10th anniversary post: Jeff Speck in Cedar Rapids

 

Jeff Speck talking about "The Safe Walk," 2015

Ten years ago this month, when urbanism was still relatively "new," our local Corridor Urbanism group was all of two months old, your humble blogger was still young and idealistic, and Jeb Bush and Scott Walker were the frontrunners for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, the prophet Jeff Speck appeared in Cedar Rapids. The Boston-based architect, city planner, and author of Walkable City [Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011] was in town to promote some of the redesign recommendations he had made while consulting with the city. Our one-way-to-two-way street conversions, separated bike lanes, and four-way-stops where there used to be traffic lights all came out of his time in our city.

My report on Speck's presentation at the City Services Center is here. Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan scored an interview with Speck, which can be found here. Speck's presentation that night is still on YouTube:

(1:15:08)

2015 was an optimistic time in a lot of ways. Across America residents and businesses were returning to city centers, violent crime had been falling for 25 years, the economy had largely recovered from the 2007-09 recession, and our city was rebuilding after the 2008 flood. Urbanism's insights promised knowledge that would help us sustain all that in ways that were also environmentally and financially resilient.

I still believe in cities, and believe that urbanism has important things to say which can help us understand our present problems, or which we can ignore at our peril. The optimism of those days has been difficult to sustain, however. National politics is getting uglier by the week, thanks to President Trump and Elon Musk and their reign of hate and lies and casual destruction. In Cedar Rapids, the most visible policies were once those street designs and reconstruction in the core, promising many safe walks to come. Now the most visible policies in Cedar Rapids have changed the subject from safe walking to carefree parking, as we put suburban development (the MedQuarter, the casino, school consolidation) where it shouldn't be. We seem to be moving towards more car-dependence, not less, which I think we will come to regret.

More importantly, urbanism across America has entered a new phase of life. Not only are the easy lifts behind us, but new challenges have arisen.

Loftus Lofts construction, New Bohemia, September 2024

Redevelopment has not been as inclusive as it should have been. Pete Saunders recently re-posted a 2018 reflection in which he quoted Richard Florida on the new wave of problems. Florida, whose The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic, 2002) and Who's Your City? (Basic, 2008) promoted the ideas of cities building off clustering of knowledge workers, more recently published The New Urban Crisis (Basic, 2017, also discussed here) in which he laments not foreseeing the problems that would result from an insurge of higher incomes.

Just when it seemed that our cities were really turning a corner, when people and jobs were moving back to them, a host of new urban challenges--from rising inequality to increasingly unaffordable housing and more--started to come to the fore. Seemingly overnight, the much-hoped-for urban revival has turned into a new kind of urban crisis.... Gentrification and inequality are the direct outgrowths of the re-colonization of the city by the affluent and the advantaged.

The city boundaries were re-integrated, but people were not, so the new prosperity ran up against the limits of the middle class bubble. Some places gentrified and older residents got displaced; a lot more places remained isolated and "devalued" (Saunders 2025).

Arco Building, 2022, features recently remodeled offices

The pandemic rearranged decades-old commercial patterns. The daylong succession of human activities (residential, work, recreational, residential) imagined six decades ago by Jane Jacobs and decimated by Euclidean zoning might have been easy to rebuild in our city centers, if only work had held still. The COVID pandemic shifted a good deal of work to remote, and the succeeding years have seen only partial recovery. Kaid Benefield wrote in Place Makers of a recent trip to Union Square in San Francisco where he found Nordstrom's closed, with Walgreen's and Bloomingdale's weeks away from the same fate. And it's not just remote work.

I think a number of trends are contributing to declining urban retail, none bigger than a consumer shift to the convenience of online shopping and delivery. A second major factor is the rise of remote work practices and consequent decline in daily office workers who have traditionally supported businesses near their places of employment. A third factor is rising crime rates in some urban neighborhoods.

With regard to crime, urban areas are having a variety of experiences, but the miracle of 1990-2015 seems to be over (citing Farrell 2024).

