Category: Uncategorized

Time for an SUV Tax

There is no question that New York City is not viable as we know it without its mass transit system, so the snowballing problems of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority should be of concern to everyone who lives or works in the city, whether or not they are regular users of the system.

Increased funding for NYC Transit (the subsidiary of the MTA that operates the subways and buses within NYC) may not be a sufficient step for improving the system but it is certainly a necessary one. Finding additional funding in an already heavily taxed city will not be easy, however, and already the Governor and Mayor are at war over whose responsibility it is. In addition to each arguing that the other already has money in their budget that can be used to help, Mayor de Blasio has proposed an income tax surcharge on tax filers earning in excess of $500,000, while Governor Cuomo is considering some version of the congestion pricing system originally proposed by Mayor Bloomberg.

When Bloomberg made his push for congestion pricing in 2007, I was working as the Chief Economist for New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson.  The Comptroller is an independently elected citywide official who frequently serves as the chief antagonist of the Mayor, and at that time Bloomberg was maneuvering to have the city’s term limits waived so he could run for a third term. Thompson, who was planning to run for Mayor in 2009 all along and now faced the prospect of opposing Bloomberg, was casting about for an alternative to Bloomberg’s proposal. As it happened, I already had drawn up an alternative as a think piece and Thompson was intrigued.  He eventually adopted it as the position of the Comptroller and as a plank in his 2009 and 2013 Mayoral campaigns.

Before describing my proposal I should note that residents of New York’s “outer boroughs” have a deep-seated suspicion of schemes to restrict access to Midtown Manhattan, whether they be in the form of tolls on the East River bridges or the more high-tech congestion pricing plan Bloomberg sought. I share their suspicion. There is, of course, a distributional effect, as a congestion pricing regime would disproportionately charge residents of the outer boroughs in order to improve a subway system that disproportionately serves Manhattan residents. But I think outer borough residents have a more visceral objection as well. Many of them work in Manhattan, study in Manhattan, play in Manhattan, and have family roots in Manhattan. They see Manhattan as the city’s commons, not as a separate borough to which its increasingly wealthy residents should have privileged access. It’s that possessiveness that all New York residents feel toward Manhattan that underlies their hostility to bridge tolls and congestion pricing. It was ultimately outer borough opposition that sunk Bloomberg’s congestion pricing proposal, and that Thompson was seeking to appease.

The proposal I devised for Thompson would impose a registration tax on motor vehicles registered in the five boroughs according to the curb weight of the vehicle. Thompson modified the proposal only by expanding it to all 12 counties of New York’s metropolitan commuter transportation district. Passenger vehicle registration fees in New York State average only about $20 per year and neither the State nor City imposes a personal property tax on vehicles as many states do. As proposed, a vehicle weighing up to 2,300 pounds (think Toyota Yaris) would pay an annual registration fee of $100, and the fee would increase by $.09 per pound above that weight, bringing the annual registration fee for, say, a Lincoln Navigator SUV to about $430.  The registration tax could generate about $350 million annually just from the 2 million automobiles and trucks registered in the city.  The revenue generated could be adjusted, of course, by adjusting the weight formula.  More precise estimates of the revenue could be made beforehand using data on the makes and models of vehicles registered, which we did not have access to at the time.

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A Good Tax

Gina Bellafante, who is usually an acute and sensitive observer of New York’s community life, wrote a somewhat misdirected column about the city’s retailing environment for Sunday’s Times.

The column portrays sympathetically several long-time Manhattan retailers who have been forced to close shop, or might soon, because of the high cost of rental space.  And they are sympathetic! However, the column identifies the City’s Commercial Rent Tax (CRT) as a contributor to the rent inflation retailers have faced and hence to the corporate homogenization of the city’s streetscape. There are several problems with this premise, not the least of which is that the CRT probably doesn’t contribute much, if at all, to the high rents for retail space.

