Gender Income Differential

One of the interesting aspects of the wage gap between men and women is that it can be easy to ignore for traditional nuclear families.  If the wife doesn't make the money, the husband can pick up the slack.  Such an argument ignores the fact that there are a huge number of families that don't have a second income as a safety net.

That number is 10 million. [Citation]

These families are headed by a single female, who is only bringing in 72% of what a family with a male wage earner does.  And it is a growing population.  Take some of the neighborhoods around Washington DC that have 20% of the households in this category.  Most of these areas have a median individual income of $40,000.  For every 10,000 people, you would be taking $22,000,000 out of the economy.

But at an individual level, the numbers are simply terrible.  On a median salary of $40,000, 72% is an annual salary of $28,000.  That takes a monthly salary from $3333 to $2400.  That $900 is a larger drop than the average American family spends on any expense other than housing.  [Citation]

RNC Convention

Listening through Governor Romney's acceptance speech, I tried to hear any references to cities, houses, or infrastructure.  Not deciding about our votes based on one answer, it was simply to try noticing where the larger economic policies result in on-the-ground improvements in the way we live.

Thinking through the speech, the Governor completely avoided any type of concrete examples of his policies.  Most of the things he talked about were very nebulous.  There was very little about putting foundations in the ground or new trains in stations or new phones on systems.

And that may be a hurdle folks will have a hard time connecting between Governor Romney's business prowess and his potential political abilities.  The work he's done in business is one of moving huge investments from one bucket to another.  That is not about jobs or new homes or nicer places to live or better trips to work.

Let's see how the other side does next week.

Fat, walkability, and wellness.

The CDC mapped self-reported BMI today.  It produced a pretty succinct map.

From Gawker

Pundits can hang whatever story on this that they want, including parallels to the bible belt, political leanings, or just snark.

I would actually say it has more to do with this:

From Walkscore.com

Walkability is not a particularly high facet of life in the same states that have a strong obesity rate. Unfortunately, the solution to poor walkability is not about improving will power or cutting fried Oreos out of your diet.  It's about changing the structure of land use, putting places people go near where they live, and getting away from a dependence on cars.  Alas, no easy solutions.

Go (miles and miles to) Fly A (gold plated) Kite

I took the day off today to stay home with the two little ones.  As we had recently watched Mary Poppins, one question has been repeated at every free day, half-free day, completely booked day, school day, work day, and immediately before bed:

"Can we fly my kite."

The morning was balmy and stagnant.  Not good weather for flying or for curly hair.  We had a couple things to do, including a library book return and lunch with mom.  But after naps and an afternoon rainstorm, the weather improved for kite flying.  Sunny and clear with a constant, but not too hard breeze.

But where to fly?

We are lucky enough to live in a county and a community with substantial green space.  We have a preserved floodplain to the rear of the house and a lot of trees throughout the community.  There are plenty of sidewalks (although narrow).  And our yard is pretty big.  But the entire area is covered by trees, cut up by small lots, and crossed by power lines.  There are not the kind of big, treeless rolling plazas that are great for people watching and sunbathing and flying kites.  Maybe we were not settled by enough Brits.

Or, it's almost a perception issue.  Those are city parks.  The ones with iron fences and stone walls and well known designers.  We suburbanites need parks to drive the kids for soccer, drive the kids for playdates, or drive to do the exercise circuit.  It is not a casual place.  It is a place for Exercise.

I'm beginning to believe that the driving isn't what is killing us, it's the expectations we build up on the ride.  We eat more at restaurants because we have to get in our car, unpark, drive, turn, drive, stop, repark, and walk across a thousand yards of tarmac before ordering.  There are expectations involved.  By the time I've done that, I want the best damn burrito ever.  And I eat accordingly.

When we get to parks by driving, we want the best damn park ever.  We want manicured ball fields, or stimulating and intricate tot lots.  We want the destination to be worth the effort to get there.

Really, I just want an oversized lawn.  But we decided to use the ball fields at a regional park about a mile and a half away.  The distance and the size of the roads to be crossed precludes this from being walkable.

And yes, the most important thing is that the girls had a magnificent time.

Tear down the university with the statue

Everybody lies.  Sometimes, when we look back on those lies, we wish we hadn't done it.  Sometimes, when we look back on it, we see the damage that we created.  Sometimes we see both the regret and the damage.


That's what I think about when I look at Penn State and the line of troubles that have come out of the attempts to cover up child rape.  Let's not sugar coat what was done by saying "the tragedies" or "the bad stuff."  It was child rape.  It was sexual acts committed against minors by an adult male.  And it was hidden, and therefore permitted, by other adult men who held power in the university and the town.


A real fulcrum here is about where the people stopped and where the institutions began.  Was Joe Paterno the person, or was he the Coach of Penn State Football?  Was Graham Spanier the person or the President of the University?  Did they have a duty as a human, or did they have a duty as the head of an organization? 


We create institutions to prevent individual error from spiraling out of control and damaging more people than a single act by a single person is worth.  Institutions - corporations, universities, cities - are beings in their own right, created as entities to hold property or be sued or take action.  They are beings with a purpose, established by charter and protected by law, set in place to protect people. 


But sometimes the damage is because the institution stops protecting humans, and turns to protecting itself.  At that time, the institutions have failed.  When the preservation of the institution trumps all the humans nearby, the institution is a destructive force.  


It is these institutions that must be utterly demolished.  To look at an institutional culture that allows child rape is to gaze in the bloody maw of a destructive organization.  It is telling that we are not actually talking about deconstructing the entire organization of the university.  We should be ready to ask how this should be destroyed, not whether.  We treat institutions reverently, even when they don't deserve it.  

City skies, little windows

It's possible to go through some days without actually looking at the sky.  Between looking at the road, or looking at the sidewalk, or looking at the lawn, we might spend the day without looking up.

This is more acute that my phone can tell me what the sky looks like.  There's at least 74 apps for telling the weather.  Hell, I even got that star app.  I asked Siri what the weather was the other day.  "The weather is clear and 90 degrees," she said.  It was raining.  Tonight, it's just the opposite.  The doppler radar is showing a big cluster of rain.  But it's not moving.  The ever-present summer pall of haze is clowning the radar.

Spent the entire day today thinking about the future.  Being a planner, that is what we tend to do.  But I forgot to look up.  At no time today did I actually look at the sky.  Didn't even look at the ceiling in the office (not that peeling stucco is much to stare at).  All the future thinking was done crouched forward and pointed at the monitor or the person across the table or marching down the hallway.

Focus is good, but it feels like I failed to aspire.  In the press to lurch ahead, there was no time taken to simply look up.  That does not make a Happy Planner.