Low income housing, SW side

Housing. Need I say more? Not too long ago, Pete Saunders noted that urbanism seems to have turned into all housing all the time. As demand for housing increasingly outstrips supply, costs in high-demand areas are making one of the basic necessities of life harder for people to obtain. (See this interactive graphic, complete with time slider.) I don't know where this is going--another crash, maybe?--but in the meantime we're dealing with big time market failure. 

At the bottom end, an ever-larger group of people have been forced into unstable housing arrangements or out onto the street. This is a nationwide problem that hits people locally. New data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development find the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness has increased 57 percent since the low point in--you guessed it--2015. (See the analysis at Torres 2025). The explosion of homelessness has made some urban areas highly unpleasant. They are our brothers and sisters, and they need a place to sleep and process waste just the rest of us do, but their increasing presence is making urban areas harder for the rest of us to use. 

Maybe if we can find ways to make office-to-residential conversion work on a large scale (Anderson 2023), we can stabilize the housing market, rejuvenate urban retail at least for necessaries, and thereby put enough eyes on the streets that they will look less ramshackle and feel less dangerous. There certainly a lot of people continuing to do the hard work of building great places, as the The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast and the Cities for Everyone webinar series seem never to run out of people to feature (although the international scope of Cities for Everyone often makes me wish I lived in France or Spain). The black urbanist movement described by Pete Saunders (2018 [2025]) continues to "focus on immediate concerns and push for pragmatic solutions."

Mostly, I still believe in walkable, compact development as the best for human quality of life as well as the most sustainable. Speck's four elements of walkability--safe, comfortable, interesting, and useful--will remain forever relevant.

Book Review: Doing Justice

Jacobsen, Dennis A. Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing. 

Minneapolis: Fortress, 2nd ed., 2017. xxx + 155 pp.

Doing Justice is a challenging book. Aimed principally at practicing Christians, it uses the words

of Jesus, prophets, apostles, and the author of the Book of Revelation to attack the status quo 

as ungodly and to provoke the readers into working to transform it in the direction of God’s 

justice. An epigram to chapter 1 concludes with Revelation 18:4: Then I heard another voice 

from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins.”

The test of this book is not so much how well it reads as much as how well it leads to 

constructive, collective social action. Its audience is rather niche: actively religious people who 

both are concerned about injustice and have a group with which they can join in acts of justice. 

For people who fit that description, Doing Justice is profoundly challenging (because my heart's 

in the right place but there are things I'd rather be doing), sympathetic (I'm also the quiet type at 

least in public), and encouraging (because wins are frustratingly few and far between).

 

Jacobsen, a pastor in the (mainline) Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, who spent many 

years serving an inner-city Milwaukee, sees justice as a broad context in which people have 

access to the goods of life, both material (e.g. enough to eat) and intangible (e.g. dignity, 

freedom). 

The world as it should be is in direct opposition to the world as it is. The world as 

it should be is rooted in truth, love, and community…. People are able to trust 

each other sufficiently to be transparent and exposed…. In a world where forty-

thousand children die of hunger-related causes every day, the world as it should 

be has an abiding concern for children and their right to have a playful present 

and a human future…. The world as it should be is God’s dream engaging the 

nightmare that the world has become. (2017: 11, 12, 15)

Those of us who live in a middle-class milieu may have little awareness of the nightmare that 

people outside of that milieu live on a daily basis. Some of Jacobsen’s parishioners’ personal 

nightmares are mentioned in the opening chapter. Vulnerable people are easily derailed when

their lives’ loads get one brick too many, and then the bricks just keep on coming. We are 

admonished to be aware of others’ struggles, and not to get too comfortable or too 

accommodated to the world as it is (what he calls “pseudo-innocence” (p. 16), citing Martin 

Luther King’s statement that love without power is sentimentality).

Encampment, Greene Square, 2024

We know we are not the egregious bullies Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, sneering and 

mocking as Rev. Marianne Edgar Budde asked the administration to show mercy to gays 

and Lesbians in all families, and to vulnerable immigrant farmworkers. Yet we know we 

are not King, or Fr. Daniel Berrigan, or the Detroit pastor (Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman) who 

wrote the foreword to Doing Justice, ministering to the outcasts, and risking freedom and 

their very lives in the quest for justice. If working within the system is so accommodating 

as to give away the store, what then must we do?

