Upzoned

On this special episode of Upzoned, Kea sits down with board member John Reuter to talk about the big story in the ST universe—the Strong Towns member drive—and why Strong Towns members are so much more crucial to our mission than the average non-profit (and not in the ways you might expect.) Then in the Downzone, they talk their recent reads, as well as the topic on everybody's minds: that Game of Thrones finale.

Ask the average North American how they help pay to keep the street that runs in front of their home in good shape, and they’ll probably say something vague like “Well, I pay my taxes.” If they’re a little more in the know, they might say that their state transportation funding comes largely from gas taxes, or user fees, or tolls, or some grand mix of many of these things. But no matter how sophisticated your understanding of road funding is, few among us wouldn’t be surprised to open our mailbox and find a notice from the city that says all that money we’ve thrown into that mysterious communal pot still hasn’t covered the costs to maintain our neighborhood street—oh, and by the way, here’s a hefty bill for the difference.

That’s exactly what happened to many families in St. Paul, MN this year. Under a new road funding system, homeowners are now responsible for paying 50% of the costs to “mill and overlay” the damaged roadways in front of their property, with the city picking up the rest. It’s a process called direct assessment— and if you’re nodding your head reading this and saying to yourself, “Good! Those suburban cul-de-sac dwellers should pay for more of that stuff!”, then we’ve got some bad news for you. Because these assessments are being applied not just on dead-end streets, but on major arterials, too—and if you have the misfortune to live on a stroad that thousands of cars use every day, your bill could get pretty hefty.

How hefty? We’re talking $8,000-surprise-invoice hefty.

So what does a Strong Towns advocate say to all this? Are debates over the fairness of direct assessment programs just a distraction from the real problem—the fundamental financial insolvency of our cities? Are they a good idea that’s being misused in St. Paul, but could be re-engineered to make drivers who choose to live on on massive double lots at the end of streets that function as private drives finally pay their fair share? Or is the answer a bit more complicated than that?

In this episode of Upzoned, Chuck and Kea dig deep into the idea of direct assessment programs and what it’ll take to build a road funding system that’s actually fair to everyone. And their respective responses right surprise you.

Then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea talk about the media that’s easing them into the summer season: Midnight in Chernobyl for Chuck, and a double-feature of Avengers: Endgame and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu for Kea.

Every day, our national news is rife with stories about how our partisan divide is tearing our political discourse apart—and our local news isn’t always that much better. But what if the most fundamental cause of all this in-fighting has more to do with our psychological wiring than with which parties we belong to and which newspapers we read?

That’s the assertion behind a recent article from the Atlantic by Dan Meegan, “Conservatives Have a Different Definition of Fair.” And the many ways that North Americans define “fairness”—whether they realize their definition is different than their neighbors’ or not—has a profound impact on the financial prosperity of our towns.

Meegan defines the two dominant understandings of fairness this way:

One is by need: Some people have more than they need, and others need more than they have. Even when liberal leaders describe policies that are beneficial to everyone, they make it clear that the most important beneficiaries are those whose needs are most urgent….

Still, there are other ways of judging what’s fair. Conservatives tend to value equity, or proportionality, and they see unfairness when people are asked to contribute more than they should expect to receive in return, or when people receive more than they contribute.

But while those differing definitions can ignite firestorms on the national level, the narrow places where they overlap can create just as many problems on the local level. Increasing spending on roads, for instance, usually seems fair to liberals because they support strong public investment that they feel will benefit everyone, including their lowest income neighbors who rely on their cars to get to work; conservatives, on the other hand, often think increasing infrastructure spending seems fair because they want to get what their taxes have paid for, and making crumbling roads usable will increase their personal freedom to move through their towns as they choose. Meanwhile, neither group realizes that their taxes aren’t, in fact, funding a solvent and resilient system. We instead have institutions that can neither meet the needs of all citizens (including the vulnerable), nor deliver on the promises our governments made us when we paid our taxes and expected a functioning road network in return.

In this episode of Upzoned, Chuck and Kea dig into this and more implications of our political psychology, including how our implicit understandings of justice shape our views of policy when it comes to transit, housing, and more.

