Rebooting with Passion

Walkable downtown of Hagerstown, Maryland

I'm back. After not having published in this space for more than a year, I’ve returned to blogging.

I’ve missed the readers here, but it’s been a mostly good year regardless.  I’ve used the break to regenerate from five years of blogging.  (This is my 744th blog post.  I may yet justify my hubris when I began numbering my posts at 0001.)  I’ve recuperated from my role in the local 2016 city council race and taken the repercussions that came from that effort.

I went through a frustratingly short stint as the land-use columnist for the local paper.  I’ve helped take Petaluma Urban Chat in new directions.  And I’ve tried the impossible task of adjusting to the new realities in the nation's capital.

But I've never forgotten the feeling of accomplishment and connection that came from writing in this space.  Few days have passed without me thinking of a topic I wanted to cover here.

My lack of output has never been a lack of interest, but only an overly full to-do list and a lack of time.

In the New Year, with the newspaper writing role terminated, I needed an outlet and so here I am.  And it may not be coincidental that this post will be published on Epiphany.

I don't have a particular subject about which to write today.  Instead, I’ll muse on where I want this blog to go and what new perspectives I’ll bring to the task.

To begin, most readers in Petaluma know that I've been involved in organizing a forum series, Know Before You Grow, that's gotten off to a good start, with an average attendance in the neighborhood of 75 for our first three events.  (For those not in Petaluma, I’ll write often about Know Before You Grow, filing in the backstory and perhaps encouraging you to emulate the effort in your town.)

To give structure to the forum series, the organizing team had to fix upon on a concise description of our mission.  We settled upon four “community values”: 

• Housing for all
• Mobility options
• Climate action
• Sustainable municipal finances

Every forum focuses on how land use, through either policies or proposed projects, can meet or fail to meet those values.

Today isn’t the day to delve into the implications of those four values.  But I believe strongly in the values and will always put them in the forefront of my thinking as I write.  All by themselves, settling on them made 2017 a good year.

But I can’t mention 2017 without noting the national dysfunction of the past year.  This won’t be a forum to discourse in general on the changes in the nation and in the capitol.  There are many others filling that role better than I can.  But I’ll touch often on how walkable urbanism, and the too frequent lack of it, may have played a role in the outcome of the November 2016 election and how the election results are in turn playing a role in future of walkable urbanism.

Sometime over the past year was a Twitter exchange that captured my thinking on the point.  As a reminder, Brent Toderian was the Vancouver Planning Director during the run-up to the 2010 Winter Olympics.  He has since left that post and is now a well-respected international urban planning consultant who tweets often about how national politics can affect local matters.

In response to the tweets, Hudson Bronson tweeted to Toderian, “Respectfully, wish you would stop tweeting about American politics so often.  Your city planning tweets are why I follow you.

In response, Kurtis Pozsgay‏ tweeted back “Get out of here with this nonsense.  Planning and politics are intertwined.”  and The Tysons Corner‏ added “Pretty tough to make good cities when feds try to rob cities of competitive advantage by giving money away to anywhere but cities.”

That pretty well sums it up.

So, those are my twin goals for this reboot, always writing from the perspective of the four Know Before You Grow goals and being constantly aware of the connection between local land use and the politics of Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

I don’t know the exact paths I’ll follow in pursuing those goals, but I’m looking forward to finding out.  And I’m glad you’re along for the ride.

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

Dave Alden is a Registered Civil Engineer. A University of California graduate, he has worked on energy and land-use projects in California, Oregon, and Washington. He was also the president of a minor league baseball team for two seasons. He lives on the west side of Petaluma with his wife and two dogs. The blog that he writes can be found at Where Do We Go from Here. He can also be followed on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

An Urbanist Learns about Electoral Politics, Part 2

In the last post, I wrote about finding myself leading an effort to recruit an urbanist candidate for the city council in my town.  It wasn’t a task I’d planned, but I noted a vacuum, suggested that someone should fill it, and suddenly found myself leading a growing parade.

It’s not a story that yet has a conclusion.  There will likely be a Part 3 and maybe even a Part 4 or more in the weeks and months to come.   For now, the committee is awaiting a decision from our top possible candidate while also working on a platform.

But even at this stage, there have been lessons learned, some that I already knew, although this experience caused them to crystallize, and others that were new to me.

The top three lessons are described below.

