The Republicans' tax revolt

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) celebrates passage (swiped from nytimes.com)

There can be no more caviling about the accomplishments of the Republican-led federal government in 2017: the tax bill that cleared December 20, and was signed by President Donald J. Trump two days later, represents major policy change. Unfortunately, in addition to achieving some legitimate objectives the bill pushes policy in some very dubious directions.

First, the good news. The bill includes a long-overdue overhaul of corporate taxation. The U.S. relies to an unusual degree on business taxes, and the complex provisions of the tax code had pushed the top rate (which nobody really pays) far above that of other advanced democracies. The current bill closes some loopholes and reduces the top tax rate from 36 to 21 percent, making American business taxation more transparent and possibly more internationally competitive. Some advocates expect this to result in more hiring with higher wages. (I'm dubious, given that corporate profits have already been doing well for most of this decade, far outpacing wages.) The provision is not revenue-neutral, but could have been offset with higher individual rates. (It wasn't.)

I'm also fine with what's happened to the home mortgage interest deduction: the amount of debt on which interest is deductible was reduced from $1,000,000 to $750,000 for homes purchased after 2017, and nearly doubling the standard deduction drastically reduces the amount of people who will take it. This provision of the code has inflated prices, encouraged communities to sprawl and individuals to over-build (see Zuegel 2017 and Williamson 2017); the presumption that homeowners make better citizens was dubious from the start.

Other positives: Using chained CPI to make year-to-year adjustments should more accurately reflect the impact of inflation on taxpayers, even though it will mean lower benefits from, say, the Earned Income Tax Credit.... The child allowance has been increased for the first time in awhile, to $2000, albeit offset by eliminating personal exemptions. For low income filers, $1400 of that credit can be refunded in a sort of "negative income tax"... And some ideas got removed from earlier versions: reducing or ending tax credits for historic preservation, as well as provisions affecting higher education like taxing tuition benefits for employees of colleges and graduate student fellowships. (Maybe those last are neutrals rather than positives, since nothing was changed.)

If the bill had gone only that far, it might have been more widely supported, in and out of Congress, although that's hard to say given Washington's toxically partisan divide. But the sponsors had to go and:

• skew the individual cuts to the wealthy. In part that's because the wealthy pay most of the income taxes in America, but that's not true of all taxes. (ITEP 2017 shows the distribution of tax payments by income level, and how that would have been affected by an early version of the 2017 tax bill.) This exacerbates an already-widening income and wealth gap in America. The skew does appear worse if you include the expiration of individual cuts after ten years, which was included to make the bill fit under budget caps, so a lot of opposition analysis focuses on 2027 numbers. In fact those cuts may or may not expire, but if they don't, they will clearly worsen the bill's impact on the deficit (discussed below.)
• double the estate tax exemption, which was absurdly high even before Republicans tried to end it in their 2001 tax cut. The ability of the very rich, some but not all of whom got that way by doing socially-productive things, to pass on huge fortunes to their heirs, all of whom got that way simply by coming out of the right vagina, is absolutely contrary to an opportunity society. We're making the world safe for aristocracy, pure and simple. And since whites got several centuries' head start on making money, this approach does racial harm as well.
• expand pass-through provisions, by which individual income can be taxed at the lower business rate. This option is not available to typical working people, of course, only to those in a position to declare themselves independent contractors. A special provision related to real estate partnerships will provide substantial benefits to the Trump family as well as Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), a late convert to the yes column, all of which is giving cynics a field day.
• retain the obscene carried interest loophole, whereby the income of financial wizards is taxed as capital gains rather than income, and therefore at a much lower rate. This has cost the government $18 billion over the last ten years, besides which it irrationally favors financial wizardry over any other work. Hello-o-o, 1 percenters!
• run as much of a deficit as they legally could claim. The official estimate of revenue loss, $1.4+ trillion over 10 years, assumes a substantial economic stimulus effect, which as I said may or may not result, and steady and considerable economic expansion throughout the period. Otherwise the impact on the deficit is substantially worse. Fiscally stimulating the economy at all in the eighth year of a bull market with the country at or near full employment is hard to justify. The capacity of the federal government to deal with future events (natural disasters, security threats, economic downturns, funding for retirement and health care programs, maintaining infrastructure), not to mention regular disruption in our high-tech economy, has been damaged, which is inexplicable. In the near term, higher deficits would trigger funding cuts for Medicare and Medicaid.
• add legislative matters to the bill. Republicans have repeatedly attempted over the years to repeal the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act and open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, without success. Both are included in this bill. The ACA change cuts health care policy off at the knees--"We have essentially repealed Obamacare," President Trump proclaimed Wednesday--roiling individual insurance markets, without any recourse for the most vulnerable.
• do all this in an all-fired hurry, without so much as a committee hearing. Senator John S. McCain (R-Arizona) complained last summer about his leadership's abandonment of "regular order" in considering legislation. This bill was a most egregious example, but he supported it anyway.

