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

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.

Hey future young planner…you’re sooooo screwed

Last week, I was on a panel speaking to college freshman majoring in architecture (you know, because BCPlanning is for the children) about the field of city planning and what planners do. It was a great discussion talking about the ins and outs of planning and most of the students seemed enthused about what planners and design professionals do for a living. Everyone on the panel was positive about the profession but stressed that we are in a recession so future planners are going to have to be very proactive and creative when finding their own path to their careers.

After the panel was over, I was talking to my colleagues on the panel when one of them said, “Should we really be encouraging theses students to go into planning when there is so much apathy internally in the planning and design world?” Did we do a disservice to these kids by not saying, “Look here kids, you’re first years in planning are going to suck…and that’s even if you find a job, you sorry bastards *insert evil Mr. Burns laugh.*” Now obviously our current opinions have shaped by the recession which has cut back our ability to do progressive planning due to a lack of funding and staff.

But honestly even before the recession I always told my office interns who were being promoted to planners that they have to be extremely patient and that they are going to have to do a lot of grunt work before they work on anything cool. This sounds like good advice for any young professional going into a job but you really have to emphasize it to young planners because planning schools do a bad selling jobs about the reality of being a low level city planner. Now it’s a tough sell, no one wants to discourage students from exploring and finding new avenues of how to do city planning. However it is unfair to sell students on the idealisms of Jane Jacobs and the theories of New Urbanism if they are going to be stuck reviewing permits at a zoning counter for a year or two. Granted being at the zoning counter will make them learn the tough ins and outs of planning but it’s a pretty damn brutal transition from school to work.


The Zoning Counter was prominently featured as one of the rings of hell in Dante’s Inferno

But back to the question, should we encourage student to go into planning? I’m sure in a few years when the economy is back on the upswing my answer as well as my colleagues would be a solid yes. But in the meantime my answer would be a cautious yes. The planning field is diverse enough where someone can literally make up there own path or start their own business. There are no easy paths right now in planning so if anyone plans to make it right now they are going to have make their own way. Good luck.

Bringing Sexy Back

I was recently on a date and my date and I were making small talk trying to get to know one another, where we are from and what we do for a living. Now usually when I tell people what I do for a living, community planning, I met with two responses:

Response A: That’s really interesting, so you plan out whole communities? That sounds like a really cool job, tell me more!

Response B: Hmm, interesting. So wait, what do you do, you just look at plans all day?

The latter response is a little less enthusiastic than the former. So when I told my date what I did, I’m a community planner, I help communities, work with politicians, lead community plans…my date replied, “huh…that’s interesting.” I chalk that up to Response B. Now I will say that I usually humble about what I do and will talk down my job rather than talk it up. And that could be seen as a lack of confidence in what I do, which would say more about me than the job I do, I guess.

But her response led me to wonder, how can I make suburban community planning sound sexy? And I thought about what I do on a day-to-day level. Should I talk about variances and development plans…no, not sexy enough. Zoning battles and making maps…no, no, no still not sexy. Maybe I’ll gripe about my job, everybody likes talking down about their boss…but I work with communities so talking down about them just makes me seem like an asshole…so scratch that. Alright, I tell people I run community plans and that communities need me…but then that sounds like I have a god complex.

Really there is no way to make being a bureaucrat sound sexy. You can explain other professions quickly in one sentence that sound way cooler or heroic even if they are not. I’m a cop – I fight crime. I’m a firefighter – I fight fires. I’m a teacher – I teach our youth. I’m a planner – I plan communities…but only when there’s a consensus…and political will…and funding and years of effort and hundreds of meetings. Sexy.

Social Change

Following up from a post from yesterday about Planning in a Recession, led me to think more about being apart of a greater social change. As planners, we have the potential to have a moderate impact on the communities we serve through regulating land management. When development dries up, our impact on the community lessens which conversely limits our activity and our creativity to solve new challenges. Now we can always go back and figure out old existing problems that never got resolved but in an election cycle no one wants to tip the apple cart and take on something in that may or may not be able to be solved.

The limits of local government planning led me to think about establishing my own private planning practice where I could be as creative as I wanted to be in exploring new planning techniques and measures across the country and even the world. I could target specific communities and build up local Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), start Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and form a consensus with all local PTA’s and community advisory groups to affect the most social change to any given community. That would be a dream job for any planner…that would require a lot of funding, time, money, dedicated community leaders, dough, active citizens, moolah, political will, greenbacks, a great campaign, dead presidents…and a lot of education to everyone involved.

