Anna Griffin Needs a Lesson in Public Goods

Anna Griffin of The Oregonian may be right that the PGE park renovation idea is a bad one (though I disagree), but her strange fixation on the term 'blighted' is odd and I find her argument convoluted. From an economics point of view public goods will be underprovided by private markets. The government, then, may have a valuable role to play in providing them. So if a city wants to, say, provide a better, more well-lighted intersection and anticipates that the external benefit of this action will increase the value of surrounding properties, funding it with bonds that will be serviced by the future higher tax revenue from the district makes sense. It doesn't really matter if this is in a ritzy district or a run-down district. Either community will be unlikely to provide it privately and the rationale is no different.

As she says:

In urban renewal districts, communities borrow money to pay for improvements such as better roads or prettier storefronts. When property values rise, the additional tax revenue goes to retire the debt rather than into city, county or school budgets.

The insinuation is that you are taking away from school budgets. But this extra revenue would not exist without the investment in the public goods in the first place. So the real debate should be whether the increased revenues will actually materialize, not whether a district is 'blighted.' Whether this is true for the PGE Park case is an important question for the bean-counters to determine whether this particular source of funding is appropriate, but in my view this is an investment in Portland as a whole not in Goose Hollow...