Placemaking in Olympia

From Christopher Alexander’s, A Timeless Way of Building

6. The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent that they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in inner conflict.

7. The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it grows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.

8. And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created by the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.

Has any place in Olympia ever done this to you?

Reference: Alexander, Christopher, The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. x-xi

Additional Thoughts on Olympia’s Community Renewal Projects

On April 19, 2012, the Land Use Committee of the Olympia City Council will consider whether to take the next step on the Community Renewal Area. This decision is not without theoretic and actual controversy. In fact, there is a marvelous piece on California’s experience with them in a publication called Forefront (apparently the first of what I hope will be many issues) published weekly by the Next American City, a 501(c)3 organization.  (I am particularly pleased with the terrific analysis of undesirable consequences of regulation and results of concentrating capital even with the greatest of good intentions.)

Let me jump to the central criticisms:

Throughout 2011, redevelopment agencies did something that they had never had to do in the previous 57 years since the formal establishment of redevelopment: They tried to explain to the public what they did and why they deserved to exist. It didn’t work.

Numerous surveys taken during this time indicate that redevelopment agencies’ lack of transparency, reported cozy relationships with developers and occasional but highly controversial use of eminent domain struck skepticism in the hearts of voters. And for every triumphant project that agencies trumpeted, residents suspected that there were untold thousands that conferred little, or no, benefit on their cities — or even worse, had an adverse effect.

But while public perceptions tended towards the cynical, some cities did manage to leverage TIF money in ways that helped their residents.

Before it became the home of the Internet and social networking billionaires, the Bay Area had been the industrial heart of the West Coast, with shipyards and steel mills ringing the bay. When those industries faded, they left places like Emeryville: Flat, toxic landfills with million-dollar views. Redevelopment money paid for environmental remediation, and from the 1980s onward the city implemented an aggressive plan to build apartment towers, retail, hotels and office towers, which have all sprouted proudly. It seems like half the Bay Area’s bachelor pads are furnished by its Ikea store.

“Emeryville was a post-industrial wasteland and we put in major infrastructure,” said Cappio, redevelopment director for the city from 1995 to 2000. She credits the city’s redevelopment agency, with its power of TIF, for making the transformation happen.

But successes like Cappio’s in Emeryville are, unfortunately, the exception. And the majority of project areas remain in various states of disrepair — as if after decades, the work of transforming communities may never be finished.

The white paper on Community Renewal that the Land Use Committee packet contained is sparse on the topic of financing. In Washington these tools described above are known by different names and are not exactly the same thing as what the article above describes. The most prominent and general tools are Community Revitalization Financing RCW 39.88 and Community Revitalization Financing RCW 39.89. However, the basic idea  is the same: An area is designated as a renewal area because it falls within the definition of blighted. (The article details the development agencies’ depressing abuse of that definition).

In California, as in the 48 other states that use versions of it, local entities harvest the so-called “tax increment” that arises in areas designated for redevelopment. As property values rise, a certain portion of the property tax increases get reinvested into further redevelopment in the designated area, rather than going to the general use fund that typically captures property tax dollars. The whole arrangement is known as tax increment financing, or TIF. Redevelopment agencies do not directly develop property, but they do nearly everything else: They create redevelopment plans, fund local infrastructure improvements, assemble parcels, assist developers, broker deals and sell bonds to pay for all of the above.

The white paper details the city’s ability to designate a commission that operates independently of the City Council and isn’t necessarily subject to the same citizen oversight that a government would be. I don’t know exactly what the LUC has in mind, but I’m not sure they do either. As I mentioned earlier, they are deciding on April 19, 2012 whether to hire a consultant who I presume would then come up with a proposal that the City Council would adopt.

Until I have a much clearer idea of what the Council has in mind, I’m against them moving forward with a CRA. I have great concerns about externalizing governmental functions; I am sure to disagree with their use of the word blight, and I think thus far the city staff and Council have a poor conception of the reasons downtown (where I presume redevelopment auger is pointed) is underdeveloped. I’ve said elsewhere that downtown hasn’t developed because people in Olympia don’t want to live downtown. I’m extremely interested in the soon to be online apartments in the Cunningham Building, but I have a hard time thinking the Condo market here will ever heat up because the prices of condominium and houses are too close to make the latter a financially attractive development project. I hate the idea of another unaccountable entity making decisions about the downtown that I personally frequent, and I am opposed to the use of any city funds toward more subjective, pie in the sky fantasies (“a family friendly and welcoming downtown”—ugh this isn’t Celebration, FL). This is simply more of the same public subsidies for private benefit and it’s doubly depressing to see it happening locally.

