Do We Have Too Much Elbow Room?

I know a family who undertook an extended European vacation a couple of years ago.  With their children nearing the time when they would take wing, it was a final family fling.  And they flung well, with stops in several European countries, an extended visit with the family of an exchange student they had hosted, and a stop in the small Italian village from which the wife’s forebearers has emigrated.

Shortly after their return, I chatted with the husband, who was still exuberant over how well the trip had gone, how much fun his family had experienced, and what great insights they had all gained.

As the conversation waned, the husband grew pensive for a moment and then offered, “I couldn’t believe how little space in which the Europeans live, even those who are affluent.  And they seem quite content with it.”

I won’t touch the contentment element of his comment.  Charles Montgomery in “Happy City” has already covered that topic sufficiently well and perhaps conclusively.  But the husband’s home size observation fit into a topic on which I’d been giving some thought.

The U.S. leads the world in home size, and we lead by a comfortable margin.  Why is that?

Some will argue that the U.S. has been phenomenally successful in the past 75 years, first turning the tide of World War II, then jumping onto the post-war opportunities to build an industrial behemoth, and then leading the world into the era of technology.  One can make a case that never has a nation had a more successful 75 years.  And the argument follows that giant homes are part of the spoils from that success.

Except that we don’t portray that success in other aspects of our lives.  More than half of all working families have less than $10,000 in retirement savings.  We’ve reduced the funding of government to the point that critical infrastructure isn’t being maintained.  We worry obsessively that an income gap is eroding the middle class.  We’ve reduced public support for college education to the point that many young adults are beginning their working lives with a crushing load of student debt.  And all those concerns are circling about us as we sit in our giant homes.

Rather than big homes being the result of national prosperity, it seems more likely that we’ve made the choice to live in big homes to the detriment of other aspects of our lives.

(Lest anyone think that I’m pointing fingers at others, let me note that my wife and I also live in a home that’s too big for our needs.  It’s a fine house and we enjoy living in both the house and the neighborhood, but we could have sufficed with fewer square feet.

We purchased the house because it was in a part of town that we enjoyed.  Initially, we had the goal of creating a rental unit out of some of the extra space, but the challenges of the architecture, building code, zoning code, and municipal fees eventually quashed that hope.  So we now join most Americans in rattling around.)

I have a theory about how we became prone to gigantism in our dwellings.  Not surprisingly, suburbia has a role.

As we began to sprawl, we choose to support the spread by subsidizing roads and gasoline.  An interstate freeway system that was originally conceived for defense, commerce, and vacations was converted into a bird’s nest of commuter routes.

Moving to the far metropolitan fringes to get a little extra space began to seem a reasonable alternative, largely because we weren’t paying the true price.

The mortgage industry, by considering family housing expenses but not transportation costs in determining mortgage qualification, further facilitated large homes far from work.

Finally, a growing sense that a spacious, if underused, living room meant more than a thriving neighborhood and a false belief that homes were good investments, when the stock market has actually outperformed housing over time, led us to homes that we didn’t need at the cost of other elements of our lives and that often don’t make us happy.

Combining this hypothesis with the suburban musings of my previous post leads to a combined hypothesis that the national successes of the U.S. led to a hubris-based belief that suburbia was a valid solution to our land-use future, which led to subsidizing suburbia, which led to giant homes on the metropolitan fringe where we live vaguely discontent and wondering why we don’t have money for the other priorities in our lives.

The insight is almost Zen, “In the bloom of our creation were the seeds of our discontent.”

None of this is meant as a call to torch the McMansions, to don hair shirts, and to march downtown to live in tiny concrete cubes.  But changing the rules so there are more options for frugal housing options and alternative household spending priorities would seem a reasonable approach.  Personally, my wife and I would happily swap our home for a home half the size and several blocks closer to downtown, but too few options exist for that change.

However, I’ll admit that I may be piling up hypotheses into a teetering tower.  If others wish to ponder these thoughts during their holiday travels and to offer alternative suggestions, I’ll be happy to listen.

Next time, I hope to return to the great streets topic.  I had the ill-timing to propose a series of North Bay roadtrips just as the heaviest December rainfall in a century approached the coastline.  Weather permitting, I’ll take a Napa County roadtrip in the next couple of days and then write about Calistoga and St. Helena on Monday.  Weather not permitting, I’ll find another topic.

