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Mobility

Strong Towns

June 7, 2023

Charles Marohn, known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues, is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and civil engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.

Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019) and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley 2021). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America. Planetizen named him one of the 10 Most Influential Urbanists of all time.

Chuck grew up on a small farm in central Minnesota. The oldest of three sons of two elementary school teachers, he joined the Minnesota National Guard on his seventeenth birthday during his junior year of high school and served in the Guard for nine years. In addition to being passionate about building a stronger America, he loves playing music, is an obsessive reader, and religiously follows his favorite baseball team, the Minnesota Twins.

Chuck and his wife live with their two daughters in their hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:12] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone.

Eve: [00:00:55] Charles Mahron is a recovering engineer. He used to build roads. Charles followed all the rules he learned while studying to become an engineer. But in 2008, well into his engineering career, he became disenchanted with the notion that more roads lead to prosperity. So, Charles started blogging his thoughts. He advocated for a new approach to land use and warned about the dangers of suburban sprawl. With each blog, Charles gained readers until the blog converted into a nonprofit organization called Strong Towns. Today, Strong Towns has millions of followers. Listen in to learn more.

Eve: [00:01:43] If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do, share this podcast and go to rethinkrealestateforgood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

Eve: [00:02:09] Hi, Charles. I’m really honored to have you here today.

Charles Mahron: [00:02:12] Thanks, Eve. It’s so nice to chat with you.

Eve: [00:02:15] Very nice. So, you recently wrote a book called Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town. That’s a really tantalizing title. What’s behind it?

Charles: [00:02:27] Well, I have a lot on behalf of the engineering profession to confess to people. I think there’s a lot that people take as being normal in our transportation system. And when you work inside of it, when you work as an engineer, when you work as a design professional, many of those things that are taken as gospel, that are taken as this is the way things are and this is the way things have to be, are built on a very kind of fragile construct. And it’s a construct that conflicts with a lot of the way humanity actually operates. We have these books that are seen as the, you know, the founding texts of our profession. We have these doctrines that are brought down from on high. And I just wanted to pull back the curtain and talk seriously about those things and make it far more accessible for people, particularly people who don’t think the system is working very well.

Eve: [00:03:30] So, I suppose my question is, is what made you think about that at all in the first place, if you were trained just like all other civil engineers in your profession?

Charles: [00:03:38] It’s a fair question. I’m not a very good engineer is the way I put it. I think a good engineer is someone who colors within the lines

Eve: [00:03:49] Embraces it.

Charles: [00:03:50] Yeah, follows the rules. I got a civil engineering degree and then worked as an engineer, got my license, but then I went back to graduate school and got a planning degree, a degree in urban planning and it’s interesting because I have only met one other person who holds the same two degrees, yet, I’m sure there are more, but I’ve only met one. They seem very similar, right? They’re both working with the built environment. They’re both the physical layout and construction of cities, but they’re two very different mental approaches and two very different backgrounds. One is a very left-brain pursuit; one is a very right brain pursuit. And I think that discomfort with both allowed me to see it in a different way. And so, I’ve acknowledged I’m not a very good engineer, I’m not a very good planner, but I am a really good strong towns advocate, which kind of tries to understand and reconcile some of the things that conflict between both of those pursuits.

Eve: [00:04:54] So then, you gave up this job and you created a nonprofit, Strong Towns, eventually. What is Strong Towns?

Charles: [00:05:01] Well, giving up the job was part of figuring that out, right? I started to write a blog and it was an evenings and weekends kind of pursuit. I was interested in figuring out why our cities were going broke. Why the cities that I was working with, which were all very fast growing, you know, had some degree of affluence, although a lot of them were very small and very poor. But they were all investing in growth in a certain way. And it was very obvious to me that this was not leading to success. And so, I started a blog way back in 2008 to explore that. Like, why is that? And, you know, because you do writing as well. When you write, it forces you to think through ideas in ways that, you know, just talking about them or just experiencing them doesn’t. And so, three days a week, I would write about these issues. And out of that came this kind of body of insight that some friends of mine said we need to start a nonprofit over. And my first thing was like, No, I don’t want to do that.

Charles: [00:06:09] And they’re like, no, we insist. And they actually filled the paperwork out and got it going. And all of a sudden, we had a 501C3, and then a foundation gave us a grant, and I’ve been trying to figure out how best to infect the world with a new set of ideas ever since. And that’s really what Strong Towns is. Strong Towns is about sharing this message, here’s how we build cities that are financially strong and resilient. Here’s how we build places that are prosperous and places where people can, through their own efforts, working together with others, make their community a better place to live and a better place to pass on to the next generation.

Eve: [00:06:52] So, how many followers do you have today? How has that grown?

Charles: [00:06:56] It depends on how we measure it. I remember in the very early days when I would have, you know, 20 readers in a month and I’d say, oh, my gosh, that’s incredible. We had two and a half unique viewers of our content last year, so it’s grown quite a bit. Strong Towns has, I think, 4200 members, which are people who have donated to our 501C3 in the last 12 months. And that also is trending upward. It has grown to be quite a movement of people dedicated to doing something different.

Eve: [00:07:30] So, let’s talk a little bit more in detail. What are the key features of a strong town versus a weak town?

Charles: [00:07:39] Yeah, it’s a very good question. And we have, you know, a Strong Town’s approach and Strong Town’s principles. We are currently in the midst of something that we call the strongest town contest. And in that contest, we try to identify places that are using good practices. So, ultimately, we describe a strong town, not in terms of a destination, but in terms of the journey. Are you doing things in a bottom-up way? Are you attentive and attuned and sensitive to the struggles of people in the neighborhood as opposed to the cash that you can get from this program, that program or this developer? Are you building things at a human scale as opposed to orienting your neighborhoods around the automobile? Are you taking incremental steps to try to learn and figure things out? Or are you doing kind of these big Hail Mary transformative projects? So, for us Strong Towns is about a frame of mind. I’d like to use the analogy, it’s a lot like diet and exercise for a city. How do we have good practices, good approaches, good discipline about how we go about things and then we celebrate that because the results are there, the results pay off.

Eve: [00:09:02] So, I mean, let’s talk about practices. I’m just wondering what position you take on key issues, just to spell it out for our listeners. So, what about zoning and density? What makes a strong town?

Charles: [00:09:16] I always like the density question. When it comes to zoning, and it comes to density, I think we recognize a couple things. First, if we look at traditional development patterns, the pattern of development we had really before the Great Depression and even going back a little bit further than that, it was organic. And in being organic, it did not have anything like the regulatory framework we had today. That is almost like a libertarian ideal of what a city is. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in Italy. I think you can think of like the Italian hill town is such a beautiful, wonderful place to be built with completely without regulation. We recognize, though, that today the body of knowledge that created that is in a sense, absent. All of the incentives, all of the cultural understandings, not to mention the trades understandings of how to build places like that. And so, zoning becomes this like essential thing we need to make our cities work. And we spend a lot of time on how do we make zoning codes better, less responsive to, again, the cookie cutter exercise of repeating the same development pattern over and over, and instead the very kind of humble and urgent exercise of making sure that the things we build connect with and respect neighborhoods and the, you know, the adjacent buildings and all that.

Charles: [00:10:56] If we take the next step to density then, we actually are not anti-dense, we’re very pro kind of density as an outcome, but we tend to struggle with density as a metric. I see a lot of planners who obsess over density and they build really horrible places. What we talk about is neighborhoods maturing over time. Every neighborhood should be allowed to evolve and mature and thicken up and the goal of a good street, the goal of a good zoning code, the goal of a city regulatory process should be to assist every neighborhood in reaching its next level of maturity. So, if you are a toddler neighborhood of single-family homes, the expectation should be how do you become an adolescent neighborhood of duplexes? And if you’re an adolescent neighborhood of duplexes, how do we get you into something that would be more intense. Two, three story buildings, densities of multiple units per lot. How do we get you to that next stage of success? That kind of mimics the development patterns of the past that were so successful. It also tends to harmonize a little bit some of the tensions across neighborhoods that make us resist growth. And I think it’s a more kind of realistic and reality-based way to experience prosperity as opposed to neighborhoods that are stagnant and designed to never change.

Eve: [00:12:29] So, I’m going to go back to something you said, which I think maybe a lot of people don’t agree with, and that how do you move a single-family neighborhood to the next level of success, which is duplexes? And I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of people in this country who don’t see that as a successful move. Why is it important?

Charles: [00:12:52] Yeah, there are a lot of people who don’t see that as success. I respect that and understand that, but I wholeheartedly disagree. The marketing brochure of the post-World War II pattern of development is stagnation and eternal prosperity. The idea is that if we go out and build the perfect neighborhood and we plan it just right and we zone it just right and we build the homes in a certain way, and then we come in with this regulatory overlay after it that makes it stagnate in place that we will somehow be able to not only achieve prosperity but sustain prosperity. And the reality is anybody can go look at 1950s and 1960s neighborhoods and observe that for almost all of it that is not the case. Suburbia, post-war development has a natural life cycle to it. And the life cycle is very simple to understand. It is one generation of being brand new and prosperous, a second generation of hanging on and trying to sustain that prosperity. And then a third generation of decline and sometimes gentrification, but oftentimes just decline. This is the way that all systems that are artificially stagnated operate and as opposed to pre-war pre-depression development patterns, which always had the next increment of development intensity as part of their DNA, you would start small, you would add on, you would take that house that kind of went into decline and renew it up to something more intense, more productive.

Charles: [00:14:36] And this renewal process created this kind of natural vibrancy, a cycle of life that we see in neighborhoods that allowed them to mature and allow the people who lived in it to participate in that maturing, both physically participate, like go out and build stuff, but also financially participate, gain in wealth and gain in standing as their neighborhood became a more complete and more productive, a more valuable place. We’ve arrested that from our development patterns. So, now you know your choice is one version of stagnation or another. And if you’re very affluent, you can get a high-end version of stagnation. If you’re middle class, you can get a middle-class version of stagnation. And if you’re poor, which, you know, increasingly we are a very poor country with very poor neighborhoods, you can have the poor version of stagnation. And to me, this is a one-way path to a stagnant economy, a stagnant country, a stagnant population.

Eve: [00:15:42] I think that’s a great description. It’s bringing to mind some places I know that are tackling that. But then how do streets and roads and parking minimums and walkability play into that change? Because, you know, if you start with the single-family suburban neighborhood, how can you progress to the next level in a place that’s really designed quite rigorously never to be that?

Charles: [00:16:07] Yeah, it’s really hard. And I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t hard. I’m on record as saying I think that over half of what we built post World War Two is going to ultimately go away, that we don’t have the wherewithal to maintain it. We don’t have the desire to maintain it. We don’t actually have the capacity to maintain all those roads and sidewalks and pipe. We certainly don’t have the money to maintain it. And so, the question that I kind of deal with is less about how do we get people who live in single family home neighborhoods to allow that accessory apartment or allow the house next door to convert into the duplex or that kind of thing. And I focus more of my time on the neighborhoods that are ready to do this, the places that are ready to embrace it. How do we clear the things out of their path so that this natural evolution can start to happen again? Because I’m convinced that those are the places that actually will be the leaders where, when this becomes a more, and it’s becoming more of a widespread phenomenon. But I think when that expands even more, we need good places to turn to as examples to say, okay, the trajectory of my neighborhood is one of two paths. Path number one is the stagnation and decline. And ultimately my neighborhood is going to fail and go away and be a place that doesn’t thrive. That is the natural destination for the stagnant post-World War II development pattern. Or option number two is like this neighborhood over here, which, yeah, they allow duplexes and triplexes and corner stores and other things to come in. But wow, look at the cool place that that is now. Look at how that has added to their prosperity. And those places are growing in value, growing in prosperity, growing in wealth. I want to be like that. And so, we’re really focused on getting, I think, those green shoot kind of neighborhoods up and started that, as this accelerates, we can point to and say, be like this. This is a better option.

Eve: [00:18:17] Right. You know, this brings to mind I am actually developing a project in Australia with my sister, just a small 15-unit building. But it’s in a neighborhood that was, you know, the city very purposefully said we want this to be the next Barcelona. And what’s really interesting about the neighborhood is it’s a hodgepodge of zoning. It’s got commercial and retail and industrial and housing all jammed together. It’s a fabulously vibrant place. It has a very long main street with, you know, 20 restaurants, five banks, everything you really want in one place, lots of public transit and their goal is to remove all parking in the next ten years. So, that’s kind of taking it to the ultimate, you know, hillside Italian town ideal, right. So, I suppose you need to have visionaries who get that to be able to drive that forward, you know?