Jacobsen argues churches and their members need to engage with the “harsh realities outside 

its walls” (p. 20). That requires more from the church than creating a peaceful sanctuary, or 

even engaging in charitable works if they don’t get at the people’s underlying (human) misery. 

“The Christians who are so generous with food baskets at Thanksgiving or with presents for 

the poor at Christmas often vote into office politicians whose policies ignore or crush those 

living in poverty. A kind of pseudo-innocence permeates this behavior” (p. 29). He turns to 

the example of Saul Alinksy (1909-1972), whose concept of community organizing sought to empower residents of impoverished neighborhoods to influence decisions that were being 

made elsewhere, like in company boardrooms and city governments. Congregation-based 

community organizing began in the Roman Catholic Church, but has spread throughout 

Christianity and even non-Christian faith communities. Six broad networks, profiled in 

chapter 4, provide leadership training as well as engagement in public action. Engaging in 

such action requires comfort with political power–Jacobsen notes dozens of references to 

“power” in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament–but also a willingness to share it 

(p. 67).

“Some fear the added responsibility that comes with power” (p. 61). Well, yeah.

Homeland Security Investigations office, southwest Cedar Rapids

As such, the first challenge, both for individuals contemplating their part in social justice 

and community organizers recruiting and challenging them (“agitation”), is to recognize their 

self-interest. This concept is at the core of modern social science, and a strong influence on

the worldview of pretty much everyone. Yet “[k]nowledge of one’s own self-interest interest also

cannot be presumed” (p. 75). Jacobsen argues in chapter 6 that for all manner of reasons, we

need an understanding of self-interest that lies between pure selfishness and utter self-abnegation (“selflessness”). The first leads us to “nearly soulless” (p. 78) transactional 

relationships with others, such as President Trump is supposed to have; the latter leads to 

getting taken advantage of, as in the cases of Christian women who stay in abusive 

marriages because they believe it's their duty.

The process of articulation might also involve distinguishing between short-term and long-

term interests (p. 75ff.). On any given day, I might prefer to relax and/or get things done around 

the house, and certainly to avoid confrontations. People like Jacobsen’s ex-con parishioner 

Jesse are so different from me that any contact is bound to be awkward. But over the long term 

I am better off living in “a liberative community in which people can live out their values, be 

connected to a network of significant relationships, and be agitated to summon forth their God-

given power and potential,” so it is in my self-interest actively to participate in the “weaving 

together” of such a community (p. 78). (If it sounds like urbanism, loyal reader–that’s because 

it is!)

Once committed to action, doers of justice are further confronted with defining and reading 

the field of play. In chapter 9, Jacobsen articulates a metropolitan conception, adding declining 

first-ring suburbs and well-heeled exurbs to the mission field of inner city-based organizing. 

Citing law professor Myron Orfield (Metropolitics [Brookings, 1997]), he argues: 

To counter the ghettoization of poverty, Orfield proposes regional strategies such as tax-

based revenue sharing, fair distribution of low-income housing, convergence of school 

districts, and equitable spread of transportation dollars to create access to jobs (p. 105). 

Opposition to metro-wide approaches is likely to be “entrenched” (p. 106), but the strength of 

the opposition should not be exaggerated, nor should wealthy and powerful opponents be 

considered permanent enemies: Metropolitan organizing offers a chance to end the warfare

against the poor and to heal the divisions of class and race that separate this sick society 

(p. 114, emphasis mine). It’s like Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton (The Regional City:

Planning for the End of Sprawl [Island, 2001]) meet the authors of Numbers and Luke!

 

Succeeding at this level has a promising payoff but requires “meticulous organization, militant 

mass action, and, above all, the willingness to suffer and sacrifice” (p. 115, quoting Nelson 

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom [Little Brown, 1994], p. 104). “There’s drudgery in social 

change, and glory for the few,” sings Billy Bragg. The mess is huge, and that can be 

discouraging: Death claims urban America for itself…. The death of decaying neighborhoods. 

