Showing posts with label Charles Marohn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles Marohn. Show all posts

Friday, September 25, 2020

Strong Towns: Redlining in Kansas City: What local reparations might look like.

The actual title of the article is "The Local Case for Reparations," which Lauren Fisher explains. It's about reparations for redlining, in case you're wondering.

 

On Monday, I was wringing my hands about how our morning article would go over. Within it, Chuck discusses a local strategy for investing in disinvested neighborhoods using opportunities and incentives that are often extended to large investors. Instead of wasting resources on big businesses that will take more than they give to a city, this approach would immediately, measurably uplift entire communities. Pretty much normal Strong Towns stuff. So why was I so nervous about it? The title is “The Local Case for Reparations.” I was worried about the reactions we’d receive. This piece is challenging to people with all kinds of views on reparations for slavery. It changed the way I think about the issue. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Previously:


“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

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Friday, July 24, 2020

Why 'destroying the suburbs' should be a Republican idea -- also, the Growth Ponzi Scheme revisited.


Exhibit 456-90-2020 in our series, "Nothing In America Makes Sense."

'Destroying the suburbs' should be a Republican idea, by Bonnie Kristian (The Week)

The Democrats, says President Trump, are going to destroy the suburbs ... so what, exactly, does destroying the suburbs entail?

Think: zoning.

Taken at face value, this is a bizarre policy choice for the Republican Party, both in its pre-2016 social conservatism and free-marketism and in its post-2016 Trumpian populism. Upzoning — allowing construction of buildings with more units or more nonresidential units than was previously permitted in a given area — seems like it should fit the GOP agenda.

It's a move toward greater economic freedom and stronger property rights. It can lower housing prices and make homeownership more accessible, especially for young couples who struggle to afford both home and kids. (A brief dig through the archives of the conservative Heritage Foundation turns up years of praise for Houston's unusual lack of zoning restrictions on exactly these grounds, and The American Conservative regularly publishes arguments for upzoning, including advocacy for doing away with single-family zoning altogether.) Also, having a granny flat means you might actually live with your granny, who can pass along familial traditions and help with childcare, a very attractive option amid pandemic. Surely this is the kind of pro-family, even pro-natalist policy Republicans ought to like. Why is Trump railing against it?

Because polls show the suburbs losing interest in Trump.

In those remarks and an even shorter comment on the subject three days prior, Trump singled out an Obama-era rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), which Biden supports and which Trump promised to repeal. That repeal arrived Thursday. The adfarm-near-me/">ministration characterizes it as a strike for freedom, federalism, and family. It is none of those things.

AFFH didn't "force" municipalities to do anything, as some conservatives have alleged. It mainly set conditions on some federal housing and transportation subsidies. (Suburbia is very subsidy-dependent.) It told local governments that to receive cash from Washington, they'd have to meet certain requirements, most notably ending single-family zoning. But single-family zoning isn't the creature of local self-governance Trump suggests. It originated significantly because of a previous set of conditions for different federal subsidies — subsidies, in fact, introduced by the archetypical Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministration: the New Deal-era White House of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We've been talking about suburban subsidies for as long as the NA Confidential blog has existed. Take it away, Charles Marohn.

"[S]ingle-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt adfarm-near-me/">ministration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance," explains Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, a new urbanism advocacy organization. "So, [AFFH said,] suburban governments, you won't get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then," he continues. "And we oppose this today because we are conservatives?"

It makes no sense.

Ah, but there's even more to it.

In addition to being heavily subsidized in both construction and ongoing maintenance, much of suburbia was shaped by 20th-century housing and highway policies that implicitly or, sometimes, explicitly functioned to segregate American homes. "White flight" was not merely an organic movement of private prejudice and social fashion. It was in no small part engineered by federal policies, as Richard Rothstein has meticulously documented in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

"To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford," Rothstein writes. Some of this was classism, he notes, but some of it was done with "open racial intent."

This, might we suggest, is the underlying reason for the suburb hubbub.

The Obama adfarm-near-me/">ministration's AFFH rule focused on the residue of that deliberate segregation, and Trump's critique of it hasn't untangled the issue of federal manipulation of local policies from the issue of racist zoning. That makes it plausible to see his talk of single-family zoning as the bastion of suburban integrity as implicitly part of an older tradition of state-enforced racism. It's not unreasonable to wonder if being "invaded by negroes" is what Trump means when he deplores watching a "beautiful suburb ... go to hell."

If you have not previously read Marohn's articles about the Growth Ponzi Scheme, as published at Strong Towns, then now is the ideal time.

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Friday, July 17, 2020

Strong Towns Throwback Friday: "We should not be asking engineers to design streets."


There'll come a time when the critique can be renewed. Until then, we'll live with the myriad errors.

design-streets">Engineers should not design streets, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Last Friday I was participating in the 5th Annual Mayor's Bike Ride in Duluth following a week spent sharing the Strong Towns message on the Iron Range. The friendly woman riding next to me asked me what could be done to to better educate engineers so they would start to build streets that were about more than simply about moving cars. My answer rejected the premise of the question: We should not be asking engineers to design streets ...
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Monday, May 04, 2020

Memo to Team Gahan: "Nine Things Local Government Needs to Do Right Now in Response to the Pandemic."


