The CLEAR act was designed to avoid a carbon trading platform susceptible to market manipulation and price volatility. (Photo courtesy of FutureAtlas CC-2.0)
A new study looks at how big of a check you might get under a bi-partisan climate change bill. The CLEAR Act (Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal) is better known around Washington as the cap-and-dividend plan. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
A new study looks at how big of a check you might get under a bi-partisan climate change bill. The CLEAR Act (Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal) is better known around Washington as the cap-and-dividend plan. Lester Graham reports…
This plan would tax fossil fuels at the source, whether a tanker or foreign oil coming into port or coal coming out of a mine. 25-percent of that money would be used to invest in cleaner alternative energies. The other 75-percent… would be paid at a flat rate to each person in the nation in a monthly check to offset higher energy prices.
James Boyce at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst is one of the authors of the new report. He says for most people that monthly check will more than cover the higher costs of fossil fuels.
“So for the typical family, they’ll be paying more in higher prices on the one hand and they’ll be getting back a dividend check on the other hand.”
Boyce says since people in the highest income brackets tend to use a lot more energy, they’ll actually come up a little short on the deal.
This cap-and-dividend plan also has fewer loopholes to be exploited by special interests.
Tucked away in the bailout package were energy tax cuts for Americans
(Source: Man-ucommons at Wikimedia Commons)
We’ve all heard about the 700-
billion dollar bail-out for Wall Street.
Getting a lot less attention was another
17-billion dollars for energy tax credits.
Lester Graham reports you can take advantage
of some of that money for your house:
Transcript
We’ve all heard about the 700-
billion dollar bail-out for Wall Street.
Getting a lot less attention was another
17-billion dollars for energy tax credits.
Lester Graham reports you can take advantage
of some of that money for your house:
Starting in January you can earn as much as $500 in tax credits for home
improvements that save energy. The credit will be taken right off the top of taxes you’ll
owe for 2009.
Ronnie Kweller is with the group Alliance to Save Energy. She says the credits can
cover a lot.
“Energy Star windows. It also includes lower-cost products like additional insulation,
sealing and caulking and weather-stripping – all those kind of things to tighten up your
home and make it energy efficient. As well as highly-efficient heating and cooling
equipment.”
Kweller says her group has details on the new consumer tax credits on its website:
ase.org.
Keep your receipts, and you’ll have to remember to file the right IRS form to take
advantage of the tax credits.
The average new American home is now 2400 square feet. Smart Growth
advocates say we’re buying big houses on big lawns and making the
problem of urban sprawl worse. Lester Graham talked with Chris Micci.
He’s a land development manager for a residential homebuilder. He’s
also a former lobbyist for the Real Estate Building Industry Coalition
in Charlotte, North Carolina. Micci says buyers see bigger as better:
Transcript
The average new American home is now 2400 square feet. Smart Growth
advocates say we’re buying big houses on big lawns and making the
problem of urban sprawl worse. Lester Graham talked with Chris Micci.
He’s a land development manager for a residential homebuilder. He’s
also a former lobbyist for the Real Estate Building Industry Coalition
in Charlotte, North Carolina. Micci says buyers see bigger as better:
CM: Typically, most suburban home buyers are looking for that larger lot, larger home.
And, you know, I can’t say there’s an absolute reason for why that is, but it’s what the,
what the customer or the consumer in the marketplace looks for.
LG: A lot of people see home as status and in fact, generally, I’m wondering how people
view their home or their house as it relates to their status in life.
CM: Oh yeah, absolutely, people definitely relate their home to their status. Obviously,
you know, for the majority of us out there, the home is the single largest purchase
financially in a person’s life…in their lifetime. As such, they see that home as a symbol of
their status and you know, appropriately so, want it to reflect that kind of status. Which,
you know, in turn reflects a larger home.
LG: Homebuilder associations say that local governments often drive the market for
bigger homes and bigger lawns because they zone areas so that lots have to be a certain
size. The idea is to draw those wealthier residents, upscale neighborhoods, so tax revenue
will come with those valuable properties. So builders have to build big houses to recoop
their money from the large land purchases. How much of a factor is government zoning
and regulation in the trend of big houses and big lots?
