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Mar 10, 2012Thinking About Tomorrow - Our Future
Ever wonder what tomorrow will be like? We're regularly told of important changes in lifestyles and behaviors but what does it mean for us on a day to day basis? WDI must have asked that question. They brought Mitchell Silver in for a fascinating tour du horizon about the future and our place in that future. Mitchell is Raleigh’s City Planner and Chair of the American Planning Association this year. He spoke Thursday March 7, to about 400 Wilmingtonians.
We’re getting older. We’re also not bothering to get married. But we are still having children although not as many and not as early in life as we used to. And the outlook the Greatest Generation had to life is far different from their successors and the Boomers and Generations X, Y, Z and the Millenials. These trends have tremendous implications for our future. SIlver spoke to those implications.
As we get older we get more resistant to taxes, particularly if we’re living on fixed incomes. We also get more resistant to change in general and are more inclined to NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard.) And, folks start to not be able to drive. Ask your older Boomer friends about taking their parents' car keys. He predicted that 15% of older folks will not be allowed to drive in the not too distant future.
New families aren’t mom, dad, son and daughter that need a big place to live. More and more, it’s mom and child. If we’re not setting up traditional families then we’re less likely to need that suburban staple the McMansion.
He’s seeing a future of limits on tax revenues, different housing patterns, and very different public demands.
How, he wonders, does a local government, and in particular its planner, operate to keep the City financially stable, the community working for its citizens, and economically healthy. He also wonders if the citizens will demand policies from their leaders that will make the transition to this new world easy or difficult.
Two pieces of the solution are sidewalks and ROI. The sidewalk will help us get around and ROI will help the City determine where to invest its Citizens tax dollars to assure a quick payback.
The amenity of the future will not be the patio in the backyard but the Sidewalk out front. Some will need the sidewalk as they won’t be driving. Others will want the sidewalk as a real necessity for the more densely built city that ROI analysis recommends.
ROI (return on investment) or payback is a means of guiding where the City invests so that it will get the most out of tax dollars. The slower the payback the longer taxpayers have to pay and pay. The longer they pay the higher taxes will have to be. He illustrated his ROI point with two examples from Raleigh.
First he contrasted a tall office tower in Raleigh’s downtown with a new home development in the suburbs. Both would generate about the same amount of property tax but the two projects had radically different up-front costs for the city and thus different paybacks. The tall building needed little from the city as it was in an already built area. The tower’s taxes would payback that cost in just a few years. The housing would require new streets, new water and sewer and other new infrastructure and services. It would take a long time for the housing project to payback the city’s investment. The tower had a high ROI or short payback period, the development has a low ROI and long payback period. Taxpayers would pay for the housing for a long time. Not a short time. If you want low taxes you want projects that pay off quickly and aren’t costing for a long time.
His second example dealt with the renewal of Hillsborough Street next to NCSU. Most of the private buildings along that street are two stories tall. The payback will be improved if those buildings expand and become, say, four story buildings. More taxes will be paid to cover the cost of the street improvement.
If that housing project is filled with McMansions then it will be bumping into another long term trend. Smaller households don’t need large houses. What a family of 4 with a dog and desiring a large yard needs in housing and what a single person needs or a single parent and one child needs is far different. Nationally, the APA is expecting as many as 20 million McMansions to be unwanted in the not too distant future.
These are huge shifts in our world. And sometimes, our political system has trouble absorbing huge shifts. The public policy challenge Silver left for the group to contemplate is to ask how we the body politic will react to these trends. What will we, the people, demand of our elected officials through our petitions and votes? Will we promote policies that make the changes go easily and work successfully or will we try to steer our body politic against the tide? Will we adopt tax and procedurally policies that move us to encourage the dense investment that provides a quick payback or will we discourage that and encourage development that leads to a long expensive payback?
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