Wind of change could blow through foreclosed homes

It struck me last night, after reading the Wall Street Journal piece about Cleveland artists buying and renovating some of their city’s foreclosed and abandoned homes and thus helping change neighborhoods for the better, that Cleveland and other hard-hit burgs ought to go a step beyond just helping urban pioneers buy and improve decaying properties – they ought to help those homebuyers change their home-power sources to wind, solar or some other nonpolluting renewable fuel, so that the homes will run clean and the owners can sell excess energy back to the grid.

This would make old neighborhoods cleaner and more self-sustaining, and maybe even help support local alternative-energy equipment manufacturers and suppliers. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of state and local governments already offer home alternative-energy conversion programs that provide funding or tax breaks to people who green up their houses. The federal government sure does, including a 30- percent-of-cost tax credit for installing small wind-energy systems, solar water-heating and geothermal heat pumps.

And where properties just have to be torn down, why not put up small wind farms in their place, as well as urban produce and flower gardens, so neighborhoods can sell what they make and reinvest it in their own services and infrastructure?

As President Obama says, why solve only one problem at a time when so many things need fixing?

Will many hands make light work of recreating America?

While we’re on the subject of different kinds of job corps and the difference they might make to U.S. infrastructure and education: An important piece of national-service legislation creating several new types of  volunteer job corps was passed by the House of Representatives about 10 days ago. President Obama was expected to sign it soon after returning to Washington, D.C., Tuesday after his eight-day European tour.

The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act dedicates $6 billion over five years to creating 175,000 new volunteer positions for Americans of all ages, from middle-school students to retirees, and to establishing four new service corps: Clean Energy, Education, Healthy Futures (helping create access to health care) and Veterans Service. It also increases hands-on, service-education opportunities for volunteers and increases the money awards for formal education that volunteers can earn for themselves or their children.

The new  thousands of volunteers are expected to make the nation’s disaster-relief efforts more effective and to generate economic benefits in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

That’s a lot of helping hands. But I wonder how much Americans’ ever-more-desperate need to earn money will discourage  them from volunteering. I hope I’m wrong, but feeding the mouths at home may trump feeding their own souls.

Europe moves ahead, creatively

Europe understands creativity and innovation.

In the United States, economic stimulus money is apparently going to be handed out to lots of individual sectors without any grand plan in place to get all of our leaders brainstorming new ideas and working together across sectors, coordinating efforts and resources and maximizing the effects of innovation on the economy and society’s other problems.  The results may be a wasteful, duplicative mishmash of unconnected policies and programs.

But the European Union, where creativity is recognized as the key to the current financial crisis and to a better future in general, has declared 2009 the EU’s Year of Creativity and Innovation. Its leaders also expect to increase the percentage of the EU’s annual budget that goes to research, technology and innovation.

EU member states such as Portugal, Spain and Luxembourg have been holding conferences and forums to officially launch their own national versions of the Year of Creativity and Innovation, bringing together thinkers and leaders from universities and business, technology and arts and culture.

A major European conference on creativity and innovation will be held by the European Commission March 2-3 in Brussels to showcase best practices among projects that have been funded by EU programs. The idea is to examine creativity and innovation from different angles, using successful, EU-funded projects as examples and discussing how to ensure similar success for new creative endeavors.    

The EU’s current innovation-investment program, called the 7th EU Research and Technology Programme, dedicates $52 billion to creativity and innovation over the six-year period from 2007 to 2013, derived from the 3 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) that member nations are expected to give. For the next funding period, 2013-21, EU leaders anticipate that financial investment will grow. 

Imagine what the U.S. could do if all the states and sectors worked out a structure for collaborating on creative thinking, research and innovation – and not just for technology, either.

President Obama?   

Some facts about the arts’ effect on the economy

An interesting comment was posted here over the weekend. The writer said he used to work for a consulting firm that assisted the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s. He observed, “Bureaucratically funded arts endeavors remove dollars from the economy they [sic] do not add tax revenue directly.”

Wow. Where to begin? Well first, a little back story: On Friday, I posted a press release from the office of U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, stating that  the Congressman planned to hold hearings this spring on the economic and educational value of the arts. Miller’s staff has promised to forward to the Congressman some questions I e-mailed that afternoon in regard to these hearings; in the interim, I’m guessing that Miller’s decision to hold the hearings may be a reaction to the apparent elimination of some arts- and culture-related businesses from the list of those to be supported by the national stimulus package currently being considered by the U. S. Senate. Perhaps he’s interested in giving citizens, or at least his fellow elected officials, an accurate picture of the effects that arts have on learning and the economic health of communities.

But even if his intent is something completely different from that, the fact remains that the arts do have measurable effects on both education and the economy. 

Perhaps the commenter doesn’t realize that not all arts businesses are nonprofit. Broadway productions, the popular-music industry, most of the film industry, art galleries and auction houses, publishing houses, commercial and journalistic photography, graphic design - all these and more are for-profit, and immensely profitable they are, too.  

Perhaps he also doesn’t realize that even nonprofit arts organizations have a tremendous effect on local, regional and national economies through both direct and indirect economic impact. Like for-profits, nonprofits employ people and buy local services and products. They generate tourism, drawing visitors who not only buy tickets and paintings, but also pay for hotel rooms, parking, meals, drinks, souvenirs and other goods. Local residents buy many of those same things because of the arts; they also hire babysitters. 

In addition, excellent arts and cultural amenities help cities attract new businesses and help established businesses attract new employees.  

In the Cleveland area of Ohio, arts and culture generate over $1 billion annually in direct and indirect economic impact.  (Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, Northeast Ohio Arts and Culture Plan, May 2000). Nationally, they generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs and create $30 billion in government revenue – and that’s just the nonprofits. For every $1 billion of that arts and culture spending, nearly 70,000 full-time-equivalent jobs result. (Americans for the Arts, Economic Recovery & The Arts). 

(The Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit organization. Think it has no effect on the local – and national - economy?)      

 I won’t even go into the educational benefits of the arts here, but I hinted at the basics in my Feb. 5 post about ways that President Obama can promote American creativity.    

As the purpose of the national economic-stimulus package is not solely to generate tax revenue, anyway, but to help fund obvious economic sine qua nons such as education and to keep operational industries that employ people and provide needed products and services, I find it pretty bizarre of anyone to assert that arts and culture have no place in it.

It’s one of the most deeply ingrained and egregiously wrong myths of American society that the arts are a burden on the economy. The truth is that the arts are a large and vital part of the economy on all levels and that they enhance the educations on which our success as a nation ultimately depends.