Charles Marohn has some really good advice for local leaders. The only question is whether his words are equipped with the latest in bunker penetration technology.

Nine Things Local Government Needs to Do Right Now in Response to the Pandemic, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Local governments are on the front lines of our nation’s response to the combined public health and economic crisis created by COVID-19.

Local leaders are being forced to adapt to new realities in an environment where the individuals, families, businesses, and civic organizations within their community are under extreme stress.

And, for the most part, local governments have found themselves on their own, without financial support from the state and federal governments, spectators of a clumsy response.

To make it through this crisis with the least loss of life, to set ourselves up for the strongest possible economic recovery, and to keep our community dialogue productive and healthy, local government must fill the leadership void.

It’s time for local governments to be the leaders their communities need. Here are the first steps to making that happen ...

You get only the first one -- this being the tip City Hall will find most difficult to wrap its avarice around.

A Necessary Mental Shift for Local Leaders

We’re in a time of transition, the process of defining a new normal. The way things used to be, local governments were largely the implementation tool of state and federal policy. In the emerging reality, our systems need to become more bottom-up.

To build strong and prosperous communities, a local leader must:

Step Up. Recognize that local government is not the lowest form of government in an ecosystem of governments, but the highest form of coordination and advocacy for your community.

Orient Horizontal, Not Vertical. Firmly ground yourself in representing the people in your community. Orient yourselves to zealously serve their needs, particularly in the face of established top-down systems that are not.

Be a Voice of Unity. Understand that, in such an emotional and volatile time, with so much difficult work to be done, divisive language will slow you down. Be your most generous self. There is too much to do -- you can’t afford to needlessly alienate anyone.

Seize the Moment. In such volatile times, small steps taken now will ripple through time and dramatically change the course of future events. You can’t wait around for others to show the way. The cities that will emerge strongest are those that take decisive action now ...

So far, here's how we've dealt with the pandemic in New Albany.


In our town, reality and satire are inseparable.
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Friday, November 22, 2019

"There’s more to (Charles) Marohn’s idiosyncratic 'Strong Towns approach' than municipal finance."


This is a good summary of the Strong Towns philosophy as interpreted from a conservative perspective. As Charles Marohn has toured the country promoting his book, he seems to be in position to be questioned from "both" sides (liberal and conservative), which might be the best indication yet that he's on to something.

Is American Sprawl Already Bankrupt?, by Addison Del Mastro (The American Conservative)

On tour, the 'Strong Towns approach' weathers some criticism and provokes plenty of thought.

GREENBELT, Md.—As urbanist and activist Charles Marohn spoke here last month, expounding on the “spooky wisdom” in his Strong Towns book, the setting itself made for an interesting coincidence.

Marohn addressed a mostly older crowd in Old Greenbelt’s community center, an impressive art deco building that dates to the city’s founding under a landmark New Deal program. Greenbelt was an early planned community and a public works project, so it’s an interesting place to talk about Marohn’s advocacy of incremental development, and humanity’s coevolution with the traditional city. As such projects go Greenbelt has been quite successful, though it struggles with a once-shiny, now-degraded stretch of sprawl along its major thoroughfare, sometimes dubbed “New Greenbelt.”

Perhaps it is fitting that Greenbelt was platted and built during the Depression, however, because it is the post-Depression era—not the later post-war era—that Marohn identifies as the point when we abandoned the traditional, time-honed approach to building our places. And when it comes to the poster child of urban failure, Detroit, he notes that there is at least one area of agreement: “Detroit is some very different place from anywhere in North America,” he says to laughs. Detroit, however, weathered the Depression better than most American cities, and so, mistaking correlation for causation—and no doubt with encouragement from Detroit’s primary industry—virtually all urban and suburban development henceforth copied the Motor City’s sprawling, automobile-dependent pattern (which, ironically, was itself adopted after the core city was already affluent and famous).

Marohn’s core contention is that, at a high level, that development pattern was itself what bankrupted Detroit and intensified its poverty and decline. Furthermore, because nearly every post-Depression place is built on the Detroit blueprint, America writ large can look forward in 20 or 30 years to the same fate. It’s quite a claim, but it’s based on what appear to be hard and inarguable numbers. We’ve simply built too much stuff per person, far more than tax revenues or even reasonable debt loads can ever maintain. It doesn’t help that we build so much at once—entire neighborhoods built to a “finished state”—so that the cost of maintenance all comes due at once in a tidal wave of decline.

There’s more to Marohn’s idiosyncratic “Strong Towns approach” than municipal finance, however. There’s a fascinating mediation on the traditional city as a sort of complex, adaptive organism that has co-evolved with human civilization; an emergent system with its own rules, not a fragile monoculture. There is deep, time-honed, iterative wisdom embedded in the physical forms of places as built until the 1930s. Every pre-Depression city in the world “charted the same iterative course,” starting with a dirt street and some wooden shacks, and ending, if it got that far, in magnificent architecture and bustling, well-paved thoroughfares. These cities were not created, you might say; they evolved. To Marohn, building a mature city, all at once and to a finished state, is something like trying to turn a bud into a flower. There is something about the architecture of human society that militates against it. “Why is it like this?” Marohn asks. “I don’t know. It’s complex and it’s spooky” ...
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Monday, September 30, 2019

More topics local candidates don't talk about: Shifting from building MORE infrastructure to making BETTER use of what we already have.


