Pointing the Ghost Ship Finger in the Right Direction

Building on International Boulevard near the Ghost Ship

I'm usually not one to talk back to the television during news broadcasts.  I may arch an occasional eyebrow if I find the understanding deficient on a key point, but that’s usually my limit.

However, there are exceptions.  One recently occurred during the reporting on the Ghost Ship fire.  For those who don't live in California, or have been in a monastery for the past week, a warehouse that had been illegally converted into residential space near the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland burned a week ago at the loss of 36 lives. 

During a news broadcast a couple of days after the fire, an Oakland City Councilmember took advantage of his 15 minutes of fame to describe the tragedy as a failure of the code enforcement role of the Oakland Fire Department.

His comments missed the fundamental point. And I expressed my thinking in strong words, interrupting my wife's viewing of the broadcast.

The problem is ultimately much deeper than whether the nine Fire Marshals of the Oakland Fire Department should have somehow inspected 20,000 commercial properties every year.  Instead the two root level issues are that we don't provide enough funds to many civic functions such that there can be any reasonable chance of complying with the multiplicity of laws and that we don’t have a commitment to provide housing for all.

Our cities are severely deprived of funds, a situation that has been inescapably and inexorably getting worse since the 1978 passage of Proposition 13.  We know this to be true, the civic balance sheets show it clearly, and yet we don’t accept responsibility for the shortfalls.

There have been letters in the Bay Area papers arguing that excuses of inadequate resources or staffing aren’t appropriate responses to a loss of human life in the Ghost Ship.  Poppycock.  We can’t ask public employees to perform their duties at impossible speeds so our tax bills can be a little lower, especially when none of us work at superhuman rates at our jobs.  Municipal services have reasonable costs and we must be prepared to pay them.

And with regard to the availability of housing, as long as we allow housing to be the product of a free market and a patchwork of subsidies, public and private, there will be people who fall through the cracks and needs the low rents of places like the Ghost Ship to avoid living on the street.  This is particularly true in a region that has a chronic housing shortage.

So, what are the connections between these two issues and the walkable urbanism which is the primary topic of this blog?  Walkable urbanism is a less expensive way of building cities, freeing up funds for other civic obligations such as fire inspections.

And walkable urban settings are the least expensive places to add new housing.  Walkable urban place won’t solve housing shortages just by existing, but they make it easier to solve the shortages if we choose to do so.

Walkable urbanism is the answer to many questions.  And the Ghost Ship fire illustrates exactly that if only we will listen and not blabber about simplistic and unhelpful answers such as the failures of overwhelmed fire marshals.

My next post will return to the proposed road diet in my town.

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

CNU 24: Best Moments, Part 2

Lobby of Detroit's Guardian Building

When I last wrote about the best quotes from CNU 24, the annual conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism recently conducted in Detroit, I thought I had covered the entirety of the first day speech by Andres Duany.  I should have looked on the back of my notes.

Today, I turned over the paper and found several more quotes from Duany worthy of being shared.  As before, the quotes are reconstructed from my notes and are likely imprecise, but capture Duany’s intent.

On the architectural role of public buildings: “Urbanist codes should cover residential, commercial, and office buildings, but not public buildings.  It’s in public buildings where architects should be free to depict the grandeur of civilization and civic life.”

On human nature: “Good urbanism in the form of walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods enables human nature to behave in its most noble form.”

On municipal finances: “Talk to the chief financial officer of any U.S. city and ask about the day the city will go bankrupt.  The CFO may hem and haw, but eventually admit that date is written on a scrap of paper in one of his bottom drawers.  Because every U.S. city is going bankrupt from sprawl.”

On measuring urbanism: “The measure of good urbanism isn’t the standard of living, but the quality of life.”

On the obsolescence of use-based zoning: “Use-based zoning succeeded at its primary goal which was separating noxious land uses from other human activities.  But technology has removed the noxiousness from most of those bothersome land uses, so use-based zoning is no longer needed.”

On decision-making: “The current obsession with bottom-up decision-making is wrong.  Every decision has an appropriate level at which it should be made, some at the top, some at the bottom, and some in between.”  (While concurring with Duany’s thought, I’ll also note that input from multiple levels should be integrated before decisions are made.)