Even a tropical paradise like Hawaii has its problems. And in Hawaii, like the rest of America, one of them is deadly roads. Honolulu’s latest effort to reduce the risk of pedestrian injuries and deaths, though, is a novel one: the city is considering a law which would prohibit crossing any street after dark except at a marked crosswalk or signalized intersection. People on foot could be fined $100 for violating this ordinance, which is more severe than most cities’ existing (and rarely enforced) anti-jaywalking provisions.

The law would apply even if, as is often the case in environments designed around cars, there is no marked crosswalk anywhere nearby.

What are they trying to do here?

This is the question that Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn poses to Don Kostelec on this week’s Upzoned podcast. (Chuck is filling in for Upzoned host Kea Wilson, who is enjoying some off-the-grid time bikepacking this week.) Kostelec is a planner with Vitruvian Planning in Boise, Idaho, and an avid Twitter user who applies his encyclopedic knowledge of street design standards and practices to advocate for a safer, more humane world for those outside of motor vehicles.

The first question Don has when he hears about Honolulu’s proposal is, “Do the roadways even give people a chance to abide by this law?” As he has written before (check out Day 7 of his epic “Twelve Days of Safety Myths”), engineering departments often ignore both context and basic human psychology when insisting that the safest thing for a person on foot to do is use a crosswalk… even when the nearest crosswalk is half a mile out of the way!

And this leads into a discussion of what’s really wrong with Honolulu’s effort: not necessarily the intent, or even the idea of strict rules for street users. Don points out that Honolulu has strict rules across the board, for motorists as well. And that can work, if you consider context and if you have a system that is designed to give all users—whether on foot, wheelchair, bicycle, car, or what have you—an equal opportunity to navigate the system safely. In Honolulu, this could mean things like actually creating frequent marked crossings, tightening the turning radii at intersections and making other design changes intended to slow traffic.

In the world we inhabit, though, that equal opportunity doesn’t exist. Not even close. And putting the onus on pedestrians to keep themselves out of any potential danger—while not designing an environment that makes it practical for them to get where they need to go without breaking the law—is no kind of solution at all.

And then, in the Downzone, Chuck reveals why he avoided social media for days (hint: don’t spoil the Endgame!). And Don talks about the nerdy reading he’s doing in preparation for the hands-on road safety mythbusting book he’s itching to write, which leads him and Chuck to discuss whether Don is more the biblical-scholar of road design, or the CSI detective of road design.

”There are powerful forces behind the relative and in some cases absolute economic decline of rural America — and the truth is that nobody knows how to reverse those forces.”

That’s the main takeaway (and the single biggest bummer-sentence) of a recent New York Times column from Paul Krugman, entitled “Getting Real About Rural America.” And in many ways, he’s exactly right.

When it comes to their economic prospects, at least, rural towns have been left behind, not just by global economic trends that have made food production a global enterprise, but by state and local leaders who struggle to figure out what to do with their agrarian and former-farming communities. Jobs are scarce, but no global company wants to set up shop in the middle of a corn field. That collaborative spark that creates enduring home-grown businesses can be a challenge when neighbors, by design, live acres apart from one another, and when even county seats often don’t have the population to support universities and other hubs of innovation. We could pump federal resources into these places, but as Krugman points out, comparable programs in other countries have failed, even with universal healthcare, childcare, and robust infrastructure funding a virtual non-issue.

So the Strong Towns team read this article, and obviously, we had just one thing to say: eh, who really needs rural communities anyway?

Kidding! Kidding!! Rural communities are some of the most vitally productive and important places in North America—and a whole lot of our staff has lived in them. But if we continue to try to solve their problems using the typical toolbox of top-down solutions—as Krugman does in his column—it can be pretty darn hard to make them financially strong.

This week on Upzoned, regular host Kea and soon-to-frequent guest John Reuter dig deep into the under-appreciated value of rural communities, and why if we use a new set of strategies to cultivate that value, their prospects for revitalization actually look pretty good. Reuter is a Strong Towns board member, a former councilman in Sandpoint, ID, and a former resident of various rural communities across the Mountain West (though these days, he calls the big city of Seattle home, where he works for the League of Conservation Voters). And he has some fascinating insights on what sort of economic development solutions do work in towns with more cows than people—including one unmissable anecdote about how one Idaho town created an enduring local business, inspired by a religious dream about bleu cheese salad dressing. (Yes, really.)

