The Overhead Wire Daily | You’re Spending Too Much of My Money

Kea Wilson of Streetsblog USA and I did a Mondays show yesterday where we talked a bout about some of the USDOT memos and rescission of policy direction on diversity, environmental justice, and climate change.

We also talk a little about some of the stuff that’s supposed to catch people’s attention for distraction like USDOT funding based on birth rates while other details are hidden in plain language. Such as only spending money on projects in the “federal interest”, which if you’ve been around long enough, you know it means road expansion not active transportation.

As I was doing the background on this though I noticed that there’s been a lot of targeting of amenity rich cities and suburbs that dare to create a different lifestyle than the typical leapfrog development and sprawl. Not that this is anything new but it seems to be coming at a number of angles including what appear to be libertarian leaning tax policy and pro-natalist family policy.

Indiana’s governor is currently targeting Carmel Indiana and other Indianapolis suburbs on property taxes after they have been spending heavily on amenities. The mayor of Carmel is also a Republican which makes the attack a bit different from others that describe cities as places of crime and poor values.

This time it’s “you’re spending too much of my money on things you want.” This is a specific strain of politics that believes all money should be kept by individuals and that the benefits of wealth building through societal investments are an illegitimate zero sum game.

In reading other pieces that actually supported USDOT’s focus on birthrates, it also becomes clear that supporters of this policy honestly have no idea where federal investments actually go or why people make decisions to live where they do. It’s as if “family friendly” is list of boxes that everyone in their social circle checks off and not a set of decisions that come from personal choices stemming from what people like or prioritize.

Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project at  University of Virginia seems to think most federal funding for transportation goes to cities for big urban projects, in places “associated with lower family formation-less marriage and fewer children”.

Back in reality formula funds and State DOTs have made sure that we spend a lot of federal money on highway and road expansions and less on quality transit in dense cities. If only what Mr. Wilcox said were true, I’d be pretty happy and this newsletter probably wouldn’t even exist!

The other thing that these writers argue is that people move to the suburbs because they are more affordable. Which is true… from a certain point of view. Housing prices are high. That we can agree on. But high housing prices impact a whole host of other life decisions that have to do with marriage and child rearing and have less to do with housing type preferences.

Housing is expensive so workers in cities get paid more. Workers get paid more so the cost of goods and services like child care is higher. Going out to eat costs more. Groceries cost more. It has little to do with as Mr. Wilcox says “people are often reluctant to put a ring on it and raise kids in apartments and condos in costly urban neighborhoods”.

This is where two things can be true! Housing is expensive so it makes people move away to look for more space when they have kids. But housing is also expensive meaning a lot of people that have money want to live there and there’s not enough supply for those that do. If there were more housing and good transportation investments in cities perhaps people would get married sooner and have kids.

As Kea notes on the show, there are more things we can do to help children and families than just build roads and tie them more to their cars. More sidewalks would be nice for one thing. But also maybe not designing cities and suburbs that require driving and a car to be productive members of society.

All those miles have costs that aren’t part of the typical affordability equation. There are health costs, climate costs, insurance costs, increased risk of death and that all doesn’t include car payments. For me, that’s my idea of “you’re spending too much of my money on things you want”.  The bank account and checkbook just looks a little different.