Upzoned

Do we really want our mayors to have a vision? This is the provocative question asked by Alain Bertaud in an article on The MIT Press Reader. Bertaud is a Senior Research Scholar at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, an urban planner, and the author of the 2018 book Order without Design.

In his article, Bertaud writes that a mayor “convinced of the necessity of having a vision” is less inclined to support innovation welling up from the population and more inclined to impose his or her own vision. 

A mayor with a vision needs to be followed, not questioned by people who lack one. Visionary leadership implies a top-down approach, in other words, but a city is mostly created from the bottom up.

Bertaud’s alternative?

Mayors and their municipal staff, including urban planners and economists, should be considered not visionaries or rulers, then, but a well-coordinated team (one hopes) of competent managers and janitors.

Bertaud’s article is the subject of this week’s Upzoned. In this episode, host Abby Kinney, an urban planner with Gould Evans in Kansas City, is joined by Strong Towns senior editor Daniel Herriges. They discuss visionary mayors, the role of city managers in creating good feedback loops, and how local governments can act as support systems for local innovation rather than gatekeepers.

Then in the Downzoned, Abby recommends a podcast that’s taking a hard look at the lucrative wellness industry. And Daniel recommends a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about North Vietnamese spy living in Los Angeles after the Fall of Saigon. 

Show Notes

• Do We Really Want Our Mayors to Have a Vision?, by Alain Bertaud

• Order without Design, by Alain Bertaud

• Dongo Chang (Twitter)

• The Dream Podcast

• The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

• Daniel Herriges (Twitter)

• Abby Kinney (Twitter)

• Gould Evans Studio for City Design

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom (Soundcloud)

• Select Strong Towns articles on local government

  • Let's Make Public Hearings More Public, by Travis Parker

  • Learn from Peers but Think for Yourself, by Charles Marohn

  • Prototyping the City (podcast)

  • Beyond the Buzzword: Innovation and How it Can Help Local Government Create Meaningful Change (podcast)

Kansas City, Missouri recently made news by becoming the first major metropolitan area to announce plans to offer free bus service throughout the city. Coverage of this story has been mostly positive...but there have been critiques and warnings as well.

Among the latter is “There’s no such thing as a free bus.” Writing last month in The Hill, Patrick Tuohey, director of the Better Cities Project, describes previous fare-free experiments in Austin and Denver that led to “overcrowded buses, disruptive passengers, and unhappy bus operators.” There are other concerns, says Tuohey, not least of which is that the money to pay for it isn’t there yet:

The city’s next fiscal year does not begin until May 1, and the just-released budget proposal does not include enough money for fare-free buses.

Kansas City’s free transit—and Tuohey’s article—are the subjects of today’s episode of Upzoned. Host Abby Kinney, an urban planner based in Kansas City, is joined by Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns. Together, they discuss the promise and perils of “free” transit, the kinds of conversations (especially around equity and land use) this plan is spurring locally, and why the argument that we should subsidize transit because we’re already subsidizing cars doesn’t hold water.

Then on the Downzoned, Chuck recommends The Chaos Imperative, a book about why businesses and organizations should create room for disruption, and Abby introduces the new website for Gould Evans Studio for City Design.

Additional Show Notes

• The Hill article: “There’s no such thing as a free bus,” by Patrick Tuohey

• Patrick Tuohey on Twitter

• The Chaos Imperative: How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness, and Success, by Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack

• Abby Kinney on Twitter

• Gould Evans Studio for City Design

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom (Soundcloud)

• Recent Strong Towns articles on Kansas City

  • Live in Kansas City: "We’re a suburban community learning we can be urban."

  • “We’re Overbuilt on the Public Side, and Underbuilt on the Private Side.”

  • How Better Design Can Help Solve Parking Problems, by Kevin Klinkenberg

A recent article in the New York Times called “Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build”—that’s fourteen “builds,” by the way—chronicled the drama (and a fair amount of absurdity) surrounding a proposed development in Lafayette, California.

