Service Learning in Public Economics

Sarah’s post about our field trip to see the redevelopment of Lynchburg in action made me think about why I don’t agree with much of the redevelopment that is ongoing. The argument against aesthetic improvements to the downtown area isn’t that beautification is useless. Beauty has a value, even if it is not easily defined. The argument is against governmental beautification of downtown. Increasing beauty is not useless. People generally are happier and more comfortable in clean, well-kept environments. However, is making people happier truly a legitimate function of government? Despite our book’s theoretical analysis about ‘maximizing total welfare’ aside, is this what the government should be looking at? Even though this is a local government project, does making a person happier rank up there with national defense, police force or a system of laws upheld by courts? Does this country have so few other problems that making public spaces pretty so that some people will be happier is a priority? The argument against beautification is about priorities and the role of government, not about usefulness. Redevelopment of abandoned buildings downtown is a great thing, but one that government, even local government, should at most facilitate through the transfer of abandoned property to someone who wants to use it.

Scholar Ralph B. Taylor has an article in the academic journal Sociological Forum in which he addresses how certain residents feel connected to their neighborhood while others do not. His work allows me to question the degree to which neighborhood connectivity attributes to neighborhood satisfaction. Are residents that feel their neighborhood is as Taylor phrases it, ”just a place to live” more apt to have a negative perception of their neighborhood? Moreover, are residents who are more connected with their communities more likely to portray their neighborhoods in the light while disregarding the true conditions of their locality? When we conduct our research, I wonder if our results could be skewed because a lack of or abundance of neighborhood connectivity. In addition, I question whether neighborhood connectivity is a determinant of neighborhood satisfaction.

Taylor, Ralph. “Neighborhood Responses to Disorder and Local Attachment.” Sociological Forum Vol. 11, No 1. 1996. 26 Mar 2009. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/684951?seq=1&Search=yes&term=Neighborhood&term=>. 

As you may have sensed from Sarah’s last blog, we are now focusing our study of neighborhood and residential satisfaction on the Tinbridge Hill neighborhood of Lynchburg rather than the College Hill area.  Never fear!  We expected change! (And this redirection is a relatively easy one given how easy it is to identify homes to survey with the City’s online GIS maps.) 

The research process, while still a process, takes twists and turns, and the sooner you accept that as part of the experience of creating knowledge, the sooner you can make thoughtful progress.  What makes this course both exciting and challenging for me as a teacher is that I am working alongside my students on this research. This means that, like them, I can’t always anticipate the nature of the twists and turns, I don’t have the answers tucked away in a file cabinet, and, as I know they’re discovering,  it’s sometime necessary for them to challenge the methods and intepretations I suggest by critically evaluating them and offering alternative ideas. 

After taking into consideration the level and concentration of LNDF activity in these neighborhoods, Laura decided it would be best if we focused on Tinbridge.  This will allow us to better understand the overall effects of the LNDF on residential satisfaction and also allow us to determine if the effects vary across neighborhoods by holding our results up against Denise’s.

On our visit with Laura, she insisted that we meet Aubrey Barbour, a Tinbridge resident and community leader who sits on the board of the LNDF.  As luck would have it, we bumped into him that very day at the Yoder Center, Tinbridge’s community hall!  We’re hoping to get to know him better and to get his input on our project. 

Tinbridge is home to the Legacy Museum and Old CityCemetery and is near the part of the Blackwater Creek Trail.

After writing up my research proposal, I have become acutely conscious of just how far-reaching this project is. It was actually difficult to keep my introduction and theory sections focused on what we are doing here and now, especially after taking a closer look at the articles that Denise Sewell referenced in her work. I really had to slow down and remind myself what we are capable of accomplishing in the last half of this semester. The context of our work is enormous–regarding the LNDF, the city, the Tinbridge Hill neighborhood itself, the College, and the field of public economics. That’s HUGE! It’s also very exciting.

