By Noah Dawson
When it comes to downtown Amarillo, there is plenty that seems sketchy, with members of the city council regularly facing criticisms, often involving alleged conflicts of interest. This week, I want to look at the issue from a wider view, and demonstrate that, even from an economic, apolitical point of view, the downtown scheme is doomed to fail.
First, let's look at what the broad strokes of the downtown scheme are, at least when it comes to the narrative laid out by council member Hays during her campaign earlier this year. Basically, downtown must be revitalized, so that the city can generate revenue from downtown, which can then be used to improve other parts of the city.
Again, I'm going to try to be generous to the city, and assume for now that there is nothing shadier going on.
This plan still will not work, as it fails to address the principal economic issue facing Amarillo, which is a lack of career opportunities for younger people in the area. It's an issue Hayden Pedigo, who challenged Hays in the May election, made central to his campaign. Few of the developments that have occurred downtown have expanded career opportunities for the well educated young population in our area, leading many to seek employment opportunities outside of the panhandle. I've seen it first hand, with friends of mine moving across the state and even across the country, looking for a place to build a career.
It's similar to the economic crisis countries like Japan are facing with aging population demographics, and if the city continues to chase down the dream of their downtown scheme, it will catch up with them. At that point, it won't matter how developed downtown is if the rest of the city's economy has collapsed.
Further, even ignoring the fact that the downtown scheme fails to address the major economic problem the city is facing, the scheme is misguided. Evidence of this can be seen with the disparate growth rates of private economic activity between downtown and other areas of the city. Despite how hard the city has tried to make the downtown scheme work, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of rapid economic growth downtown. The reason for this is a lesson most students learn in the first few weeks of an introductory economics course: comparative advantage. Basically, what this tells us, is that an economic entity should focus resources on what that entity does better than others. Simply put, Amarillo is not a city set up to have a very strong downtown. We are a city built on the wide open plains of the Llano Estacado. There's little natural economic incentive for such a place to focus on geographically dense economic development. While it is true that in the short run, high density development generates more tax revenue, in the long run, it will set our city up to fail.
I don't want to sound alarmist, but that's the reality Amarillo must accept if the city continues to pour money downtown while letting the rest of the city fall through the cracks. If our council can accept this, and focus on bringing actual jobs to Amarillo, our future could be very bright. In the meantime, there will continue to be people graduating locally and looking for jobs far away.
