Are Planners Anti-Capitalists?

There are always theoretical debates on the limits of government on the free market. No profession is affected more by these free market debates than city planning. How far the government can alter the market place of the most expensive commodity, property, is always in the backdrop in planning decisions. In fact, city planning started as a reaction to how the free market plan or didn’t plan property and ever since, planning’s role as a check and balance of sorts to the free market has always been questioned.

The divide of those who question planning’s authority on the free market versus those who are pro-regulation, naturally often falls on political ideologies. Those that are in favor of the free market determining how neighborhoods develop are often conservative. They believe that ultimately, the free market i.e. people’s wallets should determine neighborhood viability and investment. Those that are pro-regulation still very much believe in the free market but they also believe certain places, institutions and cultural characteristics should be protected from the boom and bust cycle of the market. Most planners fall into the latter category.

But the reason that most planners are pro-regulation is not solely based on liberal beliefs but it is also based on the history of capitalist free market planning. While the free market can do things government can not do, like organically gentrify dilapidated neighborhoods, design futuristic developments and create lively urban cores, the free market also has a history of being prejudiced, self-segregating and exclusionary.

From a planning perspective there seems to be two dominant patterns of the free market development in cities. There is the development pattern of building what is only absolutely necessary for the function of the marketplace. Examples of this would be early tenement housing, workforce housing located next to factories and waterways dominated by industry, railways and ports. The other development pattern of the free market is based upon on much people are willing to spend to live in neighborhoods to their likes and preferences. Examples of this would be bedroom communities, neighborhoods with covenants and of course redlining.

The latter development pattern has been much more common in American metropolises since the Urban renewal era and even much more troubling. While today, we do not see the illegal practices of redlining and blockbusting from the 1960s, we still see the free market playing into class separation. The free market has always marketed to home buyers that they should live with people who are just like them. And depending on how willing people to spend the market will fiercely defend your right to live only by others who are just like you and will price out or physically divide out all others that are different from you.

Now, many believe that if a person wants to spend their money to separate themselves from others that is their right. And it is their right even if it is the antithesis of city development, which is based upon the sharing of ideals and customs. The free market will always market exclusivity over cohesion and will use the fear of having someone living next to the unknown to play up the exclusivity of a development. And the idea of living next to others like you can make someone almost unknowingly participate in further class separation. If you asked folks, would you rather live in a diverse, cohesive city or would you rather live in a city that is divided by class struggle, most people would choose the former. But if you asked people which would they rather live, a mixed income neighborhood with people from various different backgrounds or in a neighborhood where all the houses are worth over 250K? Which neighborhood would people choose?

These distortions in the market place affect the cohesiveness and equity of city neighborhoods and therefore affect city planning decisions. If the goal is to maintain a well balanced functional city for all (Note: you do not have to sacrifice a neighborhood or a city’s well being for the sake of diversity. You can have both) is it really that unfair if planners ask for a certain percentage of below-market housing units for working families for new developments? Is it unfair for planners to ask for rent control for a city’s last remaining working class neighborhoods? Are planners anti-capitalists if we steer high-impact developments away from low-density neighborhoods?

From the "this isn't good" news department: San Diego scraps its City Planning Department

From the Voice of San Diego:

To save $1 million a year, the mayor will fold the Planning Department into the Development Services Department, which, as its name suggests, helps developers get approvals for building permits. The new group will still be called the Development Services Department. Kelly Broughton, the department's director, will remain its leader and assume the effective role of planning director...


...The Planning Department goes to neighborhoods, meets with local groups and relies on residents to articulate a vision and draft rules for the community's growth. Development Services ensures developers follow those rules, but rarely interacts with community groups...


...The departments have often acted as checks on each other. Long-term planners caution against approving developments that don't conform to a community's vision, while development services planners "are about implementation," Anderson said. "They're sometimes skeptical of long-range planning because it can be a little lofty. But it's healthy to have a little of that tension."

Longtime planning advocates say they're concerned that merging the departments may remove those checks and balances.

As soon as I get on the mic its like the night gets silent © Eminem

Tales of a City Planner – The mid level employee

We have probably all heard the politically incorrect idiom of “too many chiefs and not enough Indians.” Well in government bureaucracies there are a ton of Indians and very few chiefs. Government agencies usually have a glut of mid-level employees. Some of these mid-levelers are very talented, some just happen to be lucky, others have decades of experience and others are still fairly young. But what they all have in common is that they will not chiefs anytime soon. If you are ambitious, it’s like mid-level purgatory.

After being the “new guy” for years, I am now a proud mid-leveler but there are some drawbacks. While I get respect for running and organizing meetings and major planning efforts, I don’t have the power or the bully pulpit to make people make a decision on something. I have to consensus like a mutha’. If I want to get a major planning decision done, I have to get every one to agree on that decision, not half, not the majority but every one. I just can’t totally ignore someone because I think they have a stupid idea. I still have to listen to them and somewhat appease them.

They just have enough power to run their corner but not enough power where they cant listen you and tell you to f*ck off © Lester Freemon from The Wire describing how to talk to mid-level drug dealers.