CM: Oh, I think it’s enormous. I think it’s probably about 95% of the entire equation when you
look at it. What they see is, they have to be able to see the ability that the development is,
in their minds, paying for itself. It’s paying for the government services that it provides.
As such, they see larger lot, larger home, higher sales prices as an answer to that to help
pay for those services… and that may or may not be the truth.
LG: Do you see places where towns are working with developers so that they can have their big
suburbs but still find a place for affordable housing within the same general area?
CM: There’s been one approach to it that I don’t necessarily agree with, but it’s called
“inclusionary housing.” What it typically does is the local government will require a
developer to include about 10% of dedicated housing as considered “affordable.” And
affordable can mean just about anything. There really is no clear, working definition of
what affordable is. A lot of folks out there that have their homes, they see that as a large
investment in their life. They see a lot of high value in that investment. As such, they get
concerned that with a proportion of affordable housing in their community that has to be
mandated and dedicated as such, that it could, in fact drive values down.
In a better case scenario is when local governments work with the folks in the industry to
put together, you know, a master plan community where you can include both segments
of affordable housing, higher end housing… a mix of retail, commercial space, et cetera. I
think you’ll see more success in efforts like that than you will in mandated housing.
HOST TAG: Chris Micci is a land development manager for a residential homebuilder in
North Carolina. He talked with the Environment Report’s Lester Graham.
School districts tend to like bigger homes on larger lots because
the districts rely so heavily on property taxes. (Photo courtesy of USDA)
Each year, Americans build a staggering one and a half million new homes. A lot of environmentalists say too many of these houses are big, single family homes on spacious lots. They say that wastes farmland and natural areas. But suburban planners say they’re forced to build that way by local governments, such as school districts. The GLRC’s Shawn Allee has more:
Transcript
Each year, Americans build a staggering one and a half million new
homes. A lot of environmentalists say too many of these houses are big,
single family homes on spacious lots. They say that wastes farmland and
natural areas, but suburban planners say they’re forced to build that way
by local governments, such as school districts. The GLRC’s Shawn
Allee has more:
Jamie Bigelow makes a living building houses in suburbia. He takes a
dim view of his profession. For Bigelow, most suburbs don’t let
neighbors be… well, good neighbors. After all, homes are too far apart
for people to really meet one another and everyone has to drive far for
work or to just go shopping. According to Bigelow, families are looking
for something better.
“We believe there’s a growing market for people who want to be
interconnected and live in interconnected neighborhoods and housing,
primarily in the suburbs, no longer supplies that.”
So, about ten years ago, Bigelow and his father tried building one of these
interconnected neighborhoods in a Chicago suburb. They wanted shops
and parks nearby. They also wanted to close some streets to cars, so kids
could play safely near home, but one detail nearly derailed the project.
Under the plan, houses would sit close together on small lots. The local
zoning board hated this idea. According to Bigelow, they said small houses
would break the local school district’s budget.
“They want large houses on large lots, because for the school district,
that will give them a lot of taxes with not as many kids because there’s
not as many houses.”
The planners wanted Bigelow to build bigger, pricier houses. Bigelow and his
family fought that and eventually won. They did build that compact suburban
neighborhood, but victories like that are rare. Often, the area’s local
governments try to protect schools’ tax revenue by promoting large homes and lawns.
“They’re actually behaving, or reacting, very rationally.”
That’s MarySue Barrett of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a
Chicago-based planning and advocacy group. She says growth
sometimes overwhelms schools, and it can catch taxpayers and parents
off guard.
“They don’t have the revenue from their local property tax to pay for
hiring new teachers, so their class sizes become thirty-two, thirty-three.
And that family who said, Wait a minute, I came out here for good schools, now
I’m going to an overcrowded school? It’s the last thing I thought was
going to happen.”
From the schools’ perspective, larger lot sizes solve this problem. Big
lots mean fewer kids per acre. Larger houses bring in more property
taxes. That means higher taxes cover costs for the few kids who do
move in.
Barrett says the trend’s strongest in states like Illinois, where schools rely
heavily on property taxes. She says in the short term, the strategy keeps
schools flush, but it also pushes the suburban frontier outward, into rural
areas. That wastes land and hurts our quality of life.
