Complex vs. linear systems and the ability to create change

I had been thinking about writing a blog entry expressing my frustration about something. I get a fair number of emails and inquiries from citizens (and students) who draw me into their efforts to improve things. I might be included on a string of emails, etc.

Not infrequently, I will respond, outline how I see the issue and the opportunities for change. Generally, my points and analysis will be blown off by the person, who for whatever reason, disagrees with my interpretation.

Since I am a practical "theorist" focusing on making things happen, by realistically assessing the issues, opportunities, and barriers, and then recommending a corresponding course of action to lay forward a new and different way for accomplishing what you want, I find that very frustrating. What happens is that the other way (and the rejection of my approach) tends to fail.

This weekend, I am reading the book _Getting Change Right_ by Seth Kahan. I was introduced to the book because Seth is the featured speaker at the Ignite Conference/Transforming Business with Creativity, organized by the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County.

I am always a bit skeptical of the claims of change professionals (a form of organizational development) so I wanted to read the book. Because it is focused on the reality of making change happen in complex organizations, I think reading the book will prove to be quite useful.

Already a couple paragraphs on page 13 explain my dilemma as recounted above:

Because you are operating in a complex system, it is not always clear what actions influence what results. In a linear system, if you push, you see the impact. In a complex system this does not necessarily happen. The impact may be so removed in time that you cannot observe it directly. Or the push may be part of a system that causes its impact to be amplified, diminished, or even effective. In this situation, you rely on the eyes, ears, and minds of others to provide the necessary guidance.

As a single person or group, you have by definition limited access to the entire system. Therefore, your perspective and your understanding will constantly be tested, stretched, expanded, and enhanced by others. This is one of the most valuable and most difficult challenges of successful, large-scale change.

This sums up the disconnect that I have been experiencing. Even bringing about simple changes is a complex process. I approach change and opportunities as a complex process while most people think it is a simple, "linear," process. Even with the requirement of having to get many different people on board for change, change within government generally involves lots of parties that the average citizen might not acknowledge.

The thing I am really learning working in government for the moment, is that agencies require the approval of the Executive Office, especially the budget office, for just about any change in policies and procedures, and definitely when it concerns asking for more money. (For example, in DC, the software system is set up that you can't hire someone if the money hasn't been allocated and reserved to pay the wages and benefits for the hire.)

So when I explain to somebody that even if the point you are making is correct, that agency X should do a particular thing, it is dependent on (1) whether or not the agency sees Y policy and procedure as their responsibility; (2) if not how to convince them to change their perspective; (3) how to get the money, or if the $ amounts required are minimal, the still-required approval; (4) because to take on the new responsibility requires the involvement and sanction of other agencies; (5) not to mention that the Executive Branch may or may not be responsive; and (6) Executive Branch responsiveness to "inquiries" initiated by legislators (etc.) may be negative; it happens that I am talking about a complex system and they are thinking of their change proposal/initiative as a simple, linear process.

Something related that I have been ruing lately is the principle in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States that the people have the right "to petition the government to redress grievances."

"Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
— from the First Amendment


I am not against this right of course.

Because our education in civics and involvement and engagement tends to be pretty weak, especially in terms of the practical side of things, we tend to grow up to believe that all you have to do is take a piece of paper, write down your demands, and get a bunch of signatures, and change will happen after you present your petition to the appropriate government official.

That's far from the truth. You have to be conscious of the issues, the nuances, the ramifications of what you are asking for. And governments (and other entities) can stonewall, so you have to understand and be aware of the opportunities you might have to push the levers of change in the face of inertia and opposition.

Many advocates aren't very effective in understanding this, and in articulating and expressing their arguments in the first place, and the necessity of understanding, acknowledging and working to influence complex environments.

I find this (the difficulty of understanding complex systems on the part of activists, and shaping their arguments in response) very frustrating too. It makes an already difficult process--creating change--that much more difficult.

So I have found these two examples of change initiated by "regular people" to be quite interesting. Maryam Balbed, a 49 year old "Sk8ter Mom" in Silver Spring is helping teens who skateboard to better articulate and represent their interests ("Silver Spring ‘Sk8ter Mom' bridges generation gap: Mother of two speaks out for downcounty skate park" from the Gazette). And Nina Gonzalez, a student at Stafford High School in Stafford County, Virginia, helped to change the quality of school meals in County, Virginia ("The hero of the chicken nugget rebellion" from the Post).


David Trozzo/ For the Gazette. Maryam Balbed, 49, of Silver Spring, has emerged as an advocate for the mostly teenage Silver Spring skateboarding community as the Montgomery County Parks Department installs a temporary skate park at Woodside Urban Park in Silver Spring and considers a permanent park.

The interesting thing to me about the story about Nina Gonzalez is the detailed recounting of the various steps and approaches she took to get officials to change their perspective and to make changes in the school lunch program.

Too often, stories about children and their interests in making changes happen are made out to be "cute" and as a result, are somewhat dismissive. (Plus, sometimes kids have bad ideas, and the process of writing a story isn't evaluative and treats even terrible ideas as worthy.) This story is really good. From the article:

Gonzalez became a vegetarian in March of her freshman year. "There were not many lunch options available for vegetarians or other people who want to eat healthy," she says. Sophomore year found her sitting with other student athletes, none of them pleased with the pizza and chicken nuggets that were standard lunchroom fare.

"Especially when you came back from nutrition class, you'd think, 'This doesn't look like anything we were taught to eat,' " Gonzalez says. "It was ironic."

Instead of grousing, Gonzalez says she asked herself, "Okay, what can I do?" She started on the front line, talking to the lunch ladies. They commiserated but explained that they had no say in deciding what to serve for lunch. That was the job of the county nutrition director, Chapman Slye. So she looked him up online and made an appointment to speak with him. She was 16.

Before meeting with Slye, the honors student did her homework. She read up on the federal Child Nutrition Act of 1966 (which is up for reauthorization by Congress) and the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act and their provisions for school lunches. She checked out what other schools offered and found some that had incorporated vegetarian options and more fruits and vegetables. The idea, Gonzalez says, was to find models for providing more healthful choices for athletes, vegetarians and students who simply wanted to eat better, and to accommodate kids with dietary restrictions such as lactose intolerance.

The big breakthrough came when Gonzalez solicited samples of vegetarian foods from vendors and organized a group of students for a taste-testing session, to which she invited Slye. Her homework and legwork paid off. "In a month, we had a vegetarian option available every day," Gonzalez says. That option -- pita bread with a cheese stick, hummus, vegetables and fruit -- remains popular today, she says. Once a week, there's a meatless entree, and the salad and potato bars have been upgraded and made more appealing. The line for those bars, Gonzalez says, "is always packed."

She identified the problem--the nutrition content of the foods served and the options available within the school lunch program--and then set about finding out how the process/system worked, identifying the "actors"--the people who make the decisions, and then when they wouldn't bring about changes, she kept at it, responding to their concerns and coming up with other strategies (such as a tasting of vegetarian foods available from vendors already selling to or qualified to sell to the school system, including both students and school administrators).

I have written quite a bit over the years about the need for systematic capacity building especially in terms of developing support systems and training for people involved in community organizations and civic engagement efforts and I have mentioned the "english as a second language" textbook, Communicating Effectively in English, which is organized as a primer on how to become an engaged citizen, as a particularly interesting model for teaching civics to people who are born here! That we need the systematic education and exposure too.

At least that would help me become less frustrated.

Until we do that, we are going to spend much of our time going around in circles, and not bringing about the kinds of improvements in quality of life that I believe are supposed to be the outcomes of planning and zoning and transportation processes.

Nina Gonzalez, who pushed for vegetarian alternatives in the Stafford High cafeteria, at a Healthy School Meals Act briefing. Photo Credit: Chris Quay

Chesapeake Urban Farming Summit

In Prince George's County on June 18th at the Beltsville Agriculture Research Center,
$75 for the day (some scholarships available).

Website

The Sowing Seeds Here and Now! Summit structure will be composed of the following tracks:

1.Urban Farming Hands-on Workshops (3 sessions: Urban Farm Design and Business Plan Basics, Community Composting, High Tunnel Construction)
2.Healthy People and the Environment Focus (3 sessions: Health, Environment, Equity)
3.Policy and Planning for Economic Development (3 sessions: Land Use, Incentives, Policy and Planning)
4.Investing in Social and Environmental Justice (3 sessions: Faith Communities, Youth, Food and Justice)

(Yet) another Portland story and making the transition from dumb development to smart growth

It is very frustrating doing what I am doing these days, because it reiterates how important visionary thinking and action is to making change happen, and the forces of inertia are so entrenched--especially amongst political leaders. Some of the entrenched forces are what we might call "conventional wisdom" and doing the same thing over and over again.

