An Urban History of Prosperity’s Menace, and Those Who Sought (and Still Seek) to Tame It

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Regarding Abundance

One of the big topics of conversation among left-leaning and liberal pundits, politicians, and intellectuals so far in 2025 has been “abundance.” The key idea—mostly tied to the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book of that title, but also related to many other claims that have been building for years—is that the United States has forgotten how to build things, and in particular, how to build things for the common good. Making policy changes so as to prioritize the government getting homes built, grids wired, bridges erected, etc., as opposed to prioritizing other, more egalitarian or environmental aims, is the best way to create an electoral constituency for otherwise popular progressive goals, or so the argument goes. 

The data behind the argument is hardly original; libertarians have talked about how America has paralyzed itself through regulations for decades, and socialists have talked about how America’s obsession with profit has resulted in bloated corporations sucking up our inventiveness for just as long. But Klein and Thompson’s Abundance is significant because it uses this data to make an argument that challenges America’s liberal establishment directly (an establishment that both authors are very much a part of). The book itself is open-ended about the direction of that challenge. Is it a call for a return to the New Deal, with the government taking a direct hand in boosting basic industrial and economic projects (but mostly only those)? Or is it a neoliberal apology for big business, who would be happy to lend their productive powers to America’s state capacity in exchange for being released from various democratic restrictions and procedures? (That the Trump administration has gleefully ignored Constitutional process in the name of “getting stuff done” has only complicated the call for, and the costs of, an “abundance” orientation.) 

A Different, Yet Defining Perspective 

Daniel Wortel-London’s superb new book, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981, appears to have no direct relevance to this debate. But indirectly, Wortel-London (whose politics are clearly leftist, and highly critical of the too-common celebration of capitalist development in American life) presents a way of understanding “abundance” that is, I think, of immense value. Like the very best forms of historical research, The Menace of Prosperity uses a particular place (America’s largest and most influential city, New York) and a particular time (the 1870s to the 1970s, a century during which New York City’s citizens and leaders alike saw, celebrated, and struggled against their city’s transformation from a large urban center to a global financial megapolis) to reveal something general—in this case, something essential to the urban landscapes where 80% of all Americans live. By so doing, Daniel-Wortel also provides readers with something close to a defining perspective on how we should think about economic growth today.

Wortel-London takes his title from a line in Lewis Mumford’s 1938 classic, The Culture of Cities: “From the standpoint of decent metropolitan living one might well speak of the ‘menace of prosperity.’” The specific context of Mumford’s comment was the push in the 1930s by a large number of New York City’s power players for “fiscal stabilization.” Following the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the immense debt being carried by American cities led many urban leaders and bodies (though not, it must be said, anything like a majority of New Yorkers) to embrace a surprising mix of local conservation and progressive reform, some of which echoed the premises of early New Deal programs like the National Resource Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Cities, this argument went, needed to restrict speculation and preserve their locally available economic stock (in terms of land, natural resources, material goods, labor, and productive capacities). As Wortel-London puts it: 

At their most ambitious, these entities promoted a truly radical understanding of municipal well-being: one based not on meeting the whims of the wealthy through debt but on meeting the needs of the city’s working people through its existing resources. Meeting these needs, to be sure, might require deflating the speculative expectations and property values that had accrued in more irrational times. But the reward for this deflation would be abundance: cheaper land would enable more sanitary low-income housing, restrictions on development would enable green spaces, and all this would, in the end, save New York from the instability and social costs that “prosperity” had inflicted upon it (The Menace of Prosperity, p. 121, bold added).

What is being pulled out of this particular moment in Wortel-London’s argument is a different understanding of abundance. Rather than focusing on an abundance of produced goods, focus on an abundance of productive land; rather than building an orientation around increasing supply, build an orientation around the collective use of that which has already been supplied—which for cities means the productive locality upon which one stands. This is not low-tax conservatism, nor is it supply-side progressivism; it is conservation for the sake of democratic empowerment. This is my formulation of Wortel-London’s language, and he may not agree with it, but it shows the value of his research to the abundance conversation—and The Menace of Prosperity has a rich historical tale on its side.

Of course, the insights which history reveal to us will never remain static, and Wortel-London’s careful, sharply detailed unpeeling of NYC’s fiscal evolution demonstrates this well. The particular moment of urban reform which Mumford sought to build upon unfortunately passed, as all moments of reform similarly come and go, some leaving lesser or greater improvements in their wake, but all contributing to the constantly evolving struggle which American cities face. The key point of that struggle is presented at the book’s beginning as the repeated realization by multiple generations of New Yorkers that “the costs of elite-driven growth outweigh its benefits” (p. 2). But why is that a lesson that never sticks?  

The Dilemma of Cities Over Time 

Cities are places of expansion and experimentation. They have been imagined as such in the Western world ever since their emergence as centers of commerce and education in the late Medieval era, promising opportunity and freedom—“Stadtluft macht frei”—to all who relocated there. That such opportunity and freedom were entwined with alienation and poverty was, of course, also understood by many; hence the abiding Jeffersonian preference for an agrarian life. But the specialized material promises of city life—the occupational and social variety, the artistic excellence that even Jefferson admitted to, the tolerance, and the wealth they provide a social space for—have nonetheless continually drawn the masses of humanity into urban environments, meaning that the governance of such cities is always centrally about responding to the demands for growth, and then managing what Wortel-London refers to as their “social costs” (p. 3)—economic stratification, disinvestment in marginalized neighborhoods, community breakdown, and that old Jeffersonian concern, dependency. 

The history of American cities following the Civil War, as the American economy came to prioritize large-scale manufacturing and trade over agriculture and small-scale artisanship, became a history of capitalizing upon land—the land that city-dwellers were moving to occupy, the land that entrepreneurs wanted to place factories upon, the land that investors realized would increase in value. This search for capital was driven by both voters and speculators—and since cities were Constitutionally-defined non-sovereign entities, subject to state and the national governments, that capital could mostly be obtained in only a few ways. Slowly, through taxation, which has never been a popular revenue stream; more quickly, through debt-financing, the easiest and most fiscally devastating stream that cities have relied upon; or most directly of all, through transfers from other jurisdictions and governments, which is the stream they have the least amount of control over. (The additional possibility of cities running, on behalf of their citizens, profit-making public utilities to generate funds has been, as Wortel-London details, sadly reduced as a viable option.) The latter two methods qualify as “elite-driven”—and redirecting these methods of raising capital towards actual democratic, broad-based uses, as opposed to following elite development preferences, was (and is) something rarely accomplished.

The Menace of Prosperity’s hundred-year survey of the “fiscal imagination” of NYC’s (and, across America, other urban) leaders is essentially a remarkable recitation of attempts at this kind of redirection. The pattern is similar: the costs of elite-driven growth are recognized, are responded to with reforms, and those reforms, successful or (more commonly) not, eventually become embedded in the continuing evolution of the city, such that they develop their own constituencies and become a new basis for demands of, again, elite-driven relief. That may sound like a hopeless cycle, but it isn’t presented as such. With each response to every fiscal crisis in New York City’s history, Wortel-London shows us individuals thinking creatively to craft solutions that will improve the life of the city—though he also shows us how the “sunk costs” of previous efforts to tame elite-driven growth and make the productive possibilities of urban spaces more available to all city inhabitants add up over time.

In the 1880s and 1890s we see Henry George and his “fiscal republican” followers fight to institute some version of a land-value tax, one that would “by taxing land at 100 percent of its value….force landlords to either lower land prices in the hope of attracting productive enterprises to their property and making some kind of profit, or to sell their land to those who would….[thus] liberat[ing] urban real estate markets from the distortions of the speculator…[and] making it easier to establish businesses and freeing cities to reach their economic potential” (p. 36). The failure of the Georgist campaign was a great loss—one unfortunately tied to its unwillingness to consider cooperative alternatives, with its hyper-focus upon real estate development undermining its own constituency “once opponents of fiscal republicanism provided alternative policies for acquiring property ownership and achieving local growth” (p. 51).

