What to Do With Vacant School Buildings

Posted on by James V. Shuls

Vacant School Buildings-1Public school systems are tasked with a tremendous responsibility. Not only do we expect them to educate our children, but we also expect them to be good stewards of the tax dollars we give them. To do this, a school system must make sure buses are running on time, nutritious meals are prepared for students, teachers deliver effective instruction, and students are supported in safe environments. These, of course, are just some of the obvious responsibilities of a school system. Urban school districts, such as Saint Louis and Kansas City, have a unique problem to deal with—vacant school buildings.

Like most urban school districts, Saint Louis and Kansas City have had declining enrollment for decades. They are also facing stiff competition from charter schools, which enroll 29 and 42 percent of all public school students in each respective city. This has left each district with more than 30 vacant school buildings. Vacant buildings are a problem for the district and the community. The cost of maintenance can be a drain on resources, diverting dollars away from the classroom. The buildings can also become an eyesore for the community, inviting vagrants and illegal activity.

In my latest paper, “Vacant School Buildings: An Examination of Kansas City and Saint Louis,” former Show-Me Institute intern Abigail Fallon and I explore this complex issue. Unlike most areas of education, little research exists on vacant school buildings, and few claim to know how to handle these properties. While there may not be a definitive answer on what should be done, we argue that school districts should be more intentional about divesting these buildings or putting them back to productive use. To that end, we offer some possible solutions, namely, that these buildings should be made available for lease or sold to charter schools.

The bottom line is that school districts must become more diligent in dealing with this problem.

Ridesharing: Game Changing for Carpooling and Transit?

Posted on by Joseph Miller

As we’ve discussed before, carpooling is the second most popular way of getting to work in Missouri (behind driving alone). However, the use of carpooling has been in steady decline over the last couple decades. Today, 9 percent of workers use carpooling to get to work; in 1980 that number was almost 20 percent.

Transportation experts speculate that slow changes in the way people live and work have driven the decline. More Missourians once lived and worked in centralized geographic areas, reflecting the needs of a manufacturing-based economy and the means of the working class. The dispersal of jobs, residences, and increased ability to afford personal vehicles has made carpooling less attractive. While the decline in carpooling in Missouri may be primarily due to structural changes in the U.S. economy, its renaissance may come in the form of app-based technology created by ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft.

Services like UberPool and Lyft Line, now offered in test markets around the country, promise to create instant app-based carpooling. Riders request the service (at a steeply discounted price) and may end up sharing their ride with others heading in roughly the same direction. This means that riders do not need to find people to share the ride with or do not need to be going to and from the exact same locations as someone else in a carpool; it can be set up automatically.

uberpool

If this type of technology were to roll out in Missouri cities, it’s possible to imagine tremendous benefits for residents. On-demand carpooling could allow Uber and Lyft to operate like super-efficient jitneys (small private buses with ad-hoc routes) rather than traditional taxis or carpools. Ridesharing companies have been accused of being yuppie-based transportation, but app-based carpooling (with its much lower pricing) has the possibility of greatly increasing mobility for the disadvantaged, especially those who live in areas where reliable mass transit is difficult, if not impossible, to access. In essence, app-based carpooling has the possibility of boosting not only carpooling, but transit (albeit privately operated) usage as well.

UberPool and Lyft Line represent just some opportunities that new business models can provide for Missouri cities. Yet, in Saint Louis and Kansas City, the attitude toward new ridesharing companies has been and continues to be reflexively hostile. If both cities can remove regulatory barriers, residents will be able to benefit from these new services, and ones as yet undeveloped.

You Cannot Be Serious!

Posted on by Michael Rathbone

You gotta love Los Angeles, but when I read stories about what officials there might be planning with their minimum wage increase, my blood really starts boiling. Below is the key portion of the story:

Labor leaders, who were among the strongest supporters of the citywide minimum wage increase approved last week by the Los Angeles City Council, are advocating last-minute changes to the law that could create an exemption for companies with unionized workforces.

L.A.’s unions want to be able to offer lower wages for potential employers yet force non-union workers to be paid the higher “minimum wage.” That means if employers want to avoid L.A.’s planned wage hike, they would be forced to do business with organized labor.

For unions, the “exemption” seems to have another selling point—to get jobs with these cost-conscious employers, non-union workers would be forced to join the union.

Naturally, many L.A. labor leaders love the idea.

