Showing posts with label Strong Towns (blog). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Strong Towns (blog). Show all posts

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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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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Tuesday, February 25, 2020

A potpourri of the cringeworthy: "Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities."


This sounds familiar.

A lot of suburban chain retailers have been wrangled by city regulations into moving their parking to the side or back of the store, but they've moved the "front" of the store to the back right along with the parking lot, surmising (probably correctly) that that's how most of their customers will be entering. The problem is it creates a dead street that's hostile to human activity. Like this gem of an example of malicious compliance, in which a transformer box and some landscaping send a clear message: "Okay, they told us we had to have a door facing the sidewalk. They didn't tell us we had to make one our customers would ever want to use!"

In other words, Jeff Gahan's $15 million Reisz Mahal, which won't have an entrance from Main Street.

Urban Dinosaurs: It's Time These 8 Things Went Extinct In Our Cities, by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

 ... I hit up the Strong Towns Community site—our dedicated platform for Strong Towns members to meet each other and ask questions, offer advice and spark discussion—to crowd-source some ideas for a list of design features that should go the way of the dinosaur, lest the next generation be forced to cringe 25 years from now at our hard-to-reverse bad choices. And our brilliant members obliged with some good ones.

Some of these pertain to the public realm—the streets, the sidewalks, things the government itself ought to permanently stop doing. Some of them are about the private realm: things we might consider prohibiting developers from ever doing on their own land, because it harms and degrades the public realm when they do.

Either way, as a Strong Towns advocate, I'd be happy if I never saw another one of these urban design mistakes again in my city. How about you?

Here's the list. To read the reasons why, click through to Strong Towns.

  • Sloped parking.
  • Snout houses.
  • Ultra-wide residential streets.
  • Four-lane death roads.
  • Retail that turns its back on the street.
  • "Pod" subdivisions.
  • Reeeeeeeally long blocks.
  • Huge curb radii.
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Wednesday, October 02, 2019

The Growth Ponzi Scheme -- or why the State Street Chain Ghetto and Summit Springs suck.


It's not a perfect analogy, but I'm sticking with it; urban "leadership", suburban thinking.

One fundamental fact about Jeff Gahan's unnecessary infrastructure expenditures is that future maintenance costs aren't considered amid the self-congratulatory stroking of his personality cult.

For once Deaf Gahan is right: The hilltop Fairfield atrocity is a "perfect fit" with maximum pay-to-play monetization.


The articles were written by Charles Marohn and published at Strong Towns.

We began writing about the Growth Ponzi Scheme in 2011 with a prominent series of articles that outlined the way American cities, towns and neighborhoods were growing themselves into insolvency.  Since then, the Growth Ponzi Scheme has been discussed in numerous publications. The term, as we've defined it, continues to be widely used and cited.
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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, September 21, 2019

Podcast recommendation: "Big, Impersonal Institutions Are Failing Us. Loyalty to Our Communities Might Save Us."

“George Bailey [from It’s a Wonderful Life], in today’s world, would not stay in Bedford Falls. He’d be the first person to get out, go off to Harvard, get a job in finance, live his life in the suburbs of NYC, and retire and die in Florida. He would never go back the Bedford Falls. Having a sense of loyalty is to say, I have some kind of obligation to this place, and in return, this place has some kind of obligation to me.”

Careful: Liberalism might not mean what you think it does. This is an excellent conversation. There are ideas; there are no miracles. It is an informative 45-minute podcast if you have the spare time to listen.

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Big, Impersonal Institutions Are Failing Us. Loyalty to Our Communities Might Save Us, at Strong Towns

 “The freer we are, the less we feel we control the mechanisms of our liberty and individuality.”
— Patrick Deneen

 It’s no secret to our regular readers that Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn is an avid reader. In fact, every December, Chuck shares a list of highly recommended books from the year that’s winding down—and in 2018, at the top of his list was Why Liberalism Failed by University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen.

 If partisan alarm bells (or a partisan cheering section) just started ringing in your head, hold up—Deneen is not talking about liberalism in the sense of the modern left-right divide. He means liberalism in the sense of “the liberal Enlightenment,” or as Deneen puts it in this week’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, “the philosophical political project of modernity.”

