Upzoned

Closing the Doors on the "Bad Party" in Lake Wylie, South Carolina

Strong Towns board member Ian Rasmussen once likened the conventional approach to growth and development to a “bad party.”

At a good party, everyone who shows up is contributing more to the party—in food, drink, and energy—than they consume. Quite literally, the more the merrier. But what if you threw a party and everyone who shows up eats and drinks more than they brought? Each person who walks through the door only accelerates the decline. If your goal is make the party last as long as possible, you’d be foolish to let anyone else in.

The same can be said of the North American development pattern. The way we build our towns and cities—stretching ever outward, building more roads, increasing the cost of infrastructure, and increasing our reliance on cars—is a net-loss. The increased tax revenue from people moving into suburban-style neighborhoods doesn’t come close to paying for that growth over time. The result: a bad party. One in which growth paradoxically increases decline, making the whole community more fragile. If this was your town, and you realized what was happening, but weren’t willing to change the nature of the party itself—what would you do? The only thing you could do: bar entry to newcomers.

This is the situation Lake Wylie, South Carolina finds itself it in. Lake Wylie, an exurb of Charlotte, North Carolina, has tripled in size in the last two decades. As a recent Wall Street Journal article described, people were drawn to the town by its good schools and low taxes. But the party turned sour as schools filled, the water system got overwhelmed, and commute times exploded. So late last year, the local governing council slammed the door shut on growth. The party is no longer accepting newcomers...which makes you wonder how good the party really was to begin with.

Lake Wylie, South Carolina is the subject of this week’s episode of the Upzoned podcast. That’s right, Upzoned is back, with new host Abby Kinney—and a cool new theme song too, “Get Out (The Streetcar Song)” from Kansas City-based rapper Kemet the Phantom.

In this week’s episode, Abby and Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn talk about the dilemma facing Lake Wylie (and exurbs like it all around the country), the physical and cultural challenges of retrofitting an exurb for a healthier approach to growth, and the fundamentally fragile flaw in the very idea of a “bedroom community.”

Then in the Downzone, we get to know our new host a bit better. A native of St. Louis, Abby Kinney is an urban design and planning consultant at Gould Evans in Kansas City, Missouri. She facilitates the ad-hoc Kansas City chapter of the Incremental Development Alliance. When she’s not geeking out on cities, Abby is an avid urban mountain biker, audiobook and podcast junkie, amateur rock climber, and guitarist. Make sure to connect with her on Twitter at @abbykatkc.

Show Notes

• Wall Street Journal article about Lake Wylie

• The Journal. podcast episode about Lake Wylie

• “The Party Analogy,” by Charles Marohn

• Abby Kinney on Twitter

• Kemet the Phantom on Soundcloud

• New Theme Song: “Get Out (The Streetcar Song),” by Kemet the Phantom (Music video on YouTube)

Upzoned Live in Santa Ana

This will be our last Upzoned episode for a while. This episode was recorded in Santa Ana, California, at our SoCal Regional Gathering. We talk bullet trains, big projects, and how Southern California can shift their top/down approach to start to build Strong Towns.

SoCal Is So Addicted to Cars. Should They Get Rid of Parking Minimums Anyway?

It’s Black Friday—and at Strong Towns, that means it’s time to hang with family, nap off yesterday’s food coma, and reflect on how dumb mandatory parking minimums are. Thousands of our readers across America are out there right now happily snapping photos of half-empty lots outside their local stores as part of our annual #BlackFridayParking campaign, reflecting on the insanity of the fact that our cities actually require many of their merchants to build so many parking spots that their customers can’t even fill on the biggest shopping day of the year. (You can totally join them, by the way.)

But not everyone thinks their town has a too-much-parking problem. And if you want to go to ground zero for people who think the Strong Towns call to end parking minimums simply doesn’t apply to their community, look no further than Southern California.

In a recent podcast from KCRW’s Greater LA, host Steve Chiotakis dug into Los Angeles’ peculiar relationship with its parking landscape. LA, after all, is a city that devotes a whopping 27 square miles of its land to the storage of private vehicles, (yes, really,) but whose residents still always seem to be endlessly circling for a spot. And while some Los Angelenos Chiotakis talks to think their city will simply never kick their autodependency habit, others see hope for getting people out of their cars and onto modes of transportation that don’t require that we pave over acres upon acres of our most valuable downtown land.

So what’s the Strong Towns take? Is Southern California beyond repair, or is it time for a transformative overhaul of the City of Sunshine?

In this episode of Upzoned, Chuck and Kea tackle that tough question—and offer a preview of what you can expect at their lived podcast recording at December 4th’s Southern California regional gathering. And their answers might surprise you—especially if you think #EndParkingMinimums means #BanTheCars.

Can we make California wildfires less destructive by changing the way we build?

For months now, wildfires have been raging across the state of California—and along the way, they’ve sparked some heated conversations about whether our own building choices are to blame for the destruction and tragedy that have followed nearly every blaze.

