CNU 22: Unfairly Sniping at Those Who Highlight the Need for Hard Decisions

The 70th anniversary of D-Day, the landing of the Allied troops in Normandy, was a couple of weeks ago.  It was one more opportunity to marvel at the fortitude of the young men who jumped into the surf and waded toward the shore as bullets flew and friends fell.

But even as the attention of 1944 turned toward Normandy, the world was filled with other injustices and obscenities.  Elsewhere in France, the citizens suffered under Nazi rule.  In Germany, the concentrations camps continued their ghastly business.  And in Russia, still an erstwhile ally for another year, the autocracy that was to throw the world into four decades of cold war was strengthening its grip.

And yet, despite those continuing tragedies elsewhere in the world, few second-guessed the strategic decision of Eisenhower, Montgomery, and the other Allied commanders or the political judgment of Roosevelt, Churchill, and the other Allied leaders to focus on Normandy.

It was understood that the liberation of Europe had to start somewhere.  That to attack at multiple locations would be a foolish waste of resources and lives.

So if Eisenhower, Roosevelt, and the others choose Normandy to be that place, then the free world would accept that judgment and await updates from the beaches.

Undoubtedly, there were naysayers and critics of strategy in the days before June 6, 1944, but they were quickly forgotten in the days after the landing, as the forces of history showed the irrelevance of their supercilious chatter.

This short historical detour had unexpected relevance CNU 22, the 22nd annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism.  A call for strategic use of resources, similar to the Eisenhower/Roosevelt decisions although without the free world immediately hanging in the balance, unexpectedly came under attack.

A day before the 70th anniversary of D-Day, Jeff Speck took the CNU 22 stage and spoke about the need to build more walkable communities.  Near the end of this talk, Speck noted that our communities, although walkability retrofits are needed in many locations, lack the resources to tackle all possible walkability improvements at one time.

Therefore, community leaders must make tough decisions about where and how to deploy the limited resources for the greatest initial benefit, with the goal that the increasing prosperity from better functioning communities can flow to more and more civic needs.

Speck calls this resource allocation “urban triage”.  Urban triage is the walkable urban equivalent of focusing military forces on the Atlantic Ocean beaches of Normandy rather than simultaneously dispatching divisions to the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas.

(Lest anyone misunderstand my analogy, I’m not suggesting that Speck is the modern equivalent of Roosevelt or Eisenhower.  Instead, Speck is calling for our Mayors, City Councils, and City Managers to be the Roosevelts and Eisenhowers of our time, to make the tough decisions about the allocation of scarce resources to the places where those resources can do the most good.

Speck is also calling upon us to be good citizens, to participate in discussions about resource allocations, and then to accept the decisions with grace and not to respond with facile and distracting sideline critiques.)

However, the strategic wisdom of Speck’s urban triage was quickly overwhelmed by a flood of vitriol as first Buffalo News columnist Colin Dabkowski and then City Labs writer Mark Byrnes twisted the concept of urban triage to pretend that that is an urbanist justification for allocating resources to more affluent neighborhoods.

Urban triage is nothing of the sort.  It is nothing more than how Speck defines it, the allocation of resources to where they can do the most good.

It is true that sometimes, perhaps more times than we’d like, the resource allocation is directed to more well-to-do neighborhoods.  But the reasons behind those allocation results have nothing to do with urbanist philosophy and everything to do with the political and financial realities of our world.

Today, some of the neighborhoods where a few resources can make a big difference are affluent neighborhoods.  But many of those neighborhoods weren’t as well-to-do two decades ago when urbanists began pointing to the coming demographic move toward urban lifestyles.  Had the resources been immediately dispatched to support walkability, they would have been going into less-affluent neighborhoods, which urbanists would have cheered.

But instead, we chose at a government level to ignore the urbanist call.  But even as we did so, the market followed the predictions of the urbanists and private money moved into the neighborhoods at which the urbanists were pointing.

Urbanists never called for money to flow into affluent neighborhoods.  They called for money to flow into potentially walkable neighborhoods and those neighborhoods became more affluent during the decades that the urbanists’ calls went unheeded.

And then there’s the reality that construction financing is more easily secured for ideas with which lenders feel comfortable.  Byrnes specifically notes the story of a Buffalo urbanist developer who tried to succeed with affordable housing but was forced by marketplace realities to turn his focus downtown.  That financial reality harms the less-affluent neighborhoods, but is unrelated to urbanism.

