The following op-ed by Mike McGinn, Executive Director of America Walks, appeared on the Strong Towns website on May 3, 2021, written in response to Chuck Marohn’s five-part series about the American Jobs Plan, which appeared last month in the Daily Post.
It is difficult to write a counterpoint to Chuck’s five-part series about the American Jobs Plan when it contains gems such as this:
We’re not destroying the environment simply because our cars spew carbon; we’re destroying the environment because it requires a significant car trip for modern Americans to do things our ancestors could do with a five-minute walk.
But without getting into the overall pro and cons of the current proposal (and I lean pro), I want to offer some perspective on the direction of the debate itself.
Chuck’s essential point is solid: taxing and spending is neither inherently good nor bad; it’s how we tax and spend.
While there is room for arguing over what is or is not productive, there can be little room to dispute that we are in a deep hole and must prioritize wisely. We face crises of inequality and environmental destruction, overlaid upon and often driven by racial injustice. Our current policies aren’t cutting it.
Furthermore, history entitles one to be cynical about the American Jobs Plan. The forces that led to these outcomes have not abandoned the field, and the inertia of past practices remains powerful.
Having said that, if you told me ten years ago a U.S. President would be talking about the need to remove highways from Black and brown neighborhoods, eliminate parking minimums, and do away with exclusionary single family zoning… well, I’m not sure I would have believed it. A type of political correctness prevented frank discussion of racism. And most politicians believed that touching single family zoning or parking was like touching the third rail of a subway line. Policies that have driven extraordinarily damaging spending are now on the table for reversal.
Why that has changed is critical. It’s not due to elected officials just now “getting it.” The explanations have been out there for some time. Nor is it the result of a well-researched public opinion campaign funded by billionaires (another sorry marker of our time). It is the result of thousands of conversations, from advocates, practitioners, academics, historians, and most of all, just plain people, that’s changing minds and building public demand for smarter investments.
It’s also notable that what were previously considered to be local issues are now filtering up for action at the federal level. Some might decry that, claiming local control is the best. I’ll reserve for another day the vexing question of what is the right level for decision making for which topic. We can find numerous examples where top-down decision making is ruinous for places, from urban renewal to interstate highways through cities to “redlining” maps drawn by federal authorities. We can also see where local authorities thwart just and equitable policies that help communities prosper: the “pull up the drawbridges” approach of zoning, or leaving those without cars to struggle with inadequate transit or non-existent sidewalks. We can also include here race-to-the-bottom tax strategies that lead to a Foxconn debacle, or Washington state showering Boeing with tax breaks as Washington schools and colleges are chronically underfunded.
Suffice it to say that no matter the layer of government, there is room for power brokers to work the levers of government to steer resources to the already favored, to the detriment of our collective future.
The only counterpoint to concentrated power is an educated and active community that demands better from every level of government. I know that we feel sometimes that the debates in living rooms, hearing rooms, and Zoom rooms have no real effect. That liking and sharing is mere “keyboard activism.” If you’re just shouting and not listening, then sure, that’s a problem. But if you are truly challenging others and yourself to take a deeper look at what works and what does not, that exercise repeated thousands of times on the smallest of decisions starts to add up. It ripples outward and upward. And with the American Jobs Plan we see it can even reach the ears of a President and a distant Congress.
So keep it up, folks. We’re putting points on the board, even if there is a lot more game to play. The path to transformative change remains fraught with difficulty, but let’s find some hope where we can see the debate moving in the right direction—because we earned that hope through our collective engagement.