Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

CNU's Norquist in Hartford Courant: Fund real main streets — not highways — with the "Jobs for Main Streets" bill now in Congress | Congress for the New Urbanism

From the Congress for the New Urbanism website:

The rollout of Congress' latest stimulus bill has been all about "Jobs for Main Street." That's a great message, argues CNU President John Norquist in a timely op-ed in the Hartford Courant, except for one problem. When it comes to the jobs bill's largest expenditure — $27.5 million for highways and roads — Main Streets are largely missing. Writes Norquist:

The $27.5 billion isn't targeted to rebuild streets at the heart of older cities and towns, the cherished settings for Memorial Day parades and holiday light displays. No, the money will primarily go to projects that government knows best — the expansion of wide, motor-vehicle-only highways that go hand-in-hand with energy-wasting sprawl. This follows the earlier stimulus bill that favored massive highway projects, including a batch of expensive "highways to nowhere" that an examination by the Infrastructurist website concluded "make no sense."

The new bill does reserve $8.4 billion for transit and $800 million for Amtrak. But just when U.S. real estate markets are turning to Main Street and traditional neighborhood design, Congress throws $27.5 billion at the infrastructure — road widening — that supports sprawl.

Whether the setting is small towns like Guilford, older suburbs like West Hartford or bigger cities like New Haven, the traditional Main Street in Connecticut and other states is proving to be a model around which to build livable and energy-efficient communities. A report by economist Joseph Cortright for CEOs for Cities is the latest to find homes within walking distance of shops, schools and other amenities commanding significantly higher prices than sprawl counterparts.

And in the world of commercial real estate, the hot trend — named by Time Magazine as one of "ten ideas changing the world" — is "retrofitting suburbia" with walkable, mixed-use development. None other than Tyson's Corner, Va., the largest sprawl commercial complex in the country, is due for a multibillion-dollar urban makeover complete with traditional main streets.

The article goes on to extol the benefits of reinvesting in main streets and neighboring networks of walkable transit-served streets — benefits that include saving households hundreds of dollars monthly on transportation costs, promoting physical activity and reducing obesity, curbing greenhouse gases, and supporting more diverse economies. The research behind these conclusions is impressive and will be explored in greater depth at CNU 18  in Atlanta, "New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places" which is being oraganized in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Writes Norquist:

Evidence shows these networks save money — and they save lives. Research by engineering professors Norman Garrick of the University of Connecticut and Wes Marshall of the University of Colorado-Denver reveals that traffic injury and fatality rates are three times higher in California cities with sprawling streets than in those with compact, connected networks.

Brookings-backed research from the Center for Neighborhood Technology shows that highway-served sprawling areas in region after region have the highest household transportation costs and highest per-capita carbon emissions. Each months, residents of walkable, transit-served neighborhoods save hundreds of dollars in average transportation costs.

Read the rest at: Norquist in Hartford Courant: Fund real main streets — not highways — with the "Jobs for Main Streets" bill now in Congress | Congress for the New Urbanism

Wisconsin Safe Routes to School Case Studies: DC Everest Junior High School

In 2007, DC Everest Junior High School of Weston, WI (near Wausau) received $242,900 in Safe Routes to School funds for their project.

From the Wisconsin Safe Routes to School Reporter, Winter 2009.

The DC Everest Junior High School project installed a sidewalk on the street in front of the school, added a sidewalk from the school entrance to the new sidewalk at the front of the school and changed the traffic flow into the front of the school to one-way. In addition, a new multi-use path was created to allow students to enter at the back of the school. Prior to these improvements the area in front was a safety concern as missing sidewalks and poor layout of the street and parking lot in front of the school led to cars, buses and pedestrians all mixing together.

Now that these infrastructure improvements have been made the school is implementing pedestrian safety lessons in physical education classes, promoting bike safety, and promoting safety to the community.

With help from the Marathon County Health Department, over 400 students have received pedestrian safety lessons. The school has incorporated pedestrian safety into its bowling unit since the bowling alley is a 10-minute walk from the school. This daily walk allows the schools to incorporate safety into an existing activity. In addition, students participated in a fun game of pedestrian safety Jeopardy prior to their bowling unit in PE.

