Faith-Based Planning Must Be Neutralized

Earlier this year, I mentored a class of high school students on the intricacies of urban planning.  (I’ve previously written about the UrbanPlan curriculum.)  Several mentors were involved, each working with a small group of students.  The mentoring organizer was a public planner, recently retired after a long career which he concluded as a planning director.

As we assembled for the first of two mentoring sessions, I chatted with the organizer.  This was during the weeks immediately preceding the Petaluma Urban Chat when StrongTowns founder Chuck Marohn spoke with us by video link.  I mentioned this to this organizer, who expressed some interest.  That evening, I send him links to several posts about StrongTowns and the upcoming video chat.

As we assembled for the next mentoring session, the organizer sidled over and thanked me for the links.  Although I didn’t sense much enthusiasm, my proselytizing juices were flowing.  I suggested he come to Petaluma for the video chat.  You would have thought that I had suggested satanic worship.  He quickly backed away, assuring me, and himself, that he would never do anything like that.

It wasn’t the first time that I’ve seen senior planners with years of experience react in discomfort, fear, and denial about urbanism.

I did several projects in a community that was generally known for its progressive approach to land-use planning.  The planning director was thought by many to be at the cutting edge of new thinking about land use.  In fact, he was an adamantine opponent of urbanism.

He never put that position in words during his day-to-day duties, but the evidence was overwhelming.  Reports came back about him deprecating urbanism at planning conferences.  He would go to great lengths to impede urbanist projects in his community, including one situation that I rank among the most unprofessional I’ve seen in my career.  It was a tragedy for his town, with repercussions that still linger.

I want to make clear that I’m not painting all planners with this brush.  I’ve previously written about planners who see the logic of urbanism and yet are forced to conceal that knowledge.  And there are a great many public planners who competently and diligently apply the codes of their municipalities without bias.

But there is an aging cadre of planners for whom urbanism is anathema.

I’ve pondered the situation and the best analogy I can draw is religion.  Religious faith can be a marvelous thing, but ultimately it is just that, faith.  The definitive evidence for religious beliefs is lacking.

Similarly, the drivable suburban planning model was largely based on faith.  Despite a paucity of evidence and based solely on a seemingly plausible but untested hypothesis, the walkable urban model that had served well for millennia was discarded and replaced by the drivable suburban model.

Even as the evidence began to mount that the experiment was failing, as municipal balances sheet began to dip into the red, and as the threat of climate change loomed ever larger, we found ways to jiggle the results and convince ourselves that if we just stayed with the hypothesis a little longer, all would be well.

And the high priests of this blind faith were a generation of planners, some of whom still hold important planning positions.

I’m trying not to be overly critical of them.  Faith can be wonderfully comforting thing.  And that comfort can grow with time and age.  It can be a difficult thing to reach an advanced professional age and then be forced to confront the possibility that object of one’s faith is a failed hypothesis.

And so these planners, like many people in similar situations, ignore the evidence and continue to blindly, even aggressively, stay strong in their faith.

(I may sometimes poke fun at my engineering brethren, but we have the good fortune of working in a discipline that steeped in data, not faith.  There may be some professional backbiting, but no one goes to war over whether a bridge would function better in orthotropic steel or post-tensioned concrete.)

But the problem with having planning directors who continue to have faith in a failing vision is that they are directing us away from the future that we need.

So what should we do with these relics of a failed religion?  I’m reminded of a moment in Indian history as reported by historian Jan Morrison.  The Thuggee were a Hindu sect who believed that the correct spiritual path was to befriend traveling strangers and then to ritualistically murder and bury them during the night.

Bringing the Thuggee under control was a challenge for the 19th century imperial British authorities.  But even after the enforcement task was complete, a problem remained.  The Thuggee acknowledged that the British seemed to have superior gods because they were able to suppress the Thuggee, but the Thuggee believed that the path of ritual murder was still the correct one for them.

Even the young Thuggee, who had yet committed no crimes and therefore couldn’t be jailed, willingly admitted that they would follow the Thuggee path given the opportunity.

