Even more on tomorrow's primary election in DC

For readers of the blog outside of the DC region, perhaps I should apologize about writing so much about the DC election. I do try to write in ways where readers are able to pull out meta-lessons. The DC election is a perfectly good example.

Because DC is the strongest real estate market in the United States right now, and number two in the world only surpassed by London, it is a perfect example of the impact of the "Growth Machine" on local politics, the predominate focus on "the exchange value"--or making money from "place." The abstract of Molotch's first paper on the subject describes it thusly:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine. The relevance of growth to the interests of various social groups is examined in this context, particularly with reference to the issue of unemployment. Recent social trends in opposition to growth are described and their potential consequences evaluated.

One of the best written analyses of DC's Growth Machine, although not written by academics, is Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C.. Someone mentioned to me yesterday that they are reading this book on my recommendation and are sorry that they won't be able to finish it by tomorrow, election day.

And I write about these broad issues from time to time as well, such as in "Tom Sherwood, Duncan Spencer, Anwar Amal, and thinking about what I call the Uncivil War."

From Gary Imhoff's introduction to themail, the twice/week e-newsletter on local government from DC Watch:

Business Friendly in themail, September 10, 2006

In Tuesday's primary, one group of Democratic candidates has been described as business friendly, and they have in fact received the great majority of contributions from business interests. They are Linda Cropp in the mayor's race, Vincent Gray in the city council chairman's race, and A. Scott Bolden in the at-large councilmember's race.

But what does it mean to be business friendly? A District politician who was truly business friendly would promote all businesses, small as well as large, politically uninfluential as well as well connected. That kind of politician would be concerned primarily with making it as easy to do business in the District as it is in surrounding jurisdictions and with keeping business taxes at least within range of what they are in surrounding jurisdictions.

We live in a region with cumbersome regulations and high taxes, so staying competitive with our suburbs shouldn't be hard. We don't have to do away with business regulation and licensing, and we don't have to lower requirements dramatically; we simply have to make it less torturous to navigate through the District's regulatory and licensing processes, so that small businesses aren't at such a great disadvantage to the businesses large enough to keep lawyers and lobbyists on staff. We don't have to have low business taxes; we just have to bring them in line with the high business taxes in the surrounding counties.

In District politics, we don't use that commonsense definition of business friendly. Here, a business friendly politician is one who does special favors for special friends. Here, a business friendly politician is one who doles out special tax relief, TIFs and the like, to the richest and best connected developers, leaving the tax burden to be shared by smaller businesses and middle-class residents.

A business friendly politician here confiscates land and businesses from disfavored and small business people in order to award them to people with lobbyists working the Wilson Building. (See Lynne Duke's must-read article on Skyland Shopping Center in today's Washington Post for a look at how this process works.) A business friendly politician gives city property and tax funds and leases and contracts as rewards to a small group of insiders.

By these measures, Cropp, Gray, and Bolden are more business friendly than Fenty, Patterson, and Mendelson. Is that a recommendation?
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And note to the people in the Sierra Club booth yesterday who expressed dismay when I discussed my disagreement with the endorsement of Vincent Gray as Council Chair. I think that voting based on the fact of his supra-congruence with the Growth Machine way of doing things is more important to DC than his position on one particular environmental issue...

Index Keywords: Growth-Machine