City kids and suburban kids

Due to a recent row in city hall, Toronto is discussing the relative merits of raising children in the city versus raising them in the suburbs.  On the side of the suburbs were two brutal shootings.  Supporting kids in the city, diversity:

So I hold no aspersions that small towns or suburbs are necessarily safer than cities. But, more importantly, I believe the benefits of bringing up our son Emile downtown vastly outweigh the fears stemming from these recent acts of senseless violence.

I’ve met small-town folks who can’t imagine the horrors of living in Toronto, much less downtown. But what they don’t see is that their own life experience is limited by homogeneity. 

We don't live live in downtown Baltimore for several reasons.  First, we don't work there.  Second, there are not enough amenities to outweigh the costs.  None of the reasons involve diversity.  Unlike Toronto, the majority of our diverse areas are actually suburbs.

And those costs do include crime. Here is your obligatory Baltimore murder map.  But that is a type of crime that didn't enter our consciousness. When we did live downtown, our house was broken into while we slept upstairs.  My car was hit once.  Our roommate was mugged.  That is on top of the number of times we were accosted by random nonsense while simply trying to get through the day.

The suburbs are not easy.  We spend incredible time in our cars and tending our yard.  But the city is going to have to present some really good reasons to come back in - better than happy cooing diversity - to get our kids back in the fold.

No more zombie cities.

I have been reading a lot about motivation and productivity.  One of the most interesting things to float to the top has been the Cult of Done.  Essentially, the idea is to do it now, short circuit all the things demanding perfection, and move on to something else.

From: brepettis.com

Tactical urbanism has also floated to the top of my reading list in the last little bit.  "Quick, temporary, or cheap projects that aim to make a small part of a city more lively or enjoyable."  It's turning pavement into a temporary park or reclaiming a street for people.  They have a manifesto too.

From: Pics of Trees

Tactical urbanism takes the Done Manifesto and beats old planning over the head with it.  While planners sit and wade through the Process, the small and quirky projects are actually making cities better places to live.  Temporary?  Sure.  Whimsical? Yup.  Finished? Yes.

Why can't planning understand how the perfect is the enemy to the city itself.  Our plans have to be perfect.  Our outreach has to be perfect.  Our surveys, letters, flyers, presentations, everything has to be perfect or it doesn't leave the office.  We protect ourselves from being told "no" or being by trying to find the perfect answer.

But what is less perfected than building a city?  Once a city is perfected, it is dead.  Then we planners make the poor thing lurch along until it bites another city and passes its bad zombie city germs on to the next place.

Or we dissipate, and are actually the zombie city pathogen.  Hmmm.  That is one think about a little more.

Can't even get the name right.

In looking through the want ads, it's a little difficult to see why planning jobs are so hard to find.

Nationwide, a search of "planner" hits 20,093 jobs.  A search of "zoning" nets 2,300 jobs.  "Entitlements" gets 5,916 jobs.  Hell, even "urbanist" gets 16 jobs.

Let's start with that last one.  All but two of the urbanist jobs are for a company called Vocus.  They do social network PR and are looking for bus drivers, sales managers and accountants.  Why do they come up in a search for "urbanist"?  Because their headquarters is "new-urbanist" and they've included that fact in their business blurb.

Looking at "entitlements," the first four entries are nothing planning related.  Only the fifth one, an Entitlements Manager for a big home developer, involves planning and zoning issues.

(I've become very interested recently in how the word "entitlements" has been adopted into the planning lexicon.  That's a story for another day.)

"Zoning" starts with a planning job, peripherally.  It's dealing with due diligence for a retail chain.  A couple of notches down are zoning inspectors for Smyrna, Georgia and Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Between those are multiple positions with computer systems and data storage.  For computers, zoning is about balancing loads and storage in a network.  And there are a lot more IT jobs out there.

That first one, the "planner" search with 20,000 jobs?  Most of them are for Buyer/Planners and Planner/Schedulers.  These are product and inventory moving jobs.  They've nothing to do with city planning.

(And, for what it's worth, putting "city planning" in quotes like a good boolean only yields minor improvement.  The number of jobs available are 63 with the first four being non-planning related.  The first seven are unrelated, if you exclude city clerks and administrators.)

But then you type in "lawyer" or "accountant" and there is no question about the jobs that are being listed.   You get well down both of those pages before hitting your first entry about "working for lawyer" or "assisting the accounting department".

The upshot here is that we are not very good at defining who we are as planners or what we do in our daily work.  For those looking for jobs, that is a doubly harsh.  The digital parsers that are looking for matches between your resume and the job description are indiscriminate.  They don't care about controversy in our field.  They just reject you.

If the computers do not respect your work, how can you respect your job.

Moving at the speed of billiards.

A friend linked to a blog of gorgeous aerial shots of cities around the world.  These human creations, these living machines of memory and steel, are resplendent.  The heights that people can build and the monuments we can create.

Source: Gadling

They tell you interesting things about places, things you may never expect.  From our mental images of Jerusalem, it's easy to think the entire nation of Israel is a dusty biblical archeology dig.  Then you see a picture of Tel Aviv and are reminded otherwise.

Source: Gadling

But they're as sanitized as the machine drawings in a patent application.  Beautiful and lifeless, little images of a model railroad set.  Over the years, I have become somewhat obsessed with images of Prypiat, the Russian city in Ukraine that served Chernobyl up to it's destruction, and was evacuated immediately after.  These beautiful stills remind me of Prypiat photos.

Source: Wikipedia

Cities are machines like we are machines, living throbbing things that move and grow.  These pictures are as lifeless as ancient religious icons, sapping the life out of the living machines and replacing the awe with sparking gilt.  While the glowing aerial shots make great Chamber of Commerce brochures, true pictures of cities happen at street level, just like the living city does.

Source: Shanghai Scrap

These are men playing carom, a Shanghai version of pool/billiards.  They are in the street of one of the world's busiest cities.  Life here does not happen at the speed of a plane or a car or a swift transfer of finances or the ledger of a ship.  It happens as fast as a checker pushed with a stick.

Amenity of redundancy.

I'm on vacation this week.  Not a big one.  Sticking around the house with the kids.  Doing yard work.  Watching movies.  Staying up late.  Simply not doing anything with regular work.  Not doing the normal routine.

And that's the most important part.  I am vacationing from the routine.

Seeing how much relaxation this offers, how much a difference in thinking and feeling, I can't help but wish there were more alternatives in the routine.

I would love some alternatives to being to work.  We have a very narrow telework policy.  One that keeps you at home, so there's no possibility of working from the library or a coffee shop.  There is more than one slot of hours that work could happen or some flexibility in week schedules.  There are, again, narrow policies allowing these.  But they're set to take hours away from employees, rather than improve work-life balance.

