But the “school versus school” mentality promoted by the state report cards is pervasive. Currently in Ohio, some politicians continue to discuss plans whereby funding could “follow the student.” A kid who is doing poorly could go to a different school and state funds attached to that kid would go to the new school. This proposal plays right into the “fight or flight” mentality, too, as it presumes that the solution to every problem is for the individual to move.
Given the system we have had, it is utterly unsurprising that we don’t see overall statewide improvement in student performance, but we do see families abandoning some communities to move to other communities in response to the school report cards. If getting people to move is our goal, we could save everyone a lot of trouble simply by telling those folks to look at income levels. Just go to Wikipedia and look up the wealthiest cities in Ohio. Pick out the top twenty wealthiest places in the greater Cleveland area. Now go look up the top ten highest-scoring Cleveland-area school districts. Those ten school districts cover all but two of the twenty wealthiest places.
Clearly, using student test data to set up a contest among school districts does little more than magnify the advantage of communities that are already advantaged. Worse than that, it’s not telling us anything we didn’t already know decades ago. Wealthier kids have a starting gate that is much closer to the finish line. Everybody loves a horse race, but there’s no drama to this one. Just give them the roses at the beginning and don’t waste our time and money staging a rigged contest.
FIVE STEPS
Certainly there are other unintended negative consequences of easy mobility that merit attention, but these five—abandoned crappy retail space, too much housing, stressed tax bases, persistent racial segregation, and the use of schools as real estate marketing—give us plenty to chew on. It’s not surprising that our cities have run into unforeseen side effects of increased mobility: society has never encountered these conditions and possibilities before. But now that we’ve seen what’s going on, maybe we could make some adjustments so that the mobility-driven evolution of our cities isn’t quite so brutal to individuals and so disruptive to regional economies. The problems are complex, of course, but still, each of the five ailments above might respond to a fairly simple treatment.
RETAIL: LEAVE NO TRACE
There is a principle taught to every Boy Scout: leave no trace. No responsible camper would just leave a worn-out tent in the woods for someone else to clean up. But that is exactly the behavior of big-box retailers. This is frustrating because it comes so close to a sensible approach: why not just acknowledge that big-box retail is nomadic and build things in such a manner that they can be easily dismantled and either transported to a new site or recycled? Maybe the town where the retailer has built charges a deposit that would cover the cost of putting the land back the way it was and the occupant doesn’t get their deposit back if they don’t restore the place to the way they found it. If an old “box” is vacant for more than a year, it has to come down. Packing up camp is part of the process, just like setting it up.
New construction on blank land enjoys a lot of subsidies, from the roads that literally pave the way, to the utility lines paid for by past customers, to tax structures that reward new construction over the maintenance or rehabilitation of existing houses. The people building new on the outskirts are among the most advantaged already, so they really don’t need the less wealthy people of the region to subsidize them. We can probably eliminate those discounts. If the lack of a new-construction discount leads someone to decide to stay put and upgrade an existing structure rather than building new, that’s a pretty good sign that building new was not really an economically sound idea in the first place. Over the years, the accumulation of such decisions would gradually mitigate the housing oversupply.
TAX BASE: REDUCE OVERSUPPLY AND DON’T PENALIZE REINVESTMENT
Broad-based regional tax and revenue sharing is probably unrealistic in an intentionally balkanized place like greater Cleveland, but it might be possible to assess a modest fee on new construction whose sole purpose is to fund the demolition of abandoned housing at the same rate that new units are added relative to population (that is, if housing occupancy is growing at the same rate as new construction, then there’s no fee). That would help keep a lid on the oversupply of housing, thus keeping real estate values up across the region, and it would rid older areas of dangerous, blighted structures, and prime those areas for quicker redevelopment.
Americans are conditioned from birth to complain about taxes, but it isn’t necessarily a problem that older areas have higher tax rates, because the older real estate is more affordable in the first place. However, what if you want to build a new house at $150 or $200 per square foot in an old neighborhood whose higher tax rates assume a $75-square-foot value because most buildings have already depreciated for ninety years? Yikes! Older towns need to encode utterly predictable graduated abatements that make the effective tax rate on new construction or extensive renovation in inner-ring Cleveland Heights the same as it would be for new construction in exurban Macedonia (and they need to widely publicize this standard abatement). The city will do fine because the per-square-foot value of the new construction is higher than the typical older Cleveland Heights home, and thus roughly the same dollar amount will come in each year. Similar abatements should apply to any major investment in a home’s infrastructure that bring its systems up to “contemporary” standards. Measures such as these would encourage reinvestment in these older neighborhoods, where much of the highest-quality (if older) housing stock already exists. Such reinvestment would