(Image abovet: The Crossings at Gresham brought transit-oriented development to Portland's suburbs, opening the door for financing to flow to similar projects. Image: Myhre Group Architects.)

I am really struck by how difficult it is to make "smart growth" happen, because to have real "smart growth" as opposed to a mixed use development (many mixed use developments
are to smart growth what graphics were to "multimedia" and interactivity at the start of the graphically-based world wide web--graphics didn't make something interactive), it is absolutely dependent on quality transit.

And most places lack quality transit.

But making the transition from unsmart growth to smart growth is very difficult. People don't accept that are ultimately shaped by automobile-centric frames of reference for development, and changing the paradigm (which they don't recognize and accept) is hard even in the best of circumstances.

We see that in the discussions and difficulties over intensification attempts in White Flint in Montgomery County (see "With development plan approved, the future of White Flint begins to take shape" from the Post) and in Tysons Corner in Fairfax County ("Planners may scale back design for urban Tysons" from the Post).

Where you really see it is in the Baltimore region, which doesn't have a robust network of fixed rail transit, although it does have a couple transit lines, plus the railroad commuter service, which for the most part is focused on getting workers to Washington, rather than on making Maryland great.

In the Baltimore region it is very difficult to get transit oriented development to happen because for the most part transit is middling. So being adjacent to transit services there provides little in the way of extra locational value. Without increases in location (and therefore land) value, it doesn't make economic sense to build more intense projects. Without more intense projects you can't drive intensification forward. Instead things remain somewhat hollow and deconcentrated.

Now I wouldn't claim that DC proper had a transit oriented development strategy. It supported the development of the subway system because it was understood that it needed to maintain the relevance of the central business district to the regional economy, and making it easy for suburbanites to get to work in the central business district via transit would keep the federal government entrenched there.

I don't think there was a whole lot of concern on the part of the planners to make the system an element of neighborhood renewal and revitalization. That happened, although it has taken and is taking decades, because many neighborhoods relatively close to the core were somewhat dense, had the bones of commercial districts still extant, and some opportunities for infill development, not to mention the right spatial conditions of grid-based block and street network perfect for transit.

Portland and Arlington County have had to work it harder than DC. (Portland does have the block and street grid, especially downtown.) But they have a lot to show for their hard work and visionary decisionmaking, and continuous extension of the vision through additional and complementary actions.

(In the DC region, besides maintaining the relevance of Downtown DC within the regional economy, the best examples of transit and transit oriented development as a driver for maintaining and improving communities are probably Bethesda and Silver Spring in Montgomery County, Columbia Heights in DC, which shows how intensification strategies can work, plus of course the Arlington County example along Wilson Boulevard).

Columbia Heights Civic Plaza on Easter Sunday, photo by William Jordan. The plaza is framed by two new multiunit housing buildings with ground floor retail, the rehabilitated Tivoli Plaza mixed use development, and the DC/USA shopping center. While I think there were issues with some of these projects, and they haven't planned for the next stage of retail development there, for the most part, things are working out pretty well there.


Streetsblog has an amazing entry about suburban smart growth in Gresham, Oregon, and how the Metro Government there had to be gutsy and lead by example. See "How Portland Sold Its Banks on Walkable Development."

They built the light rail line and wanted to see more intense development around the Gresham station. One developer didn't see the opportunity and intended to build a one story parking fronted retail business. Metro ended up buying the site and building the "product," in this case a five story mixed use building, that they needed to have, to demonstrate the power of transit-led land use intensification.

In DC, we haven't done this kind of development very much at Metro stations, with the exception of Columbia Heights and to some extent Petworth. Otherwise, most projects at Metro Stations heretofore, i.e., Fort Totten and Minnesota Avenue and Rhode Island especially--the Home Depot shopping center, while U Street and Takoma have half good and half bad projects, etc.) have been pretty piss poor in my opinion.

That's because they couldn't get developers to build for the future, but instead for the most part the developers built according to what they were familiar with. And the city economic development people weren't all that willing to push the envelope anyway.

I just think of the same kind of example at 8th and H Street NE with the H Street Community Development Corp., which demolished two and three story historic buildings to build a one story piece of crap. While some forces in government did try to get them to do better, at the end of the day, their primary funder, the DC Department of Housing and Community Development and local banks, didn't give a damn and the piece of crap was built. (I used the word "product" above because that is how a DHCD official referred to the H Street project in an article in the Washington Post.)

What the city needed to do was step up and lead the process, and put money in. For all my past complaints about entities like the National Capital Revitalization Corporation, I would argue in the end they probably did a better job than the Deputy's Mayor office can do. The relative independence is important (although that brought them down in the end, Mayor Fenty wanted to divvy up the spoils, I mean "opportunities") because if you have the right people you can do work, whereas most people in government end up being satisfied with the mediocre.

Also see The Need for Alternatives to the Nineteen Standard Real Estate Product Types, Places magazine, June, 2005 by Christopher Leinberger if you want to understand the process, and why improving the city through real estate development is a very difficult and long term process.

The Home Depot shopping center adjacent to Rhode Island Metro Station is very much suburban in its development paradigm. This project happened under Mayor Williams also, just as the Columbia Heights set of projects were planned and realized as well under his term of office.

An update on H Street NE (DC)

After the Florida Market tour on Saturday (and after eating Korean food at the "Florida" Deli on Morse Street), I spent a few hours with Elise re-exploring H Street block by block. It's been awhile since I have done that and it is really kind of edifying and surprising at the same time. In 2000 (or maybe it was 1999) when I got heavily involved in neighborhood improvement activities, it was partly because I thought without getting involved myself, that the neighborhood would continue to languish ("suck").

Now the funny thing is that I don't know how much I myself really contributed. (Actually I did a lot, but it was so long ago...) There were a number of key events:

1. Then Councilmember Sharon Ambrose getting the city to fund and conduct a revitalization study. (Which was finished in 2003.)

2. The Robeys trying to get the Atlas Theater.

3. They didn't, but it put the Atlas Theater in play, and the Sprenger-Lang Foundation got it out of the clutches of the H Street Community Development Corporation, which let the building languish for years. It reopened after a $20+ million renovation in 2006.

4. And the Robeys in turn started the H Street Playhouse, which helped lead the renaissance of the eastern end of the long corridor.

5. At the same time, other people were investing in their commercial properties, while for the most part most of the buildings had been allowed to languish for decades. Not just the Robeys but people like Stuart Bennett (The Language Doctors) and David Bernhardt at the western end (David bought a building at 421 and fixed it--in my opinion it was the most "blighted" building on the corridor--in the turnaround it became one of the best, and others toward the eastern end, such as Delores Montgomery (she fixed up her simple building at 1307) and the owners of the Dry Cleaners at 1100 H Street, who restored the second story of the building, including reopening the windows that had been boarded up for decades, etc. (Elise and I, along with Anwar Saleem, who we ran into while on our walk, talked with him on Saturday.)

6. Many people don't agree with me (they are wrong, and it was watching the impact of this station that shifted my interests to transportation planning, because I believe that when done right, transportation investments are the public investments with the greatest return on investment in urban revitalization), but I attribute a lot of the improvement to the neighborhood to the New York Avenue Metro Station, which made living north of H Street less risky and more appealing for people with choices.

This has led to an improvement in the neighborhood's economics and safety--instead of drug dealing on Orleans Place, you have people pushing baby carriages, something that always shocks me thinking back to the late 1980s, when dozens and dozens of people were murdered in that part of the neighborhood.

People complain about "gentrification" without recognizing that the reason that urban neighborhoods languish is because of lack of demand, i.e., money. Neighborhood and city economies that are broken need money to improve. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

I don't use the G word. Yes, we need to deal with displacement and how to maintain mixed income communities. But we should for the most part never criticize investments in neighborhoods and cities. How else will they improve?

(I still remember one day in 1989 or 1990, when people were murdered at 5th and H and at 5th and K in unrelated incidents, within an hour or two, or the frequent incidents/shots fired at 7th and I, etc.)