Once again, there’s much to mull over in Duany’s words.

When I next return to CNU 24, I will finally leave Duany behind, at least for now, instead turning to Kaid Benfield.  But that won’t be for several posts.  In my next post, I’ll link some brilliant thinking about neighborhoods that I recently came across and then add a couple of thoughts expanding on the writer’s conclusions.

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

Link-Fest: Why Urbanism?

College Town district near
Iowa State campus

In my last post, I wrote about making adjustments in the content of these posts.  My goal was to reduce my time spent in writing and editing, while hopefully still encouraging readers to advocate for a more urbanist future.  A regular correspondent wrote to ask if he was correct in deciding that I wasn’t “cutting back”.

It was a reasonable question, but not one with an easy answer.  I responded, “If you want three posts per week in which I try to dig into an urbanist topic as deeply as I can, consistent with the inherent limits of thousand-word posts, not leaving new readers behind, and my own intellectual shortcomings, then yes, I'm cutting back.

“If you’re satisfied with three posts per week, even if they have a different blend of content, including more actionable items and greater reliance on the writings of others, then no, I'm not cutting back.”

I left it to him to answer his question.

Okay, enough about my life and my blogging commitment.  Onward to making the world an environmentally better, more financially stable place for the generations to follow.

I’ve picked the name Link-Fest for the posts in which I rely heavily on links.  I find it evocative of what I want to do, although a bit corny.  It’ll work for now.

My first Link-Fest will take looks from different angles at why urbanism matters.

When I started this blog, my primary reason for promoting walkable urbanism was market preference.  In increasing numbers, people such as me were interested in living in walkable urban settings, but the land-use process was largely rigged to deny them the option.  I thought that sucked and wrote so.

But I quickly learned that there were other, equally good reasons to be an urbanist.  Slowing climate change was a big one, as was the perilous state of municipal finances as called out by StrongTowns.

Market preference, climate change, and municipal finances have remained my big three, but there are many more good reasons in a second tier, with public health, water conservation, and child development among them.  On the last, I remain impressed by findings that children raised in urban settings are generally more intelligent and better problem solvers that their suburban and rural equivalents.

The links below take a harder look at several of these points.

Market Preference: A few years back, much made of the preference of young, unattached millennials to live in urban settings, with many using that fact as proof that drivable suburbia was dying.  Thus, the defenders of drivable suburbia pounced when updated demographics began showing that millennials, as they found partners and began families, also began returning to drivable suburban homes.  The drivable suburban advocates claimed that the market preference for walkable urbanism was a myth.

Not so fast, writes Alec Appelbaum in CityLab.  While agreeing that millennials are moving to suburbs, perhaps for affordability or for schools, he notes that there is no evidence that they want the drivable version of suburbia.  He describes how many suburbs are aggressively opposing the multifamily housing that is essential to the core of walkable urban places.  The opposition is often on grounds that verge on racism or demonize the poor.

(It’s possible I’m naïve, but I haven’t noticed the racist component of the argument in the North Bay, but agree that fear of the poor often plays a role in project opposition.)

I didn’t find that Appelbaum buttons up his case well, but he provides the pieces to construct a do-it-yourself argument that we won’t know whether millennials really want car-dependent single-family homes until we provide the full range of market options.  It’s possible that what they want is walkable, transit-friendly housing in the heart of medium-size towns.  It’s an option we need to offer.

The Shortcomings of Drivable Suburbia: Borrowing liberally from James Howard Kunstler and “Suburban Nation”, sources which he should have acknowledged more clearly, Abalashov, writing in Likewise a Blog, gives reasons why millennials may not be in love with drivable suburbia.  (If the link doesn’t work, this Google search should fill the need.)

Although Abalashov doesn’t break much new ground, he covers familiar ground with fresh eyes and an entertaining approach, delivering the moral outrage of Kunstler without the anger and sarcasm into which Kunstler often slides.

Alabashov describes the genesis of drivable suburbia as “an interdependent constellation of misanthropic zoning rules, building codes, and planning guidelines”, complains that “low-density streets don’t need to be so wide that one almost can’t see his opposite neighbour’s house because of the intervening curvature of the Earth”, and describes the architectural details intended to hide the lack of soul in suburbia as a “neurotic potpourri of superficial ornamentation”.