The CRT, initially imposed in 1963 and modified a number of times since, effectively imposes a tax of 3.9% on commercial rent payments that exceed $300,000 annually.  The tax applies only in Manhattan below 96th Street and phases in beginning at the $250,000 benchmark.  The tax raised $816 million in the City’s 2017 fiscal year which, somewhat astonishingly, represented only about 1.5% of its tax revenue.

A savvy newcomer might ask why levy this tax at all, doesn’t it do more or less what a conventional property tax on commercial buildings does? The answer is yes, it does, but its origins and continued usefulness lies in New York State’s constitutional limit on how much property tax revenue municipalities in the state can raise.  In New York City’s case, that limit is 2.5% of the 5-year average of the full value of real property within it (with some complicated adjustments). The City has periodically bumped against that cap, so having a revenue source that is similar to a property tax, but which is not subject to the cap, is fiscally useful.

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The Perils of Private Infrastructure

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Trump Administration is incapable of pursuing any coherent, sustained legislative strategy. The Administration was unable to play any useful role in fashioning a viable “repeal and replace” health care bill, and it seems equally clueless on the other big agenda item, tax reform. Seeing the Republican legislative machine stall out on those two priority items does not auger well for a third Trump initiative that was once thought to hold some bipartisan appeal: infrastructure spending. That is probably just as well, since any wide-ranging infrastructure bill coming from this Administration and Republican congress would likely be an ideological monstrosity that would entice little Democratic support.

An infrastructure program is, however, more suitable to a piecemeal approach than is health care or tax reform, so it is likely that some sort of  new infrastructure policy emerges over the next eighteen months. Trump’s first budget programmed $200 billion over ten years to implement his infrastructure program (while cutting the Department of Transportation’s budget for the coming year by 13 percent). A fact sheet outlined some of the principles that will guide infrastructure policy.

The Trump infrastructure program will invariably seek to maximize the private-sector role, although the Administration’s fact sheet only hints at that direction with proposals such as removing the cap on private activity bonds. Administration officials are also touting the concept of “asset recycling,” whereby government agencies sell existing public infrastructure to private operators and use the proceeds to invest in new infrastructure projects.

The notion of private firms providing public infrastructure is polarizing, with conservatives portraying public agencies as inherently corrupt and inefficient and the left portraying private operators as inevitably predatory. In reality, the economic infrastructure of the United States has always been a patchwork of private and public operations and whatever prevails in a particular region tends to be taken by its residents as the natural state of affairs. Most passenger rail transportation, for example, was originally developed by private firms but virtually all of it was eventually taken over by government entities. Similarly for water supply systems, although about one-quarter of the U.S. population is still served by private water. Conversely, about 70 percent of American households buy their electricity from private, investor-owned firms. Roads and highways, and commercial airports, have always been developed and operated primarily by governments.

In recent years governments have explored privatizing, or re-privatizing, some infrastructure or contracting with private firms to operate it. Encouraging privatization appears to be a key part of the Republican infrastructure agenda, and that will be controversial enough. Even more problematic, though, will be efforts to incentivize the private creation of new economic infrastructure. In that regard the development of Florida’s long-distance passenger rail network is instructive, highlighting both the opportunities and perils of relying on private firms to develop new infrastructure.

The Florida High Speed Rail Project

Efforts to reestablish intercity passenger rail links in Florida have a  checkered history reaching back decades. In 2000, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment mandating the establishment of a high-speed intercity rail system. In order to implement that mandate, the Florida legislature established the Florida High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA) in 2001. However, Florida Governor Jeb Bush was opposed to the idea of a constitutional mandate for transportation infrastructure and was skeptical of the endeavor’s cost. He managed to get the rail mandate repealed in 2004, although the HRSA remained in existence and oversaw the completion in 2005 of an EIS for the Tampa-Orlando segment of a proposed system that was envisioned to eventually run from Tampa to Miami.

