Iowa and the vision thing

Brenna Bird, Iowa Attorney General

Iowa's legislative session ended this week, and there's not much to say about its efforts that I didn't say last year. In year eight of unified Republican control of state government, the legislative accomplishments (working off the lists in Opsahl 2024 and Sostaric 2024) again were a mix of punitive actions towards unfavored groups...

• funding cuts to the nine regional Area Education Agencies, though without the wholesale gutting advocated by Governor Kim Reynolds
• cracking down on foreign land ownership
• repealing gender balance requirements for voluntary boards
• tighter label requirements for vegan options to meat and eggs, prohibiting their purchase with SNAP or WIC funds
• criminal penalties and deportation (to where?) for illegal immigrants
• barring diversity-equity-inclusion programs at state universities 
• lowering the income eligibility limit for Medicaid
  

...and favors for the favored.

• qualified immunity for armed school personnel, in hopes of overcoming insurance industry objections to the arming
• less inspection for hotels and motels
  
• lowering the legal standard for religious exemptions from state laws (actually a good bill, but in the current climate likely to be used primarily to discriminate)
• limiting local regulation of stormwater and topsoil
• a social studies curriculum that emphasizes cheerleading and de-emphasizes critical understanding
• proposed constitutional amendments calling for a flat state income tax and requiring supermajorities to increase taxes (translation: tax cuts for the rich, fewer public services for everyone else)
  
• restrictions on local governments' use of traffic cameras (we only disapprove of lawbreaking when we aren't the ones doing it)
  

There was good stuff, too: expanded work-based learning, attention to the new and creepy problem of deepfake nudes, and higher teacher salaries, though where they find the money for the salaries while slashing taxes is anybody's guess. (For the impact of revenue cuts on Iowa City schools, see King 2024.)

But while I'm glad to see the legislature go home, I'd say the poster children for Iowa's medieval attitude towards anyone who can't keep up are in the executive branch. Governor Kim Reynolds declined state participation in a federal summer meals program for poor children in order, she said, to fight childhood obesity. Attorney General Brenna Bird continues suspension of a state program providing Plan B birth control (Rappard 2023), and in some cases abortions, to rape victims. Her office is investigating the program, they say. What are they finding? They won't say. When will their investigation, now well into year two, conclude? They won't say. As with COVID, our government has other things on its mind than helping people in trouble. If it can't be solved with a tax cut or a gun, we got nothing for you.

Expect more stories like this: Algona Public Library faces possible closures

Whatever you think of this blog, I'm a better writer than I am a politician. While I complain, with ever-increasing erudition, Republican legislative majorities grow and executive branch members return with ever-larger electoral margins. So they have definitely found the formula that pleases the people of Iowa.

So, all congratulations to the election winners and their interest group allies. I am left wondering what is the plan for the future of this state? Perhaps our ever-lowering taxes and light regulatory touch on favored businesses will bring the world to our state, but so far it has not done that.

Iowa is part of a slow-growing region, the Upper Midwest. Our 2023 population estimate was 3,207,004, up 0.52 percent from the 2020 Census, about half the rate of the country as a whole, and up 5.27 percent from 2010 compared to 8.48 nationally. While for most of the 21st century Iowa's population growth has been concentrated in a few urban counties, the 2020-23 county-level data have a mixed message: Polk (Des Moines) and Johnson (University of Iowa) are found among the fastest growing counties, but Story (Iowa State University) added only 33 people, and Linn (Cedar Rapids) is down 0.5 percent. Overall, 31 counties increased in population, with 68 decreasing, though some changes were of trivial magnitude: Cass County lost four people, while Allamakee County gained ten. 

