[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 98 (Tuesday, July 13, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H5371-H5372]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     PROMOTING LIVABLE COMMUNITIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 19, 1999, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, Michael Pollan in the New York Times 
Magazine article this weekend, ``The Land of the Free Market and 
Livability,'' is certainly correct that government can and should be 
thinking of ways to align our polices for the types of communities that 
our hearts desire.
  What I find disappointing is the assumption somehow that the choices 
consumers are making now based on their pocketbook are somehow solely 
the result of benign, inevitable market demands.
  Having worked my entire career on the promotion of livable 
communities, I am struck by how the increasingly dysfunctional 
communities that are facing Americans across the country are a result 
of direct government interference in the marketplace. Consumers are 
behaving rationally by investing in ways where their incentives are 
skewed by government.
  The most dramatic example is to be found in our treatment of the 
automobile. Seventy-five years ago, communities all across the country 
had profitable, private transit streetcar systems privately owned and 
profitable. Massive government spending, literally trillions of 
dollars, were used to promote automobile traffic, while at the same 
time there was no support given to transit; and indeed in many 
communities government contributed

[[Page H5372]]

directly to the decline of transit and in some communities its demise 
by refusing to allow fares to increase with inflation and for capital 
investments to keep the systems healthy.
  While the money from the road funds is perhaps the most visible, 
there were also huge subsidies for overseas defense to protect oil 
supplies and public ownership of oil and gas supplies. There were 
dramatic subsidies for public safety, for policing related to the 
automobile, and the removal of huge tracts of land in the tax rolls and 
for roads and road right-of-way and, of course, parking and tax 
subsidies. All of these combined to tip the playing field in favor of 
the automobile. Consumers responded rationally for themselves but in 
ways that very much skewed the pattern of transportation development.
  Now, these clear transportation subsidies are but a small portion of 
the overall government interference in the market system. Our 
investments in public housing concentrated poor minority populations in 
central cities. We dramatically subsidized utility rates and sewer and 
water expansion that routinely hid the profits, from providing service 
to local inner cities, from increased costs associated with expansion 
into suburbs and greenfields. It resulted in many central city 
residents paying more for their own utilities and subsidizing lower 
rates for people outside the cities.
  The most direct and obvious interference in the market was the 
emergence of single-use zoning in metropolitan areas where we made it 
illegal for the family owning, say, a restaurant or a drugstore from 
living or having their clerks live above that activity. People were 
zoned out of mixed-use neighborhoods and literally forced into their 
cars since the drastic separation of uses forced many Americans to rely 
increasingly on automobiles, and again that was very rational behavior.
  The list goes on and on: flood insurance, water supply, brownfields 
programs, the Federal Government's own policy of locating facilities 
out further and further from concentrated uses, or the post office 
refusing to obey local land use laws and zoning codes. These are all 
examples of the government's own activities to destabilize 
neighborhoods in our central cities and our older suburbs.
  It is hard for me to imagine any rational observer being able to 
characterize what has transpired in American communities over the last 
three-quarters of a century as benign, neutral, inevitable market 
forces. The challenge today for those who would have livable 
communities is not to overcome market forces but allow the market 
forces to work. This is an appropriate use of the political process. It 
is not a trivial point, as critics attempt to paint efforts for 
promoting livable communities on the part of the administration, those 
of us in Congress, or the vast grassroots efforts around the country as 
somehow social engineering or forcing people to do what they do not 
want to do.
  It is essential to give legitimacy to the aspirations of thousands of 
activists in hundreds of communities across the country that are trying 
to promote livable communities. Just as we have established a pattern 
of unplanned growth for dysfunctional communities and regions, we can 
level the playing field to promote livable communities. I look forward 
to this Congress and this administration taking steps to be partners to 
promote these more livable communities.

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