As usual, Marohn locates the center of the target. One important question voters should be asking the Gahanites: Exactly how are we going to pay future maintenance costs for all these bright, shiny (and in so many instances, unnecessary) objects?

The Strong Towns Approach to Public Investment, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

We’re done building infrastructure. The idea that any city in North America will, in the future, have appreciably more roads or streets, more sidewalks and curbs, more pipes or pumps or valves or meters, is absurd. Some may add a bit here or there, but for the most part we’re done. What we’ve built is what we’ve got. That’s it.

In fact, I suspect that many cities will have less infrastructure in a decade than they do now. Two decades from now, I suspect contraction of infrastructure will be a common and shared experience across our cities.

This means that the task of city-building must shift dramatically, from building more to making better use of what we already have. For over seven decades, we’ve culturally viewed expansion as our pathway to success. Now we must develop strategies for thickening up our places, for going back and wringing more return out of the trillions in existing investment.

An Obsession with Maintenance
In my book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, I outline how local governments must use two complementary – but very different – approaches for making capital investments: maintenance and little bets ...
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Saturday, August 24, 2019

Charles Marohn went to Paris and learned a lot of simple things that elude us in America.


"I’m not suggesting it would be easy or straightforward for North American cities to become Paris, but as my friend John Anderson has said many times, we don’t need to be Paris, we just need to be a slightly less crappy version of America."

I've trimmed this down a bit, hoping Marohn doesn't mind that I've left his five central observations intact.

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The Streets of Paris, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 1. Street Trees
Especially here in my hometown, I’m constantly hearing how we can’t have street trees, largely for maintenance reasons. The leaves drop and mess up the drainage. The roots damage the pipes. They are in the way for people in wheelchairs. Car drivers will hit them. And my favorite: If we ever need to widen the street, they are in the way.

 And, of course, there is the persistent criticism of street trees: They won’t grow. My response to all of these criticisms has been to point to amazing places full of street trees and say, “If they can do it, why can’t we?” Paris is full of street trees, and it has been doing it successfully for a lot longer than any modern North American city has existed.

 2. Ubiquitous Bollards
In the United States, our civil engineers often insist on a clear zone on each side of the street. You can ‘t place anything in the clear zone because, by the theory of Forgiving Design, if an automobile is driven off the driving surface, the sudden stop from hitting a fixed object will harm the driver and any passengers of the vehicle. This thinking is rightfully applied to highways and areas where we want traffic to move fast without the potential for conflict. When we apply Forgiving Design to local streets, though, we get absurdities like breakaway light poles along sidewalks. There isn’t a clearer statement of the North American engineer’s values than that.

 I actually encountered an engineer once that didn’t allow a sandwich board sign because of the hazard it presented to automobiles should they strike it.

Needless to say, Paris has gone far in the opposite direction. Seemingly everywhere a vehicle could operate at speeds that would injure people, they have erected obstacles to keep the errant car from striking a human. Absorbing the kinetic energy of a collision is the responsibility of the car and driver, not the people walking along the street. This is cheap, easy, and really effective.

 3. Narrow Streets
In the United States, we use transportation funding as a mechanism to address public safety concerns. Our fire departments often operate on the theory that if you can respond to an emergency quickly, the public is safer. European countries have a much different approach, one that emphasizes prevention over response time. Here in the United States, we require wide lanes, wide shoulders and wide clear zones along our streets so that emergency response vehicles travel unhindered to any emergency. The concept of a clear zone is ridiculous in Paris.

 I’ll note that you are far less likely to die in a fire in a European city than an American one. Ditto a traffic collision. Two of our classic Strong Towns memes apply here.

 4. Slip Lanes
When a design prioritizes building wealth in a place instead of moving traffic, the basic geometry of the public space shifts. In terms of wealth creation, I really like how this street is designed. There is human space on the edge; wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side and meet a pair doing likewise coming from the opposite direction. They are protected by bollards along the entire stretch. Then there is a one-way slip lane for drivers seeking a place to park a vehicle — these lanes are constrained to ensure slow speeds. Then there is a parking lane, although with a decent amount of that space given over to scooters and bikes. Then a boulevard to provide some vertical framing for the street in the form of street trees and nice lighting. The center has two driving lanes with opposing flow, and then it all repeats along the other side.

 For cities that want to make their stroads into wealth-creating streets, this is a great cross section to utilize.

 5. Shared Space Intersections

 Finally, I’m a huge fan of shared space intersections—intersections that lack traffic markings, including stop signs or traffic signals—and I ran into a great one in Versailles. With tired kids and wife, I didn’t get to linger as long as I would have liked to, but in the short time I was there, I did see the humane mingling of humans and vehicles induced by slow speeds and the more chaotic design.

 The idea of a chaotic design is anathema to everything North American engineering practice stands for, yet when drivers are less sure of their own path—let alone the path of others—they do remarkable things like slow down, look people in the eye, and yield. It’s a beautiful thing to watch; it’s just too bad there are so few examples here in the United States.
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Monday, June 10, 2019

Stop building new infrastructure: "One Iconoclast’s Blunt Message on Transportation Funding."


This one's from 2015, but worth repeating.