The biggest gains and losses since the 2020 Census:

COUNTY	2023 POP	2020-23 CHG	COUNTY	2023 POP	2020-23 CHG
Dallas	111,092	+11.39%	Henry	19,547	-4.56%
Warren	55,205	+5.36%	Adams	3,544	-4.40%
Lyon	12,324	+3.25%	Osceola	5,978	-3.44%
Johnson	157,528	+3.05%	Crawford	16,013	-3.06%
Polk	505,255	+2.61%	Monona	8.493	-2.97%
Madison	16,971	+2.57%	Lee	32,565	-2.96%
Dickinson	18,056	+1.99%	Chickasaw	11,658	-2.94%
Lucas	8,747	+1.32%	Louisa	10,513	-2.93%
Bremer	25,307	+1.27%	Kossuth	14,396	-2.90%
Jones	20,900	+1.24%	Hardin	16,463	-2.46%

(Calculations by author from U.S. Census Bureau data.)

Even so, five of the ten fastest growing counties are near Des Moines, with two in the northwest corner Iowa Great Lakes area; the others are Johnson, Jones (near Cedar Rapids), and Bremer (near Waterloo and Cedar Falls). None of the ten fastest shrinking counties contain large cities, though Lee County--which briefly had major league baseball in 1871, and peaked in population in 1960--is home to Ft. Madison and Keokuk. Population losses are found all over the state, with clusters in the west central and southeast sections. Osceola, Chickasaw, and Louisa are actually located adjacent to fast-growing counties.

Nationally, large metro areas took some hits during the pandemic, but they have recovered their growth trajectory (see Frey 2024). Pete Saunders (2024) argues this was just a matter of time, as cities increasingly have the economic and social infrastructure that appeals to today's global movers and shakers.... But, in a nation with falling birth rates, and an increasing reliance on international immigration to fuel economic as well as population growth, what does this mean for smaller metros and even smaller non-metro places?

So what's the strategy here, Iowa, if there is one? The legislature will be back in 2025, with plans to resume consideration of bills limiting the legal liability of pesticide manufacturers, make early voting more difficult, ban local police review boards, and deny legal recognition of sex changes (Sostaric 2024).

So far Iowa has managed to reap both the economic benefits of growth in smaller metros like Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, and Iowa City, and the political benefits of bashing them. Tactics may get us from election to election, but with inequality increasing, brains draining, and everything else aging. how do we get to 2049, much less 2074? Do we have anything approaching a vision for our future?

SEE ALSO

"The Age-Race Gap in Iowa," 7 August 2023

"Iowa: You're on the Menu," 9 May 2023

"Is Iowa Becoming Even More Republican?" 3 December 2022

Can there be too much of a good thing?

Barcelona (from Wikimedia Commons)

I've never been to Barcelona--in fact, I've never been to Spain--but Barcelona, like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Paris, has emerged as a bucket list destination for urbanists. Not only does it have the massive but neighborly Sagrada Familia, an eye-popping Gothic Quarter, and at least 23 other wonders plugged by Earth Trekker, but in the mid-2010s a new city administration undertook an ambitious Urban Mobility Plan based on superblocks.

Superblocks were intended to improve quality of residential life and decrease the environmental impact of motor vehicles by routing vehicles to the exterior of neighborhoods. (See Kohlstedt 2017 for description and diagrams.) The idea was to take maybe nine square blocks, and restrict through traffic from the interior of that area, allowing more pedestrian and commercial activity on narrower park-like streets. 

Earlier superblocks had been effective but tended to produce rapid gentrification; the more aggressive approach taken by the new administration in 2015 seemed more haphazard and produced more pushback (Roberts 2019). The administration of Mayor Ada Colau recalibrated, incorporating more amenities as well as more consultation with the neighborhoods. Subsequent projects incorporated "everything we learned," Port of Barcelona President Lluis Salvado told Vox, so that in what "should have been a more hostile area... the implementation process was almost unanimously accepted" (Roberts again).

Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal

But all is not now blissful in Barcelona, reported Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal at this month's Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago. Viladecans-Marsal is an economist at the University of Barcelona, among other appointments, and has been cited on City Observatory for a co-authored 2022 paper on induced traffic demand. Presenting a work in progress entitled "The Electoral Effects of Banning Cars from the Streets: Evidence from Barcelona's Superblocks," co-authored with Cèlia Estruch, Albert Solé-Ollé & Filippo Tassinari, she said the superblocks continued to show immediate local positive effects, but that the vehicle traffic they displaced were creating more problems around streets designated for through traffic. The experiences of people living along the throughways were so negative that it tipped the political balance of the city: Mayor Colau's party lost their Council majority, and the new Council announced a plan to undo the superblocks.

Viewed from the perspective of people on the throughways, the superblocks of Barcelona sound less idyllic and a lot more like... Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A lot of our houses in Cedar Rapids are built along streets with very low traffic, albeit without the public amenities, shops, and active use of the space that appeared in Barcelona. Our vehicles, doubtless like those in your town, are funneled onto arterials, which function a lot like the throughways around the Barcelona superblocks i.e. they're noisy, unpleasant, and periodically congested. The mess created by this approach to traffic engineering is carefully detailed by Chuck Marohn in chapter 6 of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer (Wiley, 2021).

Inclined as I am to despair anyway, it is easy to conclude that in our complicated world with all of its sunk costs and vested interests, we just can't have nice things. The whole MPSA panel on "International Governing Institutions," on which Viladecans-Marsal appeared, was full of fuel for such despair. Connor O'Dwyer of University of Florida and Vaclav Orcigr of Charles University reported on a well-funded Spatial Plan in the Czech Republic creating fertile ground for state exploitation, while Yooil Bae of Dong-A University reported on the Republic of Korea's failed attempt to restore a region's flagging fortunes by merging three cities into a megacity. Even where injustice and unproductivity are widely-acknowledged, as in the cases of interstate highways plowed through urban neighborhoods (Reimagining the Civic Commons 2024), the people who remain after the sacking now rely on the highway to get places.

Perhaps the lesson of the superblocks is not to proceed too quickly, that great big "game-changing" projects are likely to be rife with unintended consequences. Even when undoing massive auto-centric sacking of our cities, the best approach is to be slow and cautious, and to have a backup plan when things don't go as planned. (If I sound like a charter member of Strong Towns, it's because I am.) Incrementalism can be hard to stick to, though, when--as in Barcelona--the problems you're addressing are widespread, or when markets can move so much faster than your cautious self. 

Closing disclaimer: Residents of Barcelona will argue they are not in Spain, or if they are it's only under duress. I feel a song coming on...

I've never been to Catalonia/But if I go perhaps I'll see ya...

Pity Hoyt Axton's not still around to finish this.

10th anniversary post: "Inequality for All"

 

 

Ten years ago this month, I saw the documentary film "Inequality for All," produced by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and longtime advocate for progressive economic policies. In the film Reich argued that increasing economic inequality in America, driven by globalization and technology, was exacerbated by governmental deregulation; that it limited economic opportunity for many Americans; and that it was solvable only by shifting money from the rich to the middle class. 

Reich's film came out three years before Donald Trump stunned the world by getting elected President on a campaign fueled almost entirely by resentment. While analysts debate the source of Trump's sustained appeal, it surely draws to some degree on insecurity brought by economic inequality, as well as cultural nostalgia. Trump, an extraordinarily wealthy man who inherited his fortune, has sharp words for "elites," but of course it is the most vulnerable who suffered the most under his rhetoric and policies.

What has been the story of inequality in the eleven years since the film? FRED, the wondrous economic dashboard created by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve, provides data on the Gini Index going back to 1963. By this measure, inequality declined through the 1960s and 70s, before rising from the mid-30s to around 40 in the early 1990s. It's hovered there ever since, declining a bit when recessions hit upper incomes. At the time "Inequality for All" came out, the single-year high was 41.4 in 2006; it recovered to 41.5 in 2014, and stayed around there through 2019 before COVID hit. It was 39.7 in 2021, the last year for which there are data. I'll lay odds it's back to at least 41.5, if not higher.

