New Year’s Resolutions 2016: More Folks and More Tenacity

Urban setting in Spokane, Washington

This is the fifth New Year’s Day that I’ve been writing this blog.  Once again, best wishes to all for a productive and increasingly urbanist New Year.

A tradition of this blog, although an admittedly trite one, is New Year’s Resolutions.  In past years, I’ve touched on subjects such as doing more urbanist reading, becoming a better educated urbanist traveler, and making more numerically-based urbanist arguments.  As the best resolutions should be, they were stretch goals, perhaps beyond reasonable reach, but encouraging beneficial growth.

Not surprisingly, I’ve not fully achieved any of the goals.  But the process of setting them and reaching for them made me a better advocate for urbanism, which is how it should have worked.

This year, I’ll set another pair of stretch goals, ones in which your assistance will be sought.  I want to expand the North Bay urbanist advocacy in two ways.

A few weeks back, I was invited to participate in the holiday lunch of a North Bay advocacy group.  They might not have called themselves urbanists, but their advocacy targets were closely aligned with urbanism.  I had worked with them several times during the year and thought we made a good team.  So I was happy to join them for lunch.

The conversation was sparkling.  A few speakers leaned toward the pedantic, forcing the chair to exercise his authority more than he may have wished, but the comments were all educated and insightful, offering a tutorial to attentive listeners.  They represented a level of community advocacy that should encourage all who hope for a better world.

But when I looked around the table at the participants, I saw folks who were mostly grey-haired, wrinkled, and walked with a stiffening gait, a description that can also apply to me on many days.  I’m not always good at estimating age, but I guessed that I was the fourth youngest person at the eighteen-person gathering.  And I’m sixty-two.

I understand why land-use advocacy often falls to the older generation.  Financial security has been achieved.  Children are educated and gone.  Even if retirements haven’t yet arrived, careers are winding down.  Lifetimes of observation and consideration have identified the issues that really matter to the advocates.

And perhaps most importantly, seniors sometimes have an extended vision that often eludes the young.  When I speak with high school juniors about land-use possibilities, they hope for changes that can be made before their senior year.  When I talk to thirty-two-year-olds, they hope for changes that can be made before they buy their next house at age thirty-five.

Perhaps because they’ve had a lifetime to observe how long some goals take to attain, it is often only the seniors who are willing to embrace and to work toward forty-year visions, even with the knowledge that they’ll almost undoubtedly have left the stage before the vision is achieved.

At the holiday lunch, mention was made of several former members who had passed on.  There was no disappointment that the departed folks had gone before the goal was achieved, but only satisfaction that they had gone knowing that progress was being made.

But for all the reasons that long-term land-use advocacy often falls to the elders, there are good reasons why young advocates are necessary.  The young can bring an energy and enthusiasm that can be more difficult for elders.  Also, many public decision-makers are still in the heart of their working careers and can too easily dismiss as “old coots” the older advocates who totter to the microphone with their grey hair, even when those old coots deliver well-honed, insightful, and essential wisdom.

But when I think about the folks who I see regularly, who speak to city councils about urbanist ideas and who write to local papers to complain about anti-urbanist biases, those folks look a lot more like the me of today than the me of thirty years ago.  And that’s not good enough.

So my first resolution on this New Year’s Day 2016 is to encourage more urbanist advocates across a broader age spectrum, with a particular focus on the young.

To be clear, I know I have many readers who are significantly younger than me.  And they’re good folks.  But I may not see them or hear from them for months on end.  And I virtually never see them at City council or planning commission meetings.

I understand the family and career reasons why that is so.  But it still leaves a hole in the ranks of advocacy.  And it fails to meet the expectation set by Gandhi, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

My second resolution touches on a related issue, which is the essential tenacity of advocacy.  The folks around the holiday lunch table knew what advocacy truly requires, which is crafting five stratagems for moving a boulder, celebrating briefly when it moves an inch, and then creating five more stratagems.

But I see much current advocacy coming from a different place, which is the dispensing of perceived wisdom, often to those are already converted, and nothing further.

In a meeting of advocates on how to promote mixed-use development, someone will flutter in, suggest we need more mixed-use development, and flutter back out, thinking that advocacy has been achieved, when the truth is that nothing was achieved.

So my second resolution is to do more to impress upon folks the dogged and persistent nature of the advocacy required to affect change.

These two resolutions may sound as if they are being applied to others, which would be the easiest kinds of resolutions to set and the least troublesome to keep.  (“You should lose weight and you over there should exercise more.”)  But they are truly internally-directed.  I worry that my approach to advocacy is failing to attract the kind of advocates needed for long-term change and that I’m failing to impart lessons about the essential tenacity of advocacy.

