Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (60 page)

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In Sarasota County, Florida, for example, Minicozzi found that it would take about three times as long for the county to recoup the land and infrastructure costs involved in developing housing in a sprawl pattern as compared with downtown. If all went well, the county’s return on investment for sprawl housing would still be barely 4 percent.

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The productive richness of the new Asheville approach becomes even clearer when you consider the geographic path taken by dollars spent at local businesses. Money spent at small and local businesses tends to stay in a community, producing more local jobs, while money spent at big national chains tends to get sucked out of the local economy. Local businesses tend to use local accountants, printers, lawyers, and advertisers, and their owners spend more of their profits in town. National retailers, on the other hand, tend to send such work back to regional or national hubs, and their profits to distant shareholders. Every $100 spent at a local business produces at least a third more local economic benefit and more than a third more local jobs. The arrival of a Walmart in any community has been shown to produce a blast radius of lower wages and higher poverty.

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About 73 percent of the retail price of gas and 86 percent of the retail price of a new car immediately leaves the local economy, according to a report by CEOs for Cities.

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According to the National Association of Realtors “2011 Community Preference Survey,” eight in ten people still say they would prefer to live in single-family detached houses over other types of housing such as town houses, condominiums, or apartments.

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In Tachieva’s opinion, this even means offering tax incentives for builders of multistory parking garages, the argument being that such garages attract needed customers to denser retail nodes in suburbia, making them robust and busy enough to warrant the construction of public transit in the future. Transportation activists argue that good public transit should come first. It’s a chicken-and-egg argument that has gone on for years. Whoever is right, we do know that without either ample parking or sexy public transit, retailers simply won’t occupy new space.

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Sociologists have found that even the materials used to clad a home’s facade can shape visitors’ perceptions about the resident’s personality. If a house is clad with wooden shingles, for example, people are more likely to think that its owners are artsy, friendly, and of a relatively high social class. Red brick suggests that they are not so artistic, but still friendly and high in social standing. If we see cinder block, we tend to lump the occupants in with the unfriendly, the inartistic, and the low class. Stucco gets the lowest status rating of all.

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As proof of a high-level conspiracy between local planners, national governments, and the United Nations, opponents point to Agenda 21, an action plan adopted after the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when 178 governments resolved to consider the environmental impacts of development. Ironically, the first time most urban planners ever hear of Agenda 21 is when Tea Party activists bring it up at public consultation meetings.

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Jon Orcutt, Sadik-Khan’s senior policy adviser, had been executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and a
Streetsblog
contributor. Assistant commissioner Andy Wiley-Schwartz came from Project for Public Spaces. Deputy commissioner for planning and sustainability Bruce Schaller had consulted for Transportation Alternatives (TA). The group’s director of communications, Dani Simons, became the DOT’s director of e-media. Ryan Russo, a TA activist in Brooklyn known for his custom orange bike, became the DOT’s director of street management and safety. Chris Hrones, a volunteer for Naparstek’s Grand Army Plaza Coalition, was hired as the DOT’s Downtown Brooklyn coordinator. Mike Flynn, who worked with Naparstek’s Park Slope Neighbors group, was hired as the DOT’s director of capital planning.

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Semenza is now so convinced of the City Repair model’s power for building social connections that he promotes it as a public health intervention in his work with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Specifically, he sees it as a way to keep vulnerable people alive during the extreme weather events that climate change is making more common.

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Kim’s father, Randy Strausser, has moved, too. In 2011 he and his wife, Julie, gave up on Mountain House and moved to Discovery Bay Golf and Country Club, another twenty minutes away from his work in the Bay Area. Around that time, he was also involved in a car accident (his fourth in twenty years) on his long commute. The truck was totaled, but Randy was unhurt. He has now upgraded to a bigger, safer truck. He has been making friends on the golf course.