Trees, Meet Forest
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
Not too long ago this site, along with the D.C. Council and much of the rest of the Washington area, was actively debating the incentive package for the new Washington Nationals stadium. At the time I was well aware of the questions about costs and benefits and was familiar with research on the subject suggesting that new stadia did not boost metropolitan economic performance (although baseball stadiums do tend to outperform those built for other sports, perhaps because they are in use more often). I nonetheless thought that the stadium might be a good idea, and one of the reasons, aside from my baseball fandom, was the role it might play in chasing metropolitan dollars—in shifting, that is, more suburban revenue into the District.
Whatever the arguments and outcomes of the stadium deal, it’s interesting to look at the position in which we found ourselves when we were still debating it. At a metropolitan level, the decision to build a stadium was probably, at least in strict economic terms, a wash, but when one introduces jurisdictional boundaries the chance to enhance the District’s relative position within the metro area suddenly makes the decision more rational.
The stadium deal is hardly the lone example of such a situation; at the moment, another is rising just outside the Capital Beltway in Oxon Hill, Maryland. The business Disneyland at National Harbor might end up being revenue gold for Prince George’s County, but it’s hard to imagine what more the developers might have done to offset the benefits of the project with regional costs. National Harbor promises to snarl traffic along the I-95/495 corridor, and the decision to build far away from Metro means that automobile alternatives are practically nil and that traveler trips and spending outside the compound will be sharply limited. (While a water taxi to Old Town is a great idea, it would take a second Miracle at Dunkirk to shift a meaningful amount of commerce over the river via boat).
Worst of all for the District, the National Harbor investment in convention space and hotels greatly limits the value of D.C.’s own new and expensive convention center and its associated hotels. It also increases the likelihood that the District and Prince George’s will waste valuable time and money throwing incentives after conventions, all in an effort to shift dollars from one side of the District line to the other.
These are just two small and discrete examples of one of the most serious planning problems facing Greater Washington: the failure to plan regionally. Other competitive actions operate continuously throughout the metropolitan area, leading to questionable distributions of people and jobs and causing an unfortunate amount of money to be spent on fights over the existing economic pie rather than on efforts to make the pie bigger.
Picture taken by iceman882.
For the farthest flung counties in Virginia and Maryland, the incentive for local leaders is to attract people and businesses into their borders, to bring the economic activity and associated tax revenue of the metro area out until they can also take a chunk. Good for them, but not for the region as a whole. As the metro area grows outward, infrastructure dollars are spread ever thinner, new roads soak up dollars that could be used to improve older, busier ones and provide transit alternatives. More residents live outside the reach of effective transit. Because the farthest flung counties tend to have the laxest development rules, growth occurs haphazardly, defying efforts to plan for efficient land use.
Closer in, counties already swelled by growth face their own set of incentives. Having gotten too big too fast for their limited infrastructure, they pull the ladder up after themselves, cutting growth sharply. While this might make perfect sense for an individual county, it’s hard on the metro area. When growth in new housing slows or stops, home prices begin to creep upward. Limited supply and rising prices cause new development to leapfrog slow growth counties, pushing out into the exurbs and contributing to sprawl, congestion, and extreme commutes.
Transportation planning has long been constrained by provincial selfishness. In hindsight, the decision to build freeways into the District seems like a poor one, as far as D.C. was concerned; by making it very easy to live outside the city and commute in, freeways encouraged many people—shockingly—to move out of the District and commute in. Virginia and Maryland seem to have learned the lesson well. While each state sends a quarter of a million workers into D.C. everyday, neither state seems all that interested in improving the quality of those trips, which are subject to steadily worsening bottlenecks. Road and rail priorities in Virginia and Maryland focus squarely on projects involving movement around the suburbs, leaving commuters into the District (to say nothing of those traveling within the District) in the lurch. Even if D.C. could strike some sort of bargain with inward commuters, using taxes or tolls to pay for improvements in their commutes, the competitive nature of Washington planning would reduce the benefits of any such agreement. With Virginia and Maryland all too happy to drag jobs farther and farther out into the suburbs, any deal raising the cost of travel in the center would simply provide an opportunity for those states to try to recruit people and jobs away from D.C. and into suburban counties.
