(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 540: Localities Subsidize the State DOT

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Adie Tomer of Brookings to discuss a paper he and his team wrote about the idea of regional block grants. He discusses the local subsidies going to state DOTs and how more local funding could mean more regional collaboration on infrastructure.

To listen to this episode, find it at Streetsblog USA, or our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood: Adie Tomer, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast again.

Adie Tomer: Thanks for having me, Jeff. Always good to see you, man.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, good to see you too. For folks that may not have heard you in episodes 373 and 250, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Adie Tomer: Yeah, sure. Sure. You didn’t catch those episodes, you don’t remember?

Jeff Wood: I did.

Adie Tomer: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you did. So, hey everyone.

My name’s Adi Tomer, I’m a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. I work on infrastructure and worked on transportation and land use and starting to get close to 20 years on this now. Still finding it all fresh and interesting stuff to look at. What’s cool about Brookings is everything we do, whether we’re talking about what’s happening in the Middle East, do macroeconomics in the us, everything else, it’s always free and available to the public on the web.

So don’t hesitate to go check that stuff out. And we always appreciate Jeff, you always do so many links to so much work that we do. So hopefully folks are used to seeing our name around.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I [00:03:00] was just thinking of, we’re actually kinda a parallel. I mean, I’ve been doing this, the newsletter at least since 2006 and the podcast since 2013 or so.

So what do you, how do you feel about where the state of planning and transportation infrastructure, all that stuff is since you started like 20 years ago?

Adie Tomer: Oh my gosh. I love that question. We’ve known each other, I’ve known you since the reconnecting days, man. So traveling same circles. So I’d love to see what you think about the same question for.

I like to think of this as hopefully, what’s a, a hopeful reminder for folks is to give almost like specific example if you were trying to get bike lanes across in most cities in America, good luck folks would be like, what are you talking about? Bus rapid transit. If you use the acronym BRT, they had no idea what you were talking about.

And so at a almost like place level, I, I think we’re in a much better spot than we were 20 years ago. Find me a, not just planner, but like someone who’s touching land use, right? It might be a transportation planner, it might be a, like a real estate developer, particularly if they’re under a certain age.

I’m not gonna tag a number, but you can, everyone’s gonna [00:04:00] imagine something in their head that if you bring up these ideas that I think all of us who are overhead wire subscribers, readers, right? Like kind of share they’re, they’re with us, dude. Like, that, that is the future. Not just of America, you know?

I know we’re still building ’em, but it’s a, it’s a real minority of folks over like. Really what we need here is a much wider highway, you know, like that. That’s just not, that’s not Dere Gore in America. And you and I, Jeff, I mean, we’re pretty similar age too. I mean, when we were growing up, that was still the thing that was a hundred percent the thing.

You were sprawling, you’re building the roads. To them, it wasn’t with any kind of like, no one’s trying to hurt anyone, but we just, you know, America thought that was what the future was. And honestly, I think in our careers we’ve seen the pivot and now we’re at that hard part where it’s okay, everyone’s gotten proverbial religion on this.

How do you deliver? How do you actually, you know, okay, everyone wants bike lanes. How do you actually build on that scale? How many cities do you track all the time that have ambitious plans that they knock out five, 10% of what they wanted? They’re behind schedule, like what their stated schedules were and things.

It’s tough going out there, but I, I’d much prefer this world than where we were at the [00:05:00] beginning of my career. I

Jeff Wood: think the big thing for me is, and I probably didn’t see it early on because I wasn’t paying as much attention, but some of the smaller cities and towns that are doing a lot of this stuff too, like the Bentonville, Arkansas’s and the other, I mean obviously the Walmart’s there and the headquarters and everything and they have a lot of money to do that, but there’s just like a lot of little places that are like doing this stuff that you wouldn’t have thought.

You know, bike lanes, walkability plans, those types of things. I mean, they’re not getting into the big transit stuff. They’re not gonna build light rail or anything like that, or Subway. But they’ve started talking about all these things and like the new urbanist stuff has permeated. There’s no talk about whether you’re gonna do like, mixed use or urban development and multiple stories in a downtown setting.

Now it’s like zoning reform. And it’s interesting to see how the conversation has changed. I mean, when I first started. I was making like guidebooks to like different technologies, right? What is bus rabbit transit? Yeah. What is light rail? What is this streetcar? What is, what are the differences between heavy rail and light rail and all that stuff.

And there was a lot of extension of and planning for first routes, like in places like Seattle and, and Min Minnesota and those types of things. And now this is like kind of the negative side almost, is that like we’ve built [00:06:00] out some of the first lines in a lot of places and now some of those second lines have come in, but it’s taking a long time to get to them.

And I always talked about this in the newsletter as well, is like. The lowest common denominator syndrome where, we spent a lot of money on heavy rail in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and then that got expensive. So people are like, well, let’s do light rail. Let’s go and do this line to Santa Ciro in San Diego for the first 1981.

And then, okay, everybody’s gonna do light rail. And then light rail got too expensive. And so everybody tries to do street cars and BRT and so. Where are we at now with that? After the 20 years, it’s still like everything’s super expensive. The only places are really doing stuff are huge capital projects like um, a San Jose Subway or like Second Avenue extension or stuff like that.

So we’re talking about these massive projects, but some of these smaller projects, community rail lines and smaller places like Nashville or whatever, they’re not getting as much kind of attention. And maybe that’s because they’ve shifted to BRT or other less improvements that are actually probably more beneficial than spending on some of those community airlines and stuff.

But I see that shift too. I don’t know where you are on that.

Adie Tomer: A hundred percent. I think, uh, you know, look, if I could never see another fixed rail [00:07:00] transit line on a highway median in America, I feel like we’d all be in a better place. I know I often see that. Think about O’Hare and the blue line. ’cause if you go into Chicago and you’re a transit supporter like many of us are, you just, you see these stops, you’re not even getting off.

I mean, the door’s open, you can literally smell the car is moving. Right. Which is what it is. And those things just, they don’t work. You know, like we, we know so much more now about station design, about land use around it. I do think there’s this expense element. It’s all obviously a whole separate line of work folks are touching.

Yeah. You know, my old boss is now my new boss again. Rob Puentes is back and he know did awesome stuff on transit costs. Obviously the mayor guys are doing it and that’s what it’s really important and you know, look, I think we probably can figure out how to get the cost down and we owed a lot of credit right now to the abundance guys and that whole crew that’s going around it.

Hey, let, let’s zero in on this. You know, Zach Sal’s work is amazing, you know, for folks who don’t read it on this stuff. And so we gotta get the cost down. But I also think you bringing up this really important point that how do we, it’s not like Gorilla, but it’s like these more bespoke, smaller elements.

