Upzoned

Will Smart City Technology Really Make Our Places Stronger?

If you asked the average Strong Towns advocate what our cities most need more of if we want them to be financially stronger, they’d have just three words for you: data, data, data.

Because the more you study fragile places, the more you keep running up against just how few of the decisions that shape our built environment are truly informed by the unique and dynamic realities of our unique and dynamic places, much less the billions of unique and dynamic people who live in them. Sure, we host the public engagement sessions, put service request portals on our .gov websites, and conduct time-limited traffic studies. But while they might scratch the surface, none of those things ever seem to really capture of the astonishing complexity of the world we live in. At best, we simply haven’t figured out a way to continuously capture the data we need to make our places truly strong. At worst, we deliberately avoid the hard work of collecting that data—because it’s too inefficient, too messy… and too easy to just cross your fingers and say yes to another mega-project that sounds good on paper.

Strong Towns fans aren’t the only one troubled by the dearth of data in our city planning process—and that’s where the techies come in. In a new article in Curbed, Patrick Sisson outlined just a few of the smart technology solutions that are reaching for innovative new ways to make the city building process radically more participatory—and if they work, it could revolutionize not only the public engagement process, but everything about the way we do reporting, design, and more.

But even though we all love data, not all Strong Towns advocates are convinced that apps that help you report potholes and light poles that measure how many bikes go down the street are the answer to bringing more feedback to the city design process.

On this episode of Upzoned, Chuck and Kea go deep into the many forms of civic tech, and try to suss out which ones are most (and least) consistent with a Strong Towns vision for communities that are authentically driven by continuous, meaningful bottom-up feedback. Along the way, they tackle some tough topics: are our city leaders asking their citizens the right questions about how they use their built environment? Can we ask those truly meaningful questions in the space of a single app, or even across dozens of them—or does community engagement need a more traditional, soulful approach? What is lost when we digitize data collection? What about embedded technologies like new high-tech traffic counters that don’t engage with stated human opinion at all? And most importantly: who on earth is the target market for apps like Smell My City?

So Your Town is Building Lots of New Housing Units! But How Many New *Doorbells* Are You Losing?

If you go for a walk around a sought-after North American city, you’re likely to see all the usual things we associate with booming city growth: the towering crane, the beeping backhoe, the shell of that new apartment building looming behind the construction tape. But just because the footprint of your town is growing doesn’t mean your population is—even if every single one of those new luxury units is filling up fast.

And if you want to understand the reason behind that seeming paradox, we have one tip for you: start counting doorbells.

That’s because, according to a new article from Slate’s Henry Grabar, many of the cities that are adding new housing units are also among the fastest to subtract old ones from within the walls of their historic buildings, converting duplexes and triplexes to single-family homes and gradually draining the density from what used to be populous neighborhoods by design. But how should a Strong Towns advocate look at this phenomenon: as a disaster for communities that are short on affordable housing supply and too slow to build, or a natural and necessary part of the incremental development process?

Today on Upzoned, Strong Towns staffers Kea Wilson and Daniel Herriges talk it out. Daniel, a San Francisco veteran who’s spent a lot of his life in booming places, gives his take on the long-range consequences of strict zoning codes that make it near-impossible for buildings to evolve to the next level of intensity, but all too tempting to knock out a wall or two and remove that second kitchen. And Kea, a Rust Belt native whose own city has seen a wave of single-family conversions without the accompanying new housing boom, talks about why even cities with more vacancies than they know what to do with might not welcome the Disappearing Doorbell problem—at least, not until the desirable neighborhoods with the strongest development patterns can upzone themselves by right.

Then in the Downzone, Daniel and Kea step way far away from the Strong Towns conversation and talk about their recent listens: indie chanteuse Sharon Van Etten, and Kea talks about her latest musical theater fav, the heartwarming Southern diner musical, Waitress.

Strong Towns: The Book is Finally Coming. But Why *Now*?

So you might have heard that our founder and President, Chuck Marohn, finally wrote the book that Strong Towns fans have been clamoring for ever since we started this movement. (If you haven’t, that’s actually kind of impressive, because we can’t stop talking about it.) And you may have even heard about the exciting, cross-continental tour we’re embarking on to share the book with as many communities we can—and to share stories from the communities we visit with the broader Strong Towns movement.

