UCSB’s Dr. Clayton Nall came to USC’s Price School to give a talk for the Bedrosian Center, and in it he presents some of his really good experimental work, partnered with William Marble, on home ownership and political ideology, helping us understand why people in ostensibly progressive enclaves like Berkeley can be so unwiling to allow inclusion via new housing.

I have THOTS, but let’s get you to Clayton’s excellent material first. Here is the highlight reel/trailer:

And here’s the full talk if you want to hop right on in:

Here’s my blather:

I meant to post about this really nice presentation from USCB’s Clayton Nall ages ago, but I forgot, and then Clayton piped up on Twitter over the weekend and I remembered. I was kvetching about Ezra Klein’s piece over the NYT last week about supposedly liberal California not delivering on progressive housing goals.

The most you can say about the Ezra Klein piece is that is he is not wrong about California failing to on progressive social promises, particularly housing. Lefties who exist to scold each other eat that stuff up, and thus I had this column all over my various timelines. The problem is the premise: California is not a particularly progressive place, it never has been–except as an imaginary construction for those who want it to stand for whatever abstract point they want to make about politics. CA’s early colonial politics were vicious (including indigenous enslavement); CA’s spatial politics regarding early Chinese immigrants were also vicious; CA has a long and disgraceful affection for sterilizing women from marginalized group that extended into the 2010s. That’s to name just a few obvious human rights abuses of many here. California in part brought us modern US conservatism–through John Birch, Howard, Jarvis, and Ronald Reagen. Californians routinely pass bone-headedly reactionary referenda from Prop 13 to Prop 8 to Prop 209 to last year’s damn mess, but particularly Prop 22. There are more registered Republicans in California than residents of many other states. The proper headline of any piece on CA should really be “place not particuarly liberal, except in the culture war imaginations of conservatives who hate gays and Hollywood, not really delivering on liberal ideals.”

There are some issues where Calfornia really does fall into that category; we (probably) won’t be the state drafting “If a woman has an abortion, she should be flogged to death on television on a new reality tv show” laws. And gun control. And I am grateful for those things.

California is better understood, like most of the US outside of New England, as a place where the governing ethics center primarily on exploiting land for wealth for white people. Yes, the US is a constitutional republic, and you can analyze its institutions that way, but development politics make a lot more sense if you set aside Federalist papers propaganda and just think about things from the perspective of settler colonialism, replicated again and again and again using various policies, practices, and regimes.

When you look at things that way, you have a ready explanation for why Democrats and Republicans don’t really differ all that much on their behavior regarding class politics and land development. You can scold and shame and harangue progressives about their lack of virtue if you want to, but as long as individual and family welfare is as tied to individual property ownership as it is in the US, you are going to have a struggle on your hands with home owners being way too risk averse to allow change. (This even includes things likely to put money in their wallets, including amenities like a rail station. )

I reaaaaaaalllly wanted to write on this topic but I never got around to it and I am really really glad that Kate Lowe and Joe Grengs did because I think it’s an important topic: it’s clear that the primary beneficiaries of streetcar projects are the landowners that surround them. Streetcars are not easy sells in terms of mobility; they are circulators. How many car trips they actually “take off the road” is a dubious conjecture, but they are fun to ride, contribute to defining districts, and circulators are really useful in the places that have them. (Those alone strike me as good enough reasons to do them even if they do not do much to fight climate change or any of the great big goals we planners tend to attach to things.)

The Detroit example shows philanthropy directed at just such a project, and I think Lowe and Grengs are more fair and less critical than I am about treating the Detroit streetcar as mobility rather than as a simple land amenity. By most indicators, this is businesses and elites doing fairly standard philanthropy: it doesn’t alter power relations, and it’s ultimately done for their own private interests. Again, I have no real problem with that except to the degree that there has been the temptation to act like these arrangements are the future of transport finance, and as Lowe and Grengs show, it’ll take a lot of changes to this model to make it workable outside the context of this one project.

Here is the citation and the link. It’s behind a paywall, but if you ask me or the author, I suspect we can find you a copy of it:

Lowe K, Grengs J. Private Donations for Public Transit: The Equity Implications of Detroit’s Public–Private Streetcar. Journal of Planning Education and Research. 2020;40(3):289-303. doi:10.1177/0739456X18761237

Transportation agencies are increasingly seeking private sector funding, but resulting deals have implications beyond specific projects. We analyze the broader regional and equity impacts of private funding by examining Detroit’s donation-funded streetcar. Despite potential negative consequences for transit-dependent populations, the longer-term political will forged through streetcar planning has a contingent possibility to enhance regional transit. In addition to donations, the streetcar relies on public sector funds, but we found limited public influence to ensure collective transportation benefits. A federal-level actor did mandate that a regional transit agency form, but more systematic public action is needed.