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

Having More Trust in Our Neighbors

In my previous post, I wrote that site design can be effective at promoting public safety.  If land uses are designed to encourage people to be outside or to keep an eye on the public realm even when they’re inside, crime can be reduced.  Also, as Charles Montgomery writes in “Happy City”, we’re likely to live happier lives.

But there’s is a hurdle to clear before we fully engage in public space.  Many of us are wary of our fellow human beings.  Perhaps we’ve learned to enjoy the company of the folks who live across the hall or next door, but we cast a dubious eye on the folks we don’t know and who live on another floor or down the block.

Montgomery has an example that perfectly illustrates this mistrust.  A hypothetical situation is proposed.  People are told that they’ve lost a wallet with identification, credit cards, and cash in their neighborhoods, but beyond where they’re likely to be known by the finder of the wallet.  When asked if the cash would be returned, only 25 percent said yes.

But when a study testing this exact situation was done in Toronto, 80 percent of the wallets were returned with the cash intact.  The strangers whom we bump against in our daily lives are more than three times as honest as we expect them to be.  That’s a staggering difference.

It’s possible that mistrust of strangers is an evolutionary trait.  Perhaps our ancestors were more likely to survive and to procreate if they were instinctively distrustful of the tribe on the other side of the valley.

But we’ve reached a point in history where the evolutionary benefit may have reversed.  Now, mistrusting strangers may push us into living situations and lifestyles from which we fail to suppress crime, harm the environment, and undermine municipal finances.   Mistrust can prevent us from embracing urbanism.

And often, the people we mistrust are good people.

A couple in my family tells a story that illustrates the point.  The couple was moving into a new home in the North Bay when the family dog slipped away.  The first they knew of the dog’s absence was when the wife received a call from people who had found the dog and were holding it until it could be reclaimed.  The husband immediately went to meet the rescuers, gratefully recovered the beloved family pet, and offered a reward.  The rescuers declined.

But the couple still had the phone number of the rescuers.  So they bought a gift certificate and called to arrange a meeting to give the certificate.  The rescuers again declined.  Ensuring that the dog was safely home was the only reward they wanted.

Reading this story, many readers are likely picturing the rescuers as a clean-cut middle-class family or perhaps a senior couple with deep neighborhood roots.  Nope.  The rescuers were a trio of lank-haired skateboarders who interrupted an afternoon jaunt to save the dog from traffic and then sat on the curb until the owners could arrive.  The kind of youngsters at whom many would look askance if they were loitering on a sidewalk.

To be clear, none of this is meant to suggest a hippy-dippy, flower power, why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along world view.  Miscreants and crime will always be with us.  To completely eliminate crime would require eliminating the free will to choose between lawful and unlawful actions.  I wouldn’t want to live in a world so devoid of personal choice that crime no longer exists.  Being good means nothing if being bad isn’t an option.  We need a little yin and yang, good versus evil, etc.

But the fact that crime will always around shouldn’t stop us from starting with the assumption that the strangers whom we may occasionally bump shoulders are likely good people.  Or from designing our world to build upon that trust.

When you’re out and about today, make eye contact with a stranger and offer a smile.  You may be rewarded with a smile in return.

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

Promoting Public Safety through Land-Use Design

I’ve previously written about UrbanPlan, a program of the Urban Land Institute which introduces students to the complexities and trade-offs of land-use decisions.  ULI recently updated the UrbanPlan package to include additional elements, such as green roofs, and new voices, such as aging-in-place advocates, to add to the complex balancing required of the students.

For many UrbanPlan participants, it’s their first exposure to a problem without a single right answer.  Working within a team, trying to balance multiple desirable but incompatible objectives, is a fine lesson for the working world.

I recently participated in my first mock city council under the new rules.  As always, I was impressed by the students.  Most had tried diligently to learn and to apply the lessons that UrbanPlan offered.

However, there was one point that struck me, and not for the first time, during the presentations.  It touched upon an issue of land-use theory that was inappropriate for a mock city council, but worthy of discussion here.

Within the fictional UrbanPlan setting, one of the buildings can have space dedicated to community uses.  A list of possible community needs is provided in the UrbanPlan package.  One of the possible uses is a police substation.  A couple of teams said that they planned to include a police substation to make their proposed neighborhood “safe”.

The problem is that police aren’t the best path to safely.  But site design is.

I intend no disrespect to the police.  In adequate numbers, they can provide deterrence.  But most municipal budgets don’t have the financial resources to sustain those numbers.  So instead police most often function in a responsive mode, reacting when a crime is reported.  A neighborhood police substation may shorten the response time, but only after a crime has been reported, which isn’t a definition of a safe neighborhood.

