Put That In My Backyard

Years ago the Principal of this Architectural and Planning firm and author of this paper had a colleague who had been exceedingly well raised. Never, in the heat of the most incendiary dispute was Peter ever known to swear. Sometimes, however, in the case of some clients' incomprehensible confusion, he was prone to suggest that things seemed to have progressed to a "melluva hess". Pete also observed for me for the very first time the now seemingly banal observation that "if we found ourselves digging a hole of trouble, the first thing to do was to for gosh sakes to stop digging and to find the causes for our proceeding upon such foolishness". Does it take the equally banal statement from one of history's most notable geniuses to alert us? Albert Einstein, Nobel Laureate in Physics, once observed, "If we are to solve the problems that plague us, our thinking must evolve beyond the level we were using when we created those problems in the first place." Make no mistake, we humans alone made those problems facing us by ignoring the long term consequences of our own actions. We might responsibly add to each of our policy determinations a required and detailed section entitled "Consequential Costs".

As a society we have found ourselves constantly plowing heedlessly into Peter's plaguing melluva hess. We seem not to have yet recognized that population growth, energy waste, global warming, urban sprawl, traffic jams and many of our other malignant ills are symptoms stemming from common sources. Are these ills beyond solution? We do not think so, but we do know for an absolute fact that, as in medicine, treating symptoms is no way to cure any malignant disease. You go directly to its source.

Because our society, mostly it seems, for moral reasons, has no programs - and are proposing none - to limit population growth, we are thus restricted to technology, space planning, and common sense to address these problems. Intelligent choices about the use of our limited land resources are imperative if our descendants are to survive in the coming centuries. Zoning has been the political mechanism through which choices about land use have been made. It therefore makes sense to look to this mechanism to effect change. Massaging our zoning codes and focusing our creativity has the potential to greatly abate if not eliminate many of those above-mentioned symptoms and, quite possibly in the process, solve many more of those problems that have evolved together with these policy decisions..

Why, for example, do we live in crowded urban areas when many if not all of us, would prefer to live in the open country or in a rural village? Simply because, unlike the wealthy among us, we cannot afford the spaciousness or conveniences we want, feel we need or would really like to have. Like 80% (or nearly 250 million) of the American public who now live in urban and suburban areas, we find the occupational, educational, emotional, cultural, entertainment and healthcare opportunities available in heavily populated locales outweigh the wonderful untrammeled spaces available in rural areas. The advantages of urban living, however, come at awesome prices. These prices are found in losses of that spatial simplicity and coherence of our surroundings, added to the incredibly higher costs of taxes, transportation, energy consumption, and the inconvenient loss of time required to just move back and forth from place to place.

Might there be ways to unite the advantages of both urban and rural lifestyles? I think there should be and I think they can be achieved. If we have the will, wit, and wisdom to discover the best of both worlds, to discover what causes the best and worst of each, to eliminate the worst and promote the best, we could create what we could then call an urban, rather than a rural, village with very distinctive and desirable characteristics.

So what is wrong with this urban/suburban scene of ours? To start with, let us look at its most visible manifestation, transportation. If we take away sightseeing and joy riding, transportation is nothing more than the act of moving people and/or products from point A to point B in the most economical and least time consuming manner. When we add the locations of these points A and B in all sorts of horizontal directions at indiscriminate additive rates and economically require even greater numbers of these points A and B as a matter of local, regional, and national prosperity, we create every fundamental basis for transportation chaos and wasteful costs. More roads simply cannot solve that gridlock problem. This is a malignancy spreading inexorably through every nerve and artery and metastasizing into every corner of our urban communities' day-by-day and year-by-year. Unless corrected it will choke our civilization literally to death.

In fact, that butter spreading of one, two, and three story separated constructions smeared over vast areas of these misnamed "lots" causes energy usages far greater than the popularly imagined devil of this scene - the automobile. Unbelievable? Add in the cost of building, maintaining and delivering goods and services upon those laterals to your costs of running helter skelter hither and thither upon them. Fully two thirds of all domestic energy use is annually devoted to our built environment. But legalized zoning has mandated for most of us the purchase of a vehicle or two, the direct and indirect cost of which is currently many hundreds of dollars per month, to use as motorized grocery carts and/or job jitneys to further congest these lateral routes, all in the name of promoting some currently grand and noble idea of the "American Dream".

Dream on, but while dreaming, consider that the federal government encourages and pays for pollution of the environment through the business uses of your neighbor's "Dream Car" from his "Dream House" at the 2008 rate of a $0.585 per mile deduction. That is a legally defined business use gets a current annual $5850 tax deduction for the average ten thousand miles per year you spend commuting and running errands, stuck in traffic jams, and shopping to keep the economy prosperous. Conversely, you get double taxed to pay for this legally mandated pollution, first out of your income, and again on your expenditures, with no deduction allowed. Then you are sternly urged to conserve energy by walking or biking or using your separately tax supported public transit system in lieu of that nasty, sprawl-inducing, smog emitting vehicle of yours. Of course there are benefits to reducing the use of private automobiles, but it is disingenuous for government to focus on public transportation and bicycle routes, while at the same time subsidizing automobile pollution and zoning for more sprawl.