Charles: [00:19:14] Yes. I feel like what you’re describing is a neighborhood, right? Like a real neighborhood. It’s a real neighborhood. Yeah. And the thing about a real neighborhood is that once it starts to accelerate, the massive waste that is parking becomes revealed to everybody.

Eve: [00:19:34] It’s expensive. Yeah.

Charles: [00:19:35] If we didn’t have this parking, we could have more seating. We could have more places to, you know, more room for walking. We could have more stores. We could have more stuff.

Eve: [00:19:44] More housing, more housing.

Charles: [00:19:47] More housing, right. In most cities in the US, parking is looked at this necessary thing, maybe even a necessary evil that we need for transactions to take place. But once you start accelerating in this way, parking becomes the huge, obvious extraneous waste of resources, and most cities seek to lessen it or eliminate it altogether, which is a really smart step to take.

Eve: [00:20:16] Yeah, and what’s been interesting to watch there is the evolution of public transit and how that city’s recognized the value of the public transit they have, which isn’t strong everywhere, right. But in this particular place, there’s a tram, they’ve added a subway station. And these have all been towards this goal of making this a walkable only place. It’s been really interesting to watch and I really want to live there. I mean, I’m not going to live there full-time. My home is in the US, but it makes me want to be there because it’s so incredibly vibrant.

Charles: [00:20:51] Yeah.

Eve: [00:20:51] So, this is really a fiscally responsible argument too, right? That’s really what it’s all about.

Charles: [00:20:57] That is where I started and that’s where I kind of focus. And it’s fascinating because I’ve gotten to places where I think a lot of people who quite frankly don’t care about the money end up as well. But I got there by doing the math, by actually sitting and running the numbers. And you brought up transit. Transit is an interesting financial case because here throughout the US we tend to treat transit as this charitable overlay of our transportation system. And when you think of it as charity for the poor or what have you, it really doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t function very well and it doesn’t create a lot of value. When you look at transit and understand that when you can successfully deploy transit, you can actually get rid of that wasteful automobile space. You can you can move out the parking, you can move out the cars because you don’t need them because people can get around easily. You can get more transactions, more people per block, per unit of space. You realize that transit is the biggest wealth accelerator that our cities have.

Eve: [00:22:05] Right.

Charles: [00:22:06] And I think we can embrace that as a financial reality while also embracing some of the other things that we value about transit in terms of being able to help people and being able to, you know, create better places for people to live and places where people who can’t afford an automobile can also utilize it and be very successful with that.

Eve: [00:22:28] I’m going to ask a question I normally don’t ask, but I’m going to bring politics into this. You’re a Republican and I’m a Democrat. And why should we both believe in strong towns? I know we do, but why should we?

Charles: [00:22:42] It’s a good question, because I know there’ll be people who will react to that strongly.

Eve: [00:22:48] I’m sure.

Charles: [00:22:49] In Minnesota, we have the caucus system. So, for our primaries, you have to identify a party and go and sit in a room with a bunch of other people and talk about policy. And for many years I caucused with the Republican Party. I haven’t caucused with the Republicans since about 2012, which is neither here nor there. I don’t generally vote Democrat. I voted a lot of independent and third party the last maybe decade, but I’m certainly more conservative than I am progressive. So, it’s a very fair insight.

Eve: [00:23:24] Right. I really meant it as you, generally. You know, I mean.

Charles: [00:23:30] Yeah. No, totally get it.

Eve: [00:23:32] I hope it didn’t make you feel uncomfortable.

Charles: [00:23:34] No, no, not at all.

Eve: [00:23:36] I generally vote Democrat, but from time to time I’m really annoyed with them. So let’s, so I think we’re all on that page, right?

Charles: [00:23:44] Yeah. No, we’re on the same page. Yeah. I voted for way more Republicans in my life. But the Republican Party, we’re in a very interesting, like, strange political time, right?

Eve: [00:23:54] Very strange. Yes. Okay. Let’s just say, why should everyone believe in strong towns?

Charles: [00:23:59] Yeah, let me answer your specific question, because I think it’s very good because I do think Republicans should be about cities. Right. And Republicans tend to not be about cities. Republicans tend to be anti-city. Right. If we go through the things that make me personally a conservative and let’s traditionally look at things like fiscal prudence, responsible government, family values, community. These are all things that require a community. They require people working together. They require people living in spaces together. And when we step back and analyze that and look at that about the most dysfunctional way you can arrange people on a landscape financially, community wise, working together, family values, prudence, all these things disappear the more dissipated we become, the more kind of separated from each other physically, which is what the marketing brochure of suburban America is. The more we actually undermine those values. And I will throw a bone to the progressives because I’ve learned to really appreciate and value, if not the means, at least the intentions of some of my progressive friends.

Charles: [00:25:25] I think if we look at the suburbs, we recognize that these are largely places that through zoning, through our way of assembling them, through our way of investing in them, have segregated themselves by class at the very least. And to a degree that is almost pathological. If you’re going to live in $200,000 house, you will be in a pod with other $200,000 houses. And if you’re going to live in a $400,000 house, you’re going to live in a pod with other $400,000 houses. And there will be earthen berms and forests and fences between you because God help us, if someone who could only afford a $200,000 house had to interact with someone who could afford a $400,000 house. This is a pathological degree of separation that we have brought into our places that is anti-human anti-community and really, I think, anti-everything that conservatives suggest that they value about, you know, just about living, about life, about places.

Eve: [00:26:33] And probably caused a lot of unnecessary friction.

Charles: [00:26:36] Yes. And I write about this in confessions. I think there’s a libertarian aspect of modern Republicans that starts and ends with equating the automobile with freedom. And you get to crazy places where I will have people like Randal O’Toole saying that the proper role of local government is to go to the state legislature and lobby for more government funding for roads, because that will give people freedom to drive more. And I believe I’m a little more intellectually honest than that, I would like to think. But when I look at the automobile, I look at a tool that is really helpful for moving me long distance at speed. But I look at it as a tool that is not very helpful for allowing me day to day to take one block two block six, block 12 block trips. But I’m forced to do it in my automobile because of the very, very expensive environment that we’ve worked. And then, by the way, I’m also required to pay large amounts of taxes for this environment because it’s not financially solvent. And I’m required to sacrifice other services in my community, like maintaining the park and running a good government because we don’t have the money to do those things because we’ve spent it all on these roads. So, there’s a very good fiscal conservative argument, but you have to get beyond the automobile equals freedom libertarian overlay to that discussion.

Eve: [00:28:14] So, what crises are we facing that you think make your argument an imperative today?

Charles: [00:28:20] There are a lot of overlapping crises, obviously. I mean, I think we’re in very tumultuous times. I’ll say this and it’s going to sound a little over the top, but, you know, there’s a little bit of like the Romanesque decadence thing that we’ve gone through. I remember watching The Hunger Games and I think a lot of people watch The Hunger Games in the US and we’re like, Yeah, I can identify with District 12 and all this, and I’m like, no, no, no, we’re paying ‘em. We’re like the capital. You don’t get it. Like, that’s the way we are living today. But the crises that we focus on at Strong Towns primarily is the financial crisis that local governments have. Local governments are broke. If you go to any city across the country that is mature. So, not a suburb in their first or second life cycle, but any place that has gone through that illusion of wealth phase of this development pattern, what you’ll find is that they have really high taxes, they have high levels of debt, they have enormous backlogs of infrastructure maintenance that they cannot fund.

Charles: [00:29:32] And they are, in all intent and purposes, a ward of the state unable to provide reliably their basic services. That is a failed local government. And we have thousands of them here in the United States. We are trying to help them understand why they are broke and we are trying to help them take rational steps to deal with that, because ultimately Detroit is not some kind of crazy anomaly. Detroit is the destination that you get when you mismanage your city, when you take a great city and you spread it out, drive up your costs, denude your tax base, you get Detroit. And Detroit is a beautiful place that has struggled and its people have suffered as a consequence. And to me, that’s the crisis that gets me up in the morning, is I want an alternative path for cities that have gone decades down this road.

Eve: [00:30:32] And what about social equity? How does that play into the equation for a strong town?

Charles: [00:30:39] It’s a very good question. I don’t talk about social equity the way that progressives talk about it, because I’m not a progressive. I’m a conservative. And I know that sometimes riles people up because they want to be affirmed in their approach and their way of talking about things. But if people will be generous with me, I think they will hear someone speaking who shares a lot of their goals and values. When we look at the landscape of North America today, what we see is that the most productive places in every city is the pre-great depression development pattern. If we just look at cities through a financial lens, what we see is that those neighborhoods that were built before the 1930s, the walkable kind of mixed-use gridded neighborhoods around neighborhood cores or a downtown, those are the places that financially are the most successful in every city. And here’s the key insight to this. They’re the most successful even when they are occupied by the poorest people in the community. And often that is the case. I mean, you have fast growing cities where these neighborhoods have gentrified, but the vast majority of US cities, the poorest people in the city, live in the old neighborhoods. And those people are subsidizing through their taxes that they pay, through the rent that they pay, that their landlord pays the taxes they are subsidizing the new affluent development that is being built out on the edge.

Charles: [00:32:11] And so, once we recognize that, that that is where our repository of wealth is. It is a massive injustice for us to not only ask these people living in these struggling neighborhoods to pay for a luxury that other people are unwilling to pay for in their own neighborhoods, but that we are devaluing and not providing the level of service and support that is commensurate with not only just being a human being. I mean, I think we can make that argument and I would be willing to go there. But my gosh, with the level of commitment and the level of contribution that they’re making to the city, my office is in a very poor neighborhood. It’s adjacent to the neighborhood that I live, which is not a very poor neighborhood, but is a, you know, on the edge of that. This neighborhood here is subsidizing the wealthy people who live on the edge of town, on the lakes. There is no reason that this neighborhood should ever want for broken and cracked sidewalks for a rundown park or any of those things. Yet we are required to live with all of that while our city invests millions of dollars out on the edge. It’s an injustice combined with a ludicrously dumb financial approach for the community. And it’s that intersection that I think can bring us together, right?

Eve: [00:33:39] So, I have to disagree on one thing. I think you are mis-labeling yourself.

Charles: [00:33:44] Please.

Eve: [00:33:44] That is a very progressive point of view. Well, it’s the same point of view I hold. I mean, I think these labels are kind of ludicrous. And, you know, you’re, it’s a very pragmatic way to approach it, but it comes to the same conclusion. Right?

Charles: [00:34:01] Here’s where I feel that you and I overlap Eve, and it’s where I find a lot of people politically who identify from a top-down way in different factions over that. You’re a very bottom-up thinker. I’m a very bottom-up thinker. And when you are very bottom up, what you recognize is that cities need people who are sensitive to conservative things, and they need people who are sensitive to progressive things, and they need those people to work together in a place. And that is how cities have always been throughout all of human history. It’s the top down where we get divided and where we struggle and where we kind of lose each other. And so, I try to avoid all those top-down conversations because I don’t find them to be very helpful.

Eve: [00:34:50] No, I agree. And I think political divide really for me comes around some very emotional and personal issues, not necessarily these ones. So, at least for me, that’s true. So, I think we agree on all of this. And in fact, you know, I live in downtown Pittsburgh and, you know, my view out the front door is often a homeless person. And I feel very uncomfortable in places where people are segregated into one class. I don’t think, I don’t know why I feel that discomfort, but I like and need to be where, you know, the whole of mankind is because that for me is reality. So, everyone has a different way they want to live their life, I suppose.

Charles: [00:35:37] I think the idea of discomfort is an interesting one, right? Because what I hear you saying is that I feel discomfort perceiving this in this way, and I’m going to give some validation to that because I think that as humans, we are wired to, for example, find nature to be beautiful, right? In many ways. But nature is nothing but organic chaos.

Eve: [00:36:05] It’s violent.

Charles: [00:36:07] It is. It is. But the beauty emerges from that. And what we try to do as humans is create and impose a certain order on the chaos. And what happens is that you don’t get the emergent beauty then. So, we can look at a city like Charleston and we can go to the old core of Charleston or Pittsburgh, where you live, which has beautiful pre 1930 neighbors. I mean, just gorgeous places.

Eve: [00:36:38] Gorgeous and the architecture in downtown is spectacular. Beautiful.

