By: Siddhartha Nutulapati

3/23/2016

Detroit. 

When you drive around the Motor City, you’re going to notice the ruins of the factories and the abandoned shells of previously prosperous houses. You’ll drive on streets so riddled with potholes you inch forward, not daring to put your foot on the gas in case you damage your car. You’ll see homeless people standing on sidewalks, holding signs pleading for money to start their life over, and you won’t see the skyscrapers of the city, because no one is there to turn on the lights.

How do you fix that?

That’s obviously a terribly complicated question, with a terribly complicated answer. There’s no set formula for governing effectively, but I do think that there exist certain policies a municipal government can purse to jumpstart a city. And as with every great undertaking, it starts with the people.

I think that a city needs to attract talented people. Most people aren’t making their way to the Detroit and Cleveland and New Orleans of the country, they’re going to New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Success will breed success, and the lack of jobs in these struggling cities are a major hindrance to attracting talent, especially the young kind. Why would I move to cold and crime infested Detroit when I could live in sunny California and get paid more? There exist organizations that try to encourage young people to come to these struggling cities, such as Teach for America, AmeriCorps, and Venture for America (full disclosure, I’ve worked with Venture for America alumni, and spoke with a few of them for this article).

The general sense you get when talking to alumni of those nonprofits, is that they’re all smart, they’re all driven, and they’re all liberal. Why does that have to be the case? Are conservative college students so cold-hearted and self-interested that they refuse to uplift the people struggling to make ends meet? Are we so prejudiced against the people in these cities that we dismiss them as welfare queens or drug addicts or simply just lazy? And are we so driven by the bottom line that we can’t take a pay cut for a couple years to try and grow a company?

No. I don’t think we are.

Obviously I can’t speak for all members of the aforementioned organizations, but from what I’ve been told, they join thinking that the nonprofit’s social impact is all that a city needs, when in fact the for-profit ventures are the ones that truly make great change in the day to day lives of people. Nonprofits have a place (Venture for America in particular does send Fellows to work at mostly for-profit companies), but there’s nothing like capitalism to grow a local economy.

That’s why I think that Republican policies are actually the best suited for cities. Small government that encourages business investment and growth is what Republicans should be emphasizing in every single mayoral campaign in the country, along with giving people the tools to succeed. Too often the Republican cause, especially in cities, has suffered under the impression that we fight only to slash services and using that money to line our CEO’s friends’ pockets. Certainly, there exist corrupt fat cats in politics, but even the cynic can’t be foolish enough to claim that no one actually becomes a public servant to serve the public. 

Local government controlled by Republicans could give rise to new industries by investing in infrastructure like a new electric grid or high speed internet. We could get rid of the red tape, restrictions, and taxes surrounding businesses so that they can hire more people and indirectly put food on the table for thousands of families. We can exempt people that moved to the city within two years of their graduation from college from taxes, and give businesses tax breaks for employing citizens of the city. Promote a flagship institution to attract talent and entrepreneurs. 

And above all, we would need to tackle education. It is the duty of the city of have a good education system, where the government lets you pursue the education of your choice, with trade schools and online coursework being given the same emphasis as a four year degree. We need to get teenagers off the streets and into the library, so they graduate from high school and aren’t giving into the vices that gangs and drugs have to offer. We need the local universities to put their endowments not just to building new dorms and administrative offices, but investing it in rebuilding the surrounding slums. 

And then you still have to pay the police and firefighters, the secretaries and county clerks, and the construction workers to install the fancy new internet cables and fill those potholes. All this is going to take a lot money. Money that most of these cities don’t have. So we have to prioritize. We would have to cut the upkeep of certain non-essential services, because the gargoyles on a building are useless if the foundation isn’t solid. But simply cutting won’t be enough, because the money just isn’t there. And now we’ve gone full circle, because the most surefire way of increasing municipal revenue is increasing the tax base, which you do by attracting people to live and work in your city. Surprisingly, you attract a larger tax base by cutting taxes — obviously, the math has to work out.

Getting the government out of the way of business and encouraging its growth, along with investing in the right industries to help bring cities and their citizens back on their feet is a tenet of the Republican vision. It’s time we bring that idea back to cities.

 

Republican Cities