Forty years later, the once-Georgist homeowners and local producers in New York’s outer boroughs, who had learned to organize—in good local democratic fashion—on behalf of the debt-financed integration of the city’s periphery with the downtown through subways, bridges, and more, were now the key opponents to the aforementioned “fiscal stabilizers.” In the view of reformers, the public sector—which “was not as committed to pursuing speculative profit”—was crucial to the development of an “economically self-sustaining” housing market which could cool the fluctuations of New Deal-era urban economies (pp. 115-116). In one of his more insightful arguments (in a book filled with them), Wortel-London details how elements of the New Deal’s conservation orientation were compromised by its sincere attempt to include “local governments and civic bodies,” with the result that “rather than seek out new solutions,” many in the Roosevelt administration “attempted to supplement older approaches with new financing, standing ready to pick up the municipal slack for assisting realty along the same lines local governments had.” The result—“federal support for suburban homeownership”—predictably “worked against efforts to restrict peripheral growth” (pp. 134, 136). Public housing couldn’t compete with such subsidized expansion. 

By the 1970s, as movements in support of civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment reached their peak, suggestions in response New York City’s latest crisis over growth were perhaps more radical than they had been in nearly a century. While the city’s liberal establishment embraced the post-WWII logic of corporate growth and redistributive taxation, others, inspired by visionaries like Paul Goodman and Jane Jacobs, started to push for rebuilding the city’s economy through decentralization, a move towards empowering neighborhoods and communal associations through “close-grained tax allowances” and the loosening of centralized zoning rules, without reliance upon “cataclysmic money” from the national government (p. 177). For the first time in the city’s history, non-Caucasians had a major presence in these arguments, as many Black activists came to see the “lack of local economic control” as a central concern (Wortel-London reports that as of 1960, “four-fifths of Harlem’s commercial and residential properties were owned by non-locals” and “four-fifths of the Harlem workforce was employed outside the community”—p. 183). But the immense momentum enjoyed by New York elites—both governmental and corporate—who bet on making the city a center of the globalized economy gave them resources to finance Jacobsian-style reforms in the city’s built environment, all while ignoring the fiscal imagination of these cooperative radicals: 

At their most ambitious, groups holding to this [cooperative, localist] vision claimed that New York’s existing development strategies—recreating the city in the image of its most powerful and profitable enterprises—was both unjust and uneconomic. And at their most radical, they argued that the economic health of neighborhoods could only take place through outright community ownership. Nonetheless, most of these “fiscal communitarians” lacked the agonistic edge that earlier fiscal reform movements held. While White brownstoners were eager to preserve some of the city’s existing housing stock, they had little inclination to displace the white-collar enterprises where many of them worked. And many in the city’s Black neighborhoods were less interested in empowering their communities than in empowering their own enterprises within those communities. Ultimately, New York’s liberal policy-makers were able to meet these demands while further accelerating the city’s white-collar development…. Oblivious to the costs of private growth and unwilling to imagine alternatives, New York’s liberal establishment would keep their faith in the city’s white-collar economy (p. 192).  

An Abundance of Urban Alternatives, If We Can See Them 

 In the end, Wortel-London believes the history of New York City’s repeated reforms of, and frequent failures in redirecting the consequences of, elite-driven growth, teach that “we cannot frame the fiscal dilemmas of local governments in simple terms of economic development versus economic decline” (p. 225). The assumptions of NYC’s elites—that subsidies can provide fiscal solvency, that wealth generation can pay for welfare—unfortunately continue to obtain throughout American cities, despite concerted efforts to show the long-term financial costs and liabilities of expanding infrastructure, and the equally devastating social costs of centering city life around the cult of business development. Growth, very simply, should not be entirely about expansions of supply or increases of goods. Partly because those expansions and increases depend too often upon the exclusionary capitalization of spatial resources that urban communities nominally offer to everyone who relocates to them, and partly because such capitalization invariably cannibalizes itself, requiring the process of seeking elite investment and debt-financing to continue unabated, perpetuating the crises which The Menace of Prosperity expertly details. 

But Wortel-London doesn’t leave his readers without hope. On the contrary, in the book’s final pages he affirms that we can build upon the history of America’s cities, as so many reformers have done before. It’s been more than 40 years since the end of The Menace of Prosperity’s story, and fiscal struggles remain; why not turn again to considering how it is that “locally oriented firms with alternative ownership structures…can provide more public revenue, with less public costs, than seemingly ‘wealthier’ firms,” and that “lodging the ownership and operation of economic enterprises within [a city’s] most marginalized communities….[will] provide these communities with much needed resources while expanding their political autonomy,” thereby working to democratize the finance structure under which all of us who live in cities depend (pp. 225, 227)? 

In a recent essay, Wortel-London looked at the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, as the latest potential participant in this ongoing struggle. Many may dismiss him the moment they hear him self-identify as a “democratic socialist”—but for city-dwellers who want (as they should) to take the lessons that The Menace of Prosperity laid out seriously, Mamdani’s talk about municipally owned grocery stores, rent freezes for qualifying tenants, and loan forgiveness for small businesses, ought to provide some food for thought. Financing these programs is the problem, as always—and yet those with urban faith might look to cooperatives, land trusts, public banking, and other innovations (all of which have drawn upon the same lessons this book reveals) as routes to explore. 

The faith that something cooperative, something Jeffersonian, can be built into the operation of urban liberalism may seem a faint hope. But for close to 1000 years, people have come to urban centers looking for opportunities, carrying with them new ideas, hoping for the freedom to build upon them. The wealth of America’s cities are immense; the most important lesson of Wortel-London’s magisterial history is that, if tens of thousands of city residents over the years have seen, in their time and in their particular context, a means to tie that wealth less to elite use and more to abundant employment, why shouldn’t we join those who are continuing to seek to realize, in today's context, this vision once more?

Planning and "The Politics of Beauty": Reflections on Stewart Udall

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

John de Graaf, an author, filmmaker, and friend of Front Porch Republic, has recently completed a documentary tribute to a hero of his: Stewart Udall, the pioneering conservationist who in many ways defined (almost entirely for better, though perhaps, in a small way, partly for worse) the environmental agenda of the U.S. government and, more specifically, the Democratic party for the past 60 years. “Stewart Udall: The “Politics of Beauty” is a gorgeously shot and highly informative short movie, a wonderful introduction to a fairly unique and entirely admirable figure from 20^th-century American history: a crew-cutted WWII veteran and New Frontier liberal whose passion for the natural world literally changed the landscape of this country--but also an open-minded thinker, a lover of poetry, family, and community, whose conservationist passions led him to be ever more conscious, as the decades went by, of the complications inherent to the liberal statism through which he did his greatest work (even if he never did turn against it entirely). In an essay last year, de Graaf called Udall a “true conservative,” someone who “really wanted to conserve things: land, air, water, beauty, the arts and graces, gentle human relations, the best of tradition, democratic ideals,” and this movie reflects that aspect of Udall’s life very well.

Udall’s early history—his birth into the Udall family in 1920 (which was already by then an expanding political clan), his life as a young Mormon in Saint Johns, Arizona, and the poverty, the conflicts, and the fellowship which existed in that arid farming community—is by no means the focus of de Graff’s film, but I was entranced by those opening shots and the story it told, complete with comments from Udall’s surviving siblings. It put me in mind of my own maternal grandfather, Joseph Arben Jolley, who was born just four years before Udall in Tropic, Utah, a similarly remote and tiny Mormon hamlet on the Colorado Plateau (though 300 miles, a couple of mountain ranges, and several Native reservations separate the two towns). Like my grandfather, Udall’s early years were without electricity or running water, something which FDR’s New Deal (specifically the Rural Electrification Act) changed, with radical consequences for the Udall family—among other things, they became Democrats, convinced that government action really can improve human lives.

It was that conviction, tied to his passion for racial and, especially, environmental justice, which shaped his public career, first as an elected representative, and then as Secretary of the Interior under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. During those years, Udall orchestrated the establishment of more national parks, historical monuments, wildlife refuges, and recreational areas than any other Interior Secretary either before or since; if you’ve ever visited Canyonlands National Park, or hiked the Appalachian Trail, or spent time at over a hundred other similar locations across America’s beautiful and diverse ecosystems and geography, it’s likely that you have Stewart Udall at least partly to thank. His years of government service were not restricted to what he did to strengthen and expand the conservationist mentality in Washington D.C.; de Graaf’s documentary does an excellent job highlighting Udall’s broad engagement with cultural issues, as well the tensions and frustrations he faced as a leading government official during the heights of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and all the protests both unleashed. But still, it is the lessons he leaned in Saint Johns, the way he applied those lessons, the things he learned from his struggles over them, and how his own take on those lessons thus evolved over the decades, which strike me as most valuable to America today.