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The New Trumpian Landscape

When I created this site, the policy landscape for urban America seemed fairly predictable– continued divided national government, with a centrist Democrat in the White House and a Republican majority in the House and probably the Senate. That alignment would provide, as it has in the recent past, opportunities for incremental improvements in the quality of urban life and some hope for reversing the mounting inequalities that threaten America’s economic and social stability.

The 2016 election upset that projection, to say the least, and I have followed very closely the staffing and emerging governing philosophy of the Trump Administration. Putting aside the thousands of subplots and and nth-order considerations, I believe you’re left with two basic conditions that define the new landscape:

  1. America’s now has a President who is profoundly ignorant and has serious personality disorders, and;
  2. He will enable right-wing extremists to pursue a reactionary domestic legislative agenda and belligerent foreign policy goals unimpeded.

The first of those realities was obvious to many, maybe even a majority, of Americans before the election and has only become more obvious since. I think that as the country gets to know him better we will only become more astonished at the vastness of his ignorance and the severity of his personality flaws. Being a New Yorker I have been exposed to a constant dribble of Donald Trump for most of my life, and I have never seen him do or say anything that contradicted my basic assessment of his character. That he didn’t know who Frederick Douglas is, or was, comes as absolutely no surprise. Perhaps his ignorance results from having Adult ADHD, I cannot say, but there is plenty of circumstantial and testimonial evidence that he has read few if any books in his adult life.

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More Than Detroit

I recently read Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. I’m a bit embarrassed that it took so long for me to get around to this outstanding book, but I guess my timing was right as I finished it on election eve.

Sugrue tells what should be a familiar story, but probably isn’t to enough people, with a great deal of nuance and impressive historical research. African Americans from the south migrated to northern industrial cities in great numbers beginning around 1920. In Detroit, as in other cities, they enjoyed some prosperity and upward mobility in the 1920s and 1940s, although that progress was harshly interrupted by the Great Depression.  The war years and the immediate postwar period were times of hope and progress, but that came to an unfortunate end as Detroit and other cities deindustrialized and decayed in the 1960s and 1970s. The deindustrialization of center cities was not a conspiracy against the black migrants, but rather it was a historical coincidence with effects so cruel as to seem designed in malice. The ensuing impoverishment of inner-city blacks conttributed to the social unrest of the 1960s and the social disorder of the 1970s.

Sugrue’s research adds to the familiar story by showing that the roots of the urban crisis were sown much earlier than is typically portrayed; no sooner had WWII ended than the auto industry begin dispersing, both to the exurbs and to other non-urban areas of the country.  Backed with research that is concrete and detailed, Sugure shows that throughout the 1950s the UAW and other labor groups were resisting industrial deconcentration and automation, but ultimately could do little to influence the corporate decisions that threatened their jobs and disrupted their communities. Of course, many white workers were able to follow their employers to the suburbs and beyond, extending their hold on working class prosperity for a few more decades.  The black workers were not even that fortunate, as discrimination in jobs and housing left them stranded in the abandoned city.

Which brings us to the second major theme of Sugure’s book–the unrelenting discrimination and segregation African Americans experienced even in the northern promised lands. I grew up in a predominately white, working class neighborhood of Queens; it eventually transitioned into an exclusively African American and Caribbean neighborhood. The original white residents were on the whole decent people, there was little organized resistance to racial change, and racial transition was by and large accepted passively as a natural and inevitable progression. “White flight” there took place in slow motion over several decades, and when the white residents left they typically “fled” to grandchildren, nursing homes and graveyards. So I’m inclined to see residential segregation as an impersonal force driven by demographic flows and maintained by individual choices.  However, the virulent racism and violent hostility to neighborhood integration in 1950s and 1960s Detroit that Sugrue painstakingly documents is revolting and dispiriting, and underscores that much energetic activism was required to maintain the color line. Although he makes an effort to understand the threats white residents perceived to their communities, his heart doesn’t seem in it and truthfully, by the time I reached those passages, this reader’s wasn’t either.

