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:

On understanding reparations.

“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.”

The Strong Towns no-gimmicks approach truly is a "third way" for the city of New Albany because it crosses political boundaries.

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 ...

Strong Towns sez: "We Don't Need More 'Invitations to the Table.' We Need a New Table."

The table used to sit at the Roadhouse. I'm not sure where it is now.

Probably in the Down-Low Bunker.

We Don't Need More "Invitations to the Table." We Need a New Table.

Two years ago, I wrote about how most public engagement is worthless. I am not a fan of the ways we have oriented local government vertically, to essentially be an implementation arm of state and federal policy instead of servants of urgent local needs. While we’ve done this internally within local government, we’ve evolved our public engagement process for similar objectives.

You can think of local public engagement as peaceful pre-crowd control. How do we provide enough opportunity for feedback and engagement so that we can say that everyone was heard, but not so much that it actually refocuses our priorities from those that we hold internally? From my 2018 column:

I’m a planner and I’m a policy nerd. I had all the training in how to hold a public meeting and solicit feedback through SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) questions. I’ve been taught how to reach out to marginalized groups and make sure they too have a voice in the process. That is, so long as that voice fit into the paradigm of a planner and a policy nerd. Or so long as I could make it fit.

There has been a lot of conversation about this here at Strong Towns since that article, and the follow up by Rueben Anderson (Most Public Engagement is Worse than Worthless), were published. Common approaches to public engagement are broken because the objectives of that engagement are wrong.

A tweet by Bernice King succinctly summarizes the power dynamic at play.

I recognize the moment we are in and am not wanting to take away from it, but I would build off the core insights of that tweet by expanding it in the way Chris Arnade has described the “front row” and “back row” Americas. A year ago, Arnade wrote about those who own the table and control who is invited ...

Dear Peter: "10 Tasks for Cities Responding to the Pandemic."

The mayor's most recent video reminded me of that Downfall flick.

Meanwhile, Chuck has more good advice that doesn't stand a chance in New Gahania.

10 Tasks for Cities Responding to the Pandemic, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

... Last week we published Nine Things Local Government Needs to Do Right Now in Response to the Pandemic, a guide for the first sixty days. Following that initial phase, local leaders must continue the mental shift they started by recognizing that:

1. Recovery will not mean restoration. 
2. You must work towards community self-sufficiency, fully knowing you won’t get all the way there. 
3. There is a tradeoff between growth and stability. 

Can you imagine anyone -- ANYONE -- amid the Team Gahan cadres capable of thinking along these lines?

Preparing for Recovery

With the community stabilized, it’s now time to shift to preparing for a recovery. Here is a list of ten things to work on once you're ready:

1. Waive Home Occupation Restrictions. 
2. Legalize Neighborhood Essential Services.
3. Kickstart Entrepreneurs. 
4. Legalize Housing Adaptations. 
5. Make Quick and Lean Investments in Walking and Biking. 
6. End Parking Requirements. 
7. Start Growing Food. 
8. Thicken Civic Infrastructure. 
9. Begin Reorienting Bureaucracies. 
10. Change How You Measure Success.

Here's the portion we're most in danger of botching, because Gahan's first instinct will be to ask HWC to "study" how we might use this assistance, thus revving up the same old pay-to-play bull feces.

State and Federal “Assistance”

It is likely that local governments will be offered some form of recovery assistance from the state and/or federal governments. In advance of these funds being offered, be proactive in having a discussion about how to respond ...

 ... Infrastructure spending is popular for state and federal officials because it creates immediate jobs and the potential for long-term growth. For local governments, new infrastructure has some of those same benefits, but also the additional long-term liability of now having to service and maintain that infrastructure. Over time, these hasty transactions rarely work out well for local communities, most of which are already burdened by years of deferred maintenance.

If you are asked or have a chance to influence deliberations, tell your state and federal officials that cities would benefit more from cash assistance than aid channeled through a narrow infrastructure funnel. Local government officials are more influential than they may think, so know that your recommendation could be impactful.

If the only form of assistance provided to local government ends up being an infrastructure appropriation, take steps to focus those funds. You want to select projects with the most upside benefit and the least additional long-term commitment. When considering projects:

• Prioritize maintenance over new capacity. 
• Prioritize below-ground infrastructure over above-ground. 
• Prioritize neighborhoods that are more than 75 years old. 

When making infrastructure investments, the more you can let a neighborhood assessment of urgent needs guide your priorities, the more effective your efforts will be. Ground yourself in your people and places. The less time you spend chasing the shiny object or projecting theoretical new growth opportunities, the more likely your investments will help the community prosper.

Does New Albany "have what it takes to spring back" from the coronavirus?

If you've lived in New Albany for any length of time and possess the ability to draw your conclusions from genuine reality, as opposed to partisan political bias, then this three-part series from Strong Towns is essential.

Does your place have what it takes to spring back from the coronavirus? Does it have what it takes to thrive? Last week, our friend Quint Studer completed a three-part series of stories exploring this very question.

Do we have a leadership cadre capable of grasping it?

"Don’t expect the reboot to put your community right back to where it was before COVID-19. For starters, it’s not possible. I’ve read and heard this many times and I agree: When this is over, the world will have changed in many ways. But also, even if we could, we shouldn’t settle for a return to the 'old' normal. We owe it to the community to aim higher." -- Quint Studer

I've narrowed the posts to bullet points.

Part 1. Thriving on the Other Side: How Your Community Can Recreate Vibrancy After COVID-19

Here are a few guidelines for re-engaging your community as we move forward post-pandemic:

• Get intentional ... Put some real objectives in place around what you want the future to look like. 
• Be smart with money ... You may be getting some stimulus funding. It will be crucial to spend it in a way that invests in the future. 
• Make small bets ... Embrace incrementalism. As you know, this is the message Chuck is famous for. Fix what’s broken first.
• Put in place a framework for making decisions ... If not, the possibilities will overwhelm you. Don’t chase every shiny ball. 