(Sound of kids coming out of school)
The day’s over for this high school in Northern Illinois. A throng of
teens heads toward a line of thirty yellow school buses. Some of them
spend up to three hours per day riding between school and home.
Inside, Superintendent Charles McCormick explains what’s behind the
long rides. He says the district’s large size is partly to blame, but there’s
another reason. The area’s subdivisions are spread among corn fields,
far from existing towns and from each other.
“Well, the land use pattern itself disperses the students, so when you look
at what bus routing means, the position of one student can add ten to
fifteen minutes to a route.”
McCormick says local governments in his school district encouraged big
homes and lots, but even his schools can barely keep up with the costs of
educating new students. He says suburban planners just can’t risk
bringing in smaller homes and more kids.
“Well, if you were to run a business the way growth affects school districts,
you’d be broke because you cannot keep up with rapid growth that produces
for every student, a deficit.”
That’s because even high property taxes don’t fully pay for each
student’s education.
Land use experts say reliance on property taxes for education puts
suburbs in a tight spot. Some want to try allowing smaller homes or
even apartments, but school funding’s a stumbling block.
Like other reformers, MarySue Barrett has been pushing for an
alternative. She wants state government to kick in a bigger share of
education dollars. The idea’s to have enough funding for each kid, regardless
of how large or expensive their home is.
“And if we have a different way of paying for our schools that’s less
dependent on the property tax, we’ll begin to move away from this
problem that’s put a choke hold on so many communities.”
It will be an uphill fight, because states are reluctant to change their tax
structures, but Barrett says it’s the worth the political cost. She says, if
we want alternatives to suburban sprawl and its traffic congestion, we
need new ways to pay for education.
Ethanol often is made from corn, and one of the by-products, distillers grains, can be eaten by cows (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)
From cows come dairy products and beef, the by-products of the cow - manure - can be anaerobically "digested," and the by-products of that process can be used to carbonate soft drinks. It might seem like an environmental and economic dream, but some are not supportive of this idea. (Photo by Bram Dejonckheere)
It’s rare when a factory and a mega-farm can help reduce pollution. But a project planned in the Midwest promises just that. The project would produce a fuel additive that is thought to reduce air pollution; provide a market for farm goods; create scores of jobs… all while not harming the environment. The Ohio project is getting millions of dollars of help from the state and federal governments. But some people doubt the project will accomplish all it promises. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamara Keith
reports:
Transcript
It’s rare when a factory and a mega-farm can help reduce pollution. But a project planned in the Midwest promises just that. The project would produce a fuel additive that is thought to reduces air pollution, provide a market for farm goods, create scores of jobs – all while not harming the environment. The Ohio project is getting millions of dollars of help from the state and federal governments. But some people doubt the project will accomplish all it promises. Tamara Keith reports:
The project is called Harrison Ethanol. It will include an ethanol factory, using millions of bushels of corn to produce the gasoline additive. At the same location, thousands of dairy and beef cattle will live in fully enclosed barns. And then there’s the small power plant, which will be fueled by manure produced by the cattle. Wendel Dreve is the project’s director.
“I think the nicest way of describing our project is it’s a vertically-integrated, agriculturally-based industrial development.”
Dreve began working on the project nearly 4 years ago. He’s retired from the oil and gas industry and built a home in eastern Ohio farm country. His neighbors approached him about starting up a corn-powered ethanol factory – something that has not existed in Ohio in a decade.
“I told them that I didn’t think we could build a ethanol plant in Ohio because there are no state subsidies, so we had to figure out a way to raise the revenue streams internally and the only way we could figure out to do that was to employ animals.”
The 12-thousand cattle housed on site, will eat the main byproduct of ethanol production, a corn mush called distillers grains. The cattle will generate money too, from sales of milk and meat. But the cattle will create manure… lots of manure… about 50 million gallons of it a year. Dreve has a solution for that, too: a power-generating anaerobic digester.
“It eliminates nearly all of the odor, it processes all of the wastes from the entire facility. So it’s like an industrial waste treatment plant on site.”
