New Year's resolutions

Source: sunshinereflections.wordpress.com

One goal of mine this year is to engage in more public discussions of urbanism, particularly its role in local public policy. I think this will require more focus than I'm used to blogging. I like being able to choose subject matter, and to ignore news distractions like partisan politics, scandals, and kerfluffles-of-the-moment (like the current bleating about whether President Obama should have gone to the march in Paris). That still gives me a lot of topics to hop between, and being from and of liberal arts education I do enjoy hopping between topics. But somehow I doubt that variety is the spice of productive meetings.

All of which has me thinking about setting priorities. This means developing a short list of ways the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area could move towards urbanism, defined most succinctly on the wise North Bay Design Kit blog as building and operating communities in ways that make them "fiscally viable and environmentally sustainable." What follows are the results of the first round of brainstorming. Note that I'm torn between processes that I understand (like metropolitan government) and goals that I value but am not sure how to achieve (like improving career opportunities for the poor). Still not ready to focus completely, I guess.

New condo development, 100 4th Av SW, swiped from homes.com

1. Develop a 24-hour downtown. Downtown and the New Bohemia area to its south have come a long way since the 2008 flood, with more attractions than they previously had. Their development should continue in ways that include all income levels; include residential as well as commercial property; welcomes bicycles and pedestrians as well as cars; and radiates outward to connect with the working-class "core" neighborhoods. A city center that is vital around the clock is more safe, more economically successful, more interesting in a variety of ways, and more environmentally sustainable. Particularly, it provides a base for both economic opportunity and arts-entertainment life that are essential in retaining talented young people.

But young people eventually age. So we need more than condos.

The city should favor economic development that builds connections and creates career opportunities

2. Include the poor. Those in or near poverty have suffered most from the recent economic downturn, but also didn't benefit from the long periods of economic growth that preceded it. Communities need to build connections to them. Mostly I think this means not excluding them, physically or economically, from participating in the development of the city. (There are pockets of poverty in Cedar Rapids, on Johnson Avenue SW or Pioneer Avenue SE for example, that are so remote from economic activity as to be absurd.) I think it probably should also mean considering, at each stage of the city's development, how specifically any project supports connecting the economically vulnerable to jobs and eventually careers.

Cedar Rapids has a number of important services aimed at lower-income citizens, including food banks, free clinics and housing options. These are helpful, even crucial, to people in poverty. But they don't get people out of poverty. That requires, in the words of Michael Dukakis's infamous presidential campaign, "good jobs at good wages."

Route 9, from crtransit.com

3. Improve public transportation. The metro area has an earnest bus system that stops running at 6:20 p.m., and runs looping routes out of downtown that all take exactly an hour. It's hard to say whether the town is over-served or under-served. My hunch is that rationalizing routes and schedules--running buses from where people are to where they want to go, at times they need them--might be revenue-neutral, or even revenue saving. Right now that's not an issue, as the system is mainly funded by federal grants, but that shouldn't be our main consideration.

Intercity rail is on hold as long as Terry Branstad is governor--he's rejected federal rail funding, and in last week's Condition of the State address advocated infrastructure improvements, by which he exclusively meant roads and bridges--but we might at least think about what we'd need to do to prepare for this possibility.

Dlask's Grocery, swiped from Erin McNamara-Ankney via Pinterest

4. Neighborhood stores, preferably locally-owned. Economics seem still to favor gigantism, with Wal-Mart the extreme though certainly not the only example. It would be nice if most neighborhoods had stores people could walk to (grocery, hardware, e.g.), with doors open to the street and parking lots behind. The stores would carry a modest selection of core goods at reasonable prices i.e. not the mark-ups common to convenience stores, New Pioneer and Fresh Market. It would be advantageous if we could somehow favor local entrepreneurship instead of relying on chain stores (and restaurants, to a considerable extent).

The Regional City argues for empowering metro regions as well as neighborhoods

5. Regional governance. Revenue sharing, a no-poaching (of each other's businesses) agreement, and maybe an urban growth limit for the communities in the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area might not immediately affect the landscape, but would have important long-term effects on area density as well as government finances. Residents of Cedar Rapids and the surrounding towns share interests in the metropolitan economy, traffic, parks and museums, among other things. There should be a shared level of government that represents those interests.