Author Archives: Betsey Buckheit

Northfield’s Complete Streets policy one of the nation’s best!

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Northfield’s Complete Streets policy has been recognized as one of the top 10 policies in the country for 2012 (we ranked #5 out of the 125 Complete Streets policies adopted in the US in 2012).

What’s so great about having a Complete Streets policy?  My big policy goal is to link transportation and land use planning to increase the productivity and sustainability of Northfield.  To reach that goal requires some consciousness-raising, disseminating information about the costs of development for cities, and many incremental steps.  A Complete Streets policy is part of making transportation planning more intentional, better linked with surrounding land uses, and increasing awareness of the critical role streets play in cities’ budgets, safety, economic development, stormwater management, quality of life and, of course, getting around town.  By itself, the policy won’t accomplish much, but it is a piece of the bigger picture.

Here’s a bit more news coverage of the announcement: Envision MN highlights Northfield’s  accomplishment; Streetsblog provides some criticism about Complete Streets policies; Better Cities calls Complete Streets a “key strategy” for revitalization of cities.  Here’s some old coverage about some of the people who helped organize the Complete Streets effort in Northfield and even a mention in Rice County’s public health information.

 

Libraries as “landmarks, booksmarks, and people-marks”

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Northfield Public Library

The New Republic has a rather lyrical review of library form and function: The Revolution at your Community Library.  Focusing on the architecture of community libraries, Sarah  Williams Goldhagen presents examples of “a new building type with a deceptively familiar name.”  In so doing, she also elegantly captures the evolution in libraries from a civic repository to places which “offer what no other contemporary building type provides: vibrant, informal, attractive, non-commercial community places where people of any age, class, gender, race, religion, or ethnicity can gather, and can obtain access to resources vital to full participation in contemporary life, including but not only the Internet.”

Northfield Public Library is all these things even if its physical form is still firmly rooted in its Carnegie repository history.  When it comes time to renovate and expand the library – the physical enclosure is getting pretty tight – it will be an interesting opportunity to hold on to the historical roots, status as civic icon, and create spaces which continue to foster “full participation in contemporary life.”

Could Northfield be the next Vancouver?

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I’ve never been to Vancouver, BC, although it’s been on my “to go” list for a long time.  Now, even more, I’d like to visit.  Why?  Their transportation policy (and the cross country skiing in BC is excellent).

Here in Northfield, we’ve struggled to make even small changes in policy to help Northfield grow in ways which encourage active transportation, productive land use, and a viable transit system.  Even so, every policy gets challenged (or simply ignored) when a new small decision needs to be made.  Complete Streets?  Great, until a street project must be approved.  GreenStep Cities and sustainability?  Wonderful, but seldom considered.  Smart Growth Comprehensive Plan?  Super, until we try to take steps to implement it.

Vancouver, however, thinks big and has since 1997 when it approved an influential Transportation Plan which prioritized – rank ordered – modes of transportation.  Vancouver has just approved Transportation 2040 which affirms the priorities for moving people (for moving goods, etc. there are separate rankings): Walking, Cycling, Transit, Taxi/Commercial Transit/Shared Vehicles, and Private Automobiles.

The hierarchy is intended to help ensure that the needs and safety of each group of road users are sequentially considered when decisions are made, that each group is given proper consideration, and that the changes will not make existing conditions worse for more vulnerable road users, such as people on foot, bicycle, and motorcycle. Each time a new roadway is designed or an existing one changed, opportunities for improving walking and cycling will be reviewed…This is a general approach and does not mean that users at the top of the list will always receive the most beneficial treatment on every street. In highly constrained urban environments, it is not always possible to provide the ideal facilities for all users’ needs.

Even better, Vancouver links transportation and land use (“Use land use to support shorter trips and sustainable transportation choices”), does not flinch from saying the goal is to reduce auto-dependence (“Manage the road network efficiently to improve safety and support a gradual reduction in car dependence. Make it easier to drive less”) and understands that the economic vitality and emergency response must also be part of the overall plan (“Support a thriving economy and Vancouver’s role as a major port and Asia-Pacific gateway while managing related environmental and neighbourhood impacts. Maintain effective emergency response times for police, fire, and ambulance”).