Of course, this gets to not be a routine pretty quick, but I'd make due.  

It gets broader than that, though.  Just getting to work has only one alternative.  There's only one parking lot.  There's only one door to go through.  There's only a handful of places to get lunch.  There's only a couple of places to go during lunch hour.

These are structural things.  So often, we focus on the "mix" of amenities.  Simple alternatives are an amenity too.  The ability to break the routine without blowing up the routine.  I still want coffee, but there's only one place on my one route to get to work.

But we skip on making sure there are backups should the initial mix fail.  A friend asked if he should buy a condo in a particular neighborhood.  It's an up-and-coming place, one with a history of being bad, but now hosts a cluster of nice shops and a movie theater.  All of which are in the same complex, owned by the same group.  I said he should think hard about the purchase.  It has a lot of upside, but it's a monoculture.  There is no redundancy to catch a mistake.

So, my vacation from the office is not about simply being out of the office.  (It's a nice perk, tho).  It's about being out of my routine and away from the bland vanilla of the workplace.  It might be easier to get back to the workplace if it didn't come with so much extra weight.

First is still the best

Today's article is a look at Hong Kong and its expanding influence moving into the Chinese main land.  As the city moves to join other major cities through infrastructure links and employment, the freedoms enjoyed by the residents of Hong Kong stand in contrast to the other residents nearby.

The author tries to bring the concept into an American example.

"Imagine if the various boroughs of New York City all had different political systems, tax structures, and gambling laws, or if Paris’s many arrondissements each had different degrees of freedom of expression."

The interesting oversight of this article is that this situation exists around New York City today.  In talking about Mega-Cities, they forgot about the first one from Boston to Washington.

The various supporting units of New York's system - Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and the rest - do have different political systems, tax structures and gambling laws. It also has a single government overseeing the entire stretch, but real limitations on the localized influence that it can exert.

For the East Coast of the US, the separation actually is a strength.  Weak corporation laws provide protection for companies in Deleware, but its location puts it in striking distance of New York finance.  Pennsylvania countryside can provide the metropolis with farm goods.

Even competition is strengthening.  Alternate ports compete with New York.  But the attributes of the competition (for example, Baltimore's position further inland) allows more specialization rather than Peter directly robbing Paul.

But there is one stark difference between the two coastal conurbations.  The personal freedoms on the East Coast of the United States are unquestioned.  This is not the case with variations between freedoms allowed in Chinese cities.

Transit and housing recovery.

Reports today show that parts of the country are escaping the housing recession better than others.  Even within the areas, some places are more successful than the rest.

One quote caught my eye.

"That fitful recovery is reflected in the Zillow analysis. Homes in sought-after neighborhoods, including those near transportation corridors and with top-notch public schools, are finding buyers. But others in neighborhoods just a few miles away, including so-called exurbs or areas that never fully gentrified, are languishing."

Notice that it says "transportation" and not "transit".  Some of the parts later in the article mention Metro near D.C., but the radio report that sent me to this article really de-emphasized much difference between transit and good highway intersections.

And that is interesting because we, as planners, take it as gospel that transit is better than cars.  But this agnosticism between cars and transit in home purchases really strikes.

Of course, some of this may be skewed.  There could be a stronger rental market near transit, one that doesn't get reflected in these numbers of home purchases.  There could also be a statistically significant separation that is simply not revealed in this reporting (or looked at in the analysis.

But we should not take it for granted that everyone agrees with us that transit is the end-all of home locating.  New job opportunities pop up all the time, and do not have to locate themselves near transit.  People go where there are jobs, or split the difference with with their spouse's work.  Folks who make these decisions are not doing it wrong, they're just doing it different.  We have to give them options too.

Just like the array of ways you have to get on the internet, the best places are those that have an array of methods to get around.  Don't count highways out yet.  Just don't spend all your transportation money on them either.

Always on information flow.

The New York Times ran an article about How Depressed People Use the Internet.  In a survey of undergrads at Missouri University of Science and Technology, the researchers determined depressive symptoms.  They then compared the results to data usage from the school's IT department.

Students who were depressed showed a pattern of internet usage that was heavy on messaging and data sharing, and low on staying in one place for any length of time.  Games and difficulty concentrating sounds a lot like depression itself.

The article wrapped up with some applications for the research, which should be read in light of mental health collapses and shootings like at Virginia Tech.  Their proposal:

"We hope to use our findings to develop a software application that could be installed on home computers and mobile devices. It would monitor your Internet usage and alert you when your usage patterns might signal symptoms of depression.  [...]Such software could also be used at universities, perhaps installed on campus networks to notify counselors of students whose Internet usage patterns are indicative of depressive behavior. (This proposal, of course, raises privacy concerns that would have to be addressed.)"

The idea of a program doing this kind of assessment on me is not as much of a non-starter as one would expect.  Do it.  Get the information and start compiling.

But tell me before or at the same time as you're telling a doctor.  Let me read the results along with the health practitioner.   This goes for all the measures we're developing with always-on medical assessments.  Tell me and let me digest the information.  The challenge will be making sure that the information is usable when it gets to me.

I look at the top of this page and see one word.  "Dashboard."  It's really a descriptive word wrapping a wholly difficult idea.  What is a dashboard but an output of filtering mechanisms from multiple sources.

It a descriptive word because, for most people over the age of 15 1/2, this is a concept that comes pretty naturally.  A lifetime of half-second glances, and we know wether to change our actions or to start worrying.

But so much of the sensor-to-analysis-to-output system in our cars is simply a black box.  Rumors abound and misunderstandings are easy.  For example, my check engine light was on for a couple of days.  It addled my mind because the car was running well and had just been checked out.

That is what must be avoided in a big data synthesis system.  It's the first rule of Wikipedia: citations needed.  Tell us where the data is coming from and WHY it is pointing in one direction or another.

Baltimore's Klout score is nominal

Reading through a recent magazine article, I ran across a discussion of Klout.  It wasn't something that had popped up on my radar at any time.  Folks I know don't really engage in it.

I took great pride in the fact that, at several points in school, I was the most mediocre.  Out of 257 people in class, I was number 129.  There were 128 people above and 128 below me.  I was on top of the bell curve.

Klout is measured out of 100, with a couple of weighted measures fed into a black box and out comes a number.  Given my history at the pinnacle of average, I pulled my accounts onto Klout, looking for a solid 50.  I did not get that.  I got a 10.

Yes, a 10.

Which, of course, pushes me to write the whole enterprise off as fart sniffing.  What utter type-A personality circle jerking that feeds the instant-gratification need in a way that is only slightly less indefensible than clicking on a cow.

Fuck them.  At least the cows were commentary.