Case in point, there was a major planning initiative that was being pushed through by several chiefs from my agencies that involved several conflicting parties. Since they were the chiefs they had the bully pulpit to make people listen to them and to steer the ship away from non-productive arguments. Someone makes a stupid comment, chief says we’ll address that later. Someone has a biased viewpoint, chief says lets focus on the mission. Someone disagrees with the overall purpose, chief tells them were moving forward with or without them. The chief gets to make movement and stand against inaction. If the chief makes a comment and is met with silence, that means that you quietly agree and the chief moves forward with that plan.

So what happens when the chief can not make this important planning initiative and sends in a mid-level employee to lead the discussion and move the meeting forward? I’ll tell you what happens, it’s like “I get on the mic its like the night gets silent” © Slim Shady. I got met with the most awkward silence you can have in a crowded room of people. It’s as if they did not appreciate being bullied by the chief and not that the chief’s minion is trying to pull rank, they collectively decided to quietly stare at me while saying nothing. It felt like shouting in a cave because my echo was the only thing that was responding to me. Real quick, if a mid-level planner shouts in a crowded room and no one wants to make a decision, does anyone hear that planner? Fortunately my fellow mid-level planner in the meeting heard the tree fall into the woods but none of the stakeholders heard her either so that was pretty much the end of the meeting.

At the very next meeting, the chief came back and moved the agenda forward with a majority consensus by making the same arguments that my fellow mid-level employee and me had made a week prior.

Eminem - If I get locked up tonight
http://splicd.com/dmb4d4TasXM/192/194

The Baltimore Plan

From the Baltimore City Paper:

Called “The Baltimore Plan,” this 20-minute Encyclopaedia Britannica film from 1953 describes an urban renewal plan of the same name, initiated in 1945. Once a blighted area was identified, a cadre of city agencies (housing, sanitation, police, etc.) would conduct inspections and rigorously enforce code violations, forcing the owners to either vacate or fix up their properties. A housing court, the first in the country, was set up as the final arbiter for stubborn cases. Another outcome of the plan was the Fight Blight fund, which issued long-term, low-interest loans to homeowners wishing to make repairs on their houses.

In the film’s stagy retelling, an intrepid young social worker braves the “urban jungle” of Baltimore in order to alert citizens and public officials to the city’s poor housing conditions. She comes across horrors such as flat rats and vacant houses but forges on. Her report caught the attention of The Baltimore Sun, which published stories in her wake. City agencies and private citizens eventually pull together—hammering, laying concrete, and building walls to jaunty Leave It to Beaver-esque music—to rebuild and renew 27 blocks in East Baltimore that served as a pilot project. At the end of the film, children frolic in clean, rat-free playgrounds, and women water verdant gardens.

The Housing Court is one enduring legacy of the plan, but the city’s crumbling housing stock—and the flat rats—are obviously still with us. Some now take a cynical view of the Baltimore Plan, or at least of some of its proponents: “[S]lum dwellers saw only minor improvements,” historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom writes, “[but] those involved with the plan caught professional fire and gained national prominence.” The plan promoted the idea of improving neighborhoods without expanding the social welfare system, he says, and thus appealed to certain interested parties. The National Association of Real Estate Boards, the National Association of Home Builders, and the Mortgage Bankers’ Association all latched onto it in an attempt to reduce efforts to build more public housing.

Despite its Pollyanna, paternalistic tone—or, perhaps, because of it—the film is a fascinating cultural artifact. The scenes, while clearly staged, provide glimpses of a bygone Baltimore. (Note the gas lamps and the arabber at the beginning.) But some footage—like an alley strewn with debris that serves as a neighborhood playground—is not as unfamiliar as it should be. “Plans have only a pencil and paper reality,” the social worker says at one point. Sadly, that much and more remains true.

Turning Vitamins into Aspirin

Dan Heath and Chip Heath from Fast Company Magazine explain why it's not enough to give people something they need.

"Ray Bard, founder of Bard Press, learned a lot about book publishing from a mistake he made early in his career. He was the agent for an author who'd written a book describing the cycle of pregnancy from a husband's perspective. It was a thoughtful book, certain to help men understand the physical and emotional changes that their wives were experiencing. Bard and the author both knew they had a hit: The book's audience included millions of men.

But when they sent the book proposal around, not a single publisher made an offer. The publishers reasoned that, while men would undoubtedly benefit from the book, they didn't know they needed it. Broadly speaking, men do not crave greater empathy with their wives' bodily changes. To Bard's dismay, the book was never published.
If entrepreneurs want to succeed, as venture capitalists like to say, they'd better be selling aspirin rather than vitamins. Vitamins are nice; they're healthy. But aspirin cures your pain; it's not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have."


Planners are often caught in the same dilemma of how to sell the public something we think they need. Often times in Planning, the public at large does not respond to a community issue unless there is a fire to put out. The public can quickly organize when they feel an eminent threat to their community coming. But how do you sell a community on other imposing threats that they do not see coming without screaming Fire! (as East Coast Planners we scream Walmart's coming and communities come out running).

Often times, good planning principles are viewed as vitamins when they are really aspirins. Good planning principles can reduce a community's transportation costs, help reduce inflated housing prices and develop stronger community connections which improves social services and provides a wider community safety net that reduces the need for government aid. But often times the sellers of this message are not seen as a respected doctor prescribing aspirin but instead were viewed as hippy clerk working at a health food store telling you that these box of magic beans will give you more energy. Blame it on the seller I guess...or blame it on us planners, for not fighting back from that perception. Either way, what's clear is that while planners have a great message, we have a poor marketing campaign for our ideas.

