A Brandon Whyte retrospective

MPO ride 2015: Why is the paint green?

Brandon Whyte, whose presence as multimodal transportation planner for the Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization has been large and constant throughout the lifetime of this blog, will be leaving Cedar Rapids for Mountain View, California, for a new job closer to family. "This job gave me purpose," Brandon said of his time in Cedar Rapids. "Serving you all, trying to improve walking and biking in the metro, is literally what I wanted to do with my life since college--since I learned that this profession was even a possibility." He offers hope for the day when the trail system will "become world-class."

By way of a parting salute, Holy Mountain offers this tour through Brandon Whyte's greatest hits--some of them, anyway--where we have crossed paths in the last eight years.

Bike to Work Week 2014: Early look at New Bohemia development

Bike to Work Week 2015: 1st Ave pit stop

MPO ride 2015: announcing Hoover Trail south of Ely

August 2015: protected bike lane demo,
led to praise for Brandon on strongtowns.org

MPO ride 2016: meet the mountain bike trail at Beverly Park

Bike to Work Week 2016: Mayor Corbett prepares to ride to Kickstand

Bike to Work Week 2017: Collins pit stop

MPO ride 2017: trail crossing at Boyson Road

October 2018: support for Tower Terrace Road ped-bike trail

August 2018: last leg of Cedar Valley Trail opened! 

May 2019: bike rental rollout

An expanding trails system is Brandon's legacy

And who could forget those bus route surveys!

Anyone who enjoys thinking about these issues as much as I do is a friend for sure! And what joy to see the buses rolling again after the shutdown!

So long, my friend. Thank you for all your good work, and good health to you and your family. Say hi to Charles Babbage if you see him!

Computer History Museum, Mountain View CA, July 2014

Is America a Racist Country? is a Dumb Question

U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC)

Senator Tim Scott's response to President Joe Biden's speech to a joint session of Congress last week was most remarkable for its discussion of race. Senator Scott combined personal experience ("I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason") with defenses of Republican efforts to change state voting laws ("Republicans support making it easier to vote and harder to cheat" as if none of us was paying attention on January 6). Along the way, he made the statement that "America is not a racist country." The context:

Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them, and if they look a certain way, they're an oppressor. From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we've worked so hard to heal. You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country. It's backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.

There was a good deal of politics in the Senator's speech, and some reference to ongoing policy debates, but the statement that got the most attention was the one above. Vice President Kamala Harris faced the question the next day on the network TV show "Good Morning America." Her response--Well, first of all, no, I don't think America is a racist country, but we also do have to speak the truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today--was calculated but hard to beat.

"America is/is not a racist country" is exactly the sort of simplistic formulation that hijacks the "debates" Scott doesn't want shut down. It presumes that there is some clear, binary distinction between all-in racism and all-out equality. We don't get a definition of "racism," or for that matter of "country," so whatever we're talking about is the pictures in our own heads. It's the rhetorical equivalent of blasting the national anthem in the middle of a conversation.

Here's the tricky part: If every single person in America refused with a pure heart ever to judge people by the color of their skin, we would have a serious race problem. Anyway. Still. Because the country we live in is the product of decisions made in its past: the exclusion of blacks from 1930s federal housing programs, the destruction of walkable black neighborhoods in the 1950s interstate highway program, the persistence of discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations into my lifetime. Of course, much of this is over. Of course, de jure discrimination has long been illegal. But those long-ago actions led to outcomes that reinforced centuries-old differences between the black and white experiences in America. Without redress or reparation, those disparate outcomes replicate themselves today, producing something that looks a lot like racism.

We should be talking about how we deal with that--and to their credit, a lot of people are--not arguing over phony definitional binaries.

SEE ALSO: 

Rashawn Ray, "Is the United States a Racist Country?" How We Rise (Brookings), 4 May 2021

Pete Saunders, "Racist Impact, If Not Intent, Is Built Into the American DNA," Corner Side Yard, 9 May 2021

The Chauvin Verdict: Looking Backward

 

(zahlenparty.de; used without permission)

Derek Chauvin, the fired police officer whose flagrant killing of George Floyd in that city last May galvanized a summer of protest including here in Cedar Rapids, was found guilty of Floyd's death by a jury this afternoon. The Twin Cities seemed braced for disturbances had the verdict been unfavorable; so far there have been no reports of violence attendant to either protests or celebrations. President Biden praised the verdict, while suggesting we have a long way to go for what he called "basic accountability" for our black citizens.