Until you think that we do this every day for places to live.  We develop any number of arbitrary metrics to rank and parcel out perks to communities.  Klout is simply doing the same thing to people.  Who are you by who has heard of you?  Well, look at the data, it's all there.

I talk a lot about data.  And I believe in using data to make places better.  But we understand that, while the data doesn't lie, we do.

Boomtime in the Oil Shale.

You know when you hear a couple of things from disparate sources that suddenly gel in your mind in a certain way?  Had one of those experiences this morning.  It came while listening to a recap of last night's NBA Finals game.

We'll start before that.  A few weeks ago, I got to sit in a meeting with a developer for some property in the DC area.  They come from Canada, Edmonton and Calgary to be precise.  Having some experience with the good people of Canada in that area, and noticing the very deep pockets and real estate interests of these folks, I said one thing immediately: Oil Money.

Yesterday, driving into the office, a report came on NPR about the up-and-coming city of Cleveland.  A lot of Northeast Ohio is seeing a boom in incomes and business.  But hearing this, I said it again: Oil Money.

Then, this morning, I listened to the breathless recap of the Oklahoma City Thunder's victory over the Miami heat.  It's hard to remember, but that OKC team once belonged in the Pacific Northwest.    Once more: Oil Money.

That kind of click was an interesting one.  We think a lot about the winners and losers in the battle to be, become, or remain successful global cities.  There are plenty of measures of up and coming or boomtowns.  Oklahoma City and Cleveland are well down the list.  

Let's think for a minute about what fracking and the oil shale boom are going to do to cities.  Here is a map of the big locations for oil shale across the United States.

Shale "Plays" - locations for exploration.  (GAWDA)

Most notable is the big red blob in the north east.  It obscures many of the old Rust Belt cities, who are desperately looking for employers and income.  Industry left these areas and they have been struggling to reposition themselves in a new economy.

Well, what if they didn't have to reposition that far.  What if a lot of that industrial infrastructure that is sitting dormant can be re-fired to start new life in oil, rather than coal or steel.  These original boom towns may once again find themselves, well, booming.  

One last point.  Three of the four states mostly covered by the Marcellus shale deposit (Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio) voted for Obama in the 2008 election.  Make no mistake he remembers that, or their 73 electoral votes.

Boom goes the sandbox.

A cool bit of news from the world of video games, specifically old school Civilization II.  This from Reddit, where a submitter has played the same game of the world building sim for 10 years.  Now in the year 4000, the planet is an environmental wasteland of misery, poverty, and war.  No real improvement or development is possible, as all resources are locked in combat with the other nations or cleaning up the last round of ice cap melting.

Awesome.  I love Civ, and could never get enough of moving through the development tree and wiping out enemies.  Until I raised the difficulty level and was destroyed in three turns by the AI.

One article about this fellow's dilemma actually looks at the AI for some of the issues.  From io9.com:

One way to look at it would be to decide that the game systems have hit their equilibrium point: the three remaining nations are locked in a cycle because of scripted AI behavior in the face of a world that cannot have any further technological innovations discovered or resources uncovered. The game has hit its breaking point; the walls of the sandbox have been found.

The image of pre-established rule bound entities being locked in such a stalemate is a very interesting one.  That the stalemate actually illustrates the box they're in is a phenomenal concept.  It's like using dynamite to measure the depth of a bathtub.

This is exactly what is going on in the office right now.  I am a bit of an interloper at work.  I move between the planning work and the development management work pretty easily.  That can also be read as I am a free agent, not trusted by either side.

And they are sides.  Most people don't know the difference between those two halves of the planning profession.  If you're in a planning department, you're a planner.  But there are groups of folks who use professional experience and community outreach to establish what goes where. And there are others who apply those visions to tangible permits and applications.

Ideally, these should feed back and forth between one another.  But they do not.  They are little fortified fiefdoms.

Now the department is locked in a fierce battle over the rewriting of the zoning ordinance.  This is not a vision document, it is law that puts limits and controls on the ground.  Part of it establishes how plans can establish zones.  The other part establishes how the zones actually effect the land they're on.

The fight that goes into this battle really illustrates the confines of the box.  Our AI that is established by the work we do - vision or development - really is defining the shape of the space we occupy.  We talk about process.  We talk about purposes.  We talk about bulk and setbacks and uses.

But we don't talk about neighborhoods.  We don't talk about architecture.  We only talk about economic development or health or poverty in carefully coded words like mixed use or density or affordability.

That is the truly frustrating part.  While the argument does feel artificial, we are true intelligences.  But we're stuck in this very small sandbox of our own making.

Urban DNA

Researchers have used geotagged images from cities around the world to develop software that can identify the little architectural details.  They found enough location sensitive architectural features to pick out which of the dozen cities they examined the photo is from.  Reports in Planetizen and New Scientist point us to the research.

Pretty interesting stuff.  Pretty crappy title from Planetizen.  A city's DNA isn't found in its balconies or its bay windows or its stoic columns.  Those are just window dressing.

There really is a genome to cities.  There are underpinnings, snippets of code, base processes that make unique places.  But they're only evidenced by architecture in the most remote and detached extrapolations.

Let's think about Paris and the gable roofs and the stout buildings and the tree lined boulevards.

Let's think about New York and the wedding cake architecture and the open plazas at the foot of massive towers.

Neither of these things were driven by some conspiracy of architects to make a city look like a particular city.  The were driven by the zoning laws that the architects were responding to, which themselves were based on

When you're looking at architecture, you're looking at an end result.  You've gone through financing.  You've gone through need.  You've gone through law.  These are the things that make up the genome of a place.

And, what's better, we're getting closer to deciphering that genome.  They did this through data mining, running geotagged pictures through software that recognizes   This type of technology is going to be fantastic, when it's connected to something deeper.

Guess what else is geotagged?  Zoning ordinances.  Development applications and approvals.  Permits and legislative decisions.  Ownership records, deeds, mortgages, wills.  Reams of paperwork that themselves can be tagged and compared between places.  That is true DNA.

The Vicious Cycle.

This is the most gleefully whimsical little video I've had on repeat for a while.

Hard to remember being that small, or the the utter surprise of true hide and seek.  I love how she goes to the last place she saw her father.

But, of course, I picked up on something else - what appears to be a successful family living in a pretty cozy apartment.  Nice stuff.  The dad is involved in some pretty interesting tech work (prompting the video).  All sharing a bedroom and some limited space.

We have a couple of little ones, and moved out to the suburbs to give them enough room.  It's a very American way of thinking about it, and one that I wish we could shake.  There are four of us in a 2,000 square foot house.  I'm not convinced we need this much interior.  We also have a quarter acre of land.  I'm not sure we need this much exterior either.

