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.