Lafayette, a wealthy suburb east of Berkeley, is known for being notoriously anti-development. When a developer proposed to build hundreds of new homes across the street from a BART station—something the land was zoned for—it set off a firestorm of protests. Some people protested that the plans were too big, others that they were too small. At one point, the developer, Dennis O’Brien, found himself in the farcical position of being sued in support of himself.

The article by Conor Dougherty is the kind of story that brilliantly illustrates the complexities, controversies, and personalities of the housing crisis. Which also makes it the right kind of article to get the Upzoned treatment.

In this week’s episode of Upzoned, host Abby Kinney is joined by Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns senior editor Daniel Herriges to unpack the Lafayette story. Together, they discuss what the situation in Lafayette says about the degree to which housing policy should be controlled at the state level vs. the local level, the dangers of one-dimensional solutions for complex problems, and whether or not it’s time to reform our laws to simply get more building done.

Then on the Downzoned, Chuck Marohn tells the story of how he met Kansas City rapper Kemet the Phantom, whose song, “Get Out (The Streetcar Song),” is the new Upzoned bumper music. That meeting was a reminder to Chuck that the movement to build strong towns goes far beyond built environment professionals: engineers, planners, and architects.

Show Notes

• The New York Times article: “Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build,” by Conor Dougherty,”

• Abby Kinney on Twitter

• Kemet the Phantom on Soundcloud

• Conor Dougherty on Twitter

• Recent Strong Towns articles on the housing crisis in California

  • “California Housing Crisis,” by Chuck Marohn

  • “One Important Question About California's Housing Future,” by Daniel Herriges

  • “Best of 2019: California’s Housing Crisis,” by Daniel Herriges

  • “Hey Google, Tell Me How to Make Bay Area Housing More Affordable,” by Daniel Herriges

Strong Towns board member Ian Rasmussen once likened the conventional approach to growth and development to a “bad party.”

At a good party, everyone who shows up is contributing more to the party—in food, drink, and energy—than they consume. Quite literally, the more the merrier. But what if you threw a party and everyone who shows up eats and drinks more than they brought? Each person who walks through the door only accelerates the decline. If your goal is make the party last as long as possible, you’d be foolish to let anyone else in.

The same can be said of the North American development pattern. The way we build our towns and cities—stretching ever outward, building more roads, increasing the cost of infrastructure, and increasing our reliance on cars—is a net-loss. The increased tax revenue from people moving into suburban-style neighborhoods doesn’t come close to paying for that growth over time. The result: a bad party. One in which growth paradoxically increases decline, making the whole community more fragile. If this was your town, and you realized what was happening, but weren’t willing to change the nature of the party itself—what would you do? The only thing you could do: bar entry to newcomers.

This is the situation Lake Wylie, South Carolina finds itself it in. Lake Wylie, an exurb of Charlotte, North Carolina, has tripled in size in the last two decades. As a recent Wall Street Journal article described, people were drawn to the town by its good schools and low taxes. But the party turned sour as schools filled, the water system got overwhelmed, and commute times exploded. So late last year, the local governing council slammed the door shut on growth. The party is no longer accepting newcomers...which makes you wonder how good the party really was to begin with.

Lake Wylie, South Carolina is the subject of this week’s episode of the Upzoned podcast. That’s right, Upzoned is back, with new host Abby Kinney—and a cool new theme song too, “Get Out (The Streetcar Song)” from Kansas City-based rapper Kemet the Phantom.

In this week’s episode, Abby and Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn talk about the dilemma facing Lake Wylie (and exurbs like it all around the country), the physical and cultural challenges of retrofitting an exurb for a healthier approach to growth, and the fundamentally fragile flaw in the very idea of a “bedroom community.”