The tax bill does some good, but considering its effects on vulnerable individuals as well as American society as a whole, it does a lot more bad.

DATA STUDIES
Tax Policy Center: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/distributional-analysis-conference-agreement-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act/full
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy: https://itep.org/finalgop-trumpbill/

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah et al.: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3089423

American Planning Association: https://www.planning.org/blog/blogpost/9140260/
US Treasury Dept: https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Documents/TreasuryGrowthMemo12-11-17.pdf 

SEE ALSO:
William G. Gale and Leonard Burman, "Congress Missed an Opportunity to Reform the Corporate Tax," Up Front, 26 December 2017
Alejandro Ortiz and Kathleen Powers, "So, What's in the Tax Bill?" Vote Smart, 13 December 2017

Bill Byrnes on law enforcement and the black middle class

Criminal justice policies that result in large-scale incarceration of young black men have spillover effects throughout the black population, middle class as well as poor, according to new research by Bill Byrnes of the Center for Research and Learning presented at one of the Center's Friday morning seminars last month. Byrnes's talk was entitled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Black Middle Class and Mass Incarceration." My fellow middle-aged white men who can't understand what Colin Kapernick and the kneeling NFL players are on about would do well to draw near and give heed.

Byrnes's Ph.D. research is based on focus group interviews with blacks and whites in suburban Cook County, Illinois (the county that includes Chicago) concerning friends and family members who have been incarcerated as well as their own experiences with the police. It builds on existing research that traces dramatic increases in prison populations nationwide after 1978 not only to increases in violent crime from the late 1960s to the early 1990s but also the effects of de-industrialization, public calls for more policing, federal wars on crime and drugs, longer sentences and stricter parole rules. The United States already had imprisoned a greater percentage of its population than other advanced democracies, but now the discrepancy is huge. Moreover, it disproportionately affects people by social class, neighborhood and particularly race: in Cook County, blacks comprise 24.8 percent of the total population but 66.9 percent of the prison population.

Bill Byrnes (Source: Center for Urban Research and Learning)

Byrnes's focus groups revealed that both blacks and whites suffer emotionally when friends and family members are incarcerated, but whites "seem on the whole better cushioned." Blacks are more likely than whites to know someone who has been incarcerated; to bear financial burdens for family members in jail; and to themselves have had some negative encounters with police. Byrnes's middle class black respondents "have to negotiate their safety in public spaces in ways whites don't have to," relying on extremely proper demeanor and professional clothing to get them through situations (although that doesn't always help, as witness the 2016 killing of Philando Castile in suburban Minneapolis).

Byrnes concludes that "mass incarceration is about resource allocation," redolent of Harold Lasswell's definition of politics as who gets what, when and how. Blacks and whites start from different social places, and their interactions with the state "are not equivalent." This not only puts an "unjust" burden on the poor--greater police presence means more incarceration and afterwards higher unemployment, persistent poverty, and lack of access to education and housing--but extends those burdens to the nascent black middle class, whose economic position does not insulate them from incarceration of friends and family, or from their own awkward interactions with police.

Why should this matter to people who aren't black? Byrnes cites three reasons:

1. The economic costs of mass incarceration diverts state resources from other programs. "Million dollar block" is an expression for a neighborhood where the state is spending over a million dollars incarcerating its residents. "Do you want to know why it costs $40,000 to go to U[niversity] of I[llinois] now?" Byrnes asked rhetorically. He could have added: Or why we struggle to maintain transportation infrastructure or fund schools or treat the mentally ill? 
2. Mass incarceration may endanger public safety as much or more as it protects it. Where areas of concentrated poverty are also areas of concentrated ex-inmates, the lack of economic opportunity as well as ongoing encounters with law enforcement breed desperation, which actually increases the likelihood of crime.
3. Democracy itself is compromised by a policy approach layered on top of existing social and economic inequalities that creates "two-track citizenship" defined to a large extent by race. To this I would add that the era of economic mobility in America ended about 1973, just as black civil rights were beginning to be protected. The subsequent economic arrangements have frozen in place a wealth and opportunity gap that for historical reasons favored whites. The current House and Senate tax reform efforts, most egregiously the proposed end of the inheritance tax but going beyond that in many ways, can only add to the problem.

