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.