4.0 HPSR 12-08-2005 - Laserfiche WebLink

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but once you've built the building the job creation is done." Yes, but there are two responses to that. First, real estate is a capital asset - like a drill press or a boxcar. It has an economic impact during construction, but a subsequent economic impact when it is in productive use. Additionally, however, since most building components have a life of between 25 and 40 years, a community could rehabilitate 2 to 3 percent of its building stock per year and have perpetual employment in the building trades. And these jobs can't be shipped overseas. Nor are they jobs that exist only as a result of self-defeating protectionism. Now there are some economists and politicians who would argue that in economic down turns public expenditures should be made to create employment. And I'm certainly not going to argue with that. And as you all know, among politicians' favorite forms of public works is building highways. David Listokin at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers has calculated the relative impact of public works. Let's say a level of government spends $1 million building a highway. (And these days that means a highway not quite the length of this room) but anyway a million dollar highway -what does that mean? 34 jobs, $1.2 million in ultimate household income, $100,000 in state taxes and $85,000 in local taxes. Or we could build a new building for $1 million. 36 jobs, $1,223,000 in household income, $103, 000 in state taxes and $86,000 in local taxes. Or we could spend that million rehabilitating an historic building. 38 jobs, a million three in household income, $110,000 in state taxes and $92,000 in local taxes. Now you tell me which is the most economically impacting in public works projects. Another area that consistently emerges as a major component of preservation's economic impact is heritage tourism. Ask someone who is in the business of economic analysis and they'll tell you how tricky trying to figure out exactly what "tourism expenditures" are. I live in Washington, D.C. If I rent a car and drive to New York City for a weekend is the toll on the Jersey Turnpike a tourism expenditure or not? Well, I'm not an expert in econometric modeling, so I've avoiding trying to calculate composite numbers. Instead, I've simply looked at the incremental difference between the expenditures of heritage visitors and other types of tourists. Virginia is one of the states that subscribe to a giant survey database that questions households about did they travel, where, how much did they spend, etc. The data is sortable. So in a study a few years ago we sorted out the patterns of heritage visitors. We defined heritage visitors as those who did one or more of the following: visited a museum (in Virginia around 90% of the museums are history museums), visited a Civil War battlefield, or visited an historic site. And we contrasted those patterns with visitors to Virginia who did none of those things. Here's what we found: heritage visitors stay longer, visit twice as many places, and on a per trip basis spend 2 '/z times as much money as other visitors. Wherever heritage tourism has been evaluated this basic tendency is observed: heritage visitors stay longer, spend more per day and, therefore, have a significantly greater per trip economic impact. Now I said that I've never tried to estimate total tourism dollars, but there are lots of people smarter than I who have. The University of Florida in conjunction with Rutgers did an