60 times a day, manure will be flushed out of the animal barns and into the digester. A large, cement structure, where the manure is broken down by microbes.
“And at the other end, you get water and methane and carbon dioxide and some solids.”
The methane will run power generators, creating “green energy,” which can be sold at a premium. The carbon dioxide from the manure will be sold to make carbonated sodas. This would be the first anaerobic digester powered by cattle manure in Ohio, and one of only a handful nationwide. Dreve says his digester will be much better for the environment than open-air manure lagoons, the cheaper method most commonly used by farmers.
But not everyone agrees. Bill Weida is an economist and director of the Grace Factory Farm Project which opposes large concentrated animal farms. Weida says most anaerobic digesters are paid for with some kind of government assistance. Harrison Ethanol is no exception. The project received a 500-thousand-dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help pay for the digester.
“No one in their right mind who is looking for an economic investment would build a digester. The only reason you’d build one is if you had some sort of a government subsidy that would help pay for it.”
Harrison Ethanol also is receiving seventy-million dollars in financing assistance from the state of Ohio. In fact, the company indicates it got some very good legal and accounting help, to find the perfect location for the project to take advantage of state and federal tax credits. Add to that federal ethanol subsidies and federal subsidies for corn production, and Harrison Ethanol is getting plenty of help from taxpayers.
Ken Cook is executive director of the Environmental Working Group. He says ethanol might reduce air pollution and reliance on foreign oil, but it is not economically viable without those huge taxpayer subsidies.
“The worry is that what we’re really doing is bailing out failed agriculture policy with heavily subsidized energy policy. We’re going into the corn industry with another set of subsidies to basically turn corn, that would have been exported at a loss, into corn that is used to make fuel at a loss to taxpayers.”
That’s not how state officials see it. Bill Teets is a spokesman for the Department of Development which has been working to bring several ethanol plants to Ohio.
“We think that this is a great project because you help farmers, you create manufacturing, you have something that helps benefit the environment and it seems to be a good type of project that we can really benefit from.”
And if everything goes as planned, Wendel Dreve will build 2 more ethanol and cattle operations in Ohio. He’s already secured tax dollars from state and federal sources for those plants.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamara Keith.
Magazine publishers and other companies are thinking ahead and getting their paper from forests that have been certified. But what does this really mean? (Photo by Stanley Elliott)
Officials in the Midwest want to prove they’re not damaging their state forests. States that sell timber to paper companies are spending thousands of dollars to earn a certificate that says they’re managing the forests in a sustainable way. Paper producers are demanding that state foresters earn certification because officials want to stave off protests from consumers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports:
Transcript
Officials in the Midwest want to prove they’re not damaging their state forests. States that sell timber to paper companies are spending thousand of dollars to earn a certificate that says they’re managing the forests in a sustainable way. Paper producers are demanding that state foresters earn certification because officials want to stave off protests from consumers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports:
It’s lunchtime and employees on break from Compuware in downtown Detroit are browisng through the magazine racks at Borders. Melody Kranz says she reads three different magazines every month. She says she is an avid recycler and an impassioned environmentalist, but never considered what kind of paper was going into her magazines.
“I don’t know why I haven’t thought about it, I just haven’t. I will now. Because I’m a gardening nut, I love to garden. So yeah, I just never really thought about it.”
But executive David Refkin is betting that Franz and others like her would think twice before picking up Time Magazine if they thought a forest was demolished to make the paper. Refkin is the Director of Sustainable Development for Time Incorporated. He says he’s noticed a strong surge in environmental awareness over the past two or three years.
“We don’t want people looking at a magazine and feeling guilty that a stream has been damaged and the fish are dying in there, or that habitats aren’t being protected because people are practicing bad forestry practices.”
Refkin says his company wants to take action now, before consumer groups decide to boycott its magazines over ecological issues. Time uses more coated paper for its publications than any other company in the U.S. The company is asking that 80 percent of all paper products Time buys be certified by 2006.