On the other hand, site design has the capacity to prevent the crime from occurring, providing the deterrence that’s otherwise unaffordable.  That deterrence, often called “eyes on the street”, can be provided through multiple elements of site design.  Residential units upstairs from retail in commercial neighborhoods.  Smaller setbacks between homes and sidewalks.  Accessory dwelling units allowing more sets of eyes to live on a street.  Walkable destinations so more people are likely to be on the sidewalks.  Well-used parks.

The role of site design in minimizing crime is well-known.  In “Happy City”, Charles Montgomery writes of lower crime rates in public housing where site design encourages gathering in courtyards.  More than fifty years ago in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Jane Jacobs wrote how busy and active sidewalks made for safer neighborhoods.

Jacobs also noted that the expanses of grass around public housing towers, the lawns that idealists thought would be used for games and picnics, instead became the domain of miscreants, emboldened by the lack of nearby watchful eyes.  Eventually, public housing residents came to despise the grass, yearning for the small stores that had once provided eyes on the street but had been razed to make way for the towers and lawns.

Many communities understand the problem with the absence of eyes, encouraging the formation of “neighborhood watches”.   But the watches are a poor substitute for the eyes of people who have a reason to be on the street and who would provide a deterrence that no neighborhood watch can match.

Imagine designing residential streets to a 45 mph standard and then imposing a 20 mph speed limit.  No matter how law-abiding a driver wants to be, it’d be harder not to let the speedometer creep upwards.  It would take an Orwellian flotilla of traffic enforcement officers to keep the traffic close to 20 mph.  So we don’t build 20 mph streets to a 45 mph standard.  Instead, we build 20 mph streets with narrower lanes and smaller radius curves, so drivers naturally drive at speeds close to 20 mph.  It’s only common sense.

But it’s a common sense that we’ve usually failed to translate into our land use planning.  We’re taken the eyes that could have provided deterrence and instead put them into family rooms at the rear of homes or in cars hurrying through neighborhoods and shielded from streetlife by tinted glass.  We’ve encouraged land-use patterns that are inherently less safe and then we’ve tried to add safety after the fact.

Fortunately, the UrbanPlan toolkit includes building types that can help return eyes to the street.  (I’d prefer more vertical mixed-use options, but perhaps that omission can be addressed in the next update.)  But the students, many because they don’t see examples in their own worlds, don’t grasp the crime-prevention power that they have.

However, I’m hopeful.  Urbanism is slowly making inroads.  Perhaps in another decade or two, the public safety aspects of good urban design will become evident to all.

And when that happens, perhaps a site planner on an UrbanPlan team will say “We considered a police substation for the restored historic building, but had designed our land-use plan to reduce crime, so instead included a community childcare center.”  That’ll be a good day.

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

Can Twenty be Plenty?

In my last post, I wrote about how our grandparents and great-grandparents yielded our streets to the automobile in the early 20th century, with the result that we’re no longer even allowed to hold block parties in the street.

Before the advent of the automobile, most street uses occurred at speeds and intervals that didn’t threaten nearby people.  Faced with the motor vehicle, capable of outrunning a drayage wagon or horse-drawn cab, able to sustain those speeds for hours, and often driven by a partially-skilled operator, our ancestors had two choices.

They could have restricted automobiles so streets remained comfortable for all users.  Or they could have abandoned the streets to cars, pushing the other users to the fringe of the right-of-way or even to oblivion.  Under a strong lobbying effort from the automobile folks, they chose the latter.

That decision had dramatic consequences, ones that have been true for all of our lives but are still startling when we consider them anew.

My front door is about forty feet from a traffic lane.  The speed limit on my street is 25 mph.  But, despite the stop signs at both ends of the block, drivers often reach 30 mph by the time they reach my home.  And pedestrians usually die if struck by a car traveling 30 or more mph.

So, forty feet from my door, a distance I can cover in fifteen strides, is a place where, unless the driver spots me in time, I can quickly become a traffic fatality.  When I chat across the street with a neighbor walking her dog on the far sidewalk, a killing zone lies between us.  I find that creepy. 

But there may be an alternative.  In “Happy City”, Charles Montgomery writes that the probability of a car/pedestrian collision being fatal to the pedestrian drops quickly below 30 mph.  By 20 mph, the pedestrian is very likely to survive.  Montgomery even speculates that pedestrians have an innate understanding of this fact, so become more comfortable when nearby vehicles travel at closer to 20 mph.

