Libraries are part of society’s information system, key resources in the ability of a community to sustain competitiveness in a knowledge based global economy.  As such, they are in a period of intense change and uncertainty as to the impact of technology on the ways we store, access, and use information.  In order to make intelligent guesses about the kind of library that will help Tupelo and Lee County succeed, we absolutely must have people at the table for whom information is digital, whose learning styles are technology-based, and who are eager to adopt and use new knowledge tools.  In order for the library to optimize its impact on community education, an active – no, make that an aggressive – working group engaging the library, the school system, and the economic development organizations must be formed.  That group should see to it that the issue of education for economic competitiveness is understood as a whole, is at the top of the public agenda, and is articulated into specific commitments and objectives.

I have another reason for seeking the involvement of the younger people in the community.  For the library to fulfill its potentially broad role, it should become a place where people engage each other, not just computers and books.  I would like to see our library become what Ray Oldenburg describes as a “third place”:  the place that is not home (your ‘first place) or work (second place) but a setting for informal social interaction and community.  Oldenburg says these places need to have a few specific characteristics:  free or inexpensive to go to; food and drink very helpful; close to a lot of people, especially in walking distance; convenient enough to develop ‘regulars’ and thus continuing relationships, but still welcoming for newcomers.  We need this for a lot of reasons.  I have an idea that there are people in and around Tupelo who would love to have such a place to go.  These places matter to the whole community, but they are intensely important to young people and singles.

Here’s my pitch:  if anyone reading this has any thoughts about what a viable ‘third place’ would be for them, or can talk about one you know about, or otherwise wants to contribute your two cents worth, that would be very helpful to the group trying to create a new library that is the community keystone we think it can be.  We also need to find a volunteer or two among the under 30 generation in Tupelo who can help us work social media in this process.  Right now, we are reaching the core supporters and that is all; we have to find some ways to broaden the process.  I have a feeling that there are people here in Tupelo who communicate through digital devices with a virtual community.  It would be a lot of fun to see if that virtual community could create a place to meet in person.

Second, the city of Tupelo just passed a budget, after a long struggle in which a lot of community effort went into proposals to reinvest in the city’s homes and neighborhoods.  The council did not end up passing any of those proposals, citing, among other factors, the need for fiscal caution and a balanced budget.  However, the budget they passed included a capital improvements plan for the next five years, and in that $25 million plan there is a $12 million indoor aquatics center.  The capital projects are not funded yet; there would still have to be a vote on issuing bonds for them, but they are in the budget while other needs are not.  This appears to be a case of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.  Seriously:  we need an indoor swimming pool more than we need a middle class, or a stable tax base, or a quality public school system?  The budget decision appears to have involved the acceptance of an argument that the aquatic center would ‘pay for itself’ with an increase in sales tax from out of town visitors coming to swim competitions.  I will just say that I would like to see those numbers. 

If we are going to spend that kind of money, a new library would be of infinitely greater value to the community.  Instead of looking for a magic bullet solution, in which we effortlessly lap up the gravy from all those swim teams coming to town, maybe an investment in the learning and earning capacity of local people would be of more long term value.  Maybe the institution that gives unemployed people access to computers to learn new skills and apply for better jobs should be a little higher on our list.  Maybe a critical resource to help the kids that go to our schools become competitive in a knowledge based economy should be a priority and not an afterthought.  In this spring’s messy debate about the city’s growth challenges, there were many voices that claimed the problem in Tupelo is in the school system.  City government doesn’t have many ways to help the school system directly, but it can provide a good library for students to use.

Finally, another local observation about taxes.  We have had to listen to so much gnashing of teeth about taxes (some of it from people who are exempt from local property taxes) that I thought it would be instructive to see what the tax ‘bite’ of the city’s  millage is, compared to other ways local people spend their money.  I think I have a representative case to look at:  a house valued around the average value of Tupelo residential properties, and two cars, an 05 and an 09.  Last year I paid $1,864 in local taxes.  Just over 30% of that was for the city:  $564.  That works out to $47 a month, less than what I typically spend for a tank of gas.  I also looked at some market research information that tracks household spending in the Tupelo area.  My $564 city tax bill represents about 22% of what the average household spends on entertainment and recreation.  In other words, we spend four times as much on strictly optional fun stuff as we do on something as basic as local government.  If I’m going to beef about taxation, it will be about what I pay to the county and get absolutely nothing for.   The tax for the school district is higher, but that represents to me the best way my tax dollar can be used.  Even though my children have come through the system and are now employed and independent, I want to pay high school taxes so more kids can get good jobs and make the local economy successful.  I want to live in a community with a really good public school system, and I’m willing to pay for that.