To the average consumer, that may not seem like big news. But for paper producers and foresters, it’s earth shattering. Larry Pedersen is with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Pedersen says getting certified means years of work for state employees. The government has to prove to investigators that its management standards take into account issues such as biodiversity, water quality, soil erosion and wildlife habitat. Pedersen says the state is also required to provide records for each tree from the moments it’s planted or inventoried to the time it’s cut down and then made into planks or paper. But he says it’s worth the effort.
“A number of wood and paper-using companies brought it to our attention that they needed to have certified products because their consumers were demanding those. And with us having four-million acres of state forestlands, we saw the writing on the wall that we needed to jump on this.”
State forests in the region generate a lot of revenue. Wisconsin’s forests earn two and a half million dollars from timber sales and Ohio pulls in almost three million. Michigan’s forests bring in 30 million dollars annually. Earlier this year, Michigan’s Governor Jennifer Granholm announced that all state forests will be certified by January 1st of 2006. And the Great Lakes State is not alone… New York, Wisconsin, and Maine are also pursuing certification and Ohio and other states are considering it.
Andrew Shalit, with the environmental activist group Ecopledge, says he’s glad Time Warner is encouraging paper companies and state governments to get certified. But he says that doesn’t necessarily mean the paper is produced in an environmentally friendly way.
“It’s great to say that they’re going to get all of their paper from certified forests. The question is, who is certifying? And in the case of Time Warner, a lot of the forests are certified by a group called SFI, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and their standards are so weak as to be almost meaningless.”
There’s a heated debate over just what certification means. There are currently two groups that certify forests in the U.S. The Sustainable Forestry Initiative, or SFI, was originally founded by the timber industry but is now an independent body. The Forest Stewardship council, or FSC, came out of the environmental movement… or more specifically, out of the effort to protect South American rainforests. Shalit says he doesn’t think SFI certification is as rigorous or as comprehensive as FSC.
“It really is a problem for the consumer because you see something in the store and it has a little green label on it with a picture of a tree and it says sustainably certified, and you think you’re buying something good. It’s hard for the individual consumer to keep up with that.”
Shalit says several states, like Michigan, have solved the dilemma of rival certification programs by getting dual certification. he says although the system has flaws, it will improve if consumers demand more stringent forestry regulations.
Executives at Time Warner hope they can avoid boycotts and pickets by taking action preemptively. The company is leading the push for forest certification in the U.S., and environmentalists say the federal government may have to bow to pressure eventually and get the national forests certified as well.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Celeste Headlee.
Heavy cleanup crews from the Genesee County Land Bank use chain saws, wood chippers, tractors and brute force to move piles of debris on the lot of an abandoned house on the north side of Flint, Michigan. (Photo by Chris McCarus)
Up until three years ago, rundown homes and abandoned lots were multiplying in the city. With the creation of the Land Bank, some people believe the city's image is beginning to turn around for the better. (Photo by Chris McCarus)
A next door neighbor to the abandoned house visits the cleanup crew. She has had to bear the eyesore and health risk next door for several years. The Land Bank currently has custody of about 2,800 properties like this in and around Flint. (Photo by Chris McCarus)
One community is fighting its problems of abandoned lands and unpaid property taxes. Those problems have led to a decaying inner city and increased suburban sprawl. The new tool the community is using is called a “land bank.” It uses a unique approach to try to fix up properties that otherwise often would be left to deteriorate. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris McCarus reports:
Transcript
One community is fighting its problems of abandoned lands and unpaid property taxes.
They’ve led to a decaying inner city and increased suburban sprawl. The new tool the
community is using is called a “land bank.” It uses a unique approach to try to fix up
properties that otherwise often would be left to deteriorate. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Chris McCarus reports:
(sound of work crews operating wood chipper)
Cleanup crews are sending downed branches through a wood chipper on a vacant lot.
They’re also removing tires, used diapers, car seats, sinks, old clothes and dead animal carcasses.
The workers are from the Genesee County Land Bank in Flint, Michigan. They’re trying to
make abandoned property useful again. Dan Kildee is the Genesee County Treasurer and the brains
behind the land bank. He thinks this new approach can recover unpaid property tax money and help
improve the Flint Metro area.
“The community gets to make a judgment on what we think we should do with this land. We get
to take a deep breath.”