How can one not be entertained with wordplay like that?

The Sufficiency of Property Taxes: StrongTowns made their bones by arguing that property tax collections aren’t sufficient to cover the cost of the infrastructure we’ve built.  They test the hypothesis in so many ways that it’s fully credible.  But the individual case studies, representing land uses that aren’t prevalent in many suburbs, can sometimes feel underwhelming.

Using the explicit data of Iowa property tax bills, the writer of My Mapstory Blog tries to fill the gap.

With mapping software and a trip into the costs of street repairs and replacement, the writer shows that property taxes are only covering 60 percent of the cost of the street in front of a typical residential home in Ames, Iowa.  When the costs of street elements that don’t front lots, such as intersections, are included, the coverage drops to 40 percent.

It’s good stuff and will hopefully silence a few more of the naysayers who refuse to see the StrongTowns truths.

(I visited Ames a few years back.  It was where I realized that college urbanism was a distinct flavor of urbanism.  The photo above is from the College Town neighborhood adjoining the Iowa State campus.)

The Vacuity of the Suburbs: Returning to the shortfalls of suburbia, a recent photo exhibit by Mimi Plumb portrayed the frequent emptiness of suburbia in the 1970s.  A more complete examination of her exploration of suburbia can be seen on her website. 

Although many of the photos portray a world that was far bleaker than anything I remember from my youth, several are direct hits on the memories of my roots, a connection that isn’t surprising because the photographer and I share those roots.

For seventh and eighth grades, Mimi and I were schoolmates at our newly opened intermediate school.  I remember her quite well, although I don’t believe we ever spoke.  She was among the ruling elite of the newly maturing girls at Foothill Intermediate.

As a tall, skinny, glass-wearing, scholastically capable but socially awkward classmate, I could only watch in wonder as Mimi and her peers established their regime.  Anyone who has ever wondered how royalty spontaneously arose out of early egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes need only look at what happens among girls between the sixth and seventh grades.

I’m not saying that Mimi was mean to the lesser girls, only that she held shared dominion.  I truly have no memory of how she used her power, being more concerned with the bullying on my side of the gender divide.  Even after all these years, I have no idea if Pugsley was responsible for the smoke bomb in Grant Taylor’s locker.

(For those wondering, Pugsley wasn’t his given name.  He had adopted the full moniker of Pugsley Aloysius Twinkletoes Denver as a protest against life in the suburbs, a conceit that his fellow students and all but one teacher allowed him.)

As a sign that junior high is long over, I emailed Plumb to say hello across the half-century old social divide and to congratulate her on her photographic successes.  Thus far, she hasn’t replied.  Hmmm, perhaps the divide remains.

Urban Places as Sources of Life Knowledge: It’s not only children who learn better in urban settings.  Raccoons do the same.  Writer Jude Isabella, in a post published in Nautilus describes the efforts by Toronto to find a garbage can that would be safe from raccoon intrusion, a search that has proved surprisingly difficult.

As Isabella quotes one raccoon observer, “If they’re in a greatly enriched and cognitively demanding environment and if there are a bunch of traits that are more demanded by a city environment, they could all be enhanced together.”

If raccoons can intellectually thrive in urban places, imagine how children could do.

This post ran long, a tendency I need to conquer, but this type of content is what I’m seeking with my Link-Fests.  I had fun with the compilation and the writing.  I hope it also met your needs.

With the regional Bay Area 2040 plan getting underway, it seems a good time to ponder the role of regional governments.  I’ll tackle the subject 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)

Affording a $400 Sidewalk Repair

(Note: If the message below seems familiar, it may be because I wrote on the same subject a couple of months back.  But new and better targeted quotes have come across my desk that allow me to make the point more effectively.  Perhaps it’s intellectually lazy, but some days are like that.)

Today begins with a one-question quiz.  It’s not an easy quiz, perhaps SAT level or above, especially for those who still believe in drivable suburbia. 

Here we go.  Can you spot the logical inconsistency between these two excerpts?

Excerpt One – A question and answer from a City of Petaluma leaflet about a new program to encourage sidewalk repairs, a program that can include financial assistance.