 The centuries-long liberal project treats society as a collection of autonomous individuals, and governments as social compacts whose primary purpose is to protect individual rights. Think, for example, of the Declaration of Independence: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The promise of liberalism is to free individuals from each other: from the tribal, religious, and communal bonds that once ruled our lives.

 The problem, according to Deneen, is that there is a paradox at the heart of that project. The freer we are from traditional social structures, the more powerful and encompassing must be the two mechanisms modern humans have invented to free us from those structures: the state and the market.

 To the extent that there is a crisis of liberalism today—and the evidence for that lies in the political turmoil facing many Western countries—Deneen believes it may be because we feel more powerless than ever to meaningfully control or affect the course of either of those entities. Many of us treat national politics as largely a spectator sport, are cynical about the relevance or impact of voting or activism, and harbor a pervasive sense that market forces, far from bring shared prosperity, are leaving many of our communities behind as well.

 What’s the answer? Deneen has no five-point plan. But he does urge us to take a hard look at the value of community—of living lives that are embedded in a place, and not shying from the interpersonal obligation that this entails. Elite culture in America teaches us to “look for the exits,” says Deneen, but there is value and meaning to be found in forging the deep bonds of community in the place you are rooted, even when that is an uncomfortable or self-sacrificing thing to do.

 Deneen has his critics, but both his argument and its critiques fall outside of well-worn partisan ground. There is plenty here worth listening to and considering for Strong Towns advocates interested in the kind of localist revolution we talk often about: building deeply resilient, prosperous places from the ground up, through local action, without depending on either Washington or Wall Street for deliverance.
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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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Wednesday, May 01, 2019

Marohn: "The core cognitive dissonance in our affordable housing conversation."


A short and insightful piece follows, in which Charles Marohn doesn't pretend to have all the answers.

As with many housing issues, I don’t have a clear three-step plan to make everything work for everyone. Similar to the latest college admissions scandal, it seems that at least part of the conversation needs to acknowledge that even if we truly believe in some vision for an ideal society—whether that includes ample affordable housing or fair college admissions standards or something else entirely—when it comes down to it, our vision for our personal happiness is often at odds with our theoretical utopia. Put another way, individually, we have a vested interest in one approach (rising prices and growth), but collectively, we express an interest in the opposite (broader affordability and housing stability).

In conclusion ...

If we first make that acknowledgement, we can start to discuss a transition between a housing market dominated by our current distorted craziness and one that is more responsive to human needs.

Making this or any other acknowledgement as a preface to a genuine discussion?

Whether it's about affordable housing, streets and roads or virtually any other civic topic in New Albany, City Hall typically doesn't do public acknowedgements, and accordingly, real public discussions seldom occur. We're not having these discussions because they are at odds with the secretive goals of the city's administration.

Perhaps this explains the 800-lb gorilla perched on the dresser during recent chats about the future redevelopment of Colonial Manor.

Noting that I'm very much in favor of the grassroots effort to define a future for the property, and also that the organizers of this effort have done incredible work in standing against the usual Jeff Gahan "fix is in" approach to public "input," there has been some dissonance involved quite beyond City Hall's childish petulance at not having its way.

Specifically, neighborhood activists have openly dismissed any notion of the Colonial Manor acreage being used for housing. I believe this owes to a number of assumptions, some valid (the New Albany Housing Authority's recent spending spree) and others not so much (density fears).

However, Gahan himself surely triggered the backlash when he lofted a short-lived trial balloon about housing in a comment to the Jeffersonville newspaper on March 12.

"We will encourage residential and mixed use. We know the city of New Albany needs all types of housing," Gahan said.

The grassroots reaction to this statement was to read the word "affordable" as an adjective preceding "residential"; to assume "affordable" was code for "public housing," and to object not only to affordable/public housing, but also any housing at all on the site -- how many speakers at last week's listening event referred to there being "too much" density already?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day -- and, for once, Gahan wasn't full of flatulence when he mentioned the desirability of mixed use, including residential. Of course, the devil in those details center on the level of municipal subsidy to campaign donors, but still, it was not an outrageous statement to make.

Obviously Gahan said nothing about this potential residential use being "affordable," which would contradict his longstanding preference for "luxury" in all forms, but the spectre of NAHA scattered site housing was enough to produce pushback, and correspondingly, redevelopment director Josh Staten made sure everyone knew that NAHA wouldn't be a part of the Colonial Manor picture.