To twist these facts of our political and financial world into an indictment of urbanism is little more than killing the messenger.

Charles Marohn of Strong Towns also responded to the controversy with a spirited and effective defense of the urban triage concept, including the observation that sometimes the neighborhoods that are in need of urban interventions are productive places whose resources are being diverted to support financially unsustainable sprawl elsewhere.  Marohn called for the resources to remain at home, especially when they can serve critical urban needs.

In your time permits, I suggest also reading the comments under the Marohn article.  Dabkowski, perhaps seeing the wisdom of those who disagreed with him, tried to claim a victory because he had spurred discussion.

Once again, Dabkowski was trying desperately to pound a square peg into a round hole.  Sprawl proponents aren’t interested in discussions, they’re interested in easy answers, even if the answers are disastrously wrong.

Climate change a concern?  Let pseudo-scientists use arbitrary and capricious endpoints to make statistically invalid arguments that the earth is actually cooling and then dismiss climate change.

Perhaps Strong Towns is making a good case that sprawl is undermining municipal finances?  Listen to someone rant about government inefficiency and decide that the problem is the government workers, not the land-use model.

Wondering if the urbanists are right about demographics trending toward a more urban world?  Let a local columnist deride urbanists as elitists and go back to sleep.

Dabkowski played into the hands of those who want simple answers without concern for accuracy.  There is no worthiness in that approach.  All there is another delay in the progress of the inevitable.

Urbanists want to bring the benefits of urbanism to all, just as the Allies wanted to free all of Europe from tyranny, but urbanists rightly insist that the effort must focus on the urbanist equivalent of the beaches of Normandy.  Imputing false motivations to the tough decisions is unjust.

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

Urbanism Gaining Ground, but the Outcome May Remain in Doubt in the North Bay

For the last few posts, I’ve riffed on arguments made by Jeff Speck in his book “Walkable City”.  It’s been a remarkably easy way to write, because Speck offers a wealth of riff-worthy arguments.

I’ll continue on this path for today before leaving Speck for awhile.  But I will return to “Walkable City”.  It’s a remarkable book that I continue to recommend highly.

Speck argues that the battle between urbanism and sprawl is tending different directions in different places.  There is much confirmation to be found.  Kaid Benfield of the National Resources Defense Council looks at the numbers and points to places where sprawl seems to have the upper hand.  Closer to home, Sacramento County has recently approved a project that appears to be textbook sprawl.  Ultimately, I’m thankful to live in the North Bay where we haven’t been as fully seduced by sprawl.

From Speck’s introduction:

“We’ve known for three decades how to make livable cities – after forgetting for four – yet we’ve somehow not be able to pull it off.  Jane Jacobs, who wrote in 1960, won over the planners by 1980.  But the planners have yet to win over the city.

“Certain large cities, yes.  If you make your home in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, or a handful of other special places, you can have some confidence that things are on the right track.  But those locations are the exception.  In the small and midsized cities where most Americans spend their lives, the daily decisions of local officials are still, more often than not, making their lives worse.  This is not bad planning, but the absence of planning, or rather, decision-making disconnected from planning.  The planners were so wrong for so many years that now that they are mostly right, they are mostly ignored.”

Benfield concurs, looking in depth at where sprawl continues to be the predominant form of new land use.  Consistent with Speck’s observation, Benfield finds sprawl occurring not in metropolises, but in the hinterlands.

Closer to the North Bay is a recent land-use approval in Sacramento County.  On a controversial vote reported in the Sacramento Bee, the County Supervisors approved an 8,000-home master plan on 2,700-acre site, which is a disheartening 3 homes per acre.  The approval was based on the hope of a university occupying a portion of the land, an anticipation that, if not a complete pipedream, is at least unlikely.

Luckily, the North Bay, although not yet a bastion of urbanism, hasn’t been as badly seduced by sprawl.  Perhaps “stroads” function as our canary in the mineshaft.

Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns writes about stroads, a coined word for a roadway that a part rural highway and part city street, usually an overwhelming width of pavement with too many driveways, often accessing outsized retail, and providing an inhospitable environment for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Folks in the North Bay sometimes ask me to point to a stroad in our part of the world.  I struggle with the question.  Perhaps South Santa Rosa Boulevard in Santa Rosa?  Or maybe Soscol Avenue in Napa?  But neither is nearly as bad as the Midwest examples to which Marohn points.