So the resolutions are about me looking in the mirror during 2016 and seeking changes in who I am and how I present myself, so that I can better attract urbanist advocates.

Whether or not I can make myself a great leader, I can still take encouragement from this quote from journalist Walter Lippmann, “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.”  All of us who advocate for long-term urbanist goals should rally to that flag.

In my next post, I’ll return to the upcoming StrongTowns visit to Santa Rosa, giving reasons why attending the public sessions should be worthwhile, even for the Petalumans who may feel jilted.  The effort can be a test of my ability to gather urbanist advocates.

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

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

(Note to regular readers: With a New Year dawning, it seemed a good time to play with the appearance of this blog.  What you see today is a work in progress.  I’ll continue to fiddle over the next week or so.  Your comments would be appreciated.)

In my last post, I presented my urbanist resolution for 2015.  I vowed to dig more deeply into the reasons why suburbia is failing and why urbanism is part of the solution.  I understand that most readers of this blog don’t need the further explanation, but I’ll be prepared for the skeptics who may wander through.

Pondering my resolution for 2015 induced me to revisit my urbanist resolutions of years past.  Doing so was insightful.  My first resolution in this blog was for New Years 2013.  I’d recently been called an urban generalist and I resolved to embrace the description.

I think I’ve succeeded as I’ve continued to probe a wide breadth of urbanist topics.  Indeed, I think a strength of urbanism is that it has so many facets and seems a remedy to so many challenges.  In my effort to remain a generalist, it sometimes feels as if I’m walking a fine line between being an urbanist renaissance man and being an urbanist with an attention disorder, but I’m okay with tiptoeing.

For New Years 2014, I laid out a number of goals, from writing better to becoming more active in the community to doing more advance study of urbanist destinations before traveling.  I can’t claim to have fully succeeded at any of the resolutions, but nor do I think I’ve failed at any.  Instead, they remain a comprehensive checklist which I can continue to monitor as long as this blog continues.

Of course, urbanist resolutions are only as important as the changes one hopes to induce.   The New Year’s Day issue of the weekly Petaluma newspaper provided a remainder of the progress that urbanism has made and the challenges that remain ahead.

On the front page of the Argus Courier is an article about the automated vehicle locating (AVL) system that will be implemented on Petaluma Transit buses during 2015.  The article notes with approbation the improvements that the AVL system will bring to the passenger experience, from real time information about bus locations to better management of transit center connections.

But as a member of the Petaluma Transit Advisory Committee, I know that the AVL can have deliver even broader benefits, such as improved data about passenger loading and off-loading locations, allowing the transit staff to respond more quickly with schedule adjustments to meet the changing needs of the community.

A transit system that can compete with cars is an essential component of urbanism.  The AVL system will help Petaluma Transit provide that competition.

Elsewhere in the newspaper is a story on the approaching opening of the Big Easy, a jazz club on a downtown alley that is intended to evoke the era of the 20s and 30s.  Urbanism needn’t include gin joints, but a gin joint emulation makes a lot more sense on a downtown alley than in a suburban strip mall.  It’s great to see creative uses coming to downtown Petaluma.

But just when those two stories make it seem that urbanism is making good progress in the North Bay, there’s an Argus Courier article, reprinted from the North Bay Business Journal, about Deer Creek Village, a new shopping center on the east side of Petaluma.  In the first sentence, the project is described as “Petaluma’s premier mixed-use infill center.”

I’m forced to agree with the “infill” description.  Deer Creek does occupy a tract of land that had been left vacant as development occurred around it.  But I’d prefer that “infill” be saved for small parcels in more downtown locations, where the infill can buttress walkability and lead to truly walkable urban places.

However, my real objection is to “mixed-use”.  Perhaps Deer Creek Village meets that zoning code definition of mixed-use, but only because the zoning code is hopelessly deficient on the point.  Jane Jacobs, who did so much to highlight the benefits of mixed-use, described it as combination of uses intended to provide active users and watchful eyes on the sidewalks for many hours of the day.  A shopping center, especially one that doesn’t include any residential uses, can’t possibly meet that standard of mixed-use.

A world in which Deer Creek Village can be described as “mixed-use” is a world in which urbanist resolutions are still desperately needed.

Luckily, there’s always hope.  In the words of Jacob Riis who highlighted the social needs of New York City at the dawn of the 20th century, “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before."  It’s a fine image for 21st century urbanists to keep in mind.

Several weeks ago, I reported a suggestion that I occasionally offer a helping hand to those who are interested in urbanism, but may need a reminder of the basics.  Although unworthy of providing of a comprehensive introduction to urbanism, I can provide a summary of the subject as I view it.  A multi-part introduction to my personal view of urbanism will start in my next post.

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