The one unexpected feature about planning that I did not expect was that planners spend a lot of time educating the public. When I first started planning I thought this job was all about having great campaigns that we would have to pitch to the public to implement our planning theories. Which is partly true, you can have a great planning theory but if you fail to present it correctly, the idea and theory will go nowhere. But even before we get to planning theories and research methods, the public expects us as experts to impart our knowledge of zoning, land use and sustainability to them. In my opinion, the amount of social change occurs when you have a community that is fully educated about the process and instruments of change. Education has the greatest impact on social change.

And wanting to be a facilitator in social change has sparked the idea of being a teacher. When I first started this journey in wanting to change my environment, I wanted to be an architect. I dedicated myself to that, I worked various internships, went away to school to be an architect. But then I came to a self-realization. All of my proposed design models I was creating would not greatly impact the people I saw outside my design studio window, in North Philadelphia, if my models were built. So I changed my career path to city planning which seemed to encompass everything about cities and creating holistic solutions. This recession in planning has now led me to another self-realization. The greatest impact I can have on a neighborhood in bringing real social change is through education.

Now I don’t know if this means being a full time teacher. I think there other creative outlets I could tap into. I would still very much like to be apart of city planning but for me there has to be a better way of impacting communities than writing tedious community plans and reviewing variances. I don’t know what that way is as of yet or how long the journey to fulfill this new path might take but I’ll be sure to talk about it in this blog. If there are any educators out there, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

Planning in a Recession

In the world of government city planning there has always been a boom and a bust cycle to our work. It’s usually seasonal. There’s usually a lull in activity during the summer and in the fall, work generally picks up again. During the holidays, some developers try to submit the most complicated development plans in hopes something slips by due to holiday vacations. And in the spring, we are usually busy as developers try to get their plans approved so they can begin construction in the summer and fall. Now in between these seasonal times, there maybe some legislation that creates a flurry of new development.

But during a recession, every season feels like the summer. Typical development works slowly trickles in. Developers are no longer calling everyday to set up a meeting to meet with you. The public is no longer calling to find out more information about a project in their neighborhood. There are very few walk-ins for people who want to expand their property or business. Exiting mega projects going through the development process slow down to a crawl or just go away and may never come back.

Everything becomes mind crushingly slow. The lack of work leads to a lack of excitement, which leads to a lack of creative thinking or any thinking at all. Work becomes a dreary fog of inactivity. Now don’t get me wrong, there are always things we can do for the community without the development process. We can and have created community plans to help shape current and future land management of neighborhoods. We still meet community groups on the regular to address any and all their needs. But to be honest, even the community’s depressed, more so than us actually.

And it’s not hard to blame the community for being a little down and not want to meet to help make their community better when they are struggling to keep their own homes afloat. Two years ago, community members would call frequently for planners to address their concerns. Now were calling them and they tell us, we’ll get back to you. Who knows, maybe they’re right to put us on hold. In the short term, there’s no money local government can really throw behind communities because of well…the recession. I guess the community gets tired of us saying, “well when things get better…” Which is true, people really should plan for the future when things are down to be prepared when things pick back up but we end up being a wet blanket. It is pretty awesome to generate all this excitement for a community meeting and getting everyone pumped for projects that will happen in…2020…maybe. God bless the folks that continue to stay and don’t walk out of the meetings right then and there.

Usually in the past when things were slow on a job, mid-level planners like myself would start to have a wondering eye. Being on the East Coast gives you almost a dozen municipalities large or small to look at for employment. But in a recession there are a dozen municipalities large and small that are not hiring. And when you look out at the financial states of other places that have furloughs, layoffs and work stoppages, you thank your lucky stars you are still employed. But in the mean time, the recession has sort of trapped us in place, in time and pay scale.

I don’t know what the future holds for us planners, developers, architects, landscape architects and those involved in development. I know things can not and should not return to the level of irresponsible growth and speculation of just three years ago. But I hope things do pick up to take everyone out us this fog.

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!

Tales of a City Planner

Planner Fatigue

Have you ever met an old grizzly cop or an even fairly young but disillusioned cop who has been mentally and emotionally beaten down by the job that all they fail to see anything positive?