One of the North Bay folks recently took a trip to Albuquerque.  He reported back that now he had truly seen what a stroad was.  And that he was thankful to live in the North Bay where we didn’t have stroads.

He’s right.  The North Bay wasn’t as fully seduced by sprawl as many other places.  Benfield doesn’t list the North Bay among his worst sprawl offenders.  But Speck would put us among the places where there are lessons still to be learned and minds to be changed.

The transition to urbanism will be easier for the North Bay.  But it’s a transition that still must be made.  The North Bay may have a competitive advantage over other regions because we have a headstart on urbanism.  But it’s a headstart that we can squander if we don’t pay attention.

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

Urbanism Books for 2013

When it comes to books, I’m a troglodyte.  I can see a lot of theoretical benefits in digital book readers.  But there’s something compelling about curling up in a comfortable chair with dead trees.  And those who have seen my library know the extent to which I take my affection for old-fashioned books.

But regardless of the format you prefer, 2012 was a good year for books on urbanism.  Which gives us a long list of possible reading materials for 2013.

Let’s start with the Planetizen list of the top ten urbanism books of 2012.  “Walkable City” is the stand-out on the list, but I’m also intrigued by “Urban Planning for Dummies”.  As Planetizen notes, “Seeing a ‘Dummies’ book about urban planning is actually a testament to the fact that the field of urban planning has arrived in the public consciousness.”  And I hope to find time for “Straphanger” and “Too Much Magic”.  The author of the latter, James Howard Kunstler, often goes beyond my beliefs, but is always entertaining.

As 2013 dawns, the hot book in urbanism is “Walkable City”.   Author Jeff Speck is an urban planner who didn’t begin his career with a focus on walkability.  However, when he dug into questions of how to improve urban function, he found walkability to be a surprisingly frequent solution.  So he finally yielded to the inevitable and wrote a book on the subject.

The book has been remarkably well-reviewed.  More importantly, it has spawned numerous other articles and inquiries into the nature of walkability.  If there will be an urbanism game changer in 2013, it’s probably this book.

A surprising omission from the Planetizen list is the ten-year anniversary reissue of “The Rise of the Creative Class” by Richard Florida.  His argument that a successful city is the result of a critical mass of creative people has gathered a following in the years since his initial book.  But the argument remains controversial to many.  The suggestion that people writing software at Starbucks is more important to civic vitality than old-line manufacturing or good government challenges too many shibboleths to be easily accepted.

Another author of note is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  Several years ago, Taleb wrote “The Black Swan”, an argument that human history is disproportionately influenced by events that were completely unexpected.   His most striking example was that on September 10, 2001 no one expected world history for the following decade to be dominated by the repercussions of terrorists flying airplanes into buildings.

Having introduced “black swan” into the planning lexicon, Taleb next tried to answer the question that he had effectively posed, how to build systems, organizations, and communities that survive black swans.  He offers his thoughts in “Antifragile”, which was published in 2012.  Not surprisingly, he finds urbanism to be one of the answers.  Indeed, StrongTowns specifically endorses “Antifragile”.

And on the subject of StrongTowns, Charles Marohn published his own book in 2012, “Thoughts on Building StrongTowns, Volume 1”.

And yet, with all these great candidates, we still haven’t gotten to the Kaid Benfield’s favorite new book.  Benfield, writing for the National Resources Defense Council on the best of 2012, notes the value that Speck and Marohn provide, but gives the nod to Pastor Eric Jacobsen and his book “The Space Between” on the relationship between urbanism and Christianity.   (I wrote about  Jacobsen several months ago.)  Benfield finds that Jacobsen adds a fresh and provocative voice to the conversation.

A few weeks ago, I said that I would devote myself to reading about climate change over the holidays.  And I did.  I’m enjoying the learning, but the holidays being what they are, I didn’t get as far into my climate change library as I had hoped.  So I’ll continue with climate change for another couple of weeks.  But Florida, Speck, Taleb, and Marohn are all on my reading table, awaiting my attention.  And I should be adding Jacobsen and Kunstler to the stack.

I hope you join me in reading at least one of these books.  Urbanism may be complex, but learning about it can be rewarding.  Whether from an electronic book reader or dead trees.

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