By Neal Peirce For Release Sunday, August 1, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Can rising exports help us save our economic skin? Are smarter metropolitan-region strategies a part of any necessary game plan?
This is the case the Brookings Institution is making, and it makes some sense. We’re into a season of dire budget squeezes — federal, state and local. There’s a rising chorus of deep worry about fast-rising public debt.
But simply focusing on government cutbacks and shrinkage misses two critical points:
First, there’s no substitute for new wealth that eventually yields the taxes that pays off debts, even massive ones. Second, just stimulating our domestic consumer economy isn’t going to do the trick. The time has come to be looking early and hard beyond our own borders in today’s global economy, focusing on every opportunity for expanded export markets.
And here’s where the Brookings economists see a first wave of exciting new opportunities. Middle class consumption is literally exploding in Brazil, India and China. Last year those countries accounted for 8.4 percent of all middle class consumption in the world; by 2020, Brookings estimates, the figure could well reach 26 percent.
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By Sam Newberg For Release Sunday, August 1, 2010
Citiwire.net
“That site is going to sit vacant for a decade.” That was the comment made to me by a frustrated developer as we left a public hearing after the city council voted down his planned apartment project. Although this scene occurred in a suburb of the Twin Cities, it could have happened anywhere. Unfortunately, it’s replicated time and again across the country.
This begs the larger question: if city after city continues to shoot down economically viable rental housing projects, where exactly we are going to accommodate the expected growth in this country in the coming decades? Furthermore, why are cash-strapped cities passing up economic development opportunities? I’m all for local decision-making, but the result of these decisions, multiplied across our metro areas, simply pushes more growth to the urban fringe — an ecologically and economically wasteful choice.
The plan called for an attractive apartment building in a city that has seen little new rental housing in recent decades. The market study indicated that the project could “pencil out,” or be financially feasible. Furthermore, the site in question was located along a transit line and close to freeways and employment. Everything seemed to line up.
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