Well at times, I feel that city planning can lead to the same disillusionment. Almost any job that deals with the public, probably tests your faith and patience in the democratic political process…and people in general.

What is the source for this bitterness and cynicism? I believe the source for most planners is that many planning offices are reactionary and not proactive. This is a particular problem for young planners who come out of planning schools feeling like social activists and often become frustrated by the seemingly slow pace of government. Older planners have seen it all…and believe in nothing now. Just joking, but there are more than a few planning veterans who have turned from skeptics into cynics.

To be fair, I do know a fair share of planning vets who are also positive and are strong advocates of new planning theories that can improve the way we plan our environments. Strangely I find these planners never-ending hope to implement new planning theories to be slightly disillusioned as well. Maybe I’m a cynic too.

The problem with cynicism in planning is that you believe no new planning theory will work because everyone is stupid (yes, we think highly of ourselves). No, we do not think everyone is stupid but we do feel that there are a lot of people in the planning process who do not have the best of intentions that often effect plan implementation. In every plan you will have people ranging from other government agencies to the public that are meddling, self-serving, small minded, biased, looking for the quick fix, discriminatory and fearful. Working alongside these different factions can definitely turn you into a cynic.

The problem with being a cynic in planning is that you fail to see the full picture of what can be done. Any new planning theory that is being proposed is automatically torpedoed because we see all the problems of what could go wrong.

Here’s the deal, planning is a very intuitive profession. Planners figure out how to make things work in sometimes very unconventional ways. Since this is not a technical profession there endless amount of ways to solve and attack a problem. In fact, planning forces you to be creative because communities are never exact carbon copies of one another. We have to be creative in finding the best end result for each individual community. The end result maybe similar to another community but never the same. So the minute we become cynics we limit our creativity we fail to find the best solutions for communities.

So how do we help young planners or just planners in general avoid becoming cynics? My guess is through a bottle of Jack Daniels. I’m sure you have better solutions…all comments on this matter are welcome.

Thanks for reading!

Tales of a City Planner

Tales of a City Planner
Red Tape

One of the biggest complaints in government is red tape. In fact there is probably some local politician who is saying right now that they are going to “cut the red tape in government and stop waste!” Only to see a free for all in backhand deals, lack of accountability and transparency and possible scandal. Which then leads to another local politician saying they are going to “clean up government,” that inevitably leads to more red tape.

As a planner we are not policy makers. We cannot arbitrarily ignore rules and processes that we think are stupid and arduous. The fun part is that each process is often independent of the other multiple processes and that’s only if it’s determined if you even have to go through any processes at all. There are so many different interpretations of different processes that we ourselves do not which process one development will go through or even how many. Sometimes it feels like your playing Plinko. Developers drop the Plinko chip and think the chip is headed for “straight to permit” and WHAM, they have to go before the Development Review Board, Design Panel and an additional public hearing. Cue the horns.

Sometimes it feels like you are being a small time hustler explaining all these different processes to the public. Typical convo:

“Ok, ok, ok…if you do this, you have to go through this process. If you do that, you have to through this, that annnnnd this. You don’t want do that. But if you do this, you should be straight…but don’t quote me.”

And that conversation is based on…a.) The government employee knows what their talking about and b.) Some other more experienced planner comes us and says, well if you do this, that annnnnd the other thing, you don’t have to go through any of this per this new law. You follow me?

Still not following me? Let me give you a recent real life example of this. I was recently at a meeting in which a private entity would donate half of their property to the government for redevelopment. Since the property’s land use had been grandfathered due to pre-existing use before it’s zoning changed, the property would need a special exception as well…and since they are giving a portion of their property away, a variance for other setbacks and regulations. On top of that there is a historical landmark on the property, which triggers the review of the Historic commission of the development plan. Finally there were major environmental problems with the site and a question on flip the bill for the environmental upgrades.

So this one development triggers an acquisition, a subdivision (along with design review), special exception, variance, historic review and stringent environmental review. So what development is so important that if triggers six, that’s right six different governmental processes? This must be some type of huge tax revenue inducing, multi-use complex that will trigger hundreds of jobs…this has to be it, right? Because who would go over this much scrutiny for a… *drumroll please*… park. That’s right a park. Not an office, not a high-rise but a park. “We’re talking about park.”