Why the City Council Has a Schism: In the last post, I noted the schism between the council factions that I described as centrist and progressive, a schism that greatly affects the function of the city.  I have a theory about how the rift came to be, a theory that has come into greater focus in the past few weeks.  It’s a story that long-time readers have heard many times, but I’ll recount this time from a different perspective and to make a different point.

Before World War II, land use in the U.S. was predominantly walkable urban.  Even if one lived at a distance from work or shopping, public transit was the most common conveyance.  Private automobiles and trucks existed, but weren’t yet the dominant paradigm.  Indeed, they were still replacing horse-drawn wagons for many tasks.  Few would have considered a twenty-mile daily commute in a single-passenger car.

In the heady years after World War II, convinced that the Allied victory had established that the U.S was all powerful, we changed paradigms.  Although there were also market forces behind the change, the primary driver was planning theory.

We had decided that we could safely consign walkable urbanism to the scrap heap of history.  We began to separate uses, residential in certain districts of our communities, retail, commercial, and industrial in others.  We created a world in which cars were no longer optional, but essential.

And then we doubled down, committing to an interstate freeway system that was initially proposed for the movement of goods and military materiel, but was soon clogged with people driving private cars to and from work.

We wrote rules, such as zoning codes and environmental policies, that either promoted the drivable suburban model or were so attuned to it that they might as well have been promoting it.  And we adopted pricing policies, such as low gas taxes, that further supported the drivable suburban paradigm.

Developers, doing what they always must to stay in business, learned to navigate the new regulatory world and delivered the land uses that we had effectively mandated.

As Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns likes to say, drivable suburbia was an experiment and, contrary to all rules of good experimentation, we rolled it out nationwide, not just in a single place like New Jersey.

And, like many experiments, it failed.

Local governments couldn’t afford to maintain the extensive infrastructure required.  Streets were congested by induced traffic.  People who didn’t own cars were marginalized.  Children too.  And, to add a final indignity, the climate began to suffer from the tailpipe emissions we’d made essential.

But, in the best tradition of human nature, Americans couldn’t admit that they’d followed a false god, instead looking for someone to blame.  Government couldn’t maintain the infrastructure because bureaucrats were inefficient and/or corrupt, leading to tax revolts that brought financial collapse even closer.  Developers had cheated us, taking as profit the funds that could have made suburbia work.

And from the fringes came the thinking that the United Nations was trying to take our cars away through Agenda 21 and that climate scientists were in a vast collusion to change the American way of life.

We engaged in this scapegoating because we couldn’t look in the mirror and acknowledge that our parents and grandparents had accepted the false vision of drivable suburbia and that we should have been more alert to the early signs of unraveling.  Even as newer generations of planners realized the errors of decades ago, but we had no interest in their recanting.  We wouldn’t let go of the suburban ideal.

So, how does this tie back to the factions on the city council in my town?  The two factions have followed different paths of blame assignment.

The centrists still believe that suburbia can be made to work if we just tweak it a bit, maybe through giving developers more free rein.  Although they’re a part of government, they still manage to attract the voters who blame the failure of suburbia on government.

On the other side, progressives believe that the failure of suburbia is the fault of developers, that developers somehow deluded us into drivable suburbia so they could maximize profits.  And they attract the voters happy to buy that story.

Those are two deeply different world views that can’t be reconciled.  And with roots that go back seventy years, it’s a schism that won’t go away easily.

Why Urbanist and Not Progressive: Given the gap between centrists and progressives and the current centrist majority on the council, it would have been easy to look for a strong progressive candidate to balance the council with the goal of getting good urbanist policy from compromises at the interface.

But that wasn’t a route that appealed to me.  I wanted someone with true urbanist credentials on the council, someone who could ally with centrists to encourage walkable urban development and with progressives to slow drivable suburban development.  It was time to turn the council away from an outdated focus on the failed suburban experiment and toward the future.

But it was a complex argument to make.  And I wasn’t sure if I could sell complexity.

Sure enough, progressives were attracted to the committee I’d founded, seeing a window to weaken the centrist majority.  At various times during the young life of the committee, I thought I would lose control as the progressives began to push their agenda.

I was reconciled to the possibility.  I wouldn’t have been the first person to lose control of a committee they’d founded.  And the progressives were passionate folks with whom I had much in common and liked, even as they were threatening to subvert my effort.