Then in the Downzone, we get to know our new host a bit better. A native of St. Louis, Abby Kinney is an urban design and planning consultant at Gould Evans in Kansas City, Missouri. She facilitates the ad-hoc Kansas City chapter of the Incremental Development Alliance. When she’s not geeking out on cities, Abby is an avid urban mountain biker, audiobook and podcast junkie, amateur rock climber, and guitarist. Make sure to connect with her on Twitter at @abbykatkc.

Show Notes

• Wall Street Journal article about Lake Wylie

• The Journal. podcast episode about Lake Wylie

• “The Party Analogy,” by Charles Marohn

• Abby Kinney on Twitter

• Kemet the Phantom on Soundcloud

• New Theme Song: “Get Out (The Streetcar Song),” by Kemet the Phantom (Music video on YouTube)

This will be our last Upzoned episode for a while. This episode was recorded in Santa Ana, California, at our SoCal Regional Gathering. We talk bullet trains, big projects, and how Southern California can shift their top/down approach to start to build Strong Towns.

It’s Black Friday—and at Strong Towns, that means it’s time to hang with family, nap off yesterday’s food coma, and reflect on how dumb mandatory parking minimums are. Thousands of our readers across America are out there right now happily snapping photos of half-empty lots outside their local stores as part of our annual #BlackFridayParking campaign, reflecting on the insanity of the fact that our cities actually require many of their merchants to build so many parking spots that their customers can’t even fill on the biggest shopping day of the year. (You can totally join them, by the way.)

But not everyone thinks their town has a too-much-parking problem. And if you want to go to ground zero for people who think the Strong Towns call to end parking minimums simply doesn’t apply to their community, look no further than Southern California.

In a recent podcast from KCRW’s Greater LA, host Steve Chiotakis dug into Los Angeles’ peculiar relationship with its parking landscape. LA, after all, is a city that devotes a whopping 27 square miles of its land to the storage of private vehicles, (yes, really,) but whose residents still always seem to be endlessly circling for a spot. And while some Los Angelenos Chiotakis talks to think their city will simply never kick their autodependency habit, others see hope for getting people out of their cars and onto modes of transportation that don’t require that we pave over acres upon acres of our most valuable downtown land.

So what’s the Strong Towns take? Is Southern California beyond repair, or is it time for a transformative overhaul of the City of Sunshine?

In this episode of Upzoned, Chuck and Kea tackle that tough question—and offer a preview of what you can expect at their lived podcast recording at December 4th’s Southern California regional gathering. And their answers might surprise you—especially if you think #EndParkingMinimums means #BanTheCars.

For months now, wildfires have been raging across the state of California—and along the way, they’ve sparked some heated conversations about whether our own building choices are to blame for the destruction and tragedy that have followed nearly every blaze.

It’s not hard to see why. California is pretty much the poster child for the #Suburban Experiment, and they’ve never quite stopped building further and further out from their coastal cores, growing at a robust post-war pace long after the rest of the country saw fringe development slow. In California, though, those fringes are located deep into fire-prone forests that are increasingly beset by drought—and building infrastructure way out into those edges doesn’t do much for their cities’ finances, either.

So California should just say an unequivocal “no” to new development in the wilderness-urban interface and start densifying its core neighborhoods, right? And we definitely shouldn’t be running power lines out into the middle of those tinderbox landscapes, yeah?

Well…it’s not quite that simple.

Today on Upzoned, we bring in a special guest: Brian Isom, wildfire management expert, researcher, and author of a great recent article over on the Orange County Register. In his article, Brian argued that negligent power companies actually aren’t the bogeyman of the wildfire crisis that many would have you believe—and that keeping Californians and their homes safe will take a lot more than the efforts of you, me, your local zoning commission, and Smokey the Bear. And in this conversation with Kea, he discusses all of this along with his work at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, as well as how a Strong Towns approach can help align market incentives to make even the driest, most overbuilt corners of the US fire-safe and financially prosperous.

Minneapolis just became the first major city to end single-family-only zoning. As Kea Wilson and Chuck Marohn discuss, this isn’t a radical idea but it is sure to have a subtly radical impact over time. What do the new guidelines mean for Minneapolis and for other cities and states considering a similar approach?