For the moment it's moot, with Gahan publicly pouting and his Democratic Party stooges whining on social media about their inability to cope in a world where city council takes its fiduciary responsibilities seriously and doesn't settle for the Phipps Rubber Stamp.

But I believe Marohn's piece adds depth to the Colonial Manor discussion -- and happily at least we're having a discussion, contrary to Gahan's pathological need to micro-manage any such process behind closed doors.

Who Benefits From Lower Housing Prices?, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... I’m being brutally honest (and a little vulnerable) here in order to make a difficult point about another public issue that can quickly become personal: affordable housing. Because here’s another brutal truth: in our cities today, nobody in a position to seriously impact the affordability of housing ever benefits from housing prices becoming affordable. In fact, the opposite holds true: most every individual or organization in a position to lower housing prices would be harmed by such a result.

And:

A policy approach that lowers home prices is going to run into a lot of structural resistance. And that’s the core cognitive dissonance in our affordable housing conversation: we want housing to somehow become more affordable without prices actually going down. Stated another way, we want people to somehow be able to afford housing while housing itself remains largely unaffordable.
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Monday, April 29, 2019

Ponder the happiness of our State Street corridor while reading about "The Causes of Traffic and Congestion."


File under:

"Attempting to address congestion with solutions that make it easier to drive can make the problem worse by continuing to make the car the preferred way to get around."

Alternatives, anyone?

The Causes of Traffic and Congestion, by Andrew Price (Strong Towns)

There are many misconceptions in my local conversation about what does or does not induce motor traffic. Some of these misconceptions are:

  • Single family homes do not increase traffic. If all we build are single-family homes, this will forever stay a quiet neighborhood.
  • Commercial development does not increase traffic, because it does not add more residents.
  • Congestion is bad, and we should treat avoiding it as a priority.

Let's dive into it: traffic, what causes it, and what we can do about it.

The Role of the Street Network
The largest contributor to congestion is the hierarchical road network. This is where you have local streets feed into collectors that feed into arterials that feed into highways.

The Strong Towns article on Dealing with Congestion explains why this is bad. We are funneling all traffic through a small number of streets, giving us a lower vehicle capacity as well as fewer redundancies for when things go wrong (creating a fragile road network where one clog can grind traffic to a halt), and artificially spaces things out by reducing what you can reach in a given distance (sometimes stupidly so as in the case where two houses share a backyard despite their front doors being 7 miles apart).

A highly connected street network (this can mean a grid, but can also take non-geometric forms such as the street network of a medieval city) is better because there are a ton of redundancies (a street closure does not matter if you have countless alternative routes from A to B) and distances are shorter as you can take a more direct route from A to B. Because the load is distributed over the many redundancies, we are no longer funneling all of the traffic over a small handful of collectors or arterials, so you are going to encounter less traffic along your way, even if all else (population density, amount of travel) remains equal.

Designating a main thoroughfare, with higher speed and greater capacity, to funnel traffic through is bad, even if it is part of a street grid. This thoroughfare will attract all of the traffic until it is so congested that it no longer offers a speed advantage over alternative routes (such as parallel side streets), and all people will do is complain how congested it is. This holds true any time we deal with funneling a flow: getting all cars to take the same road, asking all spectators to leave through the same stadium door after a sports game, making all travelers at the airport to go through a single security line, pushing all commuters onto a single transit line, getting all permit approvals to flow through a single queue, and so on. It does not take many people for it to feel crowded when everyone is concentrated in one place.

Snipping through to the conclusion.

Is congestion really a problem?
At the end of the day, we should not worry too much about congestion or traffic. Congestion is part of the solution, not the problem. Congestion is feedback that we have built a place people want to be. The response to congestion should be to allow that Mexican restaurant to open up 3 blocks away rather than 2 miles away. To create bus lines and bike lanes that give people alternative ways to get around. The incorrect response to congestion is to build faster and wider streets, because that just reinforces car dependency and all of the negative consequences that come with it.

To summarize:

Development can add traffic. However, development that brings amenities and people closer together and reduces the need to travel so far can actually reduce traffic. With a mixture of uses, you can achieve a high population density with very little motor traffic.

A highly-connected street network (either a street grid or organic) with many redundancies better distributes the load of traffic and is more resilient to disruptions.

