☆ Back to basics: Can quality of life improve if cities get out of the way? (1/3)
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Cities are not magical entities. They have a limited scope and should move away from services they don’t provide well in the first place. So says Mark Moses, author of The Municipal Financial Crisis, who tells us that recreation, housing, and charitable nonprofits are hindered—not helped—by overambitious city councils. An Opp Now exclusive Q&A.
Opportunity Now: Your book talks about how cities should avoid mission creep, but how do you square that with the need for a city to serve its residents?
Mark Moses: We need to think seriously: what is a city? A city is not some magical entity that can just do anything and everything because its leaders hang out at City Hall. I mean, it’s a legislative authority in a defined geographic area with enforcement powers.
But cities often decide who they are, what they are, and what they’re going to do, literally from council meeting to council meeting. When city leaders stick to basics and avoid getting crazy ambitious about new programs, the organization performs better.
ON: So you’re saying there are services cities just shouldn’t be providing at all?
MM: I go back to the basics. A city is good for protecting rights, for defining rights, and it’s good for dealing with certain local issues that aren’t covered by state or federal oversight.
But it’s not so good at other things, like charitable activities—unless you just want to politicize it all and have the city become a chooser of winners and losers in a nonprofit realm, right?
ON: What’s wrong with partnering with nonprofits, to help serve the community?
MM: Cities get in the way. They impose bureaucratic hurdles and expect nonprofits to operate like city departments, and that stifles a nonprofit’s creativity and effectiveness. Significant resources are required to “partner” with a city and satisfy its requirements. I've heard nonprofit managers talk about how cities get in their way when city leaders assume the role of central planner and clearing house for local charitable-type activities.
And we know cities get in the way of private industry all the time when they commandeer services.
ON: But can’t the city subsidize and scale up vital services?
MM: Well, take recreation. Classic example. Somebody decides that the city has to provide recreation, notwithstanding all the soccer and softball nonprofits that are not restricted by the geographic area of the city, that scale to actual supply and demand, and are great at fundraising, providing scholarships—but no, the city wants to politicize this and make it a city function. It’s naturally narrowing; the city decides what level of soccer and softball to provide.
In my experience, 40% or more of what recreation spends is subsidized by the general fund, but this subsidy doesn’t manifest as a discount to the taxpayers who pay for city-provided recreation services. It’s not for affordability; the taxpayer subsidy is needed to cover the overhead of operating a recreation department as a public agency. A city recreation department must adhere to the city’s hiring requirements, follow city purchasing rules, and comply with all federal and state requirements applicable to government organizations.
ON: That reminds me of affordable housing. On the regional level, the Bay Area’s transit agency MTC tried to push a $20 billion housing bond last year that would have required developers to pay prevailing wages.
MM: We’ve made it impossible for developers to build affordable housing. We set up these affordable housing programs where you spend crazy amounts of money to build a unit. Then you’re either catering to a narrow, niche market based on income and family size, or you literally put the housing up for a lottery. You just have winners who get the favorable price on the apartment, condo, or house, and everybody else is still stuck in the same inflated market that’s sustained by the local building restrictions and zoning.
Mark Moses, senior fellow at California Policy Center, is author of The Municipal Financial Crisis.
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