Charles: [00:36:42] Spectacular. We can go to these places and we can see that what emerged from that messiness and chaos was something very beautiful. And it feels almost natural and organic. The way that a forest does, because it did emerge in this way. But then we can go to a different neighborhood that was built in the 80s or 90s or in the last couple of decades, and we see something that is very orderly and is very clean, but almost like orderly clean in a hospital kind of way. Right. Like everything has its place. Everything’s been taken care of, but it doesn’t feel natural. It feels unnatural. And for people who are sensitive to this, it actually is very disorienting.

Eve: [00:37:28] It’s very disorienting. And my question is, is which one is likely to have more tourists?

Charles: [00:37:36] Well, yeah. Yeah.

Eve: [00:37:38] I mean, I’m an urban designer, not an urban planner. So, I think about, you know, the physical aspect of what makes streets and squares great places to be. And, you know, Italy is really the best place in the world to understand this. And when cities sort of stomp out the ability for those surprising moments through zoning or not permitting a wide variety of density, you start to get creep into that very sterile sort of boring zone. So, I don’t know, for me, it’s like, make room for that chaos a little bit. I like my cities with a little grit in them, you know. My husband always laughs when we drive into the suburbs and I start looking very nervous because there’s something about in my brain I need markers to help me figure out where I am. And I just get lost in the suburb. It’s a sea of all the same to me. And it’s not, it doesn’t, I don’t know where I belong there. Does that make sense?

Charles: [00:38:43] It is disorienting. Yes. Let me tell you a funny story. We had a friend of Strong Towns, actually, one of our early colleagues here, who would write for us occasionally. He was getting married and he had this funny idea to go out and take his engagement photos in a suburb. And you know how most people, if you’ve seen like my daughter, I’ve got a daughter, graduated from high school and she had her grad photos taken. And of course, they go to, you go to a city and you sit on the bench and you stand by the wall and you do. They’re all urban photos or nature photos, right? Like she went out to a park and stood in the park and stuff. But Nate Hood, this friend of mine, went out with him and his wife and took the pictures in a cul-de-sac and in like a strip mall and at like a suburban setting. And it was so, the thing about it is the concept was funny, right? But the photos themselves were so weird because you just don’t, people don’t pose in these environments. They’re not appealing to look at. They’re not appealing to be in. You looked at them and it didn’t feel comfortable or safe. You got this very, it was the abstract, right? It was you felt a level of discomfort looking at these photos, even though it was two very attractive people all dressed up, very nice, posing, very nice. They were in a landscape that was very anti-human, which is what a suburb is. It’s very car oriented, anti-human. And so, they looked ridiculously out of place and it was stunning. I mean, it was visually stunning to see.

Eve: [00:40:33] Interesting. So, do you live in a strong town? Like what are the features of your hometown that you love and what would you fix if you could?

Charles: [00:40:43] I would fix a lot of things if I could. I am blessed with living in a city where my great, great grandparents lived. In fact, I grew up on the family farm that was homesteaded by my great, great grandparents. And I live in the city now near where I used to walk to from school to have lunch with my grandmother when I was a little kid. I take the dog for walks and we go past the cemetery where my ancestors are buried. I go to church right over there, like right outside the window. And on the wall is a plaque that has my grandfather’s name on it because he was a marine in World War Two. And they did something then to, to acknowledge that. So, I am here because this is where I am from and when I acknowledge that I can see a lot of the beauty in this place. But when I lose touch with that, which we all occasionally do, I start to get very frustrated. A lot of the early strong towns writing was me voicing frustration with my city, which I think in a lot of ways has become stronger over the last decade, has evolved in our thinking. There’s an article in the paper today about how we’re looking to get rid of our parking minimums throughout the core of the downtown, which is 20 years overdue, but better late than never.

Eve: [00:42:16] What city is this?

Charles: [00:42:18] Well, Brainerd, Minnesota. You probably have never heard of this. It’s a couple hours north of Minneapolis, Saint Paul.

Eve: [00:42:23] Parking minimum reduction is taking hold rapidly. But anyway, please go on. Yes.

Charles: [00:42:28] Well, my city is 14,000 people. So, that gives you some context. And it’s not 14. Yeah, it’s not 14,000 people adjacent to a larger city. It’s 14,000 people two hours away from Minneapolis. So, we’re a long way away. Yeah, but, you know, I have found a lot of beauty here in working with my neighbors and in doing things that are very Strong Towns. This summer we have a park, a small little neighborhood park that’s kind of been neglected and overlooked. And some of us are getting together, and as soon as the snow melts, which it’s the end of March and it was below zero last night, so I don’t know what is going on. It might be June before we get rid of the snow here. But we are going to go out and spend a summer making this park a more special place just with the resources that we have and the elbow grease and the that kind of stuff. So, I feel like we have aspects of a strong town and like any place, it is a work in progress and a struggle. But I see it starting to move in the right direction. And I guess ultimately I’m confident and I think this is a core part of being part of a strong town. I’m confident that my contribution will not be wasted. Like I’m confident that we won’t get there. Like this is always going to be a journey and there’s always going to be things that frustrate me. But I am more confident now that the things I do are going to matter and will make life better for people who come after me. And a decade ago, I certainly couldn’t say that.

Eve: [00:44:20] Well, that’s a great note to end this podcast on. I certainly appreciate what you do and I really enjoyed talking to you, Chuck.

Charles: [00:44:32] Thank you, Eve. That is very sweet. And I hope you know that I follow your work as well. And I feel like your part of the answer is an important part of the answer. This whole Small Change, bottom-up funding concept is a very radical way to activate capital in ways that I think connects our heart to our pocketbooks and can be, is essential to transforming our places. So, I’m a huge fan of yours as well. And I’m grateful you took the time to put this together. Thank you.

Eve: [00:45:22] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. Please support this podcast and all the great work my guests do by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media, or leaving a rating and a review. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing, head on over to smallchange.co where I spend most of my time. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Charles Marohn

It’s all about walking.

May 3, 2023

Jeff Speck is a city planner and urban designer who advocates internationally for more walkable cities.

As Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 through 2007, he presided over the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and created the Governors’ Institute on Community Design. Prior to his federal appointment, Mr. Speck spent ten years as Director of Town Planning at DPZ & Co., the principal firm behind the New Urbanism movement. Since 2007, he has led Speck & Associates, a private design consultancy serving mainly American cities.

With Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Mr. Speck is the co-author of Suburban Nation, which the Wall Street Journal calls “the urbanist’s bible.” His 2012 book Walkable City was the best selling city-planning title of the past decade and has been translated into seven languages. He is also the writer of The Smart Growth Manual and Walkable City Rules.

Jeff Speck has been named a fellow of both the American Institute of Certified Planners and the Congress for New Urbanism. He is the 2022 recipient of the Seaside Prize, whose former awardees include Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander. His TED talks and YouTube videos have been viewed more than five million times.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:08] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone.

Eve: [00:00:43] Ten years ago, Jeff Speck wrote a book called Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. Since it was published, the book has become one of the most popular titles in urban planning. His blunt assessment of the state of the planning profession, along with ten steps for improving street design, have forever influenced livability across US cities. Basically, it’s all about walking for Jeff. Listen in and learn. After all, Jeff’s TED Talks and YouTube videos have been viewed more than 5 million times.

Eve: [00:01:34] If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do. Share this podcast and go to RethinkRealEstateforGood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts, and other goodies.

Eve: [00:02:01] Welcome to the show, Jeff. I’m really honored to have you here, especially because I’m a bit of a Walkable groupie myself.

Jeff Speck: [00:02:09] Well Eve, Thank you. I didn’t know that I was getting into real estate when I was studying design, but that is kind of where I’ve ended up.

Eve: [00:02:17] Yes. Yes. So, you’ve written a very famous book called Walkable City, which is now ten years old. And in it, you tell us how downtown can save America one step at a time. Isn’t that a really radical claim?

Jeff: [00:02:34] I didn’t realize that when I wrote it. You could say it is. I’ll try to explain why it makes sense to me. First, I’ll mention that the book is ten years old, but what’s relevant to you and your listeners is that in honor of the ten year anniversary, we’ve issued a new edition that has 100 pages of new text. So actually, I spent a month or more, well, of course, gathering the information took years, but I spent some time about a year ago doing what I usually do when I write, which is saying, what’s all the stuff that I’ve heard about that I’ve witnessed that, you know, is noteworthy and that I’ve got really ardent feelings about that I need to share. And so, there’s obviously, so much has happened in the last decade. And those 100 pages that I’ve added to the book talk about such things as the promise of autonomous vehicles and Uber and Lyft, which weren’t around to comment on when I was writing the first edition. And of course, COVID and the housing crisis and so many other things. So, it’s in some ways a new book. And I’m very pleased to hear you say it’s very famous. I know it sells well. I know it pays for my breakfast, which is pretty good for a book, but it’s a book that has, I’d like to think that it’s played a role in changing the conversation around cities and focusing on walkability as a key goal, but also a measure of success and just something that if you put walkability at the top of your list and you start to reorganize your city around being more walkable, you end up making all the right choices for your city. So, getting to your question, the book begins with a large segment that’s called “Why Walkability.”

Jeff: [00:04:24] And I would say it’s expanded in the last decade, but essentially what I did or what I tried to do was to bring to everyone’s attention three different issues impacting cities and impacting America that had been brought to my attention. And it was interesting as a city planner to be arguing for better urbanism, better urban design, which we called traditional town planning for a while, and then we called it the New Urbanism, which kind of we still do, but realizing that we were getting kind of a limited response and that arguing for good city planning in the terms of city planning wasn’t really getting the audience that it needed. And that’s when I kind of discovered these three other groups, the epidemiologists, the economists and the environmentalists. All of whom were arguing for the exact same stuff that we wanted, but from their own terms and much more effectively, and really made me think that, yes, if we make our cities more walkable, they will make America a much better place.

Eve: [00:05:25] It’s really not a radical claim then. I mean, it’s radical along with everyone else who’s making the same claim, right?

Jeff: [00:05:31] Well, it’s not radical, but the prescriptions that it then leads you to are not considered exactly standard practice in many of the cities in America and in much of the world, certainly the developing world or other places that imitate America. So, in a nutshell, the Economist’s argument was pretty straightforward. And I know you’ve had Chris Leinberger on your show, but much of the economic argument I learned from him. And it was essentially how, of course, value is generated much more strongly in mixed use, walkable places, and that, in fact, there’s kind of two sides of the coin. One is that we’re bankrupting ourselves with the individual car ownership mandate and that in the US, poor people are paying more for transportation currently than they are for housing. Many of them are paying 40% of their income just to get around, and that’s a tremendous burden on society. And of course, the typical car is costing us $10,000 a year. People talk about affordable housing. They don’t really talk about affordable living. And actually, if you don’t need a car for every adult, that makes it living much more affordable.

Jeff: [00:06:34] But then on the more optimistic, ambitious side, which is what Chris Leinberger talks about, just the fact that the same number, you know, the same square footage of living space in Greenwich Village rents for three times or sells for three times what it does in Greenwich, Connecticut. And if you know Greenwich, Connecticut, it’s an extremely lovely place. But essentially that if you create walkable, dense places, your values and your investment will be so much stronger. But then also just simple discoveries about how, you know, the denser your city is, the more patents per capita you create. And just acknowledging that we come together in dense mixed-use communities because that benefits us economically in so many different ways. The book outlines the money that Portlanders save by actually commuting less, Portland, Oregon. By commuting less, spending less time in traffic because they invested in bike lanes, because they invested in density and transit and the billions of dollars that they save annually by virtue of having made those choices a couple of decades ago. There are many more economic arguments. The epidemiological argument is essentially something I learned from a book called Urban Sprawl and Public Health, and then getting to know the authors of that book, three epidemiologists who were basically saying they studied disease and they studied the health of the culture as a whole. And they said, you know, we have the first generation of Americans who are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. And the average child born after 2000, you know, half of them are expected to get diabetes. It’s just a horrible situation that they say is due to the fact that we have engineered out of our daily life the useful walk. So, you know, there’s a bunch of doctors and others who point to our unhealthy American diet and other aspects of life in America, like car crashes that shorten our life expectancy. But the biggest factor is that walking used to be just something we did every day that made us healthy that we’re not doing because we’ve designed our neighborhoods to cause us to not do it.

