Category Archives: Jobs

A City of Missing People

25 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by in decline, Detroit, incremental change, Jobs, ruins

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Detroit's Michigan Central Station

Tourists usually pick a place to visit that’s the best at something. New York and Chicago have their skyscrapers. Orlando has its amusement parks. Detroit has decay. My wife and I stayed there a few days last summer and, honestly it was just sad. Detroit was built for 2 million people but only 700,000 people live there now. It’s a city of 1.3 million missing people. Detroit has this endless supply of buildings–wonderful buildings–that nobody uses. That’s what really gets to me about this city. All the lost potential, wasted effort, abandoned beauty. The world’s biggest ghost town.

I just saw  Detropia, a film that explains the problems of Detroit through a collage of lives, no narrator. It doesn’t get overly nostalgic and it’s not a movie of “ruin porn,” although you can’t tell Detroit’s story without ruins. Detroit’s strategy is to invest in its best places and try to build outward again. Some young people are moving downtown and that’s probably the best way for the city to start over. The problem is, the city can’t really afford to invest in itself anymore. It’s spread out over 140 square miles and it just can’t support its current population with this massive infrastructure footprint. When there’s block after block with one house where there used to be 20, how can you afford to maintain the streets, water and sewer lines, the police and fire departments, or even to plow the snow?

The thing that builds a city, millions of people making individual decisions, has been the undoing of Detroit. It’s become a repository for the state’s poor, and when they’re lucky enough to find more work, they leave. It’s a logical decision. The city is so far gone, so disappeared, that I’m afraid no matter how much the economy recovers, pretty soon it just won’t be a logical place for anyone to live.

Corktown neighborhood

Grand Army of the Republic Building, built for Detroit's Union Civil War veterans

Expand the Federal Historic Preservation Tax Credit To Stimulate Jobs

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in cities, decline, historic preservation, Jobs, taxes

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Michigan Central Station, Detroit, 2011

Thursday night, President Obama is giving his big jobs speech. I doubt we’ll get any new programs or policy changes with the current state of Congress, but I want to float the idea of expanding the federal historic preservation tax credit program as a job creator. I outlined in an earlier post how this type of program helps local economies. This is an idea I’ve been working on since 2009, when I tried to get North Carolina’s historic preservation commissions to work on their representatives and senators to consider this strategy. Senator Richard Burr, a Republican who happens to live in my city of Winston-Salem, was the only one that seemed interested, but nothing got off the ground.

Here’s some background on how the program works: As it stands now,  the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit gives a 20% federal tax credit for rehabilitation work on income-producing properties within National Register Historic Districts and landmark properties.  While this sounds like a limited group of buildings and neighborhoods, it is actually quite broad — there are more than 13,600 of these districts in the nation.  My state of North Carolina has 400 national register districts which include thousands of individual buildings.

The tax credit program could be changed in several ways that could stimulate the economy. Here’s a start:

1. Easily the most far-reaching change would be to expand the tax credit from exclusively income-producing properties to also include all residential properties. The vast majority of historic buildings are houses and this could encourage investment in older neighborhoods, particularly the rehabilitation of foreclosed properties. This idea is part of H.R. 2555, which is in committee, but here are some more ideas:

2. The amount of the tax credit could be raised. North Carolina has a state tax credit in addition to the federal program and is very successful. A 40% tax credit on income producing properties and 30% credit for non-income-producing properties, like residences, might inspire a great deal of investment in the rest of the country as it has in North Carolina.

3. The floor for the minimum spent on a project could be lowered. Right now, a person must spend at least $25,000 on a rehabilitation project in order to qualify for the tax credit. Lowering that amount would encourage some smaller renovations by people that can’t afford a wholesale renovation.

4. There is another element of the program that allows a 10% credit to rehabilitation of “older buildings,” currently defined as those built before 1936. If this definition was changed to allow buildings “fifty years old or older,” a number of properties would be included in the program that would not be otherwise.

5. Lastly, it’s difficult for non-profit organizations to take advantage of the tax credit program since they don’t technically have an income. There are a number of non-profit organizations involved in housing issues that would benefit by being included in this program.

Dear Missouri, Please Don’t Cut Your Historic Preservation Tax Credits

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in cities, historic preservation, Jobs, taxes, urban planning

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Anheuser-Busch Brewery, Saint Louis

Missouri, I know you’ve been walloped by decades of deindustrialization and now the Great Recession. You’re being forced to make some terrible choices when it comes to your state budget. On the chopping block is your historic preservation tax credit. It may seem trite to cry for the potential loss of this program. I mean, shouldn’t you be spending taxpayer money on schools and roads and bridges? Yes, but hold on a second. You need to think this through. Where are your historic structures? In the middle of your cities! For the last 50 years, people have been abandoning your cities for the suburbs. In the meantime, you’ve had to build new roads, install new water and sewer lines, build new schools, and take care of this more spread-out infrastructure. Those buildings in the middle of your cities are worth keeping around. Worth investing in. They’re your history. They don’t make ’em like that anymore and it’s not going to be cheap to fix them. But it’s worth it. Here’s why:

1. Your state tax credit helps bring federal tax credits into Missouri. That’s 20% of the money spent rehabilitating National-Register-listed income-producing buildings and 10% for pre-1936 commercial buildings. That’s a lot of free money for your local economy. And, again, where are those old commercial buildings? Oh, right. In the middle of every city and town in your state. Besides that, your state tax credit can be used for residential buildings, too (federal tax credits are only for commercial buildings).