I will add a fourth reason. It has been a core assumption since the beginning of this blog project that we will not in the coming century be able to live as separately as we have been doing for the last 75 years. Whites are going to figure out how to live with blacks, and vice versa, and policy approaches that reinforce and extend racial inequalities are making that very very difficult.

SEE ALSO:
'The Latest Bad News and Our Common Life," 17 December 2014. For more from Holy Mountain, please choose "race" from the list of labels in the right-hand column.


Ta-Nahesi Coates's essay, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 2015, is reprinted along with his own commentary/update as chapter 7 of his We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New World, 2017). It is particularly useful for his copious citation of sources. Coates was interviewed by Krista Tippett at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and that is here.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2012)
Charles Marohn, "It's Time to End the Routine Traffic Stop," Strong Towns, 31 October 2017

Re-Zoning Cedar Rapids

Community residents at ReZone Open House,
New Bo City Market, October 2017

Cedar Rapids's adoption of form-based zoning will be targeted in scale and proceed incrementally, according to city planners Seth Gunnerson and Anne Russett. The two spoke last week to the Corridor Urbanism group, following an input-seeking open house in mid-October. (I am a member of the ReZone Steering Committee, which has met occasionally since March 2016 to discuss formulation with planners and the consultants from SAFEbuilt Studio.)

ReZone Cedar Rapids grew out of the city's comprehensive plan adopted in 2015. Form-based zoning is being applied first in the downtown area, as well as four nearby areas that had previously been designated as zoning overlay districts allowing for relaxation of existing zoning rules: Czech Village/New Bohemia, Ellis Boulevard on the Northwest Side, MedQuarter and Kingston Village. The intent is to follow through where there has been ongoing focused planning efforts; these areas can then serve as models for other areas where occupants may seek focused planning in the future (such as the College District).

Citizen suggestions at the open house for future form-based zones included
Mound View/College District (center right cluster)
and along the Highway 100 extension (far left)

The area created by the extension of Highway 100 is currently a blank slate, and currently under the jurisdiction of Linn County, but is likely to be annexed by the City of Cedar Rapids before development, so form-based zoning and even walkable urbanism are open possibilities there. This poster...

...presented by H.R. Green Engineering at a city open house in March 2014 suggested walkable urbanism was at least being considered for future development along Highway 100, albeit there were two other posters there too.

Gunnerson and Russett explained that form-based zoning centers on the form and size of buildings rather than separating uses (residential, commercial and industrial being the three main traditional categories). The code also describes street networks and multiple access, neighborhood character and the relationship of buildings to streets.

Dot stickers indicated citizen support

Typically form-based regulations have buildings fronting the streets rather than existing behind parking areas...

...or green space, and describe pedestrian scale infrastructure like lighting...

and signs...

...although any form including large-lot suburban subdivisions can be part of the code.

The reasons to change the zoning code, besides encouraging more traditional walkable development, is to allow more options for neighborhoods beyond single use, update zoning that is often decades old and not descriptive of certain areas, and simplifying the process of approving or disapproving developments.

The first draft of the code is due this winter; the revised draft following public feedback will be presented to the City Council in summer 2018. The new codes may take effect immediately or be phased in over a number of months.

My guess is the average Cedar Rapids citizen will not notice much impact from this zoning change. In the targeted districts certain types of building will be restricted, but other types can be expedited. Over the long term we can hope for better economic development in those economically-important districts, and aroused public interest in attempting form-based zoning in other parts of the city. I'm more hopeful about the first than about the second.

CORRECTION: The discussion of property along the Highway 100 extension has been amended to clarify the probable sequence of annexation and development i.e. previous false information has been replaced by true information.

MORE! MORE! MORE!

City's promotional "trailer":

The city's Rezone website contains display boards as well as results of public input.

SEE ALSO:
"What is a 'Form-Based Code' and Other Mysteries of Zoning," 7 March 2016
"Envision CR Open House," 26 March 2014

Black Friday parking 2017: After the ball is over

This year's observance of the Black Friday Parking tradition took me down 16th Avenue SW, a five-lane stroad that runs west from New Bohemia past the former Lincoln School and eventually connects to old U.S. Highway 30. It's not a shopping hotspot on Black Friday or any day; as an example of first wave sprawl, it mainly features empty buildings, used car lots, and the occasional surviving restaurant. There's activity nearby--Jefferson High School, the Cedar Rapids Ice Arena, and two stadiums that between them in use most of the year--but it produces no spillover effects for 16th's economy. The average daily traffic count of 11500-13700 is mostly on their way somewhere else.