Our recent experience in New Albany illustrates Charles Marohn's basic point. We're overbuilding local infrastructure wants while calling them needs; and Jeff Gahan has affixed his personal campaign finance needs to the profuse kickbacks from these wants.

One Iconoclast’s Blunt Message on Transportation Funding, by Alan Ehrenhalt (Governing)

After advising municipalities on how to construct roads for years, Charles Marohn now believes America needs to stop building new highways. Will his new way of thinking catch on?

... (Charles Marohn) reiterated his view that the country can survive a while longer without a sweeping new federal transportation bill. Doing nothing, he said, “is preferable to throwing a lot of money at the current approach.”

The gospel according to Marohn is simple enough to put into a few words: We have built too many highways. We have built them in places that didn’t need them. We have built them in places that can’t afford to maintain them. That’s why the federal Transportation Trust Fund is going broke. And if Congress approves a new transportation bill under the old rules, we’ll just build more unneeded roads and force the communities that host them into a further cycle of debt.

Marohn isn’t against spending federal dollars to repair the infrastructure we have. He’s against handing more money over to transportation planners who will always be able to find an excuse to build something new. “The present system is overbuilt and is going to contract,” Marohn recently wrote. “We have so much transportation infrastructure that every level of government is now choking on maintenance costs. I’m tired of seeing bridges fall down and expensive roads go bad while we spend billions on new stuff we will never be able to maintain” ...
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Friday, June 07, 2019

Today's must-see video: "The traditional development pattern outperforms the suburban development pattern every time."


“In the new, experimental style of development, you have a building pattern that is not very financially productive and is really, really fragile. In the traditional style of development, you have a building form and approach that is financially really productive and highly adaptable and resilient over time.”
— Charles Marohn

I've nothing to add to this. It's as clearly stated as this can be done, and it's only four minutes of your time.

The traditional development pattern has tremendous financial upside and limited financial downside. In contrast, the suburban approach has limited financial upside and a downside that can literally go negative.

The following video explains why the traditional development pattern outperforms the suburban development pattern every time. It's part of a series called the Curbside Chat. If you've been a member of Strong Towns for a while, you're probably familiar with it. If not, it's time to acquaint yourself.
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Saturday, March 30, 2019

#SlowTheCars: "We need to design our streets so that drivers feel unsafe driving at speeds that are unsafe."


Our urban streets will not be safe until we slow cars. We won't make a significant dent in slowing cars if our toolbox is a combination of signage, more enforcement and driver education. Those are all nice, but the primary hurdle we need to overcome is our propensity to over-engineer, to apply highway thinking to local streets.
-- Charles Marohn

An oldie (2015) but a goodie. Last week while walking to work down the south side of Spring Street at around 10:00 a.m., I paused to watch the digital display by Williams Plumbing, situated just after the horrendous curve at 10th Street. For almost five minutes the sign continuously read "too fast, slow down," or whatever the words.

Gahan botched the two-way reversion, and now, beginning next year with a different mayor and a new council, it will be time at last to find ways to repair the short-sighted damage. 

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Slow the cars, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 Yield in the crosswalk, sure. Outside of the crosswalk....well, good luck mate.

 For those of you that drive, I’d like you to start taking note of something. I’d like you to mentally document the way that pedestrians act at crosswalks. When you approach a crosswalk and there is a pedestrian walking across the street, look at how they respond to your presence.

 If they are like most people, they will do something to pick up their pace and clear the intersection more quickly. They’ll walk faster. They might even run. I’ve even seen people retreat back to the side of the road then wave me – the driver – through.

 Now think of approaching that same intersection except, instead of a pedestrian crossing, there is someone in another car. What does that other driver do? Do they pick up their pace to clear the intersection for you? Do they retreat whence they came and wave you through? Of course not.

 Why the difference?

 The obvious answer would be the asymmetry of danger between the pedestrian and the automobile driver, the former being far more vulnerable. That might be the case in some instances, but you can observe pedestrians rushing across the street even when the car is fully stopped, the driver has made eye contact and there is no real risk.

 I think a more pernicious reason for this behavior is that many – perhaps most – Americans today have accepted the notion that streets are for cars. Period. Anyone not in a car might be allowed in this space as a courtesy, but the paved street is – first and foremost – the dominion of cars.

 Last week someone sent me this video on pedestrian safety from the Des Moines police department. While very well-intentioned, especially considering (insert your own crass SWAT team and/or militarization reference), I found the premise to be incredibly disturbing. First, they state that there is confusion over who has the right-of-way at “intersections and at crosswalks.” Okay, but then they add this (0:48):

The biggest problem drivers face is being able to understand all the different types of pedestrian signs.

 Say what?

 Now, to cut the police a little slack, their role in this crazy system is to maintain order. There is nothing more orderly than a bunch of signs and a plethora of laws telling us where each type is to be deployed and how everyone is legally required to act at said deployment. I’m not shocked that the Des Moines police department might view this as a regulatory problem.

 Still….drivers are having trouble understanding the signs? So, if every driver clearly saw and understood the signs but pedestrians were still getting mowed down – or, more likely, people were simply choosing not to walk because they did not feel safe or comfortable doing so – that would be okay? It would be orderly, but that is clearly not the optimum outcome.