The British solution was to place the Thuggee in villages where they could live in peace and dignity, but without the option of leaving.  The Thuggee accepted the wisdom of the solution and gradually vanished from history.

It seems that a similar solution is required is required for the planners who cling to the failed drivable suburban hypothesis.  We needn’t strip them of their dignity or their professional positions, but we need to isolate them from opportunities to perpetuate their failed belief system.

Our future requires it.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

The Changing Location of New Housing – Part 3

In my first two posts on urban/suburban demographic trends (Part 1 and Part 2), I wrote about studies on whether people and homes are moving from the suburbs back into the cities and justifications that would explain the trend.  Quick summary: A movement downtown seems to be happening, although the conclusion likely won’t be confirmed until the economy is again running well.

I’m pleased that the urban cores are likely gaining ground.  But I have a nagging concern that we’re not asking the right question for the North Bay.   If we phrase the discussion in North Bay terms, the ongoing discussion is about whether people are returning to San Francisco and Oakland.  If they are, that’s great.  It implies improving urban vitality and more lifestyles that are sustainable.

But my real concern, and the concern of this blog, is about bringing the desirable features of urban life to North Bay communities, which a debate about building permits or population growth in the urban cores doesn’t really address.

To be clear, I don’t want Petaluma, Sonoma, or Sebastopol to become like San Francisco.  San Francisco is a lovely place, but so is Petaluma.  I don’t want the latter to lose its unique charm.

But I want some of the key attributes of urban life, the easy walkability, the ready access to markets for daily shopping, the convenient transit, to be enhanced for North Bay residents.  And I want people who desire that lifestyle in the North Bay to have that option.  It’s increasing clear that urban cores offer most sustainable lifestyles.  My hope is that some of that sustainability can be brought to the North Bay without harming the character of the communities.

I believe it’s possible.  But I don’t see how increasing population in San Francisco advances that goal.

Emily Badger and Mark Strozier, although addressing a slightly different question, helped to illuminate the key point of my uneasiness and to foster another level of understanding.

Badger, writing in Atlantic Cities, describes her upbringing in an urban Chicago neighborhood, where she learned to be a snob about urban life.  “The city was innately virtuous because it had different kinds of people and more museums and a Chinatown. And if you were not willing to go through the occasional weapons inspection to win access to all of that, then clearly your priorities were wrong.”

Today, she’s living in Alexandria, Virginia and agonizing over whether she’s been subverted into living in a suburb.  She runs through rationales for arguing that Alexandria isn’t a suburb such as its founding before Washington, D.C. (how can a place be a suburb if it existed before the place to which it is “sub”?), the ready access to transit, and the absence of an Applebee’s.  She ultimately decides that city-living is about risk-taking.  As Alexandria doesn’t require risks, it must be a suburb.

Her article was entertaining and thought-provoking until the conclusion, which seemed facile and unsatisfying.  How can gun checks to be emblematic of a good place to live?

Strozier, writing for The Polis, felt the same and offered an effective reconsideration.  He had undergone a relocation similar to Badger’s, moving from Brooklyn to Tarrytown, New York to accommodate a growing family.  He was now also wondering if he was living in a suburb.

He decides that the question is moot, that the urban/suburban divide isn’t meaningful in the 21st century.  With poverty and diversity moving to the suburbs and with single-family homes no longer the sole residential unit in the suburbs, the hard line between urban and suburban land uses is disappearing.  (Only yesterday, the New York Times reported that the number of poor living in the suburbs had increased from 11.3 million in 2000 to 18.9 million in 2010.)

Furthermore, he argues that the key distinguishing feature between land uses is now human scale, the thing that makes cities walkable and the absence of which makes most suburbs drivable.  Many places that might have previously been considered suburbs have a human scale, Tarrytown and Alexandria included.  So Strozier decided that both he and Badger lived in human-scale communities and that neither had any reason to apologize.

Strozier gets it right.  I began using the walkable urban/drivable suburban distinction only a short time ago.  I don’t intend to stop using it.  It’s good shorthand.  But it’s also limited.  The key distinction between communities isn’t whether they’re “urban”; it’s whether they’re sized to us or to our cars.