Thoughtful, bold and ... collaborative. That last one's going to be tough for our local fix-is-in "Democratic" politburo, isn't it?

Part 2. A Framework for Thriving: Keep These Four Areas Front and Center as You Move Forward

None of us would have chosen to be tested this way. But since it has happened, it’s time to get to work and start tackling these challenges head on. Community leaders are being called to be more thoughtful, bold, and collaborative than we’ve ever been before.

1. Placemaking (Vibrant Downtown) ... Creating a vibrant downtown is pivotal to creating the “sense of place” that attracts talent and investment. 
2. Economic Development ...Small business is the backbone of a strong community. Ask yourself: How can we help our small businesses thrive?
3. Civic Education ... The only change that will succeed long-term is citizen-powered change.
4. Education (Early Learning) ... A strong talent base is essential to creating a strong community. That begins with a well-trained population -- and that begins when citizens are very young.

Our culture has been top-down. Will we learn anything from the pandemic?

Part 3. The Culture of Your Community May Determine Your Success on the Other Side

Here are some tips for creating an engaging and positive culture in your community.

1. Get a solid leadership infrastructure in place ... Hopefully you’ve already laid some of this groundwork. There needs to be more collaboration than ever as communities will rely heavily on local leadership as we start to come back from the pandemic.
2. Put together a come-back plan with well-articulated, measurable goals. Communicate it regularly ... As world famous hockey player Wayne Gretzky said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Try to go to where the puck is going.
3. Create a deliberate messaging campaign ... Keeping people informed is key to keeping them engaged. Constantly reiterate your plans and make sure community stakeholders are doing the same.
4. Celebrate small wins ... Be where the people are. As small wins occur, make a big deal out of them in the moment.
5. Balance optimism with realism ... Be positive where you can, but be careful to balance optimism with realism. While you have long term goals, be sure to communicate with a focus on the short-term.
6. Stay focused on creating a healthy business community ... As we discussed last week, small business is the backbone of a strong community.
7. Economic development is paramount ... Focus on opportunity, affordability and vibrancy.
8. Accelerate some projects you’ve been thinking about anyway -- just make sure they still make sense ... Here’s where you can really use the current crisis as a springboard. Approach your projects with an eye toward future realities.
9. Now is not the time to be hesitant. Hit the gas, not the brakes ... All communities face turbulent times. Those who power through the discomfort and fear are the ones who meet their goals.
10. Never declare victory ... The work of building a vibrant community is never done.

"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” ...

"As a rule of thumb, places create wealth. Non-places consume wealth."

The very concept of sprawl is pre-determined by available space. No space, no sprawl. It leads to a larger point, about place versus non-place.

My, how I detest auto-erotic automobile supremacy.

Visualizing Place vs. Non-Place, by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

It started with an actual, attention-grabbing point. Then, as is the way of all things Internet, it became a snarky meme. As is also the way of all things Internet, the meme has more to it than meets the eye.

A few years ago, our good friend Steve Mouzon (author of The Original Green) shared this graphic on his blog: a juxtaposition of the Renaissance-era core of Florence, Italy with a single freeway interchange in Atlanta, Georgia. It has made the rounds repeatedly in various urbanist and transportation circles ever since.

Mouzon’s graphic (above) is intended to make a point about the gargantuan amount of land consumed by automobile infrastructure, particularly when it’s intended for high-speed driving. Speed requires wider turn radii, wider lanes, wider medians and shoulders, and buffer space to separate people and buildings from that fast, deadly traffic. The result: the same land area that could accommodate a bustling urban district of tens of thousands (Florence in 1425 had an estimated population of 60,000) is easily consumed by a single interchange.

Supersize that to the scale of a metro area like Atlanta’s, with all of its similar freeways and subsidiary feeder stroads, and you have a place where the actual destinations people want to get to are pushed so far apart by all this road space that it becomes inconceivable to travel between them without a car—necessitating even more land-hogging car infrastructure, in a vicious cycle.

Whatever “human scale” is—one imagines medieval Florence qualifies—it sure ain’t our modern highways ...

The book is here: "Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity."

The Strong Towns book has been released. Soon there'll be stacks of these at the new Warren V. Nash Reisz Mahal City Hall, tomes towering as high as those Amazon boxes of Bicentennial seat cushion Crutchfields that Bob Caesar wasted tens of thousands of dollars of YOUR money buying in 2013 before flushing the invoices down the toilet to keep people like me from seeing them.

That was a joke, folks -- well, the first part.

There's no way Team Gahan reads Marohn, as his lessons would contradict the pay-to-play Ponzi Scheme which is Dear Leader's only true achievement in office.

More than a year of writing and editing, then months of anticipation and planning...it all led here. Today is the official release day for Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, the first book from Strong Towns founder and president Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

In Strong Towns, Chuck (as he’s known around here) upends conventional approaches to urban development. The North American development pattern, Chuck writes, equates to the largest human experiment ever attempted. "In the blink of an evolutionary eye,” he says, “we have transformed everything about how we live, get around, interact with each other, make decisions, conduct commerce, fall in love, and countless other aspects of human existence.” This pattern has come at an astronomical price, though. It traps cities and towns in a growth/debt cycle that racks up huge economic bills, not to mention steep social costs, that are rapidly coming due.

The Strong Towns approach, as you know, is different. We focus on bottom-up investments (“little bets”) that minimize risk and maximize a community’s ability to strengthen itself financially while improving the quality of life for all residents. Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City, called the Strong Towns book “our current moment’s most cogent, practical, and necessary response to the problem of urban economics.” Andrew Duany, author of Suburban Nation and the founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, put it this way:

Sometimes, in our depleted and cynical times, one hears “Well then, what is your genius plan?” Here it is, finally, with extraordinary force and clarity: a genius plan.