 One of my twin hometowns – Baxter, the fully suburban one – took this thinking to the next illogical step in a recent project they completed. Along their expanded stroad are not only signs for a pedestrian crossing just in case one encounters that sub-variant species rarely found in suburbia, Homo Sapian Carless, but they actually each have a preceding sign telling you there is a sign coming up. Very orderly. Very dumb.

Just the Federal Highway Administration
defining a street as a highway.

 This is all to be expected, however, for a centralized system like ours. While there are many local projects that don’t get state or federal funding – the small ones – the outside resources for the rest is what drives the mission and focus of all these local street departments. For instance, the bible for placing signage is a book known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The Federal Highway Administration version of the MUTCD – think of it as Patient Zero – defines a street as “see Highway” (no joke). It then defines a highway as:
Highway—a general term for denoting a public way for purposes of vehicular travel, including the entire area within the right-of-way.

 Is it any wonder people don’t feel safe crossing a street outside of car? The mentality of our entire system – and subsequently everything we communicate to driver and pedestrian alike – is that the street is the sole dominion of the automobile. Everything and everyone else is an interloper to be tolerated, at best.

 And if you think that is too harsh, consider this paradox: When we design for fast-moving traffic, we go to great lengths to remove obstacles from the clear zone; anything that won’t give like a tree or a wall. Anything we have to place in this clear zone we then design to be “breakaway” so that it gives way when a car collides with it. I’ve even seen state DOT’s demand that retailers remove sandwich board signs on the sidewalk, not because it was distracting but because the signs could damage a vehicle if the vehicle went off the stroad and hit them (note the sign was four feet from the actual building, which might also cause some damage if struck).

 We go through all this trouble to make things safe for vehicles and their drivers, but then we allow – and sometimes even design for – pedestrians to be in this space. We put sidewalks right on the edge of roadways that we post at 45 mph, even knowing that most people will drive 55 mph. Regardless, a pedestrian struck at 45 mph is just as dead. Perhaps traffic engineers are not offended by this as pedestrians are technically “breakaway” as well.

 So we tolerate pedestrians, essentially at their own risk. If we wanted to build streets to not just tolerate pedestrians but to actually accommodate people – who, by the way, are the main indicator species of a financially productive place – what would we do differently?

 Last week someone sent me one of those articles that details the history of automobile/pedestrian interaction. This one was in Collector’s Weekly and, despite the unnecessarily provocative title, was a great read. The most amazing part – and the answer to making streets that are financially productive once more – is the different attitude towards pedestrians. From the article:

Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play. “Common law tended to pin responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous vehicle,” says [Peter] Norton, “so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian.” Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren’t a major issue: Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12 miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher speeds.

 As the article went on, it detailed things such as “silent policeman” and “traffic turtles” that essentially thwarted the speed ambitions of drivers so as to keep the public realm safe for everyone. The expectations were different:

“If a kid is hit in a street in 2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, ‘What parent is so neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,’” says Norton.

“In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, ‘What evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be playing?’ That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has changed—blaming the driver was really automatic then. It didn’t help if they said something like, ‘The kid darted out into the street!,’ because the answer would’ve been, ‘That’s what kids do. By choosing to operate this dangerous machine, it’s your job to watch out for others.’ It would be like if you drove a motorcycle in a hallway today and hit somebody—you couldn’t say, ‘Oh, well, they just jumped out in front of me,’ because the response would be that you shouldn’t operate a motorcycle in a hallway.”

 Forgiving design principles that traffic engineers employ have replaced the “that’s what kids do” burden on the driver with a “that’s what drivers do” burden on all of society. If we want to make our cities prosperous again, we have to return that burden to the driver. Not just at intersections. Not just where there are properly specified signs. It is their burden, their responsibility, everywhere, all the time. Period.

 Now here’s the catch: we need to design our streets to reflect that reality. We need to design our streets so that drivers feel unsafe driving at speeds that are unsafe. That’s an entirely different America than the one we live in now, but one that’s actually less expensive to build and more financially successful once completed.
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Monday, December 03, 2018

Marohn: "Certified planners—along with licensed engineers—present the greatest institutional obstacle to wide-scale adoption of a Strong Towns approach."


A periodic reminder about Strong Towns.

WHO WE ARE.
Strong Towns is an international movement that’s dedicated to making communities across the United States and Canada financially strong and resilient.

THE PROBLEM WE FACE.
For generations, North American communities have been growing—or at least, they've been building. But as we've paved endless roads, raised countless buildings and put more and more infrastructure in the ground, we’ve given almost no thought to whether future generations will be able to afford to maintain the world we'll leave them with—or how many of the things we build are making our communities worse places to live today.

As today's essay by Charles Marohn was introduced in my member e-mail:

About ten years ago, a guy from Minnesota noticed something unusual was going on at work. He was a city planner who was respected by his peers, but the things he was helping communities build were putting them in debt—really deep in debt.

No one seemed to think this was a problem. In fact, most of his colleagues were doing the same thing. But when he did a little basic math, he realized that even in the best case scenario, the towns he worked with would never be able to afford to maintain all the pavement and pipe they'd put in the ground.

That guy, of course, was our founder and president, Chuck Marohn. And he decided to do something about this problem: he started the Strong Towns movement. And all those years, he maintained his planning certification, even though he stopped working professionally as a planner long ago.

