Energy

Interesting article on energy policy and how we're stuck into dumb long term positions.

Housing policy, too, needs to change. Supporting consumer spending on buying a new home instead of renting or rehabilitating an older home in the inner-city has led to suburban sprawl. Not only does this mean people drive more and drive farther but that they live in detached houses and work in suburban office parks and strip malls, all of which consume more energy than apartment buildings, town houses, and urban skyscrapers. We need to stop favoring new homeownership over renting (via the mortgage interest tax deduction and other subsidies). Decreasing the emphasis on homeownership and single-family home development will have the added benefits of preventing future housing bubbles and increasing socioeconomic and racial integration.

Middle-class families are also lured to the suburbs by education policies that allow those schools to be so much better than the ones in inner cities. Whereas many countries finance schools largely through general revenues at the national or regional level, the U.S. leaves most school funding up to localities, which often rely largely on property taxes. The result? Suburban school districts have more advantaged populations and better resources. Most suburban students rely on school buses or cars to get to school. This, of course, uses more oil than walking and the cost of all that gas guzzling has become a major problem for districts struggling with rising gas prices. But the bigger problem is that the socioeconomically segregated schools create inequality of opportunity and, from a land-use perspective, this means that middle-class families will keep leaving the city to give their children a better chance in life. If we raised state and federal income taxes and provisioned funding more equally across districts and also created regional mega-districts to integrate suburban and urban school districts, we could remove this incentive for white flight and suburban sprawl.

Interesting connections being made here.