Ok, I am violating my sabbatical commitment to read books and look at roses, but this piece from Dr. Jenny Schuetz at Brookings crossed my desk, and I want to talk about one part of it. First, in the interest of full disclosure, I think the world of Dr. Schuetz; I think she’s right about a lot of things and is a wonderful policy analyst. And I also understand the pressures of putting together blog post after blog post.

This one, I just disagree with. I’ve lived in cities where public housing was fine, but I don’t actually have a sense of what role public housing should play within the larger portfolio of American housing strategies. I haven’t thought about it systematically. I’m sure she’s right in that it’s not “the solution” but even upzoning, which would be a boon, doen’t strike me as “the solution” because housing, like most important things in life, is not a single-solution policy domain. I’ve never heard anybody say public housing is “the solution.” It’s a tool among many other tools. How that tool should be deployed, I don’t know, but I won’t dismiss it out of hand because I’ll take any tool I can get.

But one argument from the Brooking piece slapped me in the eyeball and we need to talk about it, and that’s this:

PUBLIC AGENCIES AREN’T DESIGNED TO BE REAL ESTATE DEVELOPERS

Proposals for “the government” to build public housing are often vague about which agency or department they mean. While funding for public housing originates at the federal level, the properties are operated by more than 3,300 local housing authorities across the country. And most of them don’t have recent experience with new construction—a long, complicated, risky business under the best of circumstances. Public agencies operate under more rigid rules and processes than private sector companies as well; for instance, procurement and labor requirements that make construction substantially more difficult and more expensive.

I get that we are now in the era of real estate specializations at universities where real estate is a very specialized thing that only certain people with certain qualifications supposedly do, but this argument is wrong the minute you step outside of housing. It MAY be that local governments do not develop much *housing*, but if there is one thing governments in the United States do as a matter of routine, it’s develop land and buildings. From bus garages to courthouses to libraries to police stations to animal shelters, etc., subnational governments maintain large real estate portfolios. The idea they are somehow incapable or less capable of managing a construction project simply ignores all the real estate that governments DO build and maintain. Governments can build bridges and dams that stand up for a century and a space program AND all the transit for the T part of TOD, but nope, an apartment complex next to the T is somehow just not something that governments can do.

The US is not called a settler-colonial state for nothing.

But let’s get to housing. Every single college student living in a dorm at a state university, from Fresno State to Applachia State to all those students at snooty UCs….all of them are living in housing constructed and maintained by public agencies. Jails, even though we all hate them, are routinely built and maintained by governments (as well as private entities, sure), but they house quite a few people. There is at any given time in the Indian Ocean at least one Nimitz class aircraft carrier that houses 8,000 people *on a boat*, which is a tiny fraction of what the US military does to house its members.

Now, all of these things are, I guess, outside the realm of “housing” but that doesn’t mean we should assume that governments are just bad at developing housing or that they don’t do it. Governments develop buildings in concert with private companies all the time, and quite often, entirely competently.

My WordPress is acting wonky so I shall stop as I’ve made my point. We could argue that private sector entities would be ever so much better at doing all the development that governments do in all sectors, not just housing, that’s fine, but let’s not act like American governments can’t develop real estate. They do it all the time.

Ok, I am going to have to admit to being a little bit of a Tore Sager fangirl because I pretty much love everything they write and everything they write about and the way they write about it and am really jealous that I didn’t write all the things they did. Like every single time they publish a thing, I’m sad I didn’t write it because it’s so good and important. So now that the introductory breathless fangirling is out of the way, let’s get to the breathless fangirling about the actual content.

Planning has a problem with democracy; not that planners themselves are anti-democratic or pro-democratic themselves, it’s just that planning as a field relies on its legitimacy to no small degree via the notion that we can help foster a deliberative, democratic decision-making about place futures. The problem we have is that democracies can do terrible things, and that plenty of democratic preferences are really shitty. Lots people in neighborhoods want to keep people out, and that is a democratic preference, and it’s generally not a good a good one. (sometimes it’s warranted, other times it is just an impulse to maintain privilege.)