In 1963, Udall published his first book, The Quiet Crisis. An idiosyncratic and unsystematic but still deeply insightful history of conservation attitudes and efforts throughout American history, its perspective on the role of government in protecting wilderness, particularly in the American West, was in some ways superseded by later books of his. But the original remains something of lost classic, regularly rediscovered and praised by those trying to understand the development of American society’s relationship to the land. Reading it in conjunction with watching de Graaf’s film both complicates and deepens our understanding of this indefatigable public servant.

In these pages, there are a fair number of embarrassing paeans to the presumed virtue and wisdom of American planners and policy-makers. Among others, the book begins with Udall presenting the national government’s Indian Claims Commission, which is generally accepted to have utterly failed in its task to treat Native land claims justly, “as a singular gesture of atonement, which no civilized country has ever matched,” and then towards the conclusion includes some glowing praise for Robert Moses, the devastating over-builder of American cities, highlighting his efforts to “overcome earlier failures to plan” and bring to American urban areas “asphalt for beach parking lots, for playgrounds, and for roads” (pp. 11, 163-164). But between such missteps, there much worth admiring and pondering.

In The Quiet Crisis, Udall provides thoughtful portraits—and critiques—of influential naturalists, conservationists, and geographers like George Perkins Marsh, Gifford Pinchot, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, and Frederick Law Olmstead. He off-handedly introduces the idea of global warning decades before scientific debates over such crashed into the public consciousness ("What are the long-range results of man's modification of the environment? When men clear a forest in order to make space for agriculture, how does this clearing affect the climate, the rate of erosion of soil, and the populations of birds and other wild animals?"--p. 81). Predictably, the book includes vicious condemnations of what he various refers to as the “Big Raid,” the “Great Giveaway,” and the “Myth of Superabundance,” the guiding ideology of many American business interests and monopolists which, facing only occasional resistance, exploited and denuded American forests, ecosystems, watersheds, species, grasslands, resources, and more throughout the 19^th century and the first part of the 20^th. Perhaps just as predictably, he lavishly praises those who took executive action on behalf of environmental interests, particularly Presidents Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. According to Udall, TR “regarded himself as the trustee of the lands owned by the people” and “dared to use his pen,” aggressively expanding the application of the Reclamation Act and the Antiquities Act so as to more than quadruple the size of protected natural lands in the United States (though whether TR’s actions really “dealt a decisive blow to the Myth of Superabundance” in America is doubtful--pp. 131, 136). And in Udall’s view, FDR’s New Deal aimed to reverse effects of “the Big Raids…[during which] much of the nation's resource capital had been borrowed and used up to advance the personal fortunes of a few”; through the creation of the REA, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Soil Conservation Service, and more, the government aimed to “to invest in land-rebuilding programs that would assure adequate resources for tomorrow….[with] the needs of the community and of the next generation…given first priority" (p. 144).

Udall’s reference there to “the needs of the community” may give one pause here, and it should. Because as the aforementioned tendency in The Quiet Crisis to occasionally see national planning as an obvious solution to any environmental or historical or urban problem demonstrates, Udall’s passion for the American landscape and wildlife was not always entirely cognizant of the local people who actually live in those landscapes and with that wildlife. It’s an attitude he clearly struggled with; in “The Politics of Beauty,” de Graaf shows an excerpt from a 2003 interview with Udall, in which he reflects that “there has always been local opposition, regional opposition, state opposition to the creation of new national parks….because people…wanted to control [the land around them] and do it the way they wanted to do it.” But even 40 years earlier, Udall was, I think, conscious of the ambiguity here. On my reading, the heart of that ambiguity resides with Henry David Thoreau, whom Udall calls “one of our first preservationists” and “a naturalist’s naturalist,” and whom, I believe, haunts his thinking. Consider his criticism of the man’s oeuvre:

Thoreau was alarmed by the Raider spirit, but he failed to realize that the land spoilers were already in command, and were committed to a course of action that would destroy the land values he prized the most. With his negative feelings about government and politics, he failed to perceive that it would take government action to stop the destruction. There were other contradictions:  although he abhorred the very thought of social action, land conservation could not begin until men organized for action; he was anti-reformer, but it would take the crusading zeal of reform-minded men to save the woods and wildlife; he was, moreover, the most thoroughgoing nonconformist alive, though the dangerous drift of the time pointed to the need for conformity to minimum rules of resource management. In short, government action was necessary to curb the exploitation of resources and allow the land to renew itself, but Henry David Thoreau was constitutionally and unalterably antiprogram and antigovernment (p. 52).

To Udall, the results of this disposition was obvious: no national parks, no resistance to those would abuse the natural world for their own profit. And yet, consider also Udall’s concluding remarks, in which he looks out the suburbanizing, postwar America he was partly responsible for leading:

We are now a nomadic people, and our new-found mobility had deprived us of a sense of belonging to a particular place. Millions of Americans have no tie to the 'natural habitat' that is their home....A land ethic for tomorrow should be as honest as Thoreau's Walden....Henry David Thoreau would scoff at the notion that the Gross National Product should be the chief index to the state of the nation, or that automobile sales of figures on consumer consumption reveal anything significant about the authentic art of living. He would surely assert that a clean landscape is as important as a freeway, he would deplore every planless conquest of the countryside, and he would remind his countrymen that a glimpse of a grouse can be more inspiring than a Hollywood spectacular or color television. To those who complain of the complexity of modern life, he might reply, 'If you want inner peace find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go (pp. 189-190).

This ambivalence—leavening what is otherwise a learned and vigorous defense of what Udall clearly understood as a progressive and beneficial fight by experts to tame American individualism and protect America’s natural bounty, most especially in the arid ecosystems of the American West—shouldn’t surprise anyone who sees in Udall the mature wisdom which de Graaf’s movie so ably demonstrates. Udall was a person capable of changing his mind—about the postwar passion for dam-building, most prominently—and of growing and rethinking as the years went by. That growth helped him come to see the foolishness of his support for Cold War policies which have paved the way for American militarism, and to regret his support for energy and highway development projects which have only led to greater urban centralization and pollution. His deep, almost religious commitment to principles of frugality, family, and justice (my sole complaint with de Graaf’s wonderful documentary is that its brief references to Udall’s Mormonism don’t capture the complicated reality of his membership in his and my shared tribe) may have expressed themselves in different ways over the decades, but they surely only grew stronger with time.

It would be too much to say that the work he committed himself to in the decades following his later years—among other things, a long legal struggle to get the national government to acknowledge the harms of the radiation it had exposed thousands to through nuclear testing in the American southwest through the 1950s and 1960s—was something he took on as a penance. On the contrary, it’s unlikely he ever regretted his role in using the power of the national government to accomplish ends which provided great benefits to the broader public, to say nothing of the benefits to the ecosystems which his push for conservation and protecting wilderness areas made possible. But I do think that over the years the ambivalence I sense in his writing--an ambivalence which reflected a frustration with Thoreau's rejection of collective action, but also an admiration for Thoreau's committed locality--put him on a somewhat different trajectory. He's not alone in finding himself struggling over the best balance between the local and the national, or between engaging individual ecological tending and establishing collective ecological boundaries. As I noted years ago, in connection with other contentious acts of national conservation--the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, specifically--Udall's trajectory has been shared by other Interior Secretaries as well. In an essay for Front Porch Republic, Nathan Nielson once spelled out this dynamic well: reflecting upon the protective routinization which the National Park Service provides to America’s beautiful places, Nielson observed that while “local governments have a better sense of what the land means…the federal route is the only viable option when the clamor for nature reaches critical mass.” Indeed.

In a letter Udall wrote to his grandchildren in 2005, Udall had a lot of advice, some of it still quite programmatic and planning oriented, and perhaps defensibly so. But he also brought his mature, reflective perspective to bear on his own part in the ambitious planning of his generation:

Operating on the assumption that energy would be both cheap and superabundant, I admit, led my generation to make misjudgments that have come back and now haunt and perplex your generation. We designed cities, buildings, and a national system of transportation that were inefficient and extravagant. Now, the paramount task of your generation will be to correct those mistakes with an efficient infrastructure that respects the limitations of our environment to keep up with damages we are causing.