Changing scale, I wish I knew a few local conservatives to sit down and talk to.  I’m not too good at creating this kind of conversation, and most of the time when I hear someone’s opinion that I want to engage, I let it pass rather than take the chance of it just being two hostile camps blasting away at each other.  Who can convene a respectful exploration?  Jim Wallis writes about the need to establish a place where Christians can talk about solving local issues without it being political. 

Third side of this point goes back to previous post about what kind of community Tupelo is and could be, with the perspective of my daughters and their peers who mostly have to leave Tupelo to find work they like, but who also find other people like them in greater numbers elsewhere.  For Tupelo to change in the direction it most needs to change, the ‘cultural creative’ types here need to form a critical mass, a community in person as well as on the internet.  That doesnt mean slotting into self-referential cliques, necessarily.  Who is out there who might be interested in talking constructively about community, about what that means and how to do it?  We don’t have to agree for that to be an experience worth pursuing.  There’s a great example, if one a long way from Tupelo, in Walter Moseley’s book The Right Mistake.

The quality of public debate has gone down significantly.  I’d like to help get it on a different track.

If there is one point I could have made with this group, it would be that this is just not going to happen.  Countless people in different places and times have called for such a return to some imagined state of past happiness, but history never ever reverses its course, no matter how many people wish it to do so.  It is amazing that the sentiment persists as strongly as it does. 

Tupelo will not succeed in reestablishing itself as an ideal small town.  Even though it is definitely a small town in actual numbers, the reality is that, in its region, it is the large city with all the negative perceptions attached to it that people have about places bigger than they are used to.  What we have not been able to convey are the positive possibilities that an urban place can offer.  The CDF plan was crafted around the idea of retaining young middle class families with children, emphasizing home ownership and stigmatizing rental residents.  This vision of Tupelo’s future is too short sighted, too much backward looking.  That was the formula of the city’s earlier successful years.  Success in the future is going to look different.  Nationwide demographics show that the traditional family with children is going to continue to decline.  The current generation entering the workforce is not interested in buying single family suburban housing; they want to live in urban places where there are lots of other single and young people, things going on, diversity.  They need rental housing, not $200,000 houses on quarter acre lots.  This is the class of people who generate economic vitality; the CDF plan doesn’t see them. 

In short, I think (and our comprehensive plan is aimed this way) that we should not try to compete with the small towns and rural areas around us for people who want to live in small towns and rural areas.  It’s great that they have that option.  Our future is to be a different option in the market, denser, with more interactions and more different kinds of people than those Norman Rockwell communities.  That sounds snarky but I don’t really mean it that way; I just want people to see that getting more urban has some plus factors, and our attitude toward our growing pains should be to look forward to what we are growing up to be.

We had a preliminary indication that things might not go well in the morning work session.  The council normally has an agenda review session prior to the official meeting, at which they can ask questions and educate themselves about the issues that would be coming up for voting.  We knew that four of the council members had substantial objections to one part of the plan or another, but nearly all of them had at some point in the process said that they knew the city needed to take some kind of action.  However, by the end of the work session they could not even agree on whether to take up the four components of the plan separately or together.  Several councilmen used the presentation of the audit report to express their fiscal conservatism, to the extent that they seemed determined to contradict any positive observations about the city’s finances that either the auditor or financial officer made.

Then, when the council meeting opened with a public hearing on the reinvestment plan, former mayor Ed Neelly spoke for nearly ten minutes against it.  His comments were echoed by seven or eight more speakers, each of whom the council had to suspend its rules to allow to speak.  Neelly employed three kinds of argument that I found dubious; they are all too common in the rhetoric that is going back and forth on these topics.

