What makes for a strong town
[Music]
[Music]
make no little plans
i’m an engineer and a planner it’s one
of these statements that
was given to us very early in our
education process it’s one of these
inspiring things that we put in our
baby’s nursery put in internet memes
that we pass around
we we put it in granite on the walls
make
no little plans the idea is that we
should be bold we should think big we
should have grand visions
for what tomorrow can bring it’s a very
inspiring way to look at the world
the phrase was uttered by daniel burnham
who put together the chicago plan
he did this uh speech in 1910
and i think it’s important to step back
and understand the world
that daniel burnham spoke this statement
in it was a world where
uh as a great planner he could look
around and see
these amazing cities these amazing
things that we had done as humans
in different continents different
latitudes different cultures these
prime achievements that we had created
by thinking big
and he has inspired
tons of people that have come after him
to dream big
in the decades after he uttered these
words we certainly did dream big
and we acted big we did a lot of big big
things in this country
if we look at the last 100 years of
development in north america
i think the one adjective you would use
to describe it is big
everything we have built has been big
and bold
we can look at a city like fresno
california which is very typical of the
north american development pattern
we see before uh the great depression
a certain incremental style of growth
that then after world war ii began to
expand
in a big big way all of our cities have
grown
in this horizontal pattern in a very
aggressive manner
we understand this as growth we
understand this as creating a certain
amount of prosperity
we also need to step back and understand
the liability involved in this
when you take a city and you spread it
out across a broad area
you create a lot of obligations
i was involved in a study in the city of
lafayette louisiana
and we noted that after world war ii
since then they had grown by
3.5 times by 350 percent
in that same period of time when we
examined their water system their water
system had grown by 10 times
and their their their hydrants a little
part of their water system
those have grown by 21 times so we asked
ourselves with all this growth
how much wealthier are the people of
lafayette louisiana
what we found is that the median
household income has only grown by 1.6
times
we’ve added enormous liabilities to our
cities
when we look around today cities
everywhere are struggling under the
burden
of maintaining just basic infrastructure
we’re told we don’t have enough money
millions of dollars per city my little
town
after world war ii has added no
population but has grown by 10 times
who’s paying for all that stuff this is
the city of lafayette a little
map we put together we did a what a
sense is a profit and loss
map for the city everywhere you see a
blue
property what you’ve seen is a property
that pays more taxes
on an annual basis than they require an
ongoing services
and every time you see a property that’s
in red it’s the exact opposite
these are properties that over the long
term annually require more and more
money to provide basic services to
than they create in tax revenue that red
stuff
out on the edge looks like the things
we’ve become used to
the malls the strip malls the big box
stores the windy cul-de-sacs with the
three-car garage with the attached house
that other stuff looks uh very like run
down to us
uh it looks very different it looks like
the stuff that we’ve walked away from
these are the poorer neighborhoods these
are the neighborhoods where the poor
people live yet
profitable generating excess revenue for
the city year after year after year
how can this be here’s two identical
properties when we look at them we see
they’re the same size the same area
this is very typical of the development
pattern shift that we’ve seen
in this country this property on the
left
is the traditional development pattern
kind of the first
infant phase of it that first increment
of growth that cities would have
experienced
two blocks over used to look just like
this the city labeled it blight had it
torn down
and now we have the new taco
drive-through this meets all the zoning
codes all the development standards
city got rid of blight everybody was
really happy when nobody bothered to
look at that property on the left
had a total value of 1.1 million dollars
those property on the right
the one that is shiny and new that we
were trying so hard to get is only worth
six hundred thousand
that old blighted block not only pays
way more taxes
but employs more people has more local
business owners they use more local
services
it’s part of our economic ecosystem
often i’m asked how is this possible
this doesn’t seem to jive with the way
we build our places
and there’s a lot of complex reasons why
this works out this way we see it over
and over and over again
city after city that we model i want to
point out just one quick thing for you
think like a poor person for a second
and imagine that you are coming together
with a bunch of your neighbors
to build a street and you’re going to
build homes along the street how would
you do this
you’re poor what you would do is you
would make houses
that were thin and deep because then you
would all share
with a cost there’d be more of you to
share with this cost of the street
now imagine that you consider yourself
wealthy did you have to worry about any
of these long-term expenses
that all this was not a big deal what
would you do you would take that house
and you would turn it
and you would make it wide and shallow
you would make it like a prince mansion
right you would
have a very different approach this is a
fundamental shift we have made
because we’ve discounted these long-term
liabilities as we’ve grown
this is in sharp contrast to the way
cities were traditionally built we can
go around the world
different continents different cultures
different latitudes and we see a very
familiar pattern
we see cities start with little pop-up
shacks
very first increment of investment so
people with some hopes and some dreams
about the future
over time as people come together and
the land becomes more valuable