Not a fully Thoreau-esque statement, to be sure, but one that is perhaps animated at least in part by his non-comformist, place-loving spirit nonetheless. Sharon Francis, Udall’s longtime aid who knew his work as well as anyone, was extensively interviewed by de Graaf; she called Udall “the Henry David Thoreau of his generation.” Ignoring all the circumstantial ways that comparison doesn't quite work (to say nothing of the fact that, two generations on from the high point of Udall's impact sixty years ago, perhaps environmentalism needs less Udallian confidence and more Wes-Jackson-style apocalyptism), and focusing instead on the shared, fundamental passions which make it essentially true, one can’t help but wonder: what better tribute could a true “conservative”—that is, a conserver of the land and the resources which provide human communities and indeed the whole human race with life and joy—possibly receive than that? "The Politics of Beauty" reminds us of this romantic, poetic, but also practical conservation-minded Udall, and that alone is reason to watch it again and again.

Taking (Democratic) Control of One's Own Traffic

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

That Charles Marohn is a friend to localist movements across the United States and beyond is indisputable. It’s not just that he has said so, repeatedly; both the whole operating premise of Strong Towns, the organization he has built, and the strategy it has followed, has been localist: encouraging ordinary people to attend to their own localities by gathering together, sharing information and concerns about the places where they live, and addressing those problems in small, organic, achievable ways. As I wrote in praise of his first book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, while Marohn may not be a trained social critic or political philosopher, he has nonetheless, through his insistence upon the necessity of slowly and democratically adapting our urban places in the direction of greater fiscal and environmental sustainability, articulated as clear and as practical a localist theory as almost any other thinker writing today.

The title of Marohn’s new book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (whose release date is today--buy it now!), might suggest a wonky doubling down upon the practical at the expense of the broadly theoretical, and that judgment isn’t wrong. By connecting this set of interconnected reflections to what Marohn now recognizes as the flawed design principles and professional assumptions he internalized during his decades of road-building work as a civil engineer, he has written a book more in the style of a technical manual than a philosophical treatise. But that doesn’t mean the philosophy isn’t there. In the midst short, data-heavy discussions of travel times, risk assessments, speed studies, Marohn’s ideas are very much still present, and in some ways they’re more political than ever.

The fundamental focus in this book is traffic, meaning the movement of people and goods along streets and roads, which is literally the lifeblood, the circulatory system, of any urbanized space. (In a book with more than its share of good lines, Marohn’s two-sentence take-down of the over-inflated complaints about traffic congestion we are all guilty of is perhaps my favorite: “People often say that they are ‘stuck in traffic,’ as if their vehicle is somehow not a literal part of the traffic in which they are stuck. They are not stuck in traffic; they are traffic”—pg. 84.) One doesn’t have to be a student of Gibbons v. Ogden and the Supreme Court’s commerce clause jurisprudence to recognize that this in an inherently political topic, with ramifications for economics, culture, government, and sometimes life and death. Marohn opens the book with the story of a haunting traffic accident, the lessons of which he returns to throughout the chapters that follow, and ends the book with another accident, one that involved himself. He does this not to politicize tragedies or near-tragedies, but rather the show the degree to which human mistakes are enabled by decisions regarding the construction and management of traffic, decisions whose political values should be available to us, but usually are not.  

This is Marohn’s goal in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:  to reveal the undemocratic—because rarely discussed and almost never subject to actual civic input—values which underlie the traffic regime that American cities are overwhelmingly subject to. Chapter after chapter, Marohn, with the zeal of a penitent convert, digs into the practices and norms of civil engineers like himself, teaching his readers—usually with impressive clarity—about LOS (Level of Service) rankings, MUTCD (Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices) warrants, the economic and sociological distinction between “streets” and “roads,” the 85^th Percentile Speed rule, and much more. By so doing, Marohn carefully details the disconnect between the people who actually live in urban areas, and those who are tasked with designing the circulatory systems which enable them to move about. That is, he succinctly shows how streets, roads, intersections, traffic signage, bus stops, and more are constructed so as to incentivize—or impel—drivers to act in ways disconnected from—or completely contrary to—what those same people, when truly presented with the full range of traffic options, generally prioritize.

So just what do people—what do we—generally prioritize? Mostly safety and cost, even when such stand in the way of maximizing traffic capacity and speed. Unsurprisingly, the language and methods of urban design in America today (and for most of the past 70 years) privilege the opposite. That does not mean America’s cities care nothing about safety or cost: on the contrary, city leaders hear citizen complaints and respond to them all the time…only usually in ways that complete fail to get at the opaque values at work in the bureaucratic contexts which so often shape our urban environments.

So, insofar as safety is concerned, it would be hard to find an American city dweller who isn’t familiar with wide streets clearly built for speed…which have subsequently been filled with traffic warnings, broken up with poorly coordinated signal lights, and closely attended by police conducting a near-abusive number of traffic stops (the symbiotic relationship here should be obvious). Or, insofar as cost is concerned, it would be equally hard to find an urban resident in America who can’t point to expansive and soaring highway interchanges or grand elevated thoroughfares gracing their city…while at the same time debt-payments and budget cuts and arbitrary ceilings on tax collection have left the basic maintenance of the city’s streets and roads further and further behind. These situations are both common and perverse, the result of city governments attempting to sincerely respond to genuine problems without daring to rethink the decision-making which got them there.

What would that rethinking consist of? Perhaps designing smaller streets for slower speeds and less carrying capacity in the first place. Perhaps organizing city finances so as to serve local sites of commercial intercourse and thus moderating and diversifying traffic flow from its start. And thereby perhaps lessening the overall debt taken on by America’s urban areas, freeing up money for already-existing maintenance obligations. In other words, perhaps the option of actually choosing not to privilege the top-down growth of a city’s traffic footprint, but instead choosing to privilege “more corner stores and neighborhood businesses…more local jobs and housing options…[more] sidewalks and biking infrastructure…more alternative ways to respond to congestion” (pg. 98). That these choices are politically difficult is obvious: the assumption that faster traffic is superior to slower traffic, that automobile access to distant locations is superior to bike or pedestrian access to local destinations, that minimizing automobile delay is superior to making room for transportation alternatives, and that speculative economic growth is superior to preserving community wealth, are all, in the civil engineering and urban design professions, a kind of “orthodoxy” (pg. 12). But that they remain, nonetheless, politically possible is Marohn’s fervent call. By supply his readers with the relevant data, Marohn's Confessions helps explain how.

This push against the presumed necessity of over-building, the supposed “inevitability” of the growth machine in American cities (as Marohn facetiously writes in the book’s introduction, which humorously expands upon his justly famous “Conversation with an Engineer” video, civil engineers are “really in the growth business”—pg. xviii), is what makes his localism populist in the spirit of Wendell Berry, who labeled this same cult of inevitability in The Art of Loading Brush “an economic and technological determinism.“ It’s also what makes his localism profoundly political. In the end, for all it’s technical, economic, psychological, and environmental details, Confessions is a plea for local democracy, as Marohn makes clear throughout the book, from beginning…

[Decisions about street safety, speed, capacity, and cost] are policy decision, and like all policy decisions, they should be decided by some duly elected or appointed collection of public officials. In a democratic system of representative government, representatives of the people should be provided the full range of options and be allowed to weigh them against each other. That rarely happens, and I have never heard of an instance where it has happened for a local street (pg. 6).

…to end:

None of these decisions [regarding all the supposed obstacles to making a busy street more pedestrian friendly] are merely technical; they are all somewhat discretionary and, thus, political….Cities are not powerless. Great local engineers who want to assert the values of the community, instead of opposing them, can become strong advocates….All...common methods of thwarting the public will are merely assertions of power. The engineer has knowledge and access to information that elected officials and the public do not. This makes the engineer a gatekeeper….There are ways to deal with this problem, most of which involve shifting power away from the engineer and the systems which empower their values….There are many great engineers out there ready to prioritize public safety over traffic speed and neighborhood prosperity over traffic volume. There are a lot of engineers ready to step out from behind the shield provided by industry standards and fulfill their ethical obligations to use their professional judgment in the service of the public. Any city council wanting to can find these people, empower them, and then support them so they can do great things (pgs. 209-210).

My reference to Wendell Berry above—whose work has inspired many writers at Strong Towns—is intentional. The political expression of localism is often derided as mere nostalgia at worst, or only appropriate for the increasingly small portion of the American population which lives in rural areas at best. Marohn is no agrarian. But here he shows us a practical localism, one centered upon the admittedly wonky technical and financial designing, building, and maintaining of America’s circulatory systems of traffic, but nonetheless as reflective of the same localist democratic ideals as anything produced within America’s agrarian or Tocquevillian traditions. No, Marohn is not a theorist, and not every argument or example or chapter in this book is intellectually consistent. But enough of them do for me to say: if only traffic engineers and urban designers read this book, the localist cause will have missed out on something great indeed.