The Meeting about the Meeting

I'm sure all my planners and bureaucrats can relate.

Tales of a City Planner - Sitting in parking lots in the Dark

aka the meetings no one wants to go

Meetings. We all have them. Most of the time, people are really not enthused to go to them. It could be a nice day outside and you don’t want to go. It can be a rainy day outside and you don’t want to go. It could be a cold or hot day outside and you don’t want to go. But whatever the reasons that you don’t want to go to a meeting are pretty much felt by everyone else involved in that same meeting. A collective cloud of “screw it, I’m not going” starts to form over the meeting place alerting others nearby to drive far, far away from this meeting place.

See as your local community planner, I notice these things when I pull up to an empty deserted meeting place and I see no cars in the parking lot. For I sit there in my car in the parking lot in the dark staring at this growing cloud of dissent and wonder if I should drive fast away like all the others. So I sit there.

And I wait.

And hope that no other cars pull up to justify my not coming in and pulling away. See the polite thing to do would be to go inside and wait to see if others slowly trickle in. But I’ve learned from experience not to do that because there is always some lonely bastard sitting in a room by themselves waiting for anyone to come in. Now future planners, you want to avoid this situation. Nothing is more awkward than two people who really don’t to be there sitting in a big, bright room.

So I continue to wait. In a parking lot. In the dark.

But atlas my wait comes to an end when three or four cars pull up at the last minute (always happens). So I begrudgingly go inside for the start of the meeting. Now as I have stated there were only three of four cars that pulled up. So that means there can only be 4-6 other people at the meeting plus the already waiting lonely bastard inside which means I’ve done drove and went out my way for a five person meeting. Could have really knocked this out by e-mail. Whatever. Let’s knock this meeting out and go on home, right? WRONG.

If you invited ten people to a meeting and only five showed up – you kind of have a halfway determined group. If you invited twenty people to a meeting and only five showed up – you have a small core of dedicated people. But if invited over one hundred people to a meeting and only five showed up, those five people didn’t have anything else to do and they are looking forward to talk all night. Always happens. You bring one hundred people to a meeting, that’s potentially fifty people in the room that have something to do and are snapping their fingers to move this meeting along. But five people? Be prepared to slowly hear about all of the community’s problems.

The perfect length of meeting for me is thirty to forty-five minutes with fifteen minutes of question time. If there are no questions the meeting ends early. Meetings should be just that, all meat. All the other fatty questions can be addressed personally after the meeting or by e-mail. The perfect meeting size is twenty to thirty people. And I have come up with an equation that for every ten people over thirty people there will be five minutes added onto the meeting. You have one hundred people at meeting, you are going to be there for an hour and half.


Here is an image of Philadelphia rap artist Gillie Da Kid who perfectly expresses a planner’s face at a long pointless meeting

Unfortunately there is an inverse of this equation that leads planners to sit in their cars in a parking lot, in the dark. For every five people that don’t show up for a meeting under twenty people, add 10 minutes to the meeting. Sick, right? So that means if you have a five person meeting you will be there for an hour. Yes a whole hour. Talking about what you may ask? I don’t know. I zone out. Most of the time, they are complaining about neighbors and government. I always get a kick out of when they complain about government in front of me since their tax dollars are being wasted by me having to attend this five person meeting of chit chat. And they say government doesn’t care.

Now during the day, I have had some great productive five person meetings. In fact I prefer them during the day. You get all the principles involved and you knock out your agenda and get things done. But on a Wednesday night. At 7 pm. A five person meeting sucks. And everyone knows this. In fact everyone is trying so hard not to be the sixth person that no one comes. Except that one lonely bastard. And four other people. And me.

Waiting. In a parking lot. In the dark. Hoping no one else shows up.

Community vs the Individual

As a planner, I always focus on making plans that will impact the greatest amount of people possible. The wants, wishes and maybe even the rights of an individual or a single property owner maybe purposefully overlooked for providing for the needs of a whole community. In community planning, our decisions for a neighborhood or a community affect everyone and almost make it impossible for someone who disagrees to opt out and choose not to be apart of our plans. What maybe difficult for the single goose maybe great for the collective gander. And this philosophy holds true for many forms of local government, ranging from police service, environmental protection, traffic engineering to public works.

Even if you live in a community where you think the collective services are poor, you can opt out that public service. You can’t police your own neighborhood or provide your own water service if you do not like your public services. Even if you and a few of your select neighbors pulled together and provided a better more efficient service for your properties, it would just further destabilize the public service and create a highly inequitable system for those who depend on public services the most. Local governments would never be in favor of explicitly providing superior services to a few and low standard services to the many within the same community. Except when it comes to public schools.

In many major cities, public schools are the greatest barrier to full-scale revival of neighborhoods. While young professionals can revitalize a core or a downtown most cities seek young families to help revitalize struggling neighborhoods. What prevents young families from living in cities is the state of education. For decades families living in cities had to face the state of a struggling city public school system or pay exorbitant amounts for private schools. Families who already had children in the city public school system were dissatisfied and were also seeking an educational alternative.

Charter schools and the revamping of magnet schools became the alternative to many young families. Charter schools started to become popular in a few major cities in the 1990s and today they have become a national phenomenon in major cities. In Washington D.C. more than one-third of non-private school students goes to a public charter school. The performance of charter schools overall had produced mixed results. Some charter schools are clearly better than others. Most reports state that students in charter schools do slightly to moderately better than their peers in public schools.