As of 2016 our Gini score of 41.1 was the highest in the developed world, with only Israel (39.0) within five points of it (The CIA World Factbook 2023-2024, p. 1007) . The UK scored 34.8, Canada 33.3, Japan 32.9, Germany 31.9, and France 31.6. So it's definitely a choice to be as unequal as we are.

Thomas Piketty's data go back farther, though he prefers to look at income shares rather than the Gini Index (see Piketty 2013: 266-267) the post-1963 pattern is virtually identical. At the time he published Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap-Harvard, 2013), the share of US national income going to the top 10 percent had reached levels not seen since the 1920s (cf. Figure 1.1, p. 24, and Figure 8.7, p. 299). Moreover, those high shares were already sustained longer than they had been in the 1920s, and now of course have been sustained even longer. (The same can be said of the share of national income going to the top 1 percent, viz. Figure 8.8 on p. 300.)

So we're at historical levels of inequality in America. Reich concluded his film on a hopeful note: "History is on the side of positive social change." Certainly we can point to past examples of positive social change, and there's surely no point in being hopeless. But it's hard to see this story ending well without a sharp change of course. Right now the main available business models are far from inspiring: either to sell luxury items to the rich, or cheap crap to the poor. That leaves us with sprawl, unstable employment, unaffordable housing, stressed parents, vehicle gigantism, deaths of despair, and less opportunity for small business starts. And where does that take us? Social fragmentation, threats to democracy, violent outbreaks... the mind reels.

I guess the one thing I would say in 2024 is it's too bad more people didn't listen to Robert Reich back then instead of Donald Trump and his ilk. Positive social change is never easy, but community-building is always worth it.

My speech to the graduates

Canvassing for a Vote by William Bingham (1852)

In early April, I was invited by Coe's chapter of Phi Kappa Phi honor society to address their annual induction ceremony and banquet, on a topic of my choice. Of course, it was going to have something to do with urbanism. The motto of Phi Kappa Phi is "Let the love of learning rule humanity."

A complete community constituted out of several villages, once it reaches the limit of total self-sufficiency, practically speaking, is a city-state (polis). It comes to be for the sake of living, but it remains for the sake of living well.... Hence, though an impulse toward this sort of community exists by nature in everyone, whoever first established one was responsible for the greatest of goods.--ARISTOTLE, The Politics, 1252b25, 1253a30 

Have you ever noticed how you feel different in different places? Maybe it's because of the things that are there to do, or the people you're with. Or maybe it's different qualities of the places themselves.

About 15 years ago, I began teaching a first-year seminar called A Sense of Place. The more I taught the course, the more I read about the phenomenon of place, and the more I encountered a vocabulary of sorts describing how places are put together and why that matters:

• blocks of buildings that are built to the street are more welcoming than when they're stuck behind swaths of parking lots
• buildings with first-story windows are more welcoming than when they present blank walls (like garages)
• buildings that look timeless or historic are more welcoming than buildings that look like they were thrown up yesterday and might not be here tomorrow--and if they actually are historic, they can provide familiarity
  
• wide streets with fast cars are less productive than narrow streets with slow cars
• in general, areas built to human scale--in other words, accessible to people walking--are more welcoming and more productive than areas built to auto-scale

Now, my 20s were by far the most mobile, peripatetic decade of my life, and perhaps you are about to find that, too, to be the case. It can take awhile to find your place in the world, and you can be, as I often was, thrown back on yourself, working through temporary jobs and temporary leases and friends of convenience. But I hope that even amidst the unsettledness, you will take time to notice the place (or places) where you find yourself. I hope that you will come to understand the attributes of good places, to appreciate them, and even to look for them. 

All that will make you a deeper, more informed consumer of places. But I'm not here to advocate consumerism, even the deeper variety. I'm here to advocate citizenship.

