Kim Reynolds Declares War

I live in Iowa, which is the happiest, most fiscally sound, and best-governed state in the universe, and also the one with the most economic opportunity. In what our recently reelected governor, Kim Reynolds, calls "a world increasingly marked by chaos," it is comforting to live in a place that is so normal and right-thinking and non-threatening.

There are Iowans, and there are extra-special Iowans like our law enforcement heroes and "parents" (i.e. parents who agree with the governor), and then there are... well, I don't know what to call them, but they're everywhere, aren't they? Even in Iowa. About the only surprise one gets in Iowa is that not everyone appreciates living in this paradise. While recounting her administration's accomplishments in her annual Condition of the State address, Governor Reynolds took time to point out that these accomplishments happened despite the direst predictions of our opponents ("as expected"--just like them!), members of the media (booooo!), and "so-called experts." In the face of our excellence, that bunch characteristically resorted to "hysteria," saving their "angriest attacks" for requiring schools to be in-person during the coronavirus pandemic. When those haters goes on about overcrowded hospitals and Iowa at one point having the highest death rate in the country, we know they're just hating for the sake of their own bilious hatred. Unlike us, they don't want what's best for our children!

We plan to shift money from under-funded public schools to private schools because we want to give "every child a chance to succeed." We could address concerns like those of Darwin Lehmann, superintendent of the Central Springs and Forest City school districts, who told the Cedar Rapids Gazette--an acknowledged media outlet, I regret to say--he worried about the proposal's impacts on public schools (McCullough 2023). But we don't see concerns, only "hysteria," and we "ignore the hysteria," don't we?

Of course, this can't go without mentioning a public school teacher who sent one of her children to private school, and some of her colleagues turned their backs on her! Haters, is what they are, haters and meanyheads! "It's about our children," haters! And we can't talk about our plan to ban all abortion without mentioning Sara in the audience, whose partner left her when she changed her mind about getting an abortion. That's the sort of moral sewer our enemies live in, folks, not only wrong all the time about policy but wrong all the time about life. And children!

(By the way, Sara now counsels other women who face the same decision she did. Until we pass the law and there won't need to be decisions any more.)

The Governor announced a public awareness campaign on the dangers of the opioid fentanyl, as well as increased penalties for manufacturing and distributing fentanyl. Fentanyl comes from immigration, which comes from Mexico through "the holes in the border," which come from the Biden administration. Truly I say to you, it is what enters Iowa that defiles it. (For the record, two days before the speech, President Biden had been in El Paso, Texas, to announce new measures on immigration policy (see Ignatius 2023)).

So let us get angry, stay angry, and all will stay well in the State of Iowa. I know this, you know this, and that's all we need to know, which is why we don't need to have any interviews with pesky reporters. And whoever wrote the headline atop this post? Probably hates children. And if someone would like to know about job creation, or the pandemic, or groundwater pollution, or police oversight, or climate change that brings tornadoes in January... well, they probably hate children, too.

(swiped from http://taccle2.eu/wp/core-skills/how-do-you-feel)

SEE ALSO:

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

"Why Should I Vote For..." 23 October 2022

"Condition of the State 2022," 11 January 2023

Provoking Action: MLK Day 2023

Harmony School of Music leads the gathering in song

Cedar Rapids' annual Martin Luther King Day celebration included calls for involvement as well as coming together as a community. The observance returned to St. Paul's United Methodist Church after three years online due to the pandemic. 

Gathering for the service

Pastors Keeyon and Stephanie Carter, who started Wellington Heights Community Church in 2020, received the Dr. Percy & Lileah Harris "Who Is My Neighbor" Award. Gentine Nzoyikorera, a senior at Kennedy High School, received the student award. The eleven-member planning committee was recognized; many of them have helped put on quite a number of these celebrations.

The day also featured an afternoon tornado touching down near Monticello, a bizarre event for January in the northern Midwest.

