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 

Urbanist Goodreads: What Else is Going Down Besides All This S**t?

 

Chuck Marohn isn't freaking out. Maybe I shouldn't either?
(Source: strongtowns.org)

NOTE: In the innocent days of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads, annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I dabbled in the format myself to analyze the impact of COVID on the future of cities; here's an example from June 2020. Now, with a runaway U.S. executive breaking the government for the purpose of retribution (Donald Trump) and/or amassing money and power (Elon Musk) and/or an ideological vision (the Project 2025 crew), and states like Iowa micromanaging localities whenever they feel like it, what is left for urbanism to think about? Quite a bit, it appears.

"Growth Ponzi Scheme Leaves Virginia Town with $34 Million Dilemma," Strong Towns, 6 February 2025

[Strong Towns grew out of planner-engineer Chuck Marohn's doubts about the rationality of some of the projects he was being hired to do. His doubts became a blog and podcast, which became an organization, which has become a movement with chapters ("local conversations") all over the world. Marohn spoke in Iowa City in July 2015.]

Strong Towns takes us this week to Purcellville, Virginia, a small town near the border with West Virginia, but not terribly far from Washington, D.C. The story reflects a theme that has been prominent throughout Strong Towns' decade-plus existence: a town can't afford to maintain infrastructure it had built when it was hopeful about growth. "I'm just saying the funds were there when the town was growing like crazy," says Liz Krens, the town's Director of Finance. Like a Greek tragedy, none of their current choices--borrow $34 million? defer maintenance?--is good. Maybe a federal grant would solve their problems, but counting on that is not responsible.

This week's Strong Towns posts also address the limitations of traffic cameras and a local group in Maine that resisted the state's plan to widen a highway through their town.

Robert Steuteville, "Hurricane-Ravaged City Bounces Back with New Main Street," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 4 February 2025

[Public Square is the online journal of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which has been promoting a return to compact, mixed-use development since they gathered in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1993. Their most recent conference was last May in Cincinnati. CNU's membership includes planners, architects, and local officials; I am none of these, but they let me in anyway.]

The lead story this week celebrates the recovery of Panama City, Florida, which won a Charter Award at the 2020 conference, following Hurricane Michael in 2018. The award-winning plan is now being enacted, centered on a restored Harrison Street, which has again become the heart of the city. With better design, street trees and slower vehicle traffic, along with a new central plaza, the core of the city has been restored to life. “There’s a growing collection of wedding photos on the circle on Harrison Avenue,” crowed lead designer Victor Dover. “No one was getting a wedding photo on the main street before.” Note that implementation was expedited by federal COVID relief funds. 

Other current Public Square stories include an urban boulevard replacing a freeway in Toledo, proposed mall redevelopment in Michigan, and a foundation specializing in wildfire recovery, as well as a post arguing for attention to housing supply and affordability in "15-minute city" projects.

Addison del Maestro, "I'm an Antisocial Urbanist Living in the Suburbs, Ask Me Anything," The Deleted Scenes, 4 February 2025

[Addison del Maestro writes about design and a whole bunch of other stuff from his base in suburban Virginia. He's Catholic by faith and conservative by politics, which makes for unique takes on urbanist issues.]

This reflective post starts with the irony that del Maestro identifies as an urbanist while living in a suburban community. "I’m not quite sure," he confesses, "how these abstract ideas I hold about housing and community and not putting up walls around places and not being exclusionary intersect with living in an actual place with actual characteristics with actual people who were “buying” those characteristics when they bought homes here." It's gotten to the point where he feels like arguing with visitors who admire his neighborhood! I can relate, doing my urbanist writing in a large-lot neighborhood with no commercial establishments for blocks. How much change can he (or I) advocate when most of our neighbors presumably prefer the current characteristics?

This week, del Maestro's wide-ranging blog also covers reuse of old buildings, eccentric product design, and materialism, as well as his own set of goodreads.

In 2018 I would take the Silver Line to McLean
for 1 Million Cups Fairfax

Ryan Jones, "Commuter Rail to Loudoun: The Next Chapter," Greater Greater Washington, 7 February 2025

[Greater Greater Washington is a website with an urbanist mission: "racial, economic, and environmental justice in land use, transportation, and housing." They focus on the D.C. area (which extends to Baltimore and sometimes Richmond). I've been personally very attached to Washington since my semester there seven years ago.]

Jones tells the story of founding a group to promote extension of metro Washington commuter rail service westward into the Virginia suburbs (maybe as far as Purcellville!). He discusses budgeting, positive effect on road traffic, and advantages over building out the Silver (Metro) Line. Their next steps is to speak to town councils in the region. "By building a consensus town by town, we hope to gain momentum to get an official feasibility study commissioned by Loudoun and Fairfax counties in partnership with state and regional agencies..."