We hear a lot about citizenship these days, but rarely in a way that guides our ways in life. Maybe citizenship comes up in the context of the convoluted set of rules that automatically winnow us in because we were born in the United States, while winnowing out immigrants who have to figure out this system while also navigating the turbulence of their own lives. At most, maybe we're asked to stand for the national anthem or get teary when someone mentions the troops.

Well, you should stand for the national anthem, and you should at least appreciate when people commit a large chunk of their lives to service. But there's more to citizenship than that...

Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

One of the earliest, and still one of the best, discussions of citizenship is in Book III of Aristotle's The Politics. Aristotle starts by rejecting definitions of "citizenship" based on residence or legal status; he eventually works round to the idea that "citizen" is not something that one is but something that one does. 

Comparing a community to a ship under sail, Aristotle argues that a citizen--like an oarsman, or a lookout, or a captain--contributes their distinctive skills to the collective effort, but what unites them all is their concern for the well-being of the community--because it is in a strong community that we live our best lives. "A good citizen," says Aristotle, "must have the knowledge and ability both to be ruled and to rule, and this is the virtue of a citizen, to know the rule of free people from both sides" (1277b15). Sometimes you make decisions, sometimes you act on decisions made by others, but both ways you are responsible to a group of people who aren't you, in a place common to you all.

And why do you do this? Why would you do this? Because this is what makes your life better, what makes your life worth living. Aristotle's whole Politics begins with the claim that communities are formed for "the good life"--a quality of life that people are unable to attain on their own, or even in small like-minded groups. 

In the diversity of a large community with all the different skills and ideas and possibilities, our world is broadened in delightful and surprising ways. People who turn their backs on these possibilities, out of fear or narrowness or egoism, miss out on a lot of what life has to offer. "Anyone who cannot form a community with others," concludes Aristotle, "or who does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is no part of a city-state--he is either a beast or a god" (1253a25).

Jose Antonio Vargas (from joseantoniovargas.com)

Depending on which first-year seminar you had, you might have read Jose Antonio Vargas's book Dear America [Dey Street, 2018]. Starting with the subtitle, "Notes of an Undocumented Citizen," Vargas expresses Aristotle's idea of citizenship as a life of participation in community: Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience (Vargas 2018: 199-200).

And all that participation and resilience occur in a place. The citizen not only understands and appreciates the qualities of their place, they contribute to making that place better for everyone around them. Maybe you'll teach, or coach basketball, or join a church, or help plant a community garden, or be a regular at a nearby bar or coffeehouse. When you escape the bubble of self-concern that politicians and corporations are always trying to put you in, when you are part of a diverse community, when you worry less about the price of toys or not being able to find a parking place, you will be on the way to the good life.

[I realize what I'm saying here sounds like a challenge, or even a reproof. But I really mean it to be an invitation--to a much richer life than you get from consumption, or achieving individual autonomy, or following "the rules"... whatever they are.]

I feel the need to say this tonight, because as we all know, the siren song of individualism is strong. Sometimes it's born of our own impatience and frustration, but a lot of times it's being used to sell something... some thing we don't need and maybe shouldn't have. In this world we are surrounded by messages telling us we will be happier when we think more about ourselves, because we deserve a better lifestyle--more fun, hipper clothes, better-tasting beer, all with free parking for my new car which by the way is guaranteed to turn the heads of my sourest neighbors. 

Sometimes all we have to do is vote for the candidate who promises to take what we deserve away from whoever has it now, and give it to us, the people who should have had it all along. But more often than not, a product is being sold, or a collection of products, like the homebuyers with their "must-haves" on the cable network HGTV. We are consumers! In a market system! Our job as consumers is to demand! Everything we have, everywhere we go, should have the attributes that we demand. Supplying is the job of the rest of the world.