Wichita and the Road Ahead

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

In the midst of violent protests, police violence, and a pandemic, I'm thinking about a road.

It's not much of a road; just a short stretch of University St., directly west of Friends University, where I've taught since 2006. Over those 14 years, I have biked back and forth on that 1/10th of a mile stretch, which dead-ends 50 ft. short of Meridian Ave., probably over 7000 times. It's the final leg of my normal commute route; I bike from my home in west Wichita eastbound on Maple St., cutting south to University at West St. As this segment of University doesn't intersect Meridian, I just ride on the railroad crossing to pop back onto University when the road dead-ends, at which point it's a straight shot to campus. My westbound return follows the same route, which I've ridden so often I can navigate this part of University with my eyes closed. Except I can't right now, because the road is all torn up. (And yes, I have still biked regularly into the campus over the past two months, letting myself into my office while the whole campus stood almost entirely empty; the camera on my office computer is a lot better for recording lectures and conducting online classes than mine at home.)

Of course, the construction isn't any kind of real problem; I can just bike around the bulldozers and dump trucks, and besides the rear entrance to the parking lot for Friends's Garvey Art Center is right there if I can't get through the construction. There are a couple of single-family homes along the street, so it was presumably greater hassle for them--but since everything else which borders both sides of the road belongs to my university, it's mostly folks like me who use it. And while I have no right to or responsibility for the road in any kind of formal sense, I nonetheless found myself somewhat curious about it all. Maybe a little bothered, even.

Why bothered? Well, partly because in the midst of the present pandemic, every penny counts. The job losses which followed in the wake of the life-preserving shutdowns that COVID-19 made necessary have resulted in record unemployment claims, and that means both major declines in tax revenue and major strains on the budgets of the cities of Kansas. Wichita is looking at an $11 million dollar deficit in the coming fiscal year, and as Chase Billingham of Wichita State has noted, while a little of the CARES millions which the federal government has designated as aid for state and local governments has been made available to some targeted programs in the city (like transit), Wichita's general fund itself hasn't received a dime. That may change, and the economy may bounce back more quickly than most economists are predicting. Still, with the advice offered by Charles Marohn's Strong Towns very much on my mind, especially when it comes to what cities like Wichita can do to strengthen the neighborhoods which are crucial to getting us through this time of transition, I kept looking at that construction as I biked past it and wondered: did this road really need to be repaired? Was this the best use of the city's money at this time? Who asked for or decided upon this repair job, and how much does it cost, anyway?

So I started shooting out e-mails. It quickly became clear that this was a construction job that came from the city, not from any stakeholders along the road. (Both the university president and our director of maintenance first found out about the construction when they received a notification from Kansas Paving, a company contracted by the city, that work on the street was about to start.) With some help from Paul Gunzelman, the Assistant City Engineer for the city of Wichita, I was eventually put in contact with Aaron Henning, a maintenance engineer with the city's Public Works & Utilities department. They were able to supply me with city documents and answer all my questions--well, all except the one I consider to be most important, but that one isn't actually an engineering question: it's a political one.

I have nothing but compliments for Paul and Aaron; for every annoying query I put to them about the meaning of acronyms like "OP3" ("Outsourced Pavement Preservation Program"--it's been years, apparently, since the bulk of the routine maintenance of Wichita's more than 5100 miles of road has been handled by the city's own workers) or "PCI" ("Pavement Condition Index," a numerical rating determined in part by staff members who, over the course of 18 months, physically visit every single segment of the aforementioned 5100 miles of road), they had a thorough answer. Insofar as this little stretch of University beside Friends which I know so well goes, the story goes like this:

The PW&U Department has developed a computerized method of ranking various inputs regarding roads (called "DST," for Decision Support Tool), including not just the observed condition of the street, but its primary material (concrete or asphalt?), and whether repairs on the road would fall under the label "preservation" (acting to prevent further deterioration) or "mitigation" (acting to limit the extent of already progressing deterioration). It turns out that this little concrete stretch of University had a PCI of 35, the second lowest ranked concrete street segment in the whole city. And so when 2019's budget was set (in which the OP3 was given $9.5 million, $3 million from the city's General Fund, $6.5 million out of the mostly debt-financed Capital Improvement Plan, with a little over $1 million specifically earmarked for repairing concrete roads), it got prioritized within the funds allocated to District 4, in which Friends University and this street is found. Hence, come late spring of 2020 (and no, I didn't bother asking about the delay; I know how things can pile up), a contract was drawn up for about 55% of the segment's total paved area to be patched and replaced, at a cost of about $45,000, and off Kansas Paving went to do its job. All clear?

Well, sure. Again, I make no criticism of Aaron or Paul or any other city engineers or any of the PW&U staff, and I foresee no reason to criticize the professionalism or efficiency of Kansas Paving. A large number of people, all responding to one another, all passing information and decisions and money along, all getting a road in better shape. This is the way cities should work, right?

But here is where I say--maybe not? Especially, maybe not right now? I go back to my original point: this was a stretch of road I knew very, very well. Was it in great shape? Not at all. Was it in terrible shape? Again, not at all. (Just look at the Google Map photo of it above.) It was a perfectly serviceable 1/10th-mile-long access road use by 1) a couple of private homeowners, 2) those Friends staff, faculty, or students who found a need to drive the 530 feet to the back entrance of the Garvey Art Center, and 3) me, biking east and west on the road, morning and afternoon, year after year after year. As Aaron assured me, no one put in any kind of request to fix this road; it was the DST that determined its time had come, and once calculations were made about what kind of mitigation vs. preservation could be done, costs were tabulated and people were put to work. At the total estimated cost of, roughly speaking, an entire yearly salary of the average probation officer, carpet installer, librarian, title examiner, payroll clerk, or--hey!--civil engineering technician here in the state of Kansas.

Wait, it doesn't work that way!--that's what everyone who read the previous paragraph will say, and they'd be right; it's not like there is any easy way to all of a sudden stop some existing flow of money and divert it to someone or something else. But this is the important, political question I mentioned before: why? Especially during a pandemic, when our city--like cities all across the country--is facing an immediate, and potentially long-enduring, fiscal crisis, why is there no mechanism for people to look at the flows of money which course through our, or any, city's systems, and reconsider? Don't forget that money spent on roads is money that invariably sets up additional maintenance costs, costs that only increase as time goes by. That's not a criticism of those people like Aaron or Paul who have spent their whole professional careers trying to balance so many conflicting demands, and discover the most sustainable way to stretch the dollars they have. If anything, it's a suggestion that maybe they've haven't been supported in going far enough in their thinking about what really needs to be preserved, versus what can stand for just a little mitigation, versus what could really, honestly, just maybe, if only for right now, be allowed to be left alone.

I look around Wichita, and I see--just while walking our dog around our west Wichita neighborhood--more people gardening, more people fixing up their homes, more people setting out chairs and hanging out with one another in their driveways or on the sidewalks, just talking, than I can recall from any previous year. Obviously the fact that restaurants, bars, and other restaurants were closed, and many people were working from home, has been a primary cause of much of that--but perhaps not the only cause? The economic costs of the pandemic have been terrible, and are likely only to continue--and in response, people have been trying to find other, different ways of getting things done. One thing that many of them (that many of us) will need to continue exploring these new, perhaps more sustainable alternatives to work and food and shelter and entertainment is--as the Strong Towns Toolkit points out--cash, both local and immediate. Cities need to hang on to what the fiscal reserves they have, and think carefully and creatively about new ways to spend it.

Am I saying that the half-dozen or so workers I've seen out on University over the past couple of weeks couldn't use the money? Of course not! I'm completely open to the idea that generating road work for Kansas Paving is an entirely defensible act of Keynesian spending, of priming the pump. But then again, if you really want to see the money the city has going directly to the city's neighborhoods and residents, then why not just cancel all the orders for sand and 2x4s and concrete which the University repair job requires, and just deliver whatever portion of that $45,000 would have been dedicated to wages directly to the workers (and maybe with a little extra thrown in), and then keeping the rest on hand? It's not like there aren't problems aplenty which challenge Wichita's ability to move in a more sustainable way through this crisis.