Besides opinion posts, Greater Greater Washington also includes their "Breakfast Links" collection of local goodreads, urbanist news from other parts of the country (including a bicycling promotion program in Denver) and opportunities to get involved around the DC area.

Pete Saunders, "Why Call It 'The Rust Belt?'" The Corner Side Yard, 2 February 2025

[Pete Saunders is from Detroit, and now lives in Chicago. He is an important Midwestern voice in a movement that can overfocus on the fast-growing towns on the coasts. His attention to black and working class experiences of cities make his voice especially valuable.]

This piece is less about policy than about nomenclature. Sanders embraces rather than resents the term Rust Belt for what was once the industrial Midwest (think Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and all those little cities in eastern Ohio, maybe Pittsburgh). It can symbolize what it could be, "a term roughly synonymous with the legend of the phoenix, the mythological bird that rises from the ashes of its deceased predecessor." Like London, which emptied out after the Romans left in the fifth century but in time became one of the leading cities of the world, the Rust Belt (or Lower Lakes, if you prefer) can rise from its knees and become something else entirely.

Stacy Mitchell's book

And there's more! 

• Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance was quoted extensively in a Washington Post article on the reslient role of small businesses in the American economy, despite apathy (at best) from national elected officials. (Did you know local restaurants now last slightly longer than the average small business start?) 
• The Active Towns podcast, hosted by John Simmerman, presents a video on a "bike bus" in Montclair Township, New Jersey. 
• Happy Cities reports on a survey in Seattle finding "a remarkable relationship between street edges, building facades and pro-social behavior," suggesting a role for city design in human sociability.  
• Kristen Jeffers's latest salutes Rev. Andrew Wilkes, a pastor in Brooklyn who shows the influence of faith on urban issues like gentrification.  
• Planetizen reports the California High-Speed Rail Authority anticipates running trains between coastal cities and the Central Valley in five to eight years.

So there ya have it--urbanists are thinking about urban stuff: infrastructure and how to pay for it, rebuilding downtown, small business, public transit, cycling, trains, and shaping values which I guess includes branding. None of them even referenced national political dysfunction.

Friends, it does my soul good to think about all these people thinking about how to improve their places. It takes considerable nimbleness to negotiate around personal differences, not to mention state and national interference. I hope that what doesn't kill us will in time make us strong. But I'm still concerned that conditions for building prosperous, resilient and inclusive communities are becoming harder each day. Keep the faith, I guess.

10th anniversary post: Blizzards get you thinking

 

That was a blizzard (2015)

Ten years ago the weather was different than it is this week. A big pile of snow--11 inches, says my post--got dumped on Iowa as January 2015 turned into February. This year, we're in a stretch of unseasonably warm weather including a couple record high temperatures and a couple more near-records. 2024-25 been a warm dry winter, which could be random luck, but we should know better than that by now.

I produced my own blizzard, of questions, ten years ago. This anniversary post seemed a good time to revisit them.

1. Why are we still building sprawl?
2. Can downtown develop/be developed by a resilient transportation system?
3. How should I be rooting on the federal transportation bill?
4. How should we consider climate change in planning?
5. Why is the clearing of public sidewalks the responsibility of the homeowner, even though the clearing of public streets is undertaken by the government?

These questions are pretty central to how we design our cities, allowing that #5 was dropped on me by a work colleague while I was working on that post, so it got looped in. City design may strike a person more urgently during a blizzard than it does when the big-box store is a simple 20-minute drive away. My 2015 frustration at the pace of positive change, too, probably reflected fatigue from the hard work of snow removal. 

Never not contemplating urbanism

Surely people were going to grasp that local government finances are driven by the demands we place on it, not by waste, fraud and abuse? That cities won't be able forever to rely on federal and state money to make up whatever funding gaps result? That public transit unlike private vehicles is scalable in a way that supports intensive economic development? That climate change makes new demands on our capacity to be resilient?

However, "There's drudgery in social change, and glory for the few," sang Billy Bragg. Today the urgency of approaching urban design differently is, if possible, less apparent at all levels of government. I've gone from being mildly frustrated to totally appalled. Urbanist design comes recommended for all sorts of reasons related to our common life: environmental sustainability in the face of climate change, place attachment, exercise, inclusion, community-building, and financial resilience. 

Strong Towns has been saying for years that local governments rely too heavily on federal and state financial assistance, which makes big development projects and sprawl seem cost-free. (See Charles L. Marohn, Jr., Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity [Wiley, 2020] for the complete argument.) Twelve erratic years of federal government shutdowns and near-shutdowns haven't apparently changed the towns' short-term thinking. Maybe a freeze on federal grants--one was declared January 27, temporarily blocked by a judge the following day, and then rescinded (see Parker 2025)--would jolt localities into more productive approaches to development?