7. The investment in the streetscape. While it is still being built and will take awhile to finish, the process started with planning in 2003, so it's pretty fast for a transportation project. But you can see the impact it is having. And I think of the work that people like Kiran Mathema did (then of Baker Projects) conceptually and now seeing it being installed (e.g., his idea for metal banners has been simplified but has been fabricated and is up on the light poles) -- although I have to say one of my best lines ever at a planning meeting, in response to their early planning which was going in a seriously wrong direction -- urban brutalist faux shopping mall aesthetic -- helped the process too.

8. The entry of Joe Englert, the tavern and night time establishment impresario, to the corridor has made a huge difference. I have said before that this has accelerated the improvement of the corridor by 5 to 10 years. I still believe that. Pretty streetscapes don't matter if the buildings are empty, or if the buildings are occupied by middling businesses that are not appealing. Joe brought verve to the business environment. H Street is the happening neighborhood (I refuse to use the term Atlas District), covered in the national press, and the destination for weekend entertainment.

I mean I was talking to a retired Baltimore County worker at Bike to Work Day in Towson last Friday, and she was telling me her son "lives in Capitol Hill." I asked her where, she said on the 900 block of 6th Street NE. (I used to live on the 800 block, for about 15 years.) I was floored. H Street is becoming "Capitol Hill" and it's where the younger set--those people hopefully with energy, verve, ideas, and gumption--want to live, not just where they can live/buy because it's cheap.

9. Yes, it will take a long time for retail to redevelop the way people want it to. And it might not ever really happen. (Explaining why takes up another blog entry which I don't have time to write.) But without getting people out to resample the commercial district, which they do because of the night life, you can never restore a retail district. The real problem with retail there is that the rents are too high, which makes it almost impossible to create a funky retail district on the scale of Carytown in Richmond, or Hampden in Baltimore, which of course is a shame, because if that could occur, it would then be a national best practice example of how to do urban revitalization.

10. The streetcar. As I was walking back to my bike, after leaving Elise at her house, looking for her cat which ran off the night before, and after having a great milkshake, Cheerwine soda, and waffle fries with gravy at the Capitol City Diner (why don't we have a place like this in Takoma, where I live now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), one of the business owners called out to me and asked me about my opinion about the streetcar and overhead wires.

He does not favor overhead wires.

I said that (1) the technology isn't there yet to not have overhead wires. (And regardless of what people say, at DDOT or anywhere else, it isn't there, with batteries or anything, not for a few years, except for extremely short distances.) (2) And that the reality is that in modern streetcar systems like in Portland or Seattle, the overhead wires don't look that bad. (3) BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, there is no modern streetcar system in operation on the East Coast, that this one will be the first, and if you want to build value and verve for the commercial district, make it truly unique and a place to see, visit, shop in, and play, build it. (4) But that as the technology improves, it can be converted from overhead wires to another method--why not make DC the testbed for streetcar technology improvements in the meantime? (5) and work to improve the system over time (incrementally).

After the conversation, he was convinced that it is better to focus on what the streetcar can bring to the corridor (if not to the city) and how it can be improved, rather than on the overhead wires.

Streetcar wire in Seattle. Flickr photo by Kevin R Boyd

11. The amazing thing for me was seeing, despite the fact that H Street is a construction project now, and pretty hard to negotiate, the numbers of people walking up and down the street. I remember how H Street used to be pretty dead on Saturdays, with not much going on. Now there are places like the Taylor (which was full) Sandwich Shop, art galleries (we went into one, which I won't mention, because I thought the art that was displayed was "not very good"), and other places to shop and eat.

12. And every time I see the conglomerate stone topped sidewalks around the city, this treatment has become the standard for commercial districts in the city as streetscape improvements occur elsewhere in the city, I think of how Gina Arlotto suggested doing this on the ANC-6A listserv, and the idea was picked up by Karina Ricks at DDOT, evaluated, and became the standard. Citizen involvement can and does improve the city. (I was involved some in this decision too.)

13. Now, H Street is still a somewhat wacked place in terms of leadership, social capital, and organizational capacity (I'm thinking of people like Robert Pittman, and even people like Margaret Holwill), with lots of different groups all vying to take credit and shape the change and fight the change (plus I gather that the ANC6A has declined a bit in quality as Joe Fengler has left the ANC for a different part of Greater Capitol Hill), or to just be illogically insane, and I am happy to not be dealing with it, but to have learned all that I have as a participant in and an observer of the process of neighborhood and urban improvement.

Most people don't get to experience this kind of neighborhood improvement in their lifetimes.

And I definitely want to go back to Capitol City Diner.

(NO photos. I took some, but haven't uploaded them yet.)

Florida Market tour and handout...

We didn't have it ready for the tour, but we have just posted an updated printable directory with a couple changes in the store lineup.

Bob Kovacs came along on the tour on Saturday and he did a video, which is up on youtube for your edification if you so choose (although I have never been happy with the sound of my recorded voice).

(Not quite 40 people came out to the tour--I expect that the threat of rain plus interminable delays on the Red Line depressed the turnout some--and as always, it was fun to do.)

Thanks to Christopher Taylor Edwards for the directory update, and to Elise Bernard and Ken Firestone for their always able assistance as co-leaders of the tour.

Quote of the day (if not month and year) (DC related)

From the Post article "D.C. mayor, opponent at odds over fence issue":

Nickles said he gets involved in city issues big and small when it comes to public confidence in government. He said he is unhappy that it has taken five months for District agencies to resolve the case and is troubled by Gray's response.

If you keep up on the issues that Nickles gets involved with, if anything when he gets involved at the micro-level on an issue, for me anyway, my confidence in municipal government and fairness and public integrity drops further.

The attorney general has three somewhat conflicting roles:

1. Representing "the people"
2. Representing "the government"
3. Representing "the Mayor" or chief executive and the Executive Branch (the government agencies).

Mostly Peter Nickles represents the Mayor.

It's why I favor converting this position from an appointed office to an elected office, so that the office holder is more focused on representing the people's interests.

It's easy to say what you should do, and really hard to make it work

Neal Peirce's latest column calls on cities and suburbs to collaborate. See "Cities and suburbs must collaborate‎" from the Denver Post. But while it might be true that "many high-density suburbs now resemble inner cities in their growth trajectories and commuting patterns" the reality is that for the most part, the level of impoverishment in the center city is still significantly greater than in the suburbs, especially when it is broken down county by county.

In most regions, the city is incredibly impoverished, and suburban residents don't see the financial benefit for addressing it. (This is the whole basis of Orfield's metropolitics argument.)

Plus the political landscape is heterogeneous and it's damn difficult to work together when officials are so different demographically (race, income, class, educational attainment). (I've come to believe in my urban revitalization work that doing commercial district revitalization successfully in heterogenous places is incredibly difficult.)

Christopher had sent me a link to a blog entry "It's the leadership stupid" from Branding for Cities, which mentioned a Financial Times article, "Wanted: a strong mayor with vision to see off rival centres" (registration required). The article starts off with this:

Successful regeneration increasingly depends on creating a unique vision for the future that attracts investment in the face of fierce competition from other cities.

“The first thing a city government needs to do is to decide what they are and what they want to be,” says Ged Drugan, programme director for the executive education centre at Manchester Business School.

“They really need a vision for the future that credibly differentiates the city and makes it stand out, but cities sometimes fall short on that.”

It's funny because I have been thinking about municipality benchmarking a lot the last few days while thinking about the issues that Baltimore County faces in the context of the Baltimore metropolitan area.

I mentioned to someone at work how Montgomery County's Council commissioned a report comparing their locality to Fairfax County, and it was a pretty direct report that found Montgomery County, Maryland wanting in many respects. See "Even Montgomery agrees: Life looks brighter in Fairfax" from the Washington Post.

What I wrote to Christopher in response to the FT article was this:

I don't know if the issue is having a unique vision necessary, as much as having a vision first of all, and second, a vision that is cognizant of the future and able to be robust and resilient in the face of change. (some direct stuff I wrote is edited out)

The county doesn't use the types of financial mechanisms--tax increment financing, special services districts (like business improvement districts or the "urban services districts" that Montgomery County uses to manage places like Bethesda and Silver Spring), etc.--that municipalities need to use in order to invest in and build forward for the future. This makes it almost impossible to provide the infrastructure investments necessary for revitalization.