But this post is not about whether public or charter schools are better its about the individual choice of a parent of a student to pull themselves out of a collective community service. While every student should have access to the best public educational services available, what are the consequences for allowing individual choice? The biggest consequence is that the best students, the students with the most talent, the A & B students are often pulled of public schools and offered or placed into a better performing public charter school or magnet school. Students of dedicated parents who are seeking the education for their children are also more likely to place their kids into charter schools or push their kids academically into magnet schools.

When you have the brightest and best students pulled out of a community school, at beast you are left with the B to C students as the highest level or role models for achievement. When you remove the A and B students out of a community school, you also remove a model in which students can strive to be and compete with. If the best a class has to offer is a C student who maybe just as bright as an A student but doesn’t do all their work on time, then that model student could negatively influence other students who may believe that student is reaching the highest level of achievement.

The same pattern of students emulating each other holds true for parents as well. When the most dedicated parents, the ones who are most likely to be apart of the PTA, are not apart of their community school then the school loses vital leadership and organization. Parental involvement has become a problem in city schools and community schools need not only help but just need for parents to just show up. When you have parental leaders in your community but they are not involved in the community school then the schools ad most importantly the students suffer.

Unfortunately there has been more and more talk politically of providing more and more charter schools and almost outright abandoning city public schools for those who could not afford to go anywhere else. In cities, we treat public education almost like we treat the city bus. Only those who could not afford anything else use public services. And just like transportation, we are no better off collectively shunning public service. But also just like public transportation, our solution to improve service has to benefit everyone and not just for those who have the choice to use it for convenience but also for those who depend on it. If we do not work collectively to make public community schools better holistically then they will continue to be dropout factories.

Fixing public schools will take an immeasurable amount of hard work and time. But just like all other community services, the community has to share with the successes and failures of those services together and not individually. Communities rise and fall together but if we change the outcomes for some people in a community and not for others is that really a community? If two neighbors live in a community and have similar amenities but one has running water and the other does not, do they share the same living conditions? Is that community equitable? If another two neighbors live in that community but one neighbor gets mugged frequently while the other lives at peace, is that equitable? And if one neighbor’s kid is a straight A student at a charter school with all the educational resources available as their disposal while the neighbor’s kid goes to a school without textbooks, is that equitable? These neighbors would live in a community that would produce two totally different outcomes under the same living conditions. And the fear is that these differences would create invisible divisions within communities that would no longer have the previous separations of race, class or culture.

Is Government about fixing problems?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is a great video comparing governments efforts to pass Civil Rights and Medicare and the current passing of the Healthcare bill. While this video is not about city planning it does affect everyone and brings up the question that we as planners face everyday, are we in charge of fixing problems? Obviously I believe that we are but there is a large segment of people who feel that any government planners are obtrusive. That's why I feel the question of whether government is about fixing problems is a great question to ask.

March 22: Rachel Re: Rachel Maddow points out the way that the health reform debate clarifies the difference between conservatives and liberals and asks, "Do you want a government that does something or don't you?" Hell no you can't, or Yes we can?

Disaster Planning

As many of you know, the nation of Haiti is facing a horrendous natural disaster of historic proportions. The current crisis of finding survivors, creating infirmaries, finding food, water and housing the displaced will be ongoing crisis for the next couple of weeks.

While I most certainly send my sincerest hopes and prayers that Haiti can overcome their most immediate crisis as quickly as possible, I wonder about what will be the fate of Port Au Prince, one year from now, five years from now and ten years from now. There are a lot places around the globe that have been impacted by natural disasters and have chosen not to rebuild because of the staggering costs of repairs. More recently, the location of development that are prone for natural disasters has come into question, leaving many government officials and the public wondering if the development should be rebuilt at all.

Haiti does not have that option. Even though the infrastructure to their capital has been destroyed they do not have the option of abandonment. Port Au Prince was not only the capital but also the hub of government services for the entire nation. Port Au Prince was also Haiti’s largest city that made it the commercial, industrial and social hub of the nation as well. The city has to be rebuilt…but how?

The city will need planners to come up with an immediate disaster plan along with a new Master Plan for rebuilding and growth for the future. Part of the reason why this disaster is so catastrophic is that there was no Master Plan in the city to begin with and growth occurred anywhere and everywhere haphazardly. Now whether a city with a weak central government can enforce that Master Plan is another story. However there are more than a few cities in developing plan that have been able to control growth and development through a Master Plan. And right now, Port Au Prince does not have a choice, in order to save the future of the city and perhaps the nation, a Master Plan is needed to sort out the chaos and shock of a complete government breakdown and destruction.

The immediate concerns are that the city needs everything right now. But when the immediate crisis is over, be it months or years from now there will have to be a plan on what, when and how the city will be rebuilt. There is no functional starting point to build off of right now in Port Au Prince. Do you rebuild housing first to shelter a city where all the residents have been displaced. Or do you focus on rebuilding stores since there is nowhere for people to buy food, clothing or cleaning supplies. Or do you rebuild the hospitals first? And in what order do you rebuild government buildings, schools and job sectors? All of these questions must be in accordance of a disaster plan and a future Master Plan.