But I decided not to surrender easily, so continued to advocate for an urbanist perspective.  With the failure of drivable suburbia obvious to all who would look, I argued that we needed an urbanist to stand up for the right kind of development.

To my surprise, folks rallied to my words.  I hadn’t realized it, but my message had been gaining adherents.  The progressives have stayed involved and remain welcome at the table.  But if the committee is successful, it’s likely that any candidates we put forth will start as urbanists.  They’ll likely also have some progressive credentials and that’s okay.   Whether they call themselves urbanist progressives or progressive urbanists doesn’t matter to me, as long as urbanist is in there somewhere.

Attracting Voters to the Urbanist Banner: A community organizer joined us for a recent meeting.  She offered some powerful words of wisdom about winning elections, words that made me see the difficulty of selling urbanism to voters.

The organizer spoke about how most voters look for immediate changes for the better from the candidates and ballot measures they support.  Long-term improvements may seem nice, but don’t pull in check marks.  People may nod about the nutritional value of vegetables, but order a cheeseburger when no one is watching.

It was solid, credible wisdom that I couldn’t dispute, but it worried me became urbanism doesn’t always have a good story to tell about short-term turnarounds.

Centrists can ask for votes based on the promise to support a broad range of development, bringing good paying jobs to local citizens and more funds into the city coffers for emergency services.

Progressives can ask for votes based on redressing the inequities of the current system.

Urbanists can ask for votes by saying that it we all take our medicine for the next fifteen years as we unwind the worst elements of drivable suburbia and gradually return to a more sustainable walkable urban model, our lives will all be better.

That’s the right message to be pushing, but it’s a tough sell.  The committee is still looking for how to tie a bow on it.

So that’s my story.  It’s been a great six weeks, as an effort to find an urbanist candidate has gained more traction than I thought possible, as I came to have a deeper, more visceral understanding of the governance schism that affects my town and likely many others, as I found myself successfully able to defend the need for an urbanist candidate, and as I came to understand the difficulty of selling urbanism to the electorate.

But time is running short on candidate filing date with the group still needing a candidate and a sellable message.  The next few weeks promise to be eventful.  I’ll keep you updated.

When I next write, I’ll offer my weekly summary of opportunities to get publicly involved in urbanist advocacy.  Hopefully, that summary will soon include debates and campaign functions for an urbanist candidate 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)

An Urbanist Learns about Electoral Politics, Part 1

Like many California cities, at least those near the coast, there isn’t much of a political right-wing in the town where I live.  I see few bumper stickers for the presumptive Republican nominee.

Instead, we mostly fall into various shades of Democrats and Independents.  But the clustering doesn’t mean that we all agree.  In particular, there is a long-lasting schism on our city council, a schism that has lately been consuming much of my attention.

It’s not easy to give labels to the two sides of the divide.  Because local issues often don’t map well with national issues, the national labels don’t apply.  But I need names to tell my story, so I’ll give it a try.

On one side are those who seem to believe that things are going moderately well.  They would agree that there are worrisome concerns, such as traffic congestion and the depleted state of the municipal treasury, but their general sense seems to be that if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, just a bit smarter, we’ll be alright.

In many situations, I would call these folks conservatives, but they could justifiably consider that term a pejorative because of the conservative dysfunction at the national level.  Besides, they may all be registered Democrats.  So I’ll call them centrists.

On the other side are those who seem to believe that there are systemic issues that need redress, whether social equity, gay rights, gun control, or something else.  Although a local newspaper columnist can’t refer to these folks except with dismissive quotation marks as “progressives”, they generally accept the word as accurate and reasonable, so I’ll call them progressives, without the quotation marks.

There are no bad folks among the councilmembers.  When I bump into any of them, centrist or progressive, I readily greet them by first name and, if the occasion is right, engage them in casual conversation about the affairs of the day, including the Giants’ bullpen and the prospects for the coming season of college basketball.

But I’m not in full political agreement with either side of the schism.  As an urbanist, I believe that walkable urbanism, although not a panacea, can help with many of the problems that now plague American cities, from climate change to affordable housing to income inequality.  But I find that neither the centrists nor the progressives, for reasons I’ll explore in my next post, adequately embrace the walkable urbanist agenda.