Sager speaks directly to our times with a discussion of what planners should be doing to refute the Schmittian authoritarian populism that has swept across multiple nations, including my own, with things like Trumpism. Trumpism is avowedly anti-urban, and we owe its adherents no deference just because they hold their preferences with passion or because they have coalesced into a political force.

This is in some ways not a happy or hopeful paper, but it is a VERY useful paper for understanding the profession in our current political context.

It’s not paywalled, so you can go read it noooooow:

1. Sager T. Populists and planners: ‘We are the people. Who are you?’*. Planning Theory. 2020;19(1):80-103. doi:10.1177/1473095219864692

The purpose of this article is to offer planning scholars a basis for criticizing authoritarian populism and not limiting ideological critique to neoliberalism. Authoritarian populism is anti-elitist, anti-pluralist and excluding in that the authentic people includes only part of the population. Authoritarian populists imagine a homogeneous people whose will determines policy. The article deals with confrontations and contact points between communicative planning theory and populist currents. It distils several core themes from five authoritative collections of works on planning theory and examines their relations with populist ideas. Authoritarian populism is an incomplete ideology that can fuse with various other ideologies. Amalgamations of populism and neoliberalism pose new challenges to participatory planning. Authoritarian populism criticizes planning institutions for blocking the immediate realization of the will of the people and being sympathetic to social diversity and cultural influence threatening heartland values. Neoliberalism is opposed to the welfare policies, equity goals, growth restrictions and other public interventions associated with spatial planning. Joint pressure from the two ideologies may alter the planning of liberal democracies in an autocratic direction.

Rent burden describes much of a person’s or family’s income goes towards paying the rent. We have maps that show rent burden, we have data; we assume we know what we are talking about when we say the “rent burden is too high.”

But we really don’t. That’s why this research is so important: instead of burden being an abstraction, the survey conducted at the Center for Social Innovation delves into how rent burden dampens peoples’s ability to flourish in health and employment as well. Rent burden is a long-term barrier to community development and empowerment. These effects were in place even before the coronavirus, so that calls for extending an enforcing eviction bans are even more important now.

You can watch the researchers here in a highlights video if you are short on time.

Here is the link to the full talk.

OMG YAYYYYYYYYYYYY this is a wonderful paper in so many regards. I have struggled in my undergraduate class, and in my own writing about perceptions of security, that planning has a deeply impoverished view of security: rejecting surveillance cameras (sure, no problem but then what? acting like bad things don’t happen is not an option) and then often glossing security as being unimportant, or just responding “Oh, the way to be safe is eyes on the street”, echoing Jane Jacobs, which again, is fine, but white shopkeepers and white eyes on the street are calling the cops on Black people and that doesn’t seem to be keeping people particularly safe, now does it?

This paper is both a wonderful theoretical contribution that recasts security as embedded in community and in “generative refusal” and it also is a fine case study on art and organizing to undo the erasure of settler colonial violence in urban locales.

Read it, just read it.

Here is the citation and the link. It’s behind a paywall, but I suspect we can find you a copy of it:

Dorries H, Harjo L. Beyond Safety: Refusing Colonial Violence Through Indigenous Feminist Planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research. 2020;40(2):210-219. doi:10.1177/0739456X19894382

Settler colonial violence targets Indigenous women in specific ways. While urban planning has attended to issues of women’s safety, the physical dimensions of safety tend to be emphasized over the social and political causes of women’s vulnerability to violence. In this paper, we trace the relationship between settler colonialism and violence against Indigenous women. Drawing on examples from community activism and organizing, we consider how Indigenous feminism might be applied to planning and point toward approaches to planning that do not replicate settler colonial violence.

Ok, I know diddly squat about Ghana other than I enjoyed my visit, and I also know diddly squat about flooding, but I LOVE how these authors use assemblage as both a theoretical approach and *almost* a method in constructing the comparative case studies of Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama, two informal settlements.

Assemblage theory is an ontological approach developed by Giles Deleuze Félix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I do not feel qualified to really present the approach, but it seems to me that Amoaka and Frimpong Boamah do a great job of taking it down from the clouds, as it were, and really unlocking the potential of the approach to help us understand how and why vulnerability to flooding happens. It releases the research from the demands of a paradigm: you don’t have to have supply or demand variables. You just examine the variables, knowing they are mutually constituted and influencing, and explore how they are assembling in the context.

