In Amarillo the seasons change abruptly. On the last day of summer, I was sweating in the shade and on the 3rd day of fall a slight shiver traveled up my unbuttoned flannel sleeve as I walked into The Amarillo College Downtown Campus. Kevin Shepherd was giving a lecture called Cultivating Strong Towns and Neighborhoods to a room full of people sharply dressed …and me. I missed the memo announcing business attire but quickly realized the type of people in the room never receive a memo, this is just how they dress. The lecture was open to the public. However, the room was full of businesspeople who showed up for business reasons. Most in the room wrote their name with capitol lettered credentials. City employees and the various money stackers gathered into silence as the young Tim Ingalls called the classroom to order.
Mr. Shepherd P.E began his lecture the way he had begun a thousand, with a question. “How many in this room think your city has enough money for future projects?”. Not a single hand crawled towards the ceiling for fear of showing ignorance. The room was privy to the actions of the wizard behind the curtain. The prosperity narrative of the past decade is a white lie told to the younger generation to ward off despaired. The entirety of human enterprise is built on the lie that we are progressing towards a utopia when in many ways we are running away from it.
Mr. Shepherd, through a riveting presentation of undeniable data and graphs, showed that our current model relies on delusion and an optimistic policy of “kicking the can” of fiscal responsibility to the next year. He explained that our local government, like most across the country, has been borrowing against the house on losing hands for years counting on the next round to pay out. The room had the feel of a doctor’s office just before a terminal diagnosis is delivered. He presented the facts: 22% of the city’s income comes from property tax, 49% of that goes to public safety (i.e. Fire and Police) 11% is allocated to transportation, 1% is spent on streets. Amarillo has 954 miles of paved roads, 83 miles of unpaved roads, and 533 miles of alleys. It costs roughly 1 million dollars to build one 11’ lane-mile of road. If you assume every road in Amarillo is two lanes (22-24’ wide) it would cost a total of 1.908 billion dollars just to replace the existing roads in the city. If Amarillo spread these costs over the next 50 years it would come to 38.2 million a year just to maintain what we have and that’s only streets.
The auto-centric obsession of post WWII American development has covered the landscape with a decadent transportation system which values motorized travel over pedestrians and is cost prohibitive to repair. Our predecessors proclaimed this as investment but delivered debt. An indiscriminate homogenization of our communities has simultaneously occurred as a characteristic of our auto-oriented worship. Developers designed cookie cutter cities which value convenience over character. Our countryside was standardized into an unsustainable model which incentivized a standard of living that destroyed sustainability with unbridled expansion. Our cities feel contrived because the design was focused on the automobile. By ignoring the pedestrian, the grid was developed to require the citizen to own a car. This forces a dependency on cars which disempowers people and perpetuates an addiction to oil, forcing each citizen to become a consumer over a resident.
Big box stores overtook mom and pop shops forcing would-be entrepreneurs out and replacing them with indiscriminate national corporations. These corporations often times receive tax incentives to come to a town and, because of the large footprint of the store and corresponding parking lot, cities fail to generate enough property tax revenue to pay for the streets which surround the store. These “super” stores rely on servicing the large number of consumers who drive in from miles around.
Mr. Shepherd began with a bit of doom and gloom but preceded to present options for correcting the course. Mr. Shepherd encouraged the community to use fiscal sustainability as a common language to guide the city’s development pattern toward one which aligns with what citizens are willing and able to pay for – now and in the future. He said the city has ample opportunities to capture additional revenue and transform downtown into a vibrant mixed-use regional destination by prioritizing people and walkability over vehicles and implementing small/incremental development to develop vacant properties and add small business and residential options in and around downtown.
The plane can still be pulled out of its nosedive. Identifying and acknowledging the reality of the situation is the beginning. Once a philosophy of development is identified as incendiary, steps can be taken to reorient cultural goals and change practices. The city has to be viewed in generational terms through a lens of sustainability. The construction practices and economic justifications of big box stores, fast food restaurants, and sprawling wide roads don’t yield long-term gains for cities. We as a culture have