“Question: What can I do if paying for sidewalk repairs is too expensive for me right now? Answer: The City is offering loans, at below-market rates, for qualified property owners.”

Excerpt Two – Taken from “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans”, an article in the current issue of Atlantic.

“The Fed (Federal Reserve Board) asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency.  The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all.  Four hundred dollars!  Who knew?”

Do you see the inconsistency?  It should jump out for those who aware of the financial state of suburbia.

The inconsistency is that the City of Petaluma and the author of the Atlantic article, Neal Gabler, see the financial health of the public quite differently.

Petaluma makes the implicit assumption that any problems in paying for sidewalk repairs are temporary cashflow problems and can be solved with low-cost loans.

Gabler sees a different story.  From the Fed data, he sees that the problem is chronic with nearly half of the population overwhelmed by a $400 expense, much less a sidewalk repair that could run to $5,000.

From personal observations, I find Gabler and the Fed closer to the truth.

I don’t intend a knock on Petaluma by saying that they’re being unrealistic about sidewalk repairs.  They’re trapped, as many are, by the failing finances of suburbia.  By law, homeowners are responsible for sidewalks.  But the City legal staff is concerned about judgments against the City because of a failure to enforce that responsibility.  So the City has adopted a policy that will give it a legal defense, even if staff understands the fallacy of expecting many homeowners to repay even low-interest loans.

I speculate, and the City may also, that the sidewalk fund will soon bottom out as the repayments lag, with the result that few sidewalks are repaired.  But at least the City will be able to point at their attempt to address the problem.  Perhaps it’s a cynical response by the City, but it’s a situation where cynicism may be the only rational response.

Some will suggest that the City should assume responsibility for sidewalk repair and maintenance.  I agree that maintaining walkability would be a government function in a reasonable world.

But a back-of-the-envelope calculation estimated the annual cost of maintaining sidewalks throughout Petaluma at $4 to $6 million, an impossible chunk of the general fund revenues which have painfully climbed back to $40 million after the recession.  And a tax measure to pay the cost would be an attempt to tap many of the same pockets that are already tapped out, so would fail miserably.

Admittedly, many homeowners are within the 53 percent who the Fed found aren’t overwhelmed by a $400 tab, but there are also many homeowners within the lower 47 percent.  From first-hand knowledge as the chair of a non-profit that worked with low-income homeowners, I know the latter to be true.

In Gabler’s analysis, in which he openly acknowledges belonging to the 47 percent despite an outwardly success life, he ascribes the increasing financial struggles of former middle class to three factors, growing income inequality by which the lower quintiles of the public don’t partake of economic gains, the ready availability of credit which encouraged insurmountable debt, and a desire, if not to keep up with the Jones, then at least to have one’s children keep up with the Jones’ children.

Although Gabler writes about the need to leave New York City for a far suburb to find affordable housing, a decision that in turn forced him to focus on keeping an aging car running, he doesn’t point to the current land-use model as a cause of widespread financial stress.  I could argue that his omission is a mistake, but also agree that the three causes he identified might lead the list even if suburbia is included.

Regardless of the role in suburbia in causing the financial malaise in former middle-class pocketbooks, the financial sustainability of suburbia is undermined by that malaise.  Whether it’s fixing potholes or mending cracked sidewalks, we have a problem.  Much of the public can’t pay for the needed repairs.

Suburbia came of age during the 50s and 60s, an era in which the U.S. had income equality that was unprecedented in the history of the world, a fact that allowed suburbia to thrive.  In the absence of income equality, it’s unclear how to support suburbia.

Of course, even if we find the political will to bring income equality back to the levels of the 50s and 60s, we still have the problem with suburbia driving climate change.

Wouldn’t it be easier to move toward a walkable urban world with its lesser extent of infrastructure to maintain?  I think so.

Most years, I write an early April paean to baseball and how it functions as an urban sport.   This year, early April slid past in a welter of other topics.  But we’re still in the latter days of the month, so I’ll my annual ode to the sport when I next write.

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 Where StrongTowns Points to Spot a Rara Avis

Those who have spoken with me about municipal government have likely heard one of my favorite sayings, “If your city manager and planning director aren’t at risk of being fired at least once a year, they’re not doing enough to make your city a better place.”