Going out of business

Gone out of business

Gone out of business

This used to be a K-Mart...

...and could be yours for the right price

Strip mall, parking lot about 40 percent full

Theisen's, parking lot close to full

Strip mall, lot about 50 percent full

Sidewalks have been added along parts of 16th Avenue;
I would not support more

Walgreen's parking lot about 50 percent full;
ditto the CVS across the street

Next year I promise to visit somewhere more hopping. In the meantime we should not invest a lot in trying to rescue 16th Avenue... just recognize that shopping areas with giant parking lots end up like this--unless, like Cedar Rapids's former Westdale Mall, the city pumps $10+ million into resuscitation--and maybe we should stop building them.

PREVIOUS VENTURES: 2016 (Edgewood Road & Westdale), 2015 (Blairs Ferry Rd)

Cedar Rapids parking ordinance: https://library.municode.com/ia/cedar_rapids/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=CH32ZO_S32.05DIPADEST_32.05.020PAST

On Twitter, check #blackfridayparking

MORE TO READ!
James Brasuell, "Better Land Use Planning: One of the Best Ways to Improve Transportation," Planetizen, 19 November 2017
Rachel Quednau, "This Week, Join in Our Annual Black Friday Parking Event," Strong Towns, 20 November 2017

Cedar Rapids City Council runoff 2017

Source: cedar-rapids.org

This month's elections for Cedar Rapids City Council featured races for five of the nine seats resulting in two new members (Marty Hoeger in District 1 and Tyler Olson at large), one member returning after a 16 year hiatus (Dale Todd in District 3), and two races that will require a runoff on Tuesday, December 5. It is to those races that we now turn.

Brad Hart and Monica Vernon are the survivors of an eight-person mayors' race. Vernon led the first round, with 30.3 percent of the vote to Hart's 20.4 percent out of  17,642 votes cast (Morelli). In our city's council-manager system, the part-time mayor is technically just one at-large vote on the City Council, but the visibility of the position allows considerable leadership potential, as outgoing mayor Ron Corbett demonstrated in his two terms. Both are running on their biographies, which are impressive. Both have been public, if not (in the case of Hart) political presences in the city for a number of years. Both surely exceed the threshold of strategic competence, articulated by my former writing colleague Paul J. Quirk as a generalist's ability to recognize the signs of responsible argument on a broad array of issues. As a manager of problems with high levels of personal activity and familiarity with the city, either would be fine.

Both have fairly elaborate websites (cited below) with separate issue pages. There's a lot of commonality between them. Vernon covers more issues, 12 to 8, while Hart's statements are longer. Both indicate recognition of city needs like jobs, financing and inclusion, but beyond being in support of all three there's not a lot of policy substance.

Employment, for example, is surely one of the core challenges America faces in the 21st century in the face of automation, outsourcing and persistent poverty. Here's Hart:

Strong businesses + workforce = healthy community. People will come to live and work in a community that is welcoming and has a great quality of life to offer--schools, housing, entertainment, recreation, safety. People stay when they become connected to the community and its people. We can all help in that effort by being more friendly, more welcoming, by random acts of kindness. Volunteering will play an important role here, too.

And Vernon:
Opportunity waits for no one. Economic development must be serious business for Cedar Rapids and the Mayor of Cedar Rapids must be a self-starter who will lead the charge with passion. Building and developing and re-developing this city must be done with a "pedal to the metal" mentality. Using common sense and an approach of equal opportunity, we must continue to push forward for progress.

I'm seeing good intentions here in both cases, but nothing one could call a plan, or even a suspicion of a strategy.

The Gazette profiles of Hart and Vernon shook loose some more specific positions. Vernon's more detailed answers include reasonable defenses of city investments in Greene Square and the New Bo City Market. She and Hart agree on the importance of recruiting and retaining major employers, accommodating all means of transportation ("we must also have drivability," says Vernon), getting state/federal support for flood protection, and judicious use of tax increment financing (TIFs), all of which involve a great deal of negotiating with and listening to businesses, state and federal officials, and city residents.

A rare criticism of past policy, besides their agreement that the incremental conversion of one-way streets to two-way has been "confusing," is Vernon arguing that the closing of the 1000 block of 2nd Avenue SE to accommodate Physicians Clinic of Iowa should have included funding for the immediate conversion of the entirety of 3rd Avenue. Funding from... the city (from what pile of cash)? Or from PCI, in which case how does that square with her stated willingness to "fight to keep" major employers, whether the issue is "housing, workforce development, land or infrastructure?"