Building a park should never be this hard. This is not an episode of Parks & Recreation. But thanks to red tape we must treat this park as if we were reviewing the site plan of a new mall. But despite the hassle and the meeting of at least six different agencies to discuss a park, I’m sure government would look a lit worse if we just arbitrarily started accepting valuable pieces of lands from private entities with no condition. I’m sure that would be fine but I’m sure that you can see how that could become a slippery slope of private influence on government.

There really is no moral to this tale except to show that red tape is fun for no one. In fact red tape can kill developments that we as planners try to push for. Is red tape necessary…I don’t know. But I can’t think of a better way of to regulate development…like a park. Anybody out there have any ideas?

And once again, thanks for reading!

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!

Tales of a City Planner

The Mundaneness of Government

Someone asked me recently, government life can’t be what they show on the new tv series, Parks & Recreation, can it? Well, at times it can be. There are plenty of meetings that I have to attend that I think at worst are pointless or at best non-productive. But I’m sure everyone who has a job feels the same way about some of their meetings. The thing is that if you have a series of unproductive meetings that are generally going nowhere, they usually end, right? Ha ha ha, not in government they don’t. As long as there is a semi organized group of residents willing to meet on a dedicated night, someone from government will be there.

This is where government life can become silly. Because government is representational we are almost required to be there for almost any and all community groups even if they have nothing to talk about. We also have to show up to meetings despite knowing the following:
- There is no agenda and nothing is happening in the neighborhood
- In-fighting within the group and listening to people argue
- Listening to rants and plans for personal vendettas against neighbors
- Listening to racism and class-ism disguised as NIMBY-ism
- Having meetings on the hood of your car because a public building is locked

Now again not all of my meetings are like this. In fact I tend to find that all of meetings with smaller groups are almost always productive and a time well spent for both me and the participants. However almost every pointless meeting I had to go to I knew before going in but I still had to go anyway. Rarely do I go to a pointless meeting and walk out of it feeling good that I went.

Now, I have worked in government for most of my professional career but I have worked in a private office before as a planner and an intern and because of that I can’t help but to wonder how much money per hour of tax payer money is being wasted by government workers going to public meetings. In the private sector, meetings like these would be cut off or they would make groups consolidate to eliminate per hour costs of planners going to multiple meetings. I do want to point out that there are plenty of private sector planners that go to multiple pointless meetings. The big difference is that they often charge their clients for these meetings (if they are not scouting for more work). Public sector planners on the other hand just receive “comp” time and no extra pay.

So for all you future planners out there, I hope you are studying Parks & Recreation for your future career because there will be a lot of bad meetings ahead in your future. And as young planner you get to go two types of meetings. The meetings where the office wants you to learn what goes on and the meetings that no one else wanted to go to…and there are a lot of those. Don’t become to discouraged though, it’s all apart of helping communities which you signed up to do and changing the world…through one bad meeting at a time.

Oh and one last word of advice to any young planner. Always eat something before going to a late night meeting…a power bar, fruit or something. There’s nothing worse then being bored and hungry.

Tales of a City Planner

Why did you decide to become a city planner?

Recently I gave a presentation to a graduate class of future social workers about the rigors of community planning and organizing. Before I began explaining the current ins and outs of planning, I first explained why I choose planning as a career. You maybe surprised to know that many planners in planning offices do not have planning degrees. Whether it’s a good or bad thing to have people from various related fields giving different perspectives, I don’t know. Most people do not grow up dreaming to review development plans and organize monthly community meetings. As a kid, I was always fascinated by cities and always loved gazing at skylines. I had no clue of what a city planner did. I wanted to be an architect.

My dream of being an architect began with legos. Every year a group of architects would hold a design workshop with legos during Baltimore’s Artscape festival where I would help build castles, ships, towers, you name it. As I got older I volunteered with the local architects to help run the lego workshop. Those same architects gave me my first of many internships in high school, which led me to major in architecture at Temple University for two years. To come full circle now, I now review the architectural plans of those same architects as a planner who I met helping kids play with legos as a teen.

It was at Temple University that I grew a deep appreciation for cities. Temple was an urban campus right in the heart of inner-city Philadelphia. I was a kids from an inn-ring suburb and while I had visited Philadelphia dozens of times because my family was from there, I had never lived there. It was an eye opening experience. The big city allowed me to experience the new cultures and neighborhoods, the subway and el trains, lively and crowded downtown streets…and great poverty.