In “Walkable City”, Jeff Speck writes that many European communities are recognizing this possibility and pushing for a maximum speed of 20 mph in all residential zones.  Their slogan is “Twenty is Plenty”.  And they’re making progress.  The “Twenty is Plenty” group in Great Britain claims that over 13 million Brits now live in communities that have adopted the “Twenty is Plenty” standard.

The concept has been slower to take root on this side of the Atlantic, with the greater expanses of U.S. suburbia acting as an implicit counterargument.  But there have been pockets of progress.  In an article from 2010, Grist writes about residents in Hoboken, New Jersey arguing for a 20 mph standard.  In the quixotic hope that sarcasm can help sell the idea, Grist describes the crusade as a “crazy stance against running over children”.

More recently, residents of Brooklyn have been surreptitiously posting guerrilla traffic signs with “20 is Plenty” as a run-up to a lobbying effort at the state capitol, where they’ll argue for greater local control over speed limits. 

For those of us, which is pretty much everyone, who grew up with residential speeds of 25 mph or higher, it may seem awkward to poke along at 20 mph.  But I’ve been occasionally driving the lower speed on streets near my home.  (Warning: Don’t do this if there are cars behind you.  The drivers can quickly become agitated.)

The lower speed can soon become comfortable, with a feeling of rightness to it.  There’s more of a sense of being part of the neighborhood, rather than hurrying through to another place.

And if one has a trip of a mile through residential streets before reaching a collector or arterial, which is fairly typical, the travel time difference is only a minute, which seems a small price to pay for restoring a balance between cars and other users of the street.

If we check the possible 20 mph standard against Speck’s four criteria for walkability, we find that it improves both pedestrian safety and comfort, putting us halfway to a more walkable city.

However, converting a neighborhood to a 20 mph zone is a complicated, nearly impossible, task under California laws and mindset.  When I next return to this topic, in about a week, I’ll write about these issues.

Before closing, I’ll touch on cul-de-sacs.  Some readers may be congratulating themselves for living on cul-de-sacs, thinking that cul-de-sacs aren’t subject to the 30 mph speeds noted above.  Those readers are partially correct, but don’t get partial credit.

While cul-de-sacs, particularly short ones, don’t have speed problems, what they’ve done is shunt travel to other streets where the speed issues are at least as bad, if not worse, as drivers speed to make up for the out-of-direction travel required by cul-de-sacs.  At best, residential traffic under the current mindset and rules is a zero-sum game, with cul-de-sacs exporting their portion of the problem elsewhere.

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

Who Owns Our Streets?

While behind the wheel yesterday, I came across a group of dozen teenagers trying to cross a street between intersections, an action that is generally called jaywalking.  I was driving on an arterial in a Central Valley city, a street with five lanes and a 40 mph speed limit.  It wasn’t a safe place to cross mid-block.

I slowed to let the first half complete their crossing, then came to a complete halt, allowing the other half-dozen, who were huddled in the center turn lane, to also reach the safety of the sidewalk.

Most of the remainder hustled across, but one was so focused on disentangling the cheese on his pizza slice that he came to a near halt in my lane.  One of his friends finally took him by the sleeve and got him moving again.

I was willing to stop for the youths, and not to honk at the wayward one, for several reasons.  I wasn’t sure if my wipers could clean a pizza slice from my windshield.  There was no traffic behind me.  I had a long drive in front of me and wasn’t in a particular hurry.  And perhaps most importantly, I felt empathy for teenagers who must deal with streets filled with speeding cars in the midst of their environment.  It’s a challenge that neither their great-grandparents nor many of their peers in other countries face.

In “Happy City”, Charles Montgomery writes about the rise of drivable suburbia.  Most of the characters he lists are familiar to those who’ve studied the history.  Le Corbusier, Ebenezer Howard, Robert Moses, and others.   But Montgomery added a player about whom less had been written, the American Automobile Association.

Montgomery writes that the AAA blossomed during the 1920s, riding along on the concept of “motordom” as an essential form of freedom and arguing that all other road users should be subordinated, which is an ironic view of freedom.

By the end of the decade, that battle was largely over with the AAA victorious.  Roads were being reconfigured for high-speed travel, free parking subsidized by city coffers was becoming commonplace, and pedestrians were reduced to scurrying across the street at restricted locations, with other crossings now called “jaywalking”, a term coined by the AAA.

Although other countries also made accommodation for motor vehicles in the same era, none were as sweeping as in the U.S.