Hart mentioned as part of an answer on city finances that "We also need to review the street construction requirements for new streets developed by others so when those streets become the responsibility of the city they last for the 40-50 years expected." That's a rare example of the mayor articulating a specific expectation, and it's spot on, although from what I know 40-50 years is optimistic for streets with a modicum of traffic.

District 5

In District 5, Vanorny outpolled three-term incumbent Shields by 60 votes out of 2128 cast, 43.2% to 40.4% (Ramm). District 5 runs along the southern edge of the city, with one northward spur west of 6th Avenue SW that just intersects the Taylor Area neighborhood. (See this map on the county website.) It appears to be the least dense of the five districts, and includes the swath of strip malls on the southwest side.

Justin Shields, from cedar-rapids.org

So it is not surprising that one of two issues discussed among Shields's recent Facebook posts, besides his leadership in flood recovery, is the multi-million dollar renovation of the former Westdale Mall. This was an enormous outflow of city money into development that is neither walkable nor sustainable. It is difficult to search for issues on a Facebook page, but there is little evidence that we are going to have to anything differently than we've done in 75 years of the suburban development pattern.

Ashley Vanorny, from her website

Ashley Vanorny is a 32-year-old IT analyst for University of Iowa Hospital. Her website discusses her calling to public service--a courageous statement in these cynical times--and her work with foster children at Four Oaks. Promoting community spirit is an essential quality of a city leader, but while she is critical of past Council actions on "issues regarding panhandling and affordable housing," but that as policy-specific as her content gets.

America, which includes Cedar Rapids, faces some profound challenges. How do we enable a satisfactory quality of life and economic opportunity for our citizens in the face of economic, environmental, racial and financial challenges? Cedar Rapids faces specific issues of a major physical remake of our school system; an overhaul of the zoning code; continued implementation of complete streets policies, particularly funding for sidewalks; development in the MedQuarter, core neighborhoods and new areas created by the Highway 100 extension; and the future of our bus system as well as potential inter-city public transportation. We've managed to have a school board election and two rounds of a city council election this fall without serious debate over any of these. It's no wonder so few people vote.

SEE ALSO:
"Cedar Rapids Mayoral Forum Nov. 13, 2017" (video), KCRG-TV9, 14 November 2017
B.A. Morelli, "Hart and Vernon to Face Off for Cedar Rapids Mayor in Runoff," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 7 November 2017
Michaela Ramm, "Cedar Rapids District 5 City Council Race Headed for Dec. 5 Runoff," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 7 November 2017
Steve Shriver, interviews with Brad Hart and Monica Vernon, 3 October 2017
"Brad Hart for Mayor: Home," www.hart4cr.com
"Justin Shields for Cedar Rapids" Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/JustinShieldsForCedarRapids/
"Ashley Vanorny--A Voice for Cedar Rapids," www.ashleyvanorny.com
"Home--Monica Vernon Cedar Rapids Mayor Candidate," www.monicavernonformayor.com
"Cedar Rapids City Council Runoff," Holy Mountain, 23 November 2013

CRCSD plan

Public input forum at Washington High School, 11/9/2017

The Cedar Rapids Community School District is floating a bold plan to remake our city's elementary schools by 2034. Nearly all (18 of 21) existing schools would be closed under the plan, which is to be officially presented to the school board in December and voted on in January. New, larger schools would be built on ten existing school sites, the three remaining schools (Grant, Hiawatha and Viola Gibson) would be renovated, and the other eight schools would be closed and re-purposed, sold, or something.

The district's rationale mixes necessity and pragmatism. They cite the need for a total of $241 million dollars of building updates in our current elementaries, while the new schools could be built for pretty much the same amount ($260 million) and could save money on staffing and operating costs. The Physical Plant and Equipment Levy Fund (PPEL) is inadequate to fund needed repairs, and by 2024 the cumulative efforts to patch aging facilities will have exhausted the fund's reserves. Because SAVE money will be available from the State of Iowa beginning in 2020 to supplement the PPEL funds, the district can execute this plan without either a tax increase or a bond issue. Given the district's previous experience closing Polk School, there's also probably something to be said for getting all the pain out of the way at once.

District chart showing PPEL fund's inability to keep up with maintenance needs

I confess to difficulty analyzing the plan, the audacity of which is breathtaking. It is immediately redolent of the "orderly but dumb" top-down comprehensive planning that Strong Towns is always criticizing. In part we are responding to a situation that is created by decades of suburban development with a comprehensive reaction that will probably reinforce that pattern. Five years ago, there were five elementary schools located in the city's core neighborhoods (two in Mound View); after this process is through there will remain two (none in Mound View).