In too many ways to count, the rational actions of individual places reduce the welfare of the metropolitan area as a whole, and these decisions continue to be made because there is so little coordination at a regional level. It’s maddening to local observers; millions of workers daily stream across state and county borders to work, play, and shop, and yet those counties and states govern as if they existed entirely in a vacuum.
As Steven Pearlstein noted this week, this illusion of isolation has strong effects on efforts to improve quality of life policies as well. It’s overwhelmingly clear that the best way to reduce the metro area’s carbon footprint is to shift more workers into the center of the region, and especially into the District. Every person who moves from the suburbs into the District reduces the metro area’s average gasoline consumption, and every move in the other direction raises it. Looking at regional transportation planning, one would never, ever guess that encouraging population growth in the center might have this outcome.
Affordable housing plans also fall apart given jurisdictional competition. As I noted a few weeks ago, a housing voucher program that didn’t apply to the metro area as a whole would be sharply less effective than one that did. The same is true for a host of poverty programs; it’s hard to marshal public support for District programs when those that benefit most from those programs often leave the District for the suburbs, taking the gains from public investment with them. It’s also clear that the broader the base of those programs, the more substantial will be the resources behind them and the opportunities available to those in them. And to be perfectly fair, the suburban jurisdictions probably know this. They probably realize that it is in their long term interest to work with the District on addressing problems like poverty and affordable housing, but lack of coordination prevents individual counties from making good on their intentions. Unless every county contributes to regional solutions, those that do are hurting themselves competitively, throwing local tax dollars at solutions on which non-participants can free ride. Every city, county, and district in the area may want to work together, but without a framework for coordinated action, the incentive for each is to look out for number one and number one only.
There is evidence that even modest efforts to promote regionalism can have big effects. To many, the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority may seem an unconstitutional and undemocratic manifestation of Richmond’s failure to govern well. Still, the NVTA has begun allocating funds for Metro and VRE, promising a long term commitment to infrastructure projects that benefit places beyond those with NVTA membership. When one reads Zach Schrag’s The Great Society Subway, it’s easy to see all the ways that regional cooperation led to the construction of an imperfect subway system, and yet cooperation led to the construction of the subway system -- one of the great triumphs in the history of Washington and one which continues to pay dividends to every jurisdiction throughout the area.
Not every decision needs to be made regionally. As a Washingtonian, I certainly appreciate the fact that my government can make decisions on policies concerning immigration and civil rights, among other things, independently of the suburbs, and I’m sure Virginians and Marylanders feel the same way. But there’s no avoiding the fact that making decisions on development and transportation planning in a vacuum costs the metro area dearly. Individual jurisdictions routinely undermine the efforts and investments of their neighbors, so rational planning for new growth becomes impossible. But what can be done? A brief search of Washington Post articles containing the names Fenty, Kaine, and O’Malley turns up promises to cooperate on security, but little else. Pearlstein advocates greater responsibility for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, something I’ve argued for before. It sounds lovely, but where will the pressure to give that body more power come from? Who is demanding more regional interaction? Practically no one, as far as I can see.
The NVTA offers some hope. Northern Virginia seems increasingly willing to look at itself and to govern as a whole. At the same time, Arlington and Alexandria, as dense and central locations, share many common interests with the District. If the NVTA can begin thinking beyond county borders and can see itself as part of a metro region, it may serve as an example of how regional bodies can improve overall planning.
I’m as guilty as anyone at encouraging the District to respond to silence from our neighboring states by putting our own local development first, but somewhere along the line either voters or their leaders need to begin pushing for a broader perspective. It’s foolish to throw money away because we can’t find avenues for cooperative planning. We all ought to be livid at the lack of coordination. The Washington area can do much, much better.