It’s not hard to see why. California is pretty much the poster child for the #Suburban Experiment, and they’ve never quite stopped building further and further out from their coastal cores, growing at a robust post-war pace long after the rest of the country saw fringe development slow. In California, though, those fringes are located deep into fire-prone forests that are increasingly beset by drought—and building infrastructure way out into those edges doesn’t do much for their cities’ finances, either.

So California should just say an unequivocal “no” to new development in the wilderness-urban interface and start densifying its core neighborhoods, right? And we definitely shouldn’t be running power lines out into the middle of those tinderbox landscapes, yeah?

Well…it’s not quite that simple.

Today on Upzoned, we bring in a special guest: Brian Isom, wildfire management expert, researcher, and author of a great recent article over on the Orange County Register. In his article, Brian argued that negligent power companies actually aren’t the bogeyman of the wildfire crisis that many would have you believe—and that keeping Californians and their homes safe will take a lot more than the efforts of you, me, your local zoning commission, and Smokey the Bear. And in this conversation with Kea, he discusses all of this along with his work at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, as well as how a Strong Towns approach can help align market incentives to make even the driest, most overbuilt corners of the US fire-safe and financially prosperous.

Live Episode: Minneapolis ended single-family-only zoning. Do the new guidelines go too far, not far enough, or are they just right (for now)?

Minneapolis just became the first major city to end single-family-only zoning. As Kea Wilson and Chuck Marohn discuss, this isn’t a radical idea but it is sure to have a subtly radical impact over time. What do the new guidelines mean for Minneapolis and for other cities and states considering a similar approach?

This episode was recorded as a webcast in the Strong Towns Facebook group, which gave Kea and Chuck the chance to answer questions live from our Facebook members.

By the way, it’s fall member drive week here at Strong Towns. The change in Minneapolis is one example of how Strong Towns is helping to shift the national conversation around growth, development, and financial strength. If you want to see that see that conversation spread to more communities, consider becoming a member at strongtowns.org/membership.

The real reason why Bill Gates' and Jeff Bezos' posh suburb is going broke

You would think that your city’s wealthiest suburb would always have enough money to keep the streetlights on and the roads paved. You’d probably also think that the suburb that the two wealthiest people on Earth call home would be able to pave its roads in gold and light its streets with Hollywood-style glamor lighting that makes everyone it shines on look ten pounds thinner. On both counts, you’d be wrong.

Earlier this week, CNBC offered an update to the story of Medina, Washington, a wealthy enclave outside of Seattle that billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates both call home. Medina has been making headlines for a surprising reason: they’re struggling to find the money to deliver the services that residents need, even though some of those resident’s homes (CoughGatesCough) have 24 bathrooms, something called a “trampoline room,” valuations of over $131 million, and owners who can comfortably pay over $1 million a year in property taxes. The reason why, CNBC suggests, has to do with a state cap on property taxes that distorts how much money actually goes to local needs and keeps the Bezoses of the world from paying what it actually costs to maintain the infrastructure that surrounds their mega-mansions—and if Washington just let the Medinas of the world have a little more local control, they’d finally be able to make the math work.

The Strong Towns staff wondered, though, whether making Medina strong was really just a matter of twiddling a few taxation knobs on the governance control panel. So host Kea Wilson, and guest host + reluctant Seattleite, John Reuter, decided to dive in and talk it out.

Would raising local and state tax rates really give wealthy communities like Medina the cash they need to pay for the suburban way of life—or is their development pattern simply so insolvent that even their high-earning residents would balk at that price tag? If Bezos and Gates decided to pay their city’s tax bill themselves, should Medina throw a party, or start worrying about what happens when the billionaires (or their heirs, or even the mere millionaires) pack up someday and leave, as has happened in so many American suburbs already? Do luxury homes and overbuilt road networks even make us happy in the long run, even if we can figure out how to afford it all? And most importantly: is one of Bill Gates’ 24 bathrooms also a trampoline room?! The comedic possibilities are endless!

Then in the DownZone, John and Kea talk the very different ways they’re celebrating Halloween: John, by dressing his dog up as Chewbacca and reflecting on the role of heroism in the Star Wars franchise, and Kea, by reading a spooky-good new novel by Helen Phillips (and, okay, dressing her dog up as Superman, but that’s just a gimme.)

Why is the "Miracle on 14th Street" Bus Rapid Transit Line Such a Miracle?

If you’re even a casual follower of the urbanist blogosphere, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard about the “Miracle on 14th Street.” That’s what transit advocates have been calling New York’s newest bus rapid transit line, which has fought its way through lawsuits from irate neighbors to become what Citylab calls “the first glimpse of a true bus-centric street in America’s largest city.” But this project is about more than just paint: car traffic is now banned on 14th street for most hours of the day, and with the road all to itself, the M14 Bus is now running at more than twice the speed of the M42.

But here’s what’s really stunning Strong Towns advocates about this story: the fact that it’s considered miraculous at all.

On today’s Upzoned, Chuck and Kea are back to break down why simple policy and paint-driven transportation improvements like the 14th street makeover aren’t more common in American cities, from federal funding structures that make it easier to build a massive light rail project than incrementally improve a bus schedule, to pop culture that makes riding the bus the butt of too many national jokes. And then we dig a little deeper and explore the range of even humbler transportation improvements our communities are leaving on the table—and a few instances where, despite what you think, a transportation fix isn’t what your community needs at all.