Designated thoroughfares and bypasses create an illusion of traffic because they funnel the traffic through a single point (and with this comes the fragility of a single point of failure that can bring down the system).

Attempting to address congestion with solutions that make it easier to drive can make the problem worse by continuing to make the car the preferred way to get around.

We should not worry too much about congestion, because it creates demand for other modes of transportation and for amenities to be closer.
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Saturday, January 26, 2019

Explaining the mayor's Rally's/Checkers photo-op in the context of Pay to Play, the Suburban Experiment, and Strong Towns.


This embarrassment owes to boondoggle splashback. I'm happy to explain.

The City of New Albany subsidized the Summit Springs hilltop development by means of using the roadway to the top as pretext to redevelop the Daisy Lane intersection at State Street.

At the time, this intervention was artfully justified by then-redevelopment honcho David Duggins' assertion that by working with private profit-seekers, the city could be sure the ensuing development would be done correctly.

Duggins subsequently was packed off to ruin human lives at the housing authority, but this lies outside the scope of today's Rally's indigestion.

From Team Gahan's standpoint, the "right" results from its Summit Springs TIF One Card deferred costs were immediately evident, and to avoid clutter, we'll spotlight just one.



In fact the overall verdict remains very clear.


The city's participation in Summit Springs under the scarcely examined rubric of "economic development" inevitably meant that business winners and losers were being chosen by local government, as in the instance of the laughably termed "iconic" Rally's/Checker chain restaurant grand opening; just note that by virtue of the public subsidies showered upon the private profiteers of Summit Springs, this restaurant itself benefited from municipal subsidies, as these same benefits were unavailable to a true indie small business opening elsewhere.

The city's propaganda team desperately needs a dose of localism, and also might learn from the example of Strong Towns, because in addition to the preceding, the infrastructure being TIFFed into creation on and near Summit Springs will bear maintenance costs in the future, and these are not being factored into the costs at present. While Summit Springs is within a short distance of the dense urban core, its rationale and required expenditures are firmly within the boundaries of the short-term "Suburban Experiment" described below by Charles Marohn ... of Strong Towns.

Read up, pay-to-play Gahanites.

Ha ha. I make myself laugh out loud at times.

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What do you do when you need to change everything? by Charles Marohn

 Our cities are struggling financially. But culturally, we lack a common understanding to explain why this is, let alone decide what to do about it.

 Many people want to believe we’re simply not paying enough taxes. Others believe that our tax rates are too high. We might have too little regulation, or not enough. Some say we need an active government, and some, more of a free market... But at Strong Towns, we don’t see things in such binary ways.

 Plenty of Americans wish we would listen to the experts and hand things over to the people who claim they know what needs to be done. Others believe we have too many experts, and that they know a lot less than they think they do...

We’re more nuanced here at Strong Towns; a little expertise combined with a lot of humility can be a powerful force for good.

 A Cultural Consensus That Lacks Real Understanding

 One area where we have something approaching an American cultural consensus is our need to spend more money on infrastructure. Left, right, center... it seems most people can agree on this. But Strong Towns advocates think differently.

What we at Strong Towns have seen so clearly is that our cities struggle not from the lack of a cultural consensus, but because of one.

 We’ve structured our economy around the principles of the Suburban Experiment, an approach to growth that provides lots of short-term rewards at the expense of our long-term strength and resiliency. Our cultural consensus on infrastructure spending is built on false statistics and short-term planning, but it lacks a common understanding about the root causes of financial failure and financial success.

 Strong Cities, Towns and Neighborhoods

 If America is going to be a strong country, it must first have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods.

 We can't manufacture prosperity with infrastructure spending or federal dollars; it has to be built from the bottom up.

 We understand that cities become strong and resilient when they grow incrementally, when they shun the easy path of simplistic solutions and instead do the hard work of making modest investments over a broad area over a long period of time.

 We know that local governments must focus on their financial productivity and that doing this math is not optional if we want to create prosperous places.

 And at Strong Towns, we know that the cities that obsess about the struggles of their own residents — cities that make a commitment to observe where people struggle day-to-day within the community, and then focus on continuously doing the next smallest thing to reduce that struggle — these cities are not only going to help people; they are going to be making the highest returning investments they can possibly make. They are going to become Strong Towns.