Empty lots and rundown homes have been multiplying for a generation. That’s left the city of
Flint in a terrible economic state. But the land bank is beginning to change things.
Until just three years ago, Michigan was like most other states. No one had come up with
a solution. The state would auction off a city’s tax liens. Then conflict between the tax
lien buyer and the property owner could go on for up to seven years. In the meantime,
properties were left to neglect and often vandalized.
Under this new program, the treasurer’s office forecloses on a property and hands it over
to the land bank, which acts as the property manager. The land bank might then demolish
a house; it might throw out the owner and let a tenant buy it; or it might auction it off
to the highest bidder. A private investor can’t just buy a tax lien. He has to buy the
property along with it and take care of it.
The land bank is financed in two main ways: through fees on back taxes and through sales
of the few nicer homes or buildings the land bank acquires that bring in relatively big
profits. Treasurer Dan Kildee says it makes sense to take that revenue to fix up old
properties and sell them to people who deserve them.
“There is no system in the United States that pulls together these tools. Both the
ability to quickly assemble property into single ownership of the county, the tools
to manage it and the financing tools to develop that property.”
The land bank program hopes to change the perception of Flint. As thousands of abandoned
homes, stores and vacant lots become eyesores, people and their money go other places,
usually to build more sprawling suburbs. The perception that people are abandoning the
inner city then speeds up that abandonment. Many people who can afford to leave the city do.
And those who can’t afford to move are left behind.
According to data gathered by the research group Public Sector Consultants, Flint has the
state’s highest unemployment and crime rates and the lowest student test scores.
Art Potter is the land bank’s director. He thinks the downward spiral can be stopped.
When it is, those folks in the central city won’t have to suffer for still living there.
“Even though the City of Flint has lost 70,000 people in the last 30 years, the people who
are still here deserve to have a nice environment to live in. So our immediate goal is to
get control and to clean these properties now.”
Urban planning experts are watching the land bank approach. Michigan State
University’s Rex LaMore says Flint is typical of Midwestern cities whose manufacturing
base has shrunk. Private owners large and small have left unproductive property behind.
As the land bank steps in, LaMore says it’s likely to succeed and become an example that
other municipalities can follow.
“They can begin to maybe envision a city of the 21st century that will be different than
the cities of the 20th century or the 19th century that we see around the United States.
A city that reflects a more livable environment. So its an exciting opportunity. I think
we have the vision; the challenge is can we generate the resources? And the land bank model
does provide some opportunity to do that.”
But the land bank is meeting obstacles. For example, the new mayor of Flint who took over
in July canceled the city’s existing contracts. A conservative businessman, the mayor is
suspicious of the city’s past deals. They included one with the land bank to demolish 57
homes. This has slowed the land bank’s progress. Its officials are disappointed but they’re
still working with the mayor to get the money released.
(sound of kids chatting, then lawn mower starts up)
The weeds grow rampant in a neighborhood with broken up pavement and sometimes
no houses on an entire block. It’s open and in an odd way, peaceful. Like a
century-old farm. It’s as if the land has expelled the people who invaded with their bricks,
steel and concrete.
In the middle of all the vacant lots, Katherine Alymo sees possibilities.
“I’ve bought a number of properties in the auctions from the land bank and also got a side
lot acquisition from them for my house. My driveway wasn’t attached to my house when I
bought it. And it was this huge long process to try to get it from them. But they sold it
to me for a dollar. Finally.”
And since then, she’s hired people to fix the floors, paint walls and mow the lawns.
She’s also finding buyers for her properties who want to invest in the city as she has.
Together, they say they needed some help and the land bank is making that possible.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chris McCarus.
Urban sprawl doesn't just alter the land in the suburbs. Central
cities are affected by the loss of investment when people leave the cities
and tax dollars are instead invested in building roads and sewers in the
surrounding areas. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Concern about urban sprawl is often limited to the loss of farmland, traffic congestion, and unattractive development. But urban sprawl has other impacts. Building the roads and sewers to serve new subdivisions uses state and federal tax money, often at the expense of the large cities that are losing population to the suburbs. In the second of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham looks at the divide between city and suburb:
Transcript
Concern about urban sprawl is often limited to the loss of farmland, traffic
congestion, and unattractive development. But urban sprawl has other impacts.
