BLOG VIEW: I arrived home from work the other day, opened my mailbox and found a bright yellow envelope waiting for me. The envelope looked like it belonged to a birthday card, which was fairly surprising – my birthday is several months away, and there is no other upcoming anniversary or holiday that would warrant such a delivery.
In examining the envelope, I discovered that its contents were not meant for me. Instead, it was addressed to Mrs. Rose Tibbett, who lives in New South Wales, Australia. Now, it is not unusual for me to receive mail that was intended for a house on another street. But it is fairly uncommon that I receive mail that was intended for a house on another continent.
Not wishing to make too much of an issue of this, I took the card for Mrs. Tibbett down to the nearest mailbox and sent it off on what I assumed would be a speedy trip Down Under. Two days later, the card for Mrs. Tibbett was back in my mailbox. Believe me, it is fairly disconcerting that my local post office insists that I am a woman in Australia.
Clearly, my post office did not bother to learn from the error of its incorrect delivery and, instead, chose to do the wrong thing again. But the post office is keeping up a sorry tradition of the federal government in making the same mistakes over and over again without learning from their folly.
We saw this happen yesterday when President Obama repeated two key mistakes that pockmarked his administration: kowtowing to Republican bully-boy posturing (in declining to name Elizabeth Warren as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) while surrounding himself with third-rate talent (in this case, giving the bureau's keys to a political opportunist who was kicked out of office by Ohio voters who know a hack when they see one).
More troubling, however, is the administration's decision to repeat a mistake that has been made since Lyndon B. Johnson was in the White House: creating cockamamie programs that indiscriminately throw federal funds at troubled urban centers.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a pilot initiative called Strong Cities, Strong Communities – or, in acronym-talk, SC2. According to HUD, SC2 will ‘strengthen local capacity and spark economic growth in local communities, while ensuring taxpayer dollars are used wisely and efficiently.’ The wise and efficient use of taxpayer dollars is not something that I associate with any administration, let alone the Obama White House, but that's another story.
Part of the problem with SC2 is its utter cluelessness. HUD's press announcement promised that SC2 is going to be ‘cutting through red tape and rationalizing the federal bureaucracy to help deal with the overlapping maze of agencies, regulations and program requirements that are sometimes confusing to local governments.’ In other words, HUD is creating a program to fix existing programs.
Even more ridiculous is SC2's ‘Community Solutions Teams,’ which are identified by HUD as swooping in to ‘assist cities with issues mayors have identified as vital to their economic strategies, including efforts to build on local assets, strengthen regional economies, develop transportation infrastructure, improve job-training programs and support community revitalization.’ So, these teams are coming in and assessing situations that have already been identified as being in need of assistance? Thus, these teams are merely reviewing the problems – and, thus, prolonging them – rather than actually enacting a take-charge solution.
SC2 also has something called a ‘National Resource Network’ that will, according to HUD, ‘aggregate public and private resources to provide a broader set of cities, towns and regions with access to a one-stop portal of national experts to provide holistic policy and implementation support.’ The network is currently awaiting funding from the federal government, which is laughable considering all of the talk in Washington over the past few weeks centers on ways to cut federal funding.Â
Ultimately, SC2 is retreading all of the mistakes that contributed to the continued miasma that too many U.S. cities face: pumping up bureaucracy while claiming to slice away red tape, studying problems instead of solving them and spending money that doesn't exist. And if that's not bad enough, two of the cities in the SC2 pilot are Detroit and New Orleans – the urban equivalent of poster children for how not to rebuild damaged cities.
Not unlike my post office's inane insistence on repeatedly sending Australian-bound mail to my home, HUD's inane insistence that failed tricks will solve problems is both astonishing and pathetic. To pick up a lament from a classic folk song: When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
– Phil Hall, editor, Secondary Marketing Executive
(Please address all comments regarding this opinion column to hallp@sme-online.com.)
