I'm with you on this, despite having great respect for Chuck. My experience, in two New England cities, has strongly colored my opinions. If you're an incremental developer who butts heads with inane rules at every turn, and these rules impose costs and impede real progress, you'd be inclined to agree, even more so when you try to engage with planners and find that the public process is performative (or "worthless", as Chuck describes it). I've been watching my left-leaning housing-friendly (in theory) community pile on pages and pages of rules with every housing-related change, and refusing to take any public input every time. I wrote this about our community just recently (note that this is not some heated political critique...I just happen to live in a community that is basically one-party control where Harris won about 70% of the vote):
"Left-leaning individuals favor a much more technocratic approach to governance — favoring expertise and thoughtful consideration of issues. This naturally results in heavier rulemaking. At its best this rulemaking will be considerate of its own echo chamber and heavy reliance on credentialism, but in reality the voices that are able to provide counterweight to these ideas (like mine) lack the proper degrees and certifications to be listened to."
So no, I don't think that communities have the people they need. They very much gatekeep and keep generalist experience like mine (HVAC licenses, bachelor's degree with no special focus in building or planning, owned a property-management business for nearly two decades, small-time landlording) out of the process. Watching people without any practical knowledge of the landscape they are regulating can be a very frustrating experience indeed.
Maybe this is a New England problem? But I doubt it!
Is there a way that a new school, or a different way of preparing credentialed "experts" could improve this situation? My sense from comparing my professional career as a planner and developer with my education is 'yes.'
But is there something in the 'water' of progressive professional spaces that believe that control and rules are the best way to get the outcomes you want?
I'm hardly an anti-regulation zealot, but when it comes to the regulation of housing, business & industry on a small scale, I believe we have gone way overboard. I'm actually a non-partisan Maine independent (which we call "unenrolled" here), which I think allows me to stay out of the partisan fray while still being able to call out either party, locally, for things that they could do better. I'd actually argue that we should have heavy rulemaking when it comes to large-scale development as a check against the worst types of corporate construction - expansive parking, throw-away buildings, wide roads, auto-centric transportation design, etc.
In a recent post I was trying to get some of the uber-liberal residents of my town (who pretty much run the town) to get comfortable with the easing of development rules, because lately to this group "deregulation" is a pejorative, because they are all hyper-attuned to what is happening in DC. So, I gathered these statements from Jimmy Carter's 1978 State of the Union speech into an easily digestible quote, then explained:
' “We really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government…We have also proposed abolishing almost 500 Federal advisory and other commissions and boards. But I know that the American people are still sick and tired of Federal paperwork and redtape. Bit by bit we are chopping down the thicket of unnecessary Federal regulations by which Government too often interferes in our personal lives and our personal business…And we are not through cutting.”...If you guessed this is a recent Trump speech or even a Ronald Reagan quote, you guessed wrong. This was spoken by Jimmy Carter during his 1978 State of the Union speech. In other words, “deregulation” didn’t always mean letting corporate villains run wild. Sometimes it meant letting ordinary folks get things done. '
I'm in the northern congressional district of Maine (the mostly red one with some liberal enclaves like my town) and trends take a long time to work there way up here - in my particular town there was a major zoning overhaul in 2001 that essentially brought suburbanized codes here. Now that we're seeing the pitfalls (working class getting pushed out of town) its been an easier sell to older residents of the town that "I just want to bring development standards back to where they were in the 1990s." We have a failed experiment here that does not outlast modern memories. I ran for a city councilor position last fall, and despite running against a highly-liked 3-term incumbent (who is a town native and retired paper mill-worker), in a town with a very comfortable voting base (mostly upper income extremely liberal retirees coming in for the past 10-15 years), I ended up with 45% of the vote to his 55% with no one knowing me, on a purely Strong Towns platform (housing reform, valuation reform, transparency).
We also have this strange thing going on in rural Maine. We have a state building code, but only towns with over 4,000 people have to enforce it. Just about every town in my county, except for ours, does not enforce it, so builders can build to mid-2000s standards and save 10-20% of building costs just over the town line (homes for $300k give or take), not deal with our rigorous inspections process, and deal with very hands-off zoning. People see this development occurring and keep wondering why we only seem to get $600k new homes (it's our development rules!!!) in our actual town (we're actually in crisis because our school population is dropping and there are almost no new housing opportunities coming on line for families - no working family in this part of Maine can afford a $600k home).
City planning is, at best, a soft science, but the way it operates in many communities it's more like a pseudoscience. Our backs are up against the wall as a society when the foundation of this profession is ignorant of the history behind it. If you're of the strong towns philosophy, the best long term approach is not radical revision to the career - communities are still going to favor urban design & other associated degrees (even if a lot of us know that a career in many diverse fields, with or without college is all you need to be a successful planner). No, I'd argue that we need a level of indoctrination for anyone going into this field. There is an ideology we are pushing, and having the pipeline filled with people that view planning through the orderly-but-dumb lens of the past few decades, means we need several in depth courses on how communities were built pre-WW2 forced into their knowledge base.