And that doesn't even get to the transit question. Most people in the region, including public officials, don't prioritize transit, seeing it as a service of last resort for poor people, mostly of color, mostly in the city. They don't see the potential of transit as an economic development tool that can reshape land use and mobility paradigms in positive, "game changing" ways.

When I look at places like Towson, White Marsh, or Owings Mills, and then compare them to Bethesda and Silver Spring (which have some advantages--transit for one, and a special taxing and services district for another, plus more population and more affluence, plus DC these days is better off than Baltimore) I am rueful over the lost opportunity.

The county is satisfied by being "better" than Baltimore City, when they really need to benchmark their success and expectations against the most successful somewhat comparable counties in the greater region (i.e., Montgomery and Fairfax, not just Carroll and Harford--rural, or Howard and Anne Arundel) and nationally.

But most municipalities are very much inward looking. This is especially true of the District of Columbia. Because people don't get out much, they don't develop the habit of looking for good examples of better practice and setting high expectations and standards for success. I don't really understand why the political and social and quality culture is so hermetic. But it is. And it doesn't make for a very resilient and robust region.

As I used to say 7-8 years ago, DC can be satisfied being more successful than places like St. Louis or Baltimore, but the reality is that the city competes with Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, and Montgomery Counties for population and business. In many instances, Washington doesn't measure up.

While I don't think it's necessary to give money (tax incentives) to companies like Lockheed-Martin to relocate to DC. I do think a substantive municipal economic development and public finance strategy and plan is necessary, one focused on building a more balanced and resilient economy. I would aver that such a strategy and plan is not in place, at least in DC.

And in this instance, DC is not exceptional as few municipalities, even with a master plan, really do this to the extent that it needs to be done.

Charity on wheels: bus fares and transit system revenue

The Post today editorializes about continued underpricing of bus fares for the WMATA system, and how this hurts the system overall. See "Charity on wheels‎."

I am glad to see the editorial, which "conforms" to my editorial judgment. It's a point I made about a year ago, in testimony at the public hearing in January 2009, reprinted in the entry "Testimony on proposed bus service cuts in the Washington region" as well as in testimony submitted this year. (And last year, Dr. Gridlock quoted my testimony in a column in the Post on the transit fares question, around the point that in constant dollar terms through 2009, the basic subway and bus fares haven't increased in over 20 years.)

When the transit operator underprices fares, they generate less revenue, and over time, this comes back in diminished quality and breadth of service. This is the place where the WMATA transit system is today.

On the other hand, it is not reasonable to avoid discussion of transit and equity issues. To the credit of DC representatives on the WMATA Board of Directors, they are concerned about equity issues and they make it the priority when it comes to making decisions on fare pricing.


Toronto takes the consideration of equity to a higher level than we do in the DC region. For example, in 2008, the City of Toronto and the Toronto Transit Commission introduced a new concept, called “Transit City,” to shape expansion planning. As recounted in the article, "Toronto Plan rolls out new era in Transit," from the Toronto Star:

"Transit City is based on the principle that no one should be disadvantaged by not owning a car. (It) takes the high-quality transit service available in the core and begins to extend that to the four corners of Toronto," said TTC chair Adam Giambrone.

This organizing principle changes the discussion when it comes to both system expansion and service cuts. If the principle is that no one should be disadvantaged by not owning a car, it means that service cuts and reductions in the places and geography that is served should for the most part be off the table.

Where my testimony from last year is deficient and is avoided in the Post editorial as well, is in making the necessary links between:

1. providing transit fare assistance to people in need;
2. disconnecting that responsibility from the transit operator (in this case WMATA);
3. connecting that responsibility to the local governments; and
4. creating a system to provide that assistance.

What that means practically is that instead of DC elected officials on the WMATA board voting against fare increases and for service cuts, they should vote to increase fares and maintain service. At the same time, as elected officials in DC, they need to show leadership and develop a system of "transit credits," comparable to how the earned income tax credit works at the federal level, to incentivize working while recognizing the somewhat regressive nature of social security taxes at lower levels of income.

(I have been advocating the idea of a transit withholding tax as a way to fund transit system improvements in DC. It could generate upwards of $200 million annually and is based conceptually on a similar tax that is assessed in the Portland and Eugene areas of Oregon. This could generate some of the necessary revenue to pay for transit credits, as well as system improvement and expansion initiatives. And unlike social security, the assessment would only be on employers, not employees.)

This gets back to a point that I keep making, that regional level of service and level of quality metrics need to be set by a regional planning authority, independent of the transit operator.

In testimony I submitted this year ("Testimony regarding Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Options to address FY2010 Budget Gap: Public Hearing #547"), I wrote:

A transit system that doesn't go where you want when you want, relatively quickly, is not a low cost system, even if the fares are "low," because to get where you want to go you have to spend a lot of time to accomplish your trip.

How can that be equitable? In short, crippling the bus and rail service by maintaining low fares keeps the system constantly focused on reducing costs, and results in a constantly reduced service profile.

Transit planning should be a separate endeavor from transit operations. By default, WMATA is both the region's transit planner and the region's transit operator.

But decisions about the level of service, level of quality, and the breadth of the transit network shouldn't be made by the transit operator, but by the region. In response to such metrics and preferences, WMATA in turn should demonstrate how to meet these preferences, what level of revenue is required, and offer options, including a discussion on fares, and appropriate farebox revenue levels, necessary to achieve the provision of the specified level of service, quality, and network robustness.
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What is necessary is that the region rebuild its consensus about what transit is supposed to do and what it is supposed to accomplish.

My recommendation for how to deal with this is included in this year's testimony:

... The St. Louis region is currently going through a region-wide public planning process concerning the role of transit in the region. For many years, Chicago has been dealing with similar issues. And the San Francisco Transit Effectiveness Project (a multi-agency city government initiative) addresses comparable concerns.

All of these processes have involved significant citizen participation and input, as well as deep and wide discussions throughout their respective regions, including the widest possible participation and involvement of stakeholders at all levels.

In order to restore trust in the WMATA system generally, and to come up with a common understanding about the role of transit in the region, pricing, and metrics for level of service, level of quality, and the breadth of the transit network, the Citizens Planning Coalition recommends (as it has been recommending for at least 4 years in various writings) that WMATA embark on a similar public planning and participation process.

It is extremely important that this be a participatory process rather than a dog and pony show seemingly seeking citizen input, without allowing for the possibility of real substance.

(Also see the article, "Crowdsourcing helps the Chicago Chamber of Commerce Find More Bus Riders," from Government Technology Magazine, on an initiative seeking proposals for improvements in the quality and breadth of the transit system in the Chicago region. As well as discussions in the Toronto Star on the "transit camp" and other independent citizen initiatives focused on improving local transit.)
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We need a real, substantive, fundamental transit planning process that is metropolitan in scope, that goes beyond the perspective of the transit service operators (WMATA and the other transit services provided by the local jurisdictions), one that grapples with the tough questions that for the most part we seem to be avoiding notwithstanding the efforts of bloggers like myself--my entries tend to focus more on the systems and structures of governance, management, and planning as it relates to the region and to the transit operator specifically--and the many many entries of substance in Greater Greater Washington especially entries by Michael Perkins, David Alpert, and Matt Johnson.

Fixing the suburbs is really important, but the suburbs aren't the city and shouldn't be mistaken for such

So it's arguable that Andres Duany is the man who fixed the city a la the headline and story in The Atlantic Magazine, "The Man Who Reinvented the City." From the article:

This year marks the 30th anniversary of New Urbanism, the school of town planning and architectural design that highlights walkability, self-contained communities, and dense neighborhoods. Hailed as the antithesis of--and answer to--suburban sprawl, car culture, and the megamall, New Urbanism has proven both influential and contentious. (Its flagship development, Seaside, Florida, served as the too-quaint-to-be-real set for The Truman Show.) But its innovations and ideologies continue to shape the post-industrial streetscape, from the Rustbelt to the Sunbelt.

I'm not saying that Andres isn't great. He is. I am impressed by his rigor, fervence, commitment, leadership, and ability to inspire.

But his most significant influence is on the suburban landscape, not the urban streetscape.

The headline of the story in The Atlantic ought to be "The man who is reinventing the suburbs." And note the word reinventing vs. reinvented. If you check out any major suburban county in the U.S., they are a long long way from being able to be called reinvented.

Rockville Pike, Montgomery County, Maryland. Photo from the Paula's Picture Window blog, and the entry "Rockville Pike is Always Changing, and Always Useful."

