INTRO: This Friday, a part of Michigan’s brain trust is meeting at MSU. You want to know how to fix Michigan? They can tell you. They don’t hold any elected offices. They’re democrats and republicans who are friends. And if they were running the state, chances are it would be better off. Listen why… Here’s Michigan Now’s Chris McCarus.
This group of policy wonks will focus on getting the most out of tax dollars. The keynote speaker will be Greg LeRoy. He started a Washington think tank, Good Jobs First. LeRoy says to get the jobs, first you have to invest in cities.
“Place and the quality of place is everything. If you look at why Google chose Ann Arbor. It’s because of the quality of life. People want to have shorter commutes. People want to be able to walk around. People want to have a choice about how they do things every day. Making attractive places to live, places that are walkable, places that are safe for families, safe for kids to walk to school, is the future of economic development.”
LeRoy is pleased that the Obama Administration has started to coordinate transportation, housing, and the environment when making funding decisions. It was never done before in Washington. And according to LeRoy, it was never done by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation either.
At the state level and at the federal level we’ve had too many programs that have not been connected to each other. In a study we did there in Michigan a couple years ago, the deals, the economic development deals of your state economic development programs we found to be very disconnected from land use planning. Very disconnected from where jobs are needed the most in terms of replacing jobs that have been lost because of factory closings and mass layoffs.”
The Michigan State University Land Policy Institute is hosting the event at the Kellogg Center. That’s on the MSU campus. Greg LeRoy says after the request from Lansing, Washington has been doing a better job on renewable energy.
“I think it’s investing in a lot of smart things for the future. In the first round of a program called the advanced manufacturing energy tax credit, companies in the state got a total of 10 tax credit grants worth more than a total of $200 million for the next generation of wind, solar and other kinds of renewable energy. The state has also been a big winner so far in competitions at the Dept of Energy for the next generation of auto batteries, lithium-ion batteries that can store electricity for long periods of time.”
Most of the people at MSU Friday will say rebuilding cities solves old problems, from budget crises, to foreclosure, joblessness and recent college grads taking off and never coming back. Though not a Michigander, Chris Leinberger will be coming back from the Brookings Institution. He himself once built new roads, malls and subdivisions outside cities. Leinberger said he had no choice. Government created the housing market in the wrong place.
Massive subsidies where we’ve been putting trillions of dollars into driveable suburban infrastructure. And then occasionally we feel badly that we have to save our cities as we were throwing them away in the last half of the 20th century. And we come up with programs that were high profile and we threw billions of dollars at these programs such as model cities and UDAG grants. But they all failed.”
They failed because a multiplier effect had been set up in the wrong direction. Suburbs created more roads, sewers and schools to pay for. Too much land and not enough people to use it. Even this week, teachers are bracing for layoffs in Farmington, Troy, Grosse Pointe and Utica. Suburbs won’t ever be vital enough to support a metro area. But cities can be. They did it before.
“The state government should focus more of its development, support and energy on redeveloping the urban landscape.”
That’s Dan Kildee. He and an Emory University law professor are the architects of land banks. They’re government offices that sell, fix up or demolish buildings on abandoned property. Michigan now has 30 of them.
“In the built environment in Michigan which is all the cities and village and a lot of the urbanized townships where we’ve already invested heavily in infrastructure and in all of the assets that create a community we ought to protect those areas. We ought to protect them by disproportionately spending our resources but also the development incentives only in those areas.”
It’s common to hear that the state is broke. Government has no money. But a $40 billion annual budget isn’t nothing. The MSU Land Policy Conference folks say, you just have to prioritize.