At the end of a long and emotional community meeting about street safety on Lyndale Avenue S (a county-owned road in Minneapolis where a young man had recently been hit and killed) Hennepin County Commissioner Marion Greene stood up to tell the crowd, in essence, why they wouldn’t get what they wanted any time soon.
The audience that Greene was addressing was a highly educated one. It included credentialed urban planners and traffic engineers who, in another circumstance, might find themselves being yelled at by a different community about a different street. Moreover, this audience had mostly coalesced around a single, practical demand; that Lyndale Ave S be restriped from four lanes to a safer three lane design. This proven strategy has been used around the country, including in Hennepin County, and everyone at the meeting knew it.
Pictured: Safe streets advocates (left) appealing to Hennepin County engineers (right).
And yet, Greene apologized, the county wasn’t able to immediately make this change. She compared the county to a “big ship,” that can take a while to turn around. After over a half a century in the business of building and maintaining supersized roads, getting the county to fundamentally rethink that approach was not achievable overnight. In the institutional logic of the county’s Medina-based road department, Lyndale Ave S wasn’t yet up for resurfacing. A redesign of the roadway would call for more time and study. The best the county could offer for the better part of the coming decade was a handful of bollards. Tough luck!
That was then, and this is now. It has since turned out that Hennepin County and other local authorities are more nimble than perhaps even they knew. The COVID-19 crisis upended a lot of received wisdom about how governments can and should function. Faced with a potential health crisis in the county’s homeless shelter system, Hennepin County moved quickly to book unhoused people into hotels. Pressed to create new spaces for people to spend time outside without close contact, cities like Minneapolis closed entire streets. And just recently, Hennepin County appears to have conceded to the advocates and planned a trial 4-3 conversion on Lyndale. In the wake of a crisis, with good elected officials and smart advocates, rapid change is possible.
But American counties and cities were facing climate, housing, and transportation safety crises before the pandemic and are still facing them as it abates. In many respects, the pandemic has exacerbated them. Can the urgency of the pandemic response be sustained to finally confront the crises that, in the Before Times, we allowed to feel normal?
For this to happen, we need a better approach to managing physical change in cities. As the community meeting about Lyndale Avenue S demonstrates, quite apart from the substance of physical change itself, the process of physical change is hotly contested. What feels too fast and too big a leap to one person is too slow and too small to someone else. Both advocates and opponents also struggle to accurately predict how changes in policy might lead to changes in the physical world, or the reverse. This leads to conflict and inaction on some of the biggest problems we face together.
Limiting Changes By Place: The NIMBY Model
If you pulled aside people on the street and asked them if they agreed that “cities should be able to change,” would anyone seriously disagree? Yet, when that thesis is translated into action, say, by allowing three households to live on a single property in areas where previously only one was allowed, there is inevitably a massive negative reaction.
At the heart of this is a widespread expectation that the parts of a city that naturally change are the parts where they do not live. This is implicit in the epithet ‘NIMBY.’ At any contentious public meeting you will hear people claim to support change in the abstract but not the particulars. A classic construction in public testimony begins with the phrase “I’m not opposed to [the type of proposal], but not here.”
How NIMBYs in SoHo recently portrayed the impacts of a proposed rezoning.
NIMBYism is a model that is concerned with place. It holds that certain places (usually with few permanent residential stakeholders) like central business districts, deindustrialized areas, and large institutional campuses are where change should be concentrated. In contrast, places where people are financially or emotionally invested, like their residential block (or the haunts where they were once young and single) should be preserved more or less as they are.
This perspective is ultimately deeply harmful, and in the long-run it facilitates segregation, sprawl, and insecurity. But it is also highly coherent as an ideology and a fairly accurate description of how American cities change. NIMBYism forms the dominant framework of American urban policy today. Virtually every American city is constrained by a paradigm where substantial changes are resisted locally, usually until they either are blocked or pushed onto the areas of the city that are least able to organize to shape them. This tends to mean that change comes to cities in huge breakthroughs, where NIMBY resistance loses the battle in one specific area and very rapidly abandons it, leading to a lot of localized change, while the rest of the city remains unchanged.
