Successful Planning Requires Game-Management Quarterbacks, Not Delusions of Grandeur

The French Quarter in New Orleans before the tourists arrive

I’ve written twice about “The Trouble with City Planning” by Kristina Ford.  In the first post, I found the middle of the book to have useful insights into the planning process, particularly on the role of general plans.  Later, I described the same worthwhile middle section as awkwardly conjoined to ill-conceived introductory and closing sections that seemed to have been the ideas of a market-focused editor rather that of the author.

Despite the latter concern, I still found the book sufficiently useful that I kept it on my reading table for the occasional riffle through the stronger portions.

It was during one of those riffles when I again came across a paragraph that was a particularly egregious example of another concern with the book.  Not enough of a concern to cause me to set the book aside, but one that made me twitch.  Before I expound, let me share the section.

“In preparing for public discussion, planners rely on their professional training.  They of course are aware of the more generalized textbook ways by which various uses of land produce adverse effects.  Planners can, for instance, accurately predict the amount of increased traffic a new commercial enterprise will occasion, and can predict in advance the air and water pollution caused by new industrial plants.”

Really?  Land planners can model traffic generation and perform environmental science?  And those are only examples of the skills that planners have, meaning they have even more talents?  Why would they ever need anyone else on the team if they have all those abilities?  Ford makes it seem as if planners can play all the instruments in the orchestra and then fly home with capes fluttering behind and giant red P’s on their chests.

I’ve known many land planners in my years as a civil engineer.  Sometimes, I’ve sat across the table from them.  Other times, we’ve been members of the same team.  But I’ve never come across a planner who had the skills implied by Ford or even pretended they did.  Nor do I want to. 

For most planning tasks, the role of a planner is to assimilate and process information that has been developed by others and is beyond the range of their own technical expertise, such as predicted traffic or environmental contaminants.  It’s not a trivial task.  To integrate technical data from multiple specialists into a coherent document and to later defend that document in public hearings takes a special ability.  But it’s a different ability from having the full breadth of technical skills that Ford implies.

If the offending paragraph noted above had been the only instance of this attitude in the entire book, I would have ascribed it to sloppy editing and never mentioned it here.  But it’s not.  Throughout much of the book, Ford offers glorious testimony to the vast breadth of technical knowledge possessed by planners. 

I’m perplexed by how Ford came to have her overinflated opinion of the skills of planners.  I can’t imagine she’s come across planners with the breadth of skills she describes.  And yet, with a nearly decade as the New Orleans Planning Director and other earlier planning employments, she must have worked with hundreds of planners.  It’s a puzzle.

Is it a problem that Ford has an odd view of planners?  Not really.  If a reader’s first introduction to planning is this book, they may come away with a false impression of the breadth of planners’ technical knowledge.  But if a reader is first encountering planning through this book, they already have a problem.   This tome better serves as a source of helpful nuances and alternative perspectives to a planning education begun elsewhere.

At the bottom line, my point is that, while the beginning and end of the book have a tacked on feel and while the author has an overly exalted view of her profession, the book still offers points worth pondering.  Readers shouldn’t be easily deterred, but should instead brush away the dross and keep digging.  I found the effort worthwhile.

In my next post, I’ll describe an anti-urban overreach by the NFL in their planning for Superbowl 50.  Although it seems that common sense will prevail, the story still provides an object lesson.

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

Teach, Then Ask

In my last post, I wrote about “The Trouble with City Planning” by Kristina Ford.  Although I suspected that the message of the book had been muddied through the editorial and publishing steps, I appreciated much of what Ford wrote, finding it a good common-sense explanation of why city planning often stumbles.

However, I took issue with one position she espoused.  The difference is probably more a matter of degree than absolutes, but meaningful regardless.  A story from my long-ago youth will illustrate.

I don’t recall having a long-standing dream to make music before the fourth grade, but when my classmates and I were offered an opportunity to take up a musical instrument early during that school year, I and many others quickly signed up.  Perhaps I thought that blowing sweet music on a trumpet would prove irresistible to the fourth grade babes.  (Kathy Fitzpatrick, where have you gone?)

 But the school district in which I attended fourth grade didn’t hand out instruments or instruction to anyone.  They insisted on spending resources only on those who showed a degree of musical aptitude.

So I found myself a week later soon in a cafeteria of fourth-graders, gathered to have our musical skills tested.  The test began with a severe looking grey-haired lady playing two scratchy snippets of music on an aging school district record player.  After the second snippet, she asked “If the first selection was correctly in tune, was the second selection sharp or flat?”

And immediately, fifty fourth-graders were looking at each other, wondering what was meant by sharp and flat.  Sensing our puzzlement, the lady gave a pursed lips lesson, explaining that sharp meant too high in pitch and flat meant too low.