We are beginning our data collection this week and I am looking forward to talking to Tinbridge residents and seeing how our residential satisfaction survey does in practice. Of all the additional variables I proposed we include, I hope most to discover that nearby vacant properties have an impact on residential satisfaction. We have yet to discover exactly how many vacant properties there are in Tinbridge Hill, but I’ve spotted a few as we’ve driven through the neighborhood. However, I am pretty convinced that vacant properties are a real serious issue in Lynchburg. In 2006, the city produced a very nice Powerpoint presentation that explains the effect of vacant properties on property values and the city’s tax base (unfortunately I don’t have an electronic copy of this document). While that’s all very relevant and distressing, they don’t even mention issues of safety or neighborhood well-being. The following statement is from the website of the National Vacant Properties Campaign:

At the very least, property abandonment in the United States is a significant waste – a waste of the individual resources making up the property, of the building itself, and of the infrastructure supporting it. But the damage caused by leaving buildings and land behind for greener pastures is even more of a tragedy than that waste. The most obvious victim might be the family living next to a house that’s become a vermin-infested drug den. But these abandoned properties hurt us all by lowering property values, creating serious environmental hazards, draining our inadequate police and fire services, and pulling apart the social networks of our neighborhoods.

Clearly, vacant properties cause a multitude of problems.

During the proposal-writing process, I also became very interested in the GIS maps that the Lynchburg City Assessor’s office has made accessible online–a resource that, according to Dr. Perry-Sizemore, has only been in existence for a few years. I have pulled a map of Tinbridge Hill that includes parks in the sage-green areas and historic districts in the blue-green areas. The Yoder Community Center is also labeled in the center of the map. Laura Dupuy, executive director of the LNDF, said that one challenge to housing development in this neighborhood is that the parcels of land are so small–which is also illustrated on this map.

On the 5th we visited the Lynchburg Neighborhood Development Foundation (LNDF) for the first time.  Executive Director Laura Dupuy described the purpose of the LNDF and shared details of some of its more recent projects (not all of which are residential!). We updated her on our plans to build upon Denise Sewell’s honors and experiential learning research project on neighborhood satisfaction in College Hill (an area where the LNDF has put great effort into improving homeownership among low- to moderate-income citizens). She described how she saw this semester’s research as useful to the LNDF and offered some of her own ideas for how we could extend the work done last year.  We then toured some of the neighborhoods where the LNDF has restored homes.  I hope that our trip helped the students understand the value of our research to the community.

 Later in the week, students completed their first theory test for the class and got started on their first paper for the project–a research proposal.  By the end of the semester, we will deliver a formal research report to the LNDF and, from our results, make recommendations for future LNDF projects.   

Last Thursday was a beautiful day for our trip with Dr. Barnes.  He showed us some of the downtown developments along the riverfront, took us to the Community Planning and Development Department at City Hall, and showed us Monument Terrace, the downtown entrance to the Blackwater Creek Trail, and Old City Cemetery.  We visited 5th Street and discussed the intended effects of the new roundabout.  I appreciate being made to think about the level of coordination and range of talent that go into community planning and the provision of many of the public services that we enjoy and expect. 

I think that our service project will further strengthen our awareness of coordination across individuals with varied skill sets, and I hope it helps students reflect on their own interests and talents when researching opportunities available to them after graduation.  A few years ago, during a day at the LNDF, students quickly listed what they thought were many of the needs of LNDF clients. They asked Laura Dupuy (the executive director) what number and which of these needs (not all of which were directly related to housing) the LNDF itself actually served. Although not an economist by training, Laura bluntly offered a textbook reponse–the LNDF specializes in what it knows it can do best.  Laura hopes that by doing so, the LNDF can have the  greatest positive impact in its neighborhoods

The simplicity of her answer took many students by surprise. When we’re thinking of creating change in our communities, we can be quick to identify needs in our society (and sometimes also their causes and interrelationships) and to celebrate our ability to identify them, but much more is required to begin to meet these needs.  Laura’s response got many students thinking about two needs of their own–the needs to reflect and to firm up the language they use to describe their personal and career goals.   So you can list many causes of poverty?  Great.  So you can identify many problems with poverty?  Great.  So you want to alleviate poverty?  Great.  HOW ARE YOU GOING TO FOCUS YOUR EFFORTS?  For the alleviation of poverty or the achievement of any other aim, what role will your personal and academic strengths play in determining your approach to your goals? What are the opportunity costs associated with each possible direction you can take, and where do you have a comparative advantage? How will you spend your time in college so you can explore the answers to these questions?  Yes, having given some thought to these questions may impress a potential employer or graduate school, but it will be in part because you will have directed yourself to those prospective opportunities that are best in line with who you are and how you truly want to grow. 