Viewed from the perspective of an entire city, this change can seem to be occurring slowly. Housing advocates like to point out that when you look at the numbers, many American cities, especially “superstar cities” on the coasts, are building less housing than they have ever done. But these quantitative arguments are unpersuasive to many people, because it often conflicts with their qualitative experience. They may say, “just look at all the cranes downtown!”
When cities change, most of that change is concentrated in just a handful of areas. In such an area it may feel like everything that was once familiar and comfortable is up for grabs for outside forces. Conversely when a neighborhood isn’t changing, it may feel as though it exists apart from the world at large.
Shifts in taste, deliberate public policy, other physical changes (like a major infrastructure investment), and other factors come into play in causing change to be uneven. But it is also a primary byproduct of the NIMBY model, that forces changes to be concentrated in space, and rejects the idea of mixed development or infrastructure.
The upshot of this is that the NIMBY model perpetuates itself through people’s experience with and expectations for their cities. For most living Americans, stasis is the rule and change is the exception. In the realm of transportation, American urban policy has remained remarkably consistent for decades since the automobile was entrenched as the travel mode of choice. In the realm of land use, a 2019 study from the University of Minnesota found that roughly 123 million Americans (70% of all people living in metropolitan areas) lived in neighborhoods that had seen no significant change in status from 2000 to 2016, and that significant changes disproportionately occurred in more central areas. Moreover, most neighborhoods (again about 70%) experiencing significant changes in this period experienced decline instead of growth. It’s no surprise that any kind of conspicuous new investment or thinking, in whatever area of citymaking, is more change than most people are used to.
Limiting Changes By Time: The Strong Towns Model
It’s easy enough to gripe about the NIMBY mindset, but skepticism of rapid change is a rational and universal human condition. American cities are designed in deference to this, with de-facto designated zones for stasis and de-facto designated zones for change, and a fiercely defended boundary between them.
Writing in Strong Towns, Daniel Herriges calls this dichotomy “The Trickle or the Fire Hose,” and he points out that it doesn’t satisfy a lot of people. A great swath of neighborhoods in decline are prevented from building wealth through small-scale changes, while the small subset of neighborhoods on the make are discouraged from retaining much of the history and character (and the people who laid that foundation) that made them initially appealing. Only secure, segregated, wealthy areas (what some University of Minnesota researchers have termed Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence) really benefit from the paradigm.
In a follow-up piece, Herriges proposes an elegant two-part bargain for peace in our time:
1. No neighborhood can be exempt from change.
2. No neighborhood should experience sudden, radical change.
This is a dramatic departure from the way things work today, but it’s anything but a new idea. Prior to the advent of modern citymaking, with its land use controls and centralized public works, essentially all places were built this way. Herriges points out that this kind of incrementalism doesn’t preclude changes—most of today’s large American metros were once 19th century boomtowns with growth rates that are unfathomable today—but it ensures that they happen through the accumulation of a number of small, localized changes and not a handful of masterstrokes imposed from on high. In contrast to the NIMBY model of change, the Strong Towns model is concerned with time.
The world if only we all listened to Strong Towns.
This is a serious, small-c conservative consensus on urban change that seems on paper like it could command broad appeal. But as a broader governing vision it seems impracticable.
Modern cities are substantially different from their pre-Euclidian zoning, pre-urban renewal, pre-interstate highway antecedents in ways that make restoring the old paradigm of broad-based incremental change difficult.
This is the case in ways both big and small. For example, large scale infrastructure has almost always required centralized planning and state investment to pull off. It’s one thing to propose a policy of flexible incremental investment in certain transportation contexts, but the same approach doesn’t scale up when changes are more costly and more permanent. There are few incremental options for changes like the construction of a subway, the removal of a highway, or a coastal storm surge barrier. Especially when it comes to mitigating and adapting to climate change, only substantial and sustained government investment can make changes of the required scale.
