Right Now Downtown

Why do I write about the book $20 Gasoline in my blog called “In Search of a City?”  There is a silver lining in high energy costs.  Cities and traditional town center will benefit.

Author Christopher Steiner in Chapter $12 maintains that high energy prices will correct the development mistakes made over many decades in the U.S.  They will make cities more orderly and dense as developers scramble to build housing and commercial buildings near bus lines and emerging rail lines.  U.S. cities will begin to look and function more like European cities.

Gasoline priced at $12 per gallon will drive households to seek neighborhoods where people can walk, bicycle and take public transportation.  Neighborhoods furthest from the urban core will crash first and hardest, not only because of high transportation costs, but because skyrocketing home energy costs will make 3,000 plus square foot homes too expensive for many people to maintain.

All cities will benefit, but older cities such as Cleveland will benefit the most.  Newer cities will struggle because they grew with bad or  non-existent planning and helter skelter development patterns.

Adjusting to high energy will be a painful process, but according to Steiner, the results will be more interesting and sustainable cities.

The Ohio Legislature may soon consider some smart-growth (as opposed to stupid-growth) policies, thanks to recommendations by a group called the Ohio Cities Task Force.  Currently, tax abatements and infrastructure spending in Ohio encourage sprawl.  For example, the State uses public money to build new water and sewer systems in spite of the fact that Ohio cities contain a growing amount of developable land that is fully served by water and sewer systems.  Most tax abatements go where they are least needed.

The task force noted that public policy and spending should encourage redevelopment of existing urban areas.  It recommends that economically distressed areas get larger tax abatements than affluent, “green field” areas (ironic, since tax abatements were created to benefit distressed areas).

It also recommends that the State spend more than 1% of its transportation budget on public transit.  Most encouraging is a recommendation that public resources generally not be used to extend utility lines to “green fields.”  In other words, someone who wishes to duplicate infrastructure at low densities in exurban areas would need to pay for it privately.

These recommendations should make any fiscal conservative happy.

Hey taxpayers!  Let’s reward Dublin for bad planning.  The Columbus Dispatch reported on Sunday that the city applied for $9.6 million in federal and state funds as a down payment on a $145 million interchange at Rt. 33 and I-270.

Why?  To fix congestion problems created by Dublin when it allowed 1,000 businesses with 34,000 employees to locate, helter-skelter, on the Rt. 33 corridor west of I-270.  This scatter approach to development is inaccessible by foot and bicycle, unserviceable by transit, and makes carpooling virtually impossible.  It requires a personal vehicle to go to the bathroom.

Here is the ongoing lesson for communities from the State of Ohio:  If you encourage the most unsustainable, auto-dependent, climate-changing sprawl and create your own congestion problems, you, too, can get rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars!

So let’s enable Dublin to continue spewing Taco Bells and WalMarts all the way to Marysville!  But we had better begin saving out money because any improvement to this interchange will only bring us more congestion.