My University was in a neighborhood that had been in blight for over 50 years. In fact, the building my studio building was in was across the street from public housing. The studio space had the top floor in a nine story and from every direction that you looked past the campus, there was a mile or more of blighted neighborhoods. I really liked being in architecture, it was my dream. But studying how people feel and perceive space seemed trivial in the face of abject poverty that was in front of us. No matter how the spaces of the buildings of across the street where designed they were never going to feel safe.

I could not get past the fact that as future architects, if we are designing new and better spaces for people, how are we going to help the people in public housing across the street? When I asked my professor, “Who designs buildings for the poor?” The answer I got was, very few. Since architecture is still a business, there is no profit in building for the poor. Your future clients will be those with means (being individuals or institutions) and that’s who you will essentially work for.

This is not to say that all architects do is design buildings and spaces for the rich. As an intern for several architectural firms, I worked numerous public projects that would affect almost everyone from hospitals, schools, government buildings and for commercial projects intended for low income neighborhoods. Even if architects were to design pro bono for low income neighborhoods, at best all they could do is change the perception of how they felt about their neighborhoods. And while it is important for everyone to have a positive relationship about their environment, especially the poor, it is not going to bring jobs to their neighborhoods, it will not provide a better education, and it will not provide them with better skills or healthcare. Can a city planner do all these things? Probably not but at least we can educate people and help guide communities into a better direction.

So I left my major of understanding how people live and interact within their immediate spaces for a major that studies how people live and interact with their community. Both professions seek to improve the quality of how people experience their environment. The planner’s job is to help communities envision a better environment.

Well I hoped you enjoyed reading my “Johnny Do-Gooder” city planning story. Most city planners have similar tales of wanting to change their world. And while working for government can be slow and arduous, most of us still hold on to the belief that we can impact the world we live in. If you read my past tales of a city planner, then you know that changing the world I know is a lot harder then I thought. And in this line of work, it is very hard to measure any discernable success or to gauge how much of an impact you really have on your community. But all I can do is learn from the mistakes from the past so I can help plan a better tomorrow. And from these blog posts, I hope that any future planners can learn from my mistakes.

Thanks for reading!

Tales of a City Planner

Theory vs. Reality

One of the coolest things about my profession is planning theory. Studying how people live and interact with spaces has always been fascinating to me. Planning theory is an open conversation that almost anyone can have about how they experience the urban environment. You do not need to be a City Planner to enjoy Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. You also do not need a PhD either to discuss planning theory in depth. As one former co-worker told me, “this aint rocket science.” But the application of planning theory to the real world is…complicated.

One of the new theories that is all the rage in planning right now, is New Urbanism. To give you a quick summary of New Urbanism, it is the application of how main streets used to be planned, focusing on walkable streets and designing buildings with a pedestrian scale. New Urbanism seeks to replace the strip shopping center with large parking lot for a main street that pulls buildings closer to the street for easier pedestrian access. In a nutshell, New Urbanism seeks to create a sense of place.

As a planning theory, New Urbanism sounds great, what planner wouldn’t want to implement these guidelines to create walkable, auto-independent neighborhoods? What planner wouldn’t want to chuck their 300+ page zoning code for the simplicity of New Urbanist principles?

Well, the ultimate goal of New Urbanist principles is to help create a simple code that encourages land uses that we want to see instead of matrix of prohibited land uses, the process of determining that code is not simple at all. As life would have it, in trying to reduce the number of regulations in the code, applying New Urbanist principles can actually increase the regulation of land.

How can that be? Obviously some planner must be doing something wrong. Well when applying new urbanist principles many agencies create several standards of aesthetic design of how a building must look and how it is placed on the site. If a developer and property owner cannot conform to the new principles, then they risk having their building permit rejected. The trade off for the developer is that decisions on aesthetics are no longer made at the whims of a planning board and agency and for the public, planning decisions would not longer be done in a piecemeal fashion.

Sounds rather strict but fair, right? What would be the problem in creating a more consistent system on a more holistic level? The problem is that almost everything built in cities within the last 50 years was built in a piecemeal fashion…and I mean everything.