For example, I think about local farmers and food producers I know--in Valley Center, Haysville, Andover--who have struggled to be part of a more sustainable food system here in Wichita; like perhaps a third of all small food operations across the country right now, the Covid Depression is threatening to wipe many of them out. Years ago, when drought threatened south-central Kansas, Wichita's government found the money to establish a rebate program (which still exists today!) incentivizing how people were spending money on sprinkling their lawns and washing their clothes. Surely some cutbacks on little-used roads could provide the city with the accounting flexibility to do something similar with one of our greatest assets: the fact that, unlike many comparable mid-sized cities, it's really quite easy here to grow food?

Well, eventually this little stretch of University will be done, and I won't see during my commute the sort of work which set my mind going on this long tangent. There are, absolutely, many more important topics to argue about right now than this one. But perhaps this small issue could be, should be, a way to get at a much larger one--namely, how to politically move our city to reconsider, or maybe just take further, the ways in which it seeks to prioritize and make more durable the decisions it makes and the money it spends. There will be, I am certain, perhaps 10 or so people that will be really happy with this fixed-up road. I may even be one of them! But I can think of other ways, more genuinely and democratically empowering ways, that the city leaders could spend money that might make even more people happy, in the long run. Here's hoping they can start seeing them (and that we will know how to help them do so!).

Questions for Riverfront Boosters and Their Critics

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Last week, Populous presented their complete (or nearly complete) vision for transforming the east bank of the riverfront through downtown Wichita.* They were not unambitious in their recommendations. In what they predict to be an at least $1.2 billion project whose construction would stretch over at least ten years, they recommend the demolition of Century II, the construction of a new performing arts center and convention center twice the size of Bob Brown Auditorium, a host of mixed-use properties to bring consumers and residents into the downtown, and the development of a wide green space which the labeled Century Park, which might include a brand new ice rink (apparently no one told them about the publicly owned Wichita Ice Center less than a half-mile away from their proposed park, or maybe they just figured no one would notice). The developer-beloved new pedestrian bridge is there, of course, but sadly, no monorail.

Of course, the truly controversial part of all that was their urging the city to level Century II. It's defenders are gathering petitions to put on the ballot a requirement that any historic building in the city can only demolished after a public vote. Given how dismissive our city government has been in the past regarding the value of historic buildings, there is a value to this proposal that goes far beyond the consequences of the riverfront proposal. At the same time, though, that focus on preserving the past simply deepens the generational divide in our city over Century II. It also has the unfortunate side-effect of doing exactly what I think shouldn't be done--treating all the parts of our riverfront space as a whole, obliging people to feel as though they either have to accept the plan which Populous produced (for a hefty fee) as a whole, or content themselves with not spending any public money on any improvements whatsoever. That's silly. So let me see if I can come up with some questions that might break some of these positions up, at least a little bit.

For the boosters: if the concern is primarily to "activate" the quality of life along the riverfront area, why the massive new convention center? Was that really a priority vocalized in the open houses and public meetings which Populous held? Isn't it reasonable that people with serious worries about Wichita's fiscal sustainability and patterns of growth might be suspicious of a presentation which sells its vision with artistic renditions of bike paths and parks and a "civic green," all while suggesting the construction of a convention center fully twice as expensive as any other part of the whole plan? A convention center which presumes a level of business that there is no evidence Wichita is plausibly in the running for?

For the critics: if defenders of Century II are willing to acknowledge the legitimate concerns that artists like Wayne Bryan of Music Theatre Wichita have with the building, despite their obvious fondness for it (and it seems like the defenders are, at least some of them, given that their online materials explicitly talk about building a new concert hall to "supplement" Century II), then why don't you make that up front, so as to not scare off the thousands of Wichitans that think a world-class performing arts center would be worth paying for? When defenders of Century II contrast supposedly snooty fans of the symphony and theater and opera to the authentic "country music crowd," and suggest moving MTW into the old city library, it only confirms the worst generational and cultural stereotypes of those pushing for change.

For the boosters: if the overall aim is to increase the urban vitality of the downtown area, why the condemning reactions to those who point out--correctly--that Populous's grand plan leaves the essentially suburban form around the hapless Waterwalk development basically unchanged, blocked off on the north by a bloated convention center and on the south by Kellogg? The space south of Waterman begs for re-integration into the urban fabric, but this option is disregarded in favor of the aforementioned dream of new Hyatt hotel-convention center-performing arts venue block. Why the tendency to discourage a properly and more sustainably piecemeal, organic approach to development, as opposed to treating everything as an interlocking whole?

For the critics: if it is allowed that at least some kind of new performing arts center is desirable, then isn't it obligatory upon the defenders of Century II to come up with suggestions for its upkeep and redevelopment following the new building's construction? Some of this, admittedly, is already being done, with plans to place CII on the National Registrar of Historic Places, which could loosen up some money for upgrades via tax credits and grants. But that only scratches the surface. Promises to "re-purpose Century II," however attractive they are to those of us with even a slightly traditionalist bent, are as empty as any other development promise unless there is real content behind them. So what is that content? Bill Warren has offered for years to use his connections to supply the city with expert suggestions about how to "turn the iconic building into a destination building that benefits the city." Well...what are his suggestions? Are they available? Are they being worked on? If they are, fantastic! Thank you, Mr. Warren! So can we get an update? A reveal date, maybe? To the Populous folks' credit, they've at least come up with something--and for better or worse, there is a reason why something usually beats nothing.

For the boosters: if you're going to talk about a grand, billion-dollar project for transforming the riverfront of Wichita, then isn't it reasonable to talk practically about how this city has a, shall we say, rather fraught relationship with city leaders casually speaking of Community Improvement Districts, Tax Increment Financing Districts, and STAR bonds? Populous's slapped together list of "Funding Benchmark Cities" doesn't inspire confidence that the political, economic, and demographic realities of Wichita, and consequently how to strengthen the city overall, are being considered seriously. In Tulsa there is the Gathering Place, an admittedly wonderful venue that has added tremendously to the civic life of that city--and one whose half-billion dollar cost was essentially paid for entirely by George Kaiser, throwing in an additional $100 million endowment for maintenance. (The Kochs' $6 million dollar donation which provided a partial endowment for and bought a new name for the old Levitt Arena at Wichita State University was admittedly generous, but can't quite compare.) In Dallas we have Klyde Warren Park, a delightful green space in the heart of the city--and one that was a 10th of the cost of Populous's recommendation for Wichita, and whose funding was managed by a philanthropic organization, the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation, that was able to make use of city, state, and federal money.

And Oklahoma City? There the comparison is at least conceivable; OKC leaders worked hard to develop a plan and sell to the citizens of the city a sales tax plan--their famous MAPS projects-- that would enable them to pursue significant urban improvements without bonds or debt, and the lessons of their success certain would be relevant to thinking about the $1.2 billion Populous plan. But one should be careful in simply assuming that OKC provides Wichita with a road-map to transforming their city--the excessive corporate friendliness and connections which characterizes OKC, its economy grounded in energy rather than manufacturing, and in particular its size relative to ours, all suggest that Wichita's path towards a revitalized downtown, while it might borrow from other urban paths, shouldn't be led down a particular road just because some architects guarantee us that they've seen other cities do it too.

I don't mean to write this to attack the idea of thinking big about the Riverfront, nor to criticize those attempting to save Century II. (As it happens, I'm actually a supporter of both.) But everyone at all familiar with political debate knows how quickly positions can become entrenched, with compromises and alternatives--say, cutting Century II in half and turning it into an outdoor amphitheater under a refurbished dome? or knocking out all its walls and making it the new home for the continually cash-strapped Kansas Aviation Museum?--being dismissed as half-measures that satisfy neither side. So consider these questions (and surely hundreds of others like them, being asked by other concerned Wichitans) simply an attempt push and prod and elicit responses that go beyond the calcified "love it or leave it!" or "build it or I'm out of here!" positions too often adopted by people who care about this city, both young and old. This year will very likely be a time of big decisions for the downtown--but big decisions can still be made, carefully, organically, respectfully, a little bit at a time. That's the way the best decisions are always made, after all.

*I wasn’t able to attend the big reveal, and hence I am indebted to the comments of, and subsequent exchanges with, Alex Pemberton, Chase Billingham, Leon Moeder, Nolan Nez, Christopher Parisho and Chris Pumpelly, for helping to clarify many of the thoughts contained in this piece.