These days, though, Chuck is considering letting that professional acronym fall off the end of his signature. And the reason why has some profound implications for the future of the Strong Towns movement.

Give it a read, and let us know: how will you make your town stronger today, no matter what letters are at the end of your name?

Good stuff.

Goodbye AICP? by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Earlier this year, I received a letter from the American Planning Association (APA) informing me that my certification from the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) was no longer in effect. The reason stated was that I had failed to complete the required ethics credit for my continuing education. There was a reinstatement process outlined in the letter, including an ultimate deadline for meeting this requirement and becoming an AICP certified planner without having to retake the test.

The letter has sat on my desk for months. I came into the office this evening to find the letter so I could reference it, and someone has cleared it off my desk. I’m unable to locate it. My AICP pin that was sent to me years ago is sitting here on the ledge, however, in the box it came in with a dead bug on top of it. Its disposition is revealing.

I’m coming to the realization that I just don’t care about my AICP. I certainly have not lost any sleep over the letter from the APA. For months, I haven’t bothered to take even the most rudimentary action regarding it. This isn’t the kind of behavior one has regarding a certification they value.

Here comes the meat.

It’s no wonder that the AICP has tended to be—in my experience—an echo chamber of public employees (with governments paying their certification) and the planning consultants who want credibility with those governments (so they can enjoy exclusivity in selling their services).

I’m neither, and I’m starting to get the impression that I don’t belong. Or am not really wanted. I spend a fair amount of time with planners—a great number of them are AICP—and I know there is a lot of enthusiasm for Strong Towns within APA’s membership. Even so, certified planners—along with licensed engineers—present the greatest institutional obstacle to wide-scale adoption of a Strong Towns approach.

Throw another log on the fire.

If we’re going to sit around and wait for planners to lead this revolution, we’re going to be disappointed. Some will be there with us, but most are going to be late adopters.
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Wednesday, November 07, 2018

Ain't talkin 'bout guns: "Understanding Safety at Neighborhood Schools."


Did any of the school board candidates discuss this?

Don Sakel, maybe?


I trust Strong Towns will forgive me for reprinting this piece in its entirety, which I seldom do, but it strikes me as precisely the sort of thinking that isn't ever considered locally.

Ever.

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Understanding Safety at Neighborhood Schools, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 Earlier this year, I was part of an unsuccessful effort to keep my local school district from tearing down an historic structure—a 1930s-era elementary school—as part of an effort to create two square blocks of parking in my city’s core downtown. Our efforts were called “disingenuous” by school officials who wrongly assumed we were anti-school, anti-education, or anti-taxes.

 No, we’re just anti-destroying the city.

 Geographically, the school district is enormous. Most of the people who voted do not live in one of the city’s core neighborhoods. Advocates for the school district had few misgivings with sacrificing an historic structure for more convenient parking. Most voters experience Brainerd as a place to drive through to get to a destination. For them, there will never be too much parking; trying to save the building was merely misplaced nostalgia.

 Even so, there was controversy in the district’s discernment process over proposals to convert playgrounds into parking lots. Early site drawings showed off-street parking in the existing playground areas. In the months before the vote, this parking was removed from the drawings, and a note was added indicating parking would be built, with the location to be determined at a later date. I’m not suggesting anything sinister at this point; district officials said their drawings were creating confusion, that they had not intended to put the parking in the playground, and so they removed the parking from the drawings. It just also happened to be a convenient omission from the public conversation.

 Now that the district has voter approval and is moving ahead with its plans, the full extent of the damage to my city’s core neighborhoods is becoming more widely understood. While they have yet to release schematics, the list of properties they are seeking through eminent domain suggests they are going to convert multiple blocks of residential dwellings into surface parking. It’s a double tragedy in that (1) it will permanently damage these struggling neighborhoods, and (2) few who are involved with the district or as advocates for the school’s plans seem to care.

 In fact, in very predictable fashion, the people promoting the off-street parking are adamantly claiming that their motivation is safety. Specifically, safety for the children.

Safety First, or Driver Convenience First?
Call me cynical. I’ve read the school district’s documentation where faculty indicated that more convenient parking was one of the “top five priorities.” I’ve been in many of these schools, and while I’m sure there are staff members who live in the neighborhoods surrounding the schools, the vast majority do not. These neighborhoods tend to be poor and struggle with disinvestment. While education is not a lucrative career, it is a solidly middle-class career here in Minnesota. Most middle-class people live outside these neighborhoods and drive in. It’s understandable why, come February in Minnesota, people driving to their place of employment would want their parking to be more convenient.

 It’s also easy to understand why a school board and senior administration—none of whom live in these neighborhoods, all of whom drive in—would be intuitively sympathetic to the convenience argument.

 As psychologists have taught us, humans tend to reach conclusions based on their intuition and then use reasoning to justify those conclusions after-the-fact. We’re going to build parking lots to increase convenience, but we’re going to justify it based on safety for children. Alright, so let’s talk safety.

 The Difference Between Urban and Suburban Environments
The vision for safety that the school district espouses comes from a misapplication of suburban design standards to an urban neighborhood. In a sense, what the district is proposing to do is to convert an urban neighborhood school into as close a facsimile as possible of a suburban campus. In that environment, safety is then addressed in standard suburban ways: separating conflicting uses, increasing traffic flow, and managing points of conflict.

