roundup

Here are my choices of the best of the best of my perusals last week. I don’t necessarily agree with everything here, but each post or article below did an excellent job of framing questions, brainstorming solutions, or just providing a different take from conventional wisdom.

Let’s kick off with this post by Strong Towns about the real costs of auto-centric planning. Wouldn’t it be great if Northfield adopted this version of a community branding or market positioning pitch?

Anywhere, USA, is yesterday’s town. Move to Someplace, USA, where we have abundant housing that is well priced along with neighborhood schools, parks, churches and shopping all within walking distance. Spend your money on a better way of life. Avoid the costly commute. You can even live with only one car. In Someplace, USA, we cater to the discriminating consumer – the one that understands living better should actually cost less.

Read the whole article for more.

Continuing along transportation lines (yes, pun intended), End of the Road: A Short History of Our Obsession with Freeways focuses on the Pacific Northwest, but much of it is relevant to the rest of the country:

[L]eaders . . . have their work cut out for them. . . Closing the Sustainability Gap is going to require some serious changes in the thinking of a lot of people. . . Politicians and highway advocates need to read the memo—reducing driving means putting fewer cars on the road, which means we shouldn’t be investing scarce resources in more highways.

This article in Atlantic Monthly implies that some of our real estate and economic woes are due in large part to stupid building and land use practices.

“… what we face today is not just a cyclical housing problem, but a structural one as well. Over the past decade, most house building occurred on the suburban fringe, in large part because that’s where houses could be built most easily and quickly. But now that the bubble has popped, we can clearly see that underlying demand in these areas is extremely weak, and oversupply is massive.

Urban-style housing in walkable neighborhoods—including those in the inner suburbs—is what’s in demand today. And for a variety of reasons, that demand will intensify in the coming years. Only by serving it can the country kick-start growth in an enormous and essential part of the economy.

Finally, I’ll conclude with urban analyst Aaron Renn (a/k/a The Urbanophile) and his review of Richard Florida‘s latest book, “The Great Reset”.

Florida’s recipe for cities is to favor grass roots change over big, top down redevelopment initiatives like stadiums, and investing in quality of life and place making. But he, like Glaeser, says that the primary focus of investments ought to be people, not places. This isn’t a matter of writing off cities or not writing off cities, but rather a political or philosophical question about where the focus of our investments ought to be.

It’s a great review of the book, as well as a balanced critique of Florida’s whole Creative Class thing.

Happy reading! And of course I’d welcome your thoughts and comments on any of the above.

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I find most of these articles and sites through RSS feeds I monitor or links sent via Twitter. (By the way, my new account there is @TracyDavis.) I’m sharing them here because, if I don’t, many local readers may not see them, and they’re too good to miss.

From the Associated Press (Madison, WI):

On the 10th anniversary of the state’s Smart Growth law, leaders of the Wisconsin Builders Association and the Wisconsin Realtors Association gave the innovative comprehensive planning initiative a qualified endorsement.

At a conclave sponsored by 1000 Friends of Wisconsin called Smart Growth@10, Jerry Deschane, Builders Association executive vice president, said his organization went into the legislative process “kicking and screaming” a decade ago, but participated in the drafting of the law, which he now regards as “a good planning statute.”

Read more here.

My hero of the week is U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who addressed a Senate subcommittee on the subject of “livability”.

I think by now it’s pretty clear that Americans want the kind of communities that are walkable, that offer a sense of connection to their neighbors. Everywhere I’ve been in the US during the past 16 months–and I’ve been to more than 80 communities in 35 states–people have been telling me they want more public transportation and walkability with less congestion and sprawl.

Read Secretary LaHood’s blog entry, Livability works for rural communities, for more.

And perhaps my favorite this week, from The American Conservative, “Sprawling Misconceptions“:

For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations. . . It’s odd that self-described libertarians such as Stossel are so slow to grasp that government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous. . . First of all, with a depressingly few exceptions, virtually every town in America looks the same. That is, it has the same landscape of arterial roads, strip malls, and residential subdivisions, accessibly only by car.

I got a real kick out of the original post’s hyper-hyperlinks when remarking on the tired accusation that sprawl’s opponents are inflicting their own views and choices on the free market by ‘limiting where they can build’ (author’s quote): “The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times.”

And in the “Could Be Worse” department, Strong Towns’ report on Minnesota’s “most vulnerable cities” puts Northfield at #573 out of 855. (Dundas is #678.)