The city cannot be rebuilt all at once. There are certain segments of the city that planners and residents are going to have to choose to rebuild first. The city will have to be rebuilt at a segment at a time, block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood at a time in accordance to a plan. If the city rebuilds in a piecemeal fashion then there will be properties in the city that will be left as unstable rubble for years and decades by property owners who cannot afford to rebuild or have gone missing.

There will also be some hard questions that planners and residents of the city will have to face in rebuilding the city. There is going to be questions of whether a city on a major fault line should be rebuilt. Because of that question, the city cannot rebuild in the same pattern and function as it did before the earthquake. While many who rebuild may not be able to have expensive earthquake retrofitted buildings like in Los Angeles and Tokyo, new building standards can be set in place to reinforce concrete construction with steel. If this cannot be done for all construction it should at least occur in major government institutions, hospitals and schools.

Other questions the city will have to face is whether construction should be allowed on the hill tops closest to the fault line. Housing construction on the hill and mountaintops would not only be a potential hazard it has also contributed to deforestation, which has also contributed to massive flooding. The placement of the city’s transportation infrastructure may have to relocate. While the airport only received moderate damage, the blockages to this vital transportation hub has made it almost impossible to deliver resources to the rest of the city. These ports in the future will need to be isolated and not located in the heart of the city. Lastly, what will the city do with the tons of crushed concrete slabs? What took generations to build by piecemeal will not have to be cleared in a massive fashion.

All of these questions are all apart of major disaster planning and city master planning that has to be addressed soon. Without a plan on how to redevelop the city’s current plight and its future reconstruction, the city will not be able to recover by piecemeal construction.

Recession = No Holiday Cookies

Before the recession wiped out many local developers by practically halting almost all new construction, developers, law firms, engineering & landscaping firms, etc…used to send local government offices all types of snacks and treats during the holidays. Nothing major, all the catered snacks and such were very nominal and were meant for everyone in the office to enjoy. We used to receive almost a dozen different trays of cookies, brownies, candy and other holiday snacks. This one law firm in particular used to send us this huge tray of these small gourmet cookies. The incredibly soft cookies came in three different flavors, chocolate, snicker-doodle and my personal favorite chocolate fudge. There had to been at least 150-200 cookies on this tray and within two hours the whole tray of cookies would be devoured.

I write this because normally on a long Friday workday during the holidays, I would snack on all the different type of goodies to get me through the day. This year, there have been no cookies delivered to the office, much to my chagrin. Along with no cookies there have also been almost no new development…well at least in any consistent development. Fortunately I have been involved in several community plans that have provided more then enough work to keep me busy. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for my sometime oppositional counterparts, developers and attorneys. I feel for those guys and gals. Though sometimes was have to work in opposition of each other, after several years of working with them, you really get to know them. Hell, they give me cookies every year.

So this post is dedicated to all the people in the planning and engineering related fields. It’s been a tough year for all planners, architects and engineers alike on both the public and private side. Although significantly more tougher on the private side. I know more then a few planners, architects and engineers that have lost their jobs this year. While I know that development and the way we developed projects before the recession will probably never be the same again, I do hope for a rebound in more sustainable, transit influenced, walkable development and not the return of more strip shopping centers and residential sprawl.

So for all of the struggling planners, architects, landscape engineers, construction managers, engineers, permit runners and local planners, I hope there will be more development for 2010. And I hope that next year the holiday cookies will return.

Tales of a City Planner

Presentation

As a community planner I have to go to a wide variety of community meetings in various different communities within my district. I have to go to big communities, small communities, rich communities, not so rich communities, old communities and new communities. All of these different communities all have different perceptions and expectations on what government can do for them. Which means sometimes you have to play the part they want you to play in order for them to listen to you. And sometimes you have to play the character in which you think they will listen to the most.

Now I don’t mean that you are selling people lies and you are being someone that you are not but the community you go to will most likely dictate how you dress. For men this means, suit or no suit, tie or no tie or dress shirt and jeans. How you present yourself can be a critical factor in whether or community is going to take you seriously and work alongside you. It’s all about identifying with the needs of that particular community. You know sometimes you can never identify with the needs of that community but you have to present yourself to look like at least your competent enough to handle that community’s needs which might range from looking like an executive to looking like the common man.

A common assumption is to dress in office attire to every meeting you go to regardless of that community’s demographics. Wrong. If you come off as if you are above the people, they will not only cooperate with you but they will become hostile with you. I was at a meeting with a planning consultant in a working class waterfront community where he tried to identify himself with the residents by complaining about his sailboat located in a wealthy town down river while he wore a tweed jacket and a bowtie. Great way to identify with the constituents, pal. I was at another meeting in a historical African-American community that had faced previous decades of discrimination, where my local government was going to tear down a decrepit older school for a brand new school. Sounds good, right? The only problem was all of the local government speakers where an array of older White men in dark suits. *Slaps Face* D’oh! Needless to say it was a long night.

Unless you are about to sell them a Monorail, do not walk into a working class community meeting like this.

In situations like I described above it is best to come to these meetings in something business casual…unless it’s a final meeting or the media is going to be there. But when I have to go to my economically less advantaged and socially rich communities, I try to come in looking like the common man. Which means, no suit, no tie, top button unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, you know the look. I try to look humble. Not because it is an act but I don’t want to appear to be above them (because I’m not) and I don’t want to intimidate those who have never worked with government. When you are a big man in a suit like I am, people either think you are really serious or you are about to break someone’s thumbs.

