Booked on Planning

Affordable housing has been around long before the programs of recent history, dating to the 19th century. To adequately provide for it requires a varied approach to serving all income levels, from the most impoverished to moderate-income families. This means both supply and demand side programs paired together, with voucher programs across the board and low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) projects supplementing the need. According to author Alan Mallach of A Decent Home, housing vouchers or their equivalent should be a universal right for those who need it. The affordable housing crisis and homelessness will not be solved until the government does this. In this episode, we discuss these topics in-depth and go into what changes he would make to the book, which was published over 12 years ago but remains an important topic today.

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Planning and problems of the city are synonymous, merging into the economics, sociology, and politics of cities which are reflective of their time. In Cities of Tomorrow, author Peter Hall says, “historical actors do perform in response to the world they find themselves in and in particular to the problems that they confront in that world.” This book is focused on the late 19th and 20th centuries, starting with the poor conditions of housing in the Victorian era which gave rise to the field of planning. He also thoroughly covers the Garden City movement, suburban sprawl and regional planning, transportation and highway building, and several design movements, some with ties to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In just over 500 pages of text, the author provides a detailed account of the successes and failures in city planning history so that we may learn and understand that most ideas are not wholly original but are versions of an earlier approach. Check out this episode with guest and fellow Cities of Tomorrow fan Gracen Johnson as we discuss the books key points and observations when reading the text in the context of society today.

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Missing middle housing—the cottage court, townhomes and duplexes, and low-rise apartment units, are becoming more essential in city development. Missing middle has shifted from a good to know by planners, city officials, and developers to a need to know. This type of housing unit is becoming increasingly important to single person households and downsizing boomers who want to live in more walkable neighborhoods, an inherent feature of the missing middle neighborhood. By providing a variety of housing options that include these types of units, cities can support economic growth and development. There is also an equity component in this conversation. Where past discriminatory zoning and housing policies have led to income disparities for minority populations, missing middle could help build back generational wealth held from these groups. To keep this home type affordable, technology needs to catch up with the movement. Modular housing can be the future of missing middle housing but is currently lacking in the modular conversation which has only really been tested on large scale apartment projects. To hear more on missing middle housing, check out this episode with author Daniel Parolek on his book Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis.

Links:

• Missing Middle Housing Book: https://islandpress.org/books/missing-middle-housing
• Missing Middle Housing Website: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ 
• Form-Based Codes Book: https://islandpress.org/books/form-based-codes 
• Prairie Queen Project: https://opticosdesign.com/work/bungalows-on-the-lake-prairie-queen/ 
• AARP Missing Middle Guide: https://www.aarp.org/livable-communities/housing/info-2020/missing-middle-housing.html
• Opticos Design: https://opticosdesign.com/blog/ 

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One of the main areas for improving our approach to planning for resilience is improving communication between departments and communication between plans. Our hazard mitigation plans should be incorporating action items from climate action plans and our comprehensive plans should be including the hazard mitigation plan information. It’s not enough to just reference the document, but all city plans and priorities need to consider hazards before adoption to avoid situations like goals for a walkable, urban, dense downtown when the downtown is prone to frequent flooding. As author Jaimie Hicks Masterson said planners should look at policies, plans, processes, and procedures within their department to ensure they support reducing hazard risks. Planners should step forward and be the conveners that we are trained to be.

Links:

• Building Resilience Through Plan Integration article with a link to the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard Guidebook: https://www.planning.org/pas/memo/2021/jan/

Episode Artwork: Malachi Brooks on Unsplash

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Pedestrian and Transit Oriented Design is not a book about design but a book about policy and process. Change doesn’t happen all at once, despite our desire, so we must make decisions about priorities and which changes happen in the first wave of upgrades and which will come later. This book helps to set those priorities by laying out three chapters with essential, highly desirable, and worthwhile but not essential design elements. As author Keith Bartholomew put it, all the elements are worth considering, but in a world of incremental change and priority setting, not all of them can be included. As planners, elected or appointed officials, or designers it’s our job to “push the cart that much up the hill and then hopefully someone will come in behind and pick up the work after that.” Meaningful change is small change. Places grow organically and are not all ready to go out of the box like Ikea furniture. Instead, find the situation and challenges of a particular place and strategize to get the best outcome you can for that situation, recognizing that no cookie cutter list will give you the answer. The best way to find answers is to look around your community for areas that are working and find ways to replicate that elsewhere though policies or programs.

