The hearts of Cedar Rapids

Hearts are appearing in windows around town. Perhaps you're seeing the same in your town. This seems to be a project recommended for children whose schools have been closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though I've also seen hearts in windows of houses of families without children. (We, empty-nesters, have a couple in our front window.) It is a great way to extend greetings across the physical distancing this pandemic has required, as more people are walking around the neighborhood.

In other good news, my wife Jane found toilet paper available during a routine visit to the grocery store this week, which is a sign the hoarding phase is over. On the other hand, we were unable to find baking powder, dental floss, or filo dough, so maybe those in toilet paper-stuffed residences have been forced to turn to hoarding smaller items.

This is not to say all is sweetness and light here. On our walk last evening, we encountered a man berating the elderly couple next door because there was a dirt pile in their front yard from a construction project. He used the phrase "World War III" several times. Earlier this week there was a shooting incident during a (very unauthorized) gathering of youths in nearby Bever Park. While a Cedar Rapids Gazette canvass of police logs from late March shows no change in service calls from previous years and a decline in arrests, nerves are definitely showing signs of fraying.

Nevertheless, the hearts in the windows are a strong sign that community impulses persist, even when it's extremely difficult to practice community, which of course is when its most needed.

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (V)

Your humble blogger and his humble sister in the days of their suburban childhood

Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here. Response to chapters 3 & 4 is here. Response to chapters 5-7 is here. Response to chapters 8 & 9 is here.

In its final chapter, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020) suddenly gets soul. Author and Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn, having made his case that the bankruptcy of local governments across is a broad but under-recognized problem, turns to the intangible advantages of more traditional approaches to development. Besides restoring your town's economy and government to a sound financial footing, you get neighborhoods with genuine community; opportunities for children to go places on their own; the physical fitness benefits that come from regular walking; something more real and important than our toxic political divide; and the sort of deep meaning to life that comes from living intentionally. He concludes, "Working together in an intentional way, it is possible to make our places stronger financially while also improving the lives of people" (p. 218, italics mine).

Marohn begins chapter 10 with a striking anecdote of their Life Before, in which his daughter meets her bff on the first day of kindergarten, and it turns out she lives right across the street:

My wife and I had lived in our house for over a dozen years at that point. Holly's family had lived in theirs even longer. We were both active families, involved in the community, with work, and with our churches. Yet, the thick woods covering the lots we each occupied along a cul-de-sac was enough of a barrier to our getting to know each other that we didn't even realize our neighbors across the street had a little girl the same as ours. (p. 200)

Not long after, his family moved to "a 1914 home in a historic area" of Brainard, Minnesota (p. 202), and a lot of the chapter discusses his epiphanies about life in a traditionally-developed urban area. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, Chuck Marohn was living on a cul-de-sac? Who would have thunk it?

Because we all come from somewhere. I come from the western suburbs of Chicago, with most of my childhood spent in a house built in the 1960s. It was in an older neighborhood, though, and the town had been around long before the Chicago metropolitan area grew to absorb it. I walked to school most of the time, my family could walk to a corner grocery store, and my parents had no concerns about sending me on errands or letting me loose to explore the area by bicycle or on foot.

I have also always had, for some reasons or other, an ambivalent attitude towards cars.

So maybe urbanism was my destiny. But I've also been fortunate for the last 38 years to live within two miles of my workplace. Had I stayed in DuPage County, I probably would have gotten used to the daily commute from cul-de-sac to office park. Maybe in the 1990s I would have read Daniel Kemmis's Community and the Politics of Place (Oklahoma, 1992) and James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (Simon & Schuster, 1993), and something in me might have been stirred, but I wouldn't have known what to do about it, because what alternative would I have had?

Who would I be if I'd never read Jane Jacobs? Who would I be if I hadn't started following Chuck Marohn?

I am fortunate to live in a place with emerging walkability, in the company of fellow urbanists and cyclists and community organizers who keep pushing the envelope in hopes of sustainable lifestyles, and where the city government, though the Council keeps hankering after subdivisions and game-changing attractions, is visionary enough to build protected bike lanes and sidewalks and do one-way-to-two-way conversions. I am fortunate to live at a time when a variety of writers and designers have given me a vocabulary to articulate my inchoate discontent with 20th century America: people like the new urbanists, Ray Oldenburg, Ellen Shephard, and the inspiration for the Corridor Urbanism group, Dave Alden. I see the world more clearly, and live in it more consciously, thanks to these encounters. And Strong Towns has been essential to all this.

And now those essentials are in this 200-odd-page book:

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (IV)

Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here. Response to chapters 3 & 4 is here. Response to chapters 5-7 is here.