But hold on a sec, you might be saying. What’s this book actually going to be all about? What will it give you that’s any different than the stuff you already get on the Strong Towns site for free? And why bring it into the world now, especially as we head into what promises to be one of the most tumultuous presidential election seasons of all time? Are people really going to want to sit around and read hundreds of pages on city finances at a time like this?

This week on Upzoned, we’re doing something a little different. Instead of spotlighting one big story from the week in global news, we’re spending this hour talking about the biggest story in the Strong Towns universe—the long-awaited Strong Towns book. And you’ll hear the answers to these questions from the man himself: Strong Towns president, founder, and soon-to-be debut author, Charles L. Marohn, Jr., better known to most of us as Chuck.

Then in the Downzone, Chuck talks about how he’s decompressing after finishing his manuscript: re-reading the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy. And Kea talks about the last book she finished: Maid by Stephanie Land, which gives an insight into what life is like as a modern-day domestic worker in the age of giant suburban homes and neighborhoods that all but guarantee that the poorest among us have to spend a lot of our time and money driving to and from work.

Why Does Your City Stop When It Snows?

In the vast majority of North American towns, a few heavy winter snowfalls per year is just an annoying fact of life. So why do some of the most predictably snowy places seem to become paralyzed every time the storms roll through—and not always because the plows can’t physically do their work?

That’s the question some residents in Milwaukee are demanding an answer to. While much of America is finally thawing out for spring, they’re still buried—and according to a recent article from Urban Milwaukee, part of the blame lies in their city’s finances.

That made us wonder: how does funding for snow clearance really work? Are constantly snow-buried streets in a city that sees harsh winter weather every year a symptom that your place could get stronger, or could get better at planning its plow routes, or adopt a better funding system for winter road maintenance or…something else entirely? And how can a Strong Towns approach help get our roads clear—or, more importantly, help us design streets that still work for all users when the big storm comes, whether they’re driving or on foot?

We sat down with Kevin Germino—Milwaukee resident, long-time Strong Towns member, and year-round pedestrian who has climbed a 6-foot mound of ice on his way to work—to ask what he thought about his city’s problem from an on-the-ground perspective. And then we talked about the power of Strong Citizens to offer the kind of knowledge our engineers don’t always seek: the unique insights of being an every day road user who’s just trying to get where they’re going.

Then in the downzone, Kevin talks about his favorite e-newsletter, Bloomberg’s Money Stuff, and their excellent coverage of Elon Musk’s latest meltdown. And Kea delves into her latest read: Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, a novelistic non-fiction account of the 1986 burning of the Los Angeles Public Library’s central branch that doubles as a love letter to the role libraries play in our communities.

(Top photo via Creative Commons)

Will Electric Vehicles Save the World, or Make Our Cities Weaker?

Every year, more electric and hybrid vehicles take to the road—and every year, North America’s infrastructure crisis seems to get a little more dire. But while the latest automotive technology certainly isn’t to blame for our cities’ inability to pay for the road networks they’ve built—the Growth Ponzi Scheme has a little more to do with that—some are worried that electric cars might not be helping the situation, especially as gasless transportation increasingly becomes the norm.

That’s because in most states in America, road maintenance is largely paid for by fuel taxes—exactly what EV drivers don’t pay when they opt to plug their Teslas in at home. And in a recent article for Fast Company, Boston University Senior Lecturer Jay L. Zagorsky details why that’s a big problem.

So what’s the answer? For Zagorsky: implement a charging tax every time you plug in your Leaf at a public station. For Strong Towns, though, things aren’t quite that simple.

In this episode of Upzoned, Chuck and Kea discuss the fundamental problems with our current fuel tax-focused approach to road maintenance funding, and why creating an electric vehicle analogue isn’t much better. And then they talk more broadly about whether keeping most Americans behind the wheel, albeit in lower-carbon cars, is really the greenest thing to do—or the best thing for our city finances.

Then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea talk about their latest reads: a memoir about navigating the space between hip hop culture and a strict home life (Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams), and a novel about what New York would look like if a global pandemic hit—and a millennial office drone with a complicated immigrant past was one of the only ones left (Severance by Ling Ma).

What Would You Do if the Government Put a Speed Limiter on Your Car?