This episode was recorded as a webcast in the Strong Towns Facebook group, which gave Kea and Chuck the chance to answer questions live from our Facebook members.

By the way, it’s fall member drive week here at Strong Towns. The change in Minneapolis is one example of how Strong Towns is helping to shift the national conversation around growth, development, and financial strength. If you want to see that see that conversation spread to more communities, consider becoming a member at strongtowns.org/membership.

You would think that your city’s wealthiest suburb would always have enough money to keep the streetlights on and the roads paved. You’d probably also think that the suburb that the two wealthiest people on Earth call home would be able to pave its roads in gold and light its streets with Hollywood-style glamor lighting that makes everyone it shines on look ten pounds thinner. On both counts, you’d be wrong.

Earlier this week, CNBC offered an update to the story of Medina, Washington, a wealthy enclave outside of Seattle that billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates both call home. Medina has been making headlines for a surprising reason: they’re struggling to find the money to deliver the services that residents need, even though some of those resident’s homes (CoughGatesCough) have 24 bathrooms, something called a “trampoline room,” valuations of over $131 million, and owners who can comfortably pay over $1 million a year in property taxes. The reason why, CNBC suggests, has to do with a state cap on property taxes that distorts how much money actually goes to local needs and keeps the Bezoses of the world from paying what it actually costs to maintain the infrastructure that surrounds their mega-mansions—and if Washington just let the Medinas of the world have a little more local control, they’d finally be able to make the math work.

The Strong Towns staff wondered, though, whether making Medina strong was really just a matter of twiddling a few taxation knobs on the governance control panel. So host Kea Wilson, and guest host + reluctant Seattleite, John Reuter, decided to dive in and talk it out.

Would raising local and state tax rates really give wealthy communities like Medina the cash they need to pay for the suburban way of life—or is their development pattern simply so insolvent that even their high-earning residents would balk at that price tag? If Bezos and Gates decided to pay their city’s tax bill themselves, should Medina throw a party, or start worrying about what happens when the billionaires (or their heirs, or even the mere millionaires) pack up someday and leave, as has happened in so many American suburbs already? Do luxury homes and overbuilt road networks even make us happy in the long run, even if we can figure out how to afford it all? And most importantly: is one of Bill Gates’ 24 bathrooms also a trampoline room?! The comedic possibilities are endless!

Then in the DownZone, John and Kea talk the very different ways they’re celebrating Halloween: John, by dressing his dog up as Chewbacca and reflecting on the role of heroism in the Star Wars franchise, and Kea, by reading a spooky-good new novel by Helen Phillips (and, okay, dressing her dog up as Superman, but that’s just a gimme.)

If you’re even a casual follower of the urbanist blogosphere, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard about the “Miracle on 14th Street.” That’s what transit advocates have been calling New York’s newest bus rapid transit line, which has fought its way through lawsuits from irate neighbors to become what Citylab calls “the first glimpse of a true bus-centric street in America’s largest city.” But this project is about more than just paint: car traffic is now banned on 14th street for most hours of the day, and with the road all to itself, the M14 Bus is now running at more than twice the speed of the M42.

But here’s what’s really stunning Strong Towns advocates about this story: the fact that it’s considered miraculous at all.

On today’s Upzoned, Chuck and Kea are back to break down why simple policy and paint-driven transportation improvements like the 14th street makeover aren’t more common in American cities, from federal funding structures that make it easier to build a massive light rail project than incrementally improve a bus schedule, to pop culture that makes riding the bus the butt of too many national jokes. And then we dig a little deeper and explore the range of even humbler transportation improvements our communities are leaving on the table—and a few instances where, despite what you think, a transportation fix isn’t what your community needs at all.

Then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea talk about their favorite recent reads: For Chuck, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest exploration into the nuances of human communication, and for Kea, an audibook by a beloved Tennessee novelist read for 9 blissful hours by Tom Hanks.