Then in the Downzone, John and Kea talk about how they’re staying entertained during their respective rainy seasons: Tara Westover’s memoir of growing up in a family of survivalists for Kea, and for John, a little-known television program called Game of Thrones. Be sure to stay tuned in for his thoughts on the infrastructure challenges of Winterfell.

It’s right there in the Strong Towns Strength Test: “If you wanted to eat only locally-produced food for a month, could you do it?”

And for many towns that want to become financially resilient, the question of how to feed their citizens is among the first that comes up. After all, if your town is struggling to keep even a handful of grocery stores open in your walkable neighborhoods, how can you even think of addressing more intractable problems, like shrinking the footprint of your road network to a scale you can afford to maintain? You need those roads to get people out to the mega-grocery at the edge of town. Or alternatively, if your town is trying to wean yourselves off of the kind of corporate subsidies that never seem to pay off, how can you ever cut the cord if you need that big chain grocery store where everyone goes to buy their milk?

If you’re screaming words like “community gardens!” and “rooftop farms!” at the screen right now, not so fast. Because according to a recent article from Anthropocene, these hyper-local solutions can only go so far—and in some cases, some of them are only producing the kind of expensive local food that makes the wealthy feel better about supporting a nearby farm, and not the kind of much-needed nutrients that the low-income still struggle to access.

So what does the Strong Towns advocate say to all this? Is it really impossible to feed your citizens without leaning on tax incentives to grocery store chains, token produce aisles in big box stores, and other bad choices that will make your place go broke over time? Are community herb beds and vegetable plots in street medians really just silly half-answers to a problem that’s way bigger than any town can hope to solve, or are they important community-strengthening tools? Can any urban environment pass the Strong Towns strength test, or will the local food question bring even the strongest towns grinding to a halt? And conversely, can the few towns that do pass this question on the test—the ones in agricultural communities—ever hope to pass the others?

Those are the tough questions we tackle in the latest episode of Upzoned. And then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea talk about their Lenten-season reads, as well as their not-at-all Lent-related watches (hint: Superhero movies).

If you asked the average Strong Towns advocate what our cities most need more of if we want them to be financially stronger, they’d have just three words for you: data, data, data.

Because the more you study fragile places, the more you keep running up against just how few of the decisions that shape our built environment are truly informed by the unique and dynamic realities of our unique and dynamic places, much less the billions of unique and dynamic people who live in them. Sure, we host the public engagement sessions, put service request portals on our .gov websites, and conduct time-limited traffic studies. But while they might scratch the surface, none of those things ever seem to really capture of the astonishing complexity of the world we live in. At best, we simply haven’t figured out a way to continuously capture the data we need to make our places truly strong. At worst, we deliberately avoid the hard work of collecting that data—because it’s too inefficient, too messy… and too easy to just cross your fingers and say yes to another mega-project that sounds good on paper.

Strong Towns fans aren’t the only one troubled by the dearth of data in our city planning process—and that’s where the techies come in. In a new article in Curbed, Patrick Sisson outlined just a few of the smart technology solutions that are reaching for innovative new ways to make the city building process radically more participatory—and if they work, it could revolutionize not only the public engagement process, but everything about the way we do reporting, design, and more.

But even though we all love data, not all Strong Towns advocates are convinced that apps that help you report potholes and light poles that measure how many bikes go down the street are the answer to bringing more feedback to the city design process.

On this episode of Upzoned, Chuck and Kea go deep into the many forms of civic tech, and try to suss out which ones are most (and least) consistent with a Strong Towns vision for communities that are authentically driven by continuous, meaningful bottom-up feedback. Along the way, they tackle some tough topics: are our city leaders asking their citizens the right questions about how they use their built environment? Can we ask those truly meaningful questions in the space of a single app, or even across dozens of them—or does community engagement need a more traditional, soulful approach? What is lost when we digitize data collection? What about embedded technologies like new high-tech traffic counters that don’t engage with stated human opinion at all? And most importantly: who on earth is the target market for apps like Smell My City?

If you go for a walk around a sought-after North American city, you’re likely to see all the usual things we associate with booming city growth: the towering crane, the beeping backhoe, the shell of that new apartment building looming behind the construction tape. But just because the footprint of your town is growing doesn’t mean your population is—even if every single one of those new luxury units is filling up fast.

And if you want to understand the reason behind that seeming paradox, we have one tip for you: start counting doorbells.