Jeff: [00:08:31] And of course, The fix is an urban design fix. And then I do talk a lot about car crashes and their impact. And then finally, the environmental argument is in part not entirely taken from a wonderful book by David Owen, who’s a New Yorker writer called Green Metropolis that you may have seen about 15 years ago. That was going to be called Green Manhattan when he wrote it. Acknowledging that the place in America where people have the lightest carbon footprint is New York City and then asking why? Acknowledging that New Yorkers use a quarter of the electricity to people in Houston, they use one tenth of the gasoline of people in Houston. If you really care about the planet and love nature, if you love nature, the best thing to do is to stay away from it and live in an urban place. The denser, the better. And just wonderful arguments about, in fact, how the maps that show carbon output per square mile are so incredibly misleading. They look like the night sky photographs of the US. You know, they’re hottest in the cities and cooler in the suburbs and coolest in the countryside. But if you if you look at carbon output per capita, those maps entirely flip. And it’s urban dwellers who have the lightest footprint. Now, I should say that in the update, I’ve added two other things that I neglected to focus on enough in the first edition. One, of course, is the social impacts of living in a more walkable place. And there’s been tons of great evidence.

Jeff: [00:10:02] In fact, one sociologist, you know, it was almost like she was doing it for me, did a study that demonstrated that there was no factor that had a greater impact on how sociable people are as how walkable their community is. It’s like the number one indicator of sociability and participation in community activities is living in a walkable neighborhood. Wow. Well, that’s nice to hear. And then something I’d neglected to talk about adequately at all was the equity impacts of living in walkable and unwalkable places and how the ownership of the automobile is a great divider, creating haves and have nots. But more to the point, how with the suburbanization of poverty and a lot of poor people now living in places that were designed only around driving and people who don’t have cars. We have a tremendous epidemic underway. And now, believe it or not, compared to 14 years ago, 82% more pedestrians are dying in car crashes and it’s a function of a number of factors we can discuss. But those trends skew very much towards people of color and poor people. If you’re Native American or African American, you’re twice as likely to be killed as a pedestrian than if you’re not. And then of course, transit, which we advocate for and walking, which we advocate for, and biking, which we advocate for disproportionately benefit those who have less. Particularly people look at biking, people look at biking as some sort of elite activity when in fact, fully 38% of the people who commute for work or school are from the lowest 25% of income earners.

Eve: [00:11:41] That’s really interesting. But I want to know how the walkable theme came to take such center stage in your professional life.

Jeff: [00:11:49] It’s a funny question that I’ve asked myself. I don’t remember any moment or a decision that happened around me becoming the walkability guy. As I suggested, my colleagues and I were always just looking at best practices or better practices in urban design, and we were trained as architects. My mentors, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who designed the famous town of Seaside back in 1980, which kicked off the whole New Urbanist movement. And then they started the Congress for New Urbanism with some other like-minded individuals. In 1993, I was there. We talked about New Urbanism, we talked about what we call neo traditional town planning because it was a return to the traditional ways of making cities independent of architectural style, right.

Jeff: [00:12:36] We’re talking about streets and blocks and squares as opposed to the tower in the park or any of these other kind of modernist reinventions of the city, which suburban sprawl is one model of. And it’s really just best practices in urban design. But we’re like comedians who go up on stage and you try your material out, right? And you see what floats and what doesn’t float. And one way or the other, I realized, first of all, that everything that I was advocating for was making places more walkable, but perhaps more significantly, that when you framed it in terms of walkability, which is not a word I invented, but I may have helped to popularize, that people really got it. People understood it and it became a main street conversation. And I would say by making the choice, not the invention by any means, but the choice of calling what we do walkability planning or walkable centered planning, we’ve been able to popularize it much more effectively. Now it’s interesting, though, because it’s not just, you know, as someone who’s into communication, you’ll be curious to know, these things reinforce themselves.

Jeff: [00:13:41] So, it’s not just a communications tool. Because actually, when I started to use the term walkable, I began to see everything through that lens, and it actually modified my practice, and I started doing something for cities. I’ve done 15 of them, called walkability studies. So, if that’s the name of your study, what are you trying to accomplish? So, I would, you know, we’ll come to town, we’ll spend a week, we’ll have about a dozen meetings with all the different constituents in that week. And I’ll begin each meeting the same way. I’ll say my purpose of this study, what you are paying me for, is for us to figure out together in the, you know, how in the least amount of time and spending the least amount of money we can visibly witness the largest number of people, more people walking and biking in your neighborhood. And it’s almost always the downtown of a city when that’s the problem you’re trying to solve, you make a whole bunch of decisions that are a little more straightforward and clearer and more complete perhaps than you would make if you’re just trying to make a good urban plan. So, you know, my general theory of walkability, which is a fun term, talks about how, for people to make the choice to walk the walk has to be simultaneously useful, safe, comfortable and interesting. And each one of those categories then puts forward a series of changes that you can make around improving mixed use, around bringing more housing downtown, subsidizing it if necessary, to have a lot of bodies in your downtown around where we spend most of our time, which is the reconfiguration of streets. And I studied architecture for, you know, years and years and years, I have ten years post-high school of studying architecture.

Jeff: [00:15:20] Now, what I do mostly is measure and design lanes in streets, because that’s where you can have the most impact on the success of a place. Because most of our downtowns in America, the places that are useful, comfortable and interesting, still aren’t safe to walk around because of the speeds that cars are traveling because of the way that they’re designed, and we fix those in cities. So, that’s become a huge part of my practice. And then comfort and interest. Comfort implies space making, spatial definition, giving proper edges to spaces because we like to be in outdoor living rooms with our flanks covered from attack. It’s something we, you know, we’ve inherited along with all animals. The evolutionary biologists tell us all animals are seeking prospect and refuge. So, we’re seeking refuge, we want to know that our flanks are covered. That means that you want to hold the edge of the streets with buildings that are near the street, tall enough to make a space. That’s something we spend a lot of time on. And then finally, interest is a little more straightforward. You know, no one wants to walk past a surface parking lot, past a structured parking lot, past a blank wall or, and this is important, past 100 yards of the exact same thing. So, we have, for example, we introduced into cities the concept of demise lines, which I’ve done in many of my projects, where you take one big building, and you actually get three architects to do the facade and make it look like three different buildings. Then when you walk down the street, something interesting is happening.

Jeff: [00:16:45] As Jane Jacobs says, No one will walk from repetition to repetition or from sameness to sameness, even if the effort expended is minimal. We line the parking with residential. We put some other use on the ground floor, or we just keep it away from the edge of the street. Right? So, there’s all these techniques and from, you know, the biggest scale of mixed use to the smallest scale of the building edge, we don’t leave anything out. And obviously some things are achievable more quickly than others. Fixing streets is often the first thing you can do, which is why I spend so much time on it. And I do a lot of work for mayors who want results within a couple of years because they’re up for re-election. So…

Eve: [00:17:24] Of course.

Jeff: [00:17:25] City planning is notoriously a 20-year phenomenon, right? But the work that that we do for cities, they don’t want to wait that long, and we focus on streets for that reason.

Eve: [00:17:38] Well, that’s a good thing, actually. So, if ten years is enough time to see if your predictions actually came true and I want to know if there were any surprises, if there have been any bad things that have happened over the last ten years.

Jeff: [00:17:53] One kind of smart thing about the book probably is I didn’t make many predictions. I certainly made a whole bunch of recommendations and gave a whole bunch of direction. And I would say, looking back, there’s nothing in that direction. I mean, the book is literally, you know, there’s four categories of the useful, safe, comfortable and interesting walk. But then there’s the ten steps of walkability. And the big part of the book is these ten steps, which include let transit work, get the parking right, mix the uses, make friendly and unique faces, welcome bikes, um, etcetera. And so, each chapter is dedicated to one issue like trees or bikes. But the chapter that I, and I say this in the update, the only chapter I wanted to retract a little bit was pieces of the biking chapter, because first of all, biking is what is evolving the fastest in most, or micro mobility in general is what’s evolving the fastest in most American cities. We are just now catching up with Berlin in the 1990s. I mean literally I was in Berlin in the 1990s and we had the bike lane up on the curb, out of the street, on the edge of the sidewalk. And now when we do new plans in American cities, that’s what we’re doing. You know, I will no longer put a bike lane in the door zone period. Ten years ago, I would because we were lucky to get it.

Eve: [00:19:24] We’re still doing that in Pittsburgh. I just noticed new ones. It’s scary.

Jeff: [00:19:30] I’ll put a bike lane adjacent to two lanes of traffic. If there’s no parking on the other side of it. More often, I’ll pull parking into the street to protect the biking and put the biking either against the curb in an existing street that we don’t rebuild, or if we’re building a new street or rebuilding the curbs, we’ll put the bike up on the curb, separated often from the sidewalk by trees. When I wrote the book, sharrows were respected. In the intervening ten years, a couple studies were done that showed that sharrows, those share the road markings in the roadway, have no positive impact and in certain instances have made streets more dangerous than not having anything at all. So, that’s out.

Eve: [00:20:11] Interesting.

Jeff: [00:20:12] The main thing I wanted to retract was that I was kind of treating the cyclist like any other lobby, bearing in mind I’m a cyclist, I’m also a driver. You know, like most people, I do all those things. I told them, you know, we can’t put bike lanes in every street. I mean, let’s be serious here. You know, if we gave everyone in every street everything they wanted, the streets would all be the size of airport runways. And, you know, it actually isn’t the proper design of a bike network to have bike lanes everywhere. If you go to Copenhagen, you know, the major streets have bike lanes, but the minor streets, most of the streets, almost all of them, are just slow speed, comfortable streets where everyone mixes and it’s better. So, I was a little bit critical of the biking lobby just to be even handed. I’ve now thought better of it. In fact, I’m leafing through my book here and, if you don’t mind, I’ll do a tiny reading.

Eve: [00:21:09] Sure, sure.

Jeff: [00:21:10] And this has to do with my retraction, since you asked. If there’s one passage of this book that I would like to retract, it’s step six’s ‘Don’t get greedy’. Sure, bike advocates are specialists, and we need our cities to be designed by generalists. As I noted, there isn’t enough room in the streets for every specialist to get what they want. But here’s what I got wrong. I’ve yet to see a city do anything requested by a bike advocate that is not made that city better for everyone. I’ve finally been to Copenhagen and biked miles of downtown without the slightest fear for my eight- and ten-year-old boys in front of me. If you haven’t had that life changing experience, don’t begin to think you know what you are doing when you deny a cyclist anything. The cycling city is the city we all need. And remembering Copenhagen fills me alternately with joy and rage. Just today, Milan announced $271 million in funding for a 466-mile citywide bike network. Paris recently upped its biking investment to half $1 billion.

Eve: [00:22:10] Wow.

Jeff: [00:22:11] In order to achieve an 100% cycling city, in quotes. Meanwhile, the Boston Cyclists Union clamors enthusiastically for an increase in the city’s bike budget to $2.6 million. And Boston’s one of the good ones. Don’t get greedy, don’t settle for scraps, demand more, 100 times more, and don’t stop until the very last bike hating motorist throws up their hands and decamps permanently for the suburbs.

Eve: [00:22:37] Or gets a bike, right?

Jeff: [00:22:39] Yeah. So, that was the only real retraction. But I have to say, you know, the book was written to be somewhat timeless and there were a few things it didn’t anticipate, like COVID. It also didn’t anticipate the housing crisis properly enough and was also not fully aware. You know, and I co-wrote and was the principal author of the book Suburban Nation, which is, was with my mentors, which was the best-selling planning book of the previous decade, 2000s. And in that book as well, certainly in Walkable City, I did not pay enough attention to or share enough of the information that people need to know about how racial prejudice has shaped our cities and particularly has shaped our housing crisis and how there is still a crisis for folks of color. And a wonderful book that informed that was Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. I presume you’re familiar with that book.

Eve: [00:23:34] Yes. I did also interview him.

Jeff: [00:23:37] I would love to get a chance to talk to him. I haven’t yet, but I read that book with great interest, and I excerpt it within my update. I think a lot of that was eye opening to me. Probably the thing that most people don’t know that I didn’t know. I learned it before I read his book, but I didn’t know it until more recently. People always talk about redlining like it was some sort of thing that the banks did, right? Oh, those evil banks redlining, not granting loans for mortgages in mixed race or neighborhoods of color. In fact, that was the federal government. That was Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. You know, that was that was that was our leaders who said, no, we will not guarantee a loan in any neighborhood of color and also any investment the federal government made in housing development, which was huge, particularly with affordable housing neighborhoods, was mandated to be single race. It’s absolutely incredible.