Twenty-five years from now, will this sad event be seen as an inflection point in American history, setting us at last towards healing; or will it have been largely forgotten, another in a long sad series of racial violence? 

The Case for Forgetting

(1) The unique circumstances of the murder, including Chauvin's grotesque behavior, his disavowal by the Minneapolis police department, and a video by a teenage bystander that exposed the lies in the initial police report--mean it's unlikely to set a precedent for future trials. Fatal gunshots are easy to explain away as resulting from the heat of the situations, whereas choking a man to death over more than nine minutes requires a degree of malice that is harder to justify. In the last several days, blacks in Minnesota, Columbus, and North Carolina have been killed in police shootings, and video was released on a March shooting of a Chicago teenager. The officers involved may not be prosecuted, and even if they are, the prosecution is unlikely to succeed (see Balko 2021, Stinson and Wentzlof 2019).

(2) Fear, as Martha Nussbaum (The Monarchy of Fear [Simon and Schuster, 2018], esp. ch. 2) says, is a powerful pre-cognitive emotion, easily exploited/triggered by those with political agendas. Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) is doing important work in leading congressional negotiations over a police reform bill, but it hasn't been that long since the consensus for reform after Floyd's murder broke down as then-President Trump sought to run for reelection as defender of the police (Millhiser 2020).

(3) The systemic racism that underlies all of these outcomes has deep roots, in long history, and won't yield easily to the gridlock and incrementalism the American political system typically produces. We are where we are because of slavery, the failure to support freedmen after emancipation, Jim Crow laws, violence like the Tulsa riots, redlining and exclusion from New Deal housing programs, and bulldozing black neighborhoods for intercity expressways. That's an awful lot to ask police, even reformed police, to fix.

Chicago neighborhoods before the Dan Ryan
(photo by author at the National Museum of American History)

The Case for Inflection

(1) Floyd's murder inspired a broad and diverse coalition of protestors, who may be able to sustain the political pressure they began last summer, and to translate their passion into institutional change. Many more people than before are aware of the daily dilemmas of our black neighbors, even in mundane activities like going for a walk (Alston 2020). Maybe this awareness will make it harder to gaslight us with looting and other false choices.

(2) The succession of horrific events, such as the three police shootings listed above, has enlightened more people that there's something systemic going on. This by now should be clear: it isn't just about  a few "bad apples" on the force, or a few bad actors in the neighborhood making bad choices. When it happens over and over and over again, it's a trend. This realization too may help to insulate people against fear-mongering.

(3) Police departments may yet come to realize they are more effective when they are working with, not against, their communities. Of the three types of power we used to talk about in political science--superior force, economic incentives, and psychological--it's psychological power, people's willingness to obey authority of their own volition, that can be projected farthest. But as John Locke pointed out centuries ago, people are only willing to obey the government to the extent that their rights are protected. When the police realize that operating from behind a blue wall only makes their job harder in the long run, and even start to advocate for social change, we'll be getting some place, a good place, a place none of us has yet been.

SEE ALSO

"Race Relations After the Pandemic," May 27, 2020

"Race Relations After the Pandemic (II)," September 2, 2020

"Race Matters, Damn It," April 16, 2013

Why I Pedecommute (and Pedal Commute)

 

Walking to work has its challenges

(4/6/2021) When I was waiting to cross 1st Avenue on my bike on the first Monday of Earth Month, I saw a colleague getting out of her car. She's younger than me, and lives closer to the college. But driving is clearly the default option in our town, as in most places in America. Cars are seductive--for their convenience, for their accessories, and I guess for a certain type their power. I chose differently long ago, and I'm glad I did.

I need to note that my commuting mode is not strictly car-free, and my core motivation is hardly ethical. I simply enjoy walking, or riding my bicycle, over driving. I may well, though I hope I don't, counterbalance the environmental benefits of my commute in some other sector of my life.

I walk or ride because it gives my head time to clear before and after work. A time spent moving at a human pace, being truly able to see things and people around me, without the onrush of stimuli in and out of my car, is good for my mental health. It gives me time to process whatever is going on that needs processing. (For citations of actual research on this, see Rose 2016: 333-334.)