First, our former mayor, who had a long career in banking and should know better, used drastic oversimplification in discussing the city’s finances.  Because the audit report included some graphs illustrating the trend in the city’s use of reserve funds – we have had to draw on them for three years in a row – Neelly chose to characterize that as evidence the city could not manage its funds or balance its budgets.  The point of having reserve funds is that they are available for use when ordinary revenues falter.  They serve no purpose sitting in the bank, but if deployed to maintain the city’s services during economic downturns, they can be replenished when revenue recovers.  Over the longer term economic cycle, the ‘budget’ is balanced.  Every government entity in America has probably used cash reserves to get through the last few years, if they had them.  Finance officer Lynn Norris reported in the earlier work session that the Moody bond rating service had upgraded the city’s bond rating this year, and that the use of reserve funds was not considered a mark of financial weakness in making that rating.  In other words, people who are professionally most qualified to judge the city on its financial standing draw a different conclusion from Mr. Neelly.  His opinion is more like that of the man on the street making unsupported statements based on incomplete information.

The second bad argument is one that is also far too widely used here, which is, in essence, “Someone else is the problem.”  In this case, everyone is making the school district out to be the failing entity that is to be blamed for out migration of middle class population.  The simplifiers will not listen to any explanation of the complex relationship of housing policy, demographics, the real estate market, and the difference in how a school system has to operate with an increasing proportion of disadvantaged students.  What the city has failed to do in the way of making its neighborhoods attractive enough to retain that (mostly white) middle class is ignored.

Third, and this was heard more from other speakers than from Neelly, is the belief in a punitive solution to the problem, mainly in the form of code enforcement.  I have argued until I am no longer heard on this point, but deploying an army of inspectors to write up code violations and badger owners to fix them is nothing but band-aid work.  The real estate market is oversupplied with a lot of older housing, and with more houses than homeowners, and undersupplied with affordable housing.  Until that market situation changes, it will continue to convert single family homes to rental occupancy, and to reward rental investors with full occupancy regardless of the condition of the structures, and to generate a constant stream of new code violations from the simple facts of old houses and declining ownership demand.   To be fair, this punitive emphasis is found on both sides:  CDF insists that rental occupancy is the enemy, the cause of neighborhood blight and educational failure.  They cite statistics for cities with problems and high percentage of rental as evidence.  I believe this is correlation but not causation.  I am no economist, but it seems to me that cities with problems end up with higher percentage of rentals because owners choose to go elsewhere.  (I also think CDF’s data failed to distinguish older cities from suburbs; it drives me up the wall for people to tell us we should do what Hernando, or Madison, or Flowood does with their 10% of rentals.  Those cities are not valid comparisons for Tupelo.)

Rentals and code violations are just what happens when homeownership leaves.  Rental investors buy property that fails to attract owner-occupancy; they never want to pay as much as an occupying owner would; and they tend to buy older structures with some wear and tear to start with.  In my opinion, to focus on either code violations or rental status is to miss the true underlying structure of the problem.

So, to return to last night’s meeting, after the tea party militia spoke, there was no likelihood of the plan being rationally discussed, so it was tabled.  The council continues to be unable to reach a decision on taking effective action.  But it gets worse:  later in the meeting, two council members tried to get the presidency changed, which opened up personal rivalries among the council.  And then, in discussion of a simple budget amendment,  the knives came out as two members voted against the amendment because it included a small line item for a small summer youth employment project sponsored by Mr. Jennings.  The program seemed to represent fiscal irresponsibility and a welfare type approach, so it was used as a target.  In response, Mr. Jennings stated that he had received a copy of an email that one of the critical council members supposedly circulated, advising his friends not to employ Mr. Jennings to do any work for them.   The whole performance was a new low for this council.  Not only were they unable to reach any kind of consensus on the substantive proposals in front of them, they have fallen into such personal animosity and divisiveness that it appears unlikely that any major initiative can be achieved during the rest of the term.  I hope I am wrong about that.

1.       Trying to invest in existing neighborhoods, or in programs to attract homeowners to those neighborhoods, is unlikely to succeed and looks like a transfer of wealth to the undeserving lower income residents of those neighborhoods.

2.       Trying to refocus capital investment away from the major thoroughfares is unwise because (a) everybody likes wider roads and experiences the benefits of driving on those wider roads to new stores and restaurants, and (b) those roads “create” growth in the form of sales and property tax revenue, thus paying for the improvements.

