New Mexico Mercury

When Detroit filed for bankruptcy last week, everyone in the country holding tax-free municipal bonds felt the cold shadow of the financial grim reaper fall across their path.

If Detroit can go broke, why can’t Topeka, or Fresno, or, more to the point, why can’t Albuquerque?

What happened to the car capital of the world? In a nutshell, it simply couldn’t solve its own problems.

Cities that can’t do that fail, fast or slow, and their economies collapse and their residents suffer. This is true recently of Stockton, California, Salem, New Jersey, San Bernadino, California in 2010, Orange County, California, the sixth most populous county in the nation, in l994, and it almost happened to New York City in l975.

It’s a sobering reality, especially in these times of unprecedented climate and energy instability. But cities that can solve their own problems have a chance at flourishing in the Brave New World of globalized dog eat dog metro competition.

And where is Albuquerque on the problem-solving spectrum? Our bond ratings are still pretty good, so we’re probably not on the edge of bankruptcy, but we’re not exactly in fighting trim either.

I’m not going to psychoanalyze Albuquerque or New Mexico. Our problems do not come from collective neurosis, mass pessimism, sociological depression, or even poverty, which has a devastating impact on so many people who manage creatively, with terrible low wages, to keep their families together and their lives moving forward.

We have all the creativity we need to solve our problems. And an abundance of that one thing every successful person, family, and city must have – an indomitable work ethic.

We’re not solving our problems because our leadership is in denial. And not only that our leaders are stuck in an economic model that presupposes the abundance of things that we can no longer take for granted – the spending clout of a growing middle class [we’ve nickeled and dimed our way out of that]; enough water to sprawl on [we’ve outgrown our water supply as it is and continue to use what we have as if there were no tomorrow]; a reliable centralized energy source [pollution makes coal power, or its substitute, natural gas, unsustainable]; a relatively stable climate [city leaders don’t have to be outright deniers not to have their heads in the sand]; the dominance of the petroleum powered automobile [just look at the prices we are paying now]; and an economy that depends on federal dollars, land speculation, tourism, and attracting big corporations to compete with local businesses [a retro city leadership still living in the 50’s won’t go very far any more].

When it comes to global metro competition, we have to get more nuanced than just trawling for bad jobs, or big salaries from bad companies.

Albuquerque has to stop denying that the world is in the middle of the biggest environmental and energy transition since the steam engine. And because of that transition, we will see an exodus of residents from other cities in the West that can’t solve the problems that come with rapid and often chaotic change.

To attract new talent and new businesses working to make the most out of the opportunities that come with change, Albuquerque must become a forward looking place.  To create a city with buying power across its economic classes, we need a hike in minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, which wouldn’t necessarily balloon the middle class at $31,200 a year, but would be something to start with and expand.

Centralized energy distribution using coal and natural gas will soon become an evil of the past. Air pollution and climate change will see to that. Albuquerque needs the foresight to incentivize decentralized energy, on a massive scale, so Albuquerque becomes known as the solar and wind city around the world, attracting thinkers, designers, and technological entrepreneurs to our workforce.

We will never lose the private car, but cars as we know them have become such an ecological burden and such an expense, that if Albuquerque worked to become the most efficient and well-planned mass transit city in the country, it would reap huge indirect economic gains.

With proper leadership, Albuquerque could well become the western American city that is known for evolving solutions to problems caused by deep drought and the torrential waters that come when drought temporarily abates. The San Juan/Chama project is now unreliable with the Colorado River basin drying up. We’re pumping way too much groundwater again, some of which is dangerously close to being too polluted to use. Importing new water is pie-in-the-sky. Only conservation, a realistic pricing structure, and “Dune” like technology where every drop of water is used and reused can compensate for the drying of the West and the crazy climate that’s causing it.

In the coming years federal dollars attached to the military industrial complex will become less and less reliable as the nuclear industry sinks into obsolescence. Land speculation won’t be dominated by the old easy, and often shoddy, sprawl into open land. Construction and real estate development will be more difficult under the pressures of infill design and neighborhood contexts, but very profitable once adapted to. Home building and mortgage banking will have to transform themselves in a hurry. Tourism in a hot and drying Albuquerque will come to rely increasingly on the city’s vast cultural and natural aesthetic assets, if the city’s leadership will pay attention to them with sufficient zeal and incentives.

And now is the time to stop giving away the store to outsiders who come to our city and compete with our business. Now is the time to incentivize local business, so local money can stay in the local economy.

If I were someone looking to relocate to a city at the top of its game, a city not likely to go bankrupt anytime soon, I’d look to a city that is addressing the basic issues of the future that are staring us in the face – climate instability,  polluting energy,  diminishing water, the burden of the private car, the tragedy of the working poor, and the desperate need for a new economic development model that is based on the future, not on a retrograde refusal to contemplate change.

Albuquerque is a long way from being there yet, but it could be such a place with the help of a younger generation of voters and thinkers, and their savvy about the Brave New Broken World ahead, and what it might take to not only survive it, but to prevail.

(Creative Commons feature image via Flickr by Mike Tungate.)