Motherboard would like to gather feedback on this article from affected individuals and stakeholders. If you would like to submit your feedback, please do so here.
So, You Want to Build Something in a City
Hope For the Best
For example, the planner’s agency was recently accused at a local community meeting of busing people to Brooklyn from Manhattan to use a popular but contentious open street and then lying about how many people from the neighborhood used it. It is also common, the planner said, for community board members to reject statistics on how many people ride certain bus routes, a dynamic I also witnessed when covering New York City subway L train shutdown community meetings in the West Village in 2018 where wealthy townhouse owners accused the MTA of lying about how many people ride the L line.“We can get ridership data from the MTA and people are like, ‘government lies’…And then we’ll do surveys at bus stops. We’ll have pictures of people on the bus…And it doesn’t matter.”
Government Lies
“A Citizenry of Gandhian Humanists”
In recent decades, urban planning textbooks have worshiped at the altar of community feedback, preaching the virtues of getting “the community” on board with any changes big or small. The urban planning profession, recognizing its past sins, ceded all claims to authority and expertise, embracing the Jane Jacobs viewpoint from The Death and Life of Great American Cities that heralded the “eyes on the street” expert rather than that of the master planner. As Parks and Rec’s Leslie Knope put it in a way that aptly satirizes the last 50 years of urban planning, “These people are members of the community. They care about where they live. So what I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.”To emphasize the unprecedented nature of this change, a 2011 article in Places Journal, an urban planning publication, titled “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” asks readers to imagine “economists at the Federal Reserve holding community meetings to decide the direction of fiscal policy” or “public health officials giving equal weight to the nutritional wisdom of teenagers—they are stakeholders, after all!” The author, Thomas Campanella, a professor in urban studies at Cornell, paints a picture of modern urban planners as an “umpire or schoolyard monitor” and “mere absorbers of public opinion” passively waiting “for consensus to build.”“These people are members of the community. They care about where they live. So what I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.” -Leslie Knope, Parks and Rec
Engagement Inflation
How to Fix This
But the biggest change, especially regarding housing construction, is to move away from this project-by-project negotiation between developers and neighborhood busybodies and towards a citywide code that actually reflects what developers can and can’t build. On this front, Freemark, the Urban Institute researcher, pointed out that “the fundamental problem we have is that the mechanisms for engagement are designed in many cases to punish projects that are better for society.” For example, ripping up hundreds of acres of wilderness in an unincorporated area and building hundreds of single-family homes that would lock in energy-intensive living for decades would typically require zero community input or review, and therefore be done relatively quickly and cheaply. In contrast, tearing down a single-family home in an urban area and building a three-apartment building near a train station would likely require a litany of variances and permits, accompanying a “very extensive review process,” as Freemark put it.The fact that most development happens independent of any citywide growth plan is visible in other harmful ways too. For example, New York has spent tens of billions of dollars improving the commuter rail system, particularly into Long Island, but there has been no accompanying commitment to build new housing near the train stations to take advantage of that extra capacity. And if a developer would like to build new housing, well, good luck getting those variances.A more sensible approach would be the creation of a regional growth plan, one that updates zoning and transportation expansion plans together. This plan would be the product of extensive community outreach and feedback, of intense investment to gather as much feedback from as many communities as imaginable, asking them what outcomes they want for the region as a whole. But it would be more like the Census than a community board meeting, happening on a time scale measured in years and not weeks. Metropolitan planning organizations, which are mandated by the federal government and receive federal funding, already do this on a smaller scale, but their plans are non-binding wish lists and generally ignored.Such a process would be awfully controversial and politically contentious. It would involve a lot of fighting and shouting. And it is not without its own pitfalls. For example, Minneapolis is doing something very similar to this. After years of planning work and hundreds of community meetings, it created the 2040 Plan, which eliminated single-family zoning among other consequential changes. Three groups, including the Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis and the Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds, sued to block the plan from taking effect, arguing the plan should have been subject to the state’s environmental review law, which itself requires its own community feedback process. The city argues each housing project should be subject to environmental review individually. The case is winding its way through the courts.Motherboard would like to gather feedback on this article from affected individuals and stakeholders. If you would like to submit your feedback, please do so here.