We build community from the ground up

Source: eskipaper.com (Creative Commons)

My spirits have been trending low of late. Maybe I'm not getting enough Vitamin B, or maybe winter's gone on too long. Maybe I'm kind of a pessimist. Or maybe it has something to do with last week's Democratic presidential debate, an unprecedented display of obstreperousness that has me thinking that President Trump's reelection is increasingly likely. Mismanagement of government, personal corruption, foully abusive rhetoric, and cruel treatment of the most vulnerable among us have cost the President nothing, and have if anything solidified his base. Meanwhile, the viable alternatives are eating each other up like the gingham dog and calico cat. "O Scotland, Scotland!"

Three years ago, as Trump began his Presidency, I dared to hope that his performance would result in broad and decisive repudiation. Although his presidency has been even more relentlessly bad than I could have foreseen, at this point broad repudiation seems far from likely. If he is defeated for reelection, it will be narrowly, with the results in a few states decisive. The next Democratic president, for whom I can tell you right now I will surely vote, will have run based on unaffordable promises and sticking it to the billionaires, and will find themselves at the helm of a broken government of a riven, ungovernable country. Good luck with that.

We are, in short, more broken and more fearful than I'd thought. Putting the pieces back together is going to take a long time, the next President's first term at the very least. And the first thing we need to do--not what some President needs to do, but what we need to do, so Presidents can eventually do productive President stuff--is to learn how to live together.

That starts locally. (For an argument that this has already started in towns around the United States, see Studer 2020.)

Source: wuestenigel.com (Creative Commons)

One set of interesting ideas is floating around Paris, France. Anne Hidalgo, running for reelection as the Mayor of the City of Paris, wants to make it a "15-minute city" (O'Sullivan 2020). This means something different in a city with 21000 residents per square mile that has closed many streets to through auto traffic, than it would in a sprawling burg like Cedar Rapids, where most adults can get anywhere in 15 minutes by getting in their cars. The campaign's image...

Paris En Commun campaign image

...shows work, shopping, dining, recreation, culture and health care within walking distance of every residence ("chez moi"). This would involve sacrificing road space to pedestrians and cyclists, designing public spaces for multiple use throughout the day, and promoting small shops, clinics, and performance spaces. It would involve somehow comfortably accommodating the needs of hordes of tourists as well as those residents who couldn't afford rising rents driven by the new amenities. City Lab notes that Mayor Hidalgo's plan as yet has neither timetable nor budget.

Even so, similar approaches have been proposed in other cities, including Barcelona, London, Melbourne, and Portland. More important for our blogging purposes are the principles are at work here: these advocates are striving to build inclusive communities.

Carlos Moreno, who teaches at the Sorbonne as well as serving as an adviser to Hidalgo's campaign, articulates six "things that make an urbanite happy,” including “Dwelling in dignity, working in proper conditions, [being able to gain] provisions, well-being, education and leisure. To improve quality of life, you need to reduce the access radius for these functions” (Belaich 2020, translated and quoted at O'Sullivan 2020). I will argue that these six are also opportunities that ought to be available to everyone--to be clear, not to make the state the employer, educator or entertainer of last resort, but to design the city such that all of these are attainable to everyone.

So, how to translate this to a contemporary American city, a typical one where, as O'Sullivan of City Lab reminds us, "Car-centric suburban-style zoning [has led] to an era of giant consolidated schools, big-box retail strips, and massive industrial and office parks, all isolated from each other and serviced by networks of roads and parking infrastructure (O'Sullivan 2020)?" That's my town, all right, and probably yours, too. Most people here are used to it, and content enough with it that they fear changes more than either such traffic as there is or the externalities it produces (pollution, isolation, lack of exercise, &c.).

Collins Road Square on Black Friday

We need the city government, not to make our choices for us, but to make choices possible. That means recognizing that not everyone has a car; while usually around here that is for economic reasons, going car free might be a commendable environmental or lifestyle choice, were it possible. Whether or not you actually have a car in Cedar Rapids, they are a necessity. They should at least be a choice.

Our transit system could and should continue to evolve, and ditto our bike infrastructure. But it's darned near impossible to design bus or bike routes for a sprawled city, where even bus riders live far apart from each other. So we need to point towards at least some parts of the city becoming denser, allowing granny flats and even small apartment buildings. Strong Towns argues that the next level of development in any neighborhood ought to be automatically legal (Marohn 2016); let it be so. While affordable housing is a different issue here than in a boomtown like Seattle or San Francisco, my friend Eric tells me it's impossible to build a $100,000 house. So let's have ordinances that encourage preservation and sale of existing housing stock, and that require landowners to keep older housing stock in reasonable shape so it continues to be livable. Pass a land value tax: It should not be possible to hold onto valuable property, letting it lie fallow or degrade, without paying for the privilege (Siskoff 2020).

Protesting demolition of the Hach Building in New Bohemia, 2014.
This property, in primo location by the Bridge of Lions, is currently fallow with no prospect of development.

Same goes for commercial buildings. We do have a yen for the shiny and new, and back it up with tax increment financing. But shiny new rents are hard to afford for local businesses, so the shiny new building down the street from me houses a Jimmy John's franchise, a Scooter's Coffee franchise, and an H & R Block tax franchise. Given that local businesses do better at job creation and at keeping money in the community, we should do better by them (Studer 2019).

We need to support public institutions, in particular public schools, but also libraries, parks, and so forth. When they suffer, middle-class people can always find alternatives. This is less true for people of lower incomes. A city with good neighborhood schools is a strong city. A city where the well-off have created housing and educational enclaves for themselves, and the heck with everyone else, is not a strong city.

Finally, we need to make life better--safer and more comfortable--for pedestrians and cyclists. Narrow the streets to slow the cars, build sidewalks where they haven't been built already, and maintain them where they are. The city could look into helping people concerned about upkeep of sidewalks, if it weren't already gasping to keep up with maintaining our ever-expanding street network. Sidewalks, bike lanes, and trails are not only important for getting around, they're important places for the public to meet each other. A walkable city provides thousands of incidental contacts every day, which is the basis for trust across lines of difference.

Neighborhood connections are not popular with everyone.

I wish this resonated with people. But we are a country of individualists, for whom community is often defined narrowly or even viewed with suspicion. We spend a lot of money and effort keeping the wrong people away, because they're inconvenient--they might park where we're used to parking, they might get in our way when we're in a hurry, their stuff might fill a view we've become accustomed to--or because we've been taught to fear them. Ownership and security are powerful motivators.

President Trump knows this. Despite multiple profound flaws, he's built a resilient presidency by appealing to people's fears, often in the most grotesque but apparently crowd-pleasing ways--the atrocious handling of refugees stands out.  Here in Cedar Rapids, any attempt to improve access to housing or non-car transportation runs up against a wall of fear and anger.  Just ask the developers of affordable housing on Edgewood Road, or live work units off Johnson Avenue. The residents of Chandler Street SW and Grande Avenue SE successfully fended off the spectre of sidewalks. Now Cottage Grove Place is weighing in against a proposed trail development between Washington High School and the Cemar Trail.

The 21st century demands an alternative to our dominant paradigms of development: market forces looking for short-term profits, political leaders listening to whatever song a big developer sings, and individuals protecting their patch of ground from children walking to school. We need something no law can provide: a cultural change that favors community, recognizing individual autonomy not as an absolute value but as the fantasy it is.

We need to conduct ourselves as if other people mattered.