Here in Northfield, we need to try to be more Vancouverish (at a scale appropriate for a community of our size/location) for the long term health (financial, physical, environmental) of the city.  

Fun urbanism – more slides

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British football fans may soon be able to have more fun than just the game at St. James Park in Newcastle.  Slides from the stadium seating 53,000 to the parking area and train station are planned and waiting for approval.  Utrecht’s “travel accelerators” got the ball sliding, so to speak, and Newcastle is looking to make the slides part of a pocket park near the stadium.  As one of the slide designers noted: “We want people to ride the slide, then go up the stairs and do it again.”

There is one other sliding possibility in Newcastle already – a 230m zip line from the Tyne Bridge across the Tyne River.

 

Have we outgrown zoning?

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 Zoning is no longer appropriate, writes architect Roger Lewis in the Washington Post recently.  It is easy enough to agree – zoning is essentially segregation.  We put big houses here, little houses over there, multi-family housing way over there (check out some of the history of land use regulation and discrimination), industrial out there, and commercial on the highway.  The inappropriateness comes from both the inequities, but also the community costs in terms of excess infrastructure and unproductive development.

So, have we outgrown zoning?  Yes, but now what?  Here in Northfield, we have a pretty smart comprehensive plan which could use some updating and focusing.  Then we have some really lousy land use regulations which are slated for revision (and with some luck and leadership, for reform or replacement).  What a golden opportunity to move beyond putting things in their zones to plan and regulate for the long term health of the community.

Some inspiration (a very small selection):

Long term thinking, not easy short term answers: some thoughts from San Diego based Placemaker Howard Blackson.  Placemaking is rapidly becoming a planning buzzword which could become just as meaningless as “mixed use” (an oxymoron when you think about it), but I’d like to think of it simply as: identify and work with the specific characteristics of the place – Northfield – rather than overly generic solutions.  Here’s another good one from the Placemakers.

Don’t just ask the community “What do you want/like?” but also educate residents about the features, costs and benefits of various development choices.

Downtown is not a cute museum: work to reinvigorate downtown’s image as the vital and distinctive economic core of Northfield which generates significantly more tax revenue per acre than other areas.

Think local: Consider how supporting local businesses helps keep money in Northfield (some info about co-ops, infill and redevelopment) and how land use and related regulation can help rather than hinder local enterprises.

Streets are really, really important.  The street network helps define the density of a community, connects places within the city and the city to elsewhere, plays a huge role in safety, stormwater, municipal costs, economic development, and quality of life.  Street decisions are also long term and very hard to change. Indeed, how we manage car traffic is critical to thinking about other features of urban development.  Streets matter.

 

 

 

 

 

How much is that tree worth?

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Don’t mess with the trees

Here’s the next installment of “What’s it worth?” – the dollarization of different community “items” (see the Zoo here and bicycling here): what are trees worth in Pittsburgh?  The iTree software tools (“Tools for Assessing and Managing Community Forests”) from the USDA Forest Service helps calculate what trees are worth by helping assess an areas’s urban forest composition and health, calculating the “eco-system services” trees are providing (pollution removal, stormwater management, and more), trees’ effects on building energy use, and assessing damage after large storms.

Great!  Having tools to help visualize and articulate the value of trees, bikes, art, sidewalks and other community goods can help demonstrate how these things do impact the community and raise awareness of their importance. In addition, since allocating scarce government resources means putting specific dollar amounts toward various goals in a principled, justifiable, accountable and transparent way such tools can help leaders at least approximate the apples to apples comparisons which can make the task possible.  

