Mentions Brent Toderian

If you think NIMBYs are hard, it’s astronomically worse when the NIMBYs are right. So you should do everything you can to avoid helping the NIMBYs be right.

I’ll often point to existing buildings and say, “If I thought that’s what I was going to get as a community, I’d be against it too.” The city has to be able to virtually guarantee the quality of the outcome from the urban design, livability, multimodal perspective. And a lot of cities have not set up the culture, the structure, the capacity, the training, or the tools to deliver quality. So when NIMBYs express a fear of change over density, they’re often right.

Don’t let them be right, is what I’m saying. Vancouver has a track record of delivering density in a pretty good way, so we can have a different conversation about change and density and height.

It starts with asking yourself: Do you want families downtown and in urban places? A number of cities say they do, yet they’re not willing to do what’s necessary to make it happen, such as regulate. That’s particularly a problem in the United States, where regulation is a dirty word. It’s that ideology around regulation that can often keep cities from progressing.

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Point two is, even if you have the homes, you need the services and amenities that support family living. Those start with daycare and schools.

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Point three is, you design the public realm for kids and families, because that means it will work for everyone. You have to think about all age groups: the parents with their strollers, young kids and their need for playgrounds, and then teenagers and their distinctive needs, which are different than those of younger kids.

An interview with Brent Toderian:

The fact that you get pockets of urbanism out in the suburbs can be a result of a few things. One, sometimes these pockets are original urban places — traditional towns or villages that stood on their own, initially — that got gobbled up by sprawl. And they’ve become special places within those suburbs. I know so many suburban communities where, if you ask where the best place is, they will name those places, because they’re the places with scale, character, and walkability.

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I’ve worked on New Urbanist projects that are walkable and mixed, and even have some density in their core, but you get to them by getting off the interchange of the highway. The urbanist project is plugged into the big-infrastructure, suburban genetic code.

It’s very difficult to retrofit the growth pattern of cities on a project-by-project basis. You get islands of right in a sea of wrong. It ultimately has to come down to a new system, a new genetic code at a regional scale — which is really hard to do, but important.

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There’s an old Chinese proverb that says: The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. So wherever you are in the learning curve, stop doing the wrong thing! [laughter]

That’s often the hardest part. It’s easier to start doing the right thing, because you get credit for those things. What’s hard is to stop doing things that don’t match your new vision — building wider roads and more lanes, or building big-box retailing on your periphery. It’s not enough to start doing the right thing, you have to stop doing the wrong thing.