Even though the explanation didn’t provide much assistance, the test nonetheless continued with seemingly innumerable questions about sharp versus flat, which quickly degraded into random guesses.  Sharp-sharp-flat-flat-flat-sharp-sharp seemed equally possible as any other pattern of answers.

As I recall, the test eventually moved onto questions such as distinguishing trumpets from violins from clarinet, but it was too late for most of us.  Our dreams of wooing female classmates with sweet music were gone and we were down to our athletic prowess and/or clever wit as attraction devices, neither of which seemed promising.  (This was a two years pre-Beatles, so the thought of gathering in a garage with guitars was still on the far side of the horizon.)

The problem, of course, was that none of us had been exposed to the type of questions being asked.  I can’t speak for my fellow classmates, but I came from a household where music was a regular part of life.  But I never once hearing anything like “Bing Crosby was a little flat on that version of ‘White Christmas’” or “The French horn was sharp in the Brahms’ Concerto.”  I’d never been introduced to the skills needed to succeed on the test and therefore failed badly.

I know that there is much current opposition to “teaching to the test”.  I concur with the concern, but the musical aptitude test was the complete reverse and it was an even worse approach.

And that’s the problem I have with author Ford.  She puts great weight on citizen input into the land planning process, effectively granting overall control to the citizenry, with the principal function of planning staff being to write down and to administer the rules needed to implement the citizens’ vision.

And while I agree that input from the citizenry is essential, often providing insights about the community that aren’t visible from the planning office, that input has to be informed.  Ford seems to think that a good public meeting at which well-formed presentations are made is sufficient.  I believe that understanding good land use requires far more background.

Furthermore, there is a fundamental difference between fourth graders and adults in how they respond to situations in which their information is inadequate to the task.  Fourth graders look perplexed and get quiet.  Adults become more convinced of the rightness of their limited grasp and become more bellicose.   And that’s not helpful to good land use planning.

To be honest, I don’t know what the right solution is.  It’s hard to convince citizens, no matter how motivated they are to improve their community, to spend the time necessary to grasp the complexities of land use.  Perhaps our current system, in which citizens provide input based on their limited background and understanding, leaving the task of using as much or as little of that input as appropriate to planning staffs and planning commissions, is the best model possible.  If so, we’ll continue to muddle through.  But even if this is the case, exalting the citizen input isn’t helpful.

Nor am I trying to put myself on a pedestal for knowing more about land use than many of my fellow citizens.  It’s true that because of both vocation and avocation, I’ve spent far more time than most in studying and pondering the conundrums of land-use planning.  But, in keeping with the dicta that the soul of wisdom lays in knowing what you don’t know, I’m still coming to grips with what I don’t know.  Continued study and thought lays in my future.

Land use is a messy, complex subject.  To a large extent, Ford acknowledges the messiness and complexity and I recommend her book for that.  But I think she slips a bit on the value of citizens’ input.

If anyone is wondering about my still-born musical career, I can provide a coda.  A year and a half after the fourth grade testing debacle, my family moved to a town where aptitude testing wasn’t used.  And I certainly wasn’t about to admit to my earlier, ignoble failure.  So I was issued a trumpet and instruction commenced, beginning a seven-year journey through the brass section.

By my senior year of high school, I was playing trombone in one of the best high school jazz bands in California.  It was a truly talented band, with at least four of its members later playing professionally.  But the trombones were the weakest section in the band.  Only one trombonist had much skill and I wasn’t that guy.

However, the band instructor recognized the weakness and stayed away from music that would have been beyond the capabilities of the weak end of his trombone section.  We played in the background, looking good, while others made great music.  The last time my lips touched a mouthpiece was a few weeks before high school graduation.  I still think about my days of playing the trombone, but don’t expect to ever return to music making.

Perhaps that’s because I never became good at tuning my instruments, with sharp and flat continuing to bedevil me.  Whether I truly lacked a good ear or whether my fourth grade failure had left a mental block, I don’t know.

In my next post, I’ll acknowledge the beginning of fall with some thoughts about post-summer, pre-holiday reading lists.  Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns recently offered his reading list ideas, which I found striking for someone of his background and interests.

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 Trouble with City Planning”: Half-Buried Insights

My knowledge of the book publishing business is theoretical only.  A few friends, mostly of the delusional sort, have suggested that a book can be found somewhere within my four years of blog posts.  Thus far, I’ve ignored their siren call, flattered by their words, but unconvinced that 1,000-word blog posts, often with only tangential relationships, can translate into a 100,000 word manuscript.

