On Building a Better Community

At the birth of civilization, people built their communities around their families in an ad-hoc fashion. There were no city planners with visionary ideas neatly organized in file folders on a credenza beneath their impeccably framed array of university diplomas and professional membership certificates.

In these primordial times before the evolution of the city planner species, a family, clan, or tribe could build wherever they wanted in any manner they wished. Necessity was the only permit required to build according to their needs.

As the wide-open spaces of agrarian life gave way to close quarters urban living, proximity made "at will" building a safety concern for neighbors living mere feet rather than acres away. The pursuit of safe, uniform, and economical building practices led to standardized building codes.

Zoning restrictions developed as a natural and logical extension of this "chaos to order" progression. Zoning acted as a form of automated error prevention by requiring specific building types to be constructed in orderly, cohesive, and complimentary clusters for the purpose of,

•        Ensuring that residential is not built adjacent to noisy, pollution producing industrial

•        Placing the goods and services of commerce within easy reach of residents

•        Balancing traffic patterns and allowing for recreational, educational, and public works facilities

•        Preserving easements for the needs of the future

In theory, zoning restrictions are common sense. In application, zoning is far more art than science.

The proportions of Residential , Commercial, and Industrial zones, as well as their placement require foresight that most people do not possess.

The addition of subcategories like Residential 2, indicating multi-family residential and IB, prescribing an Industrial Buffer zones, adds another subset of variables. Environmental impact and historical preservation are increasingly important and detail oriented considerations in city planning.

The quilt work of city planning for the future has become so complex and specialized as to require a degree in Urban, City, or Regional planning, and one or more relevant sub-disciplines.

The planning is based on projections, case studies, consultant reports, and interpretation, as well as intuition. This last element results in each planner having a different opinion on the "correct way" to go about planning. A land use planner will be muttering under their breath about how the transportation planer is incompetent, while the historic preservation planner is certain that all other planers are wrecking balls on legs. Like Feng Shui advisors, economists, investment gurus, and political campaign managers, rarely can one planner agree with another planner out of professional courtesy.

Once a specific area of a city is built, rezoning and zone variance further complicate matters and increase costs, as the need for zone reapportionment appear where planners erred in their initial calculations, projections, and prognostications.

The difficulty in city planning is obvious, predicting a dynamic community's needs decades in the future with the rapid pace of technology and a radically transformed demographic. Pretending to know what a city will need beyond a few years requires even the best planer to consult the city planning Magic 8 Ball for definitive answers.


Then, there is the human side of city planning, where calculations, theories, studies, and codes meet with fears, prejudice, cronyism, vendettas, the potential for personal gain, and pure tainted politics. All the above is tightly wrapped in a massive multi-jurisdictional Gordian knot of red tape.

City planning evokes strong emotional responses, because human beings naturally resist change. In order to mitigate our problematic human nature, perhaps some computer generated, formulaic solution to city planning would seem an unbiased, reasonable, and egalitarian method. However, our passionate human natures are seldom appeased by reason, logic, or mathematics.

When all the calculating, debating, deal making, op-ed article writing, protesting, and crying are done, one question goes unasked and remains unanswered,

"Is this city livable for families?"

We have known for millennia that we build civilizations with the family as its brick. Are we building with this axiom in mind?

•    Can a young couple with a baby on the way find a starter home at a price they can afford in the right location? Can they begin their pursuit of the American dream?

This is the foundation of community, the fledgling family, all else we build will rest upon this. If they fail, the future is bleak.

•    Can their kid graduate from a respectable high school and pursue higher education without moving across the state or at least not have to endure a 3-hour bus ride?

•    What about the kid that is not interested in a degree but there interest lay in working on cars? Is there opportunity to obtain a certificate from a trade school?

•    Consider the entrepreneurial-minded child who built a landscaping business from a single lawn mower and has can. Do they have an opportunity to work, live, and help employ the community?

This is the framing of community. If we fail here, we will produce a community of young people with the job skills to weigh tiny baggies on a scale for a living, or worse.

• When the young couple become grandma and grandpa, and they decide to sell the home in which they raised their grown successful children, can they find and afford senior housing near the grand-kids?

•   Does it provide assisted living as they become less able to care for themselves?

•    As for the people who serve a community: police, firefighters, teachers, clergy, and emergency medical personnel. Can they afford to live in the communities they serve?

You may disagree, but I believe that people do a better job when they are protecting their own communities. That is the power of buy-in, and it is the siding and walls that make a collection of people, homes, and businesses an inclusive rather than exclusive and exclusionary community.

•       Can a single mom find daycare so she can attend medical assistant training? Maybe, we could build a community center that offers childcare. Community childcare in which high school kids could participate and learn how much work a child takes. Perhaps they may not be so eager to have one of their own too early in life

•    Is there access to the health and welfare services for the community?

These complete a roof of a community protecting everyone beneath it, and these are the challenges to be addressed in building a better community.

One thing is certain about the future, as transportation costs increase exponentially a city that does not provide for a family's full life cycle will die. Tourists and day-trippers do not count in a city's population. Seasonal industries will not provide steady employment and a healthy economy, just a boom and bust cycle buoyed by unemployment checks. A city of retail clerks and waiters, will never be able to afford the education required to be anything more.

What the future holds is clear: businesses will rise and fall, entire industries will ebb and flow, interest rates will wax and wane, trends and fashions will come and go, and through all of this and everything else, the family will remain.

The family is the only thing certain to last, so we should build on this foundation: Healthy families make for healthy cities.

Far too often, our leaders look at other communities as their model without considering the residents who live in the community. They see cities like Aspen, Colorado and think,

"Wonderful! It is beautiful! I would love to live here. We could do this back home."

However, they can not afford to live there and few others can.

Our leaders often entertain ideologies which conflict with reality. Maintaining "low population densities" in spite of skyrocketing housing prices and a chronic lack of housing is a sign of their failure to accept reality. We may all suffer from lapses in judgement, but when those lapses persist in harming families, especially those fledgling first time buyer families in our community, it is time to review our goals, are plans to achieve those goals, and how those plans are being implemented.

Short term planning leads to disasters...

Like Detroit, where reliance on one industry was fine as long as that industry is thriving and thriving in America. In 1950, who would have thought the Japanese would have factories producing cars in Mexico and Canada for American drivers? No one did.

Disasters like Seattle, where large landowners and speculators bid up property values to jackpot levels and then cashed out, leaving a bunch of property that no one could afford, a broken economy, and a few rich people who moved away a long time ago. It took a decade to recover, and could have lasted a century had it not been for another disaster...

Like San Francisco, an earthquake erupted in a fire that ripped through the city destroying a large portion of its homes, businesses, and docks. We, the people of King County, came to San Francisco's aid by shipping millions of board-feet of lumber to rebuild down the coast because that is how we are.

We care when we understand what is at stake, but this is not San Francisco at risk. This time it is our businesses, our kids, our parents, our community, and it is our future... or our disaster.

It is our choice.

Build it, buy into it, believe in it... but always, invariably, and without fail consider the families that must live there and build for them.

Just to Emphasis the point