Monthly Archives: June 2010

City plan already tried and it doesn’t work

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City officials are pondering over whether they should use $1.1 million in federal funding to buy foreclosed properties and either rehab them or raze them so developers can build again on the sites, according to the Daily Reporter.

Been there. Done that. Doesn’t work.

Maybe, maybe there are organizations out there that can do rehabs and not end up destroyed by them, but there are any number that tried and failed. And maybe, maybe we should all be reconciled to the disappointing fact that it may cost $150,000 to rehab a house that will be worth maybe $75,000 to $100,000 when it is all fixed up. Those kinds of numbers are just hard to swallow, though.

And as for redeveloping the sites — have the city’s great minds driven through the city lately? The city, to its credit, actually does tear down houses that need to be torn down. (A lot of other places just let the structures become hazardous crime magnets as they fall apart.) There certainly isn’t a rush to build anew on the vacant lots, though. The vacant lots stay that way, although the tall weeds I saw yesterday suggests that maybe the city has cut way, way back on maintaining the vacant lots it already owns.

Maybe what the city ought to do is resist the urge to bite from this particular poisoned apple. The $1.1 million isn’t enough to make a real impact on Milwaukee’s housing stock anyway. Maybe the city ought to use that money to take care of the vacant lots and foreclosed properties it already owns.

Wait — what?!? It’s OK to lie if you’re M7

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The bizarro writings of the JS’ John Schmid bless a local group’s just makin’ it up:

At its two Milwaukee factories, Super Steel LLC employs about 250 workers. But in a document to be released Thursday by the Milwaukee 7 economic-strategy consortium, Super Steel’s headcount inaccurately balloons to 500 – which amounts to a full 10% of the 5,000 jobs that the M-7 credits itself with helping to create or preserve.

The M-7 commemorates its first five years of operations with a civic gathering at We Energies’ downtown headquarters Thursday that will include top political and business leaders from the seven counties of metro Milwaukee. Emblazoned on each invitation is the group’s own tally of its success: “5 years, 5,000 Jobs, $300 million in Payroll = 1 Milestone Meeting.”

And even if those numbers are demonstrably inflated, the group’s leaders are in no mood to apologize for their arithmetic. Regardless of how many jobs the group has actually helped create or preserve, it can make one overriding claim: For the first time, someone is systematically trying to recruit investment and jobs into a region that many of its own residents often disparage as a Rust Belt town, a second sister to Chicago, an inhospitable tax hell.

“We’re the boots on the ground,” said Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, one of the M-7′s primary organizers. “No one else is playing that role.”

In that context, the hyperbole in the job-creation document being released in conjunction with Thursday’s event is understandable.

The story goes on to report that M7 claims that it helped Super Steel retain 350 jobs. There are 250 jobs at the firm.

Yeah. Understandable.

Wow! Feds finally get it!

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It’s amazing, but perhaps true: the importance of transit is beginning to dawn on federal officials an d.

This isn’t about high-speed rail or big new capital projects. Someone’s actually paying serious attention to the nuts and bolts of buses and (existing)  urban rail lines!

From the Dedham Transcript:

BOSTON — Federal funding to help operate cash-strapped transit systems like the MBTA will likely be on the table as billions of dollars of transportation spending are meted out by Congress, a top Obama administration transportation official said Wednesday.

“It’s been a challenge for mid-size systems in Cleveland to rural systems in the Dakotas to the big systems in the urban areas,” Therese McMillan, second in command of the Federal Transit Administration, told the News Service after delivering remarks at a meeting of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. “Everyone is really struggling.”

McMillan cited the national recession as a cause for stress of transit systems nationwide, and she noted that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 permitted 10 percent of capital transportation spending to be used for operating expenses, such as running trains and paying employees.

But McMillan remained mum on a proposal that would permit large urban transit systems to regularly spend more federal dollars on transportation operations, acknowledging the proposal, supported by Rep. Michael Capuano, but saying the Obama administration has yet to take a position.

On the other hand, McMillan pointed to a transportation authorization bill pending in Congress that would provide $2 billion to cover operating costs for transit systems, a proposal supporters say would stave off fare increases and service cuts. According to the bill’s preamble, 84 percent of federal transit systems have raised fares, cut services or have considered one of those actions since January 2009.

Under the bill, sponsored by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), federal transportation funds may be used to transit systems’ operating expenses in order to “restore a reduction in public transportation service and related workforce reductions” or to “rescind all or a portion of a fare increase.”

Census long form

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No disrespect to the federal government (except for the oil spill, the wars, Congress, etc.), but the folks who designed the American Community Survey questionnaire must be flippin’ out of their minds.

The first thing it does is ask for your name and phone number, in case the feds want to call. Now that’s reassuring.

I’m sitting at the dining room table trying to race through it.

Didn’t want to fill it out in the first place.

My attitude isn’t good: this stuff is not the federal government’s business.

What is my race? How many bedrooms in my house? When did I buy my house? What was my gas bill last month? What was my electric bill last month?

Let’s stop and think about that for a moment. What was my utility bill? Can’t remember, exactly. How much of that was gas? How much was electricity? We Energies doesn’t bill exactly by the month. I could look all this stuff up, but naaah. Just ballpark it.

What good is knowing what a single month’s gas bill was? What about the other 11 months?

What is my house worth? What are my property taxes? How much is my mortgage? How much are my monthly mortgage payments? How much did I pay for water and sewer over the last year?

Wow — do they really expect me to remember what my last four water bills were? And why do I need a year’s worth of water charges, but only a month’s worth of utility bills?

The census people presumably expect Milwaukee respondents to go back through a year’s worth of bills and take out all the other charges the city now dumps on them. That ain’t going to happen in my house. Move on.

Am I deaf? Am I blind? Do I speak a foreign language? How many times have I been married? Do I have trouble dressing or bathing? Who do I work for? At what street address? How much did I make in wages last year? How much did I make in dividends and interest?

Intrusive questions. Don’t really know the answers to some and, given my druthers, wouldn’t answer anyway. The  coercion behind the US government mandating my cooperation really is irritating.

My own questions and answers: Do I feel very invested in this? No. Do I just want to get it done and over with? Yup. Are my replies accurate? Well….yes, if I knew the answers off the top of my head. The rest are just guesstimates that I figure are at least as accurate as the early government estimates of the rate of leakage from the gulf oil catastrophe.

Do I think I’m fairly typical of the innocent folks mandated to fill out this stupid form? Yes.

Should federal officials base any sort of policy on the results of a too-complex survey filled out by resentful people who do not know all of the answers?

No. But they will.