Maybe I quibble. Sprawl, car culture, and megamalls are suburban issues for the most part, except when people imprinted by the suburban land use development paradigm attempt to use and apply the same concepts to decidedly urban places, the center cities.

This problem I call intra-city sprawl and others have called it "inward suburbanization."

It's true that new urbanism has reinvigorated thinking about cities, and lots of planners have been reintroduced to urban concepts as a result of being exposed to New Urbanism, plus they have figured out what's wrong with cities (sometimes at least) when learning about the "transect" that links the appropriateness of built (urban) form to land use context.

This illustration from The House Book by Keith DuQuette illustrates the transect concept.

Is mixed use an exclusively "new urban" concept? Absolutely not.

Many people have contributed to the revitalization of urban concepts. And the work of many predate new urbanism, starting with Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, Jan Gehl in Europe, the Main Street revitalization approach, which was based on an effort in Corning, New York which started in the early 1960s, although the Main Street model wasn't tested until beginning in 1977, etc.

(Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces calls new urbanism "new suburbanism.")

Relativistic thinking by journalists is dangerous

If you study cognitive development theory, you learn that as people develop their mental skills, they go through various stages. Some people get stuck in the relativism phase, where they might believe that every side to an issue has good points, and it's not possible to decide. This is the phase after dualism, where everything is right or wrong, and before "commitment" when people understand that relativistic thinking is method, but that you can and should make choices.

In the "Bike to Work" day article in today's Express, the author of the piece states the DC Department of Transportation director Gabe Klein has to be agnostic about whether or not he prefers a particular transportation mode.

Not true.

The Department of Transportation is supposed to focus on the movement of people, goods, and services, sure, but it manages a transportation system, and should be focused on getting the system to function and operate _optimally_.

That means making choices.

A car takes up about 128 square feet and needs a bunch of dedicated spaces equal in size, distributed to multiple locations (home, work, school, shopping, etc.) in order to be stored. A 60 foot articulated bus takes up about 480 square feet--about four times the size of the car. But the bus can carry 60-100 people, while the car typically transports only one or two people.

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The 128 s.f. number is edited. I had written 240 s.f., but I was thinking of something else and I didn't recheck the figure I used. The number comes from 16*8 which is the typical amount of space allocated to a parking space for a compact car. Thanks to Spookiness for the impetus to the correction.
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Should a department of transportation treat all modes equally, or focus on optimality?

The case for stopping the construction of roads...

When you deal with bike trails issues, frequently people will respond that trails breed crime and vandalism. While it is true that multiuser trails are not crime free, the reality is that compared to nearby residential or commercial areas, as a rule trails experience less crime.

See "Property Value/Desirability Effects of Bike Paths Adjacent to Residential Areas" from the University of Delaware for a sum up of the research on the topic.

I mentioned this in an email at work in response to someone against a particular trail proposal.

I then commented in my response that more crimes are committed in association with automobile usage than bicycles, but we don't use that fact to fight against building new roads or closing down the existing street network. Not to mention police-criminal car chases...

No response yet. (And probably not the best thing to write as a "government official.")

Searchable property permits database application in DC

Matthew Gilmore, in a post on H-DC, calls our attention to the new DC Dept. of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs "Permit Intake Validation Service" searchable database.

He writes:

In a single, easy-to-use application you will find information from the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs including:

Issued permits
Residential housing complaint cases
Commercial (permit-related) inspections
Occupancy (certificate of occupancy and home occupation permits)
Basic business licensing (current and past)
Property conditions which may affect permitting and inspections (stop-work orders and special jurisdictions such as historic districts)

One seamless search offers data for any property in the District of Columbia. Types of permits and licenses, dates, and status are included. Agency data included goes back to 2002.

Simply enter an address or property ID (square, suffix, and lot--SSL) and search. Data is displayed in nine individual tabs but printer-friendly reports allow quick access to complete picture of the property. A link is provided to DCRA's online building permit tracking system too.

Basic data about the property including zoning, ward and ANC are included. Additional links will take you to Google Street view, returning a current picture and map; another the Bing Map Bird's Eye view; another link to Google will allow exploration of other internet-accessible information on a property, including the various real estate sites like Trulia.

Urban economic development strategies: do you invest in people or places? ... yes

Urban economists debate investing in places--big projects, working to attract plants, build sports stadiums, etc.--vs. investing in people--education, small business development, and quality of life initiatives.

A chapter of Richard Florida's book, The Great Reset, discusses this debate in terms of the rust belt, and comes down fully in favor of the people approach. See "How to Revitalize Rustbelt Cities." (Thanks Nigel for the tip.)

The article starts off by discussing the Shrinking Cities movement and then moves into focusing on regional (but place-based) assets such as universities, neighborhoods, community organizations, and will and how to leverage the opportunities presented.

My line about this is that places like Pittsburgh--one of the examples in the piece--have what I call "a desperate willingness to experiment" because they have no other choice. But Pittsburgh, in terms of revitalization opportunity, has at least seven advantages that many other communities no longer possess.

First, it has a number of quality universities that continue to attract talent, and at least two of the universities have strong engineering education programs which

Second, help develop new technologies and generate spin off businesses which build the region's economy and provide higher paying jobs.

Third, it doesn't hurt that the University of Pittsburgh Hospital System is world class, especially in organ transplantation. This anchors medical care as a key "local" industry.

Fourth, Pittsburgh still has a handful of large national and global companies based there, a mix of manufacturing-research based companies like PPG and the U.S. headquarters for Bayer AG, software companies, and service industries (such as Mellon Bank). This means that there are still job and idea-producing industries there, even though these businesses are subject to the same concentration and downsizing trends affecting such companies.

Fifth, Pittsburgh has a couple of incredibly strong foundations still present locally, focused on funding organizations and initiatives that improve the city both socially and economically.

The real mover and shaker in the Pittsburgh foundation world are the Heinz Endowments, which fund in significant ways community organizations and initiatives, but hyper-focused on results. In other words, rather than continuing to fund the same old organizations generating middling results, they measure and fund accordingly, while at the same time provide support for capacity building so that organizations are focused on building the capacity for improvement

From the Heinz website:

Our mission is to help Southwestern Pennsylvania thrive as a whole community--economically, ecologically, educationally, and culturally--while advancing the state of knowledge and practice in the fields in which we work.

(In an interesting irony, the Scaife Foundations, which are known nationally for funding what we would call very much "hard right and conservative" causes, are based in the Pittsburgh region, derived from Mellon wealth, but locally fund significant and important economic development initiatives, such as adaptive reuse historic preservation based projects.)

By comparison the foundations and institutions in the DC area focus more on maintenance of the status quo (even if they would deny it). Funding innovation, initiative and challenges to the prevailing consensus, wisdom, and agenda is the last thing you should expect from the local foundations here.

Sixth, it helps and maybe this comes from the innovation history and legacy that the region exhibits, that organizations there are problem and self-help focused.

The Sprout Fund's Seed Award, which funds small citizen-initiated projects, is more innovative than just about any foundation-based program that I can think of in the DC region. It's about fostering initiative and self-help, rather than looking to the government to solve your problems.

Other similarly focused organizations include the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, one of the nation's most effective local historic preservation organizations, and two impressive technical assistance organizations, the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh and the Community Technical Assistance Center.

Despite the many universities based in DC, plus the local affiliate of the Local Initiatives Support Center, I would aver that we have no such comparable organizations in DC. Most cities in need of revitalization lack such organizations, and it makes revitalization that much more difficult.

Ahh, and the "community development corporations" there are far more intriguing than in most cities. The South Side Local Development Corporation has led the revitalization effort on East Carson Street, one of the first Urban Main Street programs, and one of the most successful. The Penn Ave Arts Initiative is the joint effort of two neighborhood groups, and its one of the more successful arts development initiatives I've seen, working in a very difficult area with limited opportunities. The Lawrenceville Corporation's 16:62 Design Zone is another best practice revitalization initiative. And the Northside Leadership Conference has a number of interesting local development initiatives, and in part receives funding from the local hospital complex. Plus, Neighbors in the Strip continues to plug along (with inadequate support from the city) on their public market creation initiative. A 6,000 s.f. market opens this summer (their proposal is to take over part of the old B&O food auction warehouse for a full-fledged market).