 In terms of safety for an urban neighborhood, this approach is an absolute disaster. Let me explain why.

 Separating conflicting uses means keeping kids who are walking away from traffic. The theory is that, if we keep them separated, there will be no chance of any accidents occurring. The bus lane, pickup lanes, and surface parking departure lanes are all designated and kept away from where kids will be walking. Everyone in their place.

 I find this approach suspect in suburban schools, but at least there the expectation is that most students will be driven in a car or bus to and from the site. For each of our neighborhood schools, the school district’s policy is to provide no busing for students living within a mile of the school. They are all expected to walk, bike or be driven by someone to school. As the school is in a poor neighborhood with a lot of working families, a high percentage of students walk, and they will be walking in every which direction. Compared to a suburban campus, walking patterns around urban schools are more random and chaotic.

 That randomness conflicts directly with the second aspect of the district’s safety strategy: to increase traffic flow. Suburban schools channel personal vehicles and buses into their own designated lanes to help traffic flow more smoothly. This is accomplished by removing conflicts, by giving drivers a sense of security that potential conflict points have been managed. If we don’t expect turning cars, stopping traffic, wandering kids and the like, we feel more confident driving faster. A.k.a.: increase traffic flow.

 Again, I’m not sold on this as a general concept even in a suburban setting, but in an urban neighborhood, it is an obscene level of negligence. These are random environments by their nature. Students are all over the place, like they should be in a good, urban neighborhood. Doing things that artificially speed up traffic, or give drivers a heightened sense of security, makes the environment vastly more dangerous for a child on foot.

The best thing that can happen for the safety of students is counter-intuitive for those who prioritize convenience of parking and driving: people driving through a school zone should be so terrified of hitting someone or something that they drive very slow and with an extreme level of caution. In other words, the exact opposite of what is being designed.

 The third aspect of this misapplied suburban safety strategy relates to managing points of conflict: how we handle instances where children walking or biking must cross areas where buses or cars are driving. This is where we get the greatest insight as to the true motivation of the design, because designers are forced to prioritize one group over the other.

 Let’s guess which one gets prioritized for safety purposes. Come February in the dead cold of winter, will the flow of traffic for parents picking up their kids, or faculty leaving the off-street parking lot, be halted so that students on foot can cross the street and get on their way? Or will students be expected to wait on the corner while those in their heated cars and on the bus are provided the opportunity to improve traffic flow?

 Designers, in the name of safety, will attempt to channel kids on foot to designated locations where they will be collected and then, at intervals that don’t excessively interfere with traffic, be allowed to cross. In these situations, the design relies on everyone to follow the rules—or to put it another way, to mindlessly follow the rules, and be more obedient than attentive—and stay in their designated place.

Predictably, this creates the perfect excuse for the well-intentioned when tragedy strikes: “They weren’t following the rules.”

 Not: “We should have anticipated that kids don’t always follow rules.” Not: “This is a complex and random urban neighborhood where unpredictable things happen, despite our planning and design.” Not: “We shouldn’t have given everyone a false sense of security.” None of the above.

And all of this reasoning applies merely to the roughly 75 minutes per day people are entering and exiting the school site. For the remainder of the time, and through all evenings and weekends and the three months of summer, this over-engineered design approach leaves a doughnut of desolation around each school, an inducement to drive even faster through this area where we know slower speeds are the key to safety.

 From a pure safety standpoint, imposing a suburban design on an urban school is a disaster in the making. School officials who argue that this must be done for the safety of the students do not have the proper sense of how to create a safe environment in an urban setting. For the well-being of our students, and the health of our neighborhoods, we need a different vision for how to implement the will of the voters.

 Fortunately, the city council in my hometown has the capacity to stop this. At its last meeting, the Planning Commission—which I am part of— recommended a moratorium on tearing down structures for conversion to surface parking. The council has the capacity to approve this time-out at any point, without any further public notice.

 Such a time out would give city officials the opportunity to meet with the school district and work out the details in a way that is respectful to the neighborhood and truly safe for students. And if common ground could not be reached, the city has the capability to act unilaterally to require an implementation strategy that doesn’t damage the neighborhood where these students live.

 I don’t think it will come to that, however. School district officials are smart and our city council has some very good leadership. And despite different concepts of convenience and safety, everyone involved does seem to want what is best for the students. I’m optimistic we can find a way to have a great neighborhood school while still having a neighborhood.
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Friday, October 19, 2018

Marohn lacerates Hilton Hotels in pursuit of a larger point about efficiency.


Charles Marohn had a bad experience at a Hilton.

I’m just not going to stay at Hilton hotels anymore. I would encourage others not to as well.

This bad experience is the launching point for a consideration of efficiency. It turns out Marohn also was in the middle of the 2017 Delta Airlines "meltdown."

As Nassim Taleb, the Patron Saint of Strong Towns Thinking, has taught us, the operational opposite of efficiency is not inefficiency, it’s redundancy. It’s spare parts. It’s slack in the system. For example, the human body is not very efficient. We have two kidneys when we only need one. We have more brain power and lung capacity than we routinely use. If economists – or Delta efficiency experts – designed the human body, they’d get rid of all that redundancy. It keeps us from operating at peak efficiency.