There is a 45 foot wide road in front of the house with a 25 mile per hour speed limit.  People read the size of the road, the big line down the middle, and floor it.  Our road leads to an even larger divided arterial.  That leads to an even wider freeway.  You have to cross all of these things to get to the nearest convenience store.

Another way of thinking about it, between me and that convenience store are 75 houses.  If we were all in apartments like the one in the video, we could actually walk to the store.  And if we were walking to the store, our roads wouldn't need to be so big as to accommodate all the people driving to the convenience store.  Which would make the walk to the convenience store even nicer, prompting more walking, and so on.

Walking.  Reasonable living.  Nice places.  Truly a vicious cycle.  

Tumbleweeds of information

So, I typed the words "big data" into a couple of search engines at the library today.  More questions appeared than answers.  Out of 172 general articles that came back, 150 were three pages or less.  Where they exceeded three pages, we looked at 20 articles that were surveys of surveys in biological or chemical sciences.  The other two were about the information systems solutions to big data problems.

A separate search of law journals turned up 19 articles.  All of them were about the legality of data mining.

We, as planners, are not piecing together the potential for this resource.  We are not listening to our friends in biology and sociology who are starting to aggregate real data clusters in a whole.

And that's a damn shame, because we are where the rubber hits the road.  Of all the social sciences, city and urban planning is the one field where law and policy manifests itself in a measurable group of setbacks, density, development, and population.  But it's a lonely field.

And we are the place where real surveys of data should be taking place, but they are not.  So, it drives me to another question: why am I looking at this?

Big data is the frontier of urban planning.  We have two choices: become technocrats or become obsolete.  We can talk a big game about working with communities and building places and all the other stuff, but if we don't have the data to back it up, we're going nowhere.

The funny thing is that I would not have said that six months ago.

Truthfully, we shouldn't be here.  We should be able to move through a community and listen to people, read buildings, and feel the beat of the place and what makes it move forward and forms its heart.  

That time is gone.  It's not gone because of anything we did.  We did not fail.  But the world moved around us.

We have to take the vernacular of the day and use it to our advantage.  We have to take the 1s and 0s that move the economy and opinion and debate and steer them towards the arguments that we need to make.

All is not lost because this is what we do.  We were the first arbiters of feedback.  We were the first ones to look at honest places and talk about what they mean.  We were the ones who could discern where paths go, where hardship was settling, and where things were improving.  We could only feel the trend, but not delineate the potential.

We just never had anything beyond our own gut feeling to justify it.  UNTIL NOW.

Now we have data.

Now we have numbers.

Now we have surveys.

Now we have research.

Now we have objectivity. 

Now we use them to push the point home:   Cities are alive, they matter, and they will make you better.

A couple of things occurred to me today.

1) Most of the research into Big Data concerns how to deal with it.  But I haven't found many that describe it.

2) Given the amount of information that some of these things represent, folks are sticking to simple tasks.  Word counts, proximities, relationship things.  I wonder if there is value in applying the same principles to the wave of information being derived, then doing it again, then doing it again.  All that can be happening while wave after wave of analysis happens on the original set, based on the secondary and tertiary analysis.

3)  I wonder if there is a way to prepare data to become Big Data.  Not just scanning text into the computer, but taking some of this initial parsing and using it as metadata.  Of course, the metadata becomes big enough, you face the same problems.

The shape of things is still amorphous and out of reach.  I am going to take some time at the library tomorrow, and see if I get a better grip on things from there.

Today's normal blogging is interrupted to discuss the passing of Ray Bradbury.

I was a late comer to Bradbury and Vonnegut, and I got to them by falling through Ellison.  During my youth, I spent a lot of time with Asimov and Adams.  The stories were more accessible and funnier.  And shorter.

Sometimes I wonder if that last part has continued to impact the way I think.  I have always found it difficult to get quickly into a book or move through it at any speed.  I can pile through articles , but novels and long journal pieces take serious work.  I've had to gear up to cope with the longer reading as I've moved through school, padding the work with notes and underlines, just to keep up with the narrative.

It's not that I don't like reading.  But something seems lost on me when it takes so much effort to process the words and pull the story out of them.

So, I would likely never become one that memorizes a book from end to end.  Do you think they enjoyed the story?  Do you think they liked the words?  Probably not, as the were just a memorized sequence.  Maybe that work would make me the perfect person to be a memorizer.

Planning for Big Data

The buzzword/hot concept for the year is Big Data.  Internet did it.  Business does it.  Government is getting ready to do it.  The IT world is aflutter with the idea.

What is interesting is how little of the concept trickles down to the minions in the field.  What in the world is this big data stuff?

The basic concepts circle around volume, velocity, and variety.  There is a lot of digital information.  It is moving quickly.  And it comes from multiple dissimilar sources.

So what?  This is stuff for Amazon to use in deciding what book to recommend or DARPA to use in tracking terrorists on Twitter.  As a planner, I'm stuck with writing a new staff report, and that DOES NOT move quickly.

But in this talk, physicist Kyle Cranmer breaks down how the LHC is using big data in big science.  He suggests that hypotheses are no different than business models or policies.  We can use big data to confront all sorts of ideas.

And we do have big data.  Zoning ordinances, all of them, from all across the country.  Written journal articles.  The entirety of land records.  GIS data.  All those staff reports.  Sure, it's not 140 characters long.  It will take a different kind of architecture to deal with these.

Think what would happen if you had a nationwide set of all single-family detached zones.  You could appreciate the differences in terminology from across the country.  It would show the duration and durability of the zone based on the number of amendments.  Aberrations where one city allows, who knows - tanneries - in their zone would stand out.

But part of Big Dat is not just having that set.  It is making that set ready to connect to others.  Combine that Single Family Zone analysis with earlier versions of the ordinances and look how the terminology evolved.  Combine it with the staff reports to see how these have been applied, or variations in how they are interpreted.

Combine the whole set with land records to see if amendments to the zoning were reflected in the layout of lots.  Go back to the policy decisions to know if the policy in one location was more effective than in another. Combine it with sales data to see if this is the development that people want.

Big Data is not about numbers.  It is about layers.  It is a concept that planners are intimately familiar with, drawing information from novel sources to develop new concepts.  But it is going to be at a whole new scale.

Expert in the field

It's been a very long time since I wrote daily.  That is not entirely true, as I do churn out fifteen hundred words a day for work.  But to sit down and actually set aside time to write, that has been a while.

I'm fumbling, not totally ready to commit to a story or an arc.  So why do this?  To get into a routine.  To get past the embarrassment and self-doubt.  And to practice.

Then there's a cover  where Christopher Hastings, the writer of Dr. McNinja, says "I got tired of wanting someone's permission to put out my work."