Last fall, a Walk to School event was held for all the junior high students. Students walked 3/4 mile from Kennedy Park to the school during our Walktober event week. Three walk to school dates were organized and each time a student participated they received a chance to win for prizes. Although two of the days were rainy 43 students participated each day along with teachers and administrators.

Planning is already underway for bicycle safety month in May. The Perfection on Wheels bicycle stunt team will be performing at DC Everest during a bicycle safety school assembly. In addition, the school will continue to work with the Community Resource Police Officer to provide bicycle helmets at reduced prices for all the community schools. The school will also promote the bike rodeo sponsored by the police department.

To further support students bicycling to school, two new bike racks were added at DC Everest Junior High. A count in October showed over 50 students rode their bikes to school and used the bike racks. The school intends to add another rack in the spring and continue to add more racks as needed.

Contributed by Karen Wegge, DC Everest Junior High

An early success for the Franklin Trails Committee

ABOVE: One of Franklin's many "roads to nowhere." In the background: Pleasant View Elementary School, which is accessible by a single, slim, sidewalk-less, shoulder-less road.

A mixed bag at at a productive Franklin Trails Committee meeting Thursday night.

First, some very good news: The committee has been awarded a Walking Workshop grant from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. The grant was brought to the committee by alderman Kristen Wilhelm, who also completed the application. 

The Walking Workshop will act as a launch for the comprehensive Safe Routes to School program, through which we hope to get a significant grant for the city of Franklin which will make it possible for more children to walk or bike to school if they choose. The grant requires no match from the city of Franklin, so the funds would be, essentially, free money that we can use for engineering, education, encouragement, and enforcement efforts.

Once it became clear that we would be pursuing the Safe Routes to School grant, we immediately met with Franklin School District superintendent Dr. Steve Patz, as input from the district and Pleasant View administration will be vital. We also asked that a Franklin School Board member be asked to join the Trails Committee.

Our Trails Committee is an organizational body that consists of membership appointed by the mayor. We were tasked with (quoting the April 7th motion) "researching grants to provide funds for design, land acquisition,construction of walking and/or bicycle paths specific to S. 51st Street, and a connector between Pleasant View Elementary School and S. 51st Street and return to the Council with recommendation for application of grants."

Since then, the Council has approved the Trails Committee's pursuit of a Walking Workshop grant, and the larger, very comprehensive Safe Routes to School (SRTS) grant (which is limited to areas two miles from a grade school; the Walking Workshop is free to address Franklin High School). 

At this point, the establishment of specific goals and identification of problems we want to overcome will be the job of a larger, yet-to-be-formed SRTS Task Force that will consist of stakeholders from all areas of the community; school faculty, parents, residents, homeowner's associations, public safety (fire and police) officials, City staff, etc. These are the people who will decide our specific areas of focus as we address "non-vehicular connectivity" in Franklin -- specifically, in this case, for students attending Pleasant View Elementary.

There was, however, some dissent from one member of the committee as we were spit-balling suggested goals to bring into the first task force meeting. More on that in an upcoming posting when I discuss the difference between Design Speed, Posted Speed, and Operating Speed as they relate to the Drexel/51st/Rawson speedways and the safety of anyone not sheathed in metal. I'll also talk a little bit about how sprawling, incremental development in suburbs creates monster collector roads that eventually need to be tamed.

Sad Suburban Reality: Investment in anything beyond the area patrolled by your riding lawn mower is socialism

Why are today's suburban landscapes devoid of public spaces, connective roadways and trails, and other shared amenities? Because each house aspires to be its own gated community.

We've been made to believe that, somehow, $4,500 for a personal Rainbow Play Structure in the backyard is preferable to an $35 yearly bump in shared property taxes to fund, for instance, a network of community parks that would in turn attract commercial development capable of easing the tax burden on private property owners. (The play structure in my backyard, by the way, is a Rainbow knock-off. The "soon-to-be completed" park promised nearby is now a dozen years late.)

