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Moving People, Moving Minds
Land use and state's transportation objectives are in fundamental conflict, says SACIA's Bruhl
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Business New Haven
3/15/2004
By: BNH
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Christopher P. Bruhl is president and CEO of the Southwest Area Commerce & Industry Association (SACIA), and organization he joined in 1990. He serves on a variety of boards and advisory groups, among them the University of Connecticut School of Business Administration Board of Overseers and the Governor's Council on Economic Competitiveness & Technology. He serves as chairman of the private Coastal Corridor Coalition and of the public Southwestern Corridor Action Council, which deal with issues of regional highway congestion. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Connecticut Regional Institute for the 21st Century and the national U.S. Chamber of Commerce Transportation Infrastructure and Logistics Council. He spoke with BNH about land use and transportation issues.
How are land-use policies in much of southwestern Connecticut incompatible with transportation issues and objectives?
Traditionally land use in Connecticut has been shaped by market or consumer preference. Towns grew up for commercial reasons; they were places where commerce could be conducted. As commerce spread among settlements, transportation routes developed organically. An example would be bringing the mail from New York to Boston in the 18th century created the dirt path that is now [U.S.] Route 1. Naturally, more and more habitation grew up along those transportation routes. So we have this phenomenon over a couple of centuries of people making choices to cluster together, connect with one another and live along the connections. Over the last 30 to 40 years we have transformed the way people lived and related to work, but after two centuries of infrastructure development, we can't necessarily transform our transportation infrastructure. So now we have a conflict between established patterns of land use and transportation conflicting with new needs for transportation.
So what does that mean?
What that means is that it's easier to consume open space to build a new home or a new shopping center than it is to redirect that housing or commerce into downtowns. This is due to greenfields being cheaper to develop [and] Americans' preference for the single-family home, the attractiveness of this universal point-to-point transportation system called the car. All these forces favor the single-family home and the car that makes that possible - and yet, we don't have the land for it. The choice we now face is, can we make our cities more attractive in the marketplace - which is what drives consumer preference - or, if we can't, do we choose some other form of control to economically disincent so-called sprawl.
Which would you choose?
I would say that there has to be a combination. As emotionally appealing as a single answer might be, they don't work because people are more complex than that. We need to have infrastructure investment, zoning and state incentives and disincentives that reflect the different choices and encourage the choices that are most helpful to preserving open space, clean air and regenerating our cities without getting draconian about it.
How do you begin to accomplish that?
In the bonding area of the state, we need to direct bonding funds toward the livability of cities. We need to focus on the quality of public schools - not just equitable funding, but also closing the achievement gap. If you have schools that perform for all kids, more people who might like to live in cities will live in cities. If we deal with education side we eliminate some of the disincentives for living there, thereby creating a larger housing market and recreating density.
Any examples?
Stamford happens to be a perfect example. It has committed for about a decade to downtown housing and has seen enormous growth there while at the same time having very stable schools. So it has added population, added housing stock, continued to ethnically and economically diversify and continues to be the most economically successful city in the state. That's a microcosm of how all those things work together.
New Haven has also had recent success in attracting more people to live downtown. How has Stamford accomplished that?
Part of what Stamford did was to pay attention to New Haven. One of the unique factors of New Haven is the enormous asset that Yale represents: the quality of life of having cultural institutions, restaurants - that kind of 5-to-9 life - and then also the incentives for Yale employees and others to live in the city [e.g., Yale's home-ownership program that helps employees buy houses in targeted New Haven neighborhoods]. Stamford took a look at itself and realized that although it had made some good choices and was benefiting from its location in terms of bringing offices in, it had not committed to the life that its residents led. It only committed to the jobs that the residents could hold - and those are not necessarily the same thing. Hence the emphasis over the last ten years or so on making the downtown livelier by investing in cultural institutions that the city didn't have. Something like 100 new restaurants have opened in Stamford over the last ten years. That's created a life that wasn't there before.
Land-use policy is mainly set at the municipal level, while transportation policy is set mostly at the state level. But why don't decision-makers in Greenwich and Westport say, 'It's better for my county and my state if big companies in Stamford can hire $40,000-a-year workers who live closer to Stamford than New Hampshire or Pennsylvania'?
Some of them do think that way, but there's a countervailing value: the Connecticut tradition of home rule. Towns are established to provide services, and a bedrock that continues to generate a sense of identity are public schools, which we continue to deliver at the local level here. Individuals who are elected in this home-rule approach are elected to focus on the town - and not only are they not incented, but are actually discouraged by the state from thinking more broadly. Towns that want to work together discover rapidly that, for example, the Department of Transportation is not particularly an enabler of regional cooperation. Just look at the Orange-West Haven adventure [over where a new Metro North station will be sited].
Is [Fairfield County U.S. Rep.] Chris Shays barking up the right tree when he suggests raising gasoline taxes to pay for more Metro North passenger coaches?
Anyone who suggests that we should raise the gas tax is more than barking up the right tree; all of us need to be barking up that tree. When the Mianus River bridge fell down in the early 1980s, that was the public event that caused the state to realize that it had starved infrastructure investment in maintenance to the point where we killed people. We dramatically underfinanced [transportation] during the [Gov. Ella T.] Grasso years. That led to setting up a dedicated financing mechanism for transportation so you wouldn't require roads to fight with schools in the bonding every year. The workhorse of that was the gas tax, which was scheduled to go up over time. Eventually the gas tax did rise to the highest level in the country. However, Connecticut never rose to spending the most per-capita on transportation in the country. It became a politicized issue because it was easy to seize upon. The fact that the average person in Connecticut drives about 12,000 miles per year, and the average person gets about 20 miles to the gallon - meaning that the average person uses about 600 gallons of gas - that means every penny rise in the gas tax costs the average driver about $6 a year. So when we began to the reduce the gas tax, we did a couple of interesting things: we took away the money we needed to invest in overall transportation - without replacing it from the General Fund - and we created an incentive to drive more precisely when we needed to have incentives to drive less. We also create an incentive to pollute the air more, because it was cheaper and cheaper to drive larger and less fuel-efficient vehicles, like SUVs. And now we're surprised that we have financing problems in the state.
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