Like most good aphorisms, it contains a grain of truth along with a dose of exaggeration.  Productive city employees shouldn’t be expected to continually skate near the edge of termination.  Not only would excessive changes be disruptive to city halls, but employees, no matter their position, are human beings, with human concerns about supporting spouses with community ties, taking care of children trying to enjoy their high school years, and not risking retirement vesting.

Furthermore, innovation should not be encouraged only at the top, but should spring from everywhere in city halls, with everyone from the city manager to the custodians encouraged to offer ideas to improve city services.

Nonetheless, we need city managers and other folks near the top of municipal organization charts to be particularly alert to new ideas.  Thus, I was intrigued when StrongTowns offered a link to an audio interview with the city manager of a small town in Kansas who had become a devotee of the StrongTown message.

I’ve often written about StrongTowns, a Minnesota non-profit that decries the unsustainable costs of suburban sprawl and advocates for a cautious approach to municipal growth and finance.  In their words, a StrongTown is one that “is obsessive about accounting for its revenues, expenses, assets, and long term liabilities.  Their mission statement concludes with “We’ve run out of money.  It’s now time to start thinking.”

Readers not yet familiar with StrongTowns are encouraged to download their Curbside Chat booklet, which lays out the StrongTowns philosophy in a simple but comprehensive form.

I may not agree with every conclusion reached by the StrongTowns folks, but I heartily support their overall approach to municipal management.  Many of my posts are linked on their website.  And I’ve belonged to StrongTowns long enough that I’m included in their Founders’ Circle. 

The audio is StrongTowns founder Chuck Marohn interviewing Toby Dougherty, the City Manager of Hay, Kansas.  Hays, a city of 21,000, is described as the largest city in northwest Kansas, which says a lot about northwest Kansas relative to the Bay Area.  (The photo shows the view from the Rooftop Restaurant in Hays and is from the website inpursuitofpork.com.)

The interview runs 52 minutes, so may go beyond the attention span of some readers.  But I’ll share my listening experience in the hope that it gives a flavor.

Not being good at single-tasking, especially if the task is staring into space while listening to an audio interview, I soon found myself engaged in tidying up emails when listening with half attention to Marohn and Dougherty drone on about the Hays as a regional center and home to Fort Hays State University.

And then suddenly I was caught up short.  Dougherty was talking about the need for his town to be financially sustainable and to reject development that wouldn’t generate enough property tax revenue to support its long-term maintenance.  He was talking straight from the StrongTowns playbook.

I knew there were a few StrongTowns believers in city halls.  I’ve met and listened to some at the Congress for the New Urbanism annual meetings.  But those encounters were like looking at birds in captivity.  I was pleased to know that the folks existed, but away from their natural setting the impact was muted.

Listening to a city manager talking the StrongTowns line, perhaps sitting with his feet on his city hall desk in a small Kansas town, was far more real.  It was like stumbling across a ruby-throated warbler singing its song directly to me in the heart of the woods.  Yes, StrongTowns, by interviewing Dougherty, had pointed him out to me, but there was still an electric thrill of discovery.  And it was great.

My favorite moment was when Dougherty talked about how, after long puzzling over contemporary city finances, he came across the Curbside Chat, found the message compelling, and forwarded the link to the City Attorney.  At 1:30am the next morning, the City Attorney emailed back a simple “Duh.”  And just like that there were two StrongTown converts in the Hays City Hall.

As homework, those who aren’t yet familiar with StrongTowns are strongly encouraged to download and to read through the Curbside Chat.  For those with 52 minutes to spare, extra credit is available for those who listen to the Toby Dougherty interview.  But even for those without the 52 minutes, please take my word that there is something thrilling about hearing the StrongTowns message coming from the plains of Kansas.   It gives hope.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the relationship between underfunded pension obligations and urbanism.  I’ve often written that the pension difficulties are a sign of the suburban mistake, but I’ve recently come to a further conclusion about an ethical relationship between pension debt and urbanism.

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

Municipal Ledgers Remain in Critical Condition

If Petaluma is an example, and I expect it is, municipal budgets have improved.  However, significant travails are still to come, perhaps as severe as those recently experienced.  It should be a signal that urbanism is increasingly needed, but too few decision-makers are grasping the message.