Let's look at the list of permissions that my work needs before it is put out: project facilitator, project manager, planning supervisor, planning chief, publications department, publications supervisor, deputy director, and director.  That's eight, and we haven't even gotten to the elected officials.

I had an interesting conversation today with a co-worker who really was hostile to putting a lot of personal information online.  We talked through generational differences and some of my concerns about floating different information on line.

Then I pointed out the issue of self-branding.  How ambitious professionals are going to have to promote in the digital age.  We're going to have to put ourselves one line, not the self-immolating celebrity style gossip dumps, but a constant stream of work in multiple forms.

Old systems that prevent that, including staid academic journals, are being destroyed.  There is no hope that a backwards backwater government bureaucracy is going to survive.

So that's why I'm here.  There's voice things and practice things and simple routine things.  And a whole lot of request for patience.

Carry me home.

Do you realize that we are not young anymore?

By the time we know that planning is an option as a career, we are past the age of consent and the proclivities of youth.  Planners are old by default.

By the time we are done planning school and moving towards an actual career, we are deep in our twenties.  We shift and move, but it's not because we want to, it's because we have to.  There is someone at home.  We are not simply detached anymore.  We are settling.  Planners are old by conformity.

By the time we have some experience and can sway opinion, we're forty.  There are responsibilities.  There are roundly held opinions.  There are places we go for guidance and for censure.  We have internalized them.  Planners are old by contrition.

And by the time we have moved buildings, pushed design, or adapted zoning, we are well past fifty.  Planning is a slow profession, and we are the slowest projects.  Planners are old by consensus.

There is no young planner.  We can glow brighter than the sun, but it is not tonight, and it is not in this field.

Novel Sacred Unique

Do you ever get stuck in a loop? A searching loop.  One of the ones where you seem to keep searching forever.  More importantly, where you COULD keep searching forever.  There are some subjects of such depth that you just want to keep looking until you find the bottom.

You know the questions that prompt these.  "Who was the best..."  or "Who made the perfect..."  The answer is not roundly shaped or functionally adept.  More importantly, it is not there.

Why do we want the perfect answer?  Why do we even try?  Because of our desire to defend.  We defend space and we defend ideas.  We want to defend a turf of ideology.  We want to plant our flag.  And we want to defend the ideal that we have found the insight - not just the example - that is the key to something more.  This falls into both.

But every once in a while, we do better.  And that is not just staking out our own ideals.  Sometimes, more importantly, we defend the novel.  We defend the new.  As Anton Ego said in the fabulous film Ratatouille, "There are times when the critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."

God help us when we find such things.  Not that we are protected, but that we protect the sacred, the novel, and the unique.

That's the way we were in Pasadena

I was discussing the difference between Planning and planning with the wife today.   She has been looking at our finances, and worries that we are within a hair of the end result.  She made the caveat that "I'm planning, not like you, but I'm planning."

My response was "my margin of error is 50,0000 people over 20 years.  Yours is within a nickel over the next month.  The difference is different."  To wit, we end up with another question of what Planning is.

I refer back to the invisible Beatle, Mr. Harrison.  "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."  The vast majority of the time, we write plans that seem to identify an outcome, but don't really specify a result.  We don't really know where we're going.

And guess what.  Any road will take us there.

This mindset is a killer.  Very few of us have any idea what the end result should be.  And I mean TRUE end results.  Not something simple like "should this be a location for retail"  or  "we need TOD."  We never specify that "this will be a good place to live," or "this will be a good place to work."  To often, we pander to the "market."

To be honest, there is no market.  There is only people making money.  To be true, I am a planner and I have no idea what I want.

But I have a hell of a lot of ideas on how to get there.  And that is the benefit and the cost of capital-P Planning.  We know good ideas.  We should identify our biases.

We have to start specifying the roads we want to take, rather than the outcomes we want to see.  I frankly don't care if we flood the market with single family detached dwellings.  Just don't consume the epic amounts of land to do it.  I don't care if we get tons of big box stores.  Just don't destroy everything to get there.

And that is the true request: Say what you truly want.  The killer is whether your community can get to the point of formalizing such a statement.

Stats and the lies we tell ourselves.

In one of the more insidious bits of political data steering, the North Carolina General Assembly is proposing to limit the type of data used by planners to make predictions about sea level rise.  The limitation states that only past data can be used to make projections, not models.

It would be easy to bang on the head of these folks for being so naked in their manipulations.  They are avoiding making hard decisions in the hopes that the rising tide will just skip the entire state.  As a professional that uses statistics and projections and models to compel good planning decisions, this is infuriating.

But it is truly difficult to be completely offended because things like this happens all the time.  Jurisdictions pick and choose the most pleasant or self serving data to "prove" their points.  Many central cities have been throwing out projections for growth for the last fifty years, although they've been hemorrhaging people.  Adjustments are made to ridership projections to get new transit pushed through.  Even the average tree size is a little lie told to make things better when laying out a parking lot.  Those trees will never attain full growth, but we carry on like they will.

However, what should be disturbing to planners is that we most frequently do it ourselves.

One of the powerful tools that planners use to develop visions for communities is highlighting or suppressing feedback.  When we survey an area, experience and education tell us what to report back to the community and elected officials.  There's a little mysticism and a lot of training that help us pick out pathways and opportunities for development. Often, the things we don't like - big box retail or parking, to name a few - get suppressed in the name of planning orthodoxy.

Once it enters the black box of a planning mind, we do have biases that take over.  We are biased towards sustainability.  We are biased towards transit.  We are biased towards best practices.  Those are not minor data steering filters in their own right.  They run in the thousands of dollars for staff time, millions for lost opportunities, and billions for infrastructure.  It is not that these are incorrectly spent, but communities are steered towards these expenses without the benefit of complete information.

Indeed, it is easy to get angry at North Carolina when they are simply being overt about the self serving nature of data.  It's really easy because data steering is a power we planners want to keep for ourselves.

   

Royale With Cheese.

It has been almost twenty years since Pulp Fiction came out.  The movie has been dissembled so many different ways, from the fractured timeline to the violence to the literary cursing.  I was watching it tonight and was struck by something for the first time.

Pulp Fiction presents being in a car as a character all its own.

Sometimes films or shows present their settings as a unique character, one of the antagonists.  I do not recall a movie where the act of being in a vehicle is treated as the truly unique setting it is.  In a lot of films, the car is a hook to get from one place to another.  Tolkien made folks walk for months, and a car is usually treated the same.  In movies like American Graffiti, the car is a symbol of virile youth.  Of course, the Road Trip is its own genre.