Is Collaborative Planning Possible?

I wrote earlier about general problems of writing about planning and land use and about the basis of those problems which I believe arise from the widely divergent views people have about their communities. Now we can now explore conclusions and discuss what options we have in overcoming these problems.

The Atlantic uses the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative as an example of community planning gone right.

Amazingly, this distressed neighborhood began organizing to save, restore, and improve its community fabric back in the 1980s, long before “revitalization” or “smart growth” had become part of the everyday lexicon of planners and environmentalists such as yours truly. Plagued by severe disinvestment, illegal dumping of all sorts of waste, and with more than a third of its lots vacant, the Dudley residents over a period of several years got rid of the trash, stopped the dumping, gained control of the vacant properties, and undertook long-term planning based on the community’s own vision of an “urban village.”

You can read the whole story in the book, Streets of Hope. The major concession that this neighborhood group won was eminent domain in order to condemn undesirable properties which they were later put to more desirable use. Cities generally don’t hand that out willy nilly and in fact Dudley Street is one of the only examples that I know of this happening. It was granted to a severely distressed neighborhood where the city likely thought it had nothing to lose. I cannot imagine Olympia’s City Council would ever dream of doing such a thing, though as I mentioned, they’re looking at a consultant to help them optimize their use of those powers through a Community Renewal Area.

Otherwise, I have heard, read, and participated in several other examples of community planning, but they were usually hypothetical rather than actual planning. TRPC often conducts group planning sessions where for example, people use Legos to plan over a map of their city to help determine how they would like to see the city continue to develop. Unless the developer is sitting at the same table, with the land in question already under contract, it’s little more than a theoretical exercise and perhaps even a rhetorical one (e.g. “where are all the houses going to be built?”). The same goes for neighborhood scale planning. That was a relatively hot topic among the 10-15 the community members who interacted reasonably often with the OPC while I was commissioner. You can see that it even made its way in some amorphous shape into the draft Comprehensive Plan Update. I’m not sure how much more we’ll hear about that in the future.

I think we have to look at community planning from two related but separate aspects. I remove from the realm of possibilities the idea that we could “collaborate” or crowdsource to decide the details (at least from the scale I’m talking about here) involved in planning uses, heights, ingress and egress, and setbacks. There are simply too many underlying beliefs and preferences that all of us have individually. There will always be outcomes in these kinds of activities, and consequently there will always be people who will not be satisfied with them. So I find the use of the term collaborate somewhat misplaced. I never do metaphors well, but this strikes me as the classic illustration of too many cooks in the kitchen. I don’t really want the entire community pitching ingredients to the cook that the latter is bound to use in the recipe that all of us must enjoy. I’d rather take an inventory of the pantry, and call in someone who knows how to turn that kale and couscous into something I might want to eat.

On the other hand we could perhaps agree to broad visions through a collaborative, crowd-sourced process that could take place virtually. We could tell the cook what we like to eat. I suppose—and this really gets to the heart of the Olympia Views post. In fact, the city of Olympia attempted to do so a couple of years ago as part of its Imagine Olympia campaign which resulted in some of the data that city staff used to write the draft of the Comprehensive Plan Update. I attended a portion of the focus meetings, and read all the comments submitted that gave the city staff the data apparently used to create the Comprehensive Plan Update. (I wrote about the city’s use of the data earlier which was used to draft the Comprehensive Plan Update.) On the downside, I am not sure how most of those comments could result in a broad vision that most, let alone all of us would like. Broad participation in crafting a general vision has additional problems. In fact, some of the most difficult moments of the Planning Commission that I can recall were 11 people arguing over verbiage in a letter to the City Council. (We should expect that to be at least 2/11 easier going forward.) If 11 people cannot straightforwardly craft a vision, how could 50? 100? Does a comment thread or forum help? I love reading comments (excepting you know where), but I don’t know how productive reading and responding to comments is. (By the way, this Comprehensive Plan Update was released on April 2, 2012 to much fanfare culminating in a blog post on Olyblog by Thad Curtz and a sterile article on The Olympian.)

To further compound the virtual problems, the natural and perhaps inexorable tendency, like most discourse on the internet, would probably coalesce into a few intransigent ideas spread among a few different groups. These groups would then resist previously rejected, controversial, and even new ideas because they are inconsistent with the foundational basis of the particular group. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from internet discourse, it’s if you don’t like the game, you take your ball and go home, or go join or start another group comprised of people who agree with you. And it is simply amazing what makes people take their ball and run.