We think something special is happening around the release of this book. The publisher, Wiley, is reporting big pre-order numbers, which is compelling booksellers to take notice. Yesterday, we watched Strong Towns climb the sales ranks on Amazon, ending the day at #1 in three categories: Urban & Regional Economics, Development & Growth Economics, and Business Development. We can’t wait to see what release day has in store.

You’ve already done so much to get the book to this point, but can we ask one more favor? Will you help us spread the word this week? Would you take 30 seconds out of your day to recommend the Strong Towns book (or this site) to some friends—in a conversation over coffee, for example, via email, or on social. The link below provides a lot of information about the book. We’re going to keep that link continuously updated as the major reviews start to appear. (Two already have.)

“A Stronger America Needs ‘Strong Towns’ First,” by Michael Hendrix

“The Localist Theory of Charles Marohn’s Wonderfully Practical Strong Towns,” by Russell Arben Fox

The following links are a bonus of sorts from earlier in the summer, in which Marohn documents his personal journey.

My Journey From Free Market Ideologue to Strong Towns Advocate

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Pequot Lakes Bypass
Part 3: What Is Infrastructure?
Part 4: Analyzing the Cul-De-Sac
Part 5: Commercial Development
Part 6: Organic Markets in the Traditional City
Part 7: The Nature of Markets

Depave Paradise: "Replacing the neglected concrete with a more productive use, including parklets, gardens, or whatever your neighborhood may need."

Last month we had a glance at Depave Portland.

Depaving makes grassroots sense: "A little less asphalt. A little more greenery."

Now another example, courtesy of "It’s the Little Things," a weekly Strong Towns podcast.

It seems that stormwater tax credits might be a handy carrot for depaving, although as always, first the higher-ups need to pay attention.

Neglected Concrete in Your Neighborhood? Why Not Depave It? by Jacob Moses (Strong Towns)

When you walk around your neighborhood, you’ll likely get glimpses of busted-up concrete that could use a little love. It could be a small, abandoned parking lot or modest patch at the end of the block.

You may overlook these spaces, or consider them a minor blemish. However, as Strong Towns president and founder Chuck Marohn illustrated in his Neighborhoods First Report, you could translate these observations into neighborhood-boosting action.

The question, however: What opportunity can strong citizens find in neglected concrete? The answer is logical and—once you discover its benefits—will transform how you react to neglected concrete.

Depaving.

Yes, you read that right: grabbing household tools such as shovels and crowbars and—with permission from the owner—depaving the concrete. And the best part: replace the neglected concrete with a more productive use, including parklets, gardens, or whatever your neighborhood may need.

Enter Depave Paradise, a program created by the Green Communities Canada—inspired by the original Depave organization in Portland, Oregon—that helps communities across Canada turn neglected concrete into uses that boost both the environment and the local economy.

When you depave, as Depave Paradise explains on its website, you can replace the concrete with native plants, trees and shrubs—replenishing groundwater while beautifying your neighborhood.

Depaving on the neighborhood level excites us, of course. But zoom out a bit and consider all the opportunities to depave the city. Think about all of the useless, empty parking lots that could have a more productive use; think about all the unused, crumbling roads.

In this episode, we have Alix Taylor on the podcast: Manager of Water Programs at Green Communities Canada. You’ll learn how to depave neglected concrete in your own neighborhood, including how to get your neighbors involved in the process, how to pitch the idea to city leaders, and how to find sites in your neighborhood optimal for depaving.

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” ...

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.

Neighborhood revitalization: "Our city streets should be designed as a platform for wealth creation, not to speed traffic along."

I've italicized two sections below. The first serves as post header and states broad goals.

The second indirectly points to the disconnect amid New Albany's faux leadership cadres, in that Jeff Speck's original outline for street grid reform in New Albany addressed walking and biking infrastructure to help connect nearby neighborhoods to downtown. These were precisely the bits stripped away by the forever car-centric Team Gahan, which did not fathom what Speck was saying and will gaze upon Marohn's words as tantamount to impenetrable Swahili.

It is unfortunate that elected officials like Greg Phipps sanctioned the gutting of Speck. Maybe Phipps should be reading Strong Towns.

So, You'd Like a Neighborhood Grocery Store..., by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... So, what would it take to make a grocery store viable in this location? If we wanted that to happen, what would it take? As with all complex systems, the answer to that question prompts an endless succession of questions, but let’s follow a couple because they illustrate how much power we have at the local level.

First, to be viable, a neighborhood grocery would need plenty of patrons. There are thousands of people living within a few blocks of this location, but I suspect that few would get their groceries here. Most would get in their car and, once driving, travel the extra mile to the big box store. So, to convert enough residents of the neighborhood into patrons, we’d need to get more people out of their cars and get them walking.

There’s a push/pull strategy to making this shift. The push is that we need to stop equating local mobility with economic development. In short, while it needs to be easy to get to the next regional center on a road, it doesn’t need to be quick and easy to take city streets to get to the edge of town. Our city streets should be designed as a platform for wealth creation, not to speed traffic along.

This push would also help with the pull strategy of making it easier to walk. Right now, we have a working definition for “walkable” as “able to be walked.” If one can physically walk from one place to another, we tend to consider that walkable, despite the relative safety, comfort or utility of the walk. If we want a grocery here to be viable, we must have a deeper commitment to walkability.

In his book, The Walkable City, architect and planner Jeff Speck explains that great streets have four essential elements. Great streets are useful, safe, comfortable and interesting.

Useful. There must be places to go that are worth going to.
Safe. People need to feel safe visiting the street.
Comfortable. Time spent in the street needs to be pleasant and enjoyable.
Interesting. The street can't be monotonous but instead needs to have some life to it.