In a common municipal practice, the Petaluma City Council often meets in work sessions.  The sessions are publicly scheduled like regular meetings, but focus on a single topic, with sufficient time for the Council to be updated in depth.

Few citizens attend the work sessions.  At the most recent work session, the total attendance was the City Council, members of City staff, a reporter, and me.  Yes, I was the only member of the general public in the council chambers.  It was lonely in the back rows.

It’s a shame that more folks don’t partake of the educational opportunities.  Work sessions are far more informative than regular meetings.

In recent months, Petaluma has held work sessions on the budget for the new fiscal year, revised stormwater management rules, and a street maintenance prognosis.  The message from all three was that municipal finances for Petaluma, and presumably for most cities, remain precarious.   

From the session on the city budget, it’s true that the deepest trough of the recession is behind us.  The city has the revenues to begin replenishing reserve funds that had been reduced to seriously deficient levels.

But the respite is short-lived.  As bills that were deferred during the recession begin to come due, such as employee benefit and retirement costs, municipal financial projections again plummet.  Within a couple of years, new deficits are predicted.  It appears that deficits that can only be avoided if new taxes are approved, probably at the November 2014 general election.  The need for new taxes was a recurring theme of the work sessions.

The stormwater management work session addressed the updated and expanded federal standards for discharges to natural waterways such at the Petaluma River.  Expanded standards were likely needed.  We’ve made great strides in waterway health in our lifetimes, but more can still be done.

However, some of the new regulations will be surprises to the general public.  An example is a permitting system for charity carwashes.  It seems legitimate that carwashes, with their mountain of suds flowing down gutters toward stormwater systems, are a threat to a waterway, but few of us had probably considered that fact.

The problem for the city is that costs of managing stormwater regulations, including carwash permitting, are growing beyond what can be covered by property tax revenues.  City staff suggested and the City Council will consider a stormwater management fee, much like the water and wastewater fees that residents already pay.  This new fee would require voter approval, so is another possibility for the November 2014 ballot.

The street maintenance work session included the pothole issue that has long bedeviled Petaluma, starting well before the recent economic travails.  The short version is that the streets won’t be getting better.  (Petaluma Patch covered the work session here.)

Pavement Condition Index (PCI) is the standard method for monitoring pavement conditions.    PCIs range from 0 to 100, with results under 50 indicating pavements that are poor or have failed.  An average PCI of 85 is the goal for adequately-funded cities.

The average PCI for Petaluma streets is 45, at the upper end of the poor range.  The tax increase under consideration by the City Council would be a half-cent sales tax, of which one-quarter would be dedicated to street maintenance.  If the sales tax is approved at the ballot box, City staff estimated that the average street condition in Petaluma would be in the high 30s in five years.

That’s right, even with the maximum funding that the City Council suspects the public might approve, the condition of the Petaluma streets would continue to decline.  No one would estimate how steep the decline might be if the new sales tax were rejected.

City staff can’t be blamed for the street conditions.  Staff has been aggressively researching and implementing new techniques for pavement management, increasing the maintenance that can be done with the available dollars.  I won’t call the content or presentation scintillating, but anyone interested in pavement maintenance would do well to watch the video of the work session.

Against this darkening fiscal picture, it’s reasonable to ask if our cities should be doing something differently.  There are likely a number of areas in which alternative paradigms would help.  Urbanism is firmly on the list.  As a Smart Growth America study established, urbanism is a less expensive land use to service and to maintain.

However, many decision-makers seem not to recognize the value of urbanism.  Instead they argue for more drivable suburban development to somehow balance the books, conveniently forgetting that it was the drivable suburban decisions of their forbearers that put us into this mess.  The direction ignores the first rule of holes; when you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.

It’s like that old joke about a business losing money on every transaction, but making up for it by doing lots of volume.  Except that no one is laughing.

Urbanism can’t fully fix what’s wrong with municipal budgets over the next decade or two.  The effect it might make, however beneficial, would be longer-term.  In the shorter term, it seems inevitable that new taxes will be required.  As a financially-aware member of the community, I’ll likely vote for those taxes.  But I’d feel better about my vote if I knew Petaluma and other cities were making decisions, such as a swing toward urbanism, so as not to continue having fiscal crises into the indefinite future.

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