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After earlier federal bailouts and stimulus bills were faulted for enriching Wall Street and proving anemic in creating jobs, the president and congressional Democrats sent a message in choosing a name for the jobs bill that passed the House just before Christmas - the "Jobs for Main Street" bill. It's progress that this time funds will flow away from, not toward, Wall Street. And the legislation will keep some people working, especially in local and state government. But will funds from this bill really reach Main Street? Well, not so much. When it comes to the largest spending item in the bill - $27.5 billion in highway spending - Main Street is missing.
The $27.5 billion isn't targeted to rebuild streets at the heart of older cities and towns. No, it will mostly go to 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," which an examination by the Infrastructurist Web site 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 infrastructure that supports sprawl.
Whether the setting is small towns like Gaston County's Belmont, leafy older neighborhoods like Dilworth or big downtowns like Charlotte's, the traditional Main Street is 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 that homes within walking distance of shops, schools and other amenities command significantly higher prices than sprawl counterparts.
In the commercial real estate world the hot trend - Time Magazine named it among "10 ideas changing the world" - is "retrofitting suburbia" with walkable, mixed-use development. None other than vast and sprawling Tyson's Corner, Va., is due for a multibillion-dollar makeover complete with old-style main streets.
Grade-separated highways function basically as high-volume sewers for traffic and erode a neighborhood's sense of place and its property values - a lesson Charlotte has learned painfully in the blocks near Interstate 277. Traditional main streets and the connected networks around them add value in many ways:
They distribute traffic more efficiently. Local trips are less likely to clog major thoroughfares.
Compared with disposable big-box strips, they support more diverse job creation and better long-term real estate value, a trend paying dividends both in established downtowns such as Davidson and in revived areas such as Charlotte's Plaza-Midwood.
They help transit work more efficiently and do the same for other municipal services, including emergency response. A 2008 study by the City of Charlotte showed it could provide emergency services from Fire Station 2 in Dilworth for less than a fourth the cost per household as from a station near sprawling Highland Creek.
Their compact blocks and mixed-use urban form encourage walking and better public health, along with reduced driving and lower emissions.
Their infrastructure can be funded, in part, with value-capture tools such as tax-increment financing and business improvement districts, better leveraging federal dollars.
Evidence shows these networks save money - and lives. Research by engineering professors Norman Garrick of the University of Connecticut and Wes Marshall of the University of Colorado-Denver finds 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 have the highest household transportation costs and highest per-capita carbon emissions.
The federal government is learning these benefits, just not fast enough. Maybe the U.S. senators will actually find America's Main Streets. It's not hard: Voters live on them. The House got the title right - Jobs for Main Street. Now maybe the Senate will make it reality.