To the credit of the council, the boundary between the two factions can be fluid.  Enough councilmembers are flexible in how they view the issues of the day that voting patterns aren’t always predictable.  Plus, there are many issues that elicit unanimity.  But on the issues that are most divisive, which are usually the ones that matter most to me, the centrist faction generally holds the majority.  And that’s bothersome to me because I find the progressives are usually closer to walkable urbanism.

However, there may soon be a chance to tweak the balance of power.

We’ll have local elections this November.  By good fortune, all three council seats on the ballot are now held by centrists, creating an apparent opportunity to adjust the direction of the council.

The three incumbents have already announced their intention to stand for reelection.  But the progressives in the community have been silent.  So about six weeks ago, I reached out to one of the progressive councilmembers to ask about a progressive slate.  To my dismay, I learned that the handful of potential progressive candidates were all leaning against making runs.

Bothered by the potential void, I chatted with a few acquaintances and eventually invited a handful of folks to join me over a Saturday afternoon beverage to discuss the candidate situation.  The meeting clicked, participation grew geometrically, and there are now fifteen of us meeting weekly.   We’re honing a platform and encouraging potential candidates to consider a run.

We don’t yet have a candidate, but are hopefully getting closer.

Meanwhile, we’re learning lessons about electoral politics.  I already had an inkling on some of them, although this experience has caused my thinking to crystallize.  Other lessons are new.

There are three lessons in particular that I want to share.  But I’ve already taken enough of your time for one day.  When I next write, I’ll invite you to walk along with me in my journey of electoral discovery.

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

Tripping Across the Political Spectrum in Search of a Home

Last week, I had a pair of productive and interesting conversations with Petaluma urbanists, one over beers at the estimable Ray’s Delicatessen and Tavern and the other over breakfast beverages on a deck next to the Petaluma River.  (What, you thought urbanists went to chain restaurants?)

After touching upon a number of local themes, I posed a question to both that I’ve been pondering.  For the fall 2016 municipal elections, what urbanism-leaning candidates might be running?

Both responded that they hadn’t heard any rumors about possible progressive candidates.

Do you see the flag in those responses?  The automatic equation between urbanism and progressivism?

In contrast, I was reminded of something an original member of Petaluma Urban Chat told me when we first met.  He told me that whenever he followed the threads of his core beliefs to their political manifestations, he found that the results were all over the political spectrum, so he had no idea where he belonged.

I thought there was much value in what my acquaintance said, so decided to try to follow the threads of my own urbanism philosophies to their apparent political connections.

To begin, I’ll offer simplified versions of the major forms of political thought in our time:

Conservatism: The belief that things may still be okay today, but can’t keep going the direction we’ve been going and would be even better if we went back twenty, thirty, or even more years into the past.

Liberalism: The belief that things need to get better and that the best path is to unfetter individuals to do their individual best.

Progressivism: The belief that things need to get better and that the best path is to empower government, as the expression of our collective will, to undertake additional tasks.

(On the last two, I understand the common perception is that progressivism is on the same scale as liberalism, but further down the scale, something like an uber-liberalism.  My definitions instead put liberalism and progressivism on different paths, which I find a more accurate model.  Politics, like much of the world, can’t be explained by one-dimensional models.)

 Using these definitions, where does my urbanism fit?

Urbanism as a conservative strategy: I find urbanism a conservative approach to land use, arguing that the land-use patterns of the past had many inherently good ideas and that we should taking lessons from them, rather than continuing to put the past further in the rear view mirror by encouraging drivable suburban development.

Also, as particularly championed by StrongTowns, many urbanists, including me, are uncomfortable with the current funding model by which much infrastructure is built using “transfer funds” from higher levels of government without adequate consideration of local need or ability to maintain.  The StrongTowns folks instead argue that we fostered better and stronger communities when we only built the infrastructure that we could build and maintain with locally generated resources.

When Petaluma Urban Chat was jointly reading the “Curbside Chat” booklet by StrongTowns, one participant noted, to his surprise, that “StrongTowns is the Republican argument for urbanism!”

I don’t want to know the party affiliations of the StrongTowns membership, but agree that many of the StrongTowns arguments fall into the conservative camp.

So clearly, my urbanism is conservative.

Urbanism as a liberal strategy: One of my frequent arguments for urbanism is that we know how to build workable places that don’t rely on the automobile, but that we can only build those places if we stop incentivizing drivable suburban development.  Instead, we need to give the folks who know how to work in a subsidy-free environment the freedom to develop the vibrant communities that we need.