Building the roads and sewers to serve new subdivisions uses state and federal tax
money, often at the expense of the large cities that are losing population to the
suburbs. In the second of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
looks at the divide between city and suburb:
What some people call urban sprawl got started as the federal government’s answer to
a severe housing shortage. There wasn’t a lot of building going
on during the Great Depression. At the end of World War II, returning GIs needed
houses.
Reynolds Farley is a research professor at the University of Michigan’s Population
Studies Center. Farley says the federal government offered veterans low-interest
loans and developers started building modest homes on green lawns on the edge of
cities. But because of discrimination, the loans didn’t as often make it into the
hands of African-American veterans. Instead of segregated neighborhoods in the
city, segregation lines were newly drawn between city and
suburb.
“Very low-cost mortgages accelerated the movement of whites from the central city
out to the suburbs… built upon the long racial animosity that characterized cities
beginning at the time of the first World War and continuing, perhaps up to the
present.”
With segregation, there was a shift of wealth. Farley says jobs and purchasing
power were exported to the suburbs with the help of the interstate highway system.
And big new shopping centers displaced retail in downtowns.
People with low-incomes, often people of color, were left behind in cities of
abandoned houses and vacant storefronts that often didn’t have enough tax base to
maintain roads and services.
John Powell is a professor at Ohio State University. He’s written extensively on
urban sprawl and its effects on urban centers.
“So, we move jobs away, we move tax base away, we move good schools away and then
the city becomes really desperate and they’re trying to fix the problems, but all
the resources have been moved away.”
With no way found to fix the cities, whites have been moving out of cities to the
suburbs for decades. And now, middle-class blacks are moving out too. For some
metropolitan areas, leaving the city has become a
matter of income… although Powell says even then African-Americans have a more
difficult time finding a way out.
“Race never drops out of the equation. In reality, even middle-class blacks don’t
have the same mobility to move to opportunity that even working-class whites do
because of the way race works in our society.”
So, segregation continues. But now the line is drawn between middle-class blacks in
the older, inner-ring suburbs, whites in the outer-ring suburbs… and for the most
part in cities such as Detroit, poorer blacks left behind in the central city.
Smarth Growth advocates say part of the answer to urban sprawl is finding a way to
get more money back into the central-cities to make them more attractive to
everyone. That’s worked in cities such as Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis-St.
Paul. But those cities and their suburbs are predominantly white. For Northern
cities with greater racial divides, cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St.
Louis and Detroit it’s different. A lot of white suburbanites don’t want tax
dollars going to blacks in the city. And African-Americans in the city don’t see
urban sprawl as their issue, so ideas such as tax revenue sharing for a metropolitan
region are not a priority. The issue of regional tax equity that
works in predominantly white regions… becomes muddied by racial animosity in
segregated regions.
“Buzz’ Thomas is state senator in Michigan who has taken on the issue of urban
sprawl and its counterpart, the deterioration of city centers. Senator Thomas says
if state legislatures can’t find an answer to help cities, sprawl in the suburbs
will continue, paving over green space and farmland.
“You know, poverty and jobs and access to health care and access to quality
education are very realistic issues for cities like Detroit. But, a reality is they
go hand-in-hand with sprawl. As your black middle-class moves out of the inner city
because they’re not satisfied with those resolution to those issues. You know, it
links sprawl.”
Senator Thomas says legislators from rural areas and from urban areas are beginning
to realize they have a common issue. But before they can get to discussions of
regional tax equity, they first have to talk about the more difficult issue of
race…
“And have a discussion that might make me uncomfortable, that might make those
that I discuss it with uncomfortable. Only then, I think, can we really adequately
figure out how long it’s going to take us to resolve that issue.”
In the meantime, many cities are still losing population and revenue. Suburbs
continue to sprawl. And farms are becoming subdivisions, retail strip malls and
fast food restaurants.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
The CLEAR act was designed to avoid a carbon trading platform susceptible to market manipulation and price volatility. (Photo courtesy of FutureAtlas CC-2.0)