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To summarize an 800 page book in three points, cities should charge the right price for curb parking (the lowest price that maintains one to two open spaces), spend the revenue on the neighborhood with upgrades like planting trees, cleaning and upgrading sidewalks, providing transit passes, and remove off-street parking requirements. If we stop to think about the parking situation, we will realize we have been designing cities to accommodate cars for decades, instead of designing cities for the people living in them. As the author Donald Shoup points out however, planners are adept at pivoting to change course in a relatively short time. We have ample resources with all the surface parking lots in our communities to reclaim for housing and other much needed development. We should reconsider what’s the highest and best use of the curb lane, economically speaking, and often the answer is not parking. When approaching parking from an economic position, it is easy to make the argument that free parking is a drain on cities not just financially, but environmentally as well. 

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Planning for climate change can take many forms from a climate action plan or chapter in a comprehensive plan to addressing concerns over limited water and drought without using politically charged terms like climate change. The Climate Planner is a great resource not just for a climate planning process, but any public planning process. With the situation we are facing planners cannot ignore planning for a changing climate and need to include sustainability and resiliency measures in all our plans. If there is not dedicated funding for climate adaptation, pairing climate projects with other already funded work is a way to advance climate resiliency goals. Think about what the community is set on doing and the goals they have and do that while working towards climate mitigation and adaptation. In this episode with author Jason King we cover a variety of topics including dealing with challenging attendees at public meetings, working with others who may not share the same climate priorities, funding resiliency projects, and more. 

Notes:

• The Climate Planner (Routledge, 2021): https://www.routledge.com/The-Climate-Planner-Overcoming-Pushback-Against-Local-Mitigation-and-Adaptation/King/p/book/9781032020204

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is exactly what its name suggests, a geographic method for organizing information in a system. GIS is the digital version of the field of geography, a field comprised of environmental, societal, and economic factors, and uses a geographic approach that brings together problem solving and integration by layering maps to visualize trends and design solutions. Wholistic, integrated, connected, collaborative, inclusive—these five works are embodied in the geographic approach, one that is a natural way of thinking for planners whose work is grounded in location.

We spoke in this episode to Jack Dangermond, co-founder of ESRI, a global market leader in GIS and location intelligence. We wrapped up our conversation with a call to action where he said planners “are very important. You possess the skills and methods that are so important today. And only you it seems to me have the insight and ability to create solutions to address the great challenges we’re facing today as a global society. And for whatever reason you want to make up you are privileged and are being called upon at this particular moment in history to address the great issues of our time…” Listen to the full episode to hear the rest of the conversation with Jack on the world of GIS and the role planners have to play in the field.

Resources:

• High School Students Using GIS Case Study: https://www.esri.com/en-us/lg/industry/education/high-school-students-learn-stem-skills-with-gis
• L.A. High School Maptivists Research Social Justice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h50hlfnBjzk

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Transportation enables...fill in the blank. Transportation is so integral to our daily lives that it has an impact on economic development, mobility and connectivity, public health, the environment, and the list goes on. As a result, planning for transportation does not occur in a static world, but a dynamic system that is constantly changing. Adaptation is key because what we put in place now will enable our ability to meet goals in the future. Sometimes however, what we advocate for does not get implemented by elected officials. Patience is key because as years pass priorities change and past work may get implemented. Even just reframing the issue can get transportation projects built. Since transportation projects are connected to so many issues, the arguments for spending funds on a particular project should be as well. This is highlighted in the evolution of bike and pedestrian planning to active transportation planning. Active modes of transportation such as bicycling and walking is good for public health, hence the rebranding of the field. We dive into these topics and more in our conversation on the Transportation Planning Handbook.

Links:

·        Institute of Transportation Engineers: https://www.ite.org/ 

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Planning theory and laws are constantly evolving and changing. We need to continue to learn, think, and have conversations and dialogue. It is not enough to understand the core concepts, but we should go further to push the boundaries to get our communities to the next level and evolve the way we live. No longer is the status quo sufficient as we have begun to re-examination of the foundations of land use law and the questionable groundwork it stands on. Additionally, states gave local governments the power to decide what gets built on the land. As a result, land use law is primarily local and comes out of the respect for local knowledge and processes. How we choose to apply zoning codes and what to regulate has immense power. These codes impact everything from cradle to grave which is why working in the field of land use law is such an interesting and dynamic career.

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