But not enough!  I am thoroughly pessimistic when it comes to policy-makers moving beyond the very specific issue on the table.  Or perhaps I am optimistic that elected officials will be distracted by details and staff will stay within their professional comfort zones.  Missing the forest for the trees, you might say.

These tools don’t touch the structural issues in city budgeting.  If a city spends more money on streets because those streets are wider than necessary, serve unproductive land use patterns which are insufficient to support the infrastructure that’s been built, then there will be less money for everything, including trees.  Considering how to maximize public investment in both gray and green infrastructure needs to happen in addition to tree-specific spending as an option at the end of the discussion.

Such tools can perpetuate isolating functions rather than integrating them.  Trees are an excellent example.  Ideally, trees and landscaping should be part of the basic planning for how streets (parks, parking lots, and more) are designed to manage both the traffic (multi-modal, of course), stormwater, energy use, utility management, etc. and not just an optional add-on at the end of the process.  Ideally, iTree would help make trees part of the larger discussion rather than creating a new department of tree management.

So, yes, please use iTree to assess and manage the community forest (I do like this term for its implication of shared benefit and responsibility – those are OUR trees out there), educate the public about the heavy lifting trees are doing, and strategically target spending where it will do the most good.  But keep the whole metaphorical as well as literal community forest in mind when talking about the trees.

Walkable urbanism and the future of the world

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Whoa.  I’ve been trying to make the case that policy folks need to be thinking about the long term costs of some of our development strategies and not just the instant boost to tax capacity of new growth.  I’ve been thinking about the local sunk costs of late 20th century horizontal growth, but Foreign Policy’s Patrick Doherty takes it global with a New US Grand Strategy:

In the United States, the country’s economic engine is misaligned to the threats and opportunities of the 21st century. Designed explicitly to exploit postwar demand for suburban housing, consumer goods, and reconstruction materials for Europe and Japan, the conditions that allowed it to succeed expired by the early 1970s. Its shelf life has since been extended by accommodative monetary policy and the accumulation of household, corporate, and federal debt.

The upshot: the current path is unsustainable as the planet tries to accommodate 3 billion new middle class members (and the consumption that comes along with them), depletion of natural resources (see my previous post), “contained depression” (and not just a down business cycle or two), and a “resilience crisis” (the drivers of the US economy, crumbling infrastructure, and the soft infrastructure which connect us to markets is fragile).

So, we need a grand plan and the sketch provided includes reforming government, addressing climate change, and vastly improving resource productivity.  It’s a top down vision of national change, but I’m more curious about what state and local efforts can accomplish.  Atlantic Cities picked up on the walkable urbanism part of the solution, but what else could we do?

 

 

How much space do 7 billion people need?

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How much space do 7 billion people take up? It depends.

Check out this infographic for a quick visual introduction to how population density and development pattern makes a huge difference in land consumption, among other things.  Per Square Mile points out that the simple visualization just shows the people, but does not indicate the amount of land needed to sustain the population in terms of food, water, transportation networks, building materials, etc. So here’s another image of the size of the footprint the world’s population would make depending on what country is used as a development model.

Density is one of the dirty words of development.  Higher density is equated with grim high rise apartment blocks, crime and overcrowding…although it is also linked to walkability, thriving urban cores, and lower infrastructure costs.  Mostly, though, density is very measurable on a project by project basis (number of housing units or people per acre is very countable and thus easy to administer).  See Strong Towns’ Chuck Marohn’s criticism of density (and planners), too.

So, let’s not get distracted by density and think about productivity, land consumption and carrying capacity and ask: What patterns of development are more productive, consume land more slowly and enable us to live within our resources and how can we foster those patterns rather than the ones we have now?  

Dear Representative Bly

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A very nice deck chair from the Titanic

Still a very nice deck chair from the Titanic

So, Senator Kevin Dahle’s tweet about LGA sparked a recent post and now my state representative David Bly’s newsletter has me blogging on a related issue.