But for most of us, being in a car is being in a diving bell.  You are moving through space, sealed off from the world around you.  It creates a cabin fever.  You act differently when you are stuck in a car with someone.  You talk about the mundane.  You stare uncomfortably forward, washed out from your encounter with an adrenaline needle. Hell, even the lead up to the famous dance scene takes place in a car (it just happens to be parked inside the restaurant).

We do act differently when we get behind the wheel.  Differently enough to remember the next time we make decisions about driving and traffic while sitting behind a desk rather than a dashboard.  I am not sure if it's the velocity or the freedom or the other folks whizzing by.  It may even be that we drive so much we simply ignore the novelty of it all.  We are not the same people when we become drivers.

Four steps to a productive internship.

We received our shipment of interns today.  They appeared hopeful.  With any luck, this will continue throughout the summer and they will emerge as wholly formed and optimistic planners.  Ones worthy of a entering a great profession.  I will make it my personal mission that their spirits are not broken before they leave the Planning Department.

This will take some effort.  I have been struggling with what to tell them to aid them during their time here.  Some of this stems from recently reading Derek Sivers message to incoming students.  Similar things have appeared elsewhere. It pains me that these things were never sent my way.

Until now.  Here is my message to the interns.

1) Be narcissistic.  We should talk about ourselves for a little bit.  What do you like doing?  What drew you to this field?  What opportunities have you had?  What did you like about them?  What sucked?  Yes, this is planning.  Yes, we are whittling this down to a SWOT analysis.  Suck it up.  We are getting to something.

Are you simply meat?  Are you simply going to be used as cheap labor?  I don't think so.  Stop thinking like a good little minion, and think as someone who is going to be going out into the worst job market in history burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and competing against the perpetually unretired who have fifty years of experience.  Let's figure out your strengths and weaknesses, then get working on them.

2) Let's set some goals for the time here.  Again, this is about YOU, the paid intern looking at your selves and what you will be getting out of the position.  This is about you preparing yourself for the next step in your career.  Here is a theory. Here is another theory. If you don't like them, find another one.

But, again, I don't want to see any goals on here that involve "getting ten pages written."  No.  Make it about YOU.  Start with one simple one, like, "Send follow up emails to ten new contacts."  It is about doing one thing, which is meeting people.  You then have to build on that thing by learning enough about the person to not simply be a poseur.  Then you have to act on both parts by sending a followup email.  The second one should be "Submit for a conference session."

3) Reporting.  This is going to come in two parts: You will have weekly meetings with me first thing on Monday morning.  9am, no excuses.  We will be going over a journal.  That is the second part.  Keep it short, with the list of things you did each day, filled out that day.  This is going to be your running evidence of achieving things.  It is also training you to cover your ass.  If you did it, decided it, or dumped it off to someone else, it will appear in the journal.

4) No crap.  If I see you gaming or goofing on Facebook, I'm going to embarrass you.  Get your shit done.  Get extra shit done for yourself.  Get out of here.  If you need more to do in order to fill the contingent eight hours you're required to be here, let me know.  I have a list.

Now, I have not asked permission to do this, either yours or the supervisors.  But I have been here long enough to know that this place eats your soul.  It takes away the desire to be planners.  I owe my chosen career a productive new generation of planners who are happy to be doing good work.

And I will be doing this with you.  Anything I hold you to, I expect to be held to as well.  

Bastard Bee

There is a thin separation between stand-in and go-to.  We acquire things to stand-in for what we should be doing.  But if they're around, then end up as a go-to.

Case in point.  Honey Nut Cheerios.

Oh dangerous succubus, oh shrew.

We keep a box of Honey Nut Cheerios around as a stand-in for a more reasonable and healthful breakfast.  Under normal conditions, I eat oatmeal and a banana and drink some OJ before heading out the door.  The Brown Box sits on the shelf those days, peacefully waiting until need arises.

But then it starts to beckon.  It speaks to me.  "You don't want those things thinly masquerading as a true breakfast.  YOU WANT THE REAL THING."  I quake.

And so one morning there comes a time when real breakfast is "accidentally" forgotten, and I am left filling a punch bowl with sugar flavored oat rings and dropping my face into it without a spoon.

Sometimes I wonder if Planning is out of ideas.  We have a limited number of set pieces that get new coats of paint every decade.  The worst are the flagship projects - arenas, stadiums, convention centers, waterfront revitalization - that get some current buzzwords tacked on.  Transit oriented.  LEED Certified.  You know the drill.

For example, the proposal for Baltimore's proposed new arena.  For a city that has no professional basketball or hockey, it has the imminent stink of a white elephant.  BUT IT HAS A GREEN ROOF.

What happens if we try something really startling.  Let's not build a brand new arena.  Let's not dump huge sums of cash on untested one-off transit modes.  Let's not sink half a billion dollars into a money losing publicly owned hotel.

These big monsters hit a sweet spot between bulldozer politics and growth machine governance.  We need NEW income to grow.  That new income needs to come from NEW things.  Politicians can attend ribbon cuttings at NEW things.  Ergo, bring on the new arena.

But the concept is so deep in the mold that you can taste the penicillin.  The tacked-on green roof just accentuates how poor the whole idea is.  "How can we spruce up this off-the-shelf design?  Let's add some grass!"

If you're going to blow my money on another boondoggle, at least make it an awesome boondoggle.  Break through the boring. Maybe an arena integrated into an office block.

Or apartments in a second enclosure around the main stadium.

If you think of it, the most ancient of arenas - Madison Square Garden - does just this.  It sits on top of Penn Station, the busiest train station in the country.  There will be plenty of opportunities for transit development, as the new arena is going to sit near, if not at, the new Red Line.

Maybe finding the something to fit with the arena is thinking backwards.  We do not even know if there will be occupants for the arena/expanded convention center.  So we should make the arena the secondary function of the site.  What would be useful here, that an arena can be integrated into?

Increasing Rates of Intelligence

Killer infographic from the CDC about the expansion in portion size from the 1950s to today.  French fry sizes more than doubled.  Burger sizes tripled.  Soda sizes doubled THEN tripled.

This actually brought to mind another graphic, this one from Wired magazine a couple years back.

This shows the cost per calorie of items in the grocery store.  Produce is the highest (2 cents per calorie) and beverages are the lowest (0.2 cents per calorie).  Bread (0.2 cents per calorie) is also at the bottom, while meat (0.5 cents per calorie) is a bit higher.

Some of this has to do with urbanism.  But we'll talk food deserts and nutrition later.  Right now, I just want to admire when smart people translate hard information into beautiful bits of knowledge.

 

Behold the Metatron

It should be said that I really love the work I do.  Being an urban planner is a calling, and one that I take seriously.  When the constant drone of idiocy threatens the work and the community, it makes me very angry.  So that gets prattled on about endlessly.