Jeff: [00:24:35] And then, of course, the strong evidence that Rothstein collects about how the single-family zoning as a concept was basically created as a way to perpetuate race based zoning when the Supreme Court ruled that that was illegal. And then finally, the understanding that the way that the typical American family has built wealth, the typical middle class American family, if it has built wealth, it has built wealth probably through the ownership of a single-family house that got that mortgage deduction.

Eve: [00:25:08] Right.

Jeff: [00:25:08] And that that wealth building opportunity was only made available to white Americans for many decades. You know, as Martin Luther King said, you can’t expect a man to lift him up by his bootstraps if he has no boots. And so, the constant deprivation of opportunity to a portion of our population, I’m getting off topic of planning, but it’s all.

Eve: [00:25:30] But it’s all part, it’s all part and parcel of it. Definitely. I want to drag you back to the suburbs because, you know, in recent years there have been talk about making suburbs pedestrian friendly. And I’ve noticed the suburbs I drive through, you know, I get a little scared when I’m in the suburbs because I don’t know where there is. Yeah, there’s no there there. But I’ve noticed that little pieces of sidewalk emerge. They don’t necessarily go anywhere. It’s amusing to watch. Have you seen any successful attempts to urbanize the suburbs? And is this the future for suburbs?

Jeff: [00:26:12] Well, I think it’s important to understand that most American suburbs, most American post, all American post-war suburbs and most American suburbs have the wrong bones, right? It’s like chipmunks versus dinosaurs or, you know, mammals versus lizards, whatever you want to say. And when you’ve got the wrong bones.

Eve: [00:26:34] You need a lot of surgery.

Jeff: [00:26:36] Well, when you got the wrong bones, you actually, it’s impossibly expensive to change your nature. So, these giant blocks, these arterial highway, arterial collector, local road networks with a major intersection every half mile that constitute probably 50% of the American landscape right now, the built environment. They can’t be changed in a way that will make them walkable. They can be changed street by street, intersection by intersection, you know, roadside by roadside into places that are safer. They can be changed into places that are more bikeable, but they will never have a condition in which walking is a favored means of getting around. Except as we’ve seen, and I’ve participated in several of these, when you get a chunk which is big enough to become a new mixed use town center. And so, you find in places like it’s called City Center in Houston, it’s nowhere near the downtown of Houston, but it’s in the geographical center. That’s a place where a developer got a big enough piece of property and said, let’s have shopping and housing and offices and hotel and cinema and everything in one place. And eventually what you get is a little bit of a town center, and it might be what you call a park once environment, right? But people end up living there. People who work there end up living there, and certain people really reduce their carbon footprint and have a much better quality of life living in those places.

Jeff: [00:28:01] And many of our cities have this. There’s one in Alpharetta, Georgia, called Avalon. You know, they’re all over the place. And they’re, some are better than others. Some are not much better than exterior malls with a main street down the middle instead of pedestrian. But once you get significant housing, hotel, office above the main street, then it’s almost nothing that distinguishes it from being a real town center.

Eve: [00:28:28] Interesting.

Jeff: [00:28:29] The other hope for suburbs is the pre-war suburbs. I was in Tigard, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland, and they want to be more walkable. And they were almost entirely a driving suburb, but then I discovered, like struggling, but there this germ of a main street, like it was a pre-war main street. And many of our suburbs have these old centers that were disinvested but are still there, are still zoned for mixed use. And if you can get more people living there or allow more people. Change the rules, often to allow more people to live around that old main street, then you get that little walkable downtown core that becomes the heart of the community. And still, most people are driving to it, but not everyone is. And those who do drive to it have that lovely experience when they get out of their car of walking around.

Jeff: [00:29:11] Now, I want to mention I have something to say about this, too. I have a book I’m showing you called Walkable City Rules. That is a book that I recommend mostly to professionals. So, your audience, the realtors, the real estate developers or others in your audience. Walkable City is the book that people read for entertainment. They read it to get convinced. Mostly they distribute it to get to convince other people. And I’ve worked in a lot of cities where they’ve given it out by the box to the city councilors, to others. It’s a great tool for winning converts, but if you’re already doing the work and you just want all the information, you know, all the stuff you need to know, including such little tidbits as when you remove the center line from a local street, people drive seven miles an hour slower. Like that’s good to know. That’s get rid of some center lines. Or when you replace a signal with an all way stop sign, severe pedestrian injury crashes dropped by 68%. Well, that’s a nice thing to do. So, that’s all in there. But there’s one. So, it’s 101 steps to making better places, Walkable city Rules.

Eve: [00:30:16] I’m going to buy that book.

Jeff: [00:30:18] Each rule is two pages. It has a headline, it has a rule at the end, it has a photograph or a chart. Step 100 is Don’t give up on sprawl, it’s where most Americans live. It talks about these two conditions. The opportunity to create a mixed use town center if the economics are there to support it and you have a chunk of land or to find the, you know, the moribund main street that was once there and the rule 100 at the end of the page says, in sprawl, invest in old Main Streets where they exist and otherwise focus on safety for all road users because that’s the main thing that you can accomplish. And I’ll do a tiny reading from this book, which is the sad conclusion. But then there are the newer places like Chandler, Arizona, 250,000 humans doomed to scuttle around perhaps the most utterly placeless landscape in America, 65mi² of entirely car dependent nowhere.

Jeff: [00:31:14] Without the full-scale insertion of a large new town centre, what can be done to make the denizens of the purest sprawl less isolated? While true walkability is out of the question, the most essential improvements would seem to surround safety for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers too. People are dying in these landscapes at an alarming rate, thanks to high-speed road geometrics, inadequate crossings and rare and dangerous bike lanes. Such places can’t really be fixed, but they can and should be made safer using many of the techniques contained in this volume. So, that’s my conclusion for the sprawl.

Eve: [00:31:48] I’m going to I’m going to order that right after this because I want to see those rules. That’s interesting. So, let me ask you, what’s one of your favorite places or cities in the US or elsewhere where you feel really happy walking and why do you love it?

Jeff: [00:32:06] I think the best answer to your question is that any, almost any pre-war city in the US has kernels, pieces that are that are fantastic and a majority that’s probably pretty bad, and that the distinction is not so much among cities as it is among pieces of cities. I would also argue, I think this is important for your audience, that the decision, the contrast also in our work, particularly in Suburban Nation that we wrote about, isn’t about town versus city or town versus village or even suburb versus city, but it’s around walkable versus unwalkable organizational patterns and how there are cities that are unwalkable, there are towns that are unwalkable, there are villages that are unwalkable and the opposite.

Jeff: [00:32:57] You know, I grew up in a suburb. I think many Americans my age did. I’m almost 60. Where I mean, it was a pure suburb. It was Belmont, Massachusetts, next to Cambridge outside of Boston. It was completely walkable. My dad walked to work every day. I walked to the bus that took me into Harvard Square. I walked to school. It’s possible to create cities, towns, villages and suburbs that are fully walkable beyond a certain point, it’s not a question of density. And what’s more important is neighborhood structure. Neighborhood structure means small blocks, small streets, frequent intersections, civic spaces, a sense of center and a sense of edge. You know, the neighborhood and planning terminology is very well defined as being compact, mixed use and walkable.

Jeff: [00:33:43] And so, that’s what really matters. Now, to answer your question and enjoy in my memory some of the wonderful places I love to go, you know, most of those are the places that were not run through with highways that maintain their existing pre-war character. You know, I love to visit the great cities of the South, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans. Alexandria, if it weren’t part of DC would be another city like Charleston that people would go to just to walk around Alexandria, Virginia. You know, and then there are amazing Western examples, Albuquerque and you know, Carmel by the sea. Carmel by the sea. Excuse me. I’m working in Carmel, Indiana, which is not pronounced the same as Carmel by the sea. But, you know, for big cities, you know, despite the problems with homelessness and other issues, I still think San Francisco is one of the best places in the world to walk around.

Eve: [00:34:40] Yeah.

Jeff: [00:34:41] And in a global perspective, off-season, because the tourists make it hell. But off season would have to say my favorite city is Venice because it has so many wonderful qualities, most of which derive from, independent of its historic character, most of its wonderful qualities derive from the fact there are no cars in it.

Eve: [00:35:00] Yes,

Jeff: [00:35:01] This makes it so amazing.

Eve: [00:35:02] Yeah, but the tourism just almost unpalatable.

Jeff: [00:35:06] But you can truly enjoy it off season and you can live there off season.

Eve: [00:35:10] I’ll have to try that. So, I’m going to put a plug in for Australia because you know, that’s where I grew up and those cities really sprawl. I mean, Sydney has a huge sprawl, a lot of land area compared to a city like New York. But I, when I was a kid, I could walk everywhere. I could catch a bus. I lived in what you would consider a suburb. There was sidewalks on always on one side of the street, if not both. Every neighborhood had, and has to this day, a main street. And those main streets have survived.

Jeff: [00:35:43] I spent some time in Sydney, in Melbourne, in Adelaide, lovely town, in Perth. I have to say clearly Sydney is the most spectacular and most exciting to visit. I found Melbourne to be the place where I wanted to live.

Eve: [00:35:57] Oh, Melbourne’s fabulous.

Jeff: [00:35:59] So much character. But here’s what I observed about Melbourne. Street after or I should say neighborhood after neighborhood of almost endless main streets with no chain restaurants or chain stores on. Mile long. And I think what does, that is the trams. So, you’ve got streetcars in the middle of your main streets throughout, I mean the parts of Melbourne that I enjoy, and that combination of, you know, moderate density. But the streetcar corridor is what allows for all these neighborhoods in Melbourne to not only have Main Streets that are successful and continuous, but have character and unique establishments of, you know, avoiding the chain stores which aren’t a blight, but they sure make places boring. It’s really remarkable.

Eve: [00:36:53] It is remarkable. You know, Australia was a coffee culture well before Starbucks happened and somehow Starbucks could never get a foothold there because you have flat white. And so, yeah, but I think it’s a very, very different expectation about how you’re going to live your life. Not that people don’t have cars and drive a lot, but I think what you said before that I wanted to hang on to is the fact that you’ll walk if there’s something interesting along the way and interest can come in all sorts of shapes and forms, or if you have a destination to go to, you won’t walk if there’s nowhere to go. And so, is that what you think about when you’re designing a place? It’s like a it’s like an anchor on a mall, right? There’s an anchor at each end.

Jeff: [00:37:36] Well, you need to do everything you can to change the zoning and to direct the city investment through tax increment financing or any other tool at their disposal to impact what real estate developers are building. So, If a place needs more housing, then you find a way, which most places do, most urban places do need more housing in the US to be successful or more successful, You reorient the zoning and the investment around that. But that does that takes time. So, you know, the useful, comfortable and interesting walk are all a function of almost entirely the private market which the government can influence. But the safe walk is what the government can typically control immediately and invest in immediately. And so, that is where we short circuit the investment as fast as we can to make it happen. I think it is interesting also to compare Australia to the US or Canada to the US, to the degree our cities were undermined by both being reamed out by highways, but also each individual street being reamed out.

Jeff: [00:38:43] If you look at Manhattan, you know, Park Avenue used to have a park in the middle. Now it has a little median that no one would sit in because it’s just a break in 6 or 8 lanes of traffic. It used to be two lanes of traffic on each side and a big park in the middle. And so many American streets have had the trees removed, the parking removed other things to just carry more cars. In terms of highways, you know, you look at the US cities versus Canada cities and Canadian cities have done so much better in their downtowns. Well, in the US, the federal government invested $0.90 on the dollar. If you wanted to put a highway through your city centre in Canada, it was $0.10 on the dollar. So, you know, there’s choices like that that clearly. People say Americans love suburbs. We voted with our feet, but that’s completely false. I mean, there were incredible subsidies between highway building and home loan, insuring that led to the outcomes we now see.

Eve: [00:39:37] So, I have just a couple more questions. And one is, do you still get pushback? Who gives you pushback?