So can we plan virtually? Well, we can talk about planning, but being my cynical self, I don’t think these kinds of conversations will ever directly lead to the creation of the city that all of us desire. (If you think a city can be created that all of us desire, please re-read this post.)

Maybe the value of virtual planning inures singularly to the individual participant and in that by singular action, we collectively benefit. (This is the indirect route to wherever we’re trying to go.) I’ve recently accepted the idea that thoughtful interaction can, with enough time, revise previously ingrained social conclusions through thousands of little thought bubbles metaphorically arising above individual heads over a vast social scale. It may seem like this a simplistic conclusion and maybe even an intuitive one (“duh, of course people change their minds!”). But, I cannot offer proof and on a social scale, and I can’t really offer any examples. After all, there are still plenty of us who believe that an American right is access to cheap gas.

The kinds of glacial movements I am envisioning take enough time that try the patience of those who are involved in these questions. We may well be talking about generational differences. In Olympia for example, automobile use is often completely disconnected from any other questions about land use. (In the public communication of April 12, 2012 City Council meeting, all the community members who spoke about the dog park complained about fewer parking spaces in their neighborhood.) On a community-wide scale, we accept as a given the imperative of unfettered automobile use at the same time we demand a more desirable downtown. (I see that as pulling on both ends of a knotted rope.) As I’ve said earlier, only a small percentage of people of any given community will ever be involved in planning, and the majority of those get involved with it because they oppose something. If that is generally the case, I see little hope of real collaboration across divides on any platform.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel–if it isn’t an oncoming train. I recently read Daniel Kemmis’s book, Community and the Politics of Place (Thanks for recommending this two years ago, Emmett) in which Kemmis lamented the lack of real community interaction and collaboration in the public process (especially land use and planning) because we have essentially outsourced our civic responsibilities. Rather than community collaboration, we have adopted the concept of a Procedural Republic in which our only civic obligations to the polis and therefore, each other is presenting our views during our opportunity to be heard. As logic would dictate, speaking usually means an absence of listening and true collaboration requires both. (Kemmis will return to this blog in the future.) Call me a cynic again, but I think the virtual platforms are much better suited to speaking than listening thus magnifying this problem, but perhaps that will change with time. There’s not much point in bothering with land use if we believe things will never change.

The Land Use Committee and Community Renewal Area

Our first illustration of the squishy division of authority among the Olympia City Council’s Committees is front and center this week. The Land Use Committee is considering whether to move forward on a Community Renewal Area (also known as Urban Renewal). You can find the staff report here. One of the stated purposes of the CRA is revitalizing downtown, increasing commerce, and making it a safe and welcoming place (I assume this only includes those who we actually want to welcome). These goals transcend the Land Use Committee’s grant of authority and get squarely into General Government’s purview. (I assume we’re operating on the implicit understanding that GGC won’t do anything that would inhibit LUC’s work on the CRA.)

In any case, a Community Renewal Area allows the city in question to designate an area in which it has additional powers to mitigate blighted properties. This goes beyond its powers of eminent domain through condemnation. The staff report links to a white paper on the subject that you can read here. Notice that the definition of a blighted area is one which “arrests the sound growth of the city.” (I’ll save my snarky remarks for later.) We’ll also talk more about the details once we know that this is set to go forward.

The City Council took some briefings during which they decided as you might have guessed by now, that in order to move forward the staff will need to hire a consultant to harness the CRA’s tools. The cost for this project would come from uncommitted general funds, of which I can only assume there is plenty. Thus, the City Council designated a selection committee which included a banker and after a RFP process settled on the following candidates:

A. EcoNorthwest – Abe Farkas

B. National Development Council, Michelle Morlan (you can click on her name on the lower left for what appears to be a video.)

C. Urbanists , Kurt Creager

At 5:30 April 19, 2012, the Land Use Committee (which does not handle economic development) will determine whether to move forward by designating selection criteria for adoption of the plan, the consultant to implement it, and the CRA itself. Stay tuned: someone with extraordinary powers to take on blight may be arriving downtown soon. Hopefully (s)he won’t stand in one place too long at the pain of suffering a citation for Pedestrian Interference.

So should the LUC move forward on this or not?