As we all understand, however, that redundancy also keeps us alive. When we look at natural systems – systems that are complex as opposed to merely complicated like Delta airlines – what we find is that redundancy is a critical survival strategy. The ability to take reserve capacity and utilize it for adaptation during times of stress is essential.

Marohn's conclusion might surprise you.

Hilton Hotels' Efficiency Tradeoff, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... Local governments should prudently act to improve what they do, but they should never seek added efficiency at the expense of their own stability. Hilton will someday go bankrupt; their leadership is going to continue to push the efficiency mantra so tight that they will squeeze all the slack out of their system, making them fatally vulnerable to a shock of some type. That’s the ultimate fate of every efficient system, whether that failure happens tomorrow or in some distant future.

Cities can’t operate that way. If we don’t want them to fail, we must stop demanding that they do.
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Sunday, September 16, 2018

Death to chains, death to Dunkin Donuts -- and spare me the tired argument that it's a "local" business.


Charle's Marohn's piece at Strong Towns is almost five years old, but no less relevant now than it was in 2014.

Next time you're playing bumper cars and competing for inches of asphalt on State Street, look up past the runoff waterfalls to the plateau called Summit Springs, where the buildings being constructed will house businesses like Dunkin Donuts, the subject of Marohn's focus.

According to Marohn, there are at least two big problems with these chains -- which couldn't have been installed without local government subsidies generally unavailable to indie entrepreneurs, and propelled in the case of Summit Springs by TIF bonds used to finance the Daisy Lane road extension.

First, the relationship that Dunkin Donuts – and any national chain, whether selling tacos or auto parts or massages – has with your community is the same relationship that England had with its American colonies back in the 1700’s. The colonies provided raw materials. English merchants, manufacturers and transporters would take these materials, process them and provide them back – with all the value added – to the colonies. The government would take a nice bit off the top for the trouble and, just like that, you have a mercantilist economy, one designed to have a positive balance of trade for the English.

Second, there is an effect on the genuine grassroots entrepreneur.

In the localized version of capitalism, this person starts the doughnut shop. Over decades they slowly and incrementally build their business, creating a modest amount of wealth for themselves and their family in the process. In the national corporate franchise version of capitalism, this person becomes the night manager. They work for someone else. They may have some corporate profit sharing, but it is disconnected from their day-to-day work. They may have a 401(k) plan, but they’re not going to get wealthy from it.

Here’s what breaks my heart: I’ve seen that night manager. I’ve seen the look in their eyes. And I’ve seen that entrepreneur, felt the look in their eyes. One is borderline resignation, an acceptance of fate. The other contains endless optimism. I want an America full of endless optimists.

Tragically, we’ve priced them out.

Speaking personally, I hate chains because they're aesthetic abominations. I also know just how hard it is to create a business from scratch without recourse to throwing money at a tested template, and if this means I have a degree of contempt for those with enough cash to do it, that's fine by me.

But Marohn's valuable contribution to this discussion, as so often echoed in these pages by other contributors, is this:

Not all economic development is created equal. Not all local investments build wealth in our community. Not all open markets produce optimal outcomes for all places. If we want our places to prosper over time, we have to be prepared to ask a tougher set of questions at the local level.

Here's the rest of his essay, which has as its starting point the conditions to obtain a Dunkin Donuts "unit" in Minnesota. Thanks to JG for pointing to it.

Dunkin Our Future.

... Amid all the celebration, one little tidbit of information caught my attention:

Adequate capitalization – Requirements vary by market, but the lowest requirements are $250k minimum liquid assets and $500k minimum net worth per unit.

Now truly, when going through a list of potential small business startups, the kind of thing that someone without an MBA but just a lot of drive and desire could undertake, is not doughnut shop at the top of that list? Along with bakery, pizza joint and coffee shop, in my mind I imagine these as being the familiar Stage 1 businesses that pop up out of nowhere whenever that magical critical mass is obtained. (For more on Stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3 businesses, listen to my interview with Economic Gardening guru, Chris Gibbons.)

But if you are going to start a Dunkin Donuts, you need a cool half mil in net worth, at least half of which is liquid, meaning cash or something that can be quickly converted into cash. That doesn’t sound very small business friendly.

For households where the highest wage earner is under 35 years old, the ideal age for someone who is not necessarily college material but nonetheless has the work ethic and the entrepreneurial spirit to step up and start a business, the median net worth (excluding home equity) in 2009 was $2,003. Let me say that again. Take over half the families where the primary breadwinner is 35 years old or less, add up their investments and savings and then subtract their debts, and they have less than $2k. In other words, they are only $498,000 short of being able to start a Dunkin Donuts.

Note that for people 65 and older, that number jumps to slightly over $25,000, which should scare the hell out of everyone.

“Dunkin Donuts – and national franchises like them – are not looking for entrepreneurs. They are looking for investors.”
What this means is pretty clear: Dunkin Donuts – and national franchises like them – are not looking for entrepreneurs. They are looking for investors. They want people who already have money, who have already amassed wealth. They are looking for those people because they want someone locally to assume the bulk of the risk, whose interests will be aligned with the corporation and shareholders sufficiently to ensure that the right management is retained and the store is run efficiently.

That’s a very different person, and a very different impact on the city, than the doughnut shop started by your local go-getter with vision and a dream ...
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