It was a resounding sea change.  After centuries in which neighbors could shake hands in the middle of the street and chat for a few moments about the proposed British tax on tea or the reports from California about rivers of gold, neighbors were now forced to scurry to the dusty edge of the road before discussing current events, looking all the while for vehicles hurdling toward them.   With little fight, our predecessors gave up rights to a common land that had been essential to community building.

The situation came into focus on a recent situation in Petaluma.  A regular reader contacted me about a block party that he and his neighbors were planning for the Fourth of July.  They hoped to barricade off their street for the day.  His neighborhood was of recent design and construction, with short blocks and multiple alternative routes, specifically designed to promote interaction between neighbors.  Temporarily blocking off one street, especially if all the neighbors concurred, seemed reasonable.

But the reader was unsure whom to contact at City Hall for a permit.  He thought I might be able to help.

I was also unsure of the answer, but at least had an idea where to start.  I fired off an email that bounced among computers in the Public Works and Police Departments.  I was given multiple preliminary responses that were vaguely encouraging or vaguely discouraging, but the final determination remained uncertain.

Finally, someone in the Police Department dug into the Petaluma Municipal Code and found the definitive answer.    Paragraph 13.32.090(K) reads “An application for a special event permit to conduct a block party may be conditioned on notice and approval by fifty percent of the residents of dwellings along the affected street(s).  Block parties must be located in a cul-de-sac to be approved.”

The reader lived in a neighborhood without cul-de-sacs, therefore he and his neighbors, although they easily met the standard for neighborhood approval, were barred from hosting block parties.  A neighborhood that was specifically configured to promote neighborly relations was barred from holding a common area party.

This isn’t meant as a diatribe against Petaluma City Hall or the Petaluma Municipal Code.  I’m guessing that the troublesome paragraph was written decades ago, when it was generally understood that cars deserved primacy over people and when it was expected that every neighborhood would have a cul-de-sac where parties could be held.  The paragraph doesn’t indicate that we’re collectively stupid, only that we have blind spots that can become glaringly apparent.

I also understand that emergency vehicle access is the likely rationale behind the rule.  However, it seems unlikely that neighbors gathered in the street to grill hotdogs would impede an ambulance attempting to reach someone choking on one of the dogs.  Instead, I would expect the neighbors to quickly move barricades and barbecues to allow emergency care to reach their neighbor.

I’m not going to try to change the Petaluma Municipal Code.  I already have too many crusades and too little time.  But if someone else wants to take on the burden, I’ll happily join the rooting section.

And I’m still hopeful of an invitation to the block party, even if we must hang out in driveways and look both ways before crossing the streets.

Lastly, I’ll remain willing to accommodate street crossings by pizza-toting teenagers not using crosswalks.  I won’t encourage those crossings, but neither will I honk or express exasperation.  The teenagers are doing their little bit to reclaim common land and needn’t be condemned.

Schedule Notes

Petaluma Transit: The first of the Petaluma Transit meetings about evening service and a possible fare increase were held on April 23.  I had planned to attend one or both, but other obligations arose.  However, I’ll definitely drop by both outreach sessions on May 6, 10am to noon at the Petaluma Senior Center and 1pm to 7pm at the Petaluma Community Center.  If one or both of the Petaluma Transit issues interest you, I suggest you also stop by.

Parks: My recent posts on park usage elicited a range of comments.  I told several readers that I planned to continue the conversation this week, but other commitments interfered.  I’ll write further about streets to begin next week and then slide back into parks.

Petaluma Urban Chat: The next meeting of Petaluma Urban Chat will be held on Tuesday, May 13. I anticipate another fine conversation about “Happy City.”   If you think you’d enjoy further discussion of the book, I suggest you plan to join us.  I must be away that day and regret my absence, but am sure that the remainder of the group will carry on well.

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

Neighbors are Great, in Measured Doses

I have a regular reader who often responds when I write about socialization in urban settings.  After living for a number of years in a low-density, west Marin rural neighborhood, the reader and his wife moved several years ago into a moderately dense urban setting, on the outer fringe of what can be considered walkable.  (His Walk Score is 63.) 

The reader tells me that he found the socialization better in his rural neighborhood.  He reports that he and his wife have tried, with limited success, to make friends in their new neighborhood.

I’ve responded that social networks take time and that the buffer between public and private spaces is crucial.  My responses were generally adequate, but felt less informed and complete than I might have wished.