Seventh, the arts organizations there have some heft. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has focused on re-establishing arts uses downtown and maintaining and extending the arts infrastructure there. The Carnegie Institutions set a standard of excellence as well. Etc.
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So I guess the point is that you need to have people-focused institutions that are place-committed. Capital can move anytime. But locally focused and locally committed institutions won't move. And if these institutions can develop a focus on improvement that is based on best practice, innovation, and quality then they become the levers and fulcrums of a new kind of industry.

If they don't, revitalization efforts are muddled and don't ever amount to very much.

Watch out for Meth

Watch out for Meth
Originally uploaded by Karen Apricot New Orleans

Wayfinding with manhole covers

I have always been interested in the idea of using manhole covers as a distinguishing factor in urban environments. Here and there across the country (Minneapolis; New York City, now around Eastern Market in DC) there are good examples. Tokyo is really known for it. (See the book Designs Underfoot: The Art of Manhole Covers in New York City.)

Steven calls our attention to this blog entry, "Map Hole Points The Way," from Yanko Design.

The entry discusses a manhole cover based wayfinding system. Of course, you can also do this with "disks" embedded in the sidewalk. After all, there is something to be said for not having to wander out in the middle of the street to figure out where to go.

It's still a cool idea though.

Flickr photo of Chuo-Ko manhole cover in Osaka by jpellgen

Florida Market tour, Saturday May 22nd

Explore Florida Market directory and history signage, side 1
Originally uploaded by rllayman

As part of Walking (and Biking) Town DC put on by CulturalTourismDC, I will be co-leading a tour of this wholesale and retail food market district.

It's from 9am to 10:30am on Saturday, staring across from the north entrance of the New York Avenue-Florida Avenue Metro Station, at 2nd and N Streets NE.

Tomorrow starts Responsible Tourism Week

I forget sometimes that one of my areas of interest/expertise is cultural tourism. Ron Mader of Planeta calls our attention to Responsible Tourism Week, which starts tomorrow. The webpage offers these tips:

Walk the talk - Practice responsible tourism where you are.
Play nice! - Use Responsible Tourism Week as an opportunity to build healthy relationships at the local and international levels.
Make it delicious - Eat good local food and let visitors know where to treat their taste buds well.
Be generous! - Compliment someone via twitter, fave a photo or write a testimonial on Flickr, give a thumbs up to a video on YouTube.
Be creative - Make your own poster or graphic for RT Week!
Have your say - What is responsible tourism? Please answer the rt survey
Show your savvy - Use the hashtag: #rtweek2010

Resources

- Details
- Slideshare

Relatedly, the third conference on Civic Tourism is Aug. 11-14, 2010 in Fort Collins, CO.

Resources:

- Civic Tourism
- National Geographic Traveler Magazine
- Tourism Development Handbook: A Practical Approach to Planning and Marketing

Graphic, impact of dense mixed use development vs. single use deconcentrated development

Graphic, impact of dense mixed use development vs. single use deconcentrated development
Originally uploaded by rllayman

Whatevvvveeeer

Today's Post has a story on the "contested spaces in the city," the article "New baby boom fosters culture clash: Parents vs. public spaces‎."

This contestation is about the right and privilege of access to urban spaces and whether or not access privileges are extended to parents and children. Parents believe that their children deserve space. Many (I would argue, younger, privileged, and selfish) non-parents do not. For the record, I don't have children.

But frankly, the story is pretty damn boring (as our most of the columns by another Post writer, Petula Dvorak, which cover similar kinds of issues). The interesting aspect of the question inadequately discussed in the Post article or some of the other venues mentioned in the article is what we might call "the infantilization of adult spaces" by the introduction of children, for example, in bars.

This comes down to young adults not knowing how to act as adults while juggling their roles as parents. Accommodating children on buses is one thing ("Circulator starts banning unfolded strollers," the Greater Greater Washington thread mentioned in the Post article), even coffee shops (see the article below). There the issues are about civility and behavior management of children. Children in bars and certain kinds of restaurants are quite another issue.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times Mothers and children gathered to talk and drink at the Lucky Cat in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2004.

The Post article is duplicative and repetitive of stories from the past ten years in the New York Times about similar complaints in both New York City and Chicago:

- Look Who's Getting Rolled Out of the Bar (2008)
- In Surge in Manhattan Toddlers, Rich White Families Lead Way (2007)
- The Park Slope Parent Trap (2007)
- At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops (2005)
- Go Ahead and Cry. It's Happy Hour.; Mothers Find Social Outlet, and Babies Are Welcome (2004).

I wrote about the Andersonville coffee shop issue back in the first months of the blog...

Also see this article from Salon, "Everybody hates mommy - Motherhood.

Changing the paradigm #1

Themail/DCwatch is one of the city's only consistent web and email based advocates for good government in the City of Washington. Mostly, themail is posts from people across the city, including me. The editor, Gary Imhoff, writes an overview/opinion piece/screed in most of the issues. How you term his overview depends on how you feel about the issue...

The latest issue starts off with a "screed" about streetcars, using the theme stated by others similarly opposed, about how streetcars are an obsolete technology, after all they were abandoned in the last century.

My response upends that trope with a different way of thinking...

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Gary, you so don't know much about transportation planning, and why streetcars were overtaken by the automobile, that I wouldn't know where to begin. I could write a response that easily would take up an entire issue, but I won't.

The issue is how should the city plan for the future. Should it focus on optimizing automobility, when a majority of work trips are by transit, walking, and bicycling, when the city's residents own fewer cars than the national and regional average, and when a significant number of nonwork trips are by transit, walking, and bicycling, or should the city focus on strengthening and extending the transit infrastructure to further the city's economic and competitive advantages around transit, reducing dependence on automobility and on oil.

It's great that you focus on streetcars from 50 or 60 years ago. But I don't understand why you and all the other people who make similar arguments refuse to acknowledge how surface rail transit, either streetcars or light rail, function successfully today, in North America as well as Europe. You're making a straw man argument that is almost completely irrelevant to today's mobility needs, not to mention the reality that in a situation where oil supplies are declining and demand is increasing, planning for automobile-centric mobility is dangerous.

Basically, the issue is how the real estate industry wanted to maximize profit from land development and how the automobile industry wanted to sell its product meant that the land use and transportation paradigm had to change. And it did, towards a deconcentrated and spread out development pattern. [And a focus on places, the suburbs, where untouched land was ready for development, rather than the cities, where most of the land was already developed.]

But it is for this reason that streetcars and similar transit technologies ceased to be economic rather than because they were "obsolete." Automobiles were and are subsidized by massive public road building. Taxes and fees by motor vehicle operators pay about 50% of the cost of roads.

Without subsidies, and with a regulatory apparatus that made it difficult to raise rates, privately owned transit systems were unable to compete against the triple whammy of road subsidies to the automobile user, housing policies that favored spread out suburban locations, and the inability to raise rates. This problem was accentuated as workplaces spread out from the central business district or major manufacturing locations.

I will grant you that many people preferred to have individual transportation [an automobile] rather than mass transportation. But transportation that is efficient for the individual isn't necessarily efficient for the mass.

A mass transportation system optimizes the mobility of public transit vehicles (and walking). A personalized transportation system optimizes the mobility of the [individual]/automobile.

The problem is that it is not possible to build an efficient road (transportation) system where every adult conducts 5-8 trips/day by automobile.

Furthermore, center cities in general and Washington in particular were designed to optimize walking and transit (bicycling works well in the same urban form). So optimal mobility in the city in particular is best achieved by focusing on transit.

DC's economic competitive advantage within the Washington metropolitan region is specifically tied to transit, successful and robust transit. In fact, in DC generally, and in the core of the city specifically, more trips are conducted by walking, bicycling, and transit per capita than any other city in the U.S., except for NYC. DC resident commuter times are at about the national average, and are second in the region only to Arlington (which is about 1/3 the size of DC so it is more compact), but are much better than every other county in the region.

Furthermore, DC households own fewer cars than the national average, and more DC households do not own cars compared to other jurisdictions in the region.

So if you ask me, it makes sense to focus on the next generation mass mobility technologies of today--streetcars, light rail, and subways--rather than the obsolete individualized mobility technologies of last century--the automobile.

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Note that I think there are some serious problems with DC's surface rail transit planning as I have written about before. But I don't question the necessity of improving surface based transit, extending the transit network generally, and moving towards fixed rail transit on the city's streets.

Ironically, one of the things that people criticize streetcars for--having a fixed route--rather than being "flexible" like a bus, was seen very differently by people back in the 1940s, such as on H Street NE, by the business leaders.