How do you get there? You don't by having master-degree level people that have worked an entire career in the field without questioning the pitfalls of modern planning turning around and teaching college-level classes. You don't get there by having academics with no practical experience teaching to the book. There's room for some of that in the curriculum, but you need to treat this discipline more like a trade and open up the knowledge base to people that have actually performed in the field.
Strong Towns is growing and growing. I could see a role for it developing a planning institute/school in the future. It's a prime field for revolution - the ideology that got us to where we are now is decades behind us, now we're just stuck in its inertia. Planning has not been completely shut-off to alternative routes of entry, so there's an opening for a completely different way of thinking to take over the field. No one is better-positioned now than Strong Towns to lead the way. I know this sounds hokey, but there's few things that actually give me hope in this country, and the philosophical revolution that Chuck has spearheaded is really my church now.
I am less optimistic about changing the professions. We have the paradigms and professions that we do because they have popular support. They have popular support because they are entrenched parts of our culture.
Thanks for the comment. Do you think the professional paradigms are well supported in popular culture? How do you think we could change the paradigms of our professions?
I should rephrase because I was sloppy. I don’t think most people have awareness about most professional paradigms. What they do have are values that are aligned with the values of professional paradigms. Traffic engineers value LOS and traffic volume, and they care about safety as a secondary concern. Meanwhile, in the US, where almost everyone is a driver, they are similarly mobility pilled. People want to drive long distances drive at speed and on demand. When drivers find out traffic engineers are trying to make the roads wide, smooth, and straight, that already aligns with their own values. Ditto for pols and media people, who are more mobility pilled than the general population. Air bags are fine because it protects drivers and has no impact on speed, convenience, and road capacity. Road diets slow them down.
So the idea is that professional culture (and incentives) is downstream of popular culture--I think I agree with this. The incentives are definitely strong. What I find, as someone who tries to do different stuff (creating the market signal) is that there are too few professionals who 'get' what we're trying to do. Is there a sufficient market for professionals with a different approach? I think so... Notre Dame's architecture school graduates get good job offers.
In Houston, we have had some planners and engineers who think in terms of safety paradigms. They worked within the profession locally, while appealing to the local government to re-engineer our streets. They made some headway with Mayor Annise Parker, but the biggest change was with Mayor Sylvester Turner (term limited, and recently deceased). Turner implemented more bike lanes and some road diets. There was a thermostatic reaction to these policies. Mayor John Whitmire is tearing out road diets, is threatening to tear out bike lanes, and quashing planned safety improvements for other streets. This is what can happen when professionals and pols “get it,” but they do not have popular support.
I'm with you on this, despite having great respect for Chuck. My experience, in two New England cities, has strongly colored my opinions. If you're an incremental developer who butts heads with inane rules at every turn, and these rules impose costs and impede real progress, you'd be inclined to agree, even more so when you try to engage with planners and find that the public process is performative (or "worthless", as Chuck describes it). I've been watching my left-leaning housing-friendly (in theory) community pile on pages and pages of rules with every housing-related change, and refusing to take any public input every time. I wrote this about our community just recently (note that this is not some heated political critique...I just happen to live in a community that is basically one-party control where Harris won about 70% of the vote):
"Left-leaning individuals favor a much more technocratic approach to governance — favoring expertise and thoughtful consideration of issues. This naturally results in heavier rulemaking. At its best this rulemaking will be considerate of its own echo chamber and heavy reliance on credentialism, but in reality the voices that are able to provide counterweight to these ideas (like mine) lack the proper degrees and certifications to be listened to."
So no, I don't think that communities have the people they need. They very much gatekeep and keep generalist experience like mine (HVAC licenses, bachelor's degree with no special focus in building or planning, owned a property-management business for nearly two decades, small-time landlording) out of the process. Watching people without any practical knowledge of the landscape they are regulating can be a very frustrating experience indeed.
Hi David, thanks for the thoughtful response!
Maybe this is a New England problem? But I doubt it!
Is there a way that a new school, or a different way of preparing credentialed "experts" could improve this situation? My sense from comparing my professional career as a planner and developer with my education is 'yes.'
But is there something in the 'water' of progressive professional spaces that believe that control and rules are the best way to get the outcomes you want?
I'm hardly an anti-regulation zealot, but when it comes to the regulation of housing, business & industry on a small scale, I believe we have gone way overboard. I'm actually a non-partisan Maine independent (which we call "unenrolled" here), which I think allows me to stay out of the partisan fray while still being able to call out either party, locally, for things that they could do better. I'd actually argue that we should have heavy rulemaking when it comes to large-scale development as a check against the worst types of corporate construction - expansive parking, throw-away buildings, wide roads, auto-centric transportation design, etc.