Streamlining sidewalk widths, I discovered there were over 10 different widths within my plan boundary (in fact some blocks had multiple sidewalk widths).
Regulating the distance of lampposts for better lighting, I discovered there was no rhyme or reason for the existing distance between lampposts.
Planters, everybody is going to make the planer the same size right? Wrong, I discovered my plan boundary had multiple planter sizes.
Awning size, how do you determine the correct size and position when every other store has different size, shape and color?

So what’s your decision? What arbitrary number do you choose to sync your new urbanist principles with existing conditions and be able to justify that number which will surely disenfranchise some property owner? Remember, these numbers have to hold before the critical eye of development attorneys. Complicated, right? And this was the easy stuff, I’m not even getting into the major details such as limiting building height, parking restrictions, reducing street widths and pre-determining building placement on lots.

While new heights and distances maybe arbitrary the existing dimensions of a piecemeal town or study area are not. Most of the times there are several concrete reasons of why there are different sidewalk widths of a town. In many cases, government may have mandated changes at the time of development or permit. Why does this matter? Well the most successful block in your town or plan boundary may employ none of the guidelines of your new urbanist principles and may have to be redesigned to meet the new standards. Or your town of plan boundary may include an historic district right smack in the middle of an area, planners have highlighted for increased density.

What do you do? If you force new regulations on the most successful block and historic district you will most likely destroy the sense of place that you were trying to create. On the other hand exempting the two areas will make your overall town or plan boundary inconsistent. What was a simple planning matter will now become a major political battle in which major constituents will let their opinions be heard to local politicians who must make that call. The argument of who is better equipped to make a major planning decision, the planner or the politician will be left for another blog post.

To repeat my former co-worker, “this aint rocket science.” However, planners are left to make a series of judgment calls of critical importance. Some judgment calls are easy, while other calls are complicated and will have unforeseen consequences for years and maybe decades to come. I hope you have enjoyed reading the complications of implementing planning theory. For any planner reading this, I know you can sympathize and I would like to hear your comments. For any planning student, I hope you learned how complicated implementing theory is and for everyone else I hope you learned more about the city planning process.

Thanks for reading!

For my 200th Blog Post – Another Tale of a City Planner

The Site Visit

Last night I went into a community planning function in another city just for kicks when someone asked me, what do you do as a community planner. Usually I either give them a really short answer like, review developments, organize community plans, or I give them a long answer on all the minor tasks I do on a day-to-day basis. Being a community planner is really whatever you make out to be, for the most part there are no clear established tasks. A simple e-mail from a resident asking about traffic calming can balloon into a transit corridor study a year later.

However there is one task that all community planners must perform to understand their surroundings and community…the site visit. For every major and minor development or change in a community, I have to go on a site visit. Some of these site visits are informational (as in, I didn’t know this was there), adventurous (I don’t know if I should drive down this dirt path in the woods) or historical (George Washington drank here…really?) but a good number of them are a bit of a waste of time. Nothing is more fulfilling then checking a request to raise a shed to 21 feet from the required 15 feet. The bird’s eye view in MSN local.live.com has been a lifesaver from pointless site visits.

In all my travels in going to site visits by far the ones that are the most fun have been in the rural side. In looking for developments on small side streets way out in the countryside I have accidentally driven into other counties, other states (PA) and once into someone’s lamppost and drove away like hell. Country roads have the best road crossing signs. Forget about regular cross signs for students or deer, wait to you see a sign for bulls, sheep, tractors and my favorite horse-drawn buggies.

With so many crossings you would think that traffic would be relatively slow for a small, two-lane, winding road bordered by 100-year-old oak trees. But what you get are ex-urbanites, race cars and trucks all riding your bumper at 50 mph while you turning tight corners hoping there is more road ahead of you and not a tree. Driving becomes even more difficult when you are staring at a forest or an anonymous group of farms wondering, is that the development site? Good luck on stopping, or finding a place to pull over or even a u-turn.

The most fun is slowly creeping into people’s neighborhoods or property with no sign identification on your car. Now, most of the time this would be a bit of concern for me, being that as you can tell by my profile picture, I am a large African-American male and I am slowly driving through a rural all-white neighborhood. Who knows what these people think I am doing. Fortunately, all of them take pity because they KNOW that I am lost. Many people will pull over or stop what their doing to sincerely ask, “Sir, can I help you?” or “Where are you trying to head to sir?” God bless them…for not pulling shotguns (which has happened to other planners).