That [00:08:00] can really unlock at the neighborhood scale. What’s set up for more proximity? I really believe actually at the beginning of our careers, we thought basically if you build it, they will come. And the transit is the, if we build it part, and I think we’ve got that exactly opposite. Mm-hmm. Or backwards, if you will.

What we need to do is build more neighborhoods better. High proximity. You know, some folks will probably imagine their head like, that’s like four over one neighborhoods like you see in Denvers and, and Salt Lakes and things. Might be a bunch of townhomes, but if you can have higher proximity between destinations.

People then demand multimodal options that specifically aren’t private driving. ’cause parking’s hard and there’s not a big time advantage and that creates the demand that sustains it. So that’s the biggest thing actually, I’m hopeful for. And we do some work on that too. And I know, but we’re not alone in this.

How do we think about ways to better deliver? Transit biking and other associated infrastructures in the neighborhoods that like are best suited to build up demand, build up public support, do that best kind of advertising you get, you know what I mean? [00:09:00] Like when we go over, they’re all fortunate to see other markets including like in the us like New York and Chicago and Philly.

You know, you processize back when you’re like, whoa, you can, we can design differently. Right? So I’ve also, I think started to see that change too. I think folks better understand, let’s invest. Where it’s gonna make sense to have demand and that’ll kind of have more flowers bloom.

Jeff Wood: I do wanna ask you a question that’s kind of, uh, a non-sequitur to a certain extent, and I should asked you this at the beginning, but I was going through your LinkedIn and I noticed a curious entry at the very bottom, uh oh.

Uh, working at a Blockbuster video as a manager. Oh, yes. So I wanna ask you what working at a Blockbuster has meant in your life as somebody who’s focused on infrastructure and also maybe what your favorite movie is.

Adie Tomer: My favorite movie is Daisy Confused Without. Oh,

Jeff Wood: nice. I love that movie. Yeah. Later you filmed in Austin where I went to school.

Yeah.

Adie Tomer: Right. Totally. And it to, to ruin the credit I just created, I’m not a Slacker fan, actually, like Blink later. So like I’m, I guess, anti Austin in some ways, but he’s just an awesome filmmaker, and I think for those who [00:10:00] haven’t seen it before, especially the younger crew can more relate to being in high school, but on a personal level.

It is quite possibly the best high school movie ever. Yeah. Anyway, so that’s my favorite movie.

Jeff Wood: Did you, by the way, before you get to those things, did you read Megan Kimball’s book? No. What is it? So You Should, you should. It’s, uh, city Limits and it’s about the expansion of highways in Texas, and she talks about how Yes, yes,

Adie Tomer: yes.

I’m supposed to read this. Yes. No, but yes.

Jeff Wood: And so she talks about Richard. He actually helped set up, um, I think it was Richard Ator who’s helped set up a preschool, but it’s right under the I 35 where the expansion’s gonna happen. So when they do the expansion, it’s gonna get taken out and they have to move.

And I think they might’ve figured out where to go by now, but he was the one that kind of helped set that up. And it was like he owned this building. They needed a place that they were moving from Congress Avenue. And so anyways, there’s a connection to infrastructure right there. Just from days and confused, right?

Adie Tomer: Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah, so I’ll be honest, I didn’t learn anything. I think about cities and regions working Camp Blockbuster, but what I did notice, and again, I might just be aging myself here, I. Is Blockbuster was [00:11:00] kind of normally hate this term, but like it was kind of like a third place, and I managed it at, I went to school, university of Florida, in Gainesville.

Pretty typical, like big public school, college town. And there were just always groups of people coming in, right. And I think we all remember of a certain vintage, you know, age here. Of like doing that with buddies, friends, family, going in and grabbing a movie together and the communal experience that could have, and I’m sure community’s been replaced in certain ways, but you know, we all know the stats here on this too.

You know, we’re not congregating like we did before. So that was one of the coolest parts of working at Blockbuster was I was the like pusher, if you will, right. For friends, including giving away the free product. You know, that it wasn’t supposed to be sorry people, although I don’t think, I mean, get mad at me, there’s only

Jeff Wood: one left, right?

Yeah, that’s

Adie Tomer: right. That’s right. So, um, what it really was, honestly, Jeff, it was just a cool job.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, for sure. But that is connection though. I mean, thinking about community and people deciding not to go out or, or staying in, and how the pandemic has kind of pushed that even further. Yeah. Right. So I dunno if you saw, there was an article recently from Eater where they were talking about third places and no defining like [00:12:00] what is a third place.

I had this in the newsletter like maybe a couple weeks ago. Basically like saying what is the third place? Is it places that you just congregate? And also if people wanna go out and they don’t wanna be bothered, does that actually count as a third place? If they’re just like going somewhere to go somewhere, but they don’t want.

The interaction that comes with it. It’s just really fascinating to think about that and like how that experience at a blockbuster. And I, you know, I went to the one in Kingwood where I grew up, you know, many times with my friends on a Friday night looking for a movie that we all wanted to see and where we probably picked up days and confused and we probably picked up Monty Python, the search holy grail or whatever else.

And so I find that interesting as well. And I think there is a connection there.

Adie Tomer: Yeah, totally. And look, this is some of the coolest stuff happening with data right now is folks grabbing on, you know, this, the volume got turned down on us now that we’re out a pandemic. But you and I both know, and, and a lot of folks probably listen, especially folks who like that research section at the bottom, like this has not ended the ability to see where people are moving on a pretty granular level.

And trying to figure out where we’re congregating, like we are only scratching the surface on trying to understand this stuff. So we do a little bit of that, but kind of at the end of the production [00:13:00] process. So just for anyone hearing this, who wants to do more on that, especially on the more academic side and the data producers, please don’t stop.

I, I don’t think we’re even close to figuring out how to better understand what we’re doing now and then how to build environment and kind of respond to tap into it. ’cause we need to come together more. It’s such an important part of life. You know, this is neither of our professional lanes, but I think we can all safely say it.

Like being together is a lot healthier than that,

Jeff Wood: than being on our own. Yeah. Okay. So I really wanna chat with you about an idea that you had at Brookings that you shared recently, which is the idea of this regional block grant. And, um, I’m wondering what this idea is generally and then we maybe can get into more specifics.

Adie Tomer: Yeah. So let me take a mini step back on how we landed on this. Sure. So we were doing two different projects at Brookings that kind of organically took us here. One was an assessment of states, departments of transportation. I. And we looked into their accountability, both in terms of how they transparent they were with frankly their planning, [00:14:00] their project selections, how they spend their money.