2. This is the only thing that’s going to put building contractors back to work. How many new subdivisions have you seen going up? Shiny new strip malls? Me, neither. That’s because nobody’s buying. You know what some people are doing, though? They’re picking up old historic houses and commercial buildings for a song and fixing them up. You want to keep that going?

3. Jobs in historic preservation are local. When your average developer rehabs a building (if he doesn’t tear it down to begin with), he uses contemporary products. Let’s take the windows, for example. Do you want the contractor to buy 25 vinyl windows for this historic building? Let’s not even take into consideration how bad that would look, since the windows won’t be the right size for the building and you can never paint them and they’ll only last 10 years. Would you rather have a man in China making those windows, or would you rather hire a craftsman from Missouri to rehang the windows, fix a few broken pains and reglaze them? I’m going with the guy that pays taxes in Missouri.

4. People are buying the neighborhood, not just the house. They want to be able to walk to a corner store, ride their bike, sit on a front porch. They want sidewalks and interesting architecture. They want places where people feel invested in the future. Places they can be proud of. Your historic neighborhoods are all those things. Developers don’t build neighborhoods like this anymore, so you’d better preserve the ones you have.

5. Your cities and town governments like these neighborhoods because they’re cheaper to serve. They don’t have cul de sacs; they have grid street patterns that are cheaper to plow in the winter, they don’t get traffic backups, and they’re close to existing fire houses, police precincts, and schools. Their water and sewer systems are under-capacity since neighborhood population is way off its peak. And since people have been investing in your downtowns for the last decade or so, hopefully these neighborhoods are closer to work for a lot of people, too.

6. Historic buildings are energy efficient. Well, they are when you take into account where they are. Historic buildings, like I said, are in the middle of your towns and cities. They require less driving for the people that live there because they’re closer to downtown and, well, each other. Transit systems serve them easier and people can walk to their destinations easier. And have you ever considered the energy it takes to tear down a building and construct a new one? Stuff them with insulation and fix the windows and they’re as good as anything you can build today.

7. These buildings are your icons. Did I mention these building are in the center of all your cities and towns? They’re what people think of when they talk about Missouri. They’re your past. They’re the reason people send postcards. They’re the reason people come to visit and decide they’ll stay. Don’t mess this up!

Our Pollution Footprint and Job Creation

06 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in big picture, geography, globalization, Jobs, pollution

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It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple, an American Company, made my iPhone in China (mostly). I find it disappointing, though, that Apple’s suppliers were just accused for a second time of polluting several communities there. Then, a couple days ago, I was disappointed again when President Obama abandoned a more restrictive air pollution rule that was recommended by the EPA. The reason for doing this was, of course, jobs.

The argument usually goes that environmental protections are job killers. Where I live, in the Piedmont of North Carolina, air quality has gotten much better over the last 15 years. It’s not because of pollution controls, though. It has more to do with the tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs that disappeared from the region. Until recently, this area used to be the American center of textile and furniture manufacturing. People here wax poetic about how the local rivers would run whatever color the mills happened to be dyeing that day. It’s not that way anymore. The mills are largely closed, the rivers are mostly clear, and the air is more breathable. And a lot of people are out of work. So, if it wasn’t pollution controls that put these people out of work, what was it? NAFTA. I’m sure it’s cheaper to dump pollutants into the nearest river, but what’s driving manufacturing jobs oversees has more to do with wages, currency markets and trade agreements than pollution regulations.

Still, some people think we should open ourselves up to a bit more pollution to provide a kind of lesser-evil alternative to the uber-pollution status quo in China. It’s a decent argument, and I’m open to the possibility that some regulations may go too far, but I doubt a significant number of jobs would come back to the US if we start down this path. It begs the question though — what’s our responsibility for pollution in other countries? The world?

Pollution rules are built into many international treaties and regulations; maybe we need to concentrate our attention there instead. After all, if trade agreements are driving pollution, maybe trade agreements can tamp it down. Of course, the elephant in the room is carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Should we start there? A cap and trade system has the potential to stop manufacturing firms from chasing the lowest wage and start chasing the cleanest facility. That sounds like a situation that could create jobs here.