In another example, many cities across the country are enacting measures that would allow more types of small-scale infill housing to be built. In housing-starved California, production of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) has skyrocketed thanks to liberalized land-use laws. ADUs are the ultimate incremental change to residential land use. But behind this shift has been a boom in “full service” ADU companies, with the skids greased by municipality-wide efforts to pre-approve standard designs. Features of the modern administrative state, like building codes, mean that even incrementalism takes institutionalism to enact. Even then, with over 10,000 ADUs permitted in that state in 2019 alone the added housing will meet just a fraction of the state’s housing supply gap. As with climate change, the housing supply crisis is a problem where even changes that are incremental in form must be institutional in function if our society is to make any headway.
It’s important to interrogate the scale of incrementalism that this model would ultimately call for. Ultimately, most changes in city are experienced as a binary condition. A parcel of land, for instance, might start off vacant and end up as dense housing, with only a brief interlude of construction. Similarly, a stretch of street might have one configuration and completely different one after being rebuilt. Because nobody likes to waste money and effort, usually once something new is constructed, it remains that way for decades after.
This probably seems painfully obvious. But NIMBYs often make a contrary argument. Opposing a new apartment development, they may argue that it’s too high or too big for the area right now. Opposing a street redesign, they may argue that it’s too out of step with how people travel today.
The time span of physical changes in a city is hard to grasp all at once. A large building built today can expect to house people for half a century or more. A street built today will accommodate (and shape) travel patterns through 2060. It is a disservice to future city-dwellers if designers do not attempt to anticipate their wants and needs as well.
That’s ultimately why even incremental changes (like ADUs) have also not always mollified the same types of critics who earlier opposed larger, more dramatic changes. It’s easy to find stories about objectively small changes, like adding striped bike lanes, building new sidewalks, or charging a pittance for parking, which provoked vitriolic reactions. If the natural response to change was proportional to that change, it would make a strong case for incremental solutions. When that proves not the case it sends the opposite message; go big or go home, which again reinforces the “Trickle or the Fire Hose” paradigm.
Change At The Right Time And Place: The Hemmingway Model
In negotiating change in cities, communities return to the same battlegrounds and fight the same fights over place and time. Attempting to address these issues every single time something changes is a waste of productivity, yet that is the paradigm that Americans have placed themselves in.
There’s a better way for cities to enact change. It happens to be the same way that Ernest Hemmingway famously described a very different process of change in his book The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends.”
Cities must change gradually and then suddenly. Gradually because effective change requires study, planning, and a basis in consensus. Suddenly because the scale of the problems we face demands sweeping, urgent action.
Cities must also change with the support of friends and allies. It is not enough to engage the public once, settle upon a course of action, and then proceed from there. The process of change involves active support.
The root of this approach must be to empower planning. The process of planning has two related functions; first to study and decide questions of time and place, and second to develop community consensus and community support around those answers. This is the part of change that comes gradually.
Implementation is the part that comes suddenly. It is not enough to just invest in robust planning efforts. From the start, resources and a timeline must also be set aside for implantation. Cities should aim to build a culture by which adopted plans are swiftly implemented. Through the process of implementation, cities must continue public engagement in order to continue to maintain consensus, demonstrate ongoing public support, and create a channel through which feedback can be received.
This is not to say that such a process will eliminate NIMBY opposition. Rather, it should aim to steamroll it. NIMBY opposition takes advantage of the gaps of time that appear between the adoption of a plan and its implementation. By shortening that time and providing fewer opportunities for veto-points after a plan is adopted, cities can overcome that opposition.
Not far from Lyndale Avenue, the city of Minneapolis is currently contemplating how to redesign Hennepin Avenue, a critical artery between downtown and the city’s south and southwest. But the question has already been settled: Hennepin is marked on the city’s plans for bus and bike lane implementation. Absent compelling new information, that fact should resolve the question.
Minneapolis is a city where adopted plans are often carried through. But opponents of the proposed designs are nonetheless waging a battle to see the bike and bus lanes stripped from the plan. The weight of the city’s adopted policies are against them, but the deeply ingrained NIMBY model of change gives them support. We will see whether Minneapolis is ready to move towards a Hemmingway model instead.
But overall, there’s little sign yet of bigger changes in how cities approach change. Change remains inconsistent, inefficient, and unfair. Ultimately it might be the big challenges that we face that force a new paradigm, or else we might go on denying them until the end.