Then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea talk about their favorite recent reads: For Chuck, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest exploration into the nuances of human communication, and for Kea, an audibook by a beloved Tennessee novelist read for 9 blissful hours by Tom Hanks.

Spooky Wisdom: What Lessons Should We Be Learning from How Our Ancestors Built Cities?

Welcome to a special mash-up episode of the Upzoned and Strong Towns podcasts!

 

In this episode, Kea Wilson, host of Upzoned, and Strong Towns president Charles Marohn, Jr. discuss the “spooky wisdom” contained in the cities of our ancestors, reflecting the ways in which humans and human habitats have co-evolved with each other. What lessons should we be learning and how did we come to throw away that ancient wisdom so casually and so completely?

Kea and Chuck explore why so many North American neighborhoods built after World War II may have been designed by humans but can’t be said to have been designed for humans. They also talk about the difference between complex systems and systems that are merely complicated, why a massive influx of resources isn’t always a good thing, and about the power of incrementalism.

 

We’re doing something unique this week. We're releasing one episode every day and inviting special guests to commandeer the Strong Towns podcast microphone to talk with Chuck about his first book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, which releases on Tuesday, October 1. This is episode one of that series.

 

Make sure you don’t miss a single episode. Subscribe to the Strong Towns podcast on iTunes. For more information about the book—and to take advantage of soon-to-be-expiring bonus offers—visit strongtowns.org/book.

Is There a Way to Build Prisons that Makes Our Town Stronger?

You’ve seen the phrase on Strong Towns time and again: “Cities across America are going broke.” But another way to say it is a little more direct: “Cities across America need money—and they need it soon.” And with last generation’s roads quickly crumbling and the costs of last generation’s suburban-style developments swiftly becoming clear, some towns may not even have the patience to do what most communities in a bind do to plug the gaps: lure a big private employer to deliver a big property tax windfall. No, these other cities either prefer to (or must) build a big revenue-generator themselves, and do it right now.

In rural communities especially, a prison, which can contract out beds to house county, state and even federal inmates at a profit, can seem like a great quick-cash bet. Best of all, if the profits don’t pencil out as you think, you can just sell that thing off to a private corporation that will run the space for you, giving you an immediate windfall you might desperately need.

But does it always work out that way? And even if does, is it really good for our communities?

Inspired by a recent article from In These Times, Upzoned hosts Kea and Chuck take on a charged and crucial question this week: What would the prison system look like in a Strong Town? If we set aside how we feel about the criminal justice system and view a prison purely as an infrastructure investment, are big public incarceration centers just silver-bullet development in another form? What about when city-owned prisons go private? And most importantly, how can we build strong places that aren’t dangerously dependent upon the revenue from prisons at all?

Then in the Downzone, Chuck spends a reflective last week before the publication of his own book reading a biography of another author, Harper Lee. And Kea reflects on another type of prison: a wild 1970s social experiment aboard a tiny raft set adrift across the Atlantic Ocean with 11 strangers crammed inside, which is now the subject of a fascinating documentary.

Our Cities' Housing Crises are Getting Worse. Is it Time to Offer a Cash Prize to Anyone Who Can Solve Them?

For generations, think tanks and policy analysts and departments of housing and more have all been working hard to solve one seemingly intractable problem: how to get more affordable housing in places that don’t have enough of it. And while dogmatists think they have the answer—build more units! rent control! inclusionary zoning! social housing! increase wages!–some days, it seems like we haven’t cracked the code in even a single American city, much less found a silver bullet to fix them all.

That’s why one Utah homebuilder is taking a different approach: skipping the pros and asking the public for their best ideas to put more roofs over more heads. And the authors of the very best concepts don’t just get the warm glow you feel when you’ve solved a devastating national crisis: they also get a share of a $200,000 prize pool—whether they’re a housing non-profit or just an average Strong Citizen with a great concept.

Okay: $200,000 isn’t a lot of money relative to the staggering scale of our housing woes, and a contest likely funded by a company’s marketing department isn’t likely to change the trajectory of cities across North America. But for Upzoned hosts Kea and Chuck, this story raised a few questions that we think any city should be asking themselves.

If conventional approaches to fixing our housing problems aren’t working, should our cities be funding innovation contests of their own? How do cash prizes incentivize imagination for fresh civic solutions in ways that traditional salaries, peer review processes and benchmark reports can’t? Is the very concept of a contest to “fix housing” flawed, because addressing many of our cities’ most urgent housing needs might look more like meeting transportation needs, or employment needs, or other interconnected problems in our complex human ecosystems? And why aren’t cities willing to step outside the box to consider contests in general—besides the tired old fear of getting sued?

Then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea have two very different reading recommendation’s: ever-sunny Chuck suggests a Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises, and Kea, whose fictional tastes usually run to the dark and bizarre, recommends a wonderful (if slightly out-of-character) heartwarming summer pick: The Lager Queen of Minnesota.