Going to the grocery would make the walk useful, but going to an accountant’s office, a coffee shop, a bakery and then the grocery would make it even more useful. A grocery store in isolation might be a pull, but a grocery has a better change of thriving within an ecosystem of other enterprises. Converting the parking lots to other neighborhood-scaled businesses, and inviting more in throughout the neighborhood, would not only improve the tax base at little cost, it would go a long way towards creating that ecosystem.

Slowing traffic on our streets and shifting our emphasis from traffic flow to wealth creation would not only cost less, it would make walking safer and—in time—even comfortable. Not allowing more surface lots—especially when on street parking is barely used—would also help a lot, eventually making a walk interesting as well. The more people that walk, the more inviting walking will become, a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

If we really want to accelerate things, we need more people living in the neighborhood. Today, the neighborhood experiences stagnation and—along Kingwood—even decline. That makes investment more of the slum-lord version than the “convert a single-family home to a duplex” version. To make the latter a reality, we not only need to update our codes, we need underlying land values—the driver of positive redevelopment—to gradually increase.

What would make the land in this neighborhood gradually increase in value? One obvious answer is to improve the experience of living in the neighborhood and to do it in a way that gives the neighborhood some kind of exclusivity not available to the edge of town. For example, improvements to the neighborhood park add to the quality of life, but expanding parking in the park —converting greenspace to asphalt—shifts the value of those improvements from the neighborhood to the region, diluting that value in the process.

Another example would be to not build a multi-million-dollar parking ramp in the downtown but to instead focus on improving walkability between the neighborhood and the downtown. Game-changing walkability improvements can be done for pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of a ramp. Without an excess supply of parking, and with easy walking access, the land within ten blocks of downtown is going to become dramatically more valuable simply because of its exclusivity.

I could go on here and iterate like this for a long time, but there is one overriding insight that should be obvious by now: The more this neighborhood—and the more this city—evolves to function like it did prior to the Suburban Experiment, the more successful it will be ...

Strong Towns and Wendell Berry: “Though many of our worst problems are big, they do not necessarily have big solutions."

At Strong Towns, our aim is to change the way that we talk about solutions for our communities. We want to change the way that built environment experts (architects, planners, engineers, etc.), elected officials, and engaged citizens think about and engage with their place. We believe that the only way to change a flawed cultural consensus is to build a movement of people pushing for change. Our work is aimed at building a broad coalition of people who reject the dominant patterns of development and financing and actively push for a different approach, both at the national scale and in their communities.

In New Albany? Unlikely, but a boy can dream.

After all, nowhere in the Strong Towns lexicon can one find a formula for campaign finance enhancement by special interest donors, now enshrined as daily reality in our town owing to Jeff Gahan's insatiable avarice.

But we can find definitions like this: "Growth Ponzi Scheme"

Most American cities find themselves caught in the Growth Ponzi Scheme. We experience a modest, short term illusion of wealth in exchange for enormous, long term liabilities. We deprive our communities of prosperity, overload our families with debt and become trapped in a spiral of decline. This cannot continue.

In New Albany, there is little hope of changing the conversation without changing the mayor and his chortling clique. November cannot come soon enough for me.

Changing the Conversation, Bo Wright (Strong Towns)

My role with Strong Towns involves sharing our message in small meetings with folks who have not previously been exposed to the Strong Towns message. There is a particular awkward moment that always occurs in these meetings. I walk through a short version of our signature Curbside Chat presentation and outline the Growth Ponzi Scheme, in order to describe “the problem” Strong Towns exists to solve. I’ve never finished showing the problem without the individuals leaning forward in anticipation of “the solution.”

I call the moment “awkward” because in the moment, the solutions I share seem so inadequate to the scale of the problem. We’re suggesting that cities and towns across North America are fundamentally insolvent and destined for standards of living well below what we’ve come to accept. The resulting social consequences are sobering, especially for the poor in our communities. And yet here I am, suggesting that we need to focus on the little things, make productive use of the infrastructure we’ve already built, and #DoTheMath when it comes to the long-term financial implications of development decisions. I don’t know what kind of solution would feel adequate for the predicament we’ve created across our towns and cities, but in the moment, “We need to begin by focusing on the little things” feels inadequate.

The mission of Strong Towns is to support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient. And we do this by seeking to change the cultural conversation about growth and development. As I’ve shared before, Strong Towns is not focused on directly changing public policy at any level of government, and we’re not consultants to cities. While these may seem like a natural leverage point for change—and a sexier solution—we believe that the root of the problem extends from faulty assumptions about how to create community prosperity and livable places.

American cities don’t struggle from a lack of a cultural consensus. They struggle because of one. Too many American citizens and decision makers believe that our current culture of unproductive growth, rapid development and intensive, debt-driven public investment is acceptable—or worse, they believe there is no alternative to it.

This consensus is based on a core, systematic misunderstanding of how communities create and destroy wealth. We lack a common understanding of why our places struggle, let alone what we might to do to help them thrive. We need to change the assumptions that our communities and their citizens have about how a community builds wealth. We need to change the conversation.

Wendell Berry on Counterproductive “Solutions”

Back to the idea I began with: that the solutions we offer do not feel adequate. I often come back to a quote by the agrarian author and poet, Wendell Berry. In “Local Economies to Save the Land and the People”, Berry writes, “Though many of our worst problems are big, they do not necessarily have big solutions. Many of the needed changes will have to be made in individual lives, in families and households, and in local communities. And so we must understand the importance of scale, and learn to determine the scale that is right for our places.”

The notion of solutions that are harmful if applied at the wrong scale is a recurring theme of Berry’s ...

Routine traffic stops? "Let's stop using the terrible design of our cities as a random pretext and, instead, be proactive about fixing the design."