 These are radical insights. They run counter to our current consensus about growth, development and infrastructure. Yet, when we share these radical notions with others — when we have a chance to expose people to the Strong Towns message and our vision of the future — something amazing happens.

 A Powerful, Radical Message That we can All Agree on

 People who don’t agree — who can’t even productively talk to each other today — find something they agree on in Strong Towns. Something challenging. Something radical. Something that, if spread to enough people, can form that basis of a new cultural consensus.

 A strong America made up of strong cities, towns and neighborhoods. That’s the vision.

 We have a powerful message and we have built our organization around a movement to spread it. We’re attacking the complex problem of struggling cities by changing the current cultural consensus. We do this in three simple ways:

 We create content.
We distribute that content as broadly as possible.
We nudge people to take action.

 And it’s working. Don't miss out. Be part of what we're building together. Memberships start at just $5 per month. Join the movement.
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Monday, January 21, 2019

Giving cameras to homeless citizens. What do they see?


I'm struck by the introduction to this link at Strong Towns, primarily because so few of New Albany's civic leaders walk -- unless it's an election year.

At Strong Towns, we believe that the single best thing a local leader can do to make their place financially stronger is to take a walk with a constituent and identify little opportunities to improve your place together. This variation on that experiment—giving a homeless citizen a camera—generated some fascinating results. We hope local leaders are watching and listening.

By the way, it's Salem in Oregon.

Salem through the eyes of a homeless photographer, by Rachel Alexander (Salem Reporter)

We gave disposable cameras to homeless people living around downtown Salem and asked them to document their lives. Anthony McGuire shows us what Christmas looks like on the streets.

Many of McGuire's photos are nondescript - they show storefronts and buildings downtown, places he walks past regularly.

But for him, each image says something about Salem: what the growing city has prioritized, or where he can get a meal and some relief from the cold.
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Sunday, January 06, 2019

Your Sunday MUST READ: "My city is unlike any other. My city is not a thru street."


If Deaf Gahan would have paid attention the first time ... thick, ain't he? Our campaign finance aggregator-in-chief will read this sentence and ask, "but isn't pass-through logic why I'm here?"

"We let the idea of high volumes of through traffic become our identity."

In terms of specific circumstances, Lebanon, Ohio is not the same as New Albany, Indiana. But shared universals are another matter entirely. Go to Strong Towns and read the entire essay, excerpted below.

The member who sent us the following essay about their hometown of Lebanon, Ohio, wished to remain anonymous, but is hopeful that it will spark discussion in Lebanon about how the city sees itself and its future. We hope so too. The history of Lebanon related here is familiar: it echoes those of hundreds of other American towns and cities that have mortgaged their futures on unproductive patterns of growth... but that have a history and identity to be proud of, if they can embrace it anew. Is yours one of them?

Are you paying attention, Deaf Gahan?

Are you paying attention, 3rd council district?

My City is Not a Through Street (Strong Towns)

... Lebanon is a strong and beautiful city. We hold an identity wholly apart from either nearby metro. This isn’t the kind of place where you travel between indistinguishable suburbs and forget what city you’re in. This place shows that it is different, from the unique Broadway streetscape to the fast pace of business on Mulberry, and from the vast attendance of the Carriage Parade to the humble but everlasting presence of our farmers' market. Lebanon was once a place, a destination for all kinds of people, and it can be so again.

Lebanon doesn’t need the through traffic. Lebanon doesn’t need the "through" mindset. We don’t need more bedrooms for commuters to spend ten hours of their days. We don’t need to draw tourists from Cincinnati and Dayton. We don’t need huge, silver-bullet developments like Union Village to increase downtown patronage. We already have the bones of a great downtown; we have since our forefathers started building it in 1803. What we need is bottom-up growth; more businesses that are uniquely Lebanon; more reasons to work here and spend our free time (and dollars) here. Fears of the loss of "small town feel" are misguided. Our downtown is an authentic expression of who we are.

We don’t need more endless bedrooms communities and chain retail to steamroll through our beautiful countryside. And we do not need one more development of detached single-family housing.

We need to be a city growing from the center outward, unafraid to grow taller and busier—busy with people going about their lives here, not passing through in their cars to somewhere else. We need more residents who are invested in the community and want to live and work in the heart of Lebanon.

My city is unlike any other. My city is not a thru street.
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