The tireless Champion of the people. The Humbled Clay Davis

While the common man look works for residential community meetings it does not translate well with the business communities and institutional community meetings that I have to attend. When businesses are looking toward government to provide them information or work alongside government to upgrade commercial corridors, they frown upon people with unbuttoned shirts, no ties & jackets…and facial hair. There’s nothing worse when a room full of business men and women stare at you without responding to your inquiries because they do not trust what you are saying. Have you ever had to have a serious conversation with a room full of suits while you are in jeans? You feel kind of out of place. You could be in your office and you could be leading a serious discussion but you still feel that someone is going to tap you on your shoulder and ask, “Sir, where’s your jacket?” There is also nothing funnier when someone under dresses for a serious meeting and they walk in with the “Oh Sh*t!” face. You just stare at them and think to yourself, I don’t know who that guy is but he messed up.

So for all my future planners out there, I hoped were able to gain something from the fine art of meeting attire presentation. I hope you have come to learn that a suit is not always appropriate for a community meeting. For all my other fellow planners and anyone else who has to work with the public, I hope enjoyed this post. I would also like to hear some of your attire horror stories, so please leave a comment. And as always,

Thanks for reading!

10 Tips on How to become a Planning Board Commissioner

a.k.a how to work for the dark side. I kid, I kid. Their graphics are great.

The statue was really built by a thankful developer

Tip #1
Controversial Issues: A Natural Part of Planning


Stereotypes anyone? That's racist! j/k

Tip #2
Show Respect to All


The planner is really thinking that these people are batsh*t crazy

Tip #3
Be Open to Verbal as Well as Written Information

*Uses Jazz Hands* Say it with me people, Monorail!

.

Tip #4
Ask Questions Until You Get Answers

All my constituents tweet and friend me on Facebook now. Newspapers. Pff...Loser

Tip #5
Different Ways to Gauge Public Opinion

Yeah, try to hand out an info flyer at a mall. People will treat you like you have the swine flu. Even I will think your a loser for taking the flyer.

.

Tip #6
Go Where the People Are

Unfortunately the crowd went all "Town Hall" on him and demanded their community back. 'twas sad.

Tip #7

Speak Out

Uh-huh, Uh-Huh...I didn't understand a word you said sir, I'm just nodding and scribbling, nodding and scribbling.

.

Tip #8
The Importance of Reaching Out

Creepy

Tip #9
Older Citizens Have Much to Offer

Why Timmy, this makes no sense at all...there's a factory right next to a house. You know factories aren't allowed in this zone. What were you thinking Timmy?

Tip #10
Planning Is Not Just for Adults

Another Speech?

Last week a 5 part documentary series on Newark, New Jersey called “Brick City” aired on the Sundance Channel. The series was an excellent look at a tough nosed city fighting to rehabilitate itself from decades of violence, blight, poverty, back-handed politics and everything else that troubles inner-city communities. The show is centered on Newark’s highly motivated, energetic and young Mayor, Corey Booker. The Mayor, along with his staff and countless number of residents struggle to find ways to empower residents, steer youth away from gangs and reduce violent crime.

In this never ending struggle of poverty and violent crime another life is lost on a Newark street and the Mayor has to be available for comment to assure residents of their day to day safety and to demand that justice will be sought against the perpetrators. Throughout the series, this scenarios is played out multiple times leaving residents feeling any more safe or confident that justice will be sought (despite a significant reduction in murders from the year before).

Today I read about an honor roll student in Chicago who was beaten to death while walking to school. Just haven seen “Brick City,” I couldn’t help but wonder what would Mayor Booker do if he were in the Chicago’s mayor’s position…make another speech? I’m sure in Mayor Booker’s speech he would talk about how communities need to come together to overcome their ills, that we all must work harder together to protect our future, the youth and that law enforcement will work harder and smarter to try to prevent crime. But I just don’t believe these speeches anymore. This is not meant to mock or chide Corey Booker or the position that he is in as Mayor but I do not believe that if we work harder, smarter or more united that we will bring forth change. There is nothing the Mayor can do without systematic change to how cities and its suburbs are taxed and governed as well as taking a regional outlook on how to concentrate resources and improve access to employment centers, education and health institutions for everyone within a metropolitan area. Without systematic change, another speech…is just bullshit.

One of my favorite shows is “The Wire,” a fictional but very real portrayal of the inner city life and politics of Baltimore, Maryland. Fictional scenes from “The Wire” could have been easily interchanged for the non-fictional documentary of “Brick City.” During one of the final scenes of the third season of “The Wire,” an aspiring councilman who has hopes of becoming mayor makes a very ambitious speech that if the city does not come together united that the city’s neighborhoods will be permanently succumbed to violence. And if the police could just work a little bit harder and smarter, they can win the war on drugs. The dramatic scene and the very ambitious and captivating speech ends with a loud roar and applause from the council chambers to which the creators of the show say in their commentary of the scene…bullshit.

Just as in fiction as in real life, the problems of the inner-city are not just behavioral but structural. It does not matter how well someone’s good intentions are or how well a structure is dressed up, if the structure is built on a loose foundation such as a hyper-concentration of poverty, poor education, poor access to jobs and healthcare…the structure will collapse almost every time.

BRICK CITY

BRICK CITY, is a five-part documentary series that captures the daily drama of a community striving to become a better, safer, stronger place to live. Against great odds, Newarks citizens and its Mayor, Cory A. Booker, fight to raise the city out of nearly a half century of violence, poverty and corruption.