But, "You take care of your own."

Almost imperceptibly, the societal idea of what it means to be a resident of a community seems to have changed; it is more common now to speak of taxpayers than of citizens.... In gated communities and other privatized enclaves, the local community that many residents identify with is the one within the gates. Their homeowner association dues are like taxes; and their responsibility to their community, such as it is, ends at that gate.... One city official in Plano, Texas, summed up his view of the attitude of the gated community residents in his town: "I took care of my responsibility, I'm safe in here, I've got my guard gate; I've paid my [homeowner association] dues, and I'm responsible for my streets. Therefore, I have no responsibility for the commonweal, because you take care of your own."

- Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States, Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder

The Smart Growth Manual: An Interview with author Mike Lydon

My copy of the Smart Growth Manual arrives today. If it's even half as good as Suburban Nation, it'll soon be bristling with post-it notes.

Mike Lydon, co-author of the new Smart Growth Manual, is a member of the Next American Vanguard, a group of 34 young advocates, planners and policymakers representing America’s next generation of urban leaders. He formerly worked at the planning firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company alongside Andres Duany, who wrote Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream along with Jeff Speck, another prolific planner and urban designer. Lydon helped the two write and edit The Smart Growth Manual, a “companion volume” to Suburban Nation that seeks to thoroughly define “smart growth” and provide advice and best-practice examples of how to translate the idea into urban reality. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has called the book an “indispensable guide to city planning,” and the website Planetizen recently named it as one of the 10 best planning, design and development books of the year. Here, Lydon tells NAC about working on the book.

Tell us a bit about the history of the project.

The Smart Growth Manual was originally conceived as the follow-up to the highly successful Suburban Nation, written by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, published in 2000. Jeff set out to write the The Smart Growth Manual as a user-friendly guide to combating the problem of suburban sprawl so clearly identified in Suburban Nation. Jeff, who was still the Director of Town Planning for DPZ at the time, took a sabbatical to write the first draft. As Jeff tells it, Andres read the draft but felt that there was just too much changing in the planning field for the book to move forward; too many smart growth projects just coming out of the ground; too many new policies whose outcomes could not yet be measured; and too many related movements—such as green building, global warming/environmental groups, public health advocates, smart growth, New Urbanism, etc.—that had not yet achieved the traction that they have today. So they decided to hold off on the project and observe, while also continuing to refine and advance their own work.

Read the rest at NAC Daily Report: The Smart Growth Manual: An Interview with Mike Lydon

METROBURBIA, USA: Community-building and "Intersubjectivity"

Asphalt, concrete, parked cars, and -- benches notwithstanding - - no life.

From the excellent METROBURBIA, USA, by Paul K. Knox:

The basis of both individual lifeworlds and the collective structure of feeling is intersubjectivity: shared meanings that are derived from the lived experience of everyday practice. An important part of the basis for intersubjectivity is the routinization of individual and social practice in time and space. A positive and distinctive sense of place stems in large part from routine encounters and shared experiences that make for intersubjectivity. This requires plenty of opportunities for informal, casual meetings and gossip; friendly bars and pubs and a variety of settings in which to purchase and/or consume food; street markets; a variety of comfortable places to sit, wait, and people-watch; a sense of ease with changing seasons; and, above all, a sense of belonging, affection, hospitality, vitality, and historical and cultural continuity: not the attributes that anyone associates with American suburbia.

Movie theaters in corn fields and empty grocery store shells: Time for a more proactive Economic Development Council?

This is a four year-old picture, but nothing has changed. Located across from the Northwestern Mutual campus on 27th and Drexel; 1.200 employees headquartered across the street(!) couldn't keep a restaurant in business here.

Communities can be shaped by choice, or they can be shaped by chance. We can keep on accepting the kind of communities we get, or we can start creating the kind of communities we want.