Olympia City Council Committees: General Government and Land Use

As promised we’re going to shift some attention away from the machinations of the Olympia Planning Commission OPC and broaden our vision to include other aspects of the City government. I’d like to focus on the General Government and Land Use Committees of the City Council. The former carry the greatest influence on the aspects of long term planning that most concern me and as readers of this post, should probably concern you most.

General Government

The General Government Committee (GGC) was created by the Olympia Municipal Code (OMC) 2.06.010 which vests it general descriptions of topics for consideration. Those topics are:  “Public safety, operational policy, economic development, housing, general government issues, boards and commissions”

In OMC 2.06.050, and 2.06.060, we find these additional responsibilities for the GGC:

“The general government committee shall also recommend to the council the name(s) of person(s) to be appointed to the various advisory boards and commissions of the city as positions thereon become vacant. Before making the recommendation, the general government committee shall seek advice from other councilmembers, advertise for opening(s) in the press and media, notify interested citizen groups and interview interested applicants.”

“The general government committee shall also recommend to the council the name(s) of councilmember(s) or other person(s) to be appointed to the various boards and committees created by interlocal agreement. Councilmembers shall be recommended for appointment to the intergovernmental committees based upon their membership in corresponding council committees.”

Land Use Committee

In the same OMC provision that gives the GCC topics, we find the following under Land Use Committee: “Planning, transportation, environment, utilities, parks, community development, neighborhoods”

Council Committees Generally

Committee assignments last for two years.

The next line of the OMC gives us some additional, and to us lawyers, unsatisfactory vesting of authority: “The committees created in this chapter shall perform such tasks in line with the subjects described in Section 2.06.010, [topics that I listed above] or as may be referred to them by the council.” (Emphasis added.)

There are a couple of reasons I’m bringing this up now: 1.) The City Council is considering an update of the Committee/Advisory Committee ordinance; and 2.) Most of the juicy decisions that affect our city—even if the repercussions of these decisions are not immediately apparent—come through these committees. For example, the GGC recommended two fewer OPC Commissioners and even when one councilmember wanted to reopen discussion on the topic, there was a general demurer under the assertion: “These are the General Government Committee’s recommendations.” The Council quickly and unanimously affirmed those recommendations.

Finally, before I rush into the items on the respective committee agendas, I need to elucidate my cryptic criticism above. I added emphases because there is what I would call a fatal ambiguity in the authority vested in these committees. The OMC contains a fairly arbitrary division of labor to these committees. For example, what is the difference between community development and economic development? Why wouldn’t the land use committee handle housing especially when it also covers neighborhoods? Furthermore, the committee vested with general government would not get into work like neighborhood planning and government which is an extremely hot button issue around here. A final example, public safety is an issue that cannot be removed from land use if either of those are to be effectively pursued. It gets worse: This “in line” language is as squishy and ambiguous as it gets for me. I hate it and you should too.

When this ordinance was created, at some point someone saw these scopes of authority as logical. Perhaps staff wrote it with the idea that it was best to keep things a little open and flexible. Olympia may have been a different place and the Council was certainly composed an entirely different group of people. This division may have been created with particular people in mind to serve on the particular committees. Now, however, it appears arbitrary and capricious. I think there are major problems in these ambiguities that will inhibit if not prevent the city (council and staff) from accomplishing its objectives.

Olympia Planning Commission in Retreat

Here is the agenda for the OPC’s retreat last weekend. I never considered attending but I appear to have missed out: they had breakout sessions, return and reports, not to mention collective patting on the back. Sounds like quite a productive use of time.

Any of you luckies out there attend? What were your thoughts? In the aftermath of group activities, pep-talk, and trust exercises, will the OPC be able to transcend the problems of the SMP and make the Comprehensive Plan Update a process productive and successful?

Say it is so.

Planning Commissioners dead. Long Live Planning Commissioners! (2012 Edition)

Last night the Olympia City Council unanimously approved the recommendations of the General Government Committee (GCC) for 2012 OPC appointments. (You can watch the video here by selecting agenda item 6C.) That means the OPC will carry forward with only nine commissioners.

The council also referred a work item to the GCC to determine the number and composition of the OPC going forward. Such action may require an amendment to the Olympia Municipal Code but will at the very least require amending the OPC bylaws. Councilmember Roe expressed a desire to get the new commissioners appointed immediately because the OPC retreat is this weekend. (Call this author pleased as punch that he isn’t obligated to attend said retreat–the only thing worse than a lot of OPC meetings is an OPC retreat.) Prior to decision, Councilmember Rogers asked Commissioners Tousley and Horn for comments regarding representation from members of the business community. Councilmember Roe demurred, stating that she did not feel it appropriate to put those commissioners on the spot. Once again the GCC recommendations were unanimously adopted.