And what we landed on there was even with, I’m gonna give ’em the benefit of the doubt, the best of intentions, not a very accountable kind of form of governance. And what we figured out through that work was that. It is really hard to know it. Its published, but let’s be honest here, right? Like it’s really hard to understand why state picks the projects it picks, what kinds of networks it builds.

Any kind of fiscal or basically like monetary relationship between the states and its municipalities. And by the way, when I say municipalities, I’m kind of like cities, counties, even like metropolitan planning organizations or NPOs councils of governments, right. In California, you know, they’re, they’re real dogs.

And that obtuse nature is, was a real problem. And what we also figured out with it is that states are not sending their transportation dollars down to their locals. They will pick that back up, but let me just like leave it there. So this was like a big eureka moment for us that at least in the transport [00:15:00] world and the surface transport world, we are not set up for success there.

The other project that we were doing with some colleagues down in San Diego, the Policy and Innovation Center was. A question that arose kind of uniquely out of all those competitive grants that were in the infrastructure law, the bi, the IIJA, or quote unquote bipartisan infrastructure law, and just so folks know, the super short version is 25% of the bill all of a sudden became competitive.

Hundreds of new programs tons of work for the federal bureaucrats, tons of folks at the municipal, and even some at the state level to try to apply for these. The question we were curious about asking is can regions better get access to all this money? If the vast majority of federal funds, especially in transportation, water, which is the bulk of public money, it’s going right to the states and then it gets distributed down from there.

Again, this is the connection on the transfer side, not so much on the water side. They have to give it to the utilities, but even there, it’s kind of obtuse process too. What we wanted to ask was, okay, well for those of us who care about cities and regions like metropolitan regions. [00:16:00] There’s some big projects we’ve gotta execute.

Did the IIJA actually make it easier for metropolitan areas to land awards for their big regional serving projects? And what we figured out was that the data was next to impossible to kind of flex in this way. Meaning on the pure data side, to actually understand, first of all, like, can we even see how many awards are going to a regional actor?

Now later to give huge D here. Corrigan over at Transformation of America solved this. So actually folks can kind of go look at some analysis they’re doing, but at the time it wasn’t so easy. And then critically, what we couldn’t see at all was, who’s even applying for this? Are regions really getting it?

So we set out to do a lot of interviews. We had hopes to mine the data. We really couldn’t just being upfront about that. And then when we started talking to folks across the country, federal bureaucrats, folks who worked at Chamber of Commerce, of course, metropolitan plan organizations, municipalities, all the sectors here of infrastructure, even [00:17:00] energy and broadband.

What quickly came to the surface was. This is a nightmare actually in America. And some of it is systemic. I love democracy. Uh, there’s no buck coming. It’s say, and I love the US kind of system to vote with our feet as, uh, for those, you know, Tebow would say, if you will, to be all academic about it, but we got a big problem in a lot of regions, metropolitan regions where the level of separate different units of government.

From an infrastructure and land use perspective is off the charts. Collaboration is really, really hard. Now, the metropolitan planning organizations help with a lot of that. The councils of governments help with a lot of that, but we realize quickly the federal government has a huge opportunity to incentivize this kind of regionalism.

As you know, like an old, like Myron Orfield would call it metro politics. We’ve done a lot because of the [00:18:00] forced structures of MPOs and cogs ’cause of the federal money that’s incentivized everyone to get around a table. What we quickly realized though, is that the money is not there though to force follow through.

And it’s a huge gap in our system and we think it’s a big explanation for why we’re not delivering enough regional projects.

Jeff Wood: So the money goes to states mostly.

Adie Tomer: Money goes to states almost exclusively. And then states don’t share a lot, man. No, they don’t. They’ve got their own stuff going on. You know, you living in a state that, that’s pretty good about it actually.

And in all kinds of ways, you know, economic development programs that the state of California runs, and I don’t think it’s because of a proverbial like blue state. There’s other, like Utah has incredible relationships with those municipalities at the state level. This is not a political divide thing, but most states.

No, they’re not sharing a lot of money unless they have to.

Jeff Wood: Well, California, sometimes they’re required to send it straight to the MPO. Right? So there’s that.

Adie Tomer: That’s exactly right. And it, it really is what’s on the books and the states. There’s huge variation across the country, on average, just for pure transportation [00:19:00] dollars by our account, by per.

Federal highway dollars. 16% of funding gets to locals, but that includes both federal money and state money. The federal dollars, there’s actually no requirement for pass through at all, and most states actually really kind of don’t. What they end up doing is sending down their state gas tax dollars. If you broaden that to all beyond just surface translation, all transportation projects, we think at Brookings it’s even lower, like 14, 13%.

The median’s even lower than that, so it’s pretty rough out there. There’s a reason we should really be concerned about this. Not to segue us too much, but around who’s paying gas taxes. Because what we also just figured out through some work, and again, this is called highway shakedown, so if folks wanna look it up, this is where I’m pushing something.

It’s not like plugging it. It’s like, I really think this will open people’s minds to a whole different way of thinking about fiscal relationships. Over 30%, way over 30%, 34% of VMT is on locally owned roads. VMT is a basic proxy for gas tax dollars. You’re gonna go plus or minus, depending on [00:20:00] how many freight vehicles there are.

You know, going on state owned US highways and, and other state owned roads, a higher state shares. So it would be like a lower for locals. You can go the other way though, right? For more locally oriented places where just less mts happening on state roads. Remember that fuel inefficiency on local roads means actually you’re consuming more gas on ’em, right?

So, but let’s call it like 34% of tax dollars on gas taxes are coming from local roads. When you’re only giving them 16% money back localities are grossly subsidizing states. And again, I’m being upfront about this every time I talk about it, I’m I just get angry. But the eye-opener part of this is like, oh, well this is why we’re struggling in America to build this stuff that communities of all sizes need.

Local governments who have less fiscal capacity than states are subsidizing the state, DOT. If we can’t figure this out, it’s gonna be impossible to where we started today, right? Like to build all the bike lanes and the BRT, but frankly, just to, and this is the bigger expense to fill the potholes. Local roads are in bad [00:21:00] condition in America compared to the gold plated state on roads.

And so this is the eye-opener here right? It’s like how do we think about ways to get the money back to the locals and to deliver not just these local things, but also these like regional serving projects that can define places for generations to come.

Jeff Wood: So then where does the money go? If it goes to the states and then they don’t give it back down?

Does it just go to repaving projects around the state and the expansions and things like that? Does it go to this thing that Beth Osborne and I talked about a while ago, which is the state capacity that they have all these folks to do all these EIRs and EISs and get stuff through the process where we’re complaining about high speed rail, uh, in California, for example, and trying to get the folks that know how to do this stuff like.

