flynn050

In the age of "the deal" in which a real estate tycoon is President, renewed interest in the role of quasi-public development corporations that are supposed to act more like private business is in order.  Were they created to close the deal where government couldn't? Were they created to be a substitute for boss or machine system  in a time when municipal corruption was rampant? Were they created to empower people or to provide loopholes for corporations to get a better deal? Power in the city: Former Baltimore Development Corporation CEO Jay Brodie (Photo: Fern Shen) All of the above could be true, depending on what period of time is investigated, what type of quasi-governmental organization and which city one looks at. Generally, these days suspicion about those type agencies seems to prevail. Many who suspect that especially urban development corporations (UDCs, the subset of the quasi public agencies on which this article will focus) which defy classification as a cit...

The last article asked if public works projects really have to take this long. This article asks if  P3s are the right answer to the funding crisis.  When the State of Maryland felt that two major "New Starts" transit projects began to break the State's bank (combined cost $5.5 billion), the solution was P3, a public-private-partnership. US-DOT defines P3 as a “contractual agreements formed between a public agency and a private sector entity that allow for greater private sector participation in the delivery and financing of transportation projects.” The Washington suburb Purple light rail line is a 100% P3 project In other words: Build now, pay later, but pay more, lots more. A P3 project doesn't mean the private sector contributes or funds a project, it means the private sector finances a project! The cost to the public is simply deferred to a future point. Cost plus interest plus profit. In the case of the Purple Line a $2 billion project balloons to $5.6 billion f...

 "China is set to build 70 international airports in ten years, while Britain prevaricated on a single runway." ( Tony Blair,  a utobiography ) The legacy countries of what used to be called the industrialized world seems to have a terrible time getting major public works projects done: A brand-new $6 billion Berlin airport is sitting idle for $16 million every month because it hasn't been able to pass the fire protection inspections since its completion date in 2012(!), six years after ground-breaking.  Berlin: For five years a complete airport without people and planes The Second Avenue in New York was so long in the making with so many stops and starts that one doesn't even know what to count as the  begin of construction. The first phase got completed now, but with a cost of $ 2.7 billion per mile of rail people wonder if the second phase that is slated to cost $ billion will ever be built.  Baltimore's Red Line light trail project was estimated to cost nea...

The debate about whether the suburbs are dying has been going on for some years with convincing arguments for yes and no. But the accelerating demise of  America's large retail brands puts the debate into overdrive and fills mainstream media with alarm. Are the suburbs really dying? NPR's Morning Edition was asking this question this week again in light of Business Insider 's series titled "The Death of Suburbia". An ever larger mass of big-box corpses is littering the uniquely American commercial corridors of America where gas stations, fast food joints, car dealers and big boxes ferment into that universal ugliness which the writer and sprawl observer Howard Kunstler euphemistically dubbed the "geography of nowhere." Ailing mall in Baltimore County (Photo Philipsen) Gloom is setting in. The suburban retail corridors are used to a high rate of mortality and short life expectancy.  But the death of the big boxes is even more existential than the death of...