I'm having trouble finding the extract from this essay that best conveys the central point, so I've chosen two.

Routine Traffic Stops Should Not Be Used to Fight Violent Crime, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

“I’ll bet we can watch him drive for five minutes and pick out a traffic infraction.”

Those were the words of a Louisville police officer speaking to a resident about her son. The young man had been pulled over for an improper turn, which led to a lengthy episode in which he was ordered from his car, frisked, and then handcuffed while his (turned out to be mom’s) car was searched and, to a degree, dismantled.

There is a lot of outrage about this video. It’s a case study in psychology, and not a flattering one. But I’m not going to focus on that. Instead, I want to return to a topic I’ve written and spoken extensively about: the routine traffic stop.

Back in 2016, I wrote a column calling for an end to the routine traffic stop. My arguments were simple. First, routine traffic stops are very dangerous for police officers. Second, they have little to do with traffic safety. And, third, the pretext for most routine traffic stops—that someone has committed a traffic infraction—is arbitrary, disingenuous, and ripe for all the worst kinds of abuse.

As I wrote in a follow up piece, also from 2016:

Randomly enforcing traffic laws that are routinely ignored in other times and places (because they are not well-correlated to actual safety) as a pretext to initiate contact with high crime populations is unnecessarily dangerous for all involved. In addition to breeding resentment, I also strongly suspect it does not reduce crime, although it creates the illusion of fighting crime.

If we're worried about traffic safety, let's deal with that. If we're worried about catching bad guys, let's deal with that. Let's stop using the terrible design of our cities as a random pretext and, instead, be proactive about fixing the design.

There is a breakdown of the Louisville incident, then several conclusions.

And because I care about traffic safety, when the GPS coordinates associated with traffic infractions show a cluster of violations in the same spot, we need to get our engineers and urban designers out there to make some changes to the site. Our streets should be designed to be intuitively safe. If people are repeatedly doing unsafe things in a specific place, that indicates a design issue. The answer is to fix the design.

And because tens of thousands of people die in automobile collisions each year, and many more people—inside and outside of vehicles—are maimed and crippled through auto crashes, I want traffic enforcement taken seriously. I want it to focus on serious deviants: those operating a vehicle in ways that are threatening. And I want it done by traffic police, not by a violent crimes unit using traffic law as a pretext for a fishing expedition.

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Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

It's good for special interest campaign donors, but "Is a Top-Down Approach the Best Way to Revitalize Downtown?"

From the top, down -- you know, the same way water and debris washes down the side of the Summit Springs development whenever it rains.

Is a Top-Down Approach the Best Way to Revitalize Downtown? by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

The scars of 1950s urban renewal still haunt many American cities. Among them is Richmond, Virginia, where a section of downtown called Navy Hill, at one time a thriving African-American community, was decimated to facilitate the construction of Interstate 95 and, eventually, make way for the Richmond Coliseum.

Now, Richmond is weighing a controversial project to reinvent Navy Hill in one fell swoop yet again, this time through a partnership with a private developer to do a billion-dollar redevelopment of 10 blocks of city-owned land. The resulting master-planned entertainment district would contain a brand-new stadium and event venue, hotel, food hall, and some 2,500 housing units—funded in large part through tax increment financing (TIF) that would commit a major portion of future property taxes not just from Navy Hill but from a surrounding area eight times as large. Local critics have questioned the expansiveness of the TIF district, and whether Richmond is mortgaging too much of its future on this project.

Strong Towns was invited to submit an op-ed to Richmond Magazine explaining why we think this is a huge gamble with a high opportunity cost—and the city should consider more incremental approaches to achieving the same ends of revitalization and increased wealth. Here it is. The below article was originally published in Richmond Magazine, and is reprinted here with permission.

There are incremental, neighborhood-oriented alternatives. They don't generate the same volume of cash for incumbent mayors; then again, maybe people living in neighborhoods should be the first objective and not fat cat donors living in Carmel.

The Incremental Alternative

A city like Richmond can do a lot to support and accelerate more organic forms of growth. At Strong Towns, a national advocacy organization that supports a model of development that allows cities to become financially strong and resilient, we call this model “Neighborhoods First.” There are hundreds of small investments in quality of life, vitality and public safety that the city could make right now, and we’ve found that it’s often these projects that deliver the highest return on investment for a local government’s scarce resources. A humble crosswalk, some street trees and a facade grant can bring up property values and begin virtuous cycles of private reinvestment. Technical assistance and workforce development efforts can give homegrown entrepreneurs a boost.

These investments are modest individually, but transformative in aggregate, because they respond to immediate needs.

You can learn more here: Neighborhoods First: A low risk, high return strategy for building a strong town. Note that Brainerd, Minnesota is the home town of Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn.

Cities across the country are starting to realize that the “big project” approach takes up too much staff time, wastes too much political energy and distracts too much from the basic needs of existing neighborhoods. Risky, low returning projects too often become expensive boondoggles that haunt a community for decades. Public officials everywhere are desperately seeking an alternative.

Neighborhoods First; A low risk, high return strategy for a better Brainerd is an example of how a community can grow stronger by making small, incremental investments over time. By observing how neighbors live their lives, by asking them where their daily struggles are, by getting out on the street and discovering what is actually going on, any local government can discern what their community’s pressing needs are. These projects are the high return investments and they are all around us.

As an example, think back to Mayor Jeff Gahan's secession from the NA-FC Parks Department, and our subsequent TIF-impelled expenditure of somewhere between $18 and $25 million to construct bright, shiny, big-ticket, park-like objects. At the time many of us offered the alternative of using half (or less) of the money to scatter smaller park areas throughout the city's neighborhoods, in places where potential users could walk and ride bikes and not be compelled to rely on their cars to reach centralized facilities.