My PhD students read the paper with me. There are a couple places in the cases where I think the narrative gets a muddled, but that happens to all of us and it doesn’t negate the fact that this is a very nice exemplar of really using theory to deepen empirical work.

Here is the citation and the link. It’s behind a paywall, but , I suspect we can find you a copy of it if you request it:

Clifford Amoako & Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah (2020) Becoming Vulnerable to Flooding: An Urban Assemblage View of Flooding in an African City, Planning Theory & Practice, 21:3, 371-391, DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2020.1776377

Assemblage thinking has emerged over the last two decades as an important theoretical framework to interrogate emerging complex socio-material phenomenon in cities. This paper deploys the assemblage lens to unpack the vulnerability of informal communities to flood hazards in an African city. Focusing on Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama, the largest informal settlements in Accra, Ghana, this paper employs multiple methods including archival analysis, institutional surveys, focus group discussions, and mini-workshops to study the processes of exposure and vulnerability to flood hazards in these two communities. We find that being vulnerable to flood hazards in these informal settlements emerges from historically contingent, co-constitutive processes and actants: the city officials’ modernist imaginaries and socio-cultural identities of residents in informal settlements; the social material conditions experienced by residents in these settlements; and the translocal learning networks of government and non-government actors that simultaneously (re)produce oppressive urban planning policies and grassroots resistance to these policies. The paper concludes with a call to urban planners and allied built environment practitioners to understand flood vulnerability as both a process and product of these complex interactions.

I admit, I am one of those people who does all the eye-rolling when city science comes up because it way-too-often comes in the following form: Planners Have Failed to Solve the City, and Thus SCIENTISTS with their RIGOR are here to help. And then it boils down to a bunch of atheoretical and dehumanized equations, sometimes with BIG DATA attached.

In this “debate” piece, James Duminy and Susan Parnell say “not so fast, and don’t be so darn biased in your thinking” and they are, in general, right that knee-jerk dismissals are lazy and, over time, likely to be wrong. Now, I have to say, I am not convinced ulitimately by what they have here–they have reconceptualized science in ways that I suspect are really useful in order that there might be a possibility of city science, which is theoretically intereting but I suspect would make many a scientist get squinky. (That doesn’t disqualify the reconceptualization.) I do think they are onto something when they say perhaps the general model for a city science could come from citizen science (interesting). That releases the possibiities from the strangulation of academic hierachies in the first place. And they are right; if you dismiss it as impossible, you miss what it is possible to show with it.

I always like essays that make me examine my own intellectual biases and this one did it.

This baby does NOT have a paywall so you can go ahead and read it from here.

James Duminy & Susan Parnell (2020) City Science: A Chaotic Concept – And an Enduring Imperative, Planning Theory & Practice, 21:4, 648-655, DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2020.1802155

Debates surrounding the ‘new’ city sciences are polarized. On the one hand, a new generation of tech-savvy data scientists, spatial modellers, and analysts confidently express their ability to predict and explain city processes at unprecedented scales of complexity. On the other hand, those trained to see the world as fundamentally shaped by contingent meanings and subjectivities may see in such approaches little more than old positivism in new bottles, or perhaps a hubristic overstep of urban non-specialists onto their turf (Derudder & Van Meeteren, 2019).

A few years back, I honestly told journal editors I couldn’t review any more housing voucher studies. The field was crowded, lots of people could review the papers in question, and virtually all of them would be more qualified and more interested than me in housing vouchers. I think vouchers are solid policy, but I”ve run out things to say about them. If we aren’t going to fund them generously, there are hard limits as to what they can do for affordability, granted the wage and housing scarcity environments of large cities. (A true statement about any income support policy.)

Thus it always makes me happy to see housing research that reaches into the greater social and economic context of affordability as a context. Now, I am economically very lucky, but every time I open my utility bill in southern California, I have to take several deep breaths and sit down because my head *swims*. Utilitie are expensive, and while I know my specific context is special, utilties for rental houses can’t be that much less mine. Furthermore, one of the ways that climate change is going to hurt people is through their utility bills, where at least some are going to have to make choices between paying more and letting Grandma struggle during heat waves.

Kontokosta, Reina, and Bonczak take up this question about how utility costs factor into the transportation-housing cost nexus using a dataset that planners don’t tend to use much.

Here is the citation and the link. It’s behind a paywall, but if you ask me or the author, I suspect we can find you a copy of it between the two of us.