“With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both. The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them,” [Rusty Hicks, a labor leader in Los Angeles,] said in a statement. “This provision gives the parties the option, the freedom, to negotiate that agreement. And that is a good thing.”

In fact, minimum wages go directly against this concept. With minimum wages, the government gets to decide whether mutually beneficial agreements between businesses and employees are in fact good enough. And in the case of the exemption proposal, the labor union essentially is inserting itself between employees and employers, undermining both parties’ “freedom . . . to negotiate that agreement.”

Employees don’t necessarily want or need labor unions acting as a middleman and negotiating on their behalf. Usually, individual employees are their own negotiators.

Raising the minimum wage brings with it some negative consequences, like lost jobs and damaged earnings potential. But if jurisdictions do increase the minimum wage, everybody should be forced to abide by them, and that includes labor unions.

Convention Hotel Justification Built on Fiction

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

Kansas City Mayor Sly James has announced an effort, long discussed at City Hall, to subsidize a convention hotel downtown. Part of the justification for this expense is the need to attract more conventions to Kansas City, despite the fact that the convention industry is already crowded and in decline.

In Kansas City’s case, justification for this expense is also built upon a fiction. When the effort to bring the GOP convention to Kansas City fell apart last year, the Kansas City Star reported a local consultant urging coworkers on the convention bid to stay on message:

“Nothing negative,” one public relations consultant wrote. “The reason given for the decision should be a lack of downtown hotels. Period. Please stick to this messaging. . . . Let’s all take care of one another. We’re still a team.”

Reporter Dave Helling revisited this argument recently. In the email exchange, another person responded:

I couldn’t agree more. Thanks for reminding us all to stick together. The only thing I would add is a lack of downtown hotels IN CLOSE PROXIMITY TO THE CONVENTION SITE.

It appears everyone fell in line. In Helling’s story about Kansas City’s elimination from hosting the GOP convention, written as soon as the decision was announced and before he received the internal documents mentioned above, he wrote that there were several reasons being offered:

Kansas City’s relative lack of enough high-quality hotel rooms close to the Sprint Center.

The city’s potential struggle to raise $60 million for the event.

Poor rail transit.

That same story goes on to detail the politics included in the GOP’s decision, including this telling part:

“The competition was tough,” said Brenda Tinnen, chairwoman of the Kansas City Convention and Visitors Association. “There are politics involved in these decisions. . . . I’m not sure that there was any one thing that said, ‘OK, this city is better than that city.’”

Tinnen is likely correct. There always are many reasons a convention does not come to a city. It is rarely the case, as some in Kansas City government want us to believe, that conventions are lost because of any one thing. But that is what we hear from the “team” of consultants, government officials, and public relations professionals.

Taxpayers should be wary. Such expensive decisions should be based on sound policy and economics, not a mere fiction promulgated by some on the convention “team” who write about the need to “take care” of one another—whatever that means.

Cheap Rent: A Saint Louis Advantage

Posted on by Joseph Miller

Recently, I talked to a financial advisor (who did not live in Saint Louis) about whether I should buy property. To get a sense of whether owning or renting was my best way forward, the advisor asked, logically: “How much do you currently pay in rent?” I replied with my current monthly rent, after which there was a pause, and then the advisor responded: “OK that [the rent] is not realistic.”

Not being from Saint Louis, the advisor did not know that almost unrealistically cheap rent (from the rest of the country’s perspective) is readily available in the region. In fact, Saint Louis was just named the most affordable major city in the country for recent grads by Trulia Trends (“investigators of unconventional house hunting trends”).

Their analysis showed that a recent grad in Saint Louis would on average make just under $26,000, allowing them to afford almost 20 percent of units in Saint Louis. How expensive can it get in other cities? In Portland, Oregon, the median wage of recent grads is under $19,000, which would allow them to afford about 0.1 percent of rental units available. Following close behind Portland, in terms of unaffordability, are Riverside, Orange County, and Miami.

Rent

One might assume that the relationship here is one of growth and desirability. Saint Louis, with relatively low growth, is not as attractive as the fast-growing Portland or Miami. But economic growth is not the whole story, because following Saint Louis on the list of affordable metros are some of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the nation, including Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Most likely, multiple factors, including desirable weather and urban containment policies (of which Portland has been a very prominent example), are important in making a city unaffordable for young people. Put simply, it takes capped supply along with high demand for rent to become unattainable for the average grad.

