Joe Biden’s Imaginary America By Joel Kotkin •
His policies seem designed for coastal enclaves that do not represent most of the country
After two painful recessions and ever greater national discord, there is considerable support for a new beginning, even if it takes massive federal spending. The question we must ask now is what kind of spending makes sense given the character of the country, its geography, and its economic challenges. America remains a vast and diverse place, and decisions that make sense for one locale do not necessarily make any sense in others. A dispersed country needs dispersed decision-making, not edicts issued from on high by the D.C. nomenklatura.
Unfortunately, Joe Biden’s ballyhooed “infrastructure” plan, coupled with unprecedented stimulus spending, is cast by the obliging media as being about the middle class but seems oddly detached from how the overwhelming majority of the middle class lives, which is in lower-density, automobile-dependent neighborhoods. This dynamic was intensifying even before the pandemic. But Biden’s plan seems mostly about serving the relatively small sliver of transit-riding apartment dwellers living in denser neighborhoods. Overall, dense residential areas accommodate no more than 10 percent of the nation’s population.
Rather than emulate Roosevelt’s New Deal, as Biden’s handlers insist, the plan renounces much of what drove it. The New Deal, whatever one thinks of it, was about improving the material quality of life for most Americans, such as by spreading the benefits of homeownership to an ever-broader part of the population. In contrast, the Biden plan focuses on permanent redistribution through ever more entitlements and dependency — something Roosevelt opposed. It is likely to reduce our competitiveness by boosting energy and regulatory costs as well as taxes.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the Biden administration’s myopic sense of geography than its transportation priorities. Take urban transit. Biden has proposed a policy that, by some estimates, would allocate $165 billion for public transit (including urban rail — subways, light rail, and commuter rail) against only $115 billion to fix and modernize roads and bridges. Transit, which accounts for about 1 percent of overall urban and rural ground transportation, would receive nearly 60 percent of the money.
Echoing conventional progressive rhetoric, the administration’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, embraces the idea of getting Americans out of their cars and into trains and buses. For at least half a century, this has been a principal public-policy objective — and the results have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Despite the expenditure of more than $2 trillion and the construction of many new rail systems, transit’s share of daily commute trips dropped 44 percent from 1970 to 2019 (8.9 percent to 5.0 percent of the total). Even before COVID, working at home accounted for more commuting nationwide than did transit. Outside New York City, nearly 60 percent more people worked at home than rode transit in 2019, according to the American Community Survey. Transit accounted for less than 2 percent of all urban travel before COVID. The administration nonetheless is thinking about taxing vehicle mileage to pay for infrastructure, something that would be wildly unpopular outside the handful of dense urban cores where transit ridership is high.
Transit thrives in only a few municipalities (not entire metro areas) with extensive downtown-oriented urban rail systems such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington. These municipalities, with the nation’s largest downtowns, accommodate nearly 60 percent of transit work-trip destinations but only about 6 percent of the country’s jobs. New York City by itself accounts for 36 percent.
Attempts to boost transit’s share of urban travel have been plagued by a basic problem: In the nation’s major metropolitan areas (those with a population over 1 million), cars can reach almost 55 times as many potential jobs as transit in less than 30 minutes, according to University of Minnesota research. In the New York metro, with by far the largest transit system in the nation, cars can reach six times as many jobs as transit. But demand for both forms of commuting may be lower now, as the pandemic has seen millions of people working at home grow used to a commute time of zero.
A principal purpose of federal subsidies to build urban rail systems was to lure drivers from their cars. But a review of 23 completed rail systems shows that no such thing occurred: Overall, where the new systems have opened, the percentage of commuters driving alone has increased. Further, urban rail is not faster than driving alone. Nationally, overall daily commute times on transit are about twice as long as by car, according to American Community Survey data, while average commute distance by car is about 5 percent longer than the average transit commute. In the largest metropolitan areas, with by far the most comprehensive transit service, the average transit commute takes about 75 percent longer than the average auto commute.