But cities, building them and understanding them, that is what makes for a Happy Planner.  We get this unique opportunity to step backwards and just observe the glorious machine of human communities.  We don't just watch it work, we try to add in the why and the how.

It's easy to scoff at the utility of planning when the field didn't exist for the first 100,000 years that people built places.  A couple of decades of a profession doesn't offer respectability.  And given the track record, planning hasn't helped itself be a respected field.  When planners turned bulldozers on communities or tried to label places as slums, we lost a lot of ground.  Tore up the roots of the seeds we should have been protecting.  And we didn't pay attention that well when new seeds rooted.  From those vanguard settlers, places that we tried to kill have come back, without our help.

That is the truly amazing part of cities.  Even at their lowest functionality, cities work.  People get where they need to go.  Work is done.  Food is acquired.  Money changes hands.  It may be slow or disjointed, but it all happens.  When the non-functional gets abandoned, new houses go up, roads get filled, changes come fast.

All of which occurs on the surface.  There is the deeper part of the city.  Look hard at buildings and sidewalks and you will find that the city has ways of remembering things.  Bricked in windows talk of changing utility and fashion.  Growing front yards tell of evolving zoning codes.  Bare ruts in the grass show thousands of feet cutting a new path.  This is urban memory, the way the city records where it has been.

Couple that with the city taking action on its memory and current events.  Look at the city as an organism.  There is an urban intelligence, one that reacts to changes, retreats from threats, and actually decides how it is going to survive.  And it does it based on its own history.  

Memory and intelligence.  But no voice.  That is where planners should come in.  We should speak for this emergent intelligence.  We should be its mouthpiece.  

We must do more than chatting up mixed use and transit oriented development and complete streets and the buzzword after that and after that.  All of these things are superficial reshufflings of the houses and roads.  They make nice places.  But it is just for show.  

What we need are new ways to peek into the mind of the city.  

Packing for success.

Perusing the interwebs, it is easy to see the number of people who are into packing things for productivity's sake.  We are supposed pack for the gym, bring in our lunch, have a cool set of gear to ride into work every day.  Even for the apocalypse.

But work is a constant stream of shit.  The assholes are bearing down on you from all sides, and counting the time you spend blinking against your overall productivity.  They look at your bag as a method for keeping you efficiently chained to your desk at lunch.  Or worse, it is a portal between their pile of tasks and your time at home.

Hell with that.  Whatever you bring to work is a lifeline outside of the cubicle maze.  It is a reminder that you are bigger than this place, and you are being kind enough to accommodate them.  Let's pack that work bag to maintain your sanity.

1)  An actual physical book and an actual physical magazine.  Sure, you have a Kindle on your phone.  But you are not here to squeeze your entertainment around their nonsense.  You have an object (book) that has a purpose (to be read).  It does not apologize for that purpose, and you should not either.  Bonus: make it a library book because a regular visit to the library is one of the most humanizing things you will do in your day.  The magazine can be read in the can, should need arise.

2)  Healthy snacks.  This is a tip-of-the-hat to the lunch-packers.  They get one thing right when they say you will feel even worse if you blow through the entire row of sticky buns from the vending machine.  Throw a couple of apples in your bag.  They're robust enough to last a couple of days.  When the tension starts getting to you, tear into one of them with the slow chew. Also works with baby carrots.

3)  That thing you look forward to.  The Appalachian Trail maps.  The kid's coloring.  Whatever you're passionate about.  Sure, it's a screenplay about an office drone that saves the entire universe, bangs the hot redhead in accounting, and delivers a nail chewing one-liner after unloading a clip into the alien boss' face.  But it's YOUR screenplay, not theirs.

4)  Pens.  You should always have pens.

And that's it.  Leave the phone adapters in the car.  Deal with your dirty shoes elsewhere.  There is no mission creep here.

Most importantly, leave no space for them.  Not with some apology of "oh, it doesn't fit" or "oh, my bag is full."  No apologies.  Your bag is full because your life is full.  Now that your day is done, you are taking your things and returning to your home.  They are not invited.

Value. True value.

I have been reading about business recently.  Some have been business theory, and some have been starting businesses or turning your hobbies or hustles into business.

One thing that gets pulled out repeatedly is the concept of adding value.

Of course you want to add value.  Duh.  But it's importance was never at the top.  The actual route to a good business has nothing to do with a good idea.  As I was recently reminded, there are a thousand good ideas a minute in most public restrooms.  Good business has everything to do with adding value.

I don't know where Planners add value anymore.  But in most respects, we are looked at as taking value from a property owner.  No one knows where that value goes, but poof, it's gone.  Just because Planners have gotten to a place.

The American Planning Association sums up planning thus:

Planning, also called urban planning or city and regional planning, is a dynamic profession that works to improve the welfare of people and their communities by creating more convenient, equitable, healthful, efficient, and attractive places for present and future generations.

Planning enables civic leaders, businesses, and citizens to play a meaningful role in creating communities that enrich people's lives.

Good planning helps create communities that offer better choices for where and how people live. Planning helps communities to envision their future. It helps them find the right balance of new development and essential services, environmental protection, and innovative change. 

Planning "works to improve," "enables," and "helps".  We don't do anything ourselves, just point out what others should be doing.  "You, over there, develop economically!"

There is nothing in this that talks about the value added by planners. In this scenario, we're just the Greek chorus, the noise, the static.  We don't move the plot, we are just there, constantly droning on.

One would hope that our professional organization could do a better job explaining the position.

In an interview yesterday, Buck Showalter offered the following answer when asked "what is the toughest managerial job in baseball?":


"Probably managing in Triple A. Believe it or not. It's not to go away from the Major League's, but I think one of the toughest jobs in our sport is Triple A because everybody is unhappy there. We got guys on their way back. You got guys going down. You got guys thinking they should be up. I mean nobody is really happy there and we got a great guy in Triple A in Ron Johnson, who was the first base coach for Boston last year. He has done a great job for us down there. We are really lucky to have him."


I can't help but compare this view of Triple A to the attitude at the Planning Department.  Our jurisdiction believes itself to be the poor sister in a metropolitan area of rich and famous superstars.  Developers talk about the county's cheap land and proximity to downtown, but drop the idea because of bad schools and corruption.  Banks redline the area.  Jobs go elsewhere.  And the politics bears down hard on the Department to make it all stop.


That mentality of "stop" rubs off on our staff.  We have plenty of new planners who are ready to work hard to make a name for themselves, but can't find worthwhile projects in this Department.  Then we have graybeards who stay mute out of exhaustion or anger.  No one wants to be here. Everyone thinks they deserve to be somewhere else.


How to be a happy planner in this situation?