Taking Our Time with Century II

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

The argument over what to do with Century II has quite arguably been a subtext to just about every major debate which has been conducted in our city in 2019. With the rapid construction of the new baseball stadium and the redesign of McLean Boulevard on the west side of the river, the need to think about the east side, and in particular the fate of Wichita’s single most notable landmark (sorry Keeper, but you know it’s true), has been unavoidable; you can see the evidence for it everywhere.

Last spring, The Century II Citizens Advisory Committee, chaired by Mary Beth Jarvis, finished their work, concluding that a new performing arts center to replace Century II was a necessity. By the summer, historical preservationists and other activists were organized to protect Century II, asking hard and necessary questions about retrofitting alternatives, financing schemes, and influence of local development interests. At a mayoral debate in the fall, a disagreement between Mayor Jeff Longwell and Mayor-Elect Brandon Whipple over the loss of the downtown coffee house and community center Mead’s Corner was seen as staking out different approaches to historic buildings like Century II. And now, as the year comes to an end, the design group Populous–which was paid $700,000 to come up with plans for the whole Hyatt-Bob Brown Convention Center-Century II bloc–have revealed five possible scenarios for reconstructing the entire downtown riverfront; three of which gets rid of the building entirely, with one preserving it intact and another designing it as an open-air shell. After all these months the argument, as 2020 draws closer, finally seems to be coming to a head.

I don’t envy those whose responsibility it will be to juggle the financial, architectural, environmental, and economic aspects of this decision (though I’m gratified to see Whipple at least making it clear that this decision will have to be framed in such a way that voters will be able to exercise some real responsibility over it, as wasn’t the case with the fate of Lawrence-Dumont Stadium). I would only suggest, on the basis of two meetings about Century II I’ve attended in the last couple of weeks, that the generational aspect of the decision not be ignored either.

One of the meetings I’m speaking of was a small, exclusive gathering–only six people were present–at private home, which I was fortunate enough to be invited to. Bill Warren was there, getting ready to thrown down the gauntlet he announced on Sunday in support of preserving Century II. The four others (besides myself) included a couple of the most well-known and influential people in the city. Everyone there was white, and the average age skewed...well, let’s just say “older.” The focus was strictly on contemplating ways to impress upon the Wichita population the architectural significance of Century II, the possibilities for its future use, and the great costs involved in simply wishing it away.

The other meeting I have in mind was held at Roxy’s Downtown, organized by W (the new name of Young Professionals of Wichita). It was open to public, and pulled in about a 100 people, including a number of young local leaders (city councilman Brandon Johnson and county commissioner Michael O’Donnell both were there). The crowd was young–it was a mostly late-20s to mid-30s group, with only a sprinkling of Gen-X-and-above types like me–and about as racially diverse a turnout as I’ve ever seen at a civic meeting here in Wichita. The focus was on reviewing, ranking, and commenting upon the plans which Populous has presented...a process which, even before it formally began, showed every sign of reflecting a deep anti-Century II sentiment. (When one older gentleman stood up to defend Century II and suggest that internal renovations might still be possible, he prefaced his comments by saying “Please don’t throw bricks.”)

So, two very different meetings, reflecting two very different slices of Wichita’s demographics. At the W meeting I ran into a former student of mine, a young African-American woman heavily engaged in fund-raising efforts for the restoration of the Dunbar Theatre. It was great catching up with her, and she wasn’t not shy–as the conversation about Populous’s different options developed, with everyone making comments about all sorts of different possibilities and opportunities–at making her perspective known. “I’m a Wichitan, I’m not going anywhere, and so I’m thinking about what I can enjoy for the next 50 years. How many years do all those folks calling Century II some kind of monument that should be preserved have left? Maybe 20?”

She wasn’t alone in feeling that way; the votes on the various proposals, and the comments posted in real-time from peoples’ phones (it was a very interactive meeting), made it clear that getting rid of Century II–whether to create a open green space to extend from a proposed new performing arts center all the way down to the river edge (Scenario 1), or to allow for an expansion and reconstruction of the convention center (Scenario 2)–was something almost everyone agreed on. Scenario 3A, the only one which keeps Century II intact, was the lowest ranked of all five by a long measure. (Scenario 3B, which suggests knocking out Century II’s walls but opening up and preserving the space under the dome didn’t get much love either, which I thought was too bad, though maybe that’s just because I grew up in a city that similarly retro-fitted a huge old pavilion from the 1970s into an open-air space that served as our downtown centerpiece for decades.)

That the answer to the question of Century II needs to respect the views and hopes of those who will be living with and making use of it decades into the future seems obvious. But at the same time, it would be wrong to assume that the accomplished people at the first meeting were a bunch of instinctive “no’s”; rather, they were experienced people asking additional–and, in some ways, even harder–questions. Like: Have we considered building a new performing arts center solely for stage performances, thus making it more cost effective to concentrate solely on acoustic improvements in Century II for Wichita Symphony and the like? Or: Have we asked whether it really is the case that large amounts of convention business passes Wichita solely because Bob Brown lacks windows, as opposed to the (I think much more likely) fact that flight connections through ICT remain poor? Complicated and unromantic as they may seem, such questions have to be asked.

And, to be fair, they are being asked; indeed, if you listened closely at Roxy’s, you heard and saw, along with the desire to grandly remake Wichita’s riverfront, other, less expansive and more careful concerns. My former student expressed a couple of them to me. Regarding all the talk about mix-used developments to “activate” and generated revenue-generating commerce along the river: “All these shops they want to build as part of the riverfront–will they make sure that a low-income person like me will be able to shop there?” And regarding all the talk of the Arkansas River an accessible part of the plan: “What kind of river clean-up will come along with it? You can’t make a ‘Riverfront Legacy’ if the river’s natural legacy isn’t a priority.” Good questions, both of these–and that just scratches the surface.

So while there probably is a significant generational divide in how Wichitans think about Century II, it’s not a total divide by any means. Which is all the more reason to make sure we take enough time to make certain that everyone in both of these cohorts, and everyone in between, can hear all the questions be asked, without having the pressure of some promised quick land deal driving the conversation. Yes, decisions will have to be made, at city council and county commission meetings and in the voting booth; we can’t put it off much longer, and that means some will be unhappy with the results. But we can reach that result in a respectful, inclusive way, and that starts with listening. The best, most lasting parts of any city’s built environment are those that come slowly, organically, through the actions of citizens both young and old. Century II was built to be that, and the new Century II, whatever it’s called, should be too.

The Localist Theory of Charles Marohn's Wonderfully Practical Strong Towns

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

This past weekend, I took a group of students up to the annual Prairie Festival at The Land Institute in Salina, KS. I do this every year, as part of my effort to introduce the students to some genuinely radical thinking regarding environmental sustainability, local food systems, and the cultural shifts necessary to make them happen. Afterwards, as I talked to one of my students about Wes Jackson's animated and quite funny discourse, I tried to communicate to him Jackson's insistence upon the "virtues of ignorance"--probably with little success. The moment the conversation was over, I wished I'd thought to make use of Charles Marohn's wonderful book Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. Particularly this line:

Once we accept that our cities are complex systems, we are forced to come to grips with the reality that we can never fully understand them. More to the point, what we often think of as simple and obvious solutions to the problems we face are simple and obvious only because of our limited understanding. The more we truly know, the less clear things become (p. 120).

Jackson was talking about the damage which reductive, industrial solutions to the problems of food production has done to our farms and natural ecosystems, whereas Marohn's great crusade--one that has involved building a whole movement--is to get America's urban dwellers, and in particular those responsible for shaping the spaces wherein they dwell, to recover the "spooky wisdom" of older urban ecosystems, ones which grew organically and adaptatively, rather than bankrupting themselves in pursuit of "simple and obvious solutions." Both, ultimately, are discussing the same modern predicament. We are people who too often assume that--as Marohn describes at length at the end of the first chapter of his book--if there is a crime problem, we should just hire more police; if there is a traffic problem, we should just build more lanes of road; if the Walmart is stagnating, we should subsidize building another even larger one somewhere else; etc. (pp 13-14). That is, we are frequently bothered by complexity, by the time which incrementally adapting to emergent patterns requires, and by the local, circumstantial knowledge which such adaptations require; our preference, instead, is to build everything, or solve everything, "to a finished state" (p. 19), without much concern to the costs which mount in the absence of the complex stability which once attended the problem at hand.