— Richard Moe, National Trust for Historic Preservation

After enduring fairly alarming comments by fellow commissioners at Thursday's meeting, I'm compelled to prepare a presentation for the next gathering of the Economic Development Commission on how principles of Smart Growth drive economic development and sustainability.

Our discussion -- held with three members absent -- regarded possible incentives for developers wanting to build in Franklin. I am generally against subsidies; however, I brought up the idea of offering certain incentives in exchange for "placemaking" considerations by a potential builder or developer. Locating in the City Civic Center district, for instance, rather than out on the outskirts of town; adding neighborhood-access amenities; creating an innovative site plan; revitalizing an empty property; etc.

More than one of my fellow commissioners disagreed out of hand, riffing on the "Business will tell you where it wants to go" mantra. In other words, Let the chips fall where they may; let developers build where and how they see fit.

And how's that worked for us so far?

Well, Franklin's unofficial motto remains "there's no 'there' there." So much for a "sense of place."

The city budget shortfall, strained by the demands of sprawled infrastructure, requires service cut after service cut - including possible public safety cutbacks.

We have a newish movie theater complex built out in the middle of a cornfield in proximity to... nothing. Go catch a flick - then get back in your car.

The city is dotted with roads that end with no rhyme or reason. "We're waiting for a developer to eventually ..."

We've allowed a regionally-owned grocer (Wyndham Village Sendik's) to be driven out of business in under a year.

There is no "support local businesses" initiative in place.

The former Sentry grocery store, a huge building, is vacant. Walgreens next door is threatening to tear it down to facilitate a drive-thru window.

Children who live less than the length of a football field away from Pleasant View Elementary have to take a bus to a building they can see from their back yard. The school is nearly 50 years old, and the problem has yet to be solved.

Franklin is home to a single coffee shop, Moondance (with great food, by the way), which is unfortunately located on 27th street rather than "inside" the city.

Franklin's single "inside the city" local coffee shop and meeting space, 5-Star, remains vacant next to an also-vacant martini bar in a brand new building.

The "City Civic Center" is devoid of any manner of "third place" development that would augment and invigorate the Public Library and/or spur further investment there. (I had to actually debate my fellow commissioners in order to simply pass a motion, at the mayor's request, recommending that the city consider a vacant site next to the library for a coffee shop/co-working facility concept I'd advocated. Even though the concept originated in the EDC (via me), there was still one "nay" vote and an attempt by a commissioner to add a superfluous "spend no money on this" amendment to a mere recommendation to the council motion!)

And on and on ...

The simple truth regarding "business will tell you where it wants to go" is that any land a developer happens to own or have access to is always the best place to build, as far as the developer is concerned (see Shoppes at Wyndham Village). The developer then hires a site consultant to work backwards from the fait accompli. 

That's why we have a movie theater in the middle of a corn field, and why we had two Sendik's grocery stores within spitting distance of each other.

And why, in Franklin, we have none of the multi-use public space amenities and "third places" that are on the wish lists of home buyers and businesses looking to take root.

In their well-regarded book on local economic development, Planning Local Economic Development: Theory and Practice, authors Edward Blakely and Ted Bradshaw note that “industry and business regard livability as an important locational factor.” and that local governments need to “identify their quality of life attributes, build on them and effectively promote them to the business community.” *

That means "incentivising" developers to think outside their strip-mall comfort zone (again, see Shoppes at Wyndham Village) so they'll work with the city to create inspiring, interconnected places and spaces that will, in turn, attract further investment. That's how you strengthen the tax base and lower your citizens' property taxes.

The current economy places great value, for instance, on proximity and clustering. Placing jobs, homes, shops and recreation in walkable proximity increases business opportunities, helps create a much-needed sense of place, and can attract talented workers.*

Failing to invest in acknowledged quality of life attributes like walkability and placemaking can have dire consequences for a local, state or regional economy. In 2003, for example, the Brookings Institution found that Pennsylvania’s land development practices -- which, like Franklin's, had the effect of decentralizing growth and ignoring community-building -- contributed to the state’s loss of young people and its subsequent job and wage stagnation.*

The laissez-faire approach has been tried, and it failed. Time to be proactive.