In a recent post I was trying to get some of the uber-liberal residents of my town (who pretty much run the town) to get comfortable with the easing of development rules, because lately to this group "deregulation" is a pejorative, because they are all hyper-attuned to what is happening in DC. So, I gathered these statements from Jimmy Carter's 1978 State of the Union speech into an easily digestible quote, then explained:
' “We really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government…We have also proposed abolishing almost 500 Federal advisory and other commissions and boards. But I know that the American people are still sick and tired of Federal paperwork and redtape. Bit by bit we are chopping down the thicket of unnecessary Federal regulations by which Government too often interferes in our personal lives and our personal business…And we are not through cutting.”...If you guessed this is a recent Trump speech or even a Ronald Reagan quote, you guessed wrong. This was spoken by Jimmy Carter during his 1978 State of the Union speech. In other words, “deregulation” didn’t always mean letting corporate villains run wild. Sometimes it meant letting ordinary folks get things done. '
I'm in the northern congressional district of Maine (the mostly red one with some liberal enclaves like my town) and trends take a long time to work there way up here - in my particular town there was a major zoning overhaul in 2001 that essentially brought suburbanized codes here. Now that we're seeing the pitfalls (working class getting pushed out of town) its been an easier sell to older residents of the town that "I just want to bring development standards back to where they were in the 1990s." We have a failed experiment here that does not outlast modern memories. I ran for a city councilor position last fall, and despite running against a highly-liked 3-term incumbent (who is a town native and retired paper mill-worker), in a town with a very comfortable voting base (mostly upper income extremely liberal retirees coming in for the past 10-15 years), I ended up with 45% of the vote to his 55% with no one knowing me, on a purely Strong Towns platform (housing reform, valuation reform, transparency).
We also have this strange thing going on in rural Maine. We have a state building code, but only towns with over 4,000 people have to enforce it. Just about every town in my county, except for ours, does not enforce it, so builders can build to mid-2000s standards and save 10-20% of building costs just over the town line (homes for $300k give or take), not deal with our rigorous inspections process, and deal with very hands-off zoning. People see this development occurring and keep wondering why we only seem to get $600k new homes (it's our development rules!!!) in our actual town (we're actually in crisis because our school population is dropping and there are almost no new housing opportunities coming on line for families - no working family in this part of Maine can afford a $600k home).
City planning is, at best, a soft science, but the way it operates in many communities it's more like a pseudoscience. Our backs are up against the wall as a society when the foundation of this profession is ignorant of the history behind it. If you're of the strong towns philosophy, the best long term approach is not radical revision to the career - communities are still going to favor urban design & other associated degrees (even if a lot of us know that a career in many diverse fields, with or without college is all you need to be a successful planner). No, I'd argue that we need a level of indoctrination for anyone going into this field. There is an ideology we are pushing, and having the pipeline filled with people that view planning through the orderly-but-dumb lens of the past few decades, means we need several in depth courses on how communities were built pre-WW2 forced into their knowledge base.
How do you get there? You don't by having master-degree level people that have worked an entire career in the field without questioning the pitfalls of modern planning turning around and teaching college-level classes. You don't get there by having academics with no practical experience teaching to the book. There's room for some of that in the curriculum, but you need to treat this discipline more like a trade and open up the knowledge base to people that have actually performed in the field.
Strong Towns is growing and growing. I could see a role for it developing a planning institute/school in the future. It's a prime field for revolution - the ideology that got us to where we are now is decades behind us, now we're just stuck in its inertia. Planning has not been completely shut-off to alternative routes of entry, so there's an opening for a completely different way of thinking to take over the field. No one is better-positioned now than Strong Towns to lead the way. I know this sounds hokey, but there's few things that actually give me hope in this country, and the philosophical revolution that Chuck has spearheaded is really my church now.
I am less optimistic about changing the professions. We have the paradigms and professions that we do because they have popular support. They have popular support because they are entrenched parts of our culture.
I do think that the number 1 priority for urbanism is marketing and comms, and probably a few TV shows—gotta shift what people want!
Thanks for the comment. Do you think the professional paradigms are well supported in popular culture? How do you think we could change the paradigms of our professions?
I should rephrase because I was sloppy. I don’t think most people have awareness about most professional paradigms. What they do have are values that are aligned with the values of professional paradigms. Traffic engineers value LOS and traffic volume, and they care about safety as a secondary concern. Meanwhile, in the US, where almost everyone is a driver, they are similarly mobility pilled. People want to drive long distances drive at speed and on demand. When drivers find out traffic engineers are trying to make the roads wide, smooth, and straight, that already aligns with their own values. Ditto for pols and media people, who are more mobility pilled than the general population. Air bags are fine because it protects drivers and has no impact on speed, convenience, and road capacity. Road diets slow them down.
So the idea is that professional culture (and incentives) is downstream of popular culture--I think I agree with this. The incentives are definitely strong. What I find, as someone who tries to do different stuff (creating the market signal) is that there are too few professionals who 'get' what we're trying to do. Is there a sufficient market for professionals with a different approach? I think so... Notre Dame's architecture school graduates get good job offers.
In Houston, we have had some planners and engineers who think in terms of safety paradigms. They worked within the profession locally, while appealing to the local government to re-engineer our streets. They made some headway with Mayor Annise Parker, but the biggest change was with Mayor Sylvester Turner (term limited, and recently deceased). Turner implemented more bike lanes and some road diets. There was a thermostatic reaction to these policies. Mayor John Whitmire is tearing out road diets, is threatening to tear out bike lanes, and quashing planned safety improvements for other streets. This is what can happen when professionals and pols “get it,” but they do not have popular support.