As Strozier points out, the key to “walkable urban” isn’t that a place is walkable, but that there is an incentive to walk.  That, faced with a four-block trip to buy milk, the first choice is walking shoes, not car keys.  Most drivable suburbs are walkable, if one is willing to endure being a puny human being in an environment where cars hold sway.  That isn’t what is meant by “walkable urban.”   For a community to be walkable, walking must be the reasonable, comfortable choice.

Strozier’s comment points the way to the distinction that I was trying to find.  Human-scale communities are those that encourage walking.  And not only walking, but also biking and the use of transit.  Any form of transportation that doesn’t start by wrapping us in 3,000 pounds of steel and plastic, isolated from our fellow citizens.

So, the walkable urban versus drivable suburban divide can be better expressed as a foot-bike-transit friendly versus car friendly divide.

And yet that doesn’t catch the full range of possibilities either.  There is another type of community, the dense urban settings where seventy stories of glass condominiums remove residents from a connection to the street.  Indeed, the towering buildings put streets into such perpetual shadows that the streets cease to be interesting places.

So, led by the musings of Badger and Strozier, I’ve come to a new way to think about communities.  Foot-bike-transit friendly equals human-scale equals a place I want to live.  Car-elevator friendly equals not human-scaled.

Foot-bike-transit friendly becomes the sweet spot, the midpoint between horizontal sprawl and vertical sprawl.

Is it a perfect delineation?  Probably not.  But it provides a deeper level of insight than urban versus suburban.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Walkable Urban

It’s been only a few days since I first heard the phrase “walkable urban” and it’s already engrained in my vocabulary. It conveys so much content, especially when contrasted with “drivable suburban”.

One message it sends is that new urbanism isn’t limited to the four-story residential buildings that seem frightening to some. New urbanism includes single-family homes up to a half-mile from a commercial core, as long as the streets are “complete streets”, meaning that allowances are made for pedestrians and bicyclists.

One measure of a new urbanist area is Walk Score, a tally of walkability which measures the availability of sidewalks and the distances to typical destinations. The range of scores is from 0 to 100. My standard is that a Walk Score of 50 or above qualifies as urbanist. My home has a Walk Score of 60. My wife and I have great access to elementary, junior high, and high schools, but the nearby retail options are limited to a small grocery, deli, and neighborhood tavern. We’re a half-mile from downtown, so 60 seems about right.

By ranging from 0 to 100, Walk Scores illustrate a key point about walkable urban versus drivable suburban. The two phrases are helpful distinctions, but they’re arbitrary. There isn’t a barbed wire fence across the sidewalk where the Walk Score drops from 50 to 49. A healthy person living an active lifestyle can conduct much of his life on foot from a home with a Walk Score of 40 or even less.

I’ll continue to use walkable urban versus drivable suburban as good shorthand, but ask you to remember that the world is rarely black and white.

For a further explanation of the prospects for walkable urban, I direct you to a NorthJersey.com article about the demographics behind and the potential for walkable urbanism. To me, the key point is that 77 percent of the young adult demographic, the “millennials”, prefer a walkable urban lifestyle. That number should get the attention of every planning department, developer, and lender in the land.

For a bit of fun with Walk Score, check out this approach to the NCAA basketball Sweet 16. The author plays out the final two weeks of the college basketball season using the Walk Scores of the home courts as the game-winning factor. I only regret that my alma mater, the California Golden Bears, did a face plant in the first round of the tourney. The Walk Score of Haas Pavilion in Berkeley is 98. Had the Bears survived the first weekend, they would have won the walkability crown, beating Marquette’s 95.

Also take a look at a this walkability photo gallery from the same author who did the Sweet 16. All of those places can be on my vacation list. (In fact, I did visit one last summer.)

Lastly, the photo above is another fine example of walkability. Lido, Italy is across the Laguna Veneta from Venice. It’s on the mainland, so cars are again present, but bicyclists and pedestrians are allowed to share the streets. Twice during a stay in Venice, I took the vaporetto to Lido so I could walk to the beach along this street, enjoying the comfortable sharing by cars, bikes, and walkers.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated. Please comment below or email me. And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)