That’s because, according to a new article from Slate’s Henry Grabar, many of the cities that are adding new housing units are also among the fastest to subtract old ones from within the walls of their historic buildings, converting duplexes and triplexes to single-family homes and gradually draining the density from what used to be populous neighborhoods by design. But how should a Strong Towns advocate look at this phenomenon: as a disaster for communities that are short on affordable housing supply and too slow to build, or a natural and necessary part of the incremental development process?

Today on Upzoned, Strong Towns staffers Kea Wilson and Daniel Herriges talk it out. Daniel, a San Francisco veteran who’s spent a lot of his life in booming places, gives his take on the long-range consequences of strict zoning codes that make it near-impossible for buildings to evolve to the next level of intensity, but all too tempting to knock out a wall or two and remove that second kitchen. And Kea, a Rust Belt native whose own city has seen a wave of single-family conversions without the accompanying new housing boom, talks about why even cities with more vacancies than they know what to do with might not welcome the Disappearing Doorbell problem—at least, not until the desirable neighborhoods with the strongest development patterns can upzone themselves by right.

Then in the Downzone, Daniel and Kea step way far away from the Strong Towns conversation and talk about their recent listens: indie chanteuse Sharon Van Etten, and Kea talks about her latest musical theater fav, the heartwarming Southern diner musical, Waitress.

So you might have heard that our founder and President, Chuck Marohn, finally wrote the book that Strong Towns fans have been clamoring for ever since we started this movement. (If you haven’t, that’s actually kind of impressive, because we can’t stop talking about it.) And you may have even heard about the exciting, cross-continental tour we’re embarking on to share the book with as many communities we can—and to share stories from the communities we visit with the broader Strong Towns movement.

But hold on a sec, you might be saying. What’s this book actually going to be all about? What will it give you that’s any different than the stuff you already get on the Strong Towns site for free? And why bring it into the world now, especially as we head into what promises to be one of the most tumultuous presidential election seasons of all time? Are people really going to want to sit around and read hundreds of pages on city finances at a time like this?

This week on Upzoned, we’re doing something a little different. Instead of spotlighting one big story from the week in global news, we’re spending this hour talking about the biggest story in the Strong Towns universe—the long-awaited Strong Towns book. And you’ll hear the answers to these questions from the man himself: Strong Towns president, founder, and soon-to-be debut author, Charles L. Marohn, Jr., better known to most of us as Chuck.

Then in the Downzone, Chuck talks about how he’s decompressing after finishing his manuscript: re-reading the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy. And Kea talks about the last book she finished: Maid by Stephanie Land, which gives an insight into what life is like as a modern-day domestic worker in the age of giant suburban homes and neighborhoods that all but guarantee that the poorest among us have to spend a lot of our time and money driving to and from work.

In the vast majority of North American towns, a few heavy winter snowfalls per year is just an annoying fact of life. So why do some of the most predictably snowy places seem to become paralyzed every time the storms roll through—and not always because the plows can’t physically do their work?

That’s the question some residents in Milwaukee are demanding an answer to. While much of America is finally thawing out for spring, they’re still buried—and according to a recent article from Urban Milwaukee, part of the blame lies in their city’s finances.

That made us wonder: how does funding for snow clearance really work? Are constantly snow-buried streets in a city that sees harsh winter weather every year a symptom that your place could get stronger, or could get better at planning its plow routes, or adopt a better funding system for winter road maintenance or…something else entirely? And how can a Strong Towns approach help get our roads clear—or, more importantly, help us design streets that still work for all users when the big storm comes, whether they’re driving or on foot?

We sat down with Kevin Germino—Milwaukee resident, long-time Strong Towns member, and year-round pedestrian who has climbed a 6-foot mound of ice on his way to work—to ask what he thought about his city’s problem from an on-the-ground perspective. And then we talked about the power of Strong Citizens to offer the kind of knowledge our engineers don’t always seek: the unique insights of being an every day road user who’s just trying to get where they’re going.

Then in the downzone, Kevin talks about his favorite e-newsletter, Bloomberg’s Money Stuff, and their excellent coverage of Elon Musk’s latest meltdown. And Kea delves into her latest read: Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, a novelistic non-fiction account of the 1986 burning of the Los Angeles Public Library’s central branch that doubles as a love letter to the role libraries play in our communities.

(Top photo via Creative Commons)