Luckily, Charles Montgomery came to my rescue with a story in “Happy City”, a story that also resonated with experiences from my own life.  Montgomery’s theory, for which I can vouch, is that socialization requires settings in which interaction can be initiated and sustained, but from which a graceful retreat is also possible.

Montgomery tells the story of a Vancouver resident.  Thinking that he would be happy in a small apartment with a great view, the man bought a condominium in one of the slender towers that define the Vancouver approach to urbanism.  But the skinny common hallway leading to his condominium front door wasn’t conducive to social contact.  Even when he bumped a neighbor, the greetings were brief and perfunctory.  The man soon found himself lonely, with the view taunting him in his isolation.

Chance led him to move to a different condominium, one in a two-story building near the foot of the tower.  In his new unit, the social interface was different.  He could retreat inside when he wanted privacy, linger on his balcony when he was willing to exchange greetings with neighbors, and even be lured into community volleyball games in the common area.

He blossomed in his new setting, building strong relationships that helped define his life.

I can relate a similar experience from my own life.  My first three post-college homes were in multi-family settings, two apartment complexes and one condominium development.  Each place had a different configuration, with differing socialization effects, although it took me years and “Happy City” to understand why that was.

My first home was an apartment with interior hallways.  There was no place to linger in the halls.  I only saw neighbors if we both happened to be in the hallway at the same moment.  There was a pool in the center of the complex, but with some 300 units in the development, the chance of seeing a familiar face at the pool was slight.

I lived in the apartment for a year and became acquainted with only a single person.  As I recall, the only knock on my door during the entire year was by a policeman with an arrest warrant for the previous tenant.

My second home was even less facilitating of socialization.  The front doors were reached by exterior walks and stairs that were shared by only one other apartment.  Nor was there an area for mingling anywhere within the development.  I lived there eight months and don’t recall a single other person.

I wouldn’t have described myself as lonely in either of the apartments.  But after five years of college with the shared living and laughter of dorm rooms and campus apartments, it was odd to find my social life existing only at work and elsewhere away from home.

And then I got lucky.  Having done my first full-year, post-college tax return and realizing that I desperately needed deductions, I looked for a home to buy.  I found a nearby condominium project that was nearly sold out.  But one of the units had fallen out of escrow.  I quickly snapped it up.

And so I found myself with a condominium overlooking a pool.  The front door access was much like the second apartment, an exterior walkway and stairs shared with only one other unit.

But the key feature was the balcony perhaps thirty feet from the end of the pool.  I would arrive home after work, shed my tie, and step onto the deck to see who was hanging out.  Spying a few friends, I could grab a beverage and join them.  Or if there was no one with whom I wanted to chat, I could retreat inside to begin dinner.

From the balcony launch pad, much like the latter condominium in Charles Montgomery’s Vancouver example, I quickly built a social circle.  At its peak, there were perhaps a dozen of us who gathered around the pool in various combinations, sometimes continuing onto dinner in one of our homes.  And all of us lived around the pool, giving us the opportunity to engage or to withdraw as we saw fit.

It’s been more than 30 years since I moved on after that condominium, but I still remain in regular contact with one of the couples from that social circle and their children who later in life completed their family.

And that’s the message that I’d give to my reader frustrated by the socialization of his semi-walkable neighborhood.  It’s not he and his wife.  It’s not unfriendly neighbors.  It’s the settings that fail to give us the range of social interaction possibilities.

We’re cautious in how we get to know people.  We want to meet new people.  But we also don’t want to find ourselves stuck in conversation with a boor for the evening.  Not do we want to risk being rebuffed if we move too quickly.  And so we need settings that allow us to dip our toes into the social whirl and that allow us to withdraw when we wish

Urbanism can meet that standard, as the photos from Paris and Venice show.  It can also fall badly short.  What are the chances of beginning a lifelong friendship while reclining on a balcony above a parking lot?

Socialization in urban settings is a solvable problem.  But only if we understand it and try to solve 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)

Are We Fooling Ourselves about Parks?

I’ve previously written that one of the fuels of drivable suburbia is self-myths, stories about ourselves that we’d like to believe to be true, but aren’t.

Although it’s declining as a demographic segment, let me use the nuclear family as an example.  Mom fantasizes about serving drinks in a formal living room while wearing a black cocktail dress.  Dad thinks he’ll become a barbecue master with the right set-up and a bit of practice.  And both parents picture their children playing in a backyard pool before settling in to do homework in their study cubbyholes.