Despite my lack of real world experience, I finished “The Trouble with City Planning” by Kristina Ford feeling as if I’d been present during the birthing of a book that had been led astray by editorial and publishing revisions.  The suspected revisions didn’t destroy the book, but they left valuable insights semi-buried in superfluity.

So, with full acknowledgment that I have no source of information other than my own dubiously-educated observations and guesses, this is how I suspect the book was written.

Fresh from a long stint as the Planning Director for the City of New Orleans, Ford embarked on a book project, setting forth her thoughts, as refined during her time in the Big Easy, on the interaction between planning, the citizenry, and development.

Among other points, she notes how developers sometimes co-opt the planning process through early lobbying of politicians, leaving planning departments playing catch-up, how the public doesn’t understand the relationship between a city-wide plan and the development that actually occurs, how much of the public only looks at a plan when gearing up to oppose an proposal, and how planning goals needn’t represent a consolidated, coherent vision, but can present a range of desirable outcomes among which the planners must sort.  (The last is the point on which I discoursed in my prior post.)

It would have been an insightful book, one that gave shape to many of the observations that I’d been sensing about the planning process, but hadn’t found a way to put into words.

But when it reached a publisher’s desk, I suspect that concerns arose.  Perhaps the publisher had been raised in a household where the parental message was not to offer criticism unless it was be constructive criticism and now found that Ford, with her mostly downbeat albeit valid insights about planning, failed the test for constructiveness.

So, in my imagination, Ford was asked to rework the manuscript to end on a more helpful note.  She complied, appending several chapters suggesting an alternative format for written city plans, a format that she calls Good City Plans.  The direction she proposes, which is to make plans more focused on people, their lives, their hopes, and their dreams, is compelling, but ultimately deficient.  Indeed, I find the Good City Plan concept Pollyannaish.

For one, you’d need to hide currency between the pages before citizens, not motivated by a specific project, would peruse a city plan, no matter how readable.

Also, to implement the concept as Ford envisions it, you’d need planners with the rare talent of writing to a compelling narrative thread.  I’ve read enough planning documents to know that few planners have that skill.

(Not that I’m singling out planners.  Through 35 years as a consulting engineer and cartons of red pens, I know that most engineers are even worse than planners at organizing good prose.)

And yet, even with the more upbeat ending, my imagined publisher still hesitated, wondering whether there was an adequate market for a book about writing better city plans.

Then Katrina made landfall, wreaking havoc upon New Orleans.  To his delight, the publisher had on his desk a draft book written by someone who had first-hand knowledge of how New Orleans came to be particularly vulnerable to hurricane damage.

So the book went back to Ford once more, this time to add in particular insights about the history of planning in New Orleans.  By now wearying of the task, Ford did as she was asked, but her lack of enthusiasm was becoming evident.

Much of the first forty pages explain why New Orleans came to be particularly vulnerable to flooding, with reasons proffered that are both geographical and hubris-based.  A little further in, the troubling planning history for post-Katrina reconstruction was offered, with the unfortunate conclusion that the planning process eventually became more about satisfying the federal bureaucracy than about meeting the needs of the city.  And still further in, anecdotes from Ford’s tenure in New Orleans are scattered through the book.

But overall, the New Orleans connection seems undeveloped.  It may have been a fine marketing angle.  I purchased the book specifically I had plans to visit New Orleans this past summer.  But I suspect that any major city could have provided examples that would have met the narrative needs of the book nearly as well.  Ultimately, the book is about city planning, not New Orleans.

So what we have is a 40-page preamble that unconvincingly ties the “The Problem with City Planning” to New Orleans, a 30-page saccharin afterword that doesn’t provide helpful direction in the real world, and 160 insightful and illuminating pages in between about how planning really works in the trenches.  Luckily for the reader, the 160 pages are good enough that they overcome the weakness at either end.  Good enough that I intend to read the book a second time, with appropriate skimming.

The editorial blunders that I’ve imagined above may have been unfortunate, but I’ve read many books on planning that I’ve found less useful and thoughtful.  I recommend “The Trouble with City Planning.”  I also recommend reading with more attentiveness in the middle than at either end.

In my next post, I’ll take a look at Ford’s position on public involvement.  While I acknowledge her years of experience, I don’t completely accept her perspective.

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

As Long as We Can Do Reasonable and Open Balancing, It’s Okay to Want Both Cake and Pie

Perhaps it’s the scientific bent in my soul, but he weighing of land-use proposals versus land-use goals has always felt forced and contrived to me.  Hand-waving intended to make a land-use project seem to conform to a goal, even when most observers would agree that it doesn’t, makes me uncomfortable, even if I’m the one doing the hand-waving.