Where’s the money going? Is it going to that capacity? Is it going to the repaving? If it doesn’t go to the cities? Where, by the way, a lot of the local funding that we talk about in the past comes from property taxes and other things. When people are like, oh, the gas tax covers everything, where’s it going?

Adie Tomer: The short as it’s going to the state owned network. If it’s not gonna locals, the states are spending it [00:22:00] themselves. And we’ve gotta be asking in every, not just state, but then the communities. What kinds of projects are the state’s building in these backyards? And through this work and you’ve probably seen this before, the federal government announced in the early 1990s, the interstate highway system is built like this is published federal government data.

It doesn’t mean we can’t expand, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. By the way that’s, that’s like my own two set. Like, you know, if we need a new like turn lane near the port of la Heck yeah. Build that’s getting goods to everyone across the country, right? Like. There’s places we need to expand, but for the bulk of it, the actual point of the interstates from a trade perspective, the connections between cities and metro areas that are, you know, not adjacent to each other that is built.

Adie Tomer:  So now, and I think this gets back to stuff that Beth talks about too. What kinds of projects are they building? For whom? What are they trying to achieve with it? And look, there’s a lot of maintenance needs, but there’s also a lot of capacity expansions. My bigger point when I’m. The [00:23:00] state should be able to kind of do what it wants with its own money.

It should be thinking about how it has from a fiduciary responsibility set, you know, take care of these interstates and us highways, that by the way, we all rely on, even if you don’t personally take ’em, right, the goods that come to your door. So we as a country are stronger economically by having that network.

But when they’re overly subsidized, they are making decisions on investments that is like not an accurate picture of what their means are, right? They’re able to live beyond it. Meanwhile, our local governments. They have to take those property tax dollars that could go to, by the way, schools, public safety hospitals.

And they’ve gotta put some of that into roads because they’re actually losing gas tax money that their residents, their business owners, are paying in through using those local roads and subsidize ’em when the states are built. So the states, we kind of know generally what they’re building, but if they’re building it out at a significantly larger dollar figure, right, then they can raise on their own.

Then we’ve got some [00:24:00] big stuff we need to address.

Jeff Wood: It just makes me think of, and go back to Megan’s book, just thinking about all of the major highway expansions that are happening in places like Austin and Houston and Dallas, redoing the I 3 45 connector. Those types of things. All those things could be the money that actually comes from cities, and it could be used for cities, but it’s really used to go through cities, right, rather than to them.

And so I think about that when you’re chatting about these discrepancies and disparities. The other thing is, again, going back to that staff capacity, like how much the state dots have. And staff capacity to do all this stuff and to lure over the local agencies and then also at the federal level. You talk about this in the report too, the federal capacity and what they have the ability to do, whether they have the ability to help locals figure out, how to apply for a grant or how to, you know, build a bike lane or build a subway or build a high speed rail, or whatever it may be.

But this capacity, not the road capacity, but the staff capacity is another interesting angle on this that I was thinking about when I was reading through what you wrote.

Adie Tomer: Yeah. No, I appreciate that and I appreciate you talking about it before too. That’s spot on. I didn’t [00:25:00] even pick up on like, oh, of course.

Staffing, like that’s the last of state dots, fiscal issues. Meanwhile, we hear this all the time, right? Including folks you talk to at a local level. Hey, we’ve got this great stuff we wanna do. We’re short on people. We don’t have enough people to execute those projects. Well, I mean, when you’re taking away billions from localities across the country, think about how much staffing they could do, right?

If they had that money back in their pocket. Absolutely. And you know, we’re all planners on some level here and we believe in the power of the proverbial like measure twice, cut one style. You know, like let’s make sure we put our time into these plans. We want to put together what we want to build in places and absolutely it’s a shortfall and you brought it up.

It absolutely disadvantages the localities. It turns of permitting, project delivery when the states have these huge capacity advantages due to this fiscal match.

Jeff Wood: So then your solution is to create a new type of block grant that basically is almost like the direct pay stuff that’s happening in the, in the IRA, right?

Like you can directly go to the federal government and be like, I want some of this energy infrastructure money. And [00:26:00] so is it along those lines made after the community development block grant, or like how is it structured and what does it look like?

Adie Tomer: So the short is, yeah, in our minds, this is a lot like A-C-D-B-G, at least to start with in transportation and ideal world.

You’ve got a whole different kind of broad set of block branding that crosses all these infrastructure sectors and frankly, to streamline and trying to like merge the two leading DC political parties ambitions here, right? I think there is like a split the difference kind of compromise. So how can we get fiscal efficiency in terms of who it’s delivered to streamline the ability to deliver projects.

But then also return to a little bit more of like local discretion on what we’re building in America. So starting with surface transportation, why I raised this issue about the money on the gas taxes, actually there’s a whole pot of money at the federal level. We estimated to be around $10 billion a year.

That’s coming from local roads that is not delivered back to ’em in, in [00:27:00] terms of a guaranteed sense. And frankly, probably almost none of that money is going back to them. So let’s think about actually delivering it back to them through this block. Grant. You deliver it to the metropolitan planning organizations, which again, are effectively required by federal law.

There’s no place that doesn’t have ’em to make sure they can get other money that already exists on the planning side, which peanuts, right, compared to the capital money we’re talking about. So you got these NPOs, you know, 300 plus. They already have a fiscal relationship with the federal government. So you send the money to the MPO, whatever the cut’s gonna be, you then leave it up to the MPO within some kind of guardrails that Congress decides they can be.

Actually pretty streamlined on this too, how you distribute that down. Counties, municipalities. Here’s what’s really nice. You know who makes up the board of MPOs and COGS, municipalities and counties, right? Like let them decide at the board level where they already meet, where they already do their horse trading and things to decide, hey, here’s how we’re gonna splice up the federal money.

Then what you can do through that. ’cause projects, we all know this, [00:28:00] like projects always exist in a place, meaning, there’s one municipality who’s getting a project that’s regional serving often, but, so you gotta think about how do we share these fiscal resources to move those projects. My confidence from talking to so many of these folks is that if you actually put money on the table, real, we’re talking big money.

We have not published this table. I’d rather not, but I’m sitting on it. So just to put in people’s minds, we’re talking over $300 million a year in Los Angeles. That’s a lot of cash. Even in LA you can do a lot with that. Again, just to be clear, that’s not a one time, like we want a competitive grant, you know, like an infra grant that’s big 300 million, no, I’m talking about 300 million plus every year as far out as we can see.

As long as we’ve got Highway Trust fund dollars coming out, which is, that’s a whole separate conversation. Yeah, right. But we do for, we do for quite a while and we’ll probably continue to invest in it. So that’s a lot of loot. That’s loot you can also bond off of too, right? I mean, and frankly, speaking of la, that’s all through measure m and R, right?