 But the reality is that Mom doesn’t even own a black cocktail dress, the last time Dad grilled anything other than hot dogs he needed a fire extinguisher to douse the flames, the pool is filled with moldering leaves, and the children haven’t done homework in months and will be lucky to get C’s.

But meanwhile the family found a home to support their myths, a four-bedroom house on a quarter-acre lot, surrounded by other four-bedroom houses on quarter-acre lots, and everyone drives everywhere because the low density can’t support walkability.  Meanwhile, no one is happy because the failure to conform to their myths weighs on them and because their suburban setting doesn’t meet their psychological needs.

(I suspect that the happiest folks are those who’re honest and insightful about how they live their lives and find homes that accommodate those lives.  But that’s a topic for another time.)

Today, I’ll offer another myth to add to the story.  The parents expect that their children will happily spend their Sunday afternoons gamboling in the grassy sward of a neighborhood park, perhaps romping with other children.  But the apparent reality is the children have no interest in neighborhood parks.  Nonetheless, because everyone from parents to zoning code authors to planning staffs to city councils believed that the neighborhood parks are needed, many exist, often empty but sucking up municipal funds.

This tentative conclusion is based on recent observations I’ve been making.  Twice before, I’ve written about the number of park users that I found around Petaluma on sunny Sunday afternoons.  I recently took another trip around town to collect a third set of data points.

There are five neighborhood parks at which I’m asked to make periodic observations in my role on the Petaluma Recreation, Music, and Parks Commission.  During my first springtime visit, I found 32 folks using the five parks.  Disheartened, I hoped for more during my next visit.  Instead the total had declined to 20.

Nor did the trend improve during my third springtime visit.  Again counting heads near midday on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon, I found a total of eight people in my five parks.  Seven of them were clustered in a single park, with three of my parks completely empty.

Even more telling, every group of people that I spied was adult-led.  There wasn’t a single instance of a child or a group of children coming to a park on their own.  The myth of children going to a neighbor park without adult encouragement and supervision was apparently dead, at least on this Sunday afternoon in Petaluma.

That doesn’t mean that all Petaluma parks were underused on that day.  I continued onward to Leghorn Park, where I’d found had found over 100 park users on my previous visit.  This time, perhaps there wasn’t a Little League game being contested, the count was down to about 75, but good use was still being made of the broader range of park amenities.  And there was again a flow of people between the park and the adjoining Parkway Plaza shopping center.

However, I found only two people at Eagle Park, a park close to Leghorn and similar in size, but without the breadth of amenities or the retail proximity.  At least it was an improvement over the empty park that I’d found on my previous visit.

Lastly, I swung by McNear Park.  In response to a previous post, a reader suggested the McNear was the westside equivalent of Leghorn.  It was a good comment.  When I dropped by, there were about 50 people engaged in a variety of activities.  McNear lacks the breadth of facilities, the well-integrated design, and the retail proximity of Leghorn, but it stands far above the neighborhood parks on my checklist.

As I’ve written before, three Sundays of observations doesn’t prove anything.  There are people who spent years studying how parks are used and their insights should be rated far above mine.  However, among those people are writers such as William Whyte and Jan Gehl whose findings seemingly support my observations.

If my Sunday observations and broader studies with which they’re consistent are valid, what direction does that set for parks?

To begin, neighborhood parks, especially if all they include is a swath of grass, a few benches and a play structure, are badly underutilized and probably unneeded in their current form.

That isn’t to say that neighborhood parks can’t have a function.  In “Happy City”, author Charles Montgomery offers a supported argument that people are happier when they have a daily interaction with nature, even if the interaction is at a distance.  So, neighborhood parks, even if underused, may still function as a backdrop for relatively more contented lives.  So the challenge may be to reconfigure neighborhood parks toward the “biophilia” function and away from the mythical childhood play function, perhaps saving a few municipal dollars in the process.

Also, the decline of neighborhood parks doesn’t mean that parks in general are a failing idea.  I can name at least four other types of parks that are doing well.  Those types, with Petaluma examples, are:

·         Multi-faceted parks that attract a variety of users, reaching a critical mass where people show up to watch the people who are already there.  Petaluma examples: Leghorn and McNear Parks.

·         Parks for organized sports.  Petaluma examples: Lucchesi, Princeton, and the upcoming East Washington Park.

·         Native parks for hiking and biking.  Petaluma example: Helen Putnam Park.

·         Downtown plazas.  Petaluma examples: Putnam Plaza and, to a lesser extent, Walnut Park.