Jeff: [00:39:45] So, there’s this. Inchoate mass called the automotive hordes, that in certain places and certain circumstances will you know, is the specter that’s looming when you’re trying to make changes in a community. I’ve found that to some degree they’re mythological. Like everyone’s worried about what the motorists are going to think. But most places I work, and I’ve got to tell you, in most places I work, I’m not trying to make driving harder. I’m just trying to make walking and biking easier. And there are ways to do that that don’t make driving harder. Like every city, however congested it is, has certain streets that aren’t congested, or you’ve got a main street. This is, here’s a perfect example. You’ve got a main street that’s in a network, and that Main Street is handling 18,000 cars per day. And like in Lancaster, California, it is dismal. It’s five lanes. It’s a highway, 18,000 cars a day, but it’s in a network. They made a decision in Lancaster to make it only two lanes. They put a parking plaza in the middle. So, they use it for farmers markets and stuff. And when there’s no farmers market, people just angle park in the middle of the street, and it’s become a linear plaza.

Jeff: [00:41:04] This like ten block Main Street. It now only handles 12,000 cars a day. But guess what? The cars are moving on the parallel streets, which is fine. The parallel streets aren’t contributing to the social heart of the city. And in fact, most cities, most small cities and towns, they have only one chance to have a great main street. There’s no reason why that Main Street’s design should be dictated by maintaining the existing throughput. That’s the term, like maintaining throughput network wide. Sure. You know, most communities will fight any decision that limits network wide auto mobility. but you can easily make an argument that you’re going to shift traffic over a street or simply take some lanes away from a street which isn’t congested. And that’s how I work. Understanding, in fact, that behavior adjusts that when you reduce capacity, more people walk and bike and that actually the carmageddon that’s predicted by reductions in capacity never comes when you remove a highway or narrow lanes.

Eve: [00:42:10] That’s a much more sophisticated conversation that I’d love to have and that almost never wins, which is that in fact driver demand is not static, it’s not fixed, it’s dynamic, it responds to the environment. And whenever a highway has been closed or a lane has been removed, we’ve never witnessed the gridlock that people predict because people adjust their behavior and they’re often happier for it. But that’s an argument I try not to make in communities because it’s counterintuitive. Mostly I say we’re going to find ways, and I demonstrate that we can find ways to improve walking and improve biking without in any way hampering the motion of automobiles except to get drivers going the speed limit as opposed to 10 to 15 miles an hour over the speed limit, which is how our our streets are designed.

Jeff: [00:42:57] And, you know, I love to rant and I had a recent editorial in the Hill that your listeners can look up under my name, Speck and The Hill talking about how actually in the US engineers as a matter of practice design streets for ten miles an hour over the speed limit because they’ve learned safety from highways instead of learning it from reality and in reality.

Eve: [00:43:22] That’s interesting.

Jeff: [00:43:22] In urbanized areas where people walk, driver speed is not determined by the speed limit, it’s determined by the environment. And therefore, anything you do to create elbow room or forgiveness is actually causing speeding and death. So, that’s a whole nother aspect of how the traffic engineering profession does not acknowledge that environment influences behavior. They don’t understand that environment influences behavior in terms of traffic, and that traffic demand is dynamic. They don’t understand that environment influences behavior in terms of speeding, and that speeding is caused by the very forgiveness that they introduced to our town centres and it’s really angering because they figured it out in Europe. But here in the US they have not figured that out.

Eve: [00:44:04] No. So, I have one final question for you, and that is what keeps you up at night? Or maybe nothing.

Jeff: [00:44:17] I’m fairly convinced that I’m going to lose someone that I love to traffic violence.

Eve: [00:44:24] Oh.

Jeff: [00:44:25] I mean, the odds are very high.

Eve: [00:44:27] That’s a horrible thought to keep you up at night.

Jeff: [00:44:30] The odds are very high that any of us will lose someone we care about to traffic violence. There’s a 1 in 100 chance that is how you will die in America. Um, it’s more than 40,000 people a year. It’s going up every year. And if anything keeps me up at night, you know, those are the only sort of thoughts that keep me up at night. I’m a good sleeper, but, you know, it’s those near and dear. Otherwise, I would say that, you know, I don’t think we’re taking the right measures to stem climate change by any means. This idea of electrify everything is perhaps necessary, but by no means sufficient to solve the climate problem. You know, the idea that Joe Biden is driving around this 9,000 pound Hummer, not to mention that it’s an anti-pedestrian device whose battery weighs more than a Toyota Corolla. And that that’s going to save the planet is just preposterous.

Jeff: [00:45:27] You know, and between 85 and 90% of the airborne particles that come from driving are from your tires and brakes. So, what are we doing about that? You know, so I mean, there’s so many reasons why different better cars is not the answer. And the question, the question people ask in America is always, how can we make cars better? It’s the wrong question. So, of course you get the wrong answer. Yeah, I think electrification is important, but they’re looking entirely at the supply side and not the demand side for energy and pollution. And that was the mistake of, you know, the war on poverty. It was the mistake of the war on drugs. You know, supply side solutions generally don’t work. And you have to look at the demand side. And the demand side is how can we live lives wonderfully enjoyably, you know, delightfully that cause us to use less energy? And the answer is to collect into villages, towns and cities that aren’t automobile dependent.

Eve: [00:46:26] Well, I’m totally with you on that. And I thank you very, very much for joining me. And I’d love to. I’m actually going to go order your Walkable City Rules immediately, so I know what they are. It sounds like a really useful book. So, thank you, Jeff. I really appreciate you joining me.

Jeff: [00:46:42] Both Walkable City and Walkable City Rules are also on Audible. The Walkable City Rules. I do recommend you get the hard copy because there’s pictures. Walkable City, remarkably, for a planning book has no pictures, which is why it’s one reason it’s sold so well is that it’s, you know, it’s written to be entertaining.

Eve: [00:46:59] Well, thank you, Jeff. I really appreciate it.

Jeff: [00:47:02] Hey, I love the attention. I’m grateful for what you do. And I am happy that you are willing to listen to me rant for so long.

Eve: [00:47:26] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive together. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. If you like what you heard, you can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media, or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing, head on over to smallchange.co, where I spend most of my time. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesyˆof Jeff Speck

Parking minimums gone!

April 22, 2023

The pandemic shone new light on the value of urban land. Climate change has also prompted some serious thought to the role of the car in the urban landscape.

In Montreal a parking lot has become a children’s playground. In Winnipeg several have become popular beer gardens. In Toronto, a 100-unit apartment building is replacing a downtown parking lot. 

We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the idea that more parking is better.

There is some local pushback, because change can be hard to understand at first. But the trend is accelerating. After all, is a parking lot the highest and best use in a dense urban neighborhood?  Surely not! 

Now both Canadian and US cities are eliminating parking minimums completely. These minimums force developers to include parking based on anything but rigorous standards.  And they are expensive.  

The removal of parking minimums holds great promise. Some outcomes I expect to see?  Better quality affordable housing. Pedestrian-friendly streets.  Lots more outside dining. Long-vacant urban lots finally redeveloped. 

Here’s the article that got us so excited.  Want to read more like this?  Follow Eve on Linkedin.

Foot traffic ahead.

April 19, 2023

Christopher Leinberger has had a singular career embedded in urban land use issues – as a strategist, teacher, developer, researcher and author. Recently retired from academia, he most recently taught at George Washington University as the Charles Bendit Distinguished Scholar & Research Professor and chair of the Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis. His new venture is a startup, Places Platform, developing tools and methodologies to measure economic, social equity and environmental conditions in cities and metropolitan areas.

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, Chris learned early the value of connecting coursework and theory with hands-on community engagement. Although he first put his business degree to work in the corporate world, Chris found he wanted to run his own organization and opted to take over management of Robert Charles Lesser & Co (now RCLCo), a one-office real estate consulting firm in Southern California, first as executive vice president, then as an owner and managing director. By 2000, RCLCo had become one of the largest real estate advisory firms in the U.S., with four offices nationally. Chris then moved to work as a developer full-time, co-founding the Arcadia Land Company, for which he is still a managing partner.

From 2005-18, Chris served as a fellow at Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program researching, writing and speaking on issues of walkable urbanism and metropolitan governance. He also helped found LOCUS (Responsible Real Estate Developers and Investors), serving as president from 2008-16, to help push political advocacy at the federal and regional level for a walkable urban future. In addition to George Washington University, Chris has taught at the University of Michigan, University of New Mexico and Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is the author of two books, Strategic Planning for Real Estate Development Companies (1994) and The Option of Urbanism, Investing in a New American Dream (2008).

Key findings from  Foot Traffic Ahead 2023 include:

  1. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of walkable urban cities and towns are exaggerated.  Walkable urban places still have substantial price (rental rates and sale price) premiums over drivable sub-urban areas as of the end of 2021, the trough of the pandemic. The premiums are 35-45% for office, retail, rental housing and for-sale housing. In FTA 2019 the price premiums were 40-50%…so down by 5 percentage points but still substantial. Plus, all 35 metros saw their walkable urban places gain market share at 2.8 times their 2017 market share…which means drivable sub-urban places lost market share. 
  2. We know for the first time ever that in the top 35 metros, only 1.2% of the metro land mass was walkable urban…in almost all of the other 98.8% of land, walkable urbanism is illegal, due to zoning and NIMBY opposition.  We need to increase the walkable urban land to 6-8% of metro land use, so as to drive down land prices to make it more affordable.  Our research shows that the bulk of the reason for the affordable housing and homelessness crisis is extraordinary land costs, which is created by the obsolete zoning and NIMBY opposition to housing production, especially walkable urban housing.
  3. This tiny sliver of land, 1.2% of the top 35 metros, generates nearly 20% of US GDP!  This sliver of land is even smaller when you realize that it is 0.07 of 1% of all US land, which produces such a large share of US GDP.  Plus, 7% of the US population live in this tiny amount of land.
  4. Past research shows that walkable urban places almost always generate a net fiscal impact for local government, while most drivable sub-urban places have to be subsidized, even high end subdivisions need subsidy.  Building more walkable urbanism is the best way to keep local government fiscally healthy.  Arlington, VA is a national model for this since they have 10% of their land mass built out as walkable urban.  This walkable urban land has created huge financial support for their nationally outstanding schools, in spite of the fact that Arlington has a large immigrant community with 80 languages spoken in their public schools.
  5. The 8 highest ranked walkable urban metros are Metro NYC, Boston, Washington, DC, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles.  Metro LA may be surprising to readers…it is due to their investment in rail transit ($180 billion, by far the most in the country) but also the urbanization of the suburbs (Pasadena, Glendale, Santa Monica, Long Beach, etc.).  However, they did not fare as well in social equity ranking.
  6. On social equity, we demonstrated that highly ranked Metro NYC and Washington, DC rank very high…showing you can “do well while doing good.”  However, rising walkable urban LA is also dead last in social equity…lack of high density zoning around their new rail stations which continues to crush the dreams of low and moderate income households for affordable, transit-served housing. 
Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:10] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate for Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone. And speaking of building better, I’m very excited to share that my company, Small Change, is now raising capital through a community round that is open to the public. Small Change is a leading equity crowdfunding platform for impact investment in real estate. For as little as $250, anyone 18 and over can invest in Small Change, helping to fuel our growth as we disrupt the old boys club of capital that routinely ignores so many qualified people and projects. Please visit wefunder.com/smallchange to review the full details of our raise and to make an investment if you can. And remember, investing is risky. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Eve: [00:01:45] Is the city dead? Christopher Leinberger doesn’t think so. He recently co-authored a report called “Foot Traffic Ahead 2023” that loudly proclaims the city is not dead. Post-pandemic price premiums and increased market share dominate walkable urban places. These findings may cement walkable places as the wave of the future. They point to us moving toward a more connected, environmentally sustainable way of life. Christopher has a storied career in real estate policy and development. His most recent project, Places Platform, is an information services company that tells you what location, location, location is actually worth. You’ll find a more detailed bio and report highlights on Rethinkrealestateforgood.co. Listen in to learn more. If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do, share this podcast and go to RethinkRealEstateforgood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

Eve: [00:03:08] It’s nice to have you back, Christopher.

Christopher Leinberger: [00:03:11] Glad to be here.

Eve: [00:03:12] So, the common theme in your development work is the one you discovered when, I remember you said this, you were eight years old. The value of well-developed, walkable, urban land. And how did that walkable theme just come to take such center stage in your professional life?