Imagine you’re driving down a nice, roomy stroad in anytown America. The lanes are wide, the buildings are set way back from the driving lanes, there are no cops anywhere in sight, and everything around you suggests that you can hit the gas and cruise—and if you make a miscalculation, well, you’ll have a nice, generous curb to swerve onto in an emergency. But drive a few more feet, and you’ll see a pesky speed limit sign yelling at you to slow it down. Oh, and we forgot to mention—in this fantasy scenario, your car is outfitted with a brand new, government-mandated speed-limiter that won’t let you go above the number on that sign, even if you really want to.

In America, this is an unlikely thought experiment. But across the Atlantic, it might soon be a reality. According to a new article from Evo: The Thrill of Driving, Europe will make Intelligent Speed Assistance and speed limit-sensing GPS devices mandatory on all new cars within three years, forcing drivers to slow down and obey the law (unless they want to endure an annoying warming alarm that’s set off every time you punch the throttle and override the system).

Here at Strong Towns, we talk a lot about why it’s so important for our towns to #slowthecars—not just to save lives, but to save our city budgets. Streets that are designed to be comfortably navigated on foot are proven to be more economically productive for their communities, and speed limiting devices certainly don’t subtract expensive pavement from our road networks that our places can’t afford to maintain. But just maybe, could this techy solution provide the kind of disincentive for driving that could help wean our places off of universal auto-dependency—or is it just another silver bullet that whizzes straight past the fundamental problem?

In this episode of Upzoned, Chuck and Kea tackle that difficult question, and they discuss a few other scenarios where solving a problem with human psychology might be the key to making our road network better. (Hint: we already have speed limiters on many of our vehicles, even in the US. It’s called the limits of the human body, and pedestrians and cyclists know all about them.)

Then in the Downzone, Chuck revisits his love of Sherlock, and Kea reveals her new favorite superhero movie: Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. And they even tease a potential future podcast series that discusses the urban form in your favorite movies—starting with Spidey’s New York(s).

What Happens When Algorithms Get Into the Home Flipping Business

When we say the words “house flipper,” do you picture a yard sign jammed into the grass next to a freeway entrance that says something like “$$$$ We Buy Ugly Houses for Cash $$$$”? If one of the US’s biggest real estate companies has its way, you might have a different association soon.

In a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, “Zillow Wants to Flip Your House,” writer Patrick Clark explores real estate database Zillow’s unconventional decision to get into the home-buying game themselves. That’s right: the site where you spend countless hours pettily judging how much your third cousin spent on her condo might be renovating a run-down bungalow near you soon. And they’ll be using the massive power of their data (and, of course, a super-secret algorithm or two) to do it.

What are the implications of big tech literally buying and selling our neighborhoods? Is Zillow poised to be a top-down monster-buyer who uses low-ball offers to snap up whole blocks, or is their business model a fragile mess that will probably fall apart on its own? Is an impersonal algorithm that sees that cute little ranch next door as nothing more than a set of numbers on a screen really any worse than a local sleazeball who’ll buy it for a song and let it crumble until it’s time to cash in?

Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn is back this week to talk through these and more questions with host Kea Wilson. Then in the downzone, the two talk about what they’ve been binging to get through the winter: the TV series Justified for Chuck, and the podcast Believed for Kea.

Forget Gas and Insurance. How Much Does Your Daily Commute Really Cost You?

If you’re like most working Americans, you probably brave your daily commute by car—and you may well spend a good chunk of that commute trapped in the kind of mind-numbing traffic that no podcast, no matter how excellent, can combat. And according to one new report, your will to live isn’t the only thing being drained when you’re stuck behind the wheel. Your bank account is, too.

At least that’s what this year’s INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard claims. And when they say that the average worker is literally losing wages while they crawl up the interstate, they have a very specific number in mind: an average of $1,348 per commuter per year.

But not everyone is buying that math.

In a new article from Planetizen, author Todd Litman shares his skepticism with how INRIX arrived at their claims about the costs of congestion, and what they really mean for American workers. But Strong Towns wants to take it a step further—and in this episode of Upzoned, we talk about those times when, contrary to our mantra, it’s not always wise to #dothemath. (At least, not the kind of specious math that the INRIX study used to come up with numbers like $1,348.)