I mentioned here that former Commissioners Wolf and Muller were not recommended for reappointment by the GGC. I noticed that the erstwhile Commissioner Muller addressed the council last night during the public communication portion of the city council meeting, but the audio is completely garbled and his comments at least for now are known only to those who were physically present in the council chambers last night. Anyone want to tell me what he said?

The Pluralistic and Individual Foundation of Olympia

I discussed the general problems with writing about land use and planning earlier. The idea there is if we do that well, we can draw in more participants, broaden our collective vision, and through continual and sustained efforts, ultimately live in a more desirable settlement. There are several problems with this idea but all of them revolve around the idea that we all see that settlement very differently—almost as if we’re not looking at the same object at all.

Any particular geographic designation, city or town, just like any actually living organism expands, declines, rots, grows, and otherwise changes for better or for worse fluidly throughout time. This change doesn’t have a point of departure—no community has ever not been in transition in some way, shape, or form. Each community changes relentlessly if not by the births and deaths of residents, then no doubt by the structures which constitute the visual fabric. This makes thinking about our communities on a social scale difficult because each of us maintains our own individual reference point. Some of us remember a beautiful building that was torn down to make way for a parking lot. Many in our senior generation still recall memories of a Thurston County without I-5. A huge percentage of us have lived in other places and see our city as what it may someday become more than what it is now. These different reference points inhibit the foundation of a broad and comprehensive vision that a broad and comprehensive narrative requires. Without the former, people are less likely to be drawn in and participate. That is one reason that so many of the most visible participants are drawn from similar socio-economic demographic designations. They share a similar vision. The most obvious example is the business community—the profit imperative cuts through other disagreements like a red hot knife through butter. For everyone else the glacial movements of a city’s amorphous social development toward one outcome or another are seen and described differently for each person who observes them. The same land use action for example may be seen in diametric opposition to a resident trying to build a community or a developer attempting to extract value. With that in mind, consider how might someone write about land use and planning without appearing inflammatory to whosever point of view isn’t gratified. You can’t—and so you get articles about a new hotel proposal in complete isolation from the larger narrative entirely devoid of any vision at all.

There are other problems. A large segment—perhaps more than half—of the population simplistically avers that planning is unnecessary and that market mechanisms should determine what gets built, where, and how. Therefore, they hardly care to participate in the process except to the extent that their interests are imperiled. The rest of us cannot afford to get involved in these types of discussions in the first place because they are too busy raising kids, working extra jobs, looking for extra jobs or have otherwise been marginalized from participation by their socio-economic situation.  Therefore, we have a clearly divisible segment of the population involved in local land use and planning. It may or may not be representative of the larger community, but that hardly matters because in a participatory governance system, if you don’t speak up, you might as well not exist. Local politicians cannot afford to hitch their wagons to silent majorities.

We see our communities differently. We think about our communities differently. We all participate in our communities differently. It isn’t therefore, difficult to imagine why we would have trouble getting on the same page about them, or joining in some kind of process through which we are all playing the same game.

A final and perhaps most important difficulty is that development within a city, on a project-by-project basis, has reached a scale so vast financially and spatially (e.g. huge single family detached houses developments, planned villages, hundreds of housing units in a single skyscraper) that the participants (applicant or recipient) rarely desire anyone else to be involved because the moving parts involved must be coordinated with little tolerance for error in order for anyone to make any money. From this conclusion, the planning process is best left to the money-lender, the builder, and the permitting authority. In this framework, the public’s involvement should begin and end only through the permitting authority as the law allows—notice and public hearing before a neutral decision maker. I am sure there are several—across the country—exceptions to this assumption. In my experience at least, successful exceptions means an unrequired community meeting during which the drawings for the proposed project are released a little early in the hope that such an act of generosity might defray enough angry community members opponents that any opposition will fizzle out before calcification.  I believe that until the nature of our economic system changes—until development doesn’t require extracting value from the project—individual projects will never actually reflect community objectives and values.* (I am willing however to concede an exception if the developer, bank, and permitting authority were exclusively residents of the community in question—good luck on that one in this age of transnational capital and shareholders.) People don’t own and hold land for future projects in order to garner community favor. They do it to make money and any legislative or judicial action that might abridge profit opportunities on that land will be opposed regardless of the benefits to the community. Thus the conflict is crystalized into one of collective and individual rights. Again, good luck solving that one.