They’re building out’s, how they it such [00:29:00] transit there, right? So all of a sudden you’ve got this new pot of money. How do you start thinking about, Jeff, you brought it up. High Speeded rail. Hey, actually, you know what? Maybe this gives us the opportunity to actually spend some more of our own local money.

’cause we really want to get this going. Maybe like, I always forget the past name, right? But to like get the high speeded rail part going north actually towards the rest of the state. We wanna put money in there. ’cause actually it’s gonna help us for some local connections too. All of that will now be on the table.

If we can deliver this money back to regions. You know, the way you ask the state questions, like where are they putting it? It’s like, oh, like where their hearts content, right? The answer on the local level for how we see this working with pretty easy mechanics is the new money. Now Metros can spend it to their hearts content and we can really start to tap into all these creative ideas we hear about all the time at local levels in every place.

Jeff Wood: Are you worried about NPO structure from that perspective? I’m thinking of the NPOs that maybe have a lot of suburban elected officials on them who are focused outside the city. I mean, the city of Houston, you know, had a vote to get [00:30:00] out of their NPO and it never came to pass. But they wanted out because they weren’t getting the attention that maybe they thought they deserved just from the money that they were getting in the MPO.

So I know that, you know, Jerry Brown basically restructured San Diego’s NPO because it had too many outside folks who didn’t represent as much population as like the city of San Diego. So are you worried about that structure as it exists now where it is kind of oversubscribed with the suburban politicians and elected officials versus maybe ones that represent more of a population base?

Adie Tomer: It’s a great question. I, I have an answer, but I just wanna preface before I start answering, I, I have no interest in being like a politician, so, no, no. If it makes sense, I mean, give you the political, like, politician style answer first. ’cause I think this is important for everyone to keep in mind. What I care most about is that money’s getting to locals.

Communities will be in a better place if they have more money in their capital budgets. Period. Like full stop. Folks know it. What’s the stuff the state wanna build, let’s say, on state owned corridors in regions, which is a whole separate thing that we’re starting to look at [00:31:00] versus the right of way that locals own.

Locals wanna do the best stuff, right? They want to build bike lanes and think about bus prioritization lanes and all that good stuff. So getting money into their capital budgets, that’s gonna solve a lot of problems in terms of incremental improvement. Now you’re spot on. NPO governance is an issue. I don’t play for any team.

I’m just saying that’s the consistent issue you hear about through the, both the research and the applied experience like you’ve just brought up in Houston, is that big cities are typically underrepresented on their NPO boards. We’re gonna have to address that and frankly, there is a opportunity for Congress to write the rules in such a way.

And we see this all the time, and frankly, like CDBG does this where. We’re gonna say we need to require X amount of money, right? Goes to municipalities, cities, counties, of certain sizes. They’ve got to receive this much share wise, and then it’s up to them what they want to do with it, right? Meaning they can pool it with their neighbors to build something big, but at least they have fiscal authority over that.

All this can be addressed and it’s gonna require some real work to think about that. But again, back to where I started and I, I’m as much saying this for potentially hill staff who are listening. We [00:32:00] can’t forget the forest here for these trees. Locals aren’t getting enough money. They can’t build the projects they want.

And I think we kind of just figured out a big reason why. This was one of the coolest parts about our research. We did a ton of interviews across the country. Consistently, this theme kept popping up where the NPOs, the cogs, they’re a great table to come and talk to build networks, to build trust, honestly, but they often fail to work together on capital projects because there isn’t extra money on the table yet.

There certainly isn’t a pool of regional funds. So where I’m trying to go with this is I think we see a lot of the MPO board tension because it becomes, especially if you’re like in that Houston example, Hey, I’m out voted, what am I even doing here? I think if we throw a big bag of money in the middle of the proverbial table, if not literal table, then I think folks are actually gonna collaborate a lot more.

’cause now all of a sudden there’s fiscal tools of, say we saw this great work like the National League Cities have done, and the other partners on the local infrastructure hub, right? Where like. Hey, if you put competitive grants on the [00:33:00] table, people will go for ’em if they don’t win the grants. Holding your coalition together is hard. You win the grant, the coalition will continue. Right? So we think of the regional block grant program, whether it’s transportation or bigger. This is a way to actually incentivize full follow through on regionalism, folks working together on a day-to-day basis on big ideas at the metro scale.

Jeff Wood: Now to be clear, this is also, I mean, there’s even more money on the table than you’re talking about because you’re talking about just transportation policy, but there’s also the water policy. There’s also the broadband policy. There’s also all the money that was coming for electricity and green infrastructure that came for the IRA that some of that’s gonna get cut.

By the Republicans. Yeah. But it’s gonna be there in people’s minds. And you know, we’ll see next six to eight years how that gets changed. But that’s a lot of money that comes to the table. And now you’re starting to talk about working together from a transportation standpoint, from a broadband, from water, from all these regional issues.

And then you have a lot more money on that MPO table or, you know, structured in a way that can bring people [00:34:00] together that might not have talked to each other otherwise. And there might be some co-benefits there from those extra monies as well. A

Adie Tomer: hundred percent. Our buddy Jona is always talking about it too.

With his European work. America has to wake up to the fact that the size of our local economies are just completely busted beyond these municipal borders. And yet, for a bunch of reasons, oftentimes schools, but for others, we’re not gonna melt those municipal lines completely away. Again, by the way, personally putting my values on the table, I agree with it.

I think there’s like some democratic advantages to having this like stratified style system. Is there a right size? I don’t know. You know, but like centralizing everything, Nashville, Indianapolis, you know, Louisville style. It doesn’t just solve all your problem at the local level, so it, it could work for some places, other places.

No, but infrastructure’s a different story, right? Infrastructure is built on economies of scale. We define our regions, you know, in the nerdy way by commuting patterns. But it’s not just that. It’s like this is where we all spend time together. It’s what we [00:35:00] consider our, like proverbial neighbors. The dude you can go hang out with that night, you know, at like the third space or whatever, you know their place and you don’t have to get on a freaking plane or something, you know, these are our homes.

So finding ways to put all that infrastructure money on the table together. In a common pot with particularly the MPOs and cogs with the voice of the municipalities there. It just feels right for our economic, basically like evolutionary place. New York City cannot do this stuff alone anymore. We know this.

We know congestion pricing. That’s the whole debate is it’s a real debate about regionalism, right? In a lot of ways, and fiscal authorities, this stuff plays out on every single sector of infrastructure and built environ. We’re talking about. And yeah, again, on a broken record, but I’m like, if we can just put real regional money on the table, I think it’s a worthy experiment in America’s evolutionary place to see what happens.

