less now and liking it more, we should re-elect the people who got us there. 

Of course, "liberals in the Legislature" are to blame for point #2, says former legislator Krinkie, because the government has imposed some regressive taxes. No mention of how regressive property taxes actually grew so much in recent years in response to cuts in income taxes and less state revenue for local governments.   

And no acknowledgment of the Taxpayers League's role in helping to make progressive income tax policy politically toxic in Minnesota.

In fact, Growth & Justice has been among the state's strongest voices for limiting regressive taxes and for finding ways to offset their impact on lower-income families. Conservatives have made income tax increases their Alamo, while more easily giving ground on regressive fees, sales and property taxes.

On point #3, the best our righty friends can do on the state's lagging growth is to agree and then haul out the discredited talking point about how state and federal government employment growth has displaced private job creation. We laid out the facts on that one back when Rep. Marty Seifert tried it in January.

Sparring with each other can be fun, but Minnesota's policy groups from across the political spectrum ought to be bringing workable ideas, straightforward information and good will to the table in the coming months. We'll need it.

— Charlie Quimby