* [See http://www.iedconline.org/ for the report, Economic Development and Smart Growth]

Alex Marshall: "Community--the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together--is a thin, tepid brew in this country."

"Downtown" Franklin, Wisconsin.

An excerpt from HOW CITIES WORK: SUBURBS, SPRAWL, AND THE ROADS NOT TAKEN by Alex Marshall. See if you agree (more excerpts here):

Coming Home

It's a Saturday night and my house is filling with people. Some carry musical instruments. Some have sheets of poetry or fiction by their sides. Some carry nothing, but are prepared to stand up before a crowd of people and dance, perform theater, or tell a story.

We call it the Coffeehouse. We've been doing it now for seven years. The first Saturday of every month, friends and friends of friends come to our house to entertain and be entertained. Usually about fifty people show up. It's a great time.

This coffeehouse is the highlight of the month, both for me and many of the people who attend. It's not just the music, poetry, and other acts that bring people back, although these are good. It's the chance to meet, connect, and talk with other people during the breaks. Through it, my wife and I have met many of our now good friends, and other people have made similar friendships and bonds. In a city where people come and go, it provides us a mechanism to make new friends as older ones leave town.

Why do I mention it? Because our coffeehouse is a replacement for what does not exist in the outer world. And the fact that it does not exist says a lot about our society at this stage in its history. I would prefer that a corner tavern or bar be down the street, where I could magically meet my friends and make new ones. I would prefer to be held up in a naturally emerging web of friends and family, growing out of the physical place where I live and the work that goes on there.

Our situation is ironic, because if anyone should have community "naturally," it's my wife and I. We live in Norfolk, Virginia, a port city on the Elizabeth River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Huge carriers make their home here, as do huge cargo ships that freight millions of tons of coal all over the world.

It's been the home of my family on my father's side for five generations. My great-grandfather came here before the Civil War. He was the first publisher of the newspaper where I started my career in journalism, The Virginian-Pilot. My father grew up one block from where I write this. My wife is a native of the area as well. My newest niece lives down the street.

Looking at my background, one might think that I live a life rich in contacts with the past and the world that molded me, a place where an intricate and perhaps suffocating web of family and friends who have centuries of combined experience support, argue with, and love each other. Which is not the case. I have no close friends from my childhood or high school years that still live in this town, or even the state. Most of my siblings have scattered themselves around the country, as is the wont of professional people these days. Various relatives--second cousins once removed and so forth--do live near me. I know none of them well. As one commentator remarked about Europeans in contrast to Americans, "They still have cousins." Americans do not.

Various forces operating in the country and world today have pulled apart my "natural" community and scattered it to the winds. My own more cosmopolitan bent figures into this. I lived in Europe for a few years, attended college and graduate school in Pittsburgh and New York City. I am not able, nor do I desire, to sink back into the old-boy culture that does still exist here to a degree. I have a community around me, but it is one that I created or sought out, more than one I was born into. My community is in my coffeehouse, in the arts organizations I belong to, and in the civic work I do.

Community--the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together--is a thin, tepid brew in this country. It has declined to the point where improving it, saving it, nurturing it have become slogans of a variety of movements in different, seemingly unrelated fields. In urban planning, New Urbanism promises to revive community through building subdivisions more cohesively. In political theory, Amiti Etzioni hopes to reduce crime and improve social health through his philosophy of Communitarianism. In journalism, the philosophy of Public Journalism, sometimes labeled Community Journalism, promises to rebuild community and a newspaper's circulation base by having the press foster public dialogue and political participation. Our politics, our places, our press--all of these things run across power lines that jolt us with the message that something is missing in too many of our lives, some sense of cohesion and togetherness.

This desire many people have for richer, more connected lives is a valid one. I believe that a society grows out of its social, religious, and political compacts, on which ultimately even market relationships depend. But like the construction of coherent physical places, the construction of coherent communities is not something to be attempted directly. Rather, one has to understand what produces both places and communities, and what weakens them, and address those forces.