In addition to the monetary and environmental costs of such a road network, are the utility costs of what we charmingly call a "Dream Home", those structures built on those misnamed "lots". Regardless of construction materials or methods - and "greening" of the environment notwithstanding - every single structure has a series of independent surfaces that either absorb or emit energy at a rate standard to the construction means and materials at the sited location. This simply means that the smaller the structure, the greater the required energy usage per unit of space enclosed, given equivalent construction. That is no more than Physics 101. That energy usage is charged for the amount consumed is no more than Economics 101. Connecting those 101 course dots simply means that the larger the structure, the lower the unit cost of energy and materials per unit of space enclosed. (This unfortunately sheds a rather dismal light on that beautifully intentioned organization "Habitat for Humanity" and the equally well intentioned professional quests for Urban Issues Contracts in a field as yet unfocused upon Consequential Costs.)

Is there a useful lesson in this simple arithmetic? When multiplied by the vast numbers of us, it is apparent that our habit of living in single-family dwellings, spread far and wide across the landscape, connected by a vast road networks reliant on automobiles, is simply untenable. The current costs of building structures and roads to connect them, of fuel prices, of electrical usage, of land turned from agriculture or any other natural, industrial or commercial purpose to housing, has local, regional, national and global implications. The consequential costs of this energy inefficient lifestyle, mandated by zoning and its resultant land commoditization is the specific source of so many of the economic, environmental, and social problems confronting us..

There is certainly no shortage of people now concerned with these issues, but the conversation seems to be limited to how individual consumers can make better choices within our existing urban context - riding public transportation, recycling, or using energy efficient light bulbs and other appliances. The fundamental structure of how our communities are set out and actually operate - and the laws and structures and markets that support and drive that - do not seem to be seriously challenged. For example, how do economic structures set up to protect private property values feed urban sprawl? How does zoning - that mechanism used by governments to plan for land use - serve to enhance or impair sustainable urban living? How can the public at large, when asked, as seems current common practice, for planning suggestions and their deepest desires, respond with anything but nostalgia for those precious remembrances of things long past and bearing utterly no usefulness for the immense challenges facing us and much more importantly, our posterity?. How can public officialdom intelligently expect the public to think outside the box they were born into and lived their lives within designed urban environments to solve problems largely created by the officials and their forbearers? Policy makers did it and it is the specific responsibility of policy makers to extricate us from the results of past short term thinking. How wonderfully that this proposal shows them how to do exactly that, profitably and with positive benefit to all their constituents.

There is a common statement used in discussions of urban community planning, which is "Not In My Backyard". There are very good reasons why, in the present order of things, NIMBY resonates loudly and even properly with property owners everywhere. Normally it is these smallholders who live in or own buildings in the residential or commercial neighborhoods built by developers of whatever era. The constructions in these neighborhoods most generally reflect the design age in which they were built, which in turn confers a standard of uniformity upon all development in a given area. Thus, for example, an English Half Timber or Spanish Mission, perhaps interesting or charming itself, inserted as a fill-in to a Colonial neighborhood is viewed with almost as much askance and genuine fear as an architecturally elegant and original design, no matter how sensitively or intelligently done. Property ownership has been a great boon to these smallholders since it has enabled them to build a degree of wealth in monthly installments by paying off mortgages, and taking advantage of rising markets to increase equities. But any disruption to the neighborhood in occupancy, design, size of construction, or other perceived oddity creates a sense of fear that the equities owners have built will in some way be adversely affected. Misunderstood is that land alone has any but a marginal relationship to the equities earned and that costs to enhance land (except for tree planting), while perhaps aesthetically satisfying to the owner occupant, adds but little if any to an appraisal for financing or sale. It is the box, its size, location and amenities as shelter, that determines insurance, taxation rates, equity and sale values.

Zoning codes have rigorously defined and enforced their many provisions in order to protect those "values", real or imagined, of the voting blocs represented. Not surprisingly, politicians as policy makers are acutely sensitive to these issues. On the other hand, promoters and developers, needing land as a commodity to exploit, are unsurprisingly prone to find varied and sundry ways to savage those values in order to lessen the costs of developing, and obtaining permits for, some vision of their own. Trust seldom occurs between these conflicting interests.

