AIArchitect

Ever since the federal government began tackling an unprecidented financial crisis with equally unprecedented economic stimulus measures, conservative commentators have bemoaned the amount of control ivory tower experts have had in dictating the economy’s recovery. It’s a scene that’s easily constructed and plays on populist fears of detached technocrats turning the pain of an entire state’s unemployed workers into a numerical abstraction—as David Brooks put it, “10 guys sitting around in the White House trying to redesign huge swaths of the U.S. economy on legal pads.”  Something like this worked well enough (in conjunction with WWII, of course) for the Great Depression and the New Deal, but that was before the Internet.

If you’re an architect who's feeling bad because of the slumping building industry, think of this: at least you’re not an industrial product designer.

There’s a simple fact: People need buildings. Badly. All kinds of buildings. Buildings to live in, work in, worship in, go to school in. Always. To get the buildings they must have, people will often forgo purchasing the things product designers make. Think about it: You can buy second-hand just about any good that isn’t immediately consumed in some way, and no trip to Goodwill has ever made a product designer a dime. If it really comes down to it, and there's a battle between DVD rack shelves and a house to put them in, the house always wins, and not just because you sold all your DVDs to a pawn shop. Always.

The proposal to establish a national bank for infrastructure projects pre-dates the economy’s collapse, but it looks like this tragedy is giving the idea some legs. Starting in 2007, this idea has gained some traction in Congress, and President Obama has called for a national infrastructure bank as well.

Originally proposed by Everett Ehrlich and Felix Rohatyn, a former banker, diplomat, and mayor of New York City, this new way of funding infrastructure projects has three advantages over the federal government’s current method. Ehrlich and Rohatyn say that their bank will issue bonds for specific projects, much like states and local municipalities, and thus won’t have to pay for projects in their entirety up front, like the federal government currently does. As a bank, this entity would also be much more flexible in how it distributes funds.  It could provide interest rate subsidies, lend money to states, or provide direct subsidies. And because it would be governed by a non-partisan, independent board, wasteful, messy, and politically expedient pork barrel projects wouldn’t pass muster. The bank would be capitalized by the standard $60 billion that the government usually spends on infrastructure per year, and estimates of how much total construction dollars to be had by leveraging this amount range from $250 to $600 billion.  That’s a lot of bridges and water filtration plants. . . .