But the parks boondoggle obviously had been pre-planned, even if there was no discussion of it during Gahan's first campaign for mayor. A better way would have been to involve the community in the plan.

But Gahan's not a listener, is he?

Few autocrats are.

UNDERSTANDING PARKS

Too much is expected of city parks. Far from transforming any essential quality in their surroundings, far from automatically uplifting their neighborhoods, neighborhood parks themselves are directly and drastically affected by the way the neighborhood acts upon them.
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

There is a common belief that a city park is necessary to compensate for the lack of open space urban residents have when compared to those that live on the outskirts of town. This tragic misunderstanding of the role of an urban park has caused us to overlook a prime asset in Northeast Brainerd.

A good park radiates value to the surrounding neighborhood in the same way the sun radiates heat; the closer you are, the more value the park should add. While New York City’s Central Park would be extremely valuable if it were developed, the immense value of Manhattan and the other boroughs adjacent to it would suffer if the park become a housing subdivision. The location and design of the park makes the city valuable.

At the same time, it is the city that makes the parkland valuable. If we took a piece of land in rural Iowa and re-created Central Park, it would not have any real value.

It takes people using the park to build and create the value that is then reflected back to the neighborhood. A lifeless park is the sign of a lifeless neighborhood. Fixing what is wrong with Mill Park is critical, but doing so will not restore Northeast Brainerd to prosperity. The two need to happen together.

An urban park is not compensation for a neighborhood’s shortcomings. It is a reflection of a neighborhood’s value and worth and, as such, is the most revealing barometer of success or failure the city has.

*Recomended reading: The quote from Jane Jacobs above is Chapter 5 of the book, which is all about urban parks.

"Strong Towns is taking an in-depth look at the land tax and how it can incentivize a healthier, more resilient pattern of growth and reinvestment in cities."

Why these spaces stay red.

This week Strong Towns has started a series of articles pointing to the disadvantages of property taxation in an urban context, as compared to advantages from using a land tax instead (or a hybridized approach). These issues directly address our eternal blog questions: Why isn't this building owner taking care of his property -- and why isn't THAT building owner putting something on his eyesore vacant lot?

This is utterly fascinating.

This week, Strong Towns is taking an in-depth look at the land tax and how it can incentivize a healthier, more resilient pattern of growth and reinvestment in cities.

You Get What You Tax For | What’s With That Empty Lot? | The Pennsylvania Experiment | Why Isn’t This Being Implemented?

This series is sponsored by the generous support of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation (RSF).

As an introduction, this. I'll be re-reading all of these links -- and the series continues next week.

What's With That Empty Lot in the Heart of the City? by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

 ... Taxing Building Improvements is a Gift to Speculators

A parking lot in a bustling downtown is the classic example of a property where nearly all of the value is in the land itself, not the asphalt on top of it. In a rising market, you can hold onto the land and watch its value go steadily up (thanks to all the things your neighbors are doing to make the place more productive and successful). You can collect enough in parking fees to cover the taxes, and cash out when you're ready to cash out. Your property tax bill will be relatively low, because it's based on the sum of land value and improvements. The land may be in a central, prized location, but the "improvements" on the property (that's tax-assessor speak for any sort of structure built on the land) are worth next to zero.

The result of this logic when you extend it to dozens or hundreds of properties is that land goes under-utilized, even in extremely valuable locations like downtown Austin—the fastest-growing large city in America. This kind of land speculation creates additional scarcity downtown, and pushes more new development to the outskirts of the city, where it incurs more infrastructure costs, more miles of driving on the part of individuals, and more gobbling up of farmland for suburban expansion ...

 ... Taxing Land, Not Improvements, Leads to More Productive Uses

 This doesn't have to mean raising taxes overall. Rather, cities can redistribute the burden of property taxes by either taxing only the land, or taxing the land at a much higher percentage rate than the improvements. The latter is called a split-rate property tax.

This way, those who wish to build or renovate something on their property will face no tax penalty for doing so. And those who wish to hold onto a vacant lot or use it for something low-value like parking—in effect freeloading off of the location value created by the productive uses to which their neighbors have put nearby land—will face a much higher tax burden.

Attention, candidates: Grassroots economic development by working closely with local entrepreneurs to learn how the city can help foster their ideas.

Utilizing assets like The Root.

Tonight Develop New Albany holds its annual Be Local Expo, a once yearly promotion of independent small businesses. Of course there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, although it falls well short of the everyday engagement required to build and nurture the independent small business community. An "expo" is a showy thing, and the incumbents can glad-hand in a convivial setting.

But there could be so much more.

ON THE AVENUES: Prom planning's nice and all, but New Albany still needs an autonomous independent business alliance.

As long as our City Hall team prioritizes its own absolute iron-fisted political control, and refuses to consider small, sustainable efforts to support the expansion of entrepreneurial endeavors -- "creating avenues to wealth creation at all levels of society," as opposed to maximizing Gahanite campaign finance -- we'll continue to endure the pre-eminence of the prom planning committee, with predictably self-serving and tepid results.

The following podcast link offers a different scenario. Imagine if New Albany possessed fewer paid event coordinators and prom planners, and instead emphasized an "Ecosystem Builder" as described therein?

Isn't our best alternative to the subsidized-from-above River Ridge employment model to contrast and complement it with a grassroots approach like this?

Economic development is far more than squeezing a few extra dollars from the city's exhausted TIF lodes, showering outsiders with gifts underwritten by taxpayers, then waiting for incoming campaign contributions to close the circle. That's not economic development. It's a personality cult.

Better to make the most out of ourselves, right here where we live, by circulating more money locally and encouraging the social network-driven aspect of entrepreneurial activities. Cooperation creates the ecosystem, and the ecosystem fosters cooperation -- and a boost for our sense of community.