The problem with this is the resulting political pressure to avoid market changes brought onto a community by increased populations and/or prosperity. The spawn of these well intended policy provisions has been to mandate, especially in urban areas, an outward direction of development into new suburban constructions which we call sprawl, which in turn, for convenience and at the behest of separate zoning requirements, have mandated the creation of businesses to support the new population. First it was strip malls, which when proven inadequate, turned into shopping malls, as well as their later offspring, big box stores owned by absentee investors. Land became not an invaluable, irreplaceable capital resource with each and every acre being of virtual National Park value, but an exploitable commodity of wasteland for some politically perceived "Highest and Best Use". Thus, what seemed a good idea about how to avoid market changes has, like any stray introduced seed, naturalized and grown into a sea of noxious weeds, more malignant even than kudzu (that rampant ornamental vine imported from Japan now infesting areas south from Connecticut and west to Texas - which, most interestingly, as an aside, is also the defined range of the lethally poisonous copperhead snake). Certainly this urban and suburban sprawl has produced little if any trail of beauty.

Compounding the problems of urban sprawl caused by zoning codes have been the current sincere but misguided efforts to mitigate its symptoms with trains, trolley cars, and upstairs dwellings over neighborhood businesses mounted into two-, three- and even four-story abutting walkups. Such planning and transportation strategies seem to nostalgically hark back to an early 20th Century landscape rather than to plan seriously for the 21st Century. This "New Urbanism" has adopted a brutally mutated variation of the physician's oath, with new urbanists declaring they "will do as little additional harm to the environment as possible", rather than bending professional efforts toward correcting misguided policy decisions of the past and providing their users with environments of delight.

We should realize that no big city ever started as one. That might be our first no-brainer lesson in Demographics 101. That course will also teach us that there is a simple fact of life known as "The Rule of 72". This a tool used in finance to estimate an investment's exponential growth over time. The Rule of 72 tells us that a number will double in a certain period of time at a stated rate of increase (rate time's period equals 72). Thus, your thousand dollars in savings will double in amount, if nothing else is done, in nine years if the bank commits to paying you a rate of eight percent interest per year for keeping it on deposit (Voila! 8x9=72). The Rule of 72 also tells us that at the population growth rate of 1.9% per year (a number that has been relatively constant since the birth of our nation), the population of the United States will, with little doubt, about double from its estimated 2009 population of 307.5 million every forty or so years. But whatever the rate of increase, those doubled and redouble amounts lie in our posterities future.

Believe it! Those figures do not lie. Our nation will probably have some 1.2 billion people before the next century comes around unless some very dramatic changes are made or cataclysmic events occur. Where do you suppose all those people - your children, grandchildren and their children - will live? More subdivisions won't do it. More one-, two- and three-story butterings of our landscape won't do it either, especially since a full 20% of that land will be consumed by the roads necessary to access those "littles" we so proudly and euphemistically call "lots". So are our children's children and their grandchildren condemned to live in ghettos or favelas simply because we, that is you and I, lacked the imagination, courage, or common sense to start building for them the kind of communities reflecting the best of what we are capable? How many people in how many families might you suppose will come to live in your current abode? Count upon about 50 minimum square feet for each individual - or does that not make any impression upon you?

Our greatest challenge is to create a positive notion of where we are going and what we want when we get there - some vision of a beautiful future - not just for some, but for all of us. If we can intelligently visualize such a future we can find some practical and appropriate way to make it happen. Most plans for future destinations are framed for limited objectives and short time periods - a term or two of political office, or twenty years at the outside. The kinds of changes required today would be well on their way to implementation, perhaps even fully accomplished, were they commenced toward the turn of the 20th Century during Teddy Roosevelt's time. At that time the facts of mathematically predictable population growth, limited land resources and attitudes toward them, horizontal and vertical transportation technologies, and the economics of high-rise construction were in place. The sprawl of low-rise constructions over vast areas of land that is much too precious for such use, has created the congested urban areas we now inhabit, and is specifically the result of our policy making progenitors' short-term, here-and-now vision. Heed Einstein, "If we are to solve the problems that plague us, our thinking must evolve beyond the level we were using when we created those problems in the first place." We must not fail our descendants. We can and must do better than our Fathers and Grandfathers did for us. They lost the Lusitania, that perfection of engineering genius. We, (not ourselves but the inevitable wrath of nature?) caused the New Orleans catastrophe. Cannot we now, in our own age, prevent such know-it-all short term egomania as was displayed in those tragic and preventable incidents? What will inevitably happen to those great waterworking dam projects built at such stupendous cost? They will silt up, have to be removed and cause another very predictable economic catastrophe.

Time, however, is running distressingly short. The urgency of this matter cannot be overstressed. Solutions are not quick and easy, and even if not terribly hard, are still time consuming. For it takes time to modify restrictive regulations, to contest un-integrated thinking, to conceive and finance, then plan, build, sell and occupy, any community development project. We are faced with a very narrow window of time to start positive and dramatic programs to practically benefit our posterity.