Perhaps the best evidence of the failure to attract drivers comes from the Los Angeles region, the nation’s densest urban area. Slate predicted in 2012 that L.A. would be “the next great transit city.” Yet the Los Angeles County bus and rail operator has spent more than $20 billion to open urban rail lines since 1985 only to see ridership drop by a quarter while population increased by 2 million. This should not be a surprise, since L.A. commuters can reach 32 times as many jobs by car as by transit in less than 30 minutes in the metro area, according to the University of Minnesota analysis.
The greatest absurdity is high-speed rail, which proponents such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say can replace planes for long-distance trips. But this has never happened — not in France, not in Spain, and not in China, which instead has emerged as the world’s aviation leader in passenger volume. President Biden also has imagined a world where people can go coast to coast as quickly by train as by plane. The fastest high-speed trains in the world average about 200 miles per hour — compared with the nearly 500-mph average speed of transcontinental flights.
The cost of building high-speed-rail systems in the highly regulated and litigious U.S. also would be prohibitive. World Bank research has estimated the costs of U.S. high-speed-rail construction to be a third more per mile than in Europe and nearly 150 percent higher than in China.
California, cited as the inspiration for many of Biden’s least practical ideas, should stand as a cautionary tale. The California High-Speed Rail Authority in 2008 estimated the cost of building the San Francisco–to–Los Angeles/Anaheim route to be $32.8 billion to $33.6 billion. In November of that year, voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds for the system. But by 2012, costs had escalated to between $98.5 billion and $117.6 billion. Facing a political backlash over this inflation-adjusted tripling of costs, the authority adopted a revised proposal that would reduce the cost of the system by about $30 billion by not building high-speed infrastructure in parts of the Bay Area and Los Angeles. In these segments, high-speed trains would operate mixed with conventional commuter trains — a so-called blended system.
The cost escalation has only continued, leading trade journal Railway Age to surmise that “there appears to be no end in sight.” Meanwhile, the start date for service from San Francisco to Los Angeles has been pushed back 13 years, to 2033, although the authority also has said there is not enough funding to complete the route. Commenting in the San Francisco Chronicle on cost escalation on the northern terminus for the route — the new Transbay Terminal — former California assembly speaker Willie Brown wrote, “If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
Based on the experience of California, policy-makers and taxpayers should assume that the proposed North Atlantic Rail Initiative, which would build a high-speed line from New York to Boston by way of a tunnel under Long Island Sound, could cost nearly $325 billion, not the claimed $105 billion.
Further, a main justification for high-speed rail — substantially reducing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions — is anything but certain, since the construction of rail systems involves huge GHG emissions that may never be canceled out by savings from riders who switch from driving or flying. For example, the average 45 percent cost overrun and the average 40 percent ridership shortfall as documented in Oxford University research would increase the cost to remove a tonne of GHG by about 140 percent. Surely there are better strategies.
If deprioritizing roads for transit reflects a coastal-urbanist worldview, attempts to make suburban development difficult and single-family housing a thing of the past are even more out of synch with public preferences and market trends.
Historically, both parties have looked with favor on suburbs and the notion of a country where most people own their own home. Franklin Roosevelt insisted that a “nation of homeowners” would be “unconquerable.” But this view began to change under President Obama, who decided that suburbs needed to become denser and home to more poor people. Many Democrats, reading the mainstream media, assumed they were riding a “back to the city” wave that would transform American geography as well as politics. Some deep-blue jurisdictions — Minneapolis, California, Oregon — have moved toward eliminating single-family zoning. At the same time, in deepest-blue California, a citizens’ movement with determined support from minority neighborhoods has so far thwarted such heavy-handedness from Sacramento.
The Left’s embrace of forced density reveals a serious misreading of demographic and geographic trends. Despite what you might read in the New York Times, Americans on the whole never went “back to the city.” In fact, in not one year since 2000 have more people moved into the urban-core counties than moved into suburban and exurban counties. Between 2010 and 2020, some of the largest metro areas — including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Miami, Boston, and San Francisco — lost domestic migrants, according to U.S. Census Bureau population estimates. Critically, as new research shows, the people most likely to move are the educated young, previously thought to be permanently urbanistas.