In the third and final part, I’ll try to reconcile these issues and revisit Olympia View’s initial question of where and how we might plan virtually.

*Most of the cities we all love in Europe were built in an epoch that did not depend on deriving profits from that building—they were usually expenses for personal or even public consumption. So they were built for different reasons and used for different reasons. John Nash was a shrewd property developer to help ease the debits to the Royal Treasury, but the Medici, Baron von Haussman and Christopher Wren weren’t required to secure income streams from the structures they built. Coincidently, their projects were almost all master-planned, but almost none under the authority of a democratically elected local government. Don’t expect anything similar from the good graces of modern developers.

Planning Commission Composition in 2012

The staff report for the City Council meeting on April 10, 2012 lists the recommendations for appointment of three new members to the Olympia Planning Commission: Judy Bardin, Agnieszka Kisza, and Jerry Parker. Bless their hearts and good luck. They’ll need it.

This recommendation from the General Government Committee (GGC) is noteworthy for a couple of obvious reasons:  1.) It appears the GGC is recommending a reduction in the total number of commissioners from 11 to nine; 2.) Two commissioners, Thomas Muller and Richard Wolf, were not recommended for reappointment which is unprecedented as far as I know.

I truly believe that an influx of new blood was necessary, but I figured the turnover of the three who did not reapply (myself included) would have remedied that issue. The GGC disagreed with me. It will be interesting to see whether the fewer number of commissioners will have any influence on those interminable deliberations with which I grew so impatient last year. I have my doubts about that, unless there is a comprehensive review of the general deliberation process, and a much greater emphasis on the commission’s general objectives in the conduct of its work. I felt that was sorely deficient over the last two years.

For reference on how this appointment process works, the GGC conducts the nuts and bolts of the commissioner selection process by review of application materials and interviews of candidates. The GGC recommends their choices to the full City Council which has the option to adopt and reject them as you can see by reading the staff report above. Interestingly, I recall that when I was appointed, the OPC recommendations were a consent item on the council’s agenda. That is not the case this time so it may well be that Commissioners Muller and Wolf remain on the commission depending on the council’s decision tomorrow night.

Why Writing about Planning and Land Use is Problematic

Olympia Views brought up the topic and it gives me the perfect opportunity to discuss my thoughts, assumptions, and conclusions. In fact, Olympia Views has had several posts on the topic of planning and land use. Read and enjoy them.

There are several general difficulties that inhibit clear writing about land use and planning even within a limited locality like Olympia. It is actually one of the more challenging subjects to write about such that others might become interested in it. I have concluded that many if not most get into the arena because they’ve experienced what they consider to be a bad decision. Be that is it may, land-use and local/regional planning do not typically lend themselves to narratives that can be easily digested for general consumption. First, there are always parties involved whose interests depend on control of the narratives. Their stories are usually based on simplistic, but traditional notions of how things work or ought to work: e.g. “In order for our economy to turn around, we need builders putting up cheap housing developments,” unless of course the story on the day in question is the converse. Second, the process by which anything occurs in the built environment requires navigation through technical regulatory regimes which are often quite opaque and more difficult to transmit and receive via the written word. The latter also suffers from unsatisfactory elucidation in the newspaper articles because after all, they aren’t very interesting to read generally and often appear inflammatory if applied to a specific question. (“You mean they only need to give two months’ notice to build that toxic waste dump next door to my house?”) Unfortunately, attending the meetings is a torture so nefarious that it usually defies description (at least around this blog) and offers little help. Next, the duration of any land use or planning process is extremely long—sometimes years—which sucks the winds out of the sails of any story. (Though it is quite easy to cover events like the release of the Comprehensive Plan—especially when done with an eye to views in Olympia.) Writing about a boiling point of local land use isn’t exactly telling the real story in a way that people can meaningfully interact with the important issues. In that context, readers are observers, not participants in the process. Finally, whatever happens, someone is going to be upset about it—it’s a zero sum game. The aggrieved could be community-members who must deal with an ugly new building and increased traffic; or a spurned developer who swears never to apply for permit within the village limits again.

It’s worth considering this problem because creating an actual or virtual outlet for these kinds of issues might allow a greater number of people to become involved in the planning process; it would allow the dialogue among community members and all interested parties to raise above the stock proposals and objections (both of which I personally consider to be fairly superficial most of the time). Now that we’ve considered some of the general problems, we’ll take a deeper look in the next couple of posts.