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