Most of what we call community in the past has been produced as a byproduct of other things: making a living, shopping for food, keeping ourselves and our families well, protecting them and our society from physical harm, educating them. We shopped for groceries, served in the military, and went to a doctor and along the way got to know the butcher, the fellow soldier, and the local doctor. All of these actions have become less communal, and so our society has become less community-minded. We buy our food at the warehouse-style supermarket, do not serve in the military unless we volunteer, and go to the impersonal HMO to get our cholesterol checked. If we want to revive community, then we should look at the trade-offs involved in making some of our decisions more communal again.

Place has something to do with all this as well. Walking to a neighborhood cafe for breakfast is a more communal thing than using the drive-through at a McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin, although relationships can occur at either place. Driving on the freeway is less likely to generate relationships than riding a streetcar. Living in an older neighborhood fashioned around the foot is more communal than living in a contemporary one fashioned around the car. But the physical makeup of our places is just one factor in this trend.

John Perry Barlow, computer sage and former Grateful Dead lyricist, commented once that community is largely generated by shared adversity. This gets at the notion, true I believe, that our social ties, while beneficial, are not necessarily produced by situations we would choose. Although many of us miss community, we don't miss poverty, disease, and war, things that produce community with some regularity. The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure. We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.

I speak without any sentimentality or nostalgia for the past. I believe, however, that the generally fragmented lives so many of us lead break up marriages, disturb childhoods, isolate people when they most need help, and make life not as much fun. We live, to speak frankly, in one of the loneliest societies on earth. If we are to change that, then we should look more closely at the various relationships in our society--political, social, economic, and others--and attempt to construct them in more communal ways. Deciding how to structure these relationships comes back to what I increasingly believe is our most fundamental relationship--politics.

Cheaper than dinner for two at Olive Garden: The implications of Franklin's new tax levy

Much as I regularly lament the lack of comprehensive local coverage of municipal issues in a new newspaper-depleted era, I have to give credit to FranklinNow for their clear explanation of the ramifications of the City of Franklin 2010 Budget's 2.9% tax levy increase.

The new levy is $5.94 per $1,000 of assessed property value, which is reportedly the lowest in Milwaukee County.

Far from hiding it inside the story, FranklinNow included a "By the Numbers" pull quote that did the math for those who may not understand the personal ramifications of a 2.9% tax levy increase (though they did not do so online).

So, a family living in a home in Franklin with an assessed value of $250,000 faces an annual property tax bill increase of... $27.

Twenty-seven dollars.

To keep the increase from rising over the price of dinner for two at Olive Garden, cuts had to be made. In addition to an across-the-board, 1.7% cut in the overall operating budget (from FranklinNow):

The budget reduces funding to the July 4 celebration and St. Martin's Fair by 50 percent, leaves open a highway worker and custodial position and cuts funding for an intern in the planning department.

Tax dollars to other areas, including the library and street improvement funds, were frozen.

Not great news from an Economic Development standpoint.

How, with community amenities and services dwindling, do you attract to Franklin the sorts of companies that will drive down personal property taxes?

Indeed, the cost of a dinner for two at Olive Garden is not so bad, you may argue, but what about business's aversion to taxes? Conservative dogma states that "high" taxes scare business away; Franklin is a "tax hell," and that's hinders its attractiveness to business and commercial development.

Really?

Robert Ady was a longtime executive at the Fantus Company, the legendary site location business that virtually invented the process. Now the head of his own company, Ady International, Robert Ady is said to have assisted in more site locations than any living person.

Based on hundreds of face-to-face dealings with companies deciding upon the best place to locate or relocate, here are some of Ady's observations:

“[I]n the facility location process, taxes are not relatively important when compared with other cost factors such as labor, transportation and utility and occupancy costs. . . . In summary, site selection data do not suggest any correlation between low taxes and positive economic growth, or between high taxes and slow growth. The location requirements are too many, the process too complicated, and other factors too important to justify a strong relationship.”