Most of the time, my adventure stops after reaching the site but sometimes it only just begins. While at various sites, I have been chased by dogs, stared down by a mammoth bull standing just 20 feet away, been startled by foxes hoping out of bushes and ended site visit because a pile of crap was too large to be a dog. And whatever animal made that pile, I do not want to see alone in the woods. I’ve started picked up large sticks now when I have to go through woods and fields now.

Not all my own property visits have included the fear of being mauled by a forest animal. Many visits have included me jumping over streams, discovering walking and ATV paths, overlooking valleys, standing next to inlets by the Chesapeake Bay and checking out old historic ruins.

Site visits in the suburbs or in urban areas are nowhere near as fun…except for semi-country neighborhoods that have the most stunningly awful architectural gems you will ever see. Although some urban neighborhoods are pretty cool and they have these things called bars which when traveling with another planner I always end up in after the site visit.

I hope you have learned another critical aspect into what planners do and have to go through when planning the future to your neighborhood. We are not government officials in ivory towers creating master plans for neighborhoods that we have never been to before. Nope, we are in your neighborhood getting chased by your dog or in your local neighborhood tavern or restaurant.

Thanks for reading!

Tales of a City Planner

The Lack of Support

One of the main functions of a city planner is community organizing. This occurs when planning functions such as a new school proposal, new street proposals or a community plan. Most of my community meetings are already set by individual community associations where all I have to do is either present information and or answer questions.

But when organizing a community meeting, I have to organize, arrange, coordinate, present and host the meeting. Which isn’t a problem because after all, I am a planner. When there are active neighborhood associations in the community, getting decent participation for a community plan can be a breeze. These associations help do a lot of the leg work to get a decent turnout to a meeting.

Unfortunately, I have several communities that have either very weak neighborhood associations or none at all. So how do you bring out turnout you may ask? Well, it’s sort of like planning a party that no one wants to go to.
Example:

Me: “Excuse me sir, would you come out next Tuesday and participate at a community meeting to make our neighborhood a better place?”

Stranger: “Uh…sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll…be…there." *nervously looks away and then at the ground *

No one really tells you in college that performing outreach is a major part of community planning. Sure, it’s always easy to put ads in all of the local newspapers but not everyone gets the local paper and then those who do don’t read it. So you do a mass mailing, which should cover everyone…unless they are renters in which the mailing will go to the property owner and not the resident. And contacting apartment complexes for “solicitation”…that’s another post in itself. Only one thing left to do and that is blanket the community with flyers…one house at a time. The general rule of thumb is that for every 40 flyers, one person will come to your meeting.

So after putting ads in newspapers, mass mailings, flyers, word of mouth and calling any major stakeholders you have your first meeting. Success! You have a large turnout and with that turnout you collect everyone’s contact information from e-mail, phone number and mailing address. So now you don’t have to flyer as much and you can cut back on some of the mass mailings because you have a phone and e-mail database, right?

FAIL

At your next meeting only half the amount of people come out, leaving you scratching your head. The problem, half the people only came to see what the whole community planning process was about. You will most likely never see them again despite copying them to a mass e-mail alerting of them of the next community meeting.

So what did I learn in my experiences in community outreach where there is no community support or neighborhood associations? That e-mail and phone lists can not replace community association support or direct contact with residents and business owners. If you want to build up community support, you have to do it the hard way and actually put your feet in the street and be visible in community.

Tales of a City Planner

With the decline of the print newspapers, many have bemoaned the loss of good journalism. Some within the blogging community believe that bloggers can take the place of newspapers and present multiple angles of stories. Critics of that ideology believe that all bloggers do is re-post the work of real journalists and then give their opinions.

Ouch. While half of this blog is made up of a collection of art, video clips, vignettes and yes even some original thought, the other half is dedicated to my opinion as a city planner on news that affects the urban environments.

So I've decided to take it one step farther. Many of my opinions on news articles are based on my professional experiences of being city planner, so why not write about that and share them amongst other planners, future planners, architects, engineers, community activists and anyone else interested in the urban environment. Many people have asked what do I do as a community planner, well this post be the first of many about the day to day functions of city planning.


Tales of a City Planner (Part 1)
Beware of those overly nice to you before a meeting


This week I was invited to give a presentation about local area development at a residents' association meeting for a senior living facility. I rarely have contact with senior living facilities but this particular facility was very well-to-do and is located in the town's cental core. The topic of my presentation was on the recent rise of development within the town, most of which was happening less then a block away from the senior living facility.