The death of decimated families. The death of joblessness. The death of dreams. (p. 133)

 

No wonder I quail at the struggle! Now, to “take part in her sins” may seem an attractive 

alternative. But many hands make light work, or at least make the workload lighter: Into 

the courtyard of such death, congregation-based community organizing proclaims the 

resurrection of Christ, the unbending hope in the power of life, the unyielding belief that 

God, not death, has the last word (still on p. 133). It is the "holy catholic church," discussed in chapter 11, that impacts the mess, not lone toilers. It is group action that not only says

“‘no’ to social injustice… but a prophetic ‘yes’ to life” (p. 139). In the face of oppression

and misery, the church not only engages the community with patches but with affirmation

and joy as well. And dancing–towards the end of the book he quotes Emma Goldman: If

I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution (p. 141).

 

In the same song quoted above, Billy Bragg also sings, “A poet with all the answers has never 

yet been built.” Apparently that goes for bloggers as well. My posts this year have been, I 

recognize, teeming with frustration and anger. All the MAGA pillaging (cf. Wilson 2025, 

Zipper 2025, or any day's post by the indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson) has certainly 

served to highlight the fragility of progress, and how much easier it is to break things than to 

build them. But there are people out there who carry on building, and they have room for me, 

and you. As long as they don’t mind that I dance like an arthritic cow.

Iowa's physician shortage

 

Zach Kucharski of the Gazette introduces the panel

Iowa is last in the nation in obstetricians per capita, which is felt most acutely in rural areas where fewer hospitals are offering obstetrics or even pediatric services. Iowa is also third-lowest in the US in retention of physicians. Those are only two data points in an overall shortage of physicians in the Hawkeye State, which was the subject of the latest Gazette Business Breakfast earlier this week. 

Two days later, Iowa earned the infamous distinction of being the first state in the U.S. to shrink its civil rights ordinance by removing gender identity from protection. The action was justified by the legislature's earlier attempts at punishing transgendered people being struck down by the courts as running afoul of this ordinance. Without the pesky civil rights ordinance, our government is free to take whatever potshots at transgendered people that it feels like taking. What an expression of our state's official hostility to difference!

At first glance, these are two different topics. Is it possible, though, that they are connected?

Unity Point Medical District, where your humble blogger gets his doctorin'
(Google Earth screenshot)

At the Gazette event, panelists Dr. Fadi Yacoub (Linn County Medical Society), Dr. Timothy Quinn (Mercy Medical Center), and Dr. Dustin Arnold (Unity Point Health) were interviewed by the Gazette's Zach Kucharski. They referenced two main strategies for improving Iowa's physician retention: improving the doctors' bottom lines, and incentives for Iowa students to do their medical education in Iowa.

Despite Iowa's reputation for low cost of living, Quinn noted physician salaries are not keeping up with increasing levels of medical school debt, and insurance payments relative to cost of living are are comparatively low. Arnold suggested the state should see positive effects of "tort reform," which means the legislature has capped damages for medical malpractice suits. Current legislation (HSB 191) before the Iowa legislature would offer student loan repayment programs for rural doctors, and commission a study of the effects of cutting medical school from four years to three (cf. Murphy and Barton 2025). On the other hand, would-be budget cutters in Washington are looking at Medicaid, which is "essential to medical care in Iowa" (Quinn's phrase) due to the directed payment program.

The legislature is also hoping to improve retention by keeping Iowa residents in the state, creating preferences in medical school admissions. (The University of Iowa, though, is 78 percent Iowan, already near the 80 percent target for schools.) The thought is that people who are close to family and already appreciate the wonders of Iowa will want to stay here. "We don't have pro sports, we don't have concerts, but" Iowa is a state you love, said Yacoub, noting he was "preaching to the choir here." Arnold of Unity Point added Cedar Rapids is a great place to live, "once you're here you want to stay." This may or may not be true, given the state's (not the city's) regressive political culture, but even if we retain 90 percent of Iowa-based doctors the gap between working age doctors and our aging population will continue to increase.

When we take on faith that Iowa is so great you could confuse it with heaven ("Field of Dreams" reference), it precludes serious discussion of our future. When we take on faith that the most important considerations are low taxes, we miss the thousand things that make for quality of life (some of which are paid for with taxes). I'm an urbanist, not a physician, and tend to see things through an urbanist lens. As such I'm probably missing important dimensions of this specific problem. But we want more physicians to move here, so we need to think about how to make it an attractive place, which means attractive for everybody.

