Meeting the New Urbanists
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
On setting your own curriculum in life
As mentioned, I’m a believer that a great way to learn is to read books. People who know a lot about a thing put all of the best things they know in one, small, usually digestible format. Whatever the topic, someone has written a book about it.
Being a journalist, grants me an amazing super power. When I’m done with the book, I can often call up the teacher author and have office hours interview them for a story.
When I started at Livability, it was a new field for me. I’d been reading and writing about demographics and touched on urban planning issues at Ad Age (reading books and interviewing the likes of Richard Florida, Ed Glaeser and Greg Lindsay) but the idea of what makes a place a great place to live was a much broader topic.
I needed to get up to speed, quickly, so I devised a plan. I would read the key books. I would do the research and the work. Much as I had at Ad Age, I would start a blog so I had a place to write about these topics as I read about them. The blog would also be a place I could post interviews with the authors of the books. Finally, because I knew this would be an ongoing thing, I would set up an advisory board for Livability with as many of these people as I could. The idea being that I could use that to create ongoing relationships with key people, and hopefully feed them some research, too.
I got a lot of great people on the advisor board: Joel Kotkin; Kevin Stolarick, who was Richard Florida’s lead researcher; economist Jed Kolko; and, Emily Rose-Talen, Jeff Speck and Ellen Dunham-Jones, founding members of the Center for New Urbanism. The CNU was a group of urban theorists and planners who had really figured out how to design great communities. Some I would later meet at conferences. All of them I would interview for the Livability Blog. You can still read a lot of these interviews which I now host at www.bestplacesto.live.
I learned important lessons about process and about having the right people at the table. One of the leaders of the New Urbanism movement, Emily Rose-Talen, noted that most of the New Urbanist leaders were architects. She thought they needed more policy people, too, to help take design into reality. Lynn Richards, who at the time headed the Congress of the New Urbanism talked about how much policy is local, but that it’s often simpler to work at the state level. As she said, “There are 75,000 units of local government and there are 50 states.” I learned more and more about why policy of all kinds matters so much, and how policy all interconnects. Transportation policy and zoning policies and housing policies and environmental polices and anti-poverty and anti-racism polices are all the same thing in many ways. Which can be problematic in the U.S. because we have focused on the wrong things for so long.
I talked to New Urbanist pioneer and walkability expert, Jeff Speck. He literally wrote the book on it (Walkable City). He told me, “The way we subsidize things and don't subsidize others favors Americans making the wrong choices. We encourage people to live in this country in terms of their housing and transportation choices. I don't want you to get your unsustainable life more cheaply than someone else's more sustainable life. “
Speck went on to talk about the worst kind of development model, yet one so dominant in the U.S.: Sprawl. He said, “Most of sprawl is unfixable. Almost any city built before World War II, if it has any economic growth whatsoever, has a downtown that is ready to come back to life if it hasn't already. If we're interested in growing into the 21st century in a sustainable way, our governments at every scale need to create programs that make it easier for people to move to those places to live and work instead of into sprawl.”
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (yup, another New Urbanist) taught me about sprawl, too. She literally wrote the book on it, (Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream). She told me, “The U.S. really is the exemplar of sprawl. The idea of everyone having a lot of space of everyone getting an automobile and having a certain amount of financial leverage, which didn't exist in other parts of the world and still does not by the way, really supported that type of growth.”
She, too, talked about policy. “It’s government’s role to help coordinate the individual efforts. You get out of the way of some things and then you try to make some things happen. In a sense, when it comes to cities, government is a developer.“
Many of the people I talked to weren’t just idealists. They were pragmatic. They realized we live in a capitalist country. Policy is important, but one way to effectively convince policy leaders is through economic arguments. As Richards told me, “The issue isn’t to demonize the people who still want your single-family detached home out in the middle of nowhere but rather to say, ‘If 50% of the population want a walkable, livable space and the market is only responding with 5% or 6% there’s still a significant gap and that’s the gap we’re addressing.”
I learned a lot quickly, and would and still do read and think a lot about what makes a great place. The list I built, with help Richard Florida’s team, and Ipsos and so many other partners, was in my not-so-humble-opinion the most rigorous and defensible list of Best Places. There’s some discussion of that here, although most of my work there has been retired from the Livability.com site, for reasons that are beyond me. Ironically, the piece that’s left is republished from the site I ran at Ipsos after I left Livability.com. That site also got retired. [Side lesson: always save your own work, don’t trust the Internet to archive it].
Yet after all of my research, all of the surveys, all of the interviews, all of the spreadsheets. I boiled it all down to one slide:
Great cities should be places where you can LIVE.
L stood for Level: Cities create an even playing field so all residents can afford to take part in the city’s offerings.
I stood for Inclusive: Cities exemplify diversity not just by race and ethnicity, but age, income and experience.
V stood for Variety: Cities should offer options for all facets of life, from housing to healthcare, to amenities.
E stood for Engaged: Residents are out and about helping create the community, which truly matters in a great place.
When I was traveling around to places like Bend, Oregon and Boise, Idaho giving talks in various communities about how they could become more livable places I would make a joke that I really wanted to use Choice instead of Variety but that LICE wasn’t a very good acronym.
One person I interviewed didn’t think it was all that useful to try to shape policy, at least if you were an individual voter. He was Bill Bishop, author of “The Big Sort” about how America was becoming more geographically polarized. He told me something that’s likely true, but still kind of depressing. ”It’s inefficient to vote to get what you want,” he said. “But as places get more different, it becomes very efficient to move to get what you want.”
After learning the importance of policy, I then turned my attention to the leaders elected to set it for America’s Best Places to Live. Clearly if these cities were successful, they must be doing some things right. It was time to meet the mayors.