these will redevelop they’ll become
these structures that maybe two and
three story wood like this in my
hometown
this is the same street by the way just
30 years later
go another 40 years in the future and
these wood structures will be turned
into buildings of brick and granite
incremental development over time the
slow
grinding of time gradually shifting
and replacing and making places stronger
more productive more valuable
incidentally this is what this street
looks like today
it’s it’s a denuded space
of parking lots and half occupied
buildings
we have denuded our cities
we have denied them wealth and we have
added to them
enormous liabilities this is a pattern
that cannot continue
this is a pattern that we need to change
we need to take some conscious steps
to do things differently one of the
first things we need to do is we need to
focus
on maintaining what we have it’s
astounding to me how
i can go to city after city after city
who will have these big intricate
reports that say we have
tens of millions of dollars of unfunded
maintenance liabilities for our road
system
yet they go out and build more roads
we have to become obsessive about
maintaining and taking care of what we
have
we need to shift our focus instead of
looking at what the new developer coming
to town can bring us
instead of looking at the federal or
state grant program that we can get
funded
we need to look at the way our people
are using the city
focus on their needs they point to us by
their actions
the highest returning investments we can
make
we need to make our places worthy of
care
i’m an engineer this is something they
don’t teach you in engineering school
but it’s the little frivolity of life
that adds beauty to a place
that makes it worth caring about when
people don’t care about
their places they don’t take care of
them if we want our cities to be
successful
we need to show them love and we need to
start making better use of what we’ve
already built
we’ve built this enormous amount of
infrastructure we need to start using it
we need to start thickening up
our cities this is one little example
that i’m fond of
uh between these two big structures
there’s this little attorney’s office
that’s built in here it’s a very tiny
little place
uh and we laugh at it right it is funny
it is
funny looking but understand that
pound for pound the financial
productivity of this place
is six times this city’s walmart
it is these kind of investments in these
lost spaces that are going to transform
not just the uses of our cities but
their financial productivity
at strong towns we’ve come up with a
process for identifying what the best
public investments that we can make are
it’s very simple
the first thing we do is we go out and
we humbly observe
where people in our community are
struggling we then ask the question
what is the next smallest thing we can
do right now to address this struggle
we do that thing we do it immediately
and then we repeat that process over and
over
this is an incremental iterative
approach to
not only thickening up our places but to
responding to the needs of the people
in our communities i was in lawton
oklahoma
which is a city i’m very fond of
but when i was there lawton had a couple
years earlier done
a a a federally funded multi-million
dollar
streetscape project the idea was to go
in
and kind of you know make no little
plans uh reimagine what the street could
be like
they put in the decorative lights the
decorative sidewalks
they did all this stuff and nothing
happened
it’s not a bad vision it’s just not the
right project for where they are
it was not the right project for them
let me give you another
uh place this is memphis tennessee a
little street called broad avenue
broad avenue is abandoned streetcar line
and some neighbors went out
and said you know what these stores are
empty we would like to see them
reactivated
and they took paint and they took their
own efforts and sweat
and cleaned up these stores and cleaned
up this street and made it look a little
bit nicer
and the results have been fantastic
millions of dollars of new property
value investment
from a total public investment of zero
these
are the types of investments the
incremental iterative nature
of putting people first in our places
that will make our cities wealthy
so make no little plans i i’m not ready
to walk away from this
i think we should have bold visions for
the future
i think we should have an expansive view
of what we can together
accomplish but i think we have to go
back and understand that in daniel
burnham’s day you could there was a
limit to how far you could go
at one time you were forced to work
iteratively
and i think we need to bring that
discipline back we need to make no
large leaps we need to force ourselves
to work
incrementally to build prosperity in our
places
now i haven’t yet pushed back on this
people will say chuck
uh the problems we’re facing are so huge
they’re so enormous
how can we possibly work incrementally
we’re dealing with climate change
we’re dealing with uh wealth inequality
we’re dealing with social justice issues
how can we possibly work incrementally
i find that approach intellectually lazy
lacking
in imagination and not just a little bit
self-serving
when we look at cities and we look at
the way they have developed over time
we have to acknowledge that a city that
looks like this
in 1878 can grow to look like this
just a short period of time later and
can then evolve to this
and ultimately become this place that
we’re all familiar with
when we look at all the great things
that we have done in our cities all the
things we’re most proud of
what we understand is that they’re the
culmination
of decades and decades generations and
generations of hard work
of incremental iterative steps yes
there’s bold vision there
but we did not build the eiffel tower so
we could have paris
we did not build the coliseum so we
could get rome those things
were the celebration of many many many
generations of hard work and success
if we can humble ourselves to see
the value in an iterative approach
we can not only make great investments
in our communities make them financially
strong and resilient but we can do it
while improving people’s lives and
that’s
what we should be all about thank you so
much