Iowa's physician shortage exists in a national context. Quinn noted at the start medical schools nationwide have not kept up with demand, so the whole country must rely on immigration to make up the gap. (Yacoub, who came to the United States in 1989, is one example.) Later he noted the shortage of doctors extends to nurses and support staff as well. 

But it also exists amidst a sociopolitical context in our state that is becoming increasingly hostile to difference. As Richard Florida noted two decades ago, it is openness, not turning inward, that welcomes a variety of people with varieties of talents. Iowa, except for a few larger counties, is shedding population like no one's business. We have managed to combine the worst of northern weather and southern politics: Our policies and public statements are openly hostile to poor people, immigrants, the transgendered, and city dwellers, just for starters. What message does that send to anyone else who might be or feel a little different? 

The physician shortage is making working conditions for current physicians worse. As scheduling gets tighter, there is less space in a physician's life for continuing education or even lunch. I wonder how else working in Iowa might affect a physician's desire to be here? No one mentioned COVID at all, but I remember patients stacking up at hospital emergency rooms at the same time (early 2021) Governor Kim Reynolds was declaring the pandemic over. Evidence of the negative health effects of data centers (Criddle and Stacey 2025) and corn sweeteners is accumulating, but they are the darlings of our economic plans. Meanwhile, Iowa has the fastest-growing cancer rate in the country. It can't be easy to practice medicine in an environment that consistently chooses corporate bottom lines over public health, and hostility to vulnerable minorities over building prosperous and inclusive communities.

I can't say with any precision whether Iowa's official penchant for nostalgia and resentment is exacerbating our shortage of physicians. Some early-career physicians may prefer the Politics of Yesterday, while others may be indifferent. But overall it is unlikely to lure the talent we need.

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

Urbanism in St. Petersburg (Offseason edition)

Bus stop on 1st Avenue North: Ibises are like the pigeons of Florida,
but a novelty to us Midwesterners

Our trip to St. Petersburg was guaranteed to be a roaring success, if only because we boarded a plane in weather that wanted to rip our faces off, and less than three hours later we were greeted by weather that wanted to hug us and tell us everything was going to be all right. 

along the Pinellas Trail in the Warehouse Arts District:
maybe everything is going to be all right?

Meanwhile, the whole Tampa-St. Petersburg metropolitan area seemed to be holding its breath, awaiting the onslaught of spring breakers when February turns to March. The off-season may not be the best time to try to take the measure of a city's urbanism in three days, particularly when the city was whacked by a hurricane four months ago. Even so, that is what I propose to do here, with all due caution and buckets of caveats.

1. Walking

St. Petersburg has a population of 258,308. Together with its larger neighbor Tampa and surrounding towns, it's part of a metropolitan area with more than three million people. Located on the Pinellas Peninsula, it is blessed with access to large bodies of water on two sides, but rather limited as to where to grow. 

West side of town: St. Pete Beach on the Gulf of Mexico

Our rental near downtown has a Walk Score of 97! There are a lot of destinations, including museums, coffee shops, and restaurants within walkable range of where were staying, and Tropicana Field (home of Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Rays) is seven blocks straight west of here. (See also "Elements of Urbanism" 2008 for an old but accurate list).

A noted St. Petersburg architect, Tim Clemmons, arrived in 1982. "I had a favorable first impression, but I didn't see a single person" (Snider 2019). Despite the efforts of Clemmons and others since, we haven't seen a lot of people walking, either, though there were a steady supply of dog walkers. No doubt that will change next month!

As of 2016, St. Petersburg had the second-highest pedestrian death rate in the country (Stephenson 2016), but by 2024 had dropped out of the top fifteen (Solum 2024). The whole State of Florida still has the second highest pedestrian death rate, behind only New Mexico (GHSA 2024: 11).

St. Petersburg has taken its traffic deaths seriously. They have installed pedestrian treatments...

Bumpout with curb cut, 6th Street at Central Avenue

 and bicycling infrastructure...