Jeff Speck in Cedar Rapids, 2015

Jeff Speck says in Walkable City that in order to encourage more people to walk, walking needs to be safe, interesting, useful, and comfortable (2012: 7-11). Cedar Rapids has made significant progress in some areas of town, but most of the city falls far short of these ideals, so I understand why I don't encounter more people on my walks. Most people will walk if there are places they need to go within easy walking distance, if they feel safe from cars, if buildings and trees provide a sense of enclosure, and if there are plenty of signs of human activity. That to some extent describes downtown and some parts of the core neighborhoods. Less than 30 percent of Cedar Rapids children walk to school, and that number will surely decline as schools are closed and attendance areas get larger.

Walking is good exercise. You can, and should, seek out aerobic exercise at a pool or gym, but most people don't. Most people get what exercise they get incidental to their daily tasks, which means if those tasks aren't achievable by a reasonable walk, most people drive and get no exercise. Exercise is good for the body and for the soul, but the way we design our towns makes it difficult. As a result, arguably a bigger factor than diet, over 30 percent of American adults and over 20 percent of teenagers are obese (higher in the Midwest).

Walking is also beneficial to social relations. You notice more of your surroundings when you are moving slowly within them, as opposed to moving fast through them. That is particularly true of the people we live among. A lot of my fellow humans don't look or act like me, but walking among them helps me get used to that. Walk the neighborhood day after day, year after year, and you begin to recognize people--and their dogs--you wouldn't have time to see from a car. Eric O. Jacobsen (2012: 173-174) cites Jane Jacobs (1961: chs 2-4) on the interaction of people on city sidewalks: watching each other means watching out for each other, repeated casual contacts build public trust, children have a chance to learn about the complex world around them. He concludes:

Implicit behind Jacobs's confidence in the city and neighborhood to function coherently is some sense of structure and order that emerges when people live in proximity to one another. There may be a number of ways to account for this implicit structuring and ordering, but one coherent way to think about it is to envision a gracious and sovereign God who both created humanity in his image and is drawing the human creation toward a communal experience of wholeness and harmony. (2012: 179)

One man walking can't make street life, but enough people walking make possible not only street life, but safe routes to school, third places, and other locally-owned small businesses. Cars make possible acres and acres of parking lots.

A Coe hawk by the sidewalk

Walking you notice more birds, too, not to mention the ways that humans thoughtlessly impact the natural world. Transportation accounts for 28 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, and in suburban-style development about doubles emissions from household energy use. Air pollution from motor vehicles costs about $10 billion a year if you factor in respiratory illnesses caused by pollution. New development, typically large lot subdivisions, takes two million acres of undeveloped land each year (cf. Hester 2006: 201-204, Speck 2012: 51-63). 

Walking and cycling accommodate the environment in ways that cars cannot. Speck (2012: 51-63) criticizes what he calls "gizmo green," which is selling and buying gadgets from electric cars to LEED-certified buildings that improve on comparable older products without as much overall impact on the environment as walking. "It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week." He quotes Witold Rybczynski, author of Makeshift Metropolis: "[A] solar-heated house in the suburbs is still a house in the suburbs, and if you have to drive to it--even in a Prius--it's hardly green."

But hybrids are only one trend in American vehicles. Without the high gas prices we had ten years ago, vehicle sizes in America and elsewhere are gigantizing. As Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute in Britain says, "One of advertising's biggest manipulations has persuaded urban families that it's perfectly 'normal' to go shopping in a two-tonne truck" (Harrabin 2021). 

I'm glad walking and cycling to work lessens my impact on the environment, and helps to develop community feeling in our area. But, as I said, mostly I do it because it feels good.

SOURCES

Randolph T. Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy (MIT Press, 2006) 

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage, 1961)

Eric O. Jacobsen, The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Baker Academic, 2012)

Jonathan F.P. Rose, The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life (Harper Wave, 2016)

Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities (Scribner, 2010)

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)

POST SCRIPT

This is based on my personal experiences, which are as an able-bodied person... for the time being anyway. I do not for a moment want anyone to think that making a city more walkable does not also help those with disabilities. See this Strong Towns interview with Heidi Johnson-Wright, an Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator in Florida (Quednau 2018).