Detail from The Temptations of Jesus (1481-1482)
by Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445-1510)

Rugged individualism-with-cool-new-stuff is an attractive illusion now, and probably always will be with us in some form. Even Jesus had to deal with it.... It's a strange story, about the one Christians believe is the Son of God, but it appears in two of the four gospels [Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13] and is mentioned in a third [Mark 1:12-13], so it must be important. Before Jesus begins his earthly ministry, he is driven out to the wilderness where he fasts for 40 days--that's Bible-speak for "a really long time"--and is tempted by Satan. Satan invites Jesus to turn stones into bread, to accept power over all the kingdoms of the world, and to throw himself off a high place to see if angels would catch him. Each time Satan tempts him, Jesus refuses, with a well-chosen verse from the Torah thrown in for good measure. Eventually the Devil gives up.

A story like this has a lot of dimensions, and a lot of potential meanings. I think it is intended to show Jesus's essential humanity--that while on earth he dealt with the same fears, the same needs, the same desires we all do. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) called them "gain, glory and security," the three reasons humans are inclined to "invade" or act violently towards one another. In the wilderness, Satan offered Jesus ways--corrupt ways, but ways--to satisfy those needs. In each temptation, Satan was inviting Jesus to fulfill his own desires, to relieve his own suffering, to enjoy himself for once, and in all things to think of himself first.

Just like Jesus, we get hungry. The challenge is when we get so hungry, or frightened, or frustrated, that we act to the detriment of others.

Moreover, a lot of the time, your ability to act for the greater good is constrained by public policy decisions made long ago. (Try living car-free in Cedar Rapids!)

For example...

• For decades American towns have been marred by traffic engineering efforts to move motor vehicles through them faster, turning livable places into "auto sewers" (cf. Marohn 2021). Interstates have been built through what were once thriving neighborhoods--think I-94 in Chicago or Minneapolis, or I-380 here for that matter--where mostly nonwhite residents lacked the political power to protect themselves or their places. Elsewhere, widened city streets encourage vehicles to go faster, resulting in higher numbers of pedestrian deaths. And traffic still is terrible.
  
• Franchise chain operations proliferate, often abetted by local policy favors (cf. Mitchell 2006), though there's plenty of documentation that locally-owned small businesses keep more money in the community. I understand the attraction to local public officials of big projects with "game-changing" impacts, and the attachment people have to brands like Red Robin or Starbucks, yet those places don't build our communities the way local business does.
• Do you hunger to look good at a low low price? Last week a nearby church showed the 2015 documentary The True Cost, which depicts the heavy environmental, social and health costs borne by people around the world--particularly in textile-producing places like Bangladesh, Haiti and Vietnam--by so-called "fast fashion" sold in stores like H & M. The low prices we pay at these stores come at substantial cost to others.

Even when structures force our hand, as educated people, we at least have the obligation as well as the ability to think about changing policy when we can, and in the meantime about the consequences of our decisions beyond our narrow desires. 

So what am I selling here, self-denial and privation? Good heavens, no, I'm not as sad a sack as all that. As an introvert, I'm not opposed to autonomy, either. But as educated people, we know that autonomy is not ultimately fulfilling, any more than stuff or privilege is. As both Aristotle and the authors of the gospels knew, the good life is unthinkable outside of community. What brings people the most joy, the most inspiration, and all the skills we ourselves don't possess is... other people. Other people! And that includes family, friends, neighbors, random encounters with strangers--everyone who populates our community. 

I hope you will find pleasure in your lives, that you will find plenty of enjoyment and amusement and love and security and rest. I hope, if you drive, you'll have some place convenient to park your car. But as a professor, for a few more weeks at least, I'm here to profess something, and what I'm professing is this: Don't settle for going through life as a consumer. Be a citizen. 

SEE ALSO: 

"Young People of Today, Embrace Walkable Urbanism!" 22 April 2022

"Jesus in the Polis?" 16 August 2013

2022 homily on the temptations of Christ by Pope Francis