So clearly, my urbanism is liberal.

Urbanism as a progressive strategy: There are many progressive arguments I could make for urbanism, but I’ll pick an easy one, walkability.

Imagine a block of ten homes where nine of the homeowners, following their good liberal tendencies, maintain their sidewalk segments with dedication, sweeping it clean, pulling weeds, patching cracks, and replacing entire sections when needed.  But imagine that the tenth owner, whether from a lack of goodwill or financial constraints, does none of those things, with the result that the sidewalk in front of his house is deeply cracked and weed-infested.

What’s the result?  The block is impassible for those in wheelchairs or walkers, or who just might be unstable on their feet.  Walkability is absent for those who might want to walk to do their shopping or other chores.

The only solution is to empower local government with the authority to maintain sidewalks, which is a progressive strategy.

So clearly, my urbanism is progressive.

And there you have it.  My urbanism and I are securely in the progressive liberal conservative camp.

Isn’t it nice when you know you have a home?

In my next post, I’ll offer a story about an Iraqi village that offers an insight into land-use planning.

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 Shouldn’t be a Forbidden Topic

The upcoming elections have been a recent emphasis of this blog.  Within the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about looking for traces of urbanism among the candidates, about the tax measures that Petaluma and other cities have put forth to address their financial malaise, about the objections from urbanists to the tax measures , and about the misconceptions about government inefficiency that may affect voting on the ballot measures and perhaps also undermine the future of urbanism.

In keeping with my personal philosophy, I was looking at public policy from an urbanist perspective.  But to what extent is that perspective a factor in the general public discourse on these subjects?  Not the discourse in the obscure corners of the internet such as this blog, but the everyday discourse of average citizen?  To put it another way, how often is urbanism discussed at dinner parties, family picnics, or church socials?  And does it receive as much attention as the reigning suburban paradigm?

The answer, at least in my observation, is that urbanism is rarely a factor in the public forum.  And I’m troubled by that answer.  As I wrote a few weeks back, urbanism is the study of strategies for municipal success and the advocacy of the best practices.  How could such a key subject not have found its way into daily discourse?  Especially when we regularly talk about how to perpetuate the current suburban paradigm in our discussions about the need to widen streets, to approve a new big box, or to endorse a new subdivision for the jobs it would create?

It’s a question about which I’ve often thought.  I have a working hypothesis about why urbanism remains in the shadows while suburbanism is well-established in the public forum.  However, it’s only a hypothesis.  Readers are encouraged to respond with concurrence or disagreement.

Under my hypothesis, I suspect that the suburban discussion is considered economic development, which has always been considered suitable table talk.  But urbanism is considered politics, which falls under the American interdict about religion and politics not being suitable topics for public conversation.

Nor is that dichotomy limited to our land-use paradigm.  The hypothesis can also be applied to many aspects of American life, from education to emergency services to banking regulations.  Talking about how to support the current paradigm is considered acceptable conversation, but talking about changing the paradigm is considered politics and earns a quick “Shsssh.”

I’ve never understood the prohibition against discussion of politics or religion.  Yes, I understand that conversations on these topics have sometimes devolved into shouting matches that have ruined holiday dinners.   But I suggest that some of us are unable to discuss the topics in a civilized manner because we haven’t learned how to do so because we were prohibited from doing so in our formative years.

It’s become a viscous circle that now bars us from having the meaningful conversations that we need to improve our communities and our world.

With that said, I still believe strongly in the Latin maxim "De gustibus non est disputandum", which means that that matters of taste aren’t subject to argument.  But there’s a bright line between having productive, non-judgmental conversations and arguing over matters of taste.

“What do you find compelling about Judaism?” seems a fine and reasonable question.  “How can you not be a Christian?” isn’t.

“Why you think big boxes are ultimately harmful for the community?” is a fine question.  “Why do urbanists want everyone to live in six-story concrete boxes?” isn’t.

To sum up, I believe that many of us view continuing suburbanism as economic development, which makes it a topic fit for general consumption, while viewing urbanism as politics.  I find that assignment of categories to be unfortunate.  Even worse, we then put politics, along with religion, outside the range of genteel conversation.  And that is the wall that we must break down, for the sake of urbanism and many other areas in which sacred cows are being given a free pass.

As I said, this is only my hypothesis.  But it’s a hypothesis on which I’ll build in the coming weeks.  Feedback will be welcomed.

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