Of course, one shouldn't deny that those "finished states" have often included among them transformations in food production (the Green Revolution!) and personal convenience (the suburban split-level with a backyard!) which have brought enormous positives into human life. But in pursuing those states, we invariably turn the complexity of tending to the land, or strengthening our communities, into something merely "complicated," begging for ever more technical responses which become ever more disconnected from the lives of all of us who depend upon those communities and upon that land if we are survive and thrive.

All this may make Strong Towns seem like a work of cultural criticism or philosophy, but it isn't--at least not directly. In fact, Strong Towns is one of those rare books (Wendell Berry's classic The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture is another) whose argument itself exemplifies what it advocates for: it builds towards a challenge to the whole way we conceive of its chosen focus by beginning with the most local and particular relevant matters possible. For Berry, like it is with Jackson, the focus is the collapse of traditional farming, and the key relevant matter at hand is the actual lives of farmers. For Marohn, with a focus on the collapsing financial health of America's cities, the most immediately relevant matters are the actual roads, pipes, buildings, and infrastructure that surround all of us who live in cities, and how much it costs to maintain them. Marohn, who worked as a civil engineers for decades, has an expert, intimate knowledge of these materials and processes, in the same way Jackson and Berry know about soil. So from that starting point, Marohn's book--easily the best practice treatise on localism that I have read in a long time--lays out the history and math that he sees as supporting his thesis: that America's cities are addicted to growth, and addicted to taking on debt to finance that growth, resulting in endless Ponzi Schemes to keep cities fiscally alive on paper even as basic maintenance collapses and, too often as a result, the sense of civic connection and confidence which functioning cities help provide collapses as well. The result is a bracing, powerful book which ought to get every reader to sign up a Strong Towns member, if nothing else.

Marohn is neither a historian nor a sociologist, nor as skilled a writer as Berry; his short, smart interventions into the thorny issues of private and public investment, cumulative cash flows, value per acre, and more, are both insightful and persuasive, but they leave some connections unclear, sometimes requiring the reader to supply the narrative thrust. Still, none of his declarations--"Our cities must now intentionally sacrifice growth in order to have stability" (p. 105); "There is no reason for any North American city to build another foot of roadway, or put in another length of pipe, to serve any new property anywhere" (p. 130); "Growth is an old economy objective. For local governments seeking to create successful human habitat, the centrally orienting objective needs to shift to wealth creation" (p. 176)--exist in a vacuum; all are well supported and have an intuitive sense to them. Every one of us, after all, have, no matter what size or type of city we live in, seen local governments hand out tax-breaks, desperately seek state and federal loans, float irresponsible bonds, impose ever-more creative financing schemes, all in the name of building another strip-mall, another restaurant, another office park, with the hope (sometimes fulfilled, but usually not) of landing jobs and generating sufficient additional tax revenue so as to make a few token payments and then start the process all over again. And every one of knows how this addiction is both a product of, as well as a contributor to, the individualism, consumerism, and materialism which rarely produces anything like the traditions, institutions, and beautiful edifices that our best cities--which are, almost without exception, cities whose wealth-creating inner core had grown through a long process of adaptation, and had achieved a stability sufficient to withstand the temptations of rapid, debt-driven growth--are known for.

Michael Hendrix, in his review of Strong Towns, said it described a "conservative vision for community," and he's not wrong to use that label. But we need to be clear on what kind of "conserving" Marohn is recommending. It is one that would follow a very different path than the market-friendly American conservatism of the past three generations. This may not be immediately obviously, especially since Marohn frequently expresses affection of market mechanisms, and accepts market realities in the way in which he tabulates costs and consequences. Yet he also, on my reading anyway, refuses to allow the supposed invisible hand of the marketplace to exercise any kind of formal driving role in his proposals. Instead, he acknowledges that all markets operate in realms of prior determined parameters, amidst a set of values and incentives which reflect affirmative decisions--and it is such decisions that he calls upon America's city dwellers to make. It's not for nothing, I think, that his final chapter ends with a call for us to "work together in an intentional way" (p. 218). What form should those intentions take? Well, clearly sometimes they should take the form of limits upon our lifestyle and socio-economic choices. As he observes (with, I think, just a tiny hint of contempt), many Americans appear to--or at least are said to--"prefer [living] in a single-family homes on a large lot....[and not] within traditional neighborhoods in close proximity to other people"; they "want big box stores, strip malls, and fast food, not corner stores and mom-and-pop restaurants." He responds to this brusquely: "I can respect that some people prefer development styles that are financially ruinous to my city...[but] my local government should not feel any obligation to provide those options"  (pp. 144-145).

Cities have been, likely for their entire history, places of freedom, experimention, and choice--Stadtluft macht frei! and all that. Completely aside from the practical problems of making this transition (and, to be clear, such practical considerations are exactly what takes up the bulk of the book!), an urbanism which can be "stable without growth" (p. 103) would have to be city which theorizes values of freedom, experimentation, and choice quite differently than they have been over the centuries of liberal modernity. What that theory would ultimately consist of is something which many of us are searching for, with no clear solutions yet. In his own, enormously valuable way, Marohn's whole Strong Towns project contributes to this search. In Strong Towns itself, you see echoes of it, though occasionally only in an unexplored and undeveloped way. For example, Marohn's language tiptoes right up to criticizing the wealth and opportunity which industrialization brought into our lives, implying with perhaps a touch of romanticism that our urban communities may have been better places when they were poorer (pp. 60, 126-127). Similarly, the ambivalence which arguably attends Marohn's language when he discusses white flight and women entering the work force might raise concerns among those fearful that re-introducing limits to our urban imagination will likely result in a return to old, discriminatory patterns (pp. 93, 96, 111). But we shouldn't read, I think, too much into these explorations--they are, after all, as the whole approach of the book makes clear, intellectual adaptations of a sense: incremental efforts to understand more about the complexity of urban life, and figure out ways to respond to the way we have both fiscally overbuilt and culturally underinvested in it.

And that is really the main virtue of Marohn's work: he is a man willing to explore. Any small, tactical action to restrict growth, build wealth, improve mass transit, halt needless construction, preserve still functional places, shrink streets, allow incremental denisfication, reduce regulatory burdens, promote walkability, and enable people to engage in commerce and build communities and connections in the midst of the suburban grids which plaque too many of our cities is, so far as he is concerned, is something that he'll likely want to see tried. And that means he'll listen to and weigh arguments without insisting on pigeon-holing them in one category of answers or another. For example, he's clearly not a fan of cities' budgets being dependent upon the national government, but he also allows that some of what the national government does for cities is essential, and doesn't pretend that the national government needs to act just like a city government must (pp. 79-80, 85-86, 88-89). In short, what I think Marohn models, above all, is a democratic urbanism, one that turns to hard data, yes, but even more so turns to city dwellers themselves, as Berry and Jackson turned to farmers, to discover (or recover) the incremental insights that, bit by bit, makes towns strong. Does he have a democratic theory to make sense of all the ways in which cities, and the concentration of interests they represent, potentially complicate local governance? Not really. But he has shown us, through this book and in his whole campaign, just how imperative, and how practical, asking those questions, and incrementally experimenting with answers, really is.

At the end of chapter 5 of Strong Towns, "Growth or Stability"--which is, in more ways than one, the real center of the book's whole argument--Marohn makes a deeply important and culturally rich (whether he realizes it or not) set of observations. He writes (and forgive my interruptions, but it's a rich passage that deserves further elaboration):

Cities are a collection of us; they are they way we take collective action in our communities. [Here "cities" are presented as inherently democratic and civic creations, not market ones; the act of organizing spaces for commerce, art, personal expression, political action, etc., is a form of collective agency, distinct from other historical forms.] Over the past century we've gradually given up this responsibility, deferring the direction of our places to the priorities of others. [Note what is implied by "others"--they are not a single, collective force, but individualized others, others separated from what those in the city collectively attend to.] If the people [invoking "the people," that essential civic construct] are to lead again, if we are to create a prosperous future for ourselves and our neighbors, local government must reassert leadership (pp. 105-106).

This is civic republicanism, participatory democracy, populist self-governance, and fiscal humility all rolled into one; it is a great expression of fundamental localist truths. Marohn may not see himself as a social theorist or historical critic, and his book isn't without its perplexing points. But he's produced here a great, vital work of localist theory, and needs to be honored for such.