Rust Wire Looks At Highway Socialism's Tragic Impact On Youngstown

Youngstown, Ohio, is a city in many ways struggling with success to revive it's beautiful downtown and create a financially sustainable path for livable urbanism. Residents have overwhelmingly supported a program to more rationally use the city's smaller resource base by shrinking streets and rightsizing neighborhoods--in a region in which not only the city but the surrounding area have lost 6% of their population in the last decade alone.

Meanwhile, the city competes with a county and state bent on socialising wasteful roads which bleed the city's tax base for ever spreading suburban sprawl.

From Rust Wire

"State Route 224 in Boardman is not the type of road that planners or sustainability advocates would delight in seeing replicated. Traffic slogs down this commercial corridor at a snail’s pace most times of day. The local paper, The Vindicator, described driving on the street as everything from “exasperating and near impossible to unbelievable and scary.” (It just underwent widening.)

The entire six-mile commercial stretch of SR 244 lacks a foot of sidewalk space. So as much as a headache as it is to drive on, it’s far worse for pedestrians. Furthermore, stormwater runoff from the acres of parking lots along this route have contributed to a persistent and costly flooding problem in Boardman Township."

People in these often Republican suburbs need to understand the process and ethics behind this for what it is-Socialism.

So how did Western Reserve rocket up the infrastructure priority list in the Youngstown area? Well, again, that’s a matter of public policy in a state that continues to favor growth. Because Boardman and Canfield Townships are unincorporated, they won’t have to pay a dime to widen Western Reserve. It’s a county road — that means the county picks up the bill. Many suburbs, including Boardman Township (population 37,000) benefit from remaining unincorporated, allowing them to foist many of their infrastructure costs onto the county.

The injustice of this whole arrangement is that the costs of widening the road will be shared by all residents of the county — including the people who live in Youngstown. Youngstown’s roads will go unmaintained, and the county will continue to draw money from central city residents and redistribute it into the suburbs and exurbs.

To a large extent this story could have been with a few revisions been about the insane, ugly and destructive sprawl around Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Akron, Detroit or an endless number of cities.

A piece by Chuck Banas, titled, "The Sprawl Bubble" might the best succinct description of the problem.

All of this is stupefyingly expensive. These indirect costs constitute the majority of the expense, yet remain invisible to most people—spread-out in the form of local, state, and federal taxes, or camouflaged as municipal bond debt or various other forms of government debt. So in addition to being redundant, this means that suburbia is a doubly expensive living arrangement.

The other point that I’m trying to make is that the migration of wealth to the suburbs has not been a free-market phenomenon. Customer choice is only a small part of the equation, or this wouldn’t have happened in virtually every American city at the exact same time in the exact same way. Which, of course, is exactly how it did happen.

I assert that much of the economic crisis we’re seeing today is simply the end result of decades of bad decisions driven by bad economic, transportation, housing, and land-use policy.

Some Tips On How To Destroy A City

This was something I wrote two years ago on the Pittsburgh Metroblog which seems worth putting up again. It relates to a few future posts.

One bunch of people who are likely to want to come to Pittsburgh are urban planners. This isn’t a complement; Pittsburgh is almost a lab experiment in poor government and bad urban design and It’s kind of famous for it. So,it may be that people may want some tips on how too screw up their towns too. These tips are most useful if you are looking to screw up a city with a small land area (by which I mean -in the city limits) and are great for places with lots of hills, rivers or other barriers.

Here are just a few. I will come back with more.It’s a two part strategy to destroy the value of urban land; quality of life and tax base while at the same time making it easy and cheap live outside the city.It’s proven and has worked great here.

Tear holes in your city and stick in as many highways as you can. Highways that will divide and cut through existing business districts are the best. You must have major highways cutting into your downtown!! Remember, you don’t want people to live in the city especially wealthy people.

Raise Taxes in the city to pay for it and your other plans. Well, just raise taxes for any reason really.

Cut and remove as much mass transit as you can. Transit is needed to have a dense city and you don’t want that.

Add as much parking as you can. You can build huge garages to help waste tax money but you mainly need huge areas of plain old surface lots.

Put huge Sports Stadiums in or near the key areas of the city. Since they are usually empty, they are are like putting extra fancy holes in the town. they waste lots of tax money and best of all they need tons of parking!!! (remember you don’t have mass transit.)The key is to put these holes in or just near the downtown and make sure that a sea of parking lots sit on the most useful city land.

Try to remove as many mixed uses of land as you can. Say that offices should not be near homes or stores etc… This requires more driving, more and wider highways and more and more parking holes in the city. It also will likely cause lots of traffic and pollution which will chase people out of town. Remember to raise taxes or borrow to pay for the roads.

Use all kinds of anti walking policies. Shoppers usually walk and you don’t want that. Get rid of sidewalks and use highways with walls to cut up areas.

Basically, It’s a progressive strategy. You set in motion a chain reaction that requires more and more of the same–more holes and lower densities require more driving and more holes in the city and so on. For example, chances are that your downtown retail will start to die off– so you say you need to add more parking or perhaps pay the retailers to stay. Some people might start to feel bad about their town as you destroy it (by now your suicide rate might be up) so they need cheering up with some other new stadium.

You can do it to!!!

Our Socialist Road System

The nature of a statist economy creates endless confusion as (which is why it's so popular) to who has earned what and who is paying their own way. One of it's results is that a lot of our countries most strident advocates of free markets, live a lifestyle totally dependent on vast government transfers and other expenses. Another Piittsburgh blogger has a long rant on this subject.

"The factors that have allowed people to escape and ignore the social problems in the city are cheap oil and the public subsidization of interstate roads. People bitch about the (actually very small) percentage of their tax dollars that is earmarked for social programs to help the lower classes. Yet no one ever talks about the fact that our federal government artificially depresses the price of gasoline in this country with an aggressive and costly foreign policy. It's a vicious cycle that keeps our ecomomy wholly dependent on the rapidly failing oil paradigm."

"And while cities can be transformed to meet the changing variables of time, suburban/exurban developent and its accompanying "car-culture" are not only unsustainable- but also so artificial and wasteful that they can't ever be transformed into something useful."

I don't think it's in anyway accidental that the period when our country came closest to having a free market was an age of dense cities, with rapidly emerging transit systems which were connected by rail lines.