Really, the issue is how can the public conversation begin to address the relationship between property taxes and their friends (LGA, tax relief of various kinds, business subsidies), the crumbling infrastructure and the services taxes must fund, and what spending decisions we can make to change this landscape for the better.  Perhaps Rep. Bly and Sen. Dahle understand these issues very well, but so far they are only choosing to write the quick and easy stuff for constituents.

Dear Rep. Bly,

Congratulations on your return to the legislature and thank you for your continued service. Just as I took your senate colleague Kevin Dahle to task over his tweet about increasing LGA in response to requests from district mayors, I’m writing to challenge you to consider and, even more important, talk about the larger picture.

In your weekly newsletter of February 8, you said:

I agree with the Governor on his assessment that we need to reduce property taxes. The consistent increase hits low and middle-income earners much harder. Middle class families have been squeezed too much in the last ten years. Wages have remained flat while the cost of living has steadily increased. Many Minnesotans are finding it harder to save for retirement and send their kids to college. As the Governor said, this is not the Minnesota we want to leave our children. We need Minnesota to be a state that invests in its people and provides quality, efficient services.

Your remarks indicate you are concerned about equity for middle and lower income families.  I agree, but question the strategy you endorse for achieving it.  As with my letter to your colleague Senator Dahle, I question whether you are going for the quick fix without even attempting to figure out how to improve the tax system in the longer term for a sustainable state budget.

In particular, the relationship among taxes, local government costs, and policy choices which have skewed the market and the landscape remains unexamined, but it is these structural issues which desperately need your attention. My vote in the next election for you or any politician depends entirely on your contribution to shifting the conversation from short term fix to sustainable policy.  In addition the issues I raised for Senator Dahle, I have these questions:

How regressive are MN property taxes?  A new report Who Pays? evaluates state tax systems for regressiveness; sales taxes are much more regressive than property taxes, but I urge you to take a look at Minnesota’s overall tax burden on its residents and how regressive it is.  Minnesota’s sales tax was created to fund property tax relief back in 1967; this seems like a very inequitable method for change.  Please also consider how previous legislatures have tried to shift the burden to commercial/industrial property with higher class rates and the state general tax; this shift creates superficial equity for homestead tax payers while imposing an obstacle to our economic drivers who, typically, require fewer city services.  Again, please evaluate how the system is balanced rather than simply reducing one component.

Property taxes, housing costs and location: The size of homes has been increasing since the 1950s and, as a result, so have the taxes.  Part of the housing and transportation cost equation depends on where we live relative to where we work, too.  Since your district has Northfield, Londsale and other communities which became more attractive to commuters to the metro area in the last decade, there are also many homeowners who pay a great deal in transportation plus housing.  “Drive ’til you qualify” may have yielded more house for the money for individuals, but also increased household costs. So, it is not too surprising to read that housing and transportation costs taken together are outpacing incomes.  If households are paying more of their income for housing and transportation, then property taxes will be more of a burden.  Before cutting taxes, think about how the incentives for more efficient and economical development can help reduce both government and homeowner costs.

How good is Governor Dayton’s plan?  I’m not impressed.  MinnPost’s Steve Dornfeld critiques the plan and finds 3 big issues: increased complexity (see the final report from the Property Tax Working Group, too), creating new inequities, and providing incentives for local governments to raise taxes in the future. I’d add that Gov. Dayton’s plan adds economic development policies which will continue to incentivize the race to the bottom which will continue to use tax dollars to lure business to Minnesota through tax abatement and infrastructure subsidies while also including new sales taxes for business services which follows the historical pattern of trying to offset property tax issues with sales tax.

As I said to Senator Dahle, I’m counting on your leadership to help develop policies which benefit all Minnesotans for the long term, not just the constituents yelling at you right now.  Of course, I also know that change happens incrementally as you work to build support and make compromises (and that’s just within the DFL) and that I am asking for a staggering amount of reform, but I am looking for you to shift the conversation away from reactive government to thoughtful, sustainable policy-making.  Good luck!

Sincerely,

Betsey Buckheit