Tony Loyal told the story of his great-grandmother
in Jim Crow era Mississippi

Throughout the evening, the emphasis remained on the need for activity, moreso than the nature of the persistent evils against which we need to act. Betty Johnson of First Light Christian Fellowship noted "we're more and more and more divided," which if unchanged "the harder and the further we will fall." Maybe in such a supportive gathering--Cedar Rapids really puts its best face forward at these events--specifying what we're fighting is unnecessary? Or maybe the evils are so widespread and pervasive they're obvious to everybody. Perry Bacon Jr. wrote in today's Washington Post that "the so-called racial reckoning" in the wake of the murder of George Floyd "has not resulted in much real, deep policy change--and there are few signs that it will anytime soon." Bacon continues:

American police officers killed more people in 2022 than any year over the past decade, according to data compiled by the group Mapping Police Violence.... The bold policy changes touted by activists in the summer of 2020, such as drastically reducing government spending on policing and reallocating that money for housing assistance and other programs that would disproportionately benefit Black people, not only have no chance of being passed nationally but are a non-starter even in many blue cities and states. There is no real public discussion of... policies that would be necessary to improve conditions for Black Americans on a broad scale.

To which I'll add there are so many distractions--some unavoidable, and some I daresay intentional.

Gentine Nzoyikorera, President of Black Student Union
at Kennedy High School

In light of this continual cycle of hope and frustration, Tamara Marcus of Advocates for Social Justice said she has learned from older activists as well as her own experience that "this work is hard and defeats will happen," and counseled younger activists not to give into despair or anger, but to "love even harder" in the face of defeat. Gentine Nzoyikorera noted that her school's Black Student Union had only four members when it confronted the Cedar Rapids School Board about the police presence in the school, but gained a hearing because they actively sought allies. Keeyon Carter urged people to "continue to do the good work but don't forget relationship" that goes deeper than accomplishing specific tasks. Lori Ampey of Tanager Place concluded the speeches by calling for inclusion, non-judgment, and perseverance across ages, sexual orientations, and mental health: "Leave here today with the intent of finding something to do."

Pastors Keeyon and Stephanie Carter and their family;
longtime activist Anne Harris Carter is at left

The bottom line, in the words of former African American Museum of Iowa Director Tom Moore, is that Dr. King would be pleased at the progress since the 1960s but "we still have a long way to go." This annual gathering reminds us there are a lot of people in Cedar Rapids, fully in the face of cynicism and disillusionment, fighting a lot of evils. One of them might be your new best friend!

Mt. Zion Youth Explosion Dance Team

Some of the organizations represented at the service

Earlier today, Coe College students gathered to transcribe
Freedmen's Bureau documents for the Smithsonian Institution

SEE ALSO: "Onlining About Redlining: MLK Day 2022," 18 January 2022

Grace King, "On King Day, Meet 'Who Is My Neighbor?'" Cedar Rapids Gazette, 16 January 2023, 1A, 9A

Book review: Arbitrary Lines

 

At Christmas I got COVID and this book!

M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It [Washington: Island Press, 2022], xii + 240 pp.

Way back in 2016 I got named to a steering committee for revisions to the zoning code in my city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I attended meetings for a bit over a year, then the meetings kept getting scheduled when I was teaching classes, then I went off to a sabbatical. The city now has a form-based code and no parking minima for certain core areas where there is going redevelopment after the 2008 cataclysmic flood. The rest of the city is pretty much the same. I doubt I was much help.

My thought at the time, inasmuch as I'm able to get back in touch with 2016-me, was that zoning reform could accomplish two objectives: (1) by allowing mixed uses, we could reintroduce some vitality to parts of the city and stop some of the destructive features of single-use ("Euclidean") zoning; and (2) by defining the form of construction instead of usage, we could streamline the development process and thereby lower construction costs. Based on our city's updated zoning map, linked here, we may not have gotten there

2016-me would surely have benefited from a hole in the space-time continuum that would have gotten me an advance copy of Arbitrary Lines, a brief but tightly-argued work by New York City-based planner M. Nolan Gray that promises to be the starting point for all future conversations about zoning. (Producing this book involved both Island Press and George Mason University's Mercatus Center, a collaboration I for one never expected to see.) 

In less than 200 pages, Gray makes the case that zoning does more harm than good and should be abolished--no reform, just get rid of it. He notes that zoning was not practiced by local governments until the early 20th century, when a coalition of the privileged--commercial landlords, affluent homeowners, and nativists--deployed zoning to defend middle class areas from incursions by immigrants and the working-class (ch. 1). Subsequently it has operated to protect property values while limiting the supply of housing and making it thereby less accessible and more expensive (ch. 3), limiting movement to areas of the country with high-performing economies thereby restricting individual opportunity and overall growth (ch. 4), restraining racial minorities (ch. 5), and causing more resource consumption and environmental stress (ch. 6). Well, of course it has. 