It’s an interesting time to be a parks commissioner.  I look forward to my continuing duties, especially if it means breaking down further myths.

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

Are We Happy Yet?

I’m not good at book reviews.  A good reviewer should finish the book, cogitate upon the full extent of the thesis being argued, and then write about the complete book.

But I can’t finish a book before beginning my cogitation.  I come across a chapter, a paragraph, or even a single idea that captures my attention and I want to write about it and to expand upon it.  And if there are no chapters, paragraphs, or ideas that capture my attention, then I may never finish the book.

Perhaps this book review deficiency is a character flaw.  But I don’t care.  I like being excited by ideas.  And I like sharing that excitement.  And if that means that I share my thoughts about a thought-provoking land use book at a half-dozen different times and places, I’ll live with that.  I’d rather have enthusiasm than good form.

Earlier in the history of this blog, I wrote book reviews about entire books.  “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, “The Power Broker”, “Wrestling with Moses”, “Pocket Neighborhoods”, and “The Geography of Nowhere”.   I think all were perfectly competent book reviews, but none had the passion of taking a single element from a “Walkable City”, such as pedestrian interest, and expounding upon it.  So that’s how I’ll write about books from here onward.

And that’s how I’ll write about “Happy City” by Charles Montgomery.  I first introduced “Happy City” a little more than a month ago.  Since then, I’ve read and reread much of it.  Today, I want to focus on a single argument that Montgomery makes particularly well and that’s key to the thesis that he puts forth.

Montgomery argues that our ideas of happiness are understandable from an evolutionary perspective, but nonetheless flawed in our contemporary world, undermining our happiness, our financial wealth, and even the health of our planet.

As Montgomery writes, there was an evolutionary benefit to acquisition.  The hunter who wasn’t happy with killing a saber-toothed tiger, but instead continued to hunt for a mastodon, was more likely to survive and to procreate.  Even if the hunter was goaded into further hunting by watching a nearby hunter stalk a mastodon, the evolutionary advantage was still secured.  So we’re born with “keeping up with the Jones” hard-wired into us.

That hard-wiring presents itself as the sense that we’ll be “happy” with the next big acquisition, whether it’s a new luxury car or a bigger suburban house.  But the first problem is that our perception of happiness, to the extent that happiness is based on material possessions, is affected by what others around us possess.  So if we move into a new upscale neighborhood, thinking that we’ll be happy, all we’ve done is to put ourselves among people who own more things than we do, moving the threshold of “happiness” further away.

And so we chase better cars and bigger homes all the way to the urban fringe and beyond, pursuing a phantom dream.

Even worse, not only do we not find happiness in suburbia, we often find the reverse.  Personal happiness correlates adversely with length of commute.  And the children that we think will benefit from bigger bedrooms and backyards often find suburbia boring, turning to alcohol, drugs, and law-breaking for excitement.

A prevalent school of political thought is based on the concept of the “invisible hand” as first suggested by philosopher John Locke.  The argument is that our world is best served if we all seek our individual well-being, with the collective result representing the best possible set of rules.  The problem is that we, in our rush to suburbia, have been making poor decision regarding our happiness.  And if we can’t make good individual decisions, then the “invisible hand” is clumsy and ineffective.  Perhaps we can even say that it’s slapping us upside the head.

To add two final layers of misery to our false path, we struggle to maintain the infrastructure needed to maintain our far-flung world, putting further stress on our personal and government finances.  And the energy needed to sustain our sprawling places adds momentum to the growing spectre of climate change.

Our obsolete evolutionary path to happiness has led us to a perfect storm of discontent and pending despair.

Is it possible to turn around on the path?  Perhaps.  Certainly some communities and countries have shown paths to happiness that aren’t based on unbridled acquisition.  It’s where Montgomery goes next in “Happy City”.  And it’s where I’ll be following him in future posts.

Perhaps I’ll never provide a single, comprehensive review of “Happy City”.  But I can say unequivocally that it’s an important book which is worthy of your attention.

Schedule Note

If the above subject intrigues or excites you, you should participate in Petaluma Urban Chat.

As previously noted, Urban Chat will get together this week.  We’ll meet at the Aqus Café at 2nd and H Streets in Petaluma on Tuesday, April 8.  We’ll convene for conversation at 5:30, with the discussion beginning at 5:45.  The first five chapters of “Happy City” will be our topic of discussion.

Even if you haven’t yet read the book, you should find the conversation engaging.  Hopefully sufficiently engaging that you’ll findH a copy of the book and read along.

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