Where the money went

Like many cities across the county, my hometown of Brainerd, MN, is facing huge budget problems. So far they have handled those problems by doing the standard things like leaving positions unfilled, holding the line on wage increases and deferring maintenance. They have also done some more dramatic things like laying off their full-time fire fighters and shutting off some street lights at night.

Our Vulnerable Cities report shows that the city of Brainerd is highly dependent on aid payments from the state of Minnesota. When local government aid is completely phased out (yes, we said "when" and not "if" because, regardless of whether this aid is good policy or not, it will not hold up in the age of budget austerity we are entering), Brainerd would need to raise its tax rate from 44% to 94% of tax capacity just to stay even. 

And nobody in the Brainerd city government will argue that they are holding their own today.

Inevitably, Brainerd will join in the chorus of those who believe that cuts to local government aid are bleeding communities dry and that the state budget is being balanced on the "backs of our cities".

Sunday I found myself driving through the neighborhoods in southeast Brainerd and got really depressed with what I saw. I've seen it before driving through, but this time I was waiting for my wife and so I had some time to really take a deeper look at these neighborhoods. If you want to know where the "wealth" of Brainerd has gone (and cities that have followed this same path), one need only look at these streets.

Some quick background on southeast Brainerd. This part of town is very near the railroad yard and so I suspect that many of the people who lived in this neighborhood when it was originally built worked for the railroad. It has the traditional neighborhood layout (grid pattern with alleys) and even has some neighborhood schools, Harrison (still operating), Washington (converted to district administration offices) and Lincoln (closed). So walking was a part of the original neighborhood design, but as you will see, not anymore. Two generations of retrofitting has made these neighborhoods unrecognizable.

The following pictures show a representative sample of the streets in this part of town. This is a huge area - probably a mile square or more - and the streets all look like this. Some design features to notice (and it is recommended you read our prior posting on cheaper streets):

• The streets are bizarrely wide. Insanely wide. On every street you have two parallel parking lanes and then driving lanes that have to be 12 to 14 feet wide. These are highway dimensions. These neighborhoods streets are designed for intense speed.
• On street parking is provided even where the zoning codes have forced new homes to be set back in a way that provides off-street parking. The on-street parking is thus rarely used, but there is all that pavement.
• The sidewalks are gone. They may not have ever been there - the original streets were undoubtedly narrower and, with the slower traffic and lower traffic volumes, people probably just walked right down them. 

Here is the first photo. Notice that you could fit three or four car widths between these two parked cars. The design is to allow cars to safely meet at high speed without slowing down.

Here is another one. I was amused by the biking warning signs, which are actually necessary because there is a bike trail crossing here perpendicular to the road and the cars come flying through here. People generally don't bike within the public right of way, unless they don't have another choice for how to get around (no car or too many DUI's). Also note the lack of sidewalks.

Here is a place where the on-street parking was used, but this was right next to the church and I took this photo during mass. My guess is that these spots would be empty all week except for an hour on Sunday mornings. By the way, I go to church there and there is a huge parking lot that is never full except Christmas and Easter (we're Catholic, after all).

Many of the streets here are in pretty rough shape. Here is a sample. The maintenance that should routinely be performed to keep these streets from falling apart prematurely is not happening.

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And lest our readers think that building these wide expressways through neighborhoods is the "old" way of doing things, here is what some recently "improved" streets look like. Not a car parked for blocks.

This shows where some of the trees have been cut back to improve sight lines. That is standard approach from the highway design manuals. There is a nice, smooth transition here so cars do not even need to slow down. Again, brand new streets yet no sidewalks. This is a "cars only" area, despite the fact that it is the middle of a residential neighborhood and just a handful of blocks from the downtown commercial area.

An engineer's dream. You could land an airplane on this street. Our readers might think this is a thoroughfare, but it's not. This is just a plain, low-volume neighborhood street.

The wealth of our nation has been squandered, neighborhood by neighborhood, building and maintaining streets such as these. In Brainerd the cost is easily in the tens of millions of dollars for all of the extra wide streets, paved and then not properly maintained. Nationwide the number is easily in the hundreds of billions, probably more. There is no city that has embraced this approach that has the wherewithal financially to maintain this excess.

What are the values that have induced us to spend our wealth, and the wealth of subsequent generations, in this way? Clearly, they are:

• We want all trips taken to be automobile trips. Cars should not share the public realm with any other use.
• Cars must be able to drive everywhere and be able to park right at every destination.
• Cars must be able to move quickly. Trip times must be reduced.
• Cars must have as little encumbrance as possible.
• We must always be able to store cars conveniently.

(Note: The neighborhood traffic engineer would actually say that the highest value is safety, but that would be because he or she is ignorant of the difference between neighborhood streets and highways, the former being incredibly unsafe when designed using parameters for the latter. This engineer probably believes that we should have more police patrolling the streets to keep the traffic slow, as if speeding is not human nature reacting to the design but some reckless pathology that infects people when they get behind the wheel.)

So Brainerd, and thousands of historic towns like it across the country, have spent their wealth over the last two generations trying to create prosperity by abandoning their traditional development pattern - which was pedestrian oriented - and converting to a vastly more expensive, auto-oriented development pattern. In doing so, they have committed themselves to long-term maintenance costs that they have no realistic expectation of meeting, with or without state and federal transfer payments.

Has this all paid off for them?

The answer to that question, and a discussion on a Strong Towns set of values cities should apply to such neighborhoods, later this week.

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