More like this

Main Street, Galena, Illinois (photo by Robert Manson)

Bob Manson's latest entry on his terrific blog survey of independent bookstores, The Indie Blog Spot, takes him to Galena Book and Paper in downtown Galena, Illinois. Bob describes at as "a very comfortable space... a beautiful, well-lit store with a creaky wooden floor" in "an excellent location, nestled on Main Street alongside many other fine local businesses."

Bob's picture of downtown Galena is arresting. It shows a highly walkable district with numerous mostly local businesses in historic buildings that have been purposed and repurposed many times. Go up the bluff about two blocks and you're in a residential neighborhood, making Main Street eminently walkable albeit crowded during peak tourist season. Ironically, it was made possible because when the river town fell on hard times, it couldn't afford to tear down its old buildings, until eventually they became attractions. Galena's Main Street, along with historic downtown Dubuque, are the two most widely-known of their type in the region, perennial tourist magnets, and have been models for other towns (including New Bohemia and Uptown Marion).

So its success has led to replication, but largely as tourist districts. All of the districts named above have independent bookstores, and good coffeeshops, but no grocery or hardware stores. (There are specialty food stores on Main Street, but locals buy their groceries at the Piggly Wiggly with the gigantic parking lot in an unwalkable location on the edge of town.) Schools are rare. (Yay, Marion.) These are places to visit, not to live. Residential choices remain largely between houses in single-use residential districts, high-end condos, and low-end rentals.

It's possible that Main Street Galena and New Bo only attract people for the experience of an afternoon, but we seem loath to try urbanism on any scale, with the partial exceptions of small college towns (e.g. Decorah, Fairfield, Mt. Vernon). If people find showplace urbanism attractive for shopping and dining, why wouldn't at least some of them want to live in organic urbanism?

I think this house will be o.k.

 

It's not often my neighborhood makes the news, but last week the Board of Adjustment was called in to grant a zoning waiver to a house on my very block. The house pictured above, built in 1930, was crushed by an uprooted tree during the August 2020 derecho storm. Earlier this year, the wreckage was cleared away, and now the owners are rebuilding. The lot is 50 feet wide and 140 feet deep.

The first thing you notice about version 2.0 is the garage. The former garage was behind the house, with an alley access. Now there will be a garage that faces the street, with driveway access. This comes dangerously close to the "snout house" design I criticized in October 2016 for infill housing in Oakhill-Jackson. 

It is true that the garage is typically not the loveliest part of the house, and that no other house in our neighborhood has this feature. Even those houses nearby that have driveway access to the street have their garages behind the house. More substantively, as Daniel Herriges (2020) argues, the design creates two problems for any neighborhood: By putting the part where people live behind the garage, it takes away the "eyes on the street" that make pedestrians feel safe, and takes away the signs of human activity that make for an interesting walk.

The traditional city is a sort of social compact. It adheres to certain rules of design not because of aesthetic conformism, but because they produce an environment that is pro-social. The public realm enriches the buildings that front it, and the buildings enrich the public realm.

A front-loading garage, a blank wall, an absent or hard-to-find front door, an over-tall fence around a property: these things spit in the face of that social compact. They send the message, "My world is made up of my private space and the other private spaces I travel to and spend time in." (Herriges 2020)

There is the additional matter that this design feature is prohibited under our town's recently adopted form-based code, as we are "traditional residential-1," at least on that side of the street. (See pp. 215-216.) For that reason the plans were rejected by the Planning Commission, before they were restored on appeal to the Board of Adjustment. Why have a zoning code at all, or a Planning Commission, if we are just going to toss them out as soon as they are challenged by an experienced development team?

That having been said, I'm okay with the outcome. The design of the new house is less aggressive than a lot of the snout houses in subdivisions around our town, and as one of my neighbors noted, it will have a covered front porch and cedar shingles. As troubling as the practice of making zoning exceptions is, I'd have been very o.k. if the owners had decided to build a small store, or a bar, or "missing middle" housing, all of which our neighborhood could use, even if the form deviated from the code. Finally, the clincher is that the owners of the old house are maintaining ownership. If they'd sold the lot to a developer, I'd probably feel differently.

Meanwhile, builders are at work digging the new foundation...