Join Upzoned host Kea and guest Daniel Herriges as they discuss the real costs of problematic traffic studies like the INRIX scorecard: unnecessarily overbuilt road systems, destroyed neighborhoods, and long-term maintenance obligations that our places can’t afford (and make it a heck of a lot harder to do the kind of things that would really make working Americans richer). Then in the downzone, Kea and Daniel talk about their favorite recent watches, from a very unfortunate children’s show to an Oscar-nominated and artistically innovative documentary about life in rural Alabama.

Accessory Dwelling Units Rock. But Should States Be Overriding Cities' Laws About Building Them?

Accessory dwelling units may be small, but they’re a big topic in the conversation about how to strengthen the housing supply in our communities. That’s because for many places, letting private homeowners build a granny flat above the garage or a tiny home in the backyard seems like a natural, low-risk next step to thicken up our stock of affordable homes. At Strong Towns, we’ve long advocated that breaking down barriers to building ADUs is a no-brainer in most cases—but sometimes, an interesting story comes our way that just might prove the exception to the rule.

Or at least that’s what Strong Towns member and contributor Spencer Gardner thought when he read this story from the Sightline Institute about proposed ADU legislation in his home state of Washington. While WA legalized ADUs statewide way back in 1993, local regulations and zoning have still made them functionally impossible to build in many areas, stymying would-be micro-developers who can’t get around high utility connection fees, onerous setback requirements, and—the real kicker—hard and fast owner-occupancy requirements. But while removing all these barriers sounded good to Spencer when he considered his own community of Spokane, the fact that the state is the one lifting these restrictions—rather than Washington’s cities—gave him serious pause. So we invited him to be a guest on this episode of Upzoned to talk about his reservations.

Will Washington’s ground-breaking bill lead to the kind of gentle and gradual gentrification—or, to use the buzzword of the moment, “gentlefication”—that can create affordable housing solutions without disrupting the physical, economic, and cultural fabric of neighborhoods? Or will it unleash a cataclysmic gold rush of new development—albeit in bite-size form—that can distort land values and become a recipe for decline? Are capping utility hook-up fees an overdue step to make it possible for would-be tiny homers to get basic services like water into their backyard apartments? Or are there good reasons to let cities set their own fees—like when that backyard shed just so happens to be located on a far-out rural lot that’s colossally expensive to service?

And then in the Downzone, Mary Poppins Returns gets a second shout-out—this time from Kea—and Spencer gives you perhaps the weirdest downzone submission of all time. That’s right: it’s time to meet Jesus and the Angry Babies.

Can Cities Like St. Louis Get Financially Stronger by Merging with Richer Places?

Trivia time: can you name the only three American cities* that aren’t a part of a larger county—and don’t have access to the tax dollars of their suburban neighbors (and vice versa)?

If you said Baltimore, Maryland; Carson City, Nevada; and St. Louis, Missouri, you’d be right. (The asterisk is for cities in Virginia, which, for various complicated Civil War-era reasons, doesn’t count.) But if some local advocates have their way, the last name on that list might not be there for long.

Last week, a billionaire-funded group called Better Together put forward a plan to re-unite St. Louis City and St. Louis County, which have been governed separately since way back in 1876 (for more complicated Civil War-era reasons). But while some proponents are cheering, others aren’t so sure that getting the band back together is a good idea—and the reasons why on both sides are a fascinating case study in how moving lines on a map can distract from the real and crucial conversations we should be having about how we can make our places financially strong.

On this episode of Upzoned, long time St. Louis resident and Strong Towns staffer Kea sits down with Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn to talk about the ins and outs of the merger, and what they wish Missourians would talk about instead.

Would melding STL and SLC give the city access to county tax dollars that they badly need to fix their infrastructure? Or would it give the county the windfall they need just in time to rescue their aging suburban roads as they begin to fail—leaving the city worse off than it started? Would a merger really transform the St. Louis metro overnight into an economic development heavyweight, poising it to compete with Nashville and Denver for the next corporate headquarters that goes searching for a home—and if it did, would it really be a good thing? And most importantly, how can St. Louis—and every city like it—shift the conversation away from merely developing a more financially efficient city, and towards building a more financially productive one that can really thrive?

Then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea talk their recent reads, from the very on-topic Divided City by Alan Mallach to the not-so-relevant but still very fun Star Wars Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel. (Guess who’s reading which.) And then they mildly torture Kea by talking about this weekend’s upcoming entertainment: the Rams vs. Patriots Superbowl.


Top photo via Flickr.