Consider listening to the podcast and learning, especially if you're mounting a campaign for local office. Perhaps the chief reason to #FlushTheClique, #DrainTheGahanSwamp and depose a few tired Democratic office holders is to get some fresh air into this civic room.

Theirs isn't the only approach to advancing the local economy. It's just the one with maximum benefit to them.

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Why One City Hired an "Ecosystem Builder" to Support Entrepreneurs, by Jacob Moses (Strong Towns)

Want to better your community but don’t know where to start? Enter It’s the Little Things: a weekly Strong Towns podcast that gives you the wisdom and encouragement you need to take the small yet powerful actions that can make your city or town stronger.

It’s the Little Things features Strong Towns Community Builder Jacob Moses in conversation with various guests who have taken action in their own places and in their own ways.

For city officials desperate to create jobs, winning over a big corporation and convincing them to set up shop in your hometown may seem like the only option. Yet in the midst of this race to the bottom, city leaders often overlook the lower-hanging fruit right in their backyard: local entrepreneurs.

And when we say “local entrepreneurs,” we’re not just talking about the tech guy working on a new app alone in his basement or that one friend you have who left their 9-5 job to “go freelance.” Not all local entrepreneurship is so solitary, and it can take some surprising forms: the at-home baker who dreams of having her own storefront bakery downtown, the college student who wants to create a local startup. And they all have the potential to be job creators in your local economy.

Of course, a thriving startup community doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Support from city leaders is invaluable to help tap this potential.

That’s why in this episode, I chat with Skyler Yost, founding member of Strong Towns and Ecosystem Builder for the city of York, Pennsylvania (a pretty cool job title, I know). For the past two years, Skyler has worked closely with local entrepreneurs to learn how the city can help foster their ideas.

In this episode, you’ll learn how you can foster entrepreneurship in your community, including how to assess existing resources, how to create an ecosystem in which entrepreneurs are supporting one another, and most important, how fostering entrepreneurship makes your place stronger and more resilient.

Amazon, NYC, subsidies and YOUR town: "Tightening the parameters whereby cities can give out subsidies is a way to nudge us closer to that reality."

My social media feed was interesting last week. So many of you were angry: why would anyone NOT feed public money to a colossal monopolistic entity and fail to WELCOME its arrival to further squelch competition, fluff the oligarchs and concentrate amassed capital even further?

Me, for one. Sayeth a writer at The Nation:

The absurdities of the Amazon deal, which enraged New Yorkers and motivated them to fight back, are globalized absurdities present in every factory, every office, every farm, and every export-processing zone across the planet in which people are treated like cattle, offered by their governments to Amazon and other world-striding corporations as a cheap resource to be exploited. This outward-looking, supranational view is already implicit in New York’s anti-Amazon movement, which, much to the company’s displeasure, broadened its perspective to encompass Amazon’s general attitude toward unionization, corporate welfare, and immigration policy. In other words, the movement’s was a holistic critique: rejecting Amazon’s values for a wholly different idea of the kind of world we want.

Meanwhile Strong Towns shrinks the analysis to the micro, i.e. communities like ours and what we're willing to give away in the name of "economic development." There are other ways, though they're not always effective in building the personality cults of big fish in small ponds.

What Local Government Should Do in the Wake of Amazon's HQ2, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... How Baseball Resembles Economic Development
Last week Amazon announced that they were pulling out of the deal they had made with a handful of power-brokers in New York to build a new headquarters there. The traditional practice of negotiating these bad deals in private and then forcing them through the various approval processes based on sheer momentum is undermined by today’s populist mood. For those aspiring to political power, there is less to be gained by going along and being a good soldier. We live in interesting times.

I also don’t think it is lost on Amazon executives—or those of other major tech companies—that prior populist movements in the United States coincided with massive levels of wealth inequality and eventually led to the breakup of anti-competitive monopolies. Our grandchildren may study Amazon’s HQ2 shakedown as a turning point in the Gilded Tech Age.

I admit that I was confused about New York offering so much subsidy to Amazon. By my sense of how economic development works, if there was any city in North America that did not have to bribe a business to love them, it would be New York City, a highly-skilled workforce replete with tech workers with all the cosmopolitan amenities to attract the best workers in the world. New York has done all the up-front work; why not just sit back and let the deals come to them? It’s what they did with Google, which just announced a $1 billion expansion and 7,000 new jobs (without any subsidy).

Nowadays incremental local ecosystem improvements don't seem to be the strategy calculated to get you re-elected.

My hope is that cities would ultimately evolve to be like MLB teams: they would start to see that their resources would be better committed to growing their own talent within, to incrementally improving their own economic ecosystem instead of paying for free agents to pretend you’re their favorite team. It’s not happening, and I’m doubtful that it will, for reasons that MLB teams sometimes struggle with.

I love this idea of a citizen advisory group purposefully purged of usual suspects.

Establishing Ground Rules for Business Incentives
For state governments looking to strengthen their cities, I’m on record already as saying I would dramatically expand the municipal toolbox, but I’d limit the city’s annual debt service to 10% of locally-generated revenue. It’s a mechanism to prevent short-term thinking from blowing them up. I’d add to that some provisions on tax subsidies that allowed cities to be competitive, but limited how deep they could go. Something like:

• Set the maximum length of any deal to something less than seven years to keep current leadership from imperiling future leadership,
• Set the maximum annual dollar amount of any deal to something less than 2% of the city’s locally-generated revenue to keep any mistakes from damaging the system, and
• Set the maximum amount of a rebate to 50% of the amount of revenue generated from the deal, so that the new business has skin in the game.

If every city had to live by these rules—which would function, essentially, like a salary cap—it would limit the capacity of businesses to play local governments off against each other, at least within a state. I’m aware it would also limit how much smaller cities could give away to compete with larger cities—something many would call unfair. But I’ve worked and lived in small cities all my life; what they need most of all is enterprises scaled to them, not something vastly disproportionate that is only preying on their weakness.