...which is the most excitement our block has seen in a long time. Really, I think this house will be o.k.

Iowa Takes Aim at Voting

 

Jane votes, fall 2020 (Photo by Jane Nesmith)

For this nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American's vote to be denied, diluted or defiled. The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished.--RONALD REAGAN, November 7, 1981

Amid awful suffering and deteriorating conditions, Texas Republicans decided to fight a culture war. In doing so, they are emblematic of the national party, which has abandoned even the pretense of governance in favor of the celebration of endless grievance.--JAMELLE BOUIE, February 19, 2021

Hold our beer, Texas! We have grievances, too! 

Iowa's legislature is in session, which means the usual silliness is being debated and passed while our rural areas depopulate, we have one of the highest rates of COVID deaths in the country, and individuals and businesses struggle with economic recovery. Among the bills making it through the first "funnel"--Iowa has a part-time legislature with a three-month session, so bills must meet certain deadlines to remain under consideration--are prohibitions against traffic cameras, sanctions on social media companies that "censor" conservatives, scholarships to private K-12 schools, allowing the carrying of guns without a permit (unless you're riding an e-scooter), adding gun rights to the state constitution, a constitutional amendment declaring no right to abortion, ending faculty tenure at state universities, and cutting off funds to cities that "defund" their police departments. 

The most recent piece of legislation produced by this august body aims at protecting the sensitive feelings of white men during discussions of racism and sexism (Sostaric 2021b). It specifically bars school curricula or government agency diversity training that "teach, advocate, act upon, or promote divisive concepts." Among concepts declared to be divisive is "that the U.S. or State of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist." Systemic racism is a serious issue--see Alston 2020, Koh 2017, and numerous other thoughtful takes--which the Iowa legislature is taking on in the silliest way possible.

Three bills that might have a positive economic impact are tax relief for individuals and businesses that have received COVID assistance; a substantial appropriation for broadband expansion; and requiring more ethanol to be sold at service stations. The rest is pure candy for those who like Iowa the way it was, whatever that was. House Minority Leader Todd Pritchard noted, "the Governor and majority party's agenda so far this session has been too focused on divisive bills that will make Iowa's recovery even more difficult.... With Iowa's workforce shortage and aging population, anytime Iowa lawmakers send messages that make Iowa look unwelcoming to others is bad for business and Iowa's future." Some even dumber stuff didn't make it through the funnel, but we can hope for next year!

However, as I said, this is pretty much what we've come to expect from our legislature of late: sundry slings and arrows at anyone who doesn't look or act like 1950s Iowa. But, this year...

This year, we're adding making it harder to vote. Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill March 8 that moves up the deadline for arrival of absentee ballots regardless of when they were mailed, moves back the availability of absentee ballots and early in-person voting to half the time it was before 2017, outlaws mass mailing of absentee ballot request forms (an expedient used during the 2020 pandemic that might not have been repeated anyway), allows each county to have exactly one absentee ballot drop box, requires only the voter to drop off the absentee ballot, and makes disobedience by county officials a criminal offense (Sostaric 2021a). Provisions prohibiting mailing of absentee ballot applications, as well as further shortening the early-voting period were removed on the House floor. The bill was opposed by the Iowa State Association of County Auditors.

This direction is wrong on so many levels: It is part of a concerted effort by Republican legislators across America to make voting more difficult ("State Voting Bills Tracker 2021"). It is by any objective standard an overreaction to concerns about election security, it legitimizes former President Donald J. Trump's five years of baseless complaints that his opponents were cheating, and it disproportionately affects some social groups. Poor and working-class people, racial minorities, people who live in urban areas, and single parents are more likely to find this a hardship. That is what should alarm advocates of community. A common life requires that all be heard, that everyone no matter how humble have the opportunity to be part of the collective conversation. The right to participate is therefore fundamental. This law, passed by one party that represents one demographic (albeit a traditionally dominant one), strikes at the very heart of that. 

The legislative majority annually speaks volumes about who counts and who doesn't in Iowa. This year, they've gone farther, to restrict who can be heard.

SEE ALSO: Erin Murphy, "New Iowa Law Limits Early and Absentee Voting," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 9 March 2021, 1A, 9A

Iowa statehouse (Source: Wikimedia commons)