Really punchy 20m intro to the Robert Putnam / Ray Oldenburg thing from Mike Pasternock at Strong Towns.
People are lonely. Is it because we are addicted to our phones, or is that a symptom of larger design choices we made when building our places? We cover some of the general concepts related to social infrastructure an try to evaluate what to do next.
I think that’s the world my parents envisioned for me as I grew up. I could just ask them for rides. As I got older, I could ask my friends, and then I’d get married and get rides from my spouse.
If you ask anyone who’s had to rely on favors to get where they need to go, it gets old, fast. In Washington State, our Legislature funded a study about the mobility of nondrivers and the researchers were surprised to find that while relying on rides was a major source of mobility for nondrivers, the emotional burden of asking for those rides was a significant deterrent, especially for women, low-income and disabled people.
When we insist on visibility as nondrivers, our presence demands a reckoning of the costs and moral efficacy of car dependency. Rather than being ashamed about our disabilities or the lack of resources that prevents us from driving, we should be proud of our status as nondrivers. Instead of a future of congested drive-thrus, oceans of parking lots and freeway-ramp spaghetti nests, our existence tips the scales in favor of communities designed in ways that work better and are healthier for all of us.
In New York City, where the majority of residents don’t own a car, it seems odd to assert that a policy benefitting transit users, pedestrians, and cyclists is bad for attracting customers. Commuters who drive into Manhattan have significantly higher incomes than others who work in the borough, so Hochul’s claim that killing congestion pricing would relieve New York’s cost of living crisis is just as suspect.
Even if Hochul is telling the truth about restaurateurs’ complaints, they’re still a terrible justification for her flip-flop on congestion pricing. The same goes for public leaders elsewhere who scuttle other urban transportation reforms that merchants often loathe, such as replacing street parking with dedicated lanes for bikes and buses. When it comes to shoppers’ travel habits, small business owners simply don’t know what they’re talking about — and not just in New York.
In study after study in city after city around the world, researchers have found that merchants exaggerate the share of patrons who arrive by car and undercount those who walk, bike, or ride transit. Those misperceptions lead them to oppose transportation reforms that would limit the presence of cars and make urban neighborhoods cleaner, more pleasant, and less polluted — and would likely increase spending at their business, too.
The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.
The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of US security guards has increased by almost 100,000 since 2010, to a total of more than 1.1 million. As a measure of how paranoid and unwelcoming we are as a nation, security guards outnumber receptionists by more than 100,000 workers nationally.
Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev argue that we have become “one nation under guard” and say that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.
Once upon a time it was razor blades in apples; this year, it’s rainbow fentanyl in candy. But while fears of children receiving narcotic-spiked treats are unfounded, there is a very real danger that America’s children face on this most hallowed of evenings: cars.
That’s because pedestrians under the age of 18 are three times more likely to be struck and killed by a car on Halloween than any other day of the year. That risk grows to 10 times more likely for children aged 4 to 8 years old, according to a study from 2019 in JAMA Pediatrics.
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But what happens on Halloween isn’t an isolated incident. After gun injuries, motor vehicle injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the US overall. And with pedestrian fatalities (both adult and child) at a 40-year high in the US, it’s worth asking why children roaming the streets is so inherently deadly, and what can be done about it.
“Sometimes when you talk about this issue, you get pushback from people and people say, ‘Well, of course, you have more children on the streets, of course, more children are going to die,’” Doug Gordon, a writer and podcast host who advocates for safer streets and cities, told me. “But that accepts a baseline level of danger that I think we as a society have in fact accepted on the other 364 days of the year.”
In the first of many papers expected from the study, the researchers found that, a year after the ultra-low emissions zone took effect, 2 out of every 5 London students in the study had switched from “passive” to “active” ways of getting to school. So instead of being chauffeured to school by their parents, the students started walking, biking, scootering, or taking public transit. On the other hand, in Luton, which acted as a control group, 1 in 5 made the same switch to modes that got them up and active, but an equal proportion switched to passive travel. But in London’s ultra-low emissions zone, shifting to driving was rare.
The implications of getting kids active, even if it’s just for their pre-class commute, are intuitive but important.
“Walking and biking and scootering to school is better for the child, better for the family, and better for the environment,” said Alison Macpherson, an epidemiologist at York University in Toronto who researches ways to protect and promote the health and safety of children. (She was not involved in the London study.)
“It’s a great way for children to start their day,” she said. “You can imagine just being thrown in a car and thrown out of a car is not the most calming way.” Walking or biking to school, on the other hand, can be calming and conducive to concentration, Macpherson said, potentially even improving academic performance. But perhaps most importantly, at a time when an epidemic of childhood obesity is on the rise worldwide, walking or wheeling to and from school can get kids more active.
What do housing, transit and lifestyle statistics have to do with loneliness and unhappiness, you might ask. Well, I don’t think it’s a reach to suggest that separating people physically also leads to emotional and psychological separation. Moreover, the implements that make sprawl-induced physical separation work on a societal level — cars to contract long distances and digital media to ameliorate the effects of social isolation — deepen loneliness and unhappiness on the personal level. These implements also make people sedentary, directly relating to the fact that 73% of the total American population is overweight and 42% is obese, per the CDC.
One of the biggest issues is population density. At the risk of oversimplifying, it’s a lot harder to socially isolate when there are people around you.
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.
Most climate advocates have, I think rightfully, moved away from anything that is focused on this type of personal sacrifice. Land use changes mistakenly get lumped in with this strain of environmentalism. People think that we are going to have to force people to live in places they don’t want to live and that will be unpopular.
The reality is the opposite. We are currently forcing many Americans to live in auto-dependent, low-density places where they don’t want to live. Many of these folks would choose to live in walkable, urban neighborhoods if they could. This dynamic is most easily seen in the long history of surveys that ask Americans if they would rather live in a smaller home that is in a walkable neighborhood close to amenities and jobs or a larger home where you have to drive to get to those same things. While it’s true that a majority of Americans pick the bigger home, a large minority, 42% in Pew Research’s 2023 survey, choose the smaller home near amenities. The problem is that, today, very little of the US fits the preferences of that 42%.
In Smart Growth America’s 2023 Foot Traffic Ahead report, only 1.2% of neighborhoods in the 35 largest metropolitan areas met these criteria. This huge disparity in supply and demand has also contributed to big price premiums for more compact walkable neighborhoods. Many millions of Americans want to choose the smaller home that is close to things, but single-family zoning, large lot-size requirements, and a thicket of other regulations severely limit our ability to build new walkable neighborhoods and also make it hard to add homes in these existing neighborhoods. To get more climate-friendly land use patterns, we don’t need to force people against their will: we just need to remove those limitations so the 40% of Americans who are locked out of these neighborhoods can live where they want.
Part 1 here. Parts 3 and 4 still to come, apparently.
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.