As things stand, Saint Louis is in the opposite situation from cities like Portland or Boston, in that there is plenty of supply but not a whole lot of demand. That puts Saint Louis in a good position to attract startup businesses and startup graduates from more expensive metropolitan areas. However, if Saint Louis is to gather momentum in attracting businesses, it should keep a positive regulatory attitude toward new building and avoid restricting supply through urban containment.

From Standardized Tests to Standardized Character

Posted on by Brittany Wagner

Grit, not to be confused with the popular Southern breakfast dish, is a personality trait. Described by Webster’s Dictionary as “mental toughness and courage,” grit is a catchall term for personal virtues like perseverance and self-control.

Interestingly, a growing body of research is finding that traits like grit might be more important to children’s success in life than traditional academic knowledge.

The Washington Post recently reported:

[Angela] Duckworth, a former middle school teacher [and University of Pennsylvania researcher], is known for helping to popularize the notion that a student’s success is correlated to that student’s level of self-control and “grittiness,” or ability to keep working toward goals.

Her research has shown that grittier students are more likely to graduate from high school, score higher on SAT and ACT exams and be more physically fit. Grittier students also are less likely to get divorced, and they typically experience fewer career changes.

Dr. Thomas Hoerr, head of New City School in Saint Louis, is the author of Fostering Grit: How Do I Prepare My Students for the Real World? Hoerr’s instructional suggestions echo Duckworth’s findings. “Teachers should embrace teaching the whole child, and should consciously seek to foster the intrapersonal and interpersonal qualities which will make a difference in life—such as grit,” Hoerr said in an email.

Given the fact that grit is important, and it appears that teachers can have an effect on the “grittiness” of students, there is a movement around the country to link measures of students’ grit to the evaluation of schools and teachers.

Even though they both feel that fostering grittiness is important, neither Hoerr nor Duckworth are pushing for tying teacher evaluations to student grittiness.

Why? The biggest issue is measurement. Student self-assessments are commonly used to measure social and emotional factors, requiring students to self-evaluate their level of hopefulness about their future and asking questions like, “Did you laugh or smile a lot yesterday?” Duckworth has noted that grittier students, those who tend to have more self-awareness, are more likely to rate themselves lower. The very thing that makes them gritty drives them to hold themselves to a higher standard. If teacher or school evaluations are based on this measure, they will be inaccurate.

While grit is clearly important, the measures for determining teachers’ impact on it are not ready for prime time. It took decades to be able to link simple math and reading scores, and we’re still working out the bugs on those. It will be some time before new measures are available.

Grit

Was the Transfer Program Poorly Designed?

Posted on by James V. Shuls

In the early 1970s the Ford Motor Company designed the Pinto. In addition to being extremely ugly, the Pinto was extremely dangerous. A rear-end collision could cause the gas tank to rupture and ignite. For obvious reasons, the Pinto is regarded as one of the worst cars ever.

At the very least, it was poorly designed.

Many look at Missouri’s interdistrict transfer program, which has allowed more than 2,000 students from the Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts to transfer to higher performing suburban districts, as if it were a Pinto. It has forced the two unaccredited districts to hemorrhage and rest on the verge of bankruptcy.

Is it ugly? Yes. Is it poorly designed? It depends.

In 2013, the year before students transferred, fewer than 20 percent of students in the two unaccredited school districts were proficient in reading or math. Dropout rates were abysmal, and the prospects were slim for graduates of either district.

Now, let’s imagine that the transfer law was not in place. What would be different today? Chances are, the school districts would not be performing significantly better. What’s more, few outside of the school districts would have taken any note of the quality of education being delivered in these two north Saint Louis County districts.

Since nearly a quarter of the students walked out of these flailing districts, much has changed. No, the districts have not gotten significantly better; nor have they gotten significantly worse. The transfer program, however, has allowed 2,000-plus students to have the opportunity for a better education. Moreover, it has launched a robust conversation around the state about how to turn around struggling school districts.

But to understand if the program was “poorly designed,” we have to determine what it was designed to do.

Was it designed to be a school reform model for unaccredited school districts? If so, it failed, since it has drained these districts of necessary financial resources and could bankrupt both of them.

Was it designed as a long-term fix, a permanent interdistrict program? Again, if this is the case, it failed, since the program lacks a feasible tuition system. Currently, tuition ranges from roughly $10,000 to $20,000, depending on where a student transferred.

Is it possible, however, that the transfer program was designed for another purpose, like to create controversy or to spark change?