Jeff Wood: It’s interesting. In the last couple weeks we’ve had some three alarm fires related to transit funding. We have, Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, large blue states that are having these [00:36:00] problems. There’s also obviously states that are facing physical cliffs all over the country. But JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, after not getting a deal through, he said the state can’t just be the only one responsible for fixing this.

Right? And so I think what you’re talking about is actually a way to fix some of these issues. That we’re depending on the states to come through, because locally we can’t seem to figure out how to get that transportation infrastructure and the way people move to coalesce. We had Madeline Bron on, actually, we talk to her on Monday and the show will come on before this show, but we were talking about mobility as a service slash universal basic mobility pilots in Los Angeles and the way that they gave people money to be able to use anything but a car.

Right. And the way people move, if you give it to just a transit agency. People move in different ways. They use a bike, they walk, they take transit. Maybe they might need a ride hail every once in a while. Maybe they might need to fix their bike. Maybe they might need other types of funding. And that kind of opens up this idea that the transportation policy needs to be interconnected and intermodal more than maybe we give it credit for.

And so this isn’t just a state deal, it’s, it is a [00:37:00] regional deal and there needs to be the boundary disappearance from a certain perspective of infrastructure because that’s just the way people move. And that’s the way the economics and getting together in third places, like you’re talking about, works.

Adie Tomer: Look, I know the history of all the handshake stuff as much as it’s been reported in the colloquial tales on why transit gets 20% of federal gas tax dollars and why there’s a mass transit highway count. Look, folks can debate whether we should be spending that money. I think we could actually argue the good thing about the mass transit account is that’s the only guarantee that this money gets back to regions.

They’re still subsidizing. If we give another 10% of the tax dollars directly to regions, we would still be below what they’re putting into the system. So the federal government absolutely should be in this game. And what we’re seeing, because the locals are being starved and the states are being fattened, if you will, no wonder we’re going to the Pritzker and the Shapiros to say, Hey.

You’re sitting on the bigger sum, like not in a premeditated way. Right. It’s like what the actual balance sheet tell you to do.

Jeff Wood: We’re telling them to flex it, right? We’re like, flex the funding. You’re allowed to flex the [00:38:00] funding, but,

Adie Tomer: right, and, and honestly those governors and any governor who steps up for this, there’s a lot of ’em honestly, in different ways.

And again, it’s not so politically divided like we see in the rhetoric. And you know, people want transit to run. They get it at a local level. I, I really do believe that. But we don’t have enough of the fiscal resources going to the regions to make these calls. So they need to go. Hat in hand to the state, and when I say it’s wrong, I’m saying it’s wrong because it’s fiscally deeply unfair.

We talk all the time in the US about this concept of the user pay principle. Not only is it broken, but if you do really believe in it, here’s the evidence, it is truly broken, and here’s the offshoots of it. We kept using this example when we were doing all this work of like. You can see when you get off a state highway, especially in like, let’s say the snow belt, you see when you get off the highway, ’cause all of a sudden the road is in bad condition and these are still principal arteries, right?

This is not like a low use road. These are major roads you’re moving onto that need to be smooth too. And it’s just visual evidence. Where we’re starving ourselves,

Speaker 3: we’ve

Adie Tomer: got to rightsize this, and then on top of it, we have these awesome [00:39:00] regionalism arguments to do it too, to have more strategic thinking for places like a Chicago and Philly and Pittsburgh that have these.

Kind of older quote unquote legacy transit systems that are still so important to how other communities operate. They can make choices to invest in those. The Nashvilles and Austins, right, that are trying to now retrofit as they feel the geometric pressure of trying to just do it by sprawl, which just doesn’t work.

They could use more resources to retrofit in different ways. They could build different relationships with the states too, on, on what they need. So it’s like always when you manipulate dollars in this way. You get you, you get the desserts of your manipulation and we’ve gotta think about how do I think to roll that back?

And I think we’d have much better conversations, much better investments in all these places if we did it.

Jeff Wood: Now, how likely is it that you can get a bunch of Congress critters with like jagged districts who you know, might not believe in regionalism to understand why this is important to them and their constituents?

I

Adie Tomer: think we’ve got two problems in Congress in terms of [00:40:00] communication to help folks understand how much we’re all in this together. But the house is really important here, meaning versus the Senate. So number one, the vast majority of members, it’s basically all of ’em. They represent a metro area, if not multiple of them.

If the metros are smaller. Or not even. For example, like Chairman Graves of the House Transportation Infrastructure Committee. He gets the bulk of his population, both from a mix of Metro Kansas City and Metro St. Louis, which by the way, tells you how like unique his district is.

Jeff Wood: Where I lived in Austin, I love telling the story, but where I lived in Austin, I was on the edge of three congressional districts and one went to like San Antonio, one went to the border of Mexico.

And the other one went like somewhere over to Houston. And so, they go everywhere. They’re very wacky the way that we’ve gerrymandered the country. Yeah,

Adie Tomer: totally. And again, I think for folks who focus, of course on electoral politics and power, like there’s a whole different thing to analyze on those.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Adie Tomer: But for us, it actually matters on built environment and infrastructure related conversations. ’cause who do you [00:41:00] represent? Like I’m actually defending the members. That’s really tricky, right? You defend different places, but here’s what’s common. Their source of constituency, almost all of them is a metro area and invariably a big metro area.

So this is thing to remember. Flip through our passports. I. It’s just pictures of like open place like, like planes. I think Mount Rushmore’s in there. Yeah. That is a beautiful part of America. That is not what America is. America is cities and suburban strip malls and you know, that’s where we are and that’s what we’re representing in the house actually too.

1. Here’s the second part, and we actually just ran these numbers as part of this block ramp paper that we put out. Over 90% of large metro areas are split apart by congressional boundaries. 226 metro areas have more than one congressional district. So for them, it’s really hard to get everyone on the same page to advocate for what they need.

In other words, it’s really hard for the house to do that. But at the local level, they are one place at the MPO Board. At the cog board. So what we’re hopeful [00:42:00] for. Is that Congress will understand that, number one, especially on the house side. Hey, you know what? I’m not getting enough resources actually to my district.

I’m sending resources to my state. I could see a senator pushing back on that. But if a house member, they don’t really represent their state, they represent their district, and so we’re putting something on the table to get more money back to their district. The other part of this too, is thinking about how will they get a chance for more ribbon cuttings.

More ways to execute projects. So again, there’s the just the getting dollars local, but then there’s this whole political element to it that you’re actually gonna be able to open more projects to be able to say you supported those regions and create this virtuous cycle of what’s going on there. Now, whether the house members hear that and see that, that’s a hard conversation.