The Heart & Soul of Cities

Yesterday I watched a documentary called “The Nine Lives of Marion Barry” and it was a pretty fair portrayal of one of the most controversial political figures within the last fifty years. Marion Barry (who had a Master’s in chemistry…who knew?!?) was a civil rights leader who came to Washington D.C. in the 1960’s were he came a political activist who later became a city council member and ultimately the mayor. In his third term as the mayor of the Capital, Barry (as I’m sure many of you are aware) had one of the most epic political downfalls ever in this country as he was caught using crack cocaine on videotape in a joint police & F.B.I. sting operation.

A man who had worked so hard for the real citizens of D.C. had disgraced himself and his city became a national laughing stock as he had to serve six months in a Federal prison for drug possession. In 1994, the city had seemed to become the national laughing stock as they re-elected Barry for a fourth term. Marion Barry and his re-election triggered national debates about black political leadership, the crack epidemic, the polarization of black and white communities and the effectiveness of past civil rights leaders. One man, born in abject poverty who picked in cotton in Tennessee as a child, who worked his way through college and stopped short in getting his PhD in chemistry to join the civil rights movement, managed to stir up a whole heap of controversy as he became the political face of our nation’s capital.

But this post isn’t just about Marion Barry. This post is about the people who make up the heart and soul of cities. Those folks that would elect and re-elect people like Marion Barry who had listened and fought for them. These folks represent the guts of cities. They range from the menial job workers, to teachers and professors, to the hustlers and the unemployed, to proud families who had lived in the city for decades. These folks represented the everyday life of Washington D.C. that had little to do national politics, congress or the White House. Without a doubt, Washington D.C. is a one industry town. The Federal government as well as the massive amount private contracting jobs that it produces, makes up the lion’s share of jobs in the city and metropolitan area. There is a perception sometimes that D.C. is a hollow city that is just made up of Federal workers and contractors. However as someone who grew up an hour north of the city in Baltimore, I knew there were two different D.C.’s. There was the Capital and then there was Black D.C.

This dichotomy is prevalent in many cities where the public face is within stark contrast to the everyday lives of the citizens who make the city run. There are the skyscrapers of Manhattan and there are the flats, rowhouses and project high rises of Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. There are the beautiful beaches and art deco line streets of South Beach in Miami and there are the barrios of Little Haiti and Overtown. In my fair city of Baltimore, there is the world-renowned Inner Harbor and there is East and West Baltimore as depicted on the HBO television series, “The Wire.” In fact one of my favorite scenes from The Wire was the series ending final montage were one of the main characters stares at the skyscrapers surrounding the harbor while the show runs through images of the everyday life of normal city residents. It was as if someone was admiring the beauty of a castle and its walls from afar while those in its kingdom toiled in a meaningless servitude from within the walls. If Baltimore was a castle then Washington D.C. was an Emerald City both literally and figuratively.

In one of the later renditions of the Wizard of OZ, Emerald City is described as a city with splendid palaces and gardens but beset with crime and poverty. In these renditions the city wasn’t green but the citizens wore green glasses as a way to stop seeing what was going on around them. If this isn’t apropos to how the Federal government treated the residents of the city then I don’t what is. This is what makes Marion Barry’s rise to power so fascinating. In a city full of allusion, grandeur and power, the man chosen to lead the city came from those who were thought of as powerless. For as powerful as the Federal Government is in a global context, it still does not represent the city, the people do. And the needs of the everyday people of the city had been ignored. For every powerful lobbyist that lived in the city there was a bus driver and a hairdresser. For every congressman there was a teacher and a sanitation worker. For every staff aid, there was a high school drop out and some one underemployed. While cities fight to attain the former examples previously mentioned, Barry fought for the needs of the latter who were the heart and soul of Washington D.C.

The Nine Lives of Marion Barry Documentary

A trailer to a documentary about the former mayor of Washington D.C.

President Obama on Urban Policy

The White House Office of Urban Affairs and the Domestic Policy Council host a roundtable about the future of America's urban and metropolitan areas. In his remarks, the President addresses some of the challenges facing these communities, and highlights innovative solutions.

Tales of a City Planner

Cooperation

City Planners tend to be the Jack or Jill of all trades and masters of none them. I know a lot of professions say this but I think this holds especially true for city planners. We have to know a little about architecture, landscape architecture, civil engineering, historical preservation, sociology and cultural history. Knowing all these different fields of study often puts us in contact with a wide range of professionals, community groups, liaison groups, activists and semi-government institutions. Now getting all these different entities that sometimes have conflicting interests to cooperate for a common purpose can be difficult. But do you know who often presents the most difficulties in cooperation…your own government.

That’s right, this tale of a city planner will deal with the cooperation (or lack thereof) of the local government. One of the most challenging issues to deal with is when we have complete unison from the community and all it’s stakeholders to move forward on a particular project and one of your local government agencies refuses to budge or even listen to your concerns. Why would one government agency just totally ignore another government agency from the same government, you ask? Let me back up here a second.

There is a popular belief out there that government agencies group together to conspire grand plans of its own desires. Nooo. Local government agencies are run like autonomous agencies that fight each other for funding from the golden faucet like newborn pups fighting to get milk. In fact you may be saddened to know that a lot of times government agencies have no idea what the other agency is doing or if they are replicating the same work. Agencies work a lot like families. There are some family members that you are really cool with. Then there are family members you avoid and when they ask you to do something, “you’ll get back to them.”