Constantine E. Kontokosta, Vincent J. Reina & Bartosz Bonczak (2020) Energy Cost Burdens for Low-Income and Minority Households, Journal of the American Planning Association, 86:1, 89-105, DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2019.1647446

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Of the three primary components of housing affordability measures—rent, transportation, and utilities—utility costs are the least understood yet are the one area where the cost burden can be reduced without household relocation. Existing data sources to estimate energy costs are limited to surveys with small samples and low spatial and temporal resolution, such as the American Housing Survey and the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. In this study, we present a new method for small-area estimates of household energy cost burdens (ECBs) that leverages actual building energy use data for approximately 13,000 multifamily properties across five U.S. cities and links energy costs to savings opportunities by analyzing 3,000 energy audit reports. We examine differentials in cost burdens across household demographic and socioeconomic characteristics and analyze spatial, regional, and building-level variations in energy use and expenditures. Our results show the average low-income household has an ECB of 7%, whereas higher income households have an average burden of 2%. Notably, even within defined income bands, minority households experience higher ECBs than non-Hispanic White households. For lower income households, low-cost energy improvements could reduce energy costs by as much as $1,500 per year.

Takeaway for practice: In this study we attempt to shift the focus of energy efficiency investments to their impact on household cost burdens and overall housing affordability. Our analysis explores new and unique data generated from measurement-driven urban energy policies and shows low-income households disproportionately bear the burden of poor-quality and energy-inefficient housing. Cities can use these new data resources and methods to develop equity-based energy policies that treat energy efficiency and climate mitigation as issues of environmental justice and that apply data-driven, targeted policies to improve quality of life for the most vulnerable urban residents.

I’m interested in forecasting in the same way I am interested in divination. If planning is really about trying to create future imaginaries and understanding futures, forecasting is its quantitive arm. Today’s entry in the stuff I’ve enjoyed reading this year is about how experts who work with forecasts understand them. Transit New Start project forecasts have improved over time—which makes sense. The more people do, the better we get at it; the more projects we start, the more data on passenger behavior we get.

(People used to get mad at me because I was appalled at the CA HSR cost projections and not the ridership projections, but I stand my ground on that. HSR in CA would be an entirely new service. But we should know full damn well how much it costs to pour concrete in California. Passenger forecasts are extremely hard in my mind, for a lot of reasons that not the fault of either the analysts or the project promoters. That said, the incentive to diddle them is real and there’s a reason for the upward bias.)

This is a neat paper because she’s able to interview at least one person associated with all of the 82 New Start Projects that have been funded. It’s nice to see them all examined in retrospect. I look forward to seeing more of Voulgaris’ ideas here. One thing I’ve really wished for is that planners are not the only people who introduce new services, and I wonder sometimes if the world of market research and social marketing would yield some interesting insights on the field of passenger forecasts in transit and in influencing people to try transit.

Here is the citation and the link. It’s behind a paywall, but if you ask me or the author, I suspect we can find you a copy of it between the two of us.

Carole Turley Voulgaris (2020) What Is a Forecast for?, Journal of the American Planning Association, 86:4, 458-469, DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2020.1746191

The forecasts transit agencies submit in support of applications for federal New Starts funding have historically overestimated ridership, as have ridership forecasts for rail projects in several countries and contexts. Forecast accuracy for New Starts projects has improved over time. Understanding the motivations of forecasters to produce accurate or biased forecasts can help forecast users determine whether to trust new forecasts. For this study I interviewed 13 transit professionals who have helped prepare or evaluate applications for federal New Starts funds. This sample includes interviewees who have had varying levels of involvement in all 82 New Starts projects that opened between 1976 and 2016. I recruited interviewees through a snowball sampling method; my interviews focus on the interviewees’ perspectives on how New Starts project evaluation and ridership forecasting has changed over time. Interview results suggest that ridership forecasters’ motivations to produce accurate forecasts may have increased with increased transparency, increased influence on local decision making, and decreased influence on external (federal) funding.

Takeaway for practice: Planners can evaluate the likely trustworthiness of forecasts based on transparency, internal influence, and external influence. If forecast users cannot easily determine a forecast’s key inputs and assumptions, if the forecaster has been tasked with producing a forecast to justify a predetermined action, and if an unfavorable forecast would circumvent decisions by the forecaster’s immediate client, forecasts should viewed with skepticism. Planners should seek to alter conditions that may create these conflicts of interest. Forecasters seem to be willing and able to improve forecast accuracy when the demand for accurate forecasts increases.