But react we must, probably. I'm going with the district's numbers on this, because I don't have my own. From 35 years in colleges and universities, I can tell you it's impossible to win an argument with an administration who says financial necessity requires us to do something unpleasant. Where opposing perspectives and alternative plans would emerge is during election campaigns, but remarkably, we've just this fall had elections for the school board and city council in which this city-altering proposal was not discussed.

So we're left trusting (or not) that school officials are acting in good faith and with good judgment. Long-term planning is inevitably risky, because they're based on forecasts that by definition amount to guesswork with varying degrees of certainty. Among the arguable assumptions of the plan or its advocates:

• Building new facilities (the "learning environment") is the most effective use of available money to improve student learning.
• The improved facilities and professional staffing (like full-time librarians) that come with newer schools cannot be achieved in any other way.
• Maintenance needs of schools at the back end of the plan (due for reconstruction or destruction in 2030-2034) will not in the meantime affect the overall cost calculus
• State funding will not appreciably increase anytime soon--OK, that's not really arguable--but we can rely on them maintaining current programs and funding levels.
• The population of Cedar Rapids will continue to sprawl. While young professionals or empty-nesters might be attracted to residences in the city center, we won't see similar shifts among school-age children.
• The assessment of infrastructure needs is accurate, and represents needs that must be immediately addressed. These figures are in no way inflated a la the American Society of Civil Engineers' annual report that the U.S. must spend trillions of dollars to bring its roads and bridges into shape (see Marohn 2011).
• Construction of the new facilities will be of high quality that will last... like some of our oldest schools that have lasted more than 100 years, and not like some of the shoddier stuff that was thrown up in the 1950s and 60s.
• Transportation costs to the district under the plan can be managed, because not many more students will require busing--many parents are already driving their children to school--and energy costs will remain relatively low.
• Less than 25 percent of students currently walk to school, so the impact of larger attendance areas will be small. There is no hope of increasing the percentage of students walking anyway.
• Of the 1200+ students currently choosing to home school or attend out of district, many will be lured back by new facilities with up-to-date features. "People have said to me they chose not to move to Cedar Rapids because they drove up and looked at our schools," Superintendent Brad Buck told the Gazette (Duffy, cited below). [By way of contrast, today's Gazette includes a quote from Coolidge School parent Janelle Lund who argues parents aren't fleeing bad schools, they're fleeing bad test scores: It has nothing to do with how (the schools) look bad on the outside. It's because the proficiency levels are too low. Of course, test scores are driven neither by buildings nor by the quality of the instruction, they're driven by the socio-economic status of the student body. So basically they're fleeing poor people, and they're not the first to do that.]
• Impacts on neighborhood property values are unavoidable if not negligible. Overall impact on assessed value in the city will be negligible.
• Something positive will occur on the sites of the closed schools. Certainly, said one person Thursday night, "we don't want [the properties] to become derelict." We should be encouraged that previously-closed Monroe School, on a block with a large number of cheap apartments in poor condition far from existing schools or employment opportunities, is going to become even more affordable housing.

The Facilities Master Plan may need to be comprehensive, but implementation should be considered incremental. In other words, as we learn more about how these closings and consolidations are affecting students as well as the city at large, we should modify or scrap the remaining part. We can only hope that neither the contracts nor the officials themselves are so rigid as to stick to the script when adverse consequences emerge.

A word to the wise: The district's information circulated at the public input discussions noted that future investments in middle and high schools will require going to the voters (p. 27). How the matter of the elementary schools is handled will have a significant impact on the public's receptivity to the future middle-high referendum.

SEE ALSO:
Molly Duffy, "C.R. Makes Bold Pitch for Schools to Parents," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 13 November 2017, 17A, 20A
"Public Deserves More Time to Weigh C.R. Schools' Facilities Plan," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 5 November 2013
"Starting a Conversation about Education," Holy Mountain, 16 August 2015

What future for Cedar Rapids

Downtown Cedar Rapids, spring 2017

As Cedar Rapids prepares to elect a new mayor next month we should be encouraged by the optimism of Aaron Horn, the new chief operating officer of the startup cooperative NewBoCo:

There's this high-level desire to see [startup growth] happen here, and if you don't have people trying to make that happen here, it just won't.... I just had this idea that why would I run off to Chicago or Silicon Valley to be part of startup activity when people were trying to do that here (Patane 2017).