Ten years ago, Washington infighting was imperiling appropriations for the Department of Transportation, which funds state and local transportation projects. Eventually the bill got passed, but to what end? Though the Joe Biden administration nudged these projects in the direction of transit, transportation funding goes predominantly for roadway construction and expansion, which reinforces our already car-centric development. That's what prompted question #3 on my list. I followed up: If the federal government is the founder of this ridiculous feast, maybe if they cut off the allowance states and localities will be forced to be rational?... It would be at least interesting, because at least local choices would be clearer. 

Nor has an increasing pile of climate disasters catalyzed urbanism. Climate science is a key element of the "woke bullshit" President Trump feels he has a mandate to quash (For the risks inherent in Trump's aggressive climate change denial, see Flavelle 2025). Within 24 hours of Trump's inauguration, acting Environmental Protection Administration head James Payne fired all members of the Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Advisory Board, and the U.S. withdrew from the international climate talks known as the Paris Accord. Trump is attempting to pause federal grants for clean-energy projects, slash or purge the federal workforce, and has appointed a pro-extraction, climate change-denying permanent EPA administrator who has little environmental experience (Davenport 2025). It's not clear that professional environmental staff will be gagged as health staff have been, but it seems likely they will be strongly discouraged from speaking openly about anything important.

In Iowa, we're not going to talk about the climate, either. Land in Iowa is plentiful and cheap, and we apparently trust the oil lobby to make sure we still have access to gasoline for our (ever larger) vehicles. So new K-12 science standards excise the term "climate change" (in favor of "climate trends"), along with the word "evolution." Reference to human impacts on the climate will also be removed from education (Luu 2025). If we don't talk about it, maybe it will all go away?

Maybe the answers will come, not by restoring urbanism, but some wholly new design concept. Geographer Stephanie Wakefield raises that possibility in a piece for Next City that promotes her forthcoming book about the future of Miami:

Rather than an endless expanse of cities and urbanization processes with seemingly no terminus — the latter destined to be but fodder for ever greater resilience of the former — might the Anthropocene’s human and nonhuman dislocations produce other spaces, processes and imaginaries entirely? (quoted at Ionescu 2025)

I'm definitely curious about what these spaces and imaginaries might be, although I don't know how well I'll do with an entire book written in the manner of the sentence quoted above. Wakefield suggests localities will have additional design/form considerations beyond the urban-or-suburban dichotomy I'm used to. 

As it happens, later this month I'll be in St. Petersburg on the opposite side of the State of Florida. I'm looking forward to seeing what people are calling the large body of water between Florida and Texas, but also how they are dealing with likely climate threats. Here is a map of future sea level contingencies from Advantage Pinellas, the long-range transportation plan produced by Forward Pinellas, which is the St. Petersburg-area Metropolitan Planning Organization.

from Advantage Pinellas (2024, p. 41)

The first thing to notice is that's a fair chunk of land that's theoretically going to be under water. The second thing to notice is Metropolitan Planning Organizations, like Forward Pinellas and our own Corridor MPO, are funded by the U.S. government. That means our tax dollars are paying for this "woke bullshit!" How much longer will Advantage Pinellas remain online? I've downloaded it, just in case. For now, it's encouraging that people--at least those who staff MPOs--are thinking about resilient, inclusive, livable, prosperous futures. Bless them for it. Whether they will be allowed to keep doing so is at this point unanswerable. 

Strong Towns has always maintained a local focus, treating national politics as not-my-circus-not-my-monkeys. I'm not sure how valid this is anymore. At the state and national levels, powerful industry interests and Project 2025 ideologues are making the rules now, and if there's information that threatens them, they'll do their best to suppress it. Localities could try to figure things out on their own, but constitutionally they're limited by state action, and anyhow it's just easier to keep doing what we've been doing.

So, my answers to the questions I posed ten years ago: 

1. Why are we still building sprawl? Because it's the policy path of least resistance, residential and commercial developments can be large enough to be highly profitable, and localities get the property taxes without immediate needs for service.
2. Can downtown develop/be developed by a resilient transportation system? Probably not, because most cities don't have the political or financial independence for this to happen.
   
3. How should I be rooting on the federal transportation bill? Doesn't matter. Streets and highways will always get taken care of, however imperfectly they are maintained once their built.
4. How should we consider climate change in planning? Consider a range of possible outcomes for which we need to be prepared, and support rather than suppressing research.
5. Why is the clearing of public sidewalks the responsibility of the homeowner, even though the clearing of public streets is undertaken by the government? Street maintenance sucks up a lot of resources, so we get mandates on property owners instead.

I hope I'm still around in 2035 to admit how wrong I was back in 2025!

ORIGINAL POST: "Blizzards Get You Thinking," 1 February 2015

SEE ALSO: C40 Global Cities website: international intracity climate action networ. Hearing Helene Chartier from this organization speak on the Cities for Everyone webinar the morning after my post made me feel somewhat more hopeful.