As further reported by author Greg LeRoy:

Ady’s finding is consistent with those of others: tax-rate differences and tax incentives are too small to make a difference. Subsidies cannot make a bad place a good place. Good places are competitive because they have the long-term business basics that a company needs to produce supply to meet demand. So if cities and states want to grow good jobs, instead of cooking up more tax breaks, they should focus on improving their business basics—the valuable inputs and linkages they have.

Like, for instance, walkability, which has been shown to increase property values in communities that embrace the concept. This is why the National Association of Realtors is a vocal proponent of Smart Growth and Sustainable Development practices - specifically walkable, less car-dependent communities.

Simply put, it's easier to sell houses in - and attract CEOs to - communities that invest in long-term amenities like non-vehicular connectivity. Even if it costs TWO dinners at Olive Garden per year.

LeRoy explains the importance of creating attractive communities:

There are often personal factors in location decisions. Executives especially like to create a short commute for themselves. They may also locate for amenities such as golf courses or good schools for their children. The smaller the company, the more likely it is that such factors will come into play, but they are sometimes evident at bigger companies, too. For example, a study of 38 companies that left New York City found that 31 moved closer to their chief executive’s home, reducing the average CEO commute to eight miles.6 When the founder of Kinko’s sold the company to a group of New York investors, the company moved its headquarters in 2000 from Ventura, California, to Dallas, where the new CEO lived.

Back to the tax boogie-man. Robert Ady's chart of site location cost factors for an office project puts "Labor" at 72% and "Taxes" at a mere 5%.

Again, Greg LeRoy:

Federal tax statistics suggest that even Ady’s low ranking of taxes is overweighted. They provide even stronger evidence on why taxes—and therefore tax breaks—can rarely influence corporate location decisions. Internal Revenue Service statistics show that all state and local taxes make up only 1.2 percent of the typical company’s cost of doing business, far less than labor, materials, marketing, overhead, transportation—the business basics. And then companies get to deduct those state and local taxes when they file their federal tax returns, so Uncle Sam actually foots up to 35 percent of the bill. The bottom line: after federal deductibility, state and local taxes make up only 0.8 percent of the average company’s costs.

And, in Franklin, we have an alderman wishing on a star that a property tax freeze will fill public safety positions, create a sustainable community, and somehow increase the quality of life for local families.

I'll bet him dinner at Olive Garden that he's wrong.

(Greg LeRoy's book is called THE GREAT AMERICAN JOBS SCAM, and is highly recommended for it's solid research and excellent sourcing.)

UPDATED with new "conservo-math": Suburban City Budgets: Having your cake and eating it, too - The kind of math that brought us here

Recent night table reading material: Get out the red pen and highlighter...

The local conservative-for-hire blogger regularly carries water for one particular city alderman. As per routine, he dutifully reprints this particular alderman's letter to constituents asking for support of a (surprise!) property tax freeze even as our community faces numerous shortfalls and staff cuts, and unfilled public safety positions in the police and fire departments.

This particular alderman is (surprise!) up for re-election soon; who can blame an unabashed conservative for banging on the tax freeze drum?

The blogger's somewhat wishful distillation, however, is priceless:

"I wholeheartedly support [alderman] Olson and the idea of a property tax freeze that will restore unfilled police and firefighter public safety positions in the 2010 City of Franklin budget."

I think I can safely assume the blogger wasn't trying to be arch or ironic.

11/17/09 UPDATE: New post with additional conservo-math...

"Adopt a Scott Walker-like budget that prioritizes police and fire protection but also protects the taxpayer by a 0% property tax levy increase.

"If anyone doesn’t think that’s a great idea, they haven’t paid attention to the past two rallies that brought out a couple thousand supporters of Walker at the Italian Community Center."

... And some bonus schoolyard taunts aimed at a commenter as well.

As years of sprawl development practices come home to roost, some people still cling to the magic of "addition by subtraction."

Particularly when an election is close ....

[City of Franklin proposed budget HERE. Public hearing on the proposed budget is scheduled for Tuesday evening, 6:30pm at City Hall.]