Christopher: [00:03:33] Well, at first it didn’t. When I was first running, Robert Charles Lesser and Company, the largest real estate consulting firm in the country. And this is back in the bad old 1980s. And all that we were doing was drivable suburban master planned communities and stuff that I really didn’t like. But I just said, hey, the market wants it, got to give it to them. But then by the late 80s, early 90s, I remembered my growing up in Philadelphia and, you know, a lovely place Rittenhouse Square is and other great walkable urban places. And how come we weren’t building these places again? And then the market in the 90s began to accept walkable urbanism. I explain it that the pendulum went from only wanting drivable suburban, moving over to demanding walkable urban once again. So, I was thrilled that the market came around to where I would like it to go.

Eve: [00:04:39] I even remember that Urban was a not a good word to describe it.

Christopher: [00:04:44] That’s really true. I did a cover story for The Atlantic calling; How Business is Changing America. It directly led to the book Edge Cities that Joel Garreau wrote. You know, Edge City was basically this article, two, three years later in book form. And the managing editor of The Atlantic, I was calling them urban villages then. And he said, don’t use urban. That means it’s depressing, it’s never going to get fixed. It means it’s heavily minority. Nobody wants to talk about that. Well, we’re back to urbanism is cool.

Eve: [00:05:23] Urbanism is very cool. So, but why is walkable so important?

Christopher: [00:05:29] Well, transportation drives development. And for the last 10,000 years, we’ve been building cities. The transportation system or systems you have dictates what you build. So, with drivable sub-urban, it’s all cars and trucks. There’s no other option. With walkable urban, you can get to these places by cars and trucks or by freight rail or by transit, by bus, by bicycle, by walking there. But once you’re there, everything you need is within walking distance. And it just changes your life. It’s just a fundamentally different lifestyle. As anybody who has experienced both ways of building the built environment, because that’s all there are. There are just two, drivable suburban, walkable urban. Within each of those, there’s a whole spectrum of different ways of building. But they’re two fundamentally different ways of using the 42% of our wealth that we put into real estate.

Eve: [00:06:34] And I suppose it’s become much more important as climate change has become much more dominant because we want to find ways to leave our cars at home. Right?

Christopher: [00:06:43] Exactly. Everybody understands that walkable urban is crucial to the environmental efforts that we must undertake. What they don’t understand is that it’s the number one thing to do as far as addressing climate change. It’s number one.

Eve: [00:06:59] Oh, that’s interesting. So, you’ve now launched Places Platform, which I think I heard you say you hope will become the Bloomberg of real estate and the built environment. And tell me about that. What do you hope to accomplish with Places Platform?

Christopher: [00:07:14] We hope that this will be a decision-making engine for anybody, making a decision about how to invest or reinvest that 42% of a country’s wealth. It’s the largest asset class in the economy, and it’s all of our real estate, it’s all of our infrastructure. And it is critical to our economy. And right now, we don’t have a way to intelligently make decisions based upon the mixed-use nature of this world. We have silos in for sale residential, a silo in rental apartments, a silo in retail. Places Platform looks at all real estate product types and allows you to understand at the place level, at the dirt level, on up, where should you be making investments? Where should you be disinvesting? And what does it mean for social equity? And what does it mean for the financial health of our local jurisdictions? All of these questions are vaguely understood by the participants. We hope to give them a tool on their desktop to make these decisions in real time. It could even be used in a public meeting saying, what if we double the density of a place? What if we put in not rail transit but bus rapid transit? What will that do to the economics? What will that do to the net fiscal impact for that jurisdiction? Will it make the local government money? So, that’s what we hope to do.

Eve: [00:09:00] So, how far have you come in building the platform?

Christopher: [00:09:03] We have the 35 metros that we have all the real estate data for sale, housing, office, retail, industrial. We are moving it very rapidly to 100, the largest 100. And within a year we’ll have the entire country. So that, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of work in Grand Rapids, and we help them understand what the value of their downtown is, but also what are you subsidizing or making money as a city for these different places? And the surprising thing was that one of the downtown districts was the most socially equitable, had the most affordable housing. Also, quite vital. It was a, you know, a hip place, they had their food hall there and they had their arena there. But it was where most of the homeless services were as well, and homeless housing. That place, which was about 200 acres in size, was making scads of, tens of millions of dollars per year net profit to the city. Meanwhile, comparable places that were high income, you know, primarily white housing districts were being subsidized. The city didn’t know that. They had no idea. They just assumed that the high-end housing districts were making the money. No, they were losing money.

Eve: [00:10:36] And the further out they are, the more suburban they are, the more resources the city has to put into sewer systems and roads and everything that, the infrastructure that serves them, right.

Christopher: [00:10:49] There are 16 infrastructure categories and all of them, you know, there’s sewer, water, roads, police, parks, all of them are cheaper in higher density places. And they are 10 to 20 times more expensive on the per house basis for drivable suburban sprawl. It’s hugely more expensive.

Eve: [00:11:15] So, you studied 35 US metro areas. The 35 that you’ve got all the information for in a recent report I saw called Foot Traffic Ahead, and I wanted to talk about your findings, which was really focused on walkable areas. So, you know, how much of the total landmass of the US is actually walkable, or of those 35 US metro areas?

Christopher: [00:11:42] That was one of the remarkable things that we found for the first time. 1.2% of those 35 metros, 1.2% of their land mass is walkable urban. That’s it. Not much at all.

Eve: [00:11:59] Interesting.

Christopher: [00:11:59] And so, the other 98.8% by definition are drivable suburban. And by the way, it is, in almost all of that 98% of their land mass, it is illegal through zoning to build walkable urban there. So, we have basically ghettoized walkable urban in this very small amount of land. But the amazing thing is, is that 7% of the country’s population live in that 1.2% of those top 35 lands and nearly 20% of the gross domestic product of the country is created in that 1.2% of that land.

Eve: [00:12:41] So, density is a good thing, right?

Christopher: [00:12:43] Very good thing every which way. Density is a very good thing.

Eve: [00:12:46] So, that land, mass and walkability, how does that impact our housing crisis?

Christopher: [00:12:52] It impacts it because walkable urban land and places Being so restricted to that 1.2%, It’s an artificial constraint. As a result, the housing and the office and the retail Is much more expensive. 40 to 45% on a price per square foot basis, more expensive than drivable suburban. And that is primarily due to how much we’re paying for the land in that 1.2%, that the land prices have gone through the roof. It’s just crazy. We have no shortage of land in this country. And yet we’ve artificially constrained walkable urbanism to this 1.2%. And it’s driven up the land prices, it’s made it more unaffordable.

Eve: [00:13:48] So, we need to take the edges of these walkable areas and pull them out and make them bigger, bigger, bigger, right?

Christopher: [00:13:55] Exactly. But, you know, we don’t need to convert single family land into walkable urban. Now with single family land, we should, the only thing we need to do there is make it legal to build granny flats if the owner of the single-family house would do it. That’s not legal either in the vast majority of our single-family zoning.

Eve: [00:14:19] Right.

Christopher: [00:14:20] But we need to take that 1.2% and increase it to 6 to 8%, so we flood the market with land that will drive down the cost of housing.

Eve: [00:14:32] If the single-family housing on the edges of this walkable land, isn’t there some value in saying, okay, the single-family zoning exists today, but in the future we want to have more density on these sites as they become available?

Christopher: [00:14:49] I guess I figure, I’m a pragmatic kind of guy. And if we can solve the housing crisis by increasing the land mass that’s walkable urban from 1.2% to 6% and not take on the millions of people that are very happy in their single-family home. You know why lift that.

Eve: [00:15:15] Why rock the boat? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it, I get it.

Christopher: [00:15:16] When you can just focus on a much smaller piece of land.

Eve: [00:15:19] But then, where is that land? How do you find that land?

Christopher: [00:15:21] Oh, there’s plenty of land. There’s plenty of land. Oh, Lord. Keep in mind, I live in Metro DC, which is about 6 million people. And Metro Paris is literally twice the size. So, they have 12 million people. However, Metro Washington occupies four times the land of metro Paris.

Eve: [00:15:45] Right.

Christopher: [00:15:46] So, we’re built at one eighth the density of Paris. And nobody feels sorry for people who have to live in Paris. So, there’s plenty of land. There’s plenty of land. Some of the best ones. And they’ve just made this possible out in California. They’ve upzoned strip retail. And made it so that at the state level they pushed this down to the local governments that you must convert your strip retail into by right zoning that allows for high density residential on top of retail.

Eve: [00:16:22] That makes a lot of sense. So, in other words, zoning can really be like a primary driver for releasing this land and permitting more density where the land already exists. Right. That makes a lot of sense.

Christopher: [00:16:36] Exactly. And it’s going to increase the fiscal health of our cities. It’s going to increase the amount of housing in our metropolitan areas, which will help address homelessness and the housing crisis as far as just sheer affordability. It’ll be, as I said, it’s a number one thing we can do to address climate change. And the thing is, is that the single-family housing around that strip retail, right now, many times that strip retail is dead or dying. And when you create walkable urban places, it increases the quality of life and therefore the price of those homes. Because rather than walking to a strip mall, you could walk to a vital, a walkable, vital place and you’re going to increase your quality of life. We call this the halo impact of walkable urbanism. We have found that single family housing within walking distance of walkable urbanism have a 40 to 80% price premium over a comparable house. That’s not within walking distance of great urbanism.

Eve: [00:17:52] Interesting. So, the price premium, is that likely to go down if walkable areas increase in size?

Christopher: [00:18:00] I hope so. I hope that we can satisfy the market and then do what real estate developers always do. They overbuild the market, hence tanking the price during a downturn.

Eve: [00:18:14] Yeah. Okay. So, right now, what’s the highest ranked walkable city? And you have a group of eight of them, I think.

Christopher: [00:18:21] So, as you would expect, it’s always been New York. This is the fifth time we’ve done this survey and Metro New York is always at the top. Now, major caveat about New York. A, their walkable urbanism is pretty much confined to the city and pretty much confined to Manhattan Island. Everybody goes to New York; they go to Manhattan. Manhattan is 0.3 of 1% of metropolitan New York’s land mass. So, it’s tiny. But everybody has this image of New York based upon that 0.3 of 1%. The rest of metro New York is built at much lower density than metropolitan Los Angeles, much lower density.

Eve: [00:19:09] That’s interesting.

Christopher: [00:19:10] And they have very little of what’s the development trend of the future, which is the urbanization of the suburbs. Yes, they have Jersey City and White Plains and Stamford and Princeton, but they don’t have it like here in Metro DC, where there’s 30 walkable urban places in the suburbs and growing because that’s where most of the people live. Most of them live in the suburbs and they want walkable urbanism, but they don’t necessarily want to move into the center city.

Eve: [00:19:44] So, who else is at the top of the list and who’s at the bottom?

Christopher: [00:19:48] So, it’s New York and then Boston, Washington, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, and the eighth highest in this highest rank is the only real surprise, and that’s Los Angeles. I used to live in Southern California. And the thing about Southern California that most people don’t know, is that it was built around a very extensive rail transit system back in the early 20th century. By 1945, Los Angeles had the longest rail transit system in the world.

Eve: [00:20:27] Wow.

Christopher: [00:20:28] And by 1962, they ripped it out. And what they’re doing today, they’ve taxed themselves $180 billion. This is primarily local generated funds to put that system back in. There are about 60% there. So, they’re rising in the rank because they’ve invested in.

Eve: [00:20:49] They’re paying attention. Yeah.

Christopher: [00:20:51] With one exception. We also rank these 35 metros based upon their social equity. What does it mean if you’re a moderate to low-income household? Is this a good place to live? And Los Angeles ranked dead last 35 out of 35. And as best we can understand, the reason for that is zoning and NIMBY opposition to building housing. They build all these rail transit stations and then they forgot to upzone to allow the, you know, the industrial locations and the single-family locations around the stations to upzone to build high density so people can walk to the train station.

Eve: [00:21:38] It’s a perfect example of walkability being exclusive, right, for the very wealthy. What a shame. It’s the reverse of what should be happening. You assign three rankings for the cities, the 35 metro areas that you looked at, foot traffic, social equity and future momentum. And I wanted to understand how you arrived at those three rankings and exactly what they mean.

Christopher: [00:22:05] Sure. So, the foot traffic ahead ranking is what percent of your real estate inventory, office, retail, multifamily rental, for sale housing, those were the four that we looked at. What percent of that total inventory, those tens of millions of square feet of space that is in your metropolitan area, what percent is walkable urban and what percent is drivable suburban? And so, those with the highest percentage walkable urban will rank highest, and those that have very little walkable urban, you know, just a few percentage points of their total inventory will rank at the bottom. And those include Phoenix and Orlando and San Antonio and Las Vegas. These places that are absolutely built around the car. And if you want to participate in society in Las Vegas or San Antonio or Orlando, you must, it’s mandated, from on high, you must own a fleet of cars for your family, your household, to participate in society. So, that’s the ranking for foot traffic ahead index.