So as I put the book down on election eve and watched the results roll in from Michigan, I had conflicting emotions. I was saddened by the futility of white Michiganers voting against all logic in the desperate hope that Donald Trump and the GOP would save their jobs and communities or care enough about them even to try. But it was also hard to put out of my mind Sugure’s horrifying narrative of racial animosity and to convince myself that the echoes of it didn’t play an important role as well.

The Los Angeles Homeless Housing Bond

In few cities has homelessness been as contentious an issue as in Los Angeles. The residents of the city have long displayed a live-and-let-live attitude toward the homeless, and in one recent survey of Los Angeles County residents homelessness was cited as the second-most important problem facing the county. Yet, the city has often resorted to a strong-arm law enforcement approach to the street homeless; in 2009 two national advocacy groups anointed it the “meanest” city in the country for its criminalization of homelessness.

In November, Angelenos will have an opportunitunity to express which side of the street they are on, as a referendum authorizing the city to issue $1.2 billion in general obligation bonds to provide supported housing for the homeless will be on the ballot.

Los Angeles has by far the largest population of street homeless in the country.  According to the city’s estimates complying with HUD’s Point in Time enumeration, there were 17,687 unsheltered homeless people residing on the city’s streets in 2015. That compares to 3,200 in New York, 2,000 in Chicago and 500 in Washington DC.  Even allowing for errors in the count, the scale of the problem is severe.  With about 4.5 street homeless per 1,000 housed residents, Los Angeles is second only to San Francisco in terms of the intensity of the problem.

In 2002, under the direction of Police Chief William Bratton, the city began enforcing, especially in the “Skid Row” district near downtown, a 1968 ordinance that prohibited sleeping in or upon a street, sidewalk or public way.  The ACLU of Southern California filed suit on behalf of six homeless individuals, but a district court upheld the city’s sleeping ban. However, in Jones v. The City of Los Angeles the following year, a panel of Ninth Circuit judges reversed the district court’s ruling, finding that the plaintiff’s may have become homeless involuntarily and their choice to sleep on the street was “involuntary and inseparable from their status.”

In 2014, a federal appeals court also struck down a Los Angeles law prohibiting people from living in vehicles, and in 2016 the city was ordered to stop seizing and destroying the property of homeless people left unattended on the street.

In the Jones decision the appeals court ruled that the city could not enforce the prohibition on sleeping on public sidewalks as long as the number of homeless persons exceeded the number of available shelter beds.  At that time, and still, the city has nowhere near the number of shelter beds necessary to accommodate its homeless population, although the shelters that it does provide are rarely used to capacity.

In 2007, the City and the ACLU reached a settlement agreement stemming from the Jones suit, whereby the city pledged not to enforce the sleeping ban until at least 1,250 units of additional permanent supported housing are constructed for current or formerly chronic homeless persons. Although the city has supported construction of some excellent facilities, nearly 10 years later the City has not completed building all of the promised units and the exact count is a matter of dispute.

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What’s Up With Retail?

 

Early this year Macy’s announced that it was closing 40 of its department stores. In April, Sears Holdings said that it would close 10 Sears and 68 Kmart stores. Then last week, Macy’s announced that it would close about 100 additional stores. Do these retrenchments represent just the normal ebb and flow of company fortunes in a competitive marketplace, or is there something more profound going on in retailing?

Well, there seem to be three strong crosswinds impacting the retail sector today, and the large department stores are taking the brunt of them. The three are middle-class income stagnation, globalization and the internet.

Through 2014 (the last year for which data is available), the average real incomes of none of the five household income quintiles had recovered to their pre-recession peaks. However, the recovery of income has been more complete for the higher income groups. While the average income of the lowest quintile of households had recovered to only 88 percent of its pre-recession peak, the average income of the highest income quartile had recovered to 98 percent.  The share of total income garnered by the three middle quintiles declined from 46.9 percent to 45.7 percent, while the share of the highest income quintile went from 49.7 to 51.2.  Retail chains that cater to higher-income shoppers are reportedly doing well, but for many large chains the three middle groups, with annual household incomes from about $21,000 to $112,000, is where the volume is, and income growth for those households has been slow.