In chapter 8, Gray makes the case that fragmentation of metropolitan governments means that even the best-intentioned zoning code is going to be manipulable by powerful interests. In chapter 9, he commends the example of Houston, Texas, which has managed to grow quickly and remain relatively affordable while accommodating the well-off and not descending into land use chaos. "Even before zoning," he points out, "Industries need to be where land is cheap and transportation is accessible, and complaining neighbors are few and far between" (p. 152). But he also is pragmatic enough to recommend urgent steps short of outright abolition, including ending single-family zoning, abolishing parking minima, dealing with regulations on minimum floor area and lot size, and allowing single-room occupancy and manufactured housing in city limits.

This is really a lot to pack into a little book. I wish he had dealt with form-based codes, and spent more time on the difficulty of achieving housing affordability when so many people have their principal investments in their home i.e. their golden years depend on housing being less affordable (cf. Hertz 2016). On the latter point, he allows "it suggests a bleak future" and any "gains may be on weak political future" (p. 64). Maybe by spreading information about the social harms of zoning we can appeal to people's better angels? There certainly has been movement in the angelic direction, such as Minneapolis abolishing single-family zoning and Fayetteville liberalizing its ADU ordinance.

Cedar Rapids is a small city with a lot of farmland beckoning us to sprawl further. Maybe we will benefit--our governor says it's already happening--from people relocating from high-demand areas. Gray warns this "at best just buys us time... Absent fundamental reforms, the housing affordability crisis will only spread" (p. 65). So what could Cedar Rapids have achieved, had it decided in 2019 to go Full Houston with its land use policy? Less cost pressure on hot neighborhoods like New Bohemia and Kingston because those developments could be spread around the city? Manufactured homes that aren't on the absolute fringe of the city? Missing middle housing and accessory dwelling units in connected places? Enough density in spots to support better public transit? More intense development closer to surviving public schools?

Hey, a fellow can dream, can't he?

SEE ALSO: "Re-Zone CR Open House," 20 June 2018

Happy City (The Game) and the Happy City

Having spent fall semester teaching from Happy City by Charles Montgomery, I can not imagine a more appropriate Christmas present than Happy City, a new game for ages 10 and up from Gamewright. Thanks to my wife Jane--who has also used Happy City in a class--for this astutely-chosen gift!

Happy City has no relationship to Montgomery's book. He is not mentioned in the game materials or on the website, so I assume the coincidental titles are exactly that... coincidental. Even so it practically begs for comparison, which I am about to undertake. Keep in mind, though, this card game is aimed at children; if you're cruising the Internet looking for someone slagging a children's card game, you should definitely check out Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series on YouTube. You will not find that tone here.

On the other hand, the book Happy City, while accessibly-written, is a book for adults who have a tolerance for complexity and counterintuitive research findings. It would be hard for the most brilliant designer to translate Montgomery's argument into a game for the whole family intended to be played in under 30 minutes.

Playing Happy City

Happy City is a game for 2-5 players. Play goes in order of how recently each player has in their actual life traveled to another city. Each player starts with a mildly-profitable store, and from that attempts to build a city with high population and high citizen happiness. Each building is represented by a card; the game ends after one player's city has ten cards. The winner is the one with the highest overall score, determined by multiplying the population score and the happiness score. 

Source: gamewright.com/product/happy-city

The key to building your happy city is to maintain a positive flow of income, so that you can buy the features that will bring in people and/or make them happy and/or add to the city's income. The buildings come in several categories. Players are encouraged to draw from a mix of categories, though they may not use more than one of the same kind of card. Some examples:

• Happy Market: 1 coin of income (paid at the beginning of each round of turns)
• house: cost 1 coin, 1 population point
• apartment complex: cost 3 coins, 2 population points
• high-rise: cost 6 coins, 3 population points
• library: cost 2 coins, 1 happiness point
• repair shop: cost 5 coins, 1 population point, 2 coins of income
• restaurant: cost 5 coins, 1 happiness point, 2 coins of income
• casino: cost 7 coins, 2 happiness points, 2 coins of income
• ski resort: cost 8 coins, 3 happiness points
• steelworks: cost 1 coin, -1 (yes, -1) happiness point, 1 coin of income

I'd give our library at least two happiness points!