Cedar Rapids seems to be out-performing its peer cities in the 2010s. We're three weeks away from a city council election, including eight candidates vying for an open mayoral slot. It's been a rather bloodless campaign so far, with no burning issue or group conflict to polarize the electorate. There's been a lot of talk about fixing streets and filling potholes, which speaks to a certain confidence in our future. Or maybe it's a lack of concern? We are so sure we're not Steubenville, Ohio, and are never going to be, that our concerns can be potholes vs. bike lanes or which neighborhoods are getting shorted on city spending.

Do we know why we're in the position we're in? To be sure, we were early on the tech train (Rockwell Collins, McLeod USA) at least for this part of the country, our economy has diversified from the agricultural days, and we're reasonably close to the University of Iowa--though that's in Iowa City, a separate metro with a remarkably similar income pattern. We've been blessed with some visionary leaders--a group Horn seems fixing to join--and a moderate, tolerant political culture. We're doing a lot of the right things: re-examining our zoning code, re-developing downtown, flood protection, building sidewalks and trails, re-converting our one-way streets. It would be interesting to re-run the last decade without the flood, and see whether we'd be better or worse off today, but alas, this is not experimental science we're doing.

Nationally, it is widely known that generally favorable economic data since 2010 mask a wide variety of experiences. In an early crack at the data, I showed in June 2016 just with population data that the back-to-the-city movement affected the central cities in the largest metropolitan areas differently, from dramatic growth (Charlotte, Austin, Raleigh) to steep declines (Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans).

More studies have dug deeper into the data. A Brookings Institution study, based on analysis of Census Bureau data, analyzes changes in inflation-adjusted median household incomes in 300 metropolitan areas (Berube 2017). They divide the metros into five groups:

1. booming (25), including large tech hubs and small cities around oil and gas finds;
2. stabilized (37), tech and other large cities that have been able to sustain gains through tough times;
3. recovering (73) i.e. from de-industrialization or the housing crash;
4. struggling (86), mostly middle-sized cities which had relied on manufacturing;
5. hardest-hit (76), mostly older manufacturing cities.

Spread out that way, the urban renaissance appears so far to be concentrated in relatively few places, with more trying to keep up and still more genuinely floundering. (That's sort of my impression of today's economy at the individual level as well.)

A New York Times business column (Porter 2017) highlights a study by Mark Muro, also of the Brookings Institution, noting that cities the size of Cedar Rapids are on the whole doing less well than large cities. The key graphic from the article:

Where Disruption Has Hit U.S. Workers Hardest

Automation and foreign trade have buffeted the nation’s labor force, especially across the Midwest and Southeast. But big metropolitan areas have been more successful than smaller places at recovering from economic shocks.

Rates of recovery from recession

in the 10 states of greatest disruption

How states rank in being disrupted

by foreign trade and automation*

Large

metro

areas

Small

metro

areas

CHANGE FROM

2009 TO 2015, BY

SIZE OF METRO AREA

LEAST

MOST

Top 10

cities

MOST

Michigan

PRIVATE

EMPLOYMENT

+2.1%

+1.9

+1.0

Compound annual

growth rate

REAL PERSONAL

INCOME

+1.9%

+1.9

+1.3

Compound annual

growth rate

LABOR FORCE

PARTICIPATION RATE

–0.6

–0.8

–1.5

LEAST

Percentage-point

change

Hawaii

*Disruption caused by foreign trade and automation is measured by the reliance on Trade Adjustment Assistance, a program to help workers displaced by overseas competition, between 1994 and 2014, and by the ratio of robots in operation to workers in 2015.

By The New York Times | Brookings Institution analysis of data from Moody’s Analytics, Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis and Bureau of Labor Statistics

"Small metro areas" are here defined as those with populations between 80,000 and 250,000. Analysts suggest these areas lacked the critical mass to respond nimbly to changes in the economy. The Times writer quotes Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti:

The thickness of a labor market is crucial in the innovation industries that are the drivers of economic success today. This applies to the biotech engineer but not to the welder, who has more replaceable skills.

According to one estimate, 80 percent of new jobs in 2016 were created in metropolitan areas of 1,000,000 or more. Counties with populations below 250,000 actually had a net loss of jobs (Bishop 2017). Small metro residents are feeling it, too: Voters in small metros showed their frustrations by favoring Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election by nearly 20 percentage points, almost the same as rural voters (Florida 2017). Struggling World is close by, too. A New York Times magazine story out of Clinton, 90 miles to our northeast, argues that the sharp statewide swing towards the Republican Party in the 2010s has its roots in the loss of college-educated young people (Tackett). In Iowa, Wisconsin and elsewhere, the educated young move elsewhere to get work, while the economically-insecure folk who remain take out their anxieties at the polls, leading to policy outcomes with mostly symbolic payoffs that if anything just create frustrations for the cities that are the engines of the states' economies.