Before the presentation, the residents' association had invited me to dinner at their facility two hours prior to the presentation. As I ate dinner (which is a rarity, most of the time at night community meetings I leave straight from work and sit in meetings starving...on top of that, this meal was free!) in the very formal dining hall, I chatted with board members about their past lives, their lives at the facility (the place was top notch) and eventually about nearby development. As the board members asked questions about development, I gave them full explanations of the process and seemed to have alleviated at least some of their concerns. If this was an indication of the type of questions I was going to receive at the presentation, this will be an easy meeting I thought.

Fast forward to the presentation. I purposefully dumbed down my powerpoint presentation because I did not want to lose any seniors on the long, arduous, complicated matters of development and redevelopment. No offense to the seniors, but explaining our 400 page zoning code and it's procedures of development can confuse anyone and also put them to sleep as well. So I breeze through my presentation showing the residents all the proposed images of projects still in construction as well as projects still in the developmental phase. I was a little worried because I went through the presentation a little too fast. Most of the time at other community meetings I'm interrupted by questions though the middle of the presentation. So as I finish my presentation and still have over 40 minutes to kill, I turn it over to questions from the audience.

And this is where the fun begins. Sometimes when a group of people have not had a chance to talk to anyone from government about their issues in a while they have a tendency to unload on first available official they see. I was that official. To sum up all the questions and comments raised over the next hour, the seniors were most upset that a.) the town is difficult for them to walk and b.) all the new development will make traffic worse. All very legitimate questions and comments...for the first five times they asked the same variated question.

Part of the reason the seniors kept asking the same questions is because frankly did not like my answers. The answers I gave the crowd were that many of the new developments under construction had employed walkability measures that my office and the community had developed to make a more liveable and active town. The new developments were built closer to the street and have reduced parking counts to encourage new residents to walk to nearby stores and offices. The seniors weren't hearing that. They believed that no one would walk anywhere despite everything a new resident would need is within blocks of their new apartment building. The problem with the seniors thinking is that since they have trouble moving around, they assumed everyone else would as well. My suggestion that new residents would walk from their building to the super market across the street brought guffaws from the crowd.

The question of the night came from a somewhat bitter senior who pointedly asked, "how did you get here tonight, did you walk or drive?"

*Sighs*

Now my office is probably 8 blocks away from the senior living facility. I have walked many times from office to the restaurants across the street from the senior living facility on my lunch break dozens of times. That night I was carrying a laptop and folder full of papers and it was cold. So I drove. But if I were to ask what percentage of them walk outside the building at all, I would have been the bad guy (most confessed privately that they get bussed to the market across the street). At times I did feel like the bad guy, after the tenth variation of the same question you get a little testy. Answers to questions went from, "As I had previously mentioned..." to "Like I had told you guys before..." When you get to that point, you know you're meeting with seniors had not gone as planned.

This is when you have to realize, you can not take their comments personal. Not that I was taking offense to their comments but sometimes as an official for government, you have to become the whupping boy for all of government's failings that may or may not have anything to do with you or your office. I realized that after the third or fourth time I offered to make another presenation with local community associations to show how we are addressing their concerns, to only have that offer fall on deaf ears. That's when I realized that they came to the meeting to gripe...and that's ok. Everyone needs to gripe once and awhile as long as it does not become a habit because griping with inaction is not productive.

The meeting finally came to a close. One of the residents' association members came to me and said, for all their complaints, they were all engaged and were discussing issues even after the meeting was over, which never happens according to the association member. And that my friends was the positive of the meeting. One of the biggest hurdles planners' face in dealing with the public, is the public's lack of knowledge or awareness of the planning process. Some communities are better then others in their knowledge of the development process but it is always important to keep everyone connected and informed. How the community interprets the information is another issue. But if you want a healthy planning process the community must have the facts, for better or for worse. If not, the community will have an us vs them mentality which can be difficult to overcome and will always slow down progress.

Whew. This is my first post on the tales of being a community planner. For those in planning, I hope you enjoyed and had a good laugh and for those curious about planning I hope you were able to learn something or see how the planning process works. If anyone has any questions, comments, similar tales or suggestions, I would love to hear them, so please leave a comment.

Thanks for reading!