In time, with the right mix of card/building types, players can pick from a selection of bonus building cards (e.g. Superhero Central, Happywood Studios, Unicorn Ranch) , which amp up both population and happiness scores. An expert version of the game has more bonus buildings and more complicated scoring.

Evaluation

Happy City does a very good job of modeling a number of factors related to city development. The primary importance of income, making it a prerequisite to any actual building, is a good way to put fiscal realities at the forefront of our considerations. The folks at Strong Towns will be gratified that all income in the game is locally-generated. We are not relying on federal or state grants to grow our cities.

Calculating the final score by multiplying happiness by population is a good way to model the interaction of those two factors. A small number of people experiencing a lot of happiness is an enclave or an exclusive club. A large number of people experiencing low happiness are existing in a place, not citizens of it. A large number of people experiencing a lot of happiness is a happy city.

Casino, Las Vegas NV

A third good point is, even though the city is developing in a centrally planned non-organic way, at least the planner/player is responding to values that have been established externally (presumably, in the economic market or political arena) rather than by themselves. Players are not Robert Owen or Le Corbusier or Marshal Tito constructing our own utopias, but working with preferences expressed by others. Last time I played, I added a casino to my city, not because I believe they're in any way productive, but because I needed the income and the happiness points. (For the record, I think the game vastly overrates casinos and sports stadiums on both counts.) 

Besides all this, you can't really sprawl or do exclusionary zoning with only ten cards.

The biggest difference between Happy City and Happy City is how each understands happiness. The game's  high happiness scores for leisure and entertainment facilities suggests the authors equate happiness with personal fun and pleasure. Montgomery's book goes into considerable detail in questioning that sort of premise, describing in chapter 2 a more long-term feeling of well-being, and later arguing that extrinsic motivators like fun things to buy or visit are overrated by people as sources of happiness. It's intrinsic motivators like health and social connection that endure and contribute to feelings of well-being. As Mitchell Reardon, a senior planner at Montgomery's firm, told the Shared Space podcast in March 2021: 

We are social creatures, yet for decades city planning has sought to divide us. We're just trying to knit this back together, and COVID has really underlined how critical that connection is.

Shared streets, like at Washington's Wharf,
are essential to experiencing that place

Urbanists like Montgomery spend less time on the commercial and industrial features of a town than on whether or not they're connected. In Walkable City [Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011], three of Jeff Speck's four components of walkability deal with the experience of the walk--does it feel safe? comfortable? interesting?--and only one with the walk's destination. Jane Jacobs spends the first three chapters of her landmark The Rise and Fall of Great American Cities [Modern Library, (1961) 2011] talking about sidewalks. In part two, she articulates the prerequisites for urban success--mixed primary uses, small blocks, some older buildings, and concentrated population--none of which have to do with what specifically goes on those blocks or in those buildings. Toronto-based 880 Cities, which aims to  make cities "great" for 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds, focuses their efforts on "your community's streets and public spaces." And so on.

Street musician on pedestrian-only Knez Mihailova, Belgrade

Montgomery devotes the middle third of his book to assembling neuroscience research and lived experience on how happiness can be designed. Creating spaces for informal gathering, often out of infrastructure previously devoted to cars, attracts people and helps build social connection and trust (Montgomery 2013, ch. 7). He quotes Jan Gehl: What is most attractive, what attracts people to sop and linger and look, will invariably be other people. Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities (p. 150). In a society where so many people drive to work yet experience daily unhappiness doing so (pp. 179-181), anything to enhance the opportunities to cycle or walk will improve the city's happiness. So will anything to help those on public transit, "the most miserable commuters of all" (p. 193). Finally, opportunities for refuge and experience of nature will relieve stress and restore our souls (ch. 6).

Boyson Trail, Marion IA

These aren't simple push-button interventions, either. They require a lot of trial and revision, and attention to different people's lived experiences in different places. That makes sense; after all, cities are "problems of organized complexity" (Jacobs [1961] 2011, ch. 22). It follows that any attempt to model all the complexity at the level of a two-dimensional board game is going to fall short, so let us not cavil at Happy City, which after all is a fun and quick play, and which gets a lot of the city right.

Just let's don't confuse amenities with happiness.

(Source: happycities.com)

SOURCE: Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013.

SEE ALSO: 

"Big Amenity and the Problem of Uncertainty," 2 July 2016

James Brasuell, "City-Building Video Games for Planners," Planetizen, 25 December 2022 [if video games are more your thing than card games]