Ultimately, what we all want is for the right business to be matched with the right city for the right reasons. Tightening the parameters whereby cities can give out subsidies is a way to nudge us closer to that reality.

And for populist advocates on the left and right who dislike these kind of deals, here’s how to be more effective. First, I recommend you educate yourselves on how these tax subsidies actually work. I’ve heard many advocates out there undermine their own credibility by suggesting things like, “We can use this money saved on schools and solar panels.” In fact, you didn’t save anything, you just didn’t collect any of the money you would have given away in subsidy. These kinds of corporate incentives come out of future taxes the company would otherwise owe, not from money that’s available up front.)

Then, I think you should advocate for two things in your community:

First, your city should have a set of values for when giving out tax subsidy is a good fit and what kinds of things would disqualify an applicant. Having such a document in advance, something that can be discussed community-wide, will counter the blindness that passion can create during decision-making.

Second, I’d recommend a broadly representative advisory group to study tax subsidy deals and make an independent recommendation before the deal gets to the city council. Some prominent business people that aren’t in the get-rich-quick game—more like an established banker than a real estate agent—along with someone from the school system, neighborhood groups, maybe a member of the clergy…. Just not the regulars. This group should be trained on how tax subsidy deals work. When a package is put together, they should be empowered to review it and report, not to the city council, but to the community at large, prior to any vote. The staff supporting them should not be the same staff that put together the deal.

Subsidies aren’t going away, but the failure of this Amazon deal—on multiple levels—should prompt us all to re-examine ways to improve our own local approach.

How do minimum parking requirements factor into New Albany's forthcoming updated zoning ordinance?

The argument against minimum parking requirements is not new. Donald Shoup was talking about it in 1999.

Urban planners typically set the minimum parking requirements for every land use to satisfy the peakdemand for free parking. As a result, parking is free for 99% of automobile trips in the United States. Minimum parking requirements increase the supply and reduce the price -- but not the cost -- of parking. They bundle the cost of parking spaces into the cost of development, and thereby increase the prices of all the goods and services sold at the sites that offer free parking. Cars have many external costs, but the external cost of parking in cities may be greater than all the other external costs combined. To prevent spillover, cities could price on-street parking rather than require off-street parking. Compared with minimum parking requirements, market prices can allocate parking spaces fairly and efficiently.

Strong Towns takes a strong stance on the matter.

End Parking Minimums: Waste of money. Waste of space.

It's time to put an end to parking minimum laws and allow our cities to become productive places again.

What's wrong with parking minimums?
Strong Towns allow new businesses to flourish and treat their land as a valuable resource. Minimum parking requirements hinder the potential of Strong Towns by creating barriers for new local business start ups, and filling our cities with unproductive, empty parking spaces that don’t add value to our places.

Join us each November for our annual #BlackFridayParking event, which takes a bold stand against parking minimums with an interactive, nationwide campaign.

Want to see an end to parking minimums across America? Join the movement that's working to accomplish that.

There's a resource page with links to numerous articles about the usefulness of removing parking minimums. Here's one:

What makes surface parking so destructive is that it consumes a finite resource (land) with virtually no direct financial benefit. Our pre-occupation at Urban Three is local finance. From that perspective, parking — in particular the vast kind that adorns strip malls and box stores — is dead weight. Local governments, be they in cities, towns, or counties, are all constrained by the land they can develop. What they do with that resource is thus, paramount to how well they can pay their bills. Tax revenue is but one of many resources squandered by each acre of land devoted to deactivated cars.

Here's another:

Parking minimums are the strange, out-dated, and totally unscientific law that's probably languishing in your city's zoning code. They sound dull (and they are) but they're incredibly important because they have dramatically shaped our cities in a detrimental manner.

Today, I'm explaining exactly why these laws are harmful and what you can do about them.

1. They rob us of financial productivity and prosperity.
2. They hinder small business owners, homeowners, developers and renters.
3. They fill our cities with empty, useless space.

Now I'm just piling on:

One Line of Your Zoning Code Can Make a World of Difference, by Aaron Qualls

Aaron Qualls is the Director of Planning & Community Development for the city of Sandpoint, Idaho. He shared this essay with us about the benefits Sandpoint has seen in the ten years since it removed all minimum parking requirements in its downtown, and we’re pleased to share it with you.

In 2009, as buildings were being bulldozed for surface parking to meet minimum standards in Historic Downtown Sandpoint, Idaho, city leadership took bold action. Downtown area off-street parking requirements were completely eliminated. The decision was preceded by heated debate and was not unanimous. Now, ten years later, what was the result?

Since that contentious decision by the Sandpoint City Council, millions have been invested downtown—projects that would not have been feasible, but for the elimination of parking requirements. Several jobs, building renovations, and expansions by local businesses were essentially made possible by adding a single line of code.

Arguably, no city ordinance is more underestimated for its long term impacts than off-street parking requirements. Many cities are now starting to recognize the negative effects parking minimums can have on housing affordability, historic preservation, the environment, small businesses, walkability and municipal budgets ...

The city of New Albany's staffers have been working for perhaps two years with an outfit called 11th Street to rewrite our code of ordinances. I took a glance at a draft copy from last year and found this, which comes at the end of 5-10 pages of explanation about newly revised ... minimum parking requirements.

I've written to several appointed and elected officials in New Albany seeking clarification as to why in an era of disappearing minimum parking requirements, we seem to be doubling down -- BUT I'm the first to admit the planning/zoning muck-speak is such that I may be completely misinterpreting this section.

If any of them reply, I'll let you know.

Related:

A rant about the fundamentals of parking space economics.

What's a Parking Benefits District? DNA needs to pay more attention to matters that pertain to merchants.

"Why free parking is bad for everyone."