Disinvestment ties roads, blight together in D.C.

Awful policy-making streams from Washington like water down slippery rocks these days.

But special mention is due the proposal, now largely dead, to raid blight funding for cities like Detroit to shore up the nearly broke national highway trust fund.

It was exceptionally frightful, for obvious reasons. Detroit, Cleveland — name just about any old industrial city and they’ve got a problem with abandoned houses. Most of the money to tear them down comes from federal Hardest Hit Fund, but a deal proposed last week to get a six-year transportation bill funded would have sacrificed money allocated for this year that has yet to be spent.

It was a farcical plan to paper over one form of disinvestment — Congress’ long-time political inability to raise the gas tax to properly fund roads — with another iteration. Michigan’s senior senator, Democrat Debbie Stabenow, along with others from states with cities like Detroit, got the Senate to back down. (The idea could resurface in the fall, though, unless Congress finds an alternative source for the money.)

But there’s a more substantive irony to what the Senate tried to do.

Why do we even need blight funds in cities like Detroit? Why did the city have, at the height of the problem, 70,000 abandoned homes and more than a dozen square miles of emptiness?

Well, those things are, themselves, largely the product of tragic federal policy-making.

Blight is a function of abandonment, and the emptying out of Detroit and other cities was directly attributable to many decisions made by Congress.

Start with the building of the many highways that devastated city neighborhoods and made it easier for people to live miles from the city’s core. In Detroit, the highway build-up coincides almost perfectly with the beginning of population loss in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Housing policy helped, too, in the form of massive subsidies for the building of suburban houses and subdivisions.

Deindustrialization, fueled in part by federal trade policies and other economic policies, also destroyed the manufacturing base that built Detroit and made middle-class life possible for city families.

And all of those policies, of course, were also tinged by racism (blacks were left out, by federal policy, from the initial move to the suburbs) that helped create the economic isolation experienced by poor blacks in neighborhoods that, yes, now grapple with insurmountable blight.

Cities themselves made tragic errors, too — financial promises they couldn’t keep, under-investment in education and safety and other things that keep people from leaving. But the conditions in America’s cities have everything to do with the disinvestment in city life adopted by Washington since the late 1950s.

Now, lawmakers don’t even stop to acknowledge that history on their way to doubling down on urban disinvestment as a way to pay for infrastructure that’s crumbling from its own financial neglect.

The cure for this is responsibility, and a stronger sense of justice.

The highway trust fund should be funded through a higher gas tax — not raised at the federal level since the early 1990s — or some other dedicated revenue stream. It borders on criminal that lawmakers have failed to identify that funding for this long, and that we’re so close to having all road and highway construction in the country halted because of Washington’s political incapability.

Meanwhile, road funding should have nothing to do with blight funding, which can accurately be viewed as a bit of recompense to cities whose fortunes have been dashed by the same disinvestment that’s crushing our infrastructure.

Cities and roads need help, and support, independent of one another’s fates. What they don’t need is more of a Congress that hasn’t had the skill or certitude to produce enough of either.