Connectivity in Community

Recorded on Opening Day for baseball!

Today the Generation on the Rise crew (minus Brandon Ford who is galavanting around Ireland with an ICMA team) steps up to bat and the field is wide open on the topic of connectivity. Although the vision is alluring, it is also a technical rabbit hole. But well worth the effort if you are interested in taking on connectivity in your community.

Host Eden Ratliff goes toe to toe with Dave Pribulka and Nancy J Hess on how and when we see connectivity happening in local government.

Eden, Dave, and Nancy dig into the Strong Towns movement, multimodal transportation, and the tension between walkability ideals and the hard economics of development. From Nancy’s memory of walking to work in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to Dave’s Vancouver revelation, from Greencastle sidewalks to Charlottesville’s radical parking-free experiment, this conversation travels far to make a local point: the decisions managers and elected officials make about streets, sidewalks, and parking minimums are fundamentally decisions about who gets the advantage and and how connectivity impacts the larger system.

Part urban planning seminar, part management mentorship, all great conversation.

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QUOTES:

"The essential tension is: how does local government policymaking actually shape the community and the culture?" - Nancy

"This is a car-centric country, but that doesn't mean we need to be a car-centric community. That's a hot take. You can really start to unpack that." - Eden

"The more we invest in this connectivity and infrastructure, the higher it drives housing prices and the more it's gonna push out the people that need it the most — 'cause they don't have cars or other means of transportation." — Dave

"They did not (by the way) ruin the city because there's no parking requirements. People work it out." - Eden

"It's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. You've gotta really be partnered with a developer that's gonna be willing to take a little risk." — Dave

"In the comprehensive plan it talks about trails and connectivity a lot, and it was very community led — the community was all for it. But when it comes time to build that trail in front of your house, all of a sudden your opinion changed. So he would say: sell the romance." - Eden

"Always be thinking five, ten years down the road. Because if we are so laser-focused on the issues in front of our nose today, we're not going to be setting our communities up for success in the years ahead." - Dave

I went back to OhioBut my pretty countrysideHad been paved down the middleBy a government that had no pride

The farms of OhioHad been replaced by shopping mallsAnd Muzak filled the airFrom Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls

Said, ay, oh, way to go, Ohio - Lyrics to OHIO by Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders

-Nancy’s experience of returning to her home in Ohio.

" ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.’ That was our mantra. We saw it coming and we didn't do our part. I wish we would've done more to protest — but here we are." - Nancy, referring to Joni Mitchell’s 1970 folkson

🚗 Hot Takes for Managers | Connectivity

* “Car-centric country ≠ car-centric community.” You don’t have to accept the infrastructure you inherited. Even small towns with tiny budgets can move the needle — painted crosswalks, one sidewalk, one park trail. Start somewhere.

* The parking minimum is a small business killer. Every space you require a developer to build is real estate that priced out the coffee shop that would have made your downtown worth visiting. Know your ordinance. Consider what you’re actually asking for.

* Sell the romance, not the project. When your community loves trails in the abstract but hates the one going past their yard, stop arguing the specifics. Zoom out. Connect the project to the vision they already said they wanted in the comprehensive plan.

* Onboard elected officials before they’re sworn in. Eden’s pre-election onboarding meetings include trying on fire gear, checking out police cars, a frank conversation about property rights law…. “You can’t just say no” is much easier to hear before the vote, not after.

* If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in trouble. Build your team of consultants, solicit, and engineers. Enable them to speak up. Your job is to grease the wheels — not to be the wheel.

* Vancouver is the benchmark. Build toward it anyway. You can’t retrofit your nineteenth-century borough into a complete streets city overnight. But you can make one block more walkable this year. And the next. That’s how Phoenixville happened.