As I note in my latest paper, “Interdistrict Choice for Students in Failing Schools: Burden or Boon?” the transfer students were largely absorbed into 24 receiving districts with little disruption. In this regard, the transfer program functioned relatively well.

The program has told families in low-performing schools that their children do not have to be doomed to perpetual underperformance. These families took the right to an education guaranteed by our state’s constitution. Angel Matthews, for instance, experienced the benefits that come from choosing your own school. Angel was one of 175 students who initially transferred from Normandy and Riverview Gardens to the Kirkwood School District, and she has embraced the rigors and opportunities of her new school by taking AP honors classes, cheerleading, and running track.

The transfer program has caught our attention, but it is not a permanent fix. We must now develop new policies that establish quality schools in every neighborhood. These policies must include some form of school choice, lest we fall back into our old pattern of assigning students to chronically failing schools.

 

Convention Hotel: Power & Light District v. 2.0?

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

Just in case you thought the city actually had learned its lessons from the Power & Light District debacle, recent reports will disabuse you of that notion. We were initially told that there only would be a $35 million payout from the city, financed by bonds. The rest of the $150 million in city support would be made up of abatements, TIF, and a Commercial Improvement District (CID) tax.

Steve Vockrodt at The Pitch considers other costs that the city doesn’t seem to be including in their estimates:

The property upon which the hotel will be built (bound by Truman Road and 16th Street and by Baltimore and Wyandotte) is mostly city-owned, which means that it currently generates no property taxes. Troy Schulte, the city manager, has said the land is worth $13 million.

Assuming that valuation is correct, it means that the land—if the city sold it to a developer and it returned to the tax rolls—would generate $333,998 a year in property taxes. Under TIF, the development captures all that money.

Given these arrangements, then, the public subsidy for the hotel is going to be a lot more than $35 million. About half the cost of the $300 million project will wind up being paid for by public taxes.

But wait, there’s more. The Kansas City Business Journal adds:

In addition, the just-released copy of the memorandum states, the city will pay fixed annual management fees to the hotel owner through the 15-year catering agreement. The fees, ranging from $2.4 million to $5.4 million, have a net present value of $47.3 million, according to the [Memorandum of Understanding] MOU.

And if event gross revenues are insufficient to make the scheduled fee payment, the MOU states, “the city shall pay from any legally available city funds.”

In other words, if the project underperforms, taxpayers will make up the deficit. Sound familiar? The MOU also requires that taxpayers subsidize the construction of the hotel by forgoing tax income on the materials; income from the sale of the site to be used; and a cap on the fees required for construction. These costs likely are not counted in the project total, but they are real funds the city would forgo. The Journal continues:

In addition, the developers will receive a sales tax exemption on construction materials, and the city, which owns three-quarters of the proposed hotel site, will donate that land (though it will be due payment if the hotel is ever sold).

The MOU also calls for the city to cap the developer’s fees for zoning, permits, inspections and reviews at $800,000 and to provide no subsidies to any competing hotels for 10 years after the new Hyatt’s opening.

That last part is the kicker. Hyatt realizes that the deal it wants—with its myriad subsidies, tax breaks, and payouts—if directed toward other hotels, would hurt their business. It only follows that the deal they are asking for now will hurt the hotels already downtown.

Who on the City Council is going to stand up for (1) those existing hotels who likely will be hurt by this project and (2) the taxpayers who are being asked to underwrite something that will undercut previous subsidized investments?

Union President Agrees That Union Elections Lead to Greater Accountability

Posted on by John Wright

Bradley Harmon, president of CWA Local 6355—a union representing state government employees—recently testified before a legislative committee against a union election bill. Although he was there to offer his opposition to the bill, he ended up admitting that the elections he opposes actually make unions more accountable to the workers they represent. See the clip, recorded by Progress Missouri, above.

Holding elections for government unions is one of the most exciting labor reforms discussed in Missouri right now. Currently, if you work for the government and you’re represented by a union, you’re pretty much stuck with that union. If you can organize, gather signatures, and then win a “decertification” election, you may force the union out. But barring this, government employees, like teachers, social workers, and firefighters, are pretty much “married for life.”

Holding regular union elections addresses this issue. When employees of public institutions get the option to vote for their representatives every few years, union representatives are forced to be accountable to their members. When workers get a vote, a union executive’s job depends on representing workers well.

You can read more about government union elections in Missouri here, here, here, and here.

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