Eve: [00:23:22] And what about social equity, the second ranking?

Christopher: [00:23:24] So, social equity is an index. So, there’s three different components that go into it. And the most important one is how much does a moderate-income household say, 80% of the area median income. What percent of that household income is spent on housing, the number one category of household spending, and on transportation. And why that’s important is the transportation is the number two household spending category. And so, it really revolves around where do you live and are you forced to rely upon cars?

Eve: [00:24:15] Right.

Christopher: [00:24:15] The average American household spends about 18% of their household income on transportation. If you live in a walkable urban place, you spend 9%, half of that on transportation because you have transit and biking and walking. You can drop cars out of your household. Maybe you only have one, maybe you don’t have any. A low-income drivable suburban household has to spend 25% of their household income on transportation.

Eve: [00:24:43] And I assume it goes up the further out from the city they are and.

Christopher: [00:24:48] Exactly.

Eve: [00:24:48] You know, the more affordable housing now is being pushed further and further out. So, it’s just making the problem worse and worse, right?

Christopher: [00:24:55] Exactly. Basically, our affordable housing strategy in this country has been drive until you qualify. So, just go and drive another ten, 20 miles and you’ll find cheap enough land and cheap enough housing that you’ll be able to afford it. However, you’ll never see your kids and you’re polluting the planet and your public health goes down because we know there’s a causal connection between how much you drive and obesity.

Eve: [00:25:23] Yes. Okay, and then the third one, future momentum, which sounds the most interesting to me. What does that mean? What is future momentum?

Christopher: [00:25:33] The main issue with future momentum? There’s a few different factors, but the main factor is how fast is walkable urbanism’s market share growing? And so, think of this as EVs, you know, electric vehicles. EVs in this country, and I don’t know the exact number right now, but roughly there are 5% of the total fleet is EV. But 10% of new car sales are EVs.

Eve: [00:26:07] So, it’s growing.

Christopher: [00:26:08] So, they’re growing twice as fast as their market share. Same thing is happening with walkable urbanism. All 35 metros, the walkable urban is gaining market share at a rapid rate, almost three times faster than their base market that we looked at in 2017. So, the growth from 2017 to the end of 2021 growing at 2.8 times faster than their market share in 2017. And those metro areas that have high future momentum are ones that have very high market share changes, what we call market share shifts. So, Atlanta, the market share shift is four times faster. You had mentioned Pittsburgh.

Eve: [00:27:02] Well, yeah, Pittsburgh is an interesting example. That’s my hometown. So, fared well in foot traffic and the ninth spot, and then very well in social equity at the sixth spot. And then awfully in future momentum, 33rd, not a lot better than.

Christopher: [00:27:19] No. And that’s because their market share is not growing. That’s one of the lowest market share growths in the country.

Eve: [00:27:27] That’s horrible.

Christopher: [00:27:28] I know it’s a shame because you’ve got great housing stock. Pittsburgh’s been around for years, and they’ve got great, walkable urban. Basically, there’s a cutoff in this country. At about 1940, housing stock built before 1940, almost all of it was walkable urban and that’s where the biggest boom, that’s where all the gentrification is going, is homes that were built prior to 1940 that went downhill economically in the late 20th century. And now young people just say, wow, we got to live in these. My wife and I have five kids between us, all five of them, they’re all married. They all own their own homes. 4 of 5 of them are in pre-1940, housing, tiny lots walkable urban when they were built, and then all the retail went away in the late 20th century, and now all the retail is coming back. So, they have a place to walk to get a quart of milk to go to a restaurant, right.

Eve: [00:28:29] Pittsburgh also has a great walkable downtown. It’s really amazing.

Christopher: [00:28:32] Yes, it is.

Eve: [00:28:33] But what does a place like Pittsburgh do to change that outcome?

Christopher: [00:28:38] A lot of this is going to be well, obviously, we talked about zoning that you’ve got to get the zoning right. You have to make the right thing easy. I’m also a developer. I’m not active with my development company. I started this firm about 20 years ago, but I’m now just a limited partner, and this firm was involved with a conversion of 120-acre golf course to a high density, walkable urban place. Over the years, this golf course got surrounded by freeways. And it’s a half mile from the King of Prussia mall, which is the largest mall on the East Coast. It took us 12 years to get zoning approval, which included a trip to the state Supreme Court. And it became the largest zoning overturn decision in the history of the country. And we kept on writing checks for 12 years with no assurance. And today, after ten years of building it out, we’re 70% built out. It is the downtown. It’s the social center of this part of Montgomery County. People love it. It’s where they go for date nights. It’s where they take their kids for all their birthdays because of all the water fountains and all that stuff.

Eve: [00:29:58] But you know, who has the tenacity to do that?

Christopher: [00:30:01] Or stupidity. We had the stupidity.

Eve: [00:30:04] I think the tenacity. I think that’s pretty remarkable. But yeah, hindsight is pretty easy, right? I bet everyone there is saying, oh, this is wonderful and forgetting the real pain of getting there.

Christopher: [00:30:16] So, that’s number one. But then number two is engaging in place management and place strategic planning. Recognize that each of these places, I liken the place level as the fifth level of governance in our society. We have federal, state, regional, city and then place. And these places that are walkable urban must have a strategy and they must be managed on a day in, day out basis. Tends to take the form of Main Street organizations, could be business or community improvement districts. A lot of private sector developers are just doing it themselves. Boston Properties does this a lot with their major projects like Reston Town Center, and somebody’s got to be in charge and managing 24/7. The safety, the cleanliness, the festivals, the economic development, manage the parking, engage in new economic development strategies, all sorts of things that a mayor would be doing for a city needs to be done at the place level as well.

Eve: [00:31:27] So, then what’s the biggest surprise in all of this research for you?

Christopher: [00:31:31] Well, the biggest surprise was how small the land mass was. We knew it was small, but not 1.2%. I obviously made a apples-to-oranges comparison here with that 1.2% of the land in these 35 metros generates nearly 20% of the country’s GDP. If you took that land and showed what percent of the US land is it? It’s under 0.1 of 1% of US land.

Eve: [00:32:02] Wow.

Christopher: [00:32:02] Generates 20% of the GDP. We didn’t know that.

Eve: [00:32:07] I suppose, in summary, what do you think it will take to move the needle to a higher percentage of workable land?

Christopher: [00:32:14] Well, one thing that’s going to drive even the most resistant person or government official or developer, is that many of our local jurisdictions are in deep trouble fiscally. That, number one, they probably have a pension plan for their workers that is dramatically underfunded. And they’re going to have to increase taxes to pay off the promises they’ve made to their police and fire and to their civil servants because there’s just no money in these pension plans. That’s number one. Number two, though, is their infrastructure, particularly the drivable suburban infrastructure, has been in place for the last 30, 40, 50 years. That’s their effective life. You have to go in and repair them, replace them, and it’s going to cost more to replace them in real dollar terms than to build them in the first place. Because you’re using them while you repair them?

Eve: [00:33:23] Yes.

Christopher: [00:33:24] With roads, you have to, you know, you have to do the work at night and on weekends because you have to keep the road open during rush hour. Yes. And at nights and weekends, you pay two and three times the cost of labor.

Eve: [00:33:40] And you get a lot of complaints.

Christopher: [00:33:42] A lot of complaints. So, our jurisdictions can’t afford their current drivable suburban approach to life. They just can’t afford it. And we have done enough fiscal impact studies, and also our partner in the Smart Growth America has done many, many fiscal impact studies that demonstrate that walkable urban land generates ten to 20 times the positive fiscal impact on cities that drivable suburban generates.

Eve: [00:34:19] So, just to wrap up, what’s next for you? Do you have another report you’re working on?

Christopher: [00:34:26] Yes, working on digging further into the foot traffic ahead study. One of the things that we found out is that the pandemic was a bump in the road for walkable urbanism, that the premiums went down about five percentage points. So, it’s roughly now 40 to 45%, depending on which product, housing or office. And it used to be 45 to 50%. So, that bump in the road, we’ve been isolating it, and the bulk of that decrease in price premiums was due to our downtowns. Not downtown adjacent places, not urban commercial places, not urban university places, not suburban town centers, not the redevelopment of suburban malls. There’s many types of walkable urban place. Most people do think downtown as walkable urban. That’s where the problem is, in our downtowns. And the reason for that is that our downtowns got addicted to office space. Basically, there’s a theory in finance called the portfolio theory that in other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And our cities put all their fiscal future in the office basket. And now downtown offices got crushed in the pandemic. And they’re going to be, continue to be crushed as these office leases roll over because these are five and ten year leases and they’re coming due and people will leave or take much less space. So, we are all obviously focusing on how can we redevelop again, our downtowns. And the obvious example or the obvious direction is to convert offices to residential. Very important that that be done, but it’s going to be very painful.

Eve: [00:36:29] So, that’s happening in Pittsburgh already. There’s already quite a few announcements for building conversions, which has been really interesting to watch. I live downtown, so it’s becoming a bigger neighborhood pretty rapidly.

Christopher: [00:36:42] That’s the important thing. One of the things we learned during this pandemic is that the downtown adjacent places that grew rapidly over the last 20 years. You know, the downtown adjacent places that surround a downtown have been doing so well. Their portfolio profile is, you know, 30, 40% office, 40, 50% residential, 10% support retail, maybe 15% retail, and then some civic functions, stadiums or museums. They have a much more stable portfolio. And they did very well, in fact, better than they did before, because many of the office workers working downtown stayed home.

Eve: [00:37:32] Yeah.

Christopher: [00:37:33] And they went to the restaurants at lunch.

Eve: [00:37:37] Yes.

Christopher: [00:37:37] They just hung around in their downtown adjacent places. So, these downtown adjacent places did better during the pandemic.

Eve: [00:37:43] Yeah, I would believe that.

Christopher: [00:37:43] Downtown has to learn from the downtown adjacent places as to balancing their portfolio.

Eve: [00:37:49] Well, thank you very much. Thanks for joining me. And I can’t wait to see the next report. I love the work you’re doing, and this is really important work, I think.

Christopher: [00:37:58] Great. Thank you, Eve. Okay. Good to see you.

Eve: [00:38:00] Okay. Thank you very much.

Christopher: [00:38:02] Okay, bye bye.

Eve: [00:38:10] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. You can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing yourself head on over to wefunder.com/smallchange where you can invest directly in Small Change and our mission to democratize capital formation to create impact in commercial real estate development. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Christopher Leinberger

$0 Fares.

November 7, 2022

“Kansas City’s Zero Fare transit program shows major success – and what still needs to be done. It’s been three years since Kansas City voted to make its public transit free. Can it keep going?” writes Sandy Smith for Next City.  

In 2019 Kansas City council were unanimous in their vote to make pubic transit free, making it the first large city in the US to implement a $0 fare program in an effort to move towards more equitable transit options. Now anyone living anywhere in Kansas City can catch a bus for free. When the COVID pandemic began, Johnson County, Kansas, joined in.

The Public Transportation Association reports that over the last two years there was an annual drop in ridership of 25 – 26%. This may seem like a big loss, but it’s a much lower ridership loss than some other cities. St Louis Metro Transit, for example, lost almost 39%t of its riders in 2020 and more than 55% in 2021. 

According to the 2021 State of Black KC study, Zero Fare provided many riders with greater access to the city. Of the surveyed riders:

  • 90% ride the buses more often 
  • 92% can shop for food more easily 
  • 88% have better access to healthcare providers 
  • 82% can get or keep a job 
  • 86% feel that the city cares about their needs
  • 84% can explore new places

In other words, the program has seen early success. An added bonus are the savings for riders which can go towards groceries, health, education and more. 

As well as increased mobility and financial benefits, nearly 80% of riders also now feel safer on buses, a feeling backed by statistics in the 2021 Zero Fare impact analysis by Mid-America Regional Council (MARC). And let’s not forget the environmental benefits of increased ridership. MARC’s analysis suggests that Zero Fare could eliminate 7,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Of course, there’s still plenty of work to be done. Service frequency is an issue which definitely needs improvement. And more importantly, a continuing source of funding still needs to be found to make Zero Fare permanent. But Zero Fare is a step in the right direction.

Read the original article here.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

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