But you really can’t explain to the public that the reason their request got denied is because another agency doesn’t agree with your position or just flat out ignored you without making government look incompetent. Because if you do, they will look at you like you are an idiot….”what do you mean this government agency wouldn’t allow you to do it…you are government!” *Sighs* If only it were that simple.

In defense of other agencies, Planners are usually the only agency who consistently coming up with new ways on how to do other people’s jobs. For example, to employ New Urbanist principles, a public works agency would to have make changes ranging from minor to radical on how they regulate their traffic policies and safety. This could possibly require increased planning for individual projects and the elimination of boilerplate comments for that agency. If you work for public works you most likely feel that your current process for regulating traffic is fine and why change your process for the wacky whims of a planner to make communities walk better.

And you know, we get it. We wouldn’t want some other agency telling us how we should do our jobs. All we ask is for a little cooperation. The job of planner is not typical, it is wide ranging. We can not only just focus on traffic or just open space or just land use. We have to focus on the whole picture…which means we may aggravate more then a few agencies. Although some of them are cool, you know who you are, “you’re cool.”

So how can we make other agencies cooperate more to ultimately achieve our wishes or the community’s wishes? Well there is no silver bullet but I believe that as planners we probably have to take the step of being more accessible and transparent to…our own government. And by that I mean we have to show how recommendations are tied into a bigger picture and show that there is community support. Whether this is done by a Facebook page or a blog, we as planners have to do a better job in selling the message. The reason for that is that our message is complicated. We can not “boilerplate” our comments. The solution for one failing solution may worsen the problem for another failing intersection.

To add on to planners’ complicated message, we are the clearing house for messy government problems and random citizen inquiry. We may not be able to fix the problem but we probably know somebody who can fix the problem…with a little cooperation. Well, I hoped you enjoyed this tale of a city planner and please feel free to let me know if you have had any similar experiences and how you have dealt with cooperation in your profession. And as always,

Thanks for reading!

Tales of a City Planner

Successes

You know as professionals when people ask what we do or when we explain to the others what we do we tend to only focus on the challenges and frustrations of our job. Recently one of the younger planners at my job asked me for advice on whether or not he should continue to study planning when they apply for grad school next year. He was given advice from others about going into other related fields and was bemoaning the typical (but often justified) gripe that planning was not progressive enough. As I was joining in with the young planner about the slowness of government, I stopped…and thought to myself that despite all the challenges that city planners face, we do have our fair share of successes.

So this post will not be dedicated to a funny tale, a planning rant or a hypothetical question but to the successes I have had as a planner. There are a lot of times as a planner that you fight for the merits of a plan or a community and get overruled by political will, community opposition or by pressure from a key stakeholder. But despite the losses we may have occurred we can often prove through our consistency of comments a new framework of ideas and procedures that can be flushed out into a new policy. While I have certainly been apart of many lost battles and had to concede at times for the sake of moving forward, I know have been apart of positive policy change within my office that has put my office in a better position to affect change then it did in the past.

While as an office we can not change the approval of bad developments in the past we can continue to strive to make better developments in the future. While the progress can be slower then we would like at least we know progress is being made. Often times as young planners we slow progress as no progress because we lack the vision some times to see or better yet to know how far the policies we are apart of have shifted.

The irony is that for as fast as we as young planners would like to move to change policies, we can not move faster then the understanding of the communities we represent. Even if we have the best intentions, if we plan ideas faster then what the community can comprehend we would ultimately be a bunch of planners telling a community what we are going to do without their input. This is what we do not want to do because ultimately our success should be defined on whether we achieved a community’s goals responsibly (without disenfranchisement) and not solely based the success of an individual development plan.

And from community interaction is where I believe I have my greatest success. My father once told me that the goal of communication is not to be understood but to not be misunderstood. To be a good community planner you have to be the liaison to a lot of different understandings which may all be competing against each other, totally baseless or all true at the same time. As a community planner I have to explain the ins and outs of zoning to communities so that they can properly interpret zoning and not gleam their own account of zoning. I also must make sure I understand all of their concerns and issues when I bring them before other government agencies when making policy decisions.

Now not everyone in the community will like me. Just the fact that I work for government will perhaps always make them suspicious of me. However almost everyone in the communities I represent respects the information that I give them because I make sure that the information I give them is precise, accurate and without any misunderstanding. Due to that fact I have been fortunate that I have not had any hotheads in the community go off on the job I’m doing. Do people still yell and get angry at me? Sure. But most of the time is based on past failures of government long before my time.

So for any young planner out there reading this or any frustrated planner or any other professional for that matter, I’d say it’s healthy to vent out your frustrations about your job but do not become jaded. Once you become jaded you often stop seeking to achieve any type of success or positive change and become content to the same policies which may be doing harm. I write these posts to educate discuss and learn from any of you guys who post comments and not as a journal of daily gripes.

I mentioned way back in first “tale of a planner” series that a past professor told my class that his greatest success as a planner was preventing bad plans from happening. Well that may ultimately be true for a lot of planners because it is hard to discern personal accomplishment within a neighborhood but by far our greatest success is helping people. And I believe in that department, I have done my job well.

Thanks for reading!