I want to focus on the citizens’ experience of the benefits of this car focused strategy.  What seems to be happening is that this experience – one’s first trip down a newly widened and repaved section of street, or to a newly opened business on such a street – is concrete and directly accessed by the public.  They don’t have to read about it, they don’t have to try to figure it out, they just get it.  And they experience this in their cars, through their cars.  When we are driving we experience an enhanced self, a person/car unit that makes all kinds of enjoyable experiences possible, which has become the decision-making unit on this issue.  People are thinking with their cars.  They are making decisions in the interests, I could almost say, of their cars, but certainly of themselves in the car mode.  They want the community built to maximize the options of the car-driving public.

The preference for a car oriented community is also shaped by the apparently dominant social pattern of separating oneself from low income and minority people.  Suburbs are built for this purpose, not for lower cost housing or bigger yards or better schools or any other factor.  Cars are necessary for suburbs to exist, as are continually enhanced roads to make the longer and longer trips from home to work.  The car oriented community caters to the unwillingness of white middle class Americans to live in the proximity of anyone who is not white middle class, or, if they can manage it, in the same tax jurisdiction.  Any policy that suggests this is not the best way to build communities, that questions the necessity of such segregation, is a threat to our busiest money-making operation and to the set of values that the suburbs represent.   Most of the citizens who feel this way cannot articulate it, but there is a sort of folk sociology in place that forms the basis of their evaluation of proposed policies.  While I believe it is dangerously inaccurate, they do have a working model of the relationships among transportation, land use policy, schools, and property values.

The car thus comes to represent, not just personal mobility and freedom, as their advertising messages suggest, but essential equipment for escaping the perceived dangers of the older community with its poor people and minorities.  We will never be able to stop building more roads and more suburbs, becoming more dependent on oil and more destructive of the earth’s resources, as long as the majority thinks they have to be able to get away from the minority.  We can’t even begin building a community where people live as neighbors, because we have to provide for the cars and the escape routes first.

Those suburbs are produced by a ‘growth machine’ which relies on a market motivated by the perception that places with growing minority populations must be escaped from.  Because of the wealth gained by development interests through continuous outward expansion of cities, there is a firm linkage between the orientation of local economies to horizontal growth and policies that allow inner city areas and populations to be abandoned.  This abandonment allows government resources to be directed to serve other areas (“growth areas”) and also allows the unabated problems of inner city populations to serve as a catalyst for further turnover of older neighborhoods.

I think this is what accounts for much of the otherwise inexplicable venom that is directed toward the idea of sustainability on the broad scale, and toward local proposals to refocus capital investment away from a street-widening program to a plan focused on revitalization of neighborhoods.  Those strategies draw fire both from commercial stakeholders who are used to government adding value to real estate, and from citizens who are suspicious of any government function that seems likely to promote contact with the people they want to stay away from, or that appears to benefit those seen as unproductive members of society.

A lot of money is made by transferring community wealth into smaller jurisdictions that can be made into income-restricted, predominantly white, easily marketed places to live.  The public policies that might slow down this transfer are portrayed, somewhat incoherently, as either elitist or as socialist programs to benefit the underclass at the expense of the honest taxpayer.  The elitism charge is based on the premise that suburban locations are the preference of the majority, so they should be allowed to develop without question.  Average Joe likes to drive cars a lot, so taking some of his road money to build bike lanes or sidewalks for a small segment of the population is elitist.  This is amazing to me.  I would have thought anyone could see value in having sidewalks, but they are opposed here with language that ranges from mildly mocking to furious.

The quasi-fiscal argument against a program that aims to rebuild older neighborhoods seems to include two elements.  One is that such a program won’t work because no one will ever want to move back into a neighborhood that has been abandoned to minorities and poor people.  The other is that amenities, services, incentives and assistance provided to residents or property owners in these neighborhoods constitute a form of welfare, not available to the responsible residents of more valuable places.  In fact, the benefits are thought to be paid for by those same responsible members of society, a double iniquity.

The current Tea Party tantrum is an extreme form of this attitude.  Personally I think some of the excessive rhetoric that we have heard in relation to what might once have been rational policy questions is submerged anger stemming from being in a morally questionable position.

I should probably explain this in more detail, but I am kind of disgruntled right now, so I will just refer you to Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, Xavier Briggs’  The Geography of Opportunity, and John Logan and Harvey Molotch’s Urban Fortunes.