However, some recent reading has given me new insights into the balancing of land-use projects versus land-use goals.  A Petaluma Planning Commission hearing can serve as an example.

The subject of the hearing was a proposed apartment complex, three stories in height.  The surrounding neighborhood was largely single-family homes, with an existing two-story apartment complex and a couple of single-story commercial uses.

Given the height of the proposed apartment buildings, many neighbors argued that the proposal failed to meet the Petaluma General Plan goal calling for new projects to be compatible with existing neighborhoods.  The neighbors further argued that the failure to meet this goal required the Planning Commission to reject the project or at least to substantially modify it.

Although the Commission hasn’t yet rendered a decision on the project, it’s possible that the decision will include a contrived observation that the project, even with its three stories, meets the neighborhood compatibility goal, a result that leaves me unsatisfied, not because I dislike the project, but because the explanation seems a facile dismissal of a legitimate issue. 

Luckily for my state of puzzlement, in her book “The Trouble with City Planning”, Kristina Ford offers a different way of looking at land-use goals.  She suggests that cities should have a wide range of goals, even if those goals might sometimes be in conflict, and that planning staffs and planning commission should be charged with balancing these multiple goals during their review of a particular project.  She even suggests that goals can be sometimes ignored because of the greater importance of other, contradictory goals.

Ford offers several examples including a casino along Canal Street in New Orleans that violated goals about building massing and expected uses on the thoroughfare but met other goals for economic development and employment.  Another example was a snow cone shop that met goals for neighborhood retail but, through the potential for sale of illicit substances out the back door, might later undermine goals about neighborhood safety and peacefulness.

Ford suggests that goals needn’t present a single coherent and limited vision, but should represent a broad range of desirable outcomes, even if the sorting through and weighting of the goals in regard to specific land-use projects may be difficult and the public explanation uncomfortable.

Please understand that I suspect that most planning departments already do this difficult balancing of goals, although only as an internal function.  Instead, I’m suggesting that the external results are often presented in sugar-coated words implying that all goals were met, words that are designed to soothe feelings, but that I find unsatisfactory and that I fear may ultimately undermine faith in the land-use process.

Circling back to the Petaluma apartment hearing, I’ll offer two possible responses to the neighborhood on the question of neighborhood compatibility.  The first would be “Even though the apartment buildings are taller and have greater volumes that the surrounding buildings, we find that architectural detailing is sufficient to meet the goal of neighborhood compatibility.”  This is the general model that the explanations of most land-use decisions seem to follow.

The alternative response would be “The apartment buildings don’t meet the goal of neighborhood compatibility, but for this site we judge that the competing goals of supplying local housing needs and providing sufficient density to support transit are sufficiently important that the architectural non-compatibility can be disregarded.”

I suspect that many land-use decisions are made on the latter basis, but are presented to the public with the former argument.  And furthermore, I fear that the smarminess of the former argument undermines public faith in the planning process.  In the moment, people may not like the unvarnished truth, but ultimately they respect the truth-teller.

Or perhaps it’s just that I favor intellectual honesty over political correctness, which I’ll acknowledge as a character flaw.

In my next post, I’ll focus more directly the book noted above, “The Trouble with City Planning”.  I find the book an odd amalgam, but nonetheless a book with philosophical insights worth consuming.

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

Acting Independently from Sacramento and Washington

A consistent theme of this blog is that drivable suburbia is largely the result of top-down directives.  I argue that cities, more so than states or nations, have an intuitive understanding  of how civilization should be organized, an understanding that was ignored during the post World War II building boom.

(I’m currently reading “The Trouble with City Planning” by Kristina Ford, who puts the blame squarely on the Federal Housing Act of 1954.  Section 701 of the act required federally approved plans before releasing federal funds for local housing projects.  Planners quickly learned that plans with a separation of uses, the defining characteristic of drivable suburbia, would be readily approved by the federal authorities.)

Given my bias toward greater local control of government, I’m pleased whenever I note a municipality exerting some independence.

A North Bay case in point is a recent action by the City of Healdsburg to raise the minimum age for purchasing tobacco from the state standard of 18 to a Healdsburg standard of 21, becoming the first California city to do so.

Admittedly, changing a few numbers on the signage in convenience stores is orders of magnitude different from encouraging land uses that overcome the multitude of sprawl-incentivizing policies from Sacramento and Washington, D.C, but independence doesn’t come quickly or easily.  Restricting the access of young adults to tobacco is a worthy goal in itself, so is a reasonable first step toward land use independence.

Today tobacco, tomorrow North Bay zoning codes and impact fees that no longer discourage compact development.

In my next post, I’ll offer my thoughts on the transit-oriented development plans being offered for public comment in Petaluma.

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