In their testimony to the DC Public Service Commission in the hearings on the abandonment of the 10/12 line on H Street, they argued that a bus line could move, while a streetcar line would not, so that there would be no guarantee that transit service would continue to serve the corridor and maintain the commercial district.

They were right.

Is it any coincidence (as Ed Tennyson argues) that the massive drop in public transit ridership

coincided with the conversion of fixed rail transit systems to buses?

Sure this drop in ridership also corresponds with the massive increase in personal automobile ownership, so you can't attribute all of the change to the difference in transit technology. But it is worth considering.

TINTO and sports funding

You've heard the term, "gigo," in the computer world, with regard to databases--garbage in, garbage out, meaning you're output is only as good as your input.

I am offering a new term, "tinto," meaning "taxes in, no taxes out" to refer to Councilman Jack Evans and how he supports continuous tax support of sports facilities but doesn't believe that taxes on sporting events ought to support anything other than those facilities.

Today's Post has a story, "Councilman plans to hit up sports fans with District ticket tax," reporting on Councilman Thomas' proposal to put a tax on tickets to sporting events to support parks and recreation programs. From the article:

Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), chairman of the Committee on Finance and Revenue, said Thomas's proposal is problematic. While Thomas said the Washington Nationals would be exempt under an earlier agreement with the city, Evans said Verizon Center -- home to the Capitals, Mystics and Wizards -- would also be exempt unless the arena owner agrees to accept the tax.

"People involved with these teams don't want the money used for things outside" their stadiums, Evans said.

Why the hell does the City Government write contracts that totally, unequivocally favor the sports teams at the expense of the city and its return on investment for the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the sports teams (for stadiums, arenas, and infrastructure)?

Remember how the Washington Nationals wouldn't pay rent for their stadium because it wasn't "finished" even though they were using it, had their offices inside and functioning?

Doesn't it majorly piss you off that only if they actually live in the city, do players from the "Washington" Nationals, "Washington" Capitals, or "Washington" Wizards pay any income taxes to DC on their salaries, which are earned in DC, where they play?

For some guidance on how the "Growth Machine" works in terms of sports teams, see the section "Local News Media, Green Bay Packers and the Growth Machine" from the paper "Sport News in the Local Media - Green Bay Packers' Return to Glory."

Vote and die

Remember all those "vote or die" campaigns targeting young voters, say from the mid-1990s through 2004 or 2008.

What happens when you vote and things still really suck?

What are you supposed to do when your choices are so rank, that you don't even want to go to the polls and cast a ballot to begin with?

This comes to mind after going around the city this past weekend (without my camera) and seeing campaign signs for Vincent Orange as DC Council Chair. Today's Post has a story about the campaign, "Vincent Orange will challenge Kwame Brown in race for D.C. Council chairmanship," and the very traditional terrible hacks (John Ray, H.R. Crawford, Kevin Chavous) who are supporting him. Ugh. Really bad. I can't think of many worse people in the city than John Ray (e.g., of the Florida Market City Council master development rights "land grab") or H.R. Crawford (real estate shenanigans) or Kevin Chavous and his charter schoolitis.

I wonder of course, if Kwame Brown is any better. I had the misfortune of attending his very first campaign event in something like 2003 or 2004 and so I've always had a hard time... I like his father, Marshall, but Marshall was one of Marion Barry's chief field directors, and that makes it even harder for me.

In the Mayoral election, we have choices between Mayor Fenty, who believes he knows everything, and isn't driven by vision, and Vince Gray. Gray is smart, but he, like all of the other candidates thus far, is for the most part one of the interchangeable cogs in the Growth Machine.

Abstract from "City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place" by Harvey Molotch:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

This is why I usually find it funny when people think that somehow their candidate is different. For the most part, all candidates support the consensus agenda of "growth."

Yes, it does make a difference between who gets elected, sometimes. I'd rather have a Martin O'Malley over a Robert Ehrlich. O'Malley supports transit and other ground-up economic development efforts (such as commercial district revitalization, heritage based tourism initiatives, etc.); Ehrlich does not.

But the choices the electorate faces in DC look increasingly bad, and except for the fact that you have other hacks running for the at-large City Council position (Clark Ray--his campaign plank is that Mayor Fenty needs more support on Council; Kelvin Robinson--he was chief of staff for awhile for Mayor Williams), targeting Phil Mendelson, who does in fact challenge the Growth Machine from time and time, and therefore has earned my support, I am looking at the upcoming primary election as a very distasteful experience where I don't want to go to the polls and vote at all.

Why is it that our choices are so bad to begin with?

Also see this blog entry from 2005, "Tom Sherwood, Duncan Spencer, Anwar Amal, and thinking about what I call the 'Uncivil War'"and this one from 2008, "Being "right" vs. being strategic politically."

Rebalancing urban mobility priorities towards sustainability and the DC example

I have a couple of half written blog entries about this topic, I just don't really have time to finish something these days... But I started writing this entry as a comment in the thread on Washcycle, in response to this particular entry, "The Empire Strikes Back." Washcycle, Greater Greater Washington, and other online media sources have been very good on the topic. I regret that I haven't had the time heretofore to weigh in.

1. Washcycle comments how Mid Atlantic AAA has had to back down from its "war on drivers" position in the face of criticism from members, the national AAA, and other stakeholders. Instead, they have repositioned their argument about "the process" and whether or not there has been adequate study and public involvement.

2. There is no question that DC OP and DDOT can always improve the public process. Sure.

3. But wrt this issue that is somewhat disingenous a position for MA AAA because there has been a public process that has been reasonably decent. What happened is that the public process was designed to prioritize sustainable transportation, not automobility, and so Mid Atlantic AAA isn't happy.

4. The real question is the issue of rebalancing transportational space towards urban priorities rather than suburban mobility paradigms of automobility/autocentricity and the optimal use of infrastructure.

Flickr reworking by Russ Nelson of an original image and concept by the City of Muenster, Germany.

5. The city's urban form was designed at a time when cars didn't exist. The center city was designed very specifically to prioritize walking first and foremost.

It happened that as transit and bicycles were added to the mix, these modalities also worked very well in a form and development pattern that was reasonably dense, and put work destinations pretty close to where people lived, and overlaid neighborhoods and the close by city center with civic amenities and other destinations. (See the webpage "The Automobile Shapes The City: From “Walking Cities” to “Automobile Cities." This idea is based on the paper by Peter Muller, "Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis.")

Short blocks, radial avenues that cut across the grid, population density, neighborhood-based amenities, and "jobs-housing balance" typifies Pierre L'Enfant's design and ideas for how DC was supposed to develop. The idea is to create an urban system which works to minimize the need to make special trips, or trips of long distances.

Public policy ought to "demand" that public space be utilized most efficiently and optimally. Therefore, how the network of streets is designed and used, ought to be re-allocated to the most efficient modes.

Walking, transit, and bicycling is the most optimal way to get around in the core of the city especially.

Therefore walking, biking, and transit use on the city's streetspace should be prioritized, not begrudged.

That is going to cause lots of animus on the part of the automobilist.

6. Because most DC residents were not originally urban dwellers, they too tend to be imprinted with what we might call a suburban-centric viewpoint of how mobility works, and the accommodation of cars.

I constantly tell people in the suburbs (where I am working at present) that it isn't any easier to rebalance mobility towards sustainable transportation in the city, that many urban constituencies are just as committed to their automobile and prioritizing parking space as any suburbanite.

The Mid-Atlantic AAA position with regard to the car: first, foremost, and always; regardless of the place, is a perfect example of this.

7. So related to this, the rebalancing, and my unfinished blog entries, is the "Barnes dance" pedestrian prioritized intersection coming to 7th and H Streets NW. That's another example of what the city needs to do at least in the core of the city, making more places more congenial to and supportive of walking, since a majority of work trips in the city are conducted sustainably (walking, transit, bicycling), and in the core of the city, a significant number of nonwork trips are performed sustainably as well.

Pedestrian-prioritized intersection at Yonge and Dundas Streets, Toronto. Toronto Star photo.

8. At the same time, GGW was right to point out a few weeks ago, that the city hasn't adequately planned for surface-based transit prioritization downtown. I wrote about that in "Bus transit prioritization and creating a downtown transitway network."

9. But the best public process in the world isn't going to get automobilists to back down, despite the logic, despite traffic plans, etc. Mid-Atlantic AAA doesn't care about the process. What they care about is prioritizing automobiles, always, all the time, anytime.

