Dare We Dream in Concrete?

Jonathan Lewis
Founder and Chair, Microcredit Enterprises

A poem chiseled into an obscure, cement wall at the Yerba Buena Gardens in downtown San Francisco asks, “Dare We Dream in Concrete?”

As a teen, my parents and I toured the USA, visiting many “dreams in concrete”:  national parks with grand lodges and rangers to teach their history; hydroelectric dams pulsing power to homes and cities; miles of freeway stretched coast to coast, taking my family to “see the USA in our Chevrolet” as the popular TV ad of the times advised us.

What I did not see with my own eyes were the hundreds of thousands of “invisible” job-creating projects founded during the Great Depression for the unemployed who worked at running arts and literacy programs or feeding kids and distributing clothes.  Nor did I notice the housing, recreation centers and schools in virtually every town whose foundations anchored the dreams and future of America.

In the last century, the United States government financed 45,000 miles of freeways.  No one called it socialism or government largesse.  Today the Interstate Highway System remains the largest public works project in human history, returning six dollars of private sector economic activity for every dollar spent on road construction.

When Americans travel internationally for work or play, the physical amenities, the public buildings, the parks and the pavement are what we first notice.  The British philosopher G. K. Chesterton observed:  “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land.  It is…to set foot in one’s own country as a foreign land.”

If you can imagine being a tourist visiting the USA, the comparison with the rest of the developing world is unflattering.   Airports are inefficiently dated, public transit is slow, streets are potholed, public buildings dingy, freeways clogged and parks untended.

As the American homeland of highways decays before our eyes and under our feet, bridges to the rest of the world are also going unbuilt.  Ask the Africans.  “In recent years, China’s infrastructure investment in Africa has been greater than that of the World Bank and the African Development Bank combined, and it dwarfs America’s,” reports Nobel Prize Laureate Stiglitz.

It is fashionable in some quarters to downgrade American public works (now masquerading under the fancy tuxedo word “infrastructure”) as taxpayer boondoggles, or unaffordable, or make-work government jobs.  The result is a nightmare of limitations:

• Did you know, despite disgracefully over-crowded classrooms, America has more shopping centers than high schools?  (Barry Schwartz, Paradox of Choice)

• Did you know “seventy-five years after Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated that reliable access to credit was the key to electrifying rural households, the United States still has a shameful number of off-grid communities on Native American reservations?”  (Carl Pope, Sierra Club Chair, Foreign Policy)

• Did you know, though none of us wants to drive on a dangerous bridge, “more than 26%, or one in four, of our nation’s bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete?”  (Report Card for America’s Infrastructure)

Public works mean jobs, growth and less poverty.  It is really that simple.

The American political squabble over the federal financial deficit is off base.  The really important, and missing, national debate should be about the dreams deficit, in concrete or otherwise.