It really is. I think it’s okay for us to talk about the quiet stuff out loud. Understand these debates. Where the states right now are getting subsidized, they are going to fight tooth and nail. I would, if I worked for a state or if I worked for their membership organizations, right, like they should, [00:43:00] they should be fighting tooth and nail to hold onto it.

What we’ve gotta do is help folks understand on the hill, and that’s why everyone has a role in it. Again, I wanna repeat it, talking about, we think $10 billion a year. This is huge money. How do you convince folks, Hey, we’re not starving the system, we’re shifting. It’s like shifting the stacks of chips and still the majority of it sits with the states.

’cause now that we’ve built all this highway network, they have the majority of VMT, right? But this weird legacy of everyone pays for the state network. ’cause we didn’t have one, you know, in the 1950s. We need to get off that and try a new model. We have to have actually a structural shift, and I think the house members could be, may gain to it, but where the constituencies really matter, business interests especially need to be talking to ’em.

Chambers of commerce are actually struggling through this. They are not getting the investments locally that would help all their members, whereas the monies are going to places further afield inside their state. They need to really be asking that. And of course, coalitions of public sector, civic leaders, right?

They need to be pound the pavement with their house members telling them [00:44:00] what’s going on.

Jeff Wood: From a land use perspective and just listening to talk, I was just thinking about sprawl and I, maybe it’s because of the discussions I’ve had with folks recently talking about supply chains, talking about the Robinson Patman Act, the things that are happening that cause sprawl, and I’m obviously, you’re not gonna sell some of those folks in Congress about stopping sprawl.

That’s not that’s not, that’s not good point. That’s not gonna move any needles, right? No, but I am thinking about the Houstons of the world, and we’ve had folks come on and talk about this too. And this is one of the findings that I think is my top finding of the year is, California is. Not built out per se, but it’s hit its edges.

And so now we’re having a housing crisis because it’s harder to build in central cities than it has been before. And we’re gonna see Houston and Dallas and other cities, and they’re starting to kind of feel that a little bit. They’re gonna come upon that same thing. And there’s even a glazer paper about this recently too.

I’m just thinking about that and what that means if you get that pot of money in a regional sense from a transportation perspective. What does that mean for like the housing and the shortage that we’re seeing? Because if we run outta space and all of the money before from infrastructure funding was going to that [00:45:00] sprawl, and the way that we could build lots of housing was those tracks of land that were huge and we could build thousands of units of single family homes.

It all comes back kind of, you know, the backwash, the backwash comes and so how do we deal with that?

Adie Tomer: Yeah, I love that. Uh, two things to tackle. First, let’s start with like the congress, the sprawl thing. I’m really passionate about this. Of course we’re not lobbyists, but like you talk to folks in DC that’s the job, right?

And it’s really important to not try to bring your individualized vision of what, not like Utopia is, but like your perfect community. That’s not what Congress is for. That’s what’s so cool about America. We can have all different kinds of places and actually you can let the market decide what’s competitive wise if you will win it.

Right? Like, what do people want? And so when we put out these ideas, you know, look, I’m, I’m on the record in places, you know, like you I feel like I’m not a, I grew up in sprawl. I, I, I don’t love it. I do let people having affordable housing, and I do like people achieving their visions. I, I wish personally like.

Mini soapbox here. I just wish we priced it effectively. ’cause it’s got a lot of negative externalities that we’re not [00:46:00] capturing in the US and Yeah,

Jeff Wood: the extra subsidies and stuff. Yeah. Yeah,

Adie Tomer: totally. And some of that can be solved local and state. Like we don’t even need Congress to do it. But the point is like I don’t, I don’t think Congress needs to like have a sprawled pro or negative agenda, if you will.

What I want to focus on here is fairness and that simply sending it back to states does not, nor has it ever meant that all of the communities in that state are gonna be uplifted to their own kind of ambitions. So we’ve gotta really remind Congress of that, and that’s really important. So different state dots do different things, right?

That’s not the point. The point is, let’s actually get money back to where it’s fair. Allow communities to engender themselves to this. The second point you’re bringing up though, which like, uh, again, the abundance crew, if you will, but especially the two authors of the book deserve a ton of credit. It is like really raising the profile of these issues.

’cause like a lot of us were working on these topics before, so we’re just well prepped and that’s why I’m actually so appreciative. They make our lives easier. We can talk about our topics more. It’s really cool. I think what they’re really hitting up against is what you raise. Which is what happens when regions, particularly in an [00:47:00] automobile oriented technological age, which is basically, you know, outside the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, even places like LA and San Francisco, they retrofitted themselves for it.

Almost like we built that model. We now know, physically speaking, how hard it is to build in certain places, and we need a totally different construction regime. Especially on real estate, but also of course the infrastructure that connects it to address these crises of people not being able to live in the places they wanna live.

Houston’s going through it its own way. You know, the irony of Connor Doherty’s recent piece, which I thought was great, Connor’s super free thinker, you know, um,

Jeff Wood: he grew up like a block for me, for where I am right now. No, man. Yeah,

Adie Tomer: dude, I love talking to Con

Jeff Wood: yo, his piece, he got a lot of anger from that one.

Adie Tomer: Oh, of course he did, man. ’cause he said the stuff that people didn’t wanna hear. Look, I’ve been in like affordable housing meetings in DC where I’m like, yeah, we do have an affordable housing program in America. It’s called Sprawl. No one wants to hear it, but that’s what it was. And then you get in these bigger places and the irony of what he just put out came later.

Right? I don’t think it was in the piece. I. That specific suburb was like, Hey, by the way, we’re actually trying to shut down development now. Like [00:48:00] we’re totally well, and ironically, of course, it’s the infrastructure that’s really holding the back, and that includes like public works, like schools and things.

So the only model here for swallow is keep going, right? Like geographically, keep going. And eventually you will run outta land at a local level in the sense of the constant, the time that people wanna spend traveling. So we’ve gotta figure out how to go up everywhere and we, we don’t have the right agenda for that yet, but more money locally is gonna make life easier to start thinking about different kinds of programs, different kinds of incentives.

You know, other stuff we’re working on at Brookings, what we’re thinking about is what are those kinds of fiscal instruments on the transport side that really could be, not necessarily like cutting edge, but aren’t used that much, or maybe not even exactly invented yet, where the financing model, if you will, on transport was we’ll build the highway so you can develop that land.

Well that’s broken now, but also the answer isn’t necessarily like subway tunneling everywhere either. We don’t have those densities. You brought this up earlier. You know, we might want more bus, rapid transit, more kind of bespoke, smaller price tag kind of investments. I actually don’t think we’re fully thinking yet about [00:49:00] what the financing model can be through the transportation budgets.