10. Plus, they aren't going to accept the urban planning belief that some degree of congestion is a good thing, that it discourages people from driving, and that it is a sign of vibrancy and success, at least in the city. (In the suburbs it's a sign that the mobility system is unbalanced.)

Historic preservation redux: you can't ever take constituency building for granted

In talking over with Suzanne about the previous two entries, we were discussing what's likely to happen with Save America's Treasures, etc., and she commented on how people get insular and take things for granted, and then being unable to respond, when cutbacks and changes are made or proposed.

This reminded me of yet another blog entry that is worth reprinting...
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(some stuff about DC edited, this introduction was written at the start of the Fenty Administration in DC in 2007.)

... But this brings up the issue of constituency building once again. Not so much with the Office of Planning--any director of that organization is screwed because they have to do things that they are told to do, and various neighborhoods aren't going to like it, and they end up aligning with others who promise a change at the top, not recognizing the system is the problem more than the specific people (although I suppose under Fred Green it was both the system and the people...).

Read "City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place" by Harvey Molotch. Until you do, you won't really understand how things work.

Wolves, a/k/a developers, and those who serve them (financiers, lawyers etc.)

Sheep, a/k/a citizens, government contracts, and politicos who think they are calling the shots, but are merely dancing to the tune of the Growth Machine. All the while politicos like Marion Barry thought they were calling the shots, developers like Oliver Carr and John Akridge were creating real estate empires...

At the end of the day, control of property and money is what matters most, isn't it? Photo: (AFP/File/Adek Berry)

I mention this because the person responsible for the Main Street program, the position titled "director of long term revitalization" is out. The blog entry below is something I wrote in May, but it is no less relevant today--although not too helpful to the people who lost their jobs.

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And yesterday, May 8th, 2010, I learned that the DC Main Street director is out too, as units within the Department of Small and Local Business Development have been consolidated. Same thing...
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It's odd though, because the ideas of "social capital" and civic engagement presuppose a strong and vital and engaged populace leading events. The reality is that the people who have the time and energy to help build capacity and deliberative involvement are the people who work for the government. (I will likely write more about this later as I am reading Orr's Black Social Capital about the schools in Baltimore, but it starts off discussing the ideas of the social capital "school" and the critics.)

As I said in the blog entry below, as well as in a blog entry about WMATA, "More on Metro and rethinking transit marketing," agency heads need to think more strategically about managing relationships with their offices and building a constituency, a base of support that transcends the elite. You need people power too, to help solidify support and longevity. (Results are key, of course...)

At the same time, consumers of government programs/recipients of grants need to understand better that what they are engaged in is a partnership. If it doesn't work that way, on either side, then the long term success of the program could be at risk.
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Reprint:

Main Street and getting schooled in politics, constituency building, and building support for your program, 5/22/2006

Learning about politics from the State of Maryland.

I think I wrote in March about Jim Diers and the Department of Neighborhoods in Seattle. His book, Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, is about the various neighborhood-based planning and capacity building efforts in that city during his tenure as the director of the office. The current mayor decided not to keep him on, and the last chapter discusses a bit his surprise about this, given the success of the various programs.

My sense about this when reading the book, is that they (he) didn't expend energy on developing meta-support for the program. And that the various efforts in the neighborhoods were great for the individual neighborhood, but didn't build capacity in a city-wide sense.

This is important because it is so clear that the same thing happened in DC with the Main Street program. I don't know if this is because DC is unique, that people like to eat their young, are incredibly negative and parochial, or what. I do think in any case, people are short-sighted. As I say time and time again, there is a reason why many neighborhoods in the city have been troubled for a long long time.

I participated in a program review exercise for the DC Main Streets program about a year ago, and most of the people were very negative about various staff, etc. They probably just wanted to get the money from DC Main Streets and leave it at that.

But that sure didn't build a constituency for lobbying and building support for the program in a substantive way. Now the program faces an uncertain future as Mayor Williams leaves office, and as a "new" revitalization program, "Great Streets" takes center stage. (Although already this program seems to have some problems vis-a-vis support from City Council, see this article by Sean Madigan from the Washington Business Journal, "DC Council pulls back $10M from Great Streets" for more about that.)

Since urban renewal days, every 3-4 years, it appears as if the DC government has introduced a new revitalization program of one sort or another. If you go back and look at Washington Post coverage of H Street for the years 1979-1987, you can really see this. Merchants on the corridor pictured in an article from 1984 are present on the corridor today, still waiting for the promise of revitalization to come true.

In retrospect, I can understand why they were polite to people like me, coming into their businesses, talking about the opportunity and likelihood of revitalization, but they held back from really committing themselves or getting involved. They truly had seen it all before....

The Main Street program in the city was given a bit of money and some support, but hasn't had the chance to burrow in and build. And given the level of disinvestment most neighborhood commercial districts have experienced over the decades, it was pretty naive to expect that a bunch of volunteers, with almost no money for programming, could miraculously turn around these commercial districts in a couple years, after decades of failed DC Government attempts to do the same.

Even so, two things at the Preservation Maryland conference convinced me about the importance of constituency building in politics. It's not like I don't know know this to be true, but I find the politics and palavering part of community development to be somewhat distasteful. I am into ideas, and implementation, best practices, model building, analysis, etc. I am not into the cocktail parties and receptions (although I do enjoy door knocking and the like, even though it is time consuming).

1. Anyway, the Coalition of Maryland Heritage Areas has a breakfast at the PM conference, and this year there was a keynote speaker, Sen. John Astle of Maryland. He represents Anne Arundel County, lives in the Annapolis historic district, and among his duties serves on the Senate Finance Committee and on the State Tourism Development Board.

Senator John Astle, Maryland.

He spoke about how to interact with public officials, how he didn't know much of anything about tourism to begin with, but how the director of the Annapolis Convention and Visitors Bureau cultivated him, and how this began the process of Sen. Astle learning about the importance of tourism (and historic preservation) and how he came to be a strong advocate for the state's cultural heritage.

For example, for every dollar the State of Maryland spends on heritage areas, they have documented an annual return of $4.61--meaning that one dollar spent 10 years ago when the program was first created has returned over $40 back to the state and local governments in terms of tax and other revenues.

Sen. Astle had some good advice for how to engage elected officials and build awareness and support for your program(s). I'm not going to write it all out for you, but in any case it was practical, focused advice. And I know that few Main Street programs in DC have done a very good job communicating with their local councilmember or the at-large councilpeople.

One of the things Sen. Astle said is important--don't invite a bunch of politicians to an event, because it's easy for them to say no, figuring someone else will still attend, but when you build an event around one person, they really can't refuse you.

2. On Friday, there was a luncheon and awards presentation for Main Street Maryland programs. Oddly enough, the City of Baltimore Main Street program doesn't appear to be considered part of the State of Maryland Main Street program, eligible for state funding, etc., although some people from the Baltimore programs attended the lunch.

Main Street Maryland promotional display, Preservation Maryland annual conference, Annapolis, May 18-19, 2006.

The state program had apparently downshifted for awhile but is gearing back up. I am certain this is because it is an election year, and Gov. Ehrlich is looking for support from the 18 communities that have state-designated Main Street programs. For example, at the meeting it was announced that the state had come up with a few hundred thousand dollars for Main Street programs, with applications to be made available shortly, with a due date of 6/30. My immediate reaction was "Can you say electioneering?"

Even so, this luncheon was important for building support for the Main Street program at the state level, regardless of who is in office. They gave out many awards (I don't have the materials with me at the moment) in three categories: volunteer of the year (3 awards, nominated by the programs), bricks and mortar-business development (maybe 6-8 awards), and for special events, programs, and materials, such as the award-winning Easton Plein Air Competition and Arts Festival.

Plein air painting in Easton, Maryland.

In the second year of the DC Main Streets program, there was a reception at the City Museum, but the event was never repeated.

THAT WAS A MISTAKE.

To build capacity and support, DC Main Streets should have (and still could) develop an annual one day conference including an awards luncheon.

If you don't work to consciously build your own base and constituency, it's hard to get anyone to support you. Ask Jim Diers... you couldn't ask for a more successful neighborhood-based planning and capacity building program than his, and yet, when officeholders changed, he had to go...

(Some of this thinking will get incorporated into stuff I am working on about marketing public services, especially transit.)