Competition between name-brand retailers and discounters is not new, but in recent decades the out-sourcing of dry-goods production to China, Bangladesh and elsewhere has tilted the playing field in favor of the discounters. Epitomized by the Walmart formula, which combines a cheap foreign supply chain with monopsony buying power and a no-frills “supercenter” shopping experience, the discounters have increasingly pressured the department store chains (as well as smaller chains and independent retailers) that traditionally marketed fashion and quality. Warehouse clubs like Costco have also made inroads among middle-income families whose incomes have stagnated. From 2000 through 2014 the number of department stores nationally declined from about 10,500 to 8,000 while the number of supercenter and warehouse club outlets has grown from about 1,800 to 5,300.  Walmart alone operates over 3,400 supercenters. Total retail sales in warehouse clubs and supercenters are now about triple the sales volume of traditional department stores.

Traditional retailers also face intensifying competition from internet sales. In 2015, internet sales topped $432 billion. While that represents only abut 9 percent of all retail sales, e-retailing has captured about 30 percent of the retail sales growth since 2007. As a consequence, in-store retailing has grown at only a 1.2 percent real annual rate over the past eight years, compared to the 8.2 percent growth rate of e-retailing.

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Homeownership and Retirement

The New York Times today presented a “Room for Debate” feature on the declining rate of homeownership, which has declined 6 percentage points from its peak. The debaters include Dean Baker, Elyse Cherry, William E. Spriggs, A. Michele Dickerson and Ed Glaser. Though I have some qualms with Cherry’s prescription of mass principal write-downs for underwater borrowers, the debaters generally offer reasonable takes on the pros and cons of home ownership and the implications of a declining ownership rate.

It is surprising, however, how little attention these reasonable commentators give to the retirement security benefits of homeownership. That oversight is particularly stark in Glaeser’s comments, where he states bluntly that “there is little public benefit in pushing people to own rather than rent homes.”

Consider a simple example where two identical families earning $75,000 annually at 30 years of age are contemplating renting permanently or plunging into homeownership. Say the first choses a permanent rental apartment for 20 percent of their gross income (about $1,250/month) and the other purchases an equivalent house with a similar monthly mortgage payment, although they will have to pay another 10 percent of their income in property taxes, insurance and maintenance expenses. To keep things simple, let’s ignore the tax benefits of homeownership and the opportunity costs of the home buying family’s initial down payment. Furthermore, assume that all rental and ownership costs inflate by 2 percent per year, except of course the homeowners’ mortgage expense, which is fixed for its 30 year amortization period.

Initially, in this simple scenario, the buying family would be paying a housing cost premium of 50 percent to own rather than rent. But since their mortgage costs are fixed, that ownership premium falls steadily, so that by the time they are 60 years old they are paying only a 6 percent monthly premium over their renting counterparts. By the time they are 61, their mortgage is fully amortized (No refinancing! No home equity loans!) and their ownership costs drop to 50 percent of their counterparts’ rental costs.

In nominal dollar terms, at age 65 the renter family will be paying $2,451 in monthly rent while the home-owning family will have total monthly housing costs of just $1,225. That difference will make a huge difference in the retirement welfare of the two families, not to mention the benefit of cost predictability enjoyed by the homeowners.

Of course, many embellishments to this simple model can be made, but the basic conclusion will stand under a wide variety of assumptions. The renters would have to display a great deal of savings discipline over their working lifetimes to generate enough investment income to offset their housing cost disadvantage and be better off overall than the homeowner at retirement age. I haven’t done a lit review of renter/owner savings behavior, but I’ll guess that very few renter families would display such savings discipline.

So, if there is a public benefit that the elderly be securely housed there is a public benefit to encouraging home ownership. If there isn’t a public benefit to homeownership in this sense, is there a public benefit to other retirement security policies, such as Social Security or 401-k tax advantages?