Opinion by Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
Red Tape Florida’s recent piece on Austin’s successful efforts to tackle affordable housing had a lot of important themes:
- The key to lowering prices is driving up supply
- The cost of red tape is significant
- Time is money and a bogged-down bureaucratic process hurts not just builders but the eventual home and business owners
But it was another theme that struck me. I saw something in Austin Mayor Kirk Watson that I simply haven’t seen within Tallahassee City government: True leadership and vision.
While Tallahassee is paying for awards and positive coverage, renaming streets and issuing proclamations, its economy remainsstagnant and affordable housing persists as an acute problem.
Tallahassee has largely resorted to unoriginal, public-sector driven solutions — subsidizing projects with federal and state housing dollars, supporting community land trusts, offering down payment assistance, funding rehabilitation programs, requiring or incentivizing affordable units through inclusionary housing policies, and partnering with nonprofits and developers on publicly backed projects. Those efforts may help individual families and add some units to the housing stock, but they largely rely on government money, government programs or government direction.
Austin tried something different. It considered an idea that would surely seem novel to Tallahassee leaders: Maybe we are a part of the problem.
It turned a critical eye on itself and hired an outside firm to provide an unbiased report answering this question: is our bureaucracy negatively impacting the issue of affordable housing?
Can you even imagine that happening in Tallahassee?
City leaders are too busy flexing, cheerleading and railroading. Decisions are made in backrooms, not in the public’s view. Data isn’tgathered independently with a “what we can learn” mentality. Instead, it’s cherry-picked and presented only in the most positive light.
The internal culture is toxic and that actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let me explain.
Tallahassee is known across the state and even the nation as a business-unfriendly city. This is simply a fact – I’ve heard it so many times from so many people in so many sectors I don’t need a poll to tell me it’s true.
But part of the culture that leads to this business unfriendliness is arrogance. An insular attitude. A “we know best” mentality.
Why, Tallahassee government leaders would likely say, do we need to survey our own operation when we already know we’re right and everybody else is wrong?
It’s that mentality that leads to absolutely inane results, like the shed from hell, that, according to my sources, STILL hasn’t been approved for use by the City. Or the Midtown Reader grass field, which STILL hasn’t been allowed to be turned into desperately needed parking. And the list goes on (and is growing, as Red Tape Florida is now receiving tips from Tallahassee and across the state on a daily basis).
The Austin mayor was willing to cross party lines — and other imaginary political boundaries — to gather information to actually solve a problem. He was willing to admit a fault so that it could then be fixed.
In Tallahassee, we are hopelessly divided by a 3-2 dynamic where if one side suggested an ordinance banning the torture of puppies and kittens, the other side would immediately claim to be pro-puppy and kitten torture.
Sadly, even business leaders have become so invested in this 3-2 fable that they will support completely unqualified candidates simply to maintain “control,” when all they are really doing is sentencing the city to another two to four years of ineptitude and weak leadership.
Heck, even when it is obvious that there is a problem – a floundering economy, or a failing Office of Economic Vitality – there doesn’tappear to be the gumption for government leaders to admit it.
We are left with another generation’s worth of problems that never get solved because no one is willing to ask the first question Austin asked:
Could we be part of the problem?
That’s not a partisan question. It’s not a liberal question or a conservative question. It’s a leadership question.
Until Tallahassee has leaders willing to challenge their own assumptions, invite outside scrutiny and admit that City Hall itself may be standing in the way of progress, we’ll continue treating symptoms instead of causes.
Austin’s mayor had the confidence to look inward before pointing outward.
That’s the kind of leadership Tallahassee has been missing.