Employers like economics majors, but few jobs for these majors actually have the word “economist” in their titles.  However, the skills and abilities taught in the major are valued across many lines of work.  Today, this semester’s students are going to visit the LNDF for the first time.  I’m sure they’ll continue to recognize that many community issues can be viewed through the lenses of multiple disciplines, and I hope they see again the unique skills that an economics background can bring to these issues. 

There are several reasons why I decided to take this class. I enjoy applied learning.  I want to see how what I am learning is applied to the world around me. In my opinion, economics is a discipline in which applied learning is crucial and beneficial. Last semester I took a political science and global studies course titled Global to Local Studies; I took great pride in what my peers and I did for the Lynchburg community. This semester, Economics of Public Sector is comprised of three brilliant students (including myself!) and a wonderful and caring professor. So far, I’ve enjoyed reading Denise’s work and seeing how it can be explored deeply to do a great service for the community. I hope to gain a greater appreciate for the discipline after completing this course. I also hope to develop a stronger desire to connect economic theory to the world and community around me.

While studying for my exam in this class, I came upon something called the “regulatory budget,” which is a theoretical budget measuring the economic burden that the federal government imposes on the economy. For obvious reasons, such a document doesn’t exist, but it reminded me of something that I wanted to share with the class that is relevant. Even though a direct measure of this impact would be impossible to calculate, one crude measure of the burden is looking at the amount of legal code that the Federal government forces people to follow. While interning at the Cato Institute, I put together a page count by Federal Agency of the Code of Federal Regulations. This was not my most exciting task, but it was one of the ones that I gained a great deal of insight from. In total, I counted more than ninety thousand pages of Code to be followed, of which the Internal Revenue Service accounts for more than thirteen thousand pages by itself. This amount of legal code is nearly impossible for professional tax experts to grasp and keep up to date on, let alone normal citizens whom this Code directly affects every day. The extensiveness of this regulatory code means that business people spend more time thinking about the legal and specifically tax consequences of a decision than the economic consequences for their shareholders and consumers. That cannot be a good thing for the economy. 

First of all, I spent this weekend in D.C. at Powershift 2009, which was a completely amazing, awesome event.  I mention this here because every policy conversation and every debate about how to preserve or reclaim environmental quality in our communities concerned the taxing and spending habits of the government.  Whether or not anyone recognized it or verbalized it, these were conversations about public goods and the roles of government and non-profits.

I went to two workshops I found extremely relevant to this course: one concerning class divides in the environmental movement, and the other concerning the linkages between the economy and climate change.  The integration of topics at Powershift was phenomenal.  The loudest message was that without an economic solution, an environmental solution does not exist.  Without alternative employment for workers in coal plants, we can’t possibly shut down those coal plants.  A movement or policy that can’t reach beyond middle class communities is flawed, and probably unjust.  Without making green technology accessible to people of all incomes, technological innovations can’t be as meaningful or productive.  The role of economists in environmental issues has never been clearer to me. It actually appears that this role of an economist is applicable to other topics of social and political change.  Any and all changes require tradeoffs, economic and otherwise, which I believe economists have some of the best tools to evaluate.  Thankfully, I’m discovering that I can probably do work with any topic I want after I graduate.

I also some have comments that pertain to the actual experience of this public economics course.  Last Thursday, Dr. Barnes took us on a tour of downtown Lynchburg and the 5th Street area.  It was great to see the city’s plans in action.  Plus, it was a gorgeous day.  I was fascinated to see exactly where many of the plans made on paper have been implemented.  The planning for things like sidewalks, road signs, bus stops–things I wouldn’t have actively considered when planning to revitalize a neighborhood–were surprisingly detailed with measurements and illustrations.  Dr. Barnes said that much of the opposition to these plans call the changes something like useless aesthetic improvements. I would disagree with that.  Even if some of the plans for 5th Street and downtown are aesthetic (bigger newer signs, prettier sidewalks, sitting areas), I would argue that citizens in a more beautiful neighborhood are happier, more comfortable and more likely to go out and engage in the community.  I’m sure that’s something someone out there in the vast world of academia has studied.  It honestly seems ignorant to write off these neighborhood improvements as purely aesthetic and therefore useless.  I can vaguely remember downtown Lynchburg when I visited R-MWC three years ago, and I would say that even the improvements thus far make it a more pleasant place to be, which is never a bad thing.

Click here for some photos from our field trip.