So if we build those up at a regional scale, you know, we see this here in Cleveland, Ohio, where I actually live. Shaker Heights, Ohio. It’s a streetcar suburbs, so there’s my bonafides, but the Port of Cleveland here, this is a super interesting model. They actually use their revenues and of course they have bonding authority to then make loans for all kinds of real estate developments across the region.

And many of them are kind of like urbanist stamp of approval, if you will. I don’t know if that’s their agenda. I just wanna be clear, like they really help projects, particularly in the inner core, ’cause it’s the Port of Cleveland, right? To develop. But they’re more models like that that we can think about how to use big stacks of public capital.

Right. Which often live in the infrastructure departments to then help let loose. The kinds of development in the right places and make deals that might look like they can’t move actually. Like address those gaps. What folks term the financing gaps. Right? There’s a lot more to mind on financing corridor based TOD based properties.

I know some colleagues that wanna do some work on this that’s coming. There’s a lot [00:50:00] of work to do here, but we just need to get more public capital at the local level so they can really start to shake their arms and legs and test some new stuff out.

Jeff Wood: Are there good examples like internationally for this like in in Asia or in Europe or other places where we can start to like look at what’s happening when you do give all this money locally?

I

Adie Tomer: don’t know. It’s one of my favorite things to say, you know, like, I don’t know. We don’t know. Right? We need to look into it. I mean, we all know like the trans example on like Hong Kong and using the air rights and the station development. Right? But like that’s, that’s not what we’re getting at here. I think that’s too small.

You know what, we know in the US we use Tiffs Tax Permit Finance. Like there’s tools we’ve got, but clearly it’s not addressing the full. Deal that you’re bringing up of actually densifying the amount of density of community wants, right? Like Houston doesn’t want necessarily what San Francisco wants, but they all do wanna densify effectively at different levels.

I don’t think we know yet what the full toolbox could look like to deliver on it.

Jeff Wood: I’m just thinking from like talking with, um, Eric Elin, who was at FDA at one point. Now he works for the city of San [00:51:00] Jose on their station planning for the high-speed rail line for Dear Dawn Station. And also what Jonah’s talking about, you know, like thinking about from a structural standpoint and from a staff capacity standpoint, like I.

What does Germany do or what does France do, or what does Japan do? I was telling you I went to China last year. Like what does Shenzhen do or, or what does Hong Kong do? Like how do they build those 10 lines in, in, in like 10 years? Like how does, uh, the I de France, how do they build the Grand PRI express?

Yeah. Right. And the structures and high speed rail. Like what are the structures that the station developers come from the state level? Those types of like capacity things. And so I kind of hinted this earlier with my capacity question as well. You know, the state dots have all this capacity now to go through the process, the EIRs, the development, the design of systems, and then, you know, for transit or for bike lanes, for everything else, you hire a consultant and you bring them in.

There’s not a lot of like local capacity to do those things. And so I’m thinking of like examples from other countries of capacity. That we can bring back the abundance or whatever it might be that we can bring back as examples and, and you know, a lot of [00:52:00] folks don’t like to listen to things from other countries.

You know, there’s that problem too, right? There’s like, well, we’re, America, we’re different and we have this problem. Even in the US they’re Portland, they’re different. They’re San Francisco, they’re different. Yeah. Whatever it is. And so I’m just kind of spitballing here, but that is interesting to me.

Adie Tomer: Oh, I think it totally is.

I think, look Jeff, you’re putting out really good research ideas for folks and, and folks should take the idea and run with it. I mean, that’s what’s so cool about research is it’s a really open collaborative community where folks, you’re fellow moral, philosophical travelers with like, you’re all in this together.

There’s a lot we can do. My last quick thought on it is what always works in America is showing a balance sheet where we’re gonna do well. Our currency in terms of language, if you will, is profit in America, and that’s just built into the system. We’re a market based democratic economy and we’re gonna need to think about going in those directions to build more of this stuff.

We had a model that worked for highway construction, beautifully privatized profit, built this huge public works asset, right? That now we own 1991. The Feds were like, yep, we did it. I really still think we’re stuck in limbo on what’s the [00:53:00] new agenda? That’s not gonna just come in one piece. Frankly, the interstate buildup, Jeff Davis over at ENO has done amazing work hard, it took decades of, of conversation, testing different stuff to get to that point.

And I don’t think we’re gonna have a one size fits all actually answer here, but we need a different agenda for building public works in communities and making sure we can privately build, or maybe even publicly, right? If you want to copy like the Viennese model somewhere like publicly, privately, building the real estate developments, that’s gonna allow those neighborhoods to flourish in a different way than they do now.

Jeff Wood: There’s a great article in Nonprofit quarterly about a webinar they held with Shelter Force where somebody was talking about that same stuff is like, thinking about the profit model, we can do it differently where we look at housing as infrastructure instead of just housing as, you know, something that people are landlords profit from.

Because we’ve seen what happens in Virginia and other places where they started thinking differently about it. And that’s probably, you know, something that we need to think about too is like if we’re gonna be in a market based economy, like how do we just. Think differently about how we’re providing these goods to the market or providing infrastructure that people need, which includes [00:54:00] housing.

So, I could talk to you forever. I feel like, uh, we, we could go for hours and hours on this. You mentioned at the top of the show work, and folks find this paper and more of your work.

Adie Tomer: Thanks Jeff. And yeah, dude, I could also talk to you forever. We, we do most of the time not on the mic, right? So, yeah, so brookings.edu or just like search infrastructure, Brookings, or even my name on the web, or SEO folks in the comm office are really good.

You know, you can find Brookings out there, but I really mean this, and, and hopefully you can validate if you will. Like, folks should drop me a line if they want to talk. That’s how we learn. Most of the folks you see working in policy shops in dc uh, we don’t get smart by talking. We get smart by listening.

So curious to hear people’s thoughts on these ideas and, and what we missed and how we can do it better.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. And where can folks find you if you wish to be found on social media?

Adie Tomer: Oh dude. LinkedIn is it, man. I’m, I’m, it’s not safe anywhere else. Yeah, that’s a great place to drop a note too, to get in touch with me personally too.

You can find it through the Brookings Forum, but yeah, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m trying to put everything on LinkedIn these days, so Please, if you’re interested in this stuff, I’m interested in, please reach out. I’d love to connect.

Jeff Wood: I mean, that’s where I found out about your [00:55:00] blockbuster adventures!

Adie Tomer: there you go. I know.

Jeff Wood: Well, Adie, thanks so much for joining us again. We really appreciate your time.

Adie Tomer: Yeah. Thanks Jeff. Talk to you guys soon