Last year, as even a New York Times analysis indicates, most urban counties lost population as people moved to suburbs and smaller towns. This accelerating movement of city residents to suburbs has included two large, historically liberal constituencies: Millennials and minorities. Members of the younger set, inevitably getting older, were already ditching the big city before the pandemic, as the Brookings Institution found in 2019. This is being driven, suggests a Zillow survey in May, by “space seekers” — Millennials who want to get married and have children and naturally follow the home preferences of their parents.
Meanwhile, the suburbs have become increasingly integrated. Demographia’s City Sector Model analysis indicates that 83 percent of Hispanics and 76 percent of African Americans, the two most economically disadvantaged groupings, already live in the suburbs. The stereotypes of the 1950s and 1960s no longer hold. In the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, 44 percent of residents live in racially and ethnically diverse suburbs, ranging from 20 percent to 60 percent non-white. More than a third of the 13.3 million new suburbanites between 2000 and 2010 were Hispanic, with white non-Hispanics accounting for a mere fifth of suburban growth in that same period. African Americans have also been steadily moving from inner cities, in some cases because of gentrification and because many middle-income areas have declined owing to economic collapse or crime.
These trends will continue at the national level if for no other reason than that there is no population growth among white non-Hispanics, even in suburbs. From 2010 to 2019, according to the American Community Survey, Asian and Hispanic populations grew rapidly, and blacks experienced some growth, while the white non-Hispanic population declined by more than 100,000. White Millennials may ultimately replace their parents, but virtually all net suburban growth will be concentrated among minorities.
Ignoring them and other suburbanites could prove politically costly, given that suburban voters generally decide elections from the presidency on down.
In previous generations, economic power drifted to the coasts, but in recent times, particularly during the pandemic, the nation’s heartland — from the Appalachians to the Plains, the Intermountain West, and the South — has been home to nine of the 53 major metropolitan areas with the highest job retention. The interior states are now recovering far faster from the pandemic than the coasts are.
Biden’s proposals have some good things to offer the heartland, such as expanding high-speed Internet and initiatives to reshore industries such as medical equipment and semiconductors. But overall, the Biden agenda, with its passenger-rail and carbon obsessions, is not heartland-friendly. Even congressional Democrats from farm states recoil at some of Biden’s proposals, particularly those concerning estate taxes, while his green agenda, notes Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira, threatens those who work with their hands in factories, the logistics industry, and the energy sector.
Harvard’s Michael Porter has identified the rise in U.S. oil and gas production as “perhaps the single largest opportunity to improve the trajectory of the U.S. economy.” But the impact of “decarbonization,” particularly a full ban on fracking as envisioned by Vice President Harris, for example, would cost more jobs than those lost in the Great Recession, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report. It’s often suggested that these lost jobs would be replaced by “green jobs.” But that is something of a fairy tale. An analysis of the hypothesized green positions by North America’s Building Trades Unions shows them to pay far less and last far less long than the positions they would replace. Or as Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, summarized this situation for Politico: “It’s pie-in-the-sky bullsh** about these green jobs being good middle-class jobs, because they’re not.”
Whatever the benefits of Biden’s proposals for subsidy-triggered Wall Street and venture capitalists, much of the country — from the Appalachians to North Dakota to New Mexico — will suffer, losing their primary means of boosting their wealth. As former Clinton adviser Bill Galston suggests, the president needs to scale down his focus to widely popular goals such as fixing roads and expanding broadband. If not, he will be fighting the choices and careers of most Americans.
One possible suggestion might be to embrace the old Nixon idea of a “new federalism,” which would give states and localities more discretion in how to use federal funding. Some areas, for example, may want to expend their transportation monies on high-speed rail or trolleys while others would prefer to invest more in roads, bridges, ports, or river systems. They should be allowed to find their way to lower GHG emissions by promoting close-in suburban offices, dial-a-ride and autonomous vehicles, and enhanced telecommuting without sacrificing privacy, control, and the backyard.
Instead of imposing on the nation one set of policies for every major issue, let’s disperse decision-making wherever possible. The road to success, in policy or politics, lies in addressing the real needs of the varied places in an increasingly diverse America, not the imaginary needs of a republic that doesn’t exist. The country may need infrastructure improvements, but which investments make sense can be best determined by those impacted by them, not by those who, in the federal stratosphere, know best from on high.
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