Separated bike lane, 6th Street S

Pinellas Trail: bike/ped trail that runs by both
the Rays' stadium and the Warehouse Arts District

I saw at least one example of a walk light before the driving green.

Walk light, 6th Street at 1st Avenue N

But streets are wide...

300 block of 6th Street S

...and cars drive fast. Drivers are mostly courteous, though, so the culture seems to be changing.

Infrastructure comes and goes; a few blocks west of the separated bike lane on 1st Avenue S, we saw a cyclist draw the ire of our Sun Runner driver for riding in the BRT lane, which he was doing, but there really was nowhere for the cyclist to go to get out of the way.

2. Transit

The Sun Runner on a sunny morning

We had to use Uber from and to the airport, but were able to rely on public transportation or our feet for all other travel. We bought passes ahead of time on the Flamingo Fares app, which was fussy but workable. The first day, we took the Sun Runner (Bus Rapid Transit) along 1st Avenue North out to St. Pete Beach. The Sun Runner is comfortable, and accommodates bicycles (there are three of these storage gizmos).

Bicycle storage on the Sun Runner

The Sun Runner comes every 15 minutes during the day between Downtown and St. Pete Beach. Ridership was diverse by race, age and social class, which is a definite win. Card readers were installed at two doors. I found them to be fussy, too, but observed no cheating (unlike Minneapolis-St. Paul), possibly due to occasional security presence. 

The second day we went to the Byrd Hill Nature Preserve on the south side of town. We took the #4 down, and the #20 back. Both are straight north-south routes. The newer bus on the #4 line had an extremely informative message board showing the next three upcoming stops.

message board on the #4 bus

Per the Pinellas County Transit Authority website, as a senior, I am entitled to a $1.10 fare per ride (less than half the normal $2.25), but I have to get my card validated somewhere so I skipped it. There is a $5 fee cap per day, which the Flamingo Fares card reportedly handles, but we did not ever put that to the test.

Transit oriented development: Grocery store by the 8th street BRT stop

We didn't travel to Tampa or Clearwater, which I gather is more complicated to do by transit. And St. Petersburg-Clearwater Airport is, weirdly, completely inaccessible by public transit. For hopes for future passenger rail in the region, see Blanton 2021.

3. Coffee

Jane by the entrance to Paradeco Coffee Roasters

There is just a ton of coffee in this town. The usual multinationals are here, of course, but much less in evidence than are the many, many local establishments to choose from in St. Petersburg. 

Our first visit was to Kahwa Coffee on the Southside, on our way to the Byrd Hill Nature Preserve. Kahwa is a local chain, with eight locations in St. Petersburg proper, and more throughout the Tampa Bay region. The Southside location, which opened in July 2023, is in a residential area; besides Jane and me, there were just two men who were working from their laptops and phones. (Would it have been different on the weekend, or during the tourist season?) It was neither suburban-shiny nor urban-cozy; there were a few couches, but mostly plastic tables and chairs, and the concrete floor was painted gray. The coffee was top-notch, and Jane was exuberant about the selection of teas.

Interior, Southside Kahwa Coffee
(swiped from kahwacoffee.com)

The next day we went downtown to Paradeco Coffee Roasters, in the Plaza Tower near the pier. It's listed as a woman-owned business, and LGBTQ+-friendly, which in these unfriendly times I have come to value. On a morning when the streets seemed a bit sleepy, the place was simply packed! Chairs and tables, tile floor, one type of drip coffee, and again, a tea selection that had Jane enraptured. (She went with an orange-turmeric iced tea, pictured below.) 

Our haul at Paradeco (photo by Jane)

There were people working on laptops, people not working, and families with children. Some people greeted people at other tables, which is a very good sign. So, very social if not very cozy.

One would have to spend a lot of time in St. Petersburg, I think, to get a real sense of the range of coffeehouse experiences.

We did not get to Black Crow Coffee in the Grand Central District,
but it came recommended by previous lodgers

SEE ALSO:

2050 Long-Range Transportation Plan produced by Forward Pinellas (MPO)

St. Petersburg Walking Tour https://floridastories.oncell.com/en/st-petersburg-176884.html