Towards the end of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020), author and Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn suggests a number of approaches cities can use to cope with their precarious financial situations. There are many thought-provoking ideas herein; I'll address three.

Little bets are "small investments throughout a neighborhood, all aimed at improving the quality of life" (p. 155). The idea is to respond to the struggles of people already living there with "the next smallest thing that can be done today," intending "to nudge private capital off the sidelines by giving people confidence in the direction of the neighborhood. He cites the projects of Tactical Urbanism and Better Block as inspirations. Small projects like outdoor seating, crosswalks, and parklets don't cost very much, yet can bring neighbors out and together, and (in keeping with Marohn's financial theme) can convince property owners to make improvements because they're likely to pay off.

The advantage of little bets is a city can try something new where failure is not catastrophic, or likely to saddle the town with a long-term financial drag. I don't know how much the city has spent on bike lanes, but the first wave downtown cost about $3 million, which is a rounding error in a city budget of $500+ million, and you're not stuck with them if they don't work because the streets have to be repainted sooner or later anyway.

Under construction, 2013

A game-changer of a hotel/convention center, on the other hand, is a big bet, with long-term obligations if no one buys it, and they've had a poor track record in other cities, even if they do bring Lady Antebellum to town (see esp. Sanders 2014). The key question every official should ask is, "What if it fails?" If the answer is, we're out a small amount of money and self-esteem, then go ahead. If the answer is, we're screwed, don't do it.

Neighborhood evolution is what happens when change is not prohibited by zoning and other boards, environmental regulations, or empowered hostile neighbors. Neighborhoods that are frozen in time "damage the entire community," in part because they prevent the city from adapting to, well, anything, but particularly financial realities. They also exclude or burden a lot of people: "When city regulations demand that everything be built at a large scale and to a finished state, we not only price out much of society but we ensure that many of those who do own a home will struggle with that investment" (p. 163). So,

It is critical that every neighborhood in America be allowed, by right, to evolve to the next level of development intensity. That means empty spaces need to be allowed starter homes, even small houses, on footprints that can be expanded over time. It also means that single-family homes must be allowed to add accessory apartments, or convert to a duplex, without any special permitting, approval of neighbors, or added conditions. To become more financially productive, we need our neighborhoods to thicken up. (p. 163)

 He reminds us that "mixed use" is what all neighborhoods were until recently. And those traditional neighborhoods continue to be the most financially productive, even in decline.

Three blocks from my house is a small apartment building, one of several in the Wellington Heights neighborhood. It's bigger than the houses around it, of course, but not outlandishly so. It adds to the density and affordability of this core neighborhood without making a spectacle of itself. Why can't we do more of that? Because property values, I know. And parking, and noise, which are the usual complaints dragged out when neighbors want to stop a project. Maybe if more people in the city knew what a dangerous game we've been playing all these years, it would help tip the balance in favor of better housing.

Subsidiarity is a pliable concept but usually associated with local control of policy making. He quotes the definition from Wikipedia, for pity's sake; I'll step up to the Catholic Encyclopedia: "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good." (The Catholic Encyclopedia had a particular fondness for the Tea Party movement, which got a lot of Republicans elected to statewide offices who thereupon preempted local decision-making with at least as much vigor as Democrats ever did, but let it pass.) Marohn argues that local governments with restored decision-making power could make more rational decisions, and wouldn't have to rely for needed revenue on sprawl (or business subsidies, or game-changing projects, ...).

It's hard to be against subsidiarity, because all it's saying is everything should be done at the correct level, whatever you think that level is (unless you favor one-world socialist government, maybe). But state sovereignty has been abused everywhere, not least in states like Iowa run by people who hate the national government but also hate cities. (Recall Governor Kim Reynolds's comments about Des Moines and Iowa City not being the real Iowa, as she signed a bill preempting sanctuary cities.) You'd like to see cities given a real chance to chart their own courses. 

Two caveats: 

1. Unlike Americans in the age of Alexis de Tocqueville, we live in a national/global economy, and it's hard to imagine economic policy being made entirely on a local scale. As we in Cedar Rapids saw after the 2008 flood, when an overwhelming disaster occurs, it's nice when the nation has your back. In a perverse way, President Trump's failure of leadership in the face of the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the need for a functioning national government. But we shouldn't rely on or defer to the national government on matters of local competence. 
2. As Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton have articulated (The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, Island Press, 2001), most cities are part of a more complex metropolitan area that frustrates rational decision making. We need effective metropolitan governance.

But allowing for a federal role where appropriate, and effective metropolitan policy cooperation rather than rivalry and poaching, empowering local governments needs to happen.