There aren't enough data in the study from Cedar Rapids, but what there are would put us in the "stabilized" group: 2016 median family income ($63385) is up 6.4 percent since 2009. That makes sense when you consider that our catastrophic flood occurred in 2008, and much federal aid and private investment has followed. Compared to 1999, though, we're down 2.7 percent.

If we don't know how we got stabilized--or worse, are naive about how we got here--how do we avoid regressing to the mean? Does Cedar Rapids, despite its being a small city, have a thick enough labor market to retain college-educated young people through lean times as well as fat? (The current national bull market, seven years on, won't last forever.) One way to enlarge the labor market could be to enlarge the scope of the city by strengthening connections with Iowa City, including better intracity transportation by which I do not mean adding another lane to I-380. Further strengthen those connections with a regional revenue-sharing agreement with a non-compete provision so area municipalities work together to make an appealing, resilient region.

More questions: can we do better at retaining young, educated people, while building an economy (and a community) that includes everyone? Is the city's financial conditions strong enough to sustain us through whatever history and the economy bring next?

Aaron Horn, from his Twitter page

Aaron Horn clearly thinks Cedar Rapids has the potential to remain strong, so we'll give him the last word.

I think we [in the State of Iowa] have a lot of work to do. Generally, especially here at NewBoCo, we just feel like it's not enough. We feel like we're doing a lot here at NewBoCo and it's not enough.... We just take that on personally as we're not just going to sit around and say, "The State of Iowa is not doing enough." We're just going to dig in our heels and say, "Where are the gaps, and what do we need to do to fill that?"

MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
Justin Golbabai, "What Happens if the Delivery Trucks Don't Come," Strong Towns, 18 October 2017
"The Right Way to Help Declining Places," Economist, 21 October 2017
Ellen Shepard, "Chicagoans Had Better Take a Hard and Wary Look at Any Deal to Woo Amazon," Chicago Sun-Times, 28 September 2017

Seattle public library

Seattle Central Library (Source: Wikipedia)

The Seattle Public Library, built about 10 years ago and designed by starchitect Rem Koolhaas, is a wonderful space notwithstanding its bizarre shape. I was very curious to see the building, which is located on a city block defined by 4th and 5th Avenues, and Spring and Madison Streets, having heard both strongly negative and positive comments over the years. Count me among the positive.

I will grant that, seen from above, it looks silly, and that they probably paid way too much for the design. At street level, it's a different story. It plays well with the street. The sidewalk on 4th Avenue goes by the glass front and an inviting doorway.

4th Avenue entrance

I'm less taken with the ground floor, which has a sterile, industrial-basement feel.

The children's room, to the left, is warmer, but with what I take to be a sad sign of these times.

The rest of the library is a mix of warm and whimsical, but very functional. There are elevators for direct travel, escalators for scenic travel, and steps for strenuous travel.

The non-fiction books, on floors 7-9, are arranged in a spiral. Fans of the Dewey Decimal System will recognize this as the art section.

The upper floors provide comfortable and quiet reading areas...

...as well as views of the city--here, the federal appeals courthouse...

...and here, downtown looking towards Elliott Bay.

I come from a small city, where our very excellent library fits on just two floors, so I don't know how I would feel about scooting up to the 9th floor to retrieve history and biography books, but this is a big library in a big city and I think I'd get used to it.

James Howard Kunstler is a severe critic of the library, and of starchitects in general. His problem is less with the outside appearance than with the disorienting nature of the interior, which he says is contrary to the function of the public building i.e. to help ground people and help them make sense of the noisy world around them. I don't know what if any alterations the library has made in the 9 1/2 years since Kunstler's commentary (cited below), but I found it quite the contrary. The lower floors were well-used, but--like Yosemite National Park--the farther we got from the entrance the less crowded and more quiet it became, and the upper floors definitely were the sort of oases urban life requires. Wayfinding was rather easy.
 
I liked being in every part of the library, and I think if anything I'm unusually sensitive to noise and disorientation--maybe especially so the day I visited, because that day had started at 5:42 a.m. with some guy outside my window yelling about the Book of Revelation. If I lived in Seattle, I'd be here a lot.

The 1906 version looks grander and less absurd, but does it play as well with the street?

SOURCE: James Howard Kunstler, "The Seattle Public Library and Other Award-Winning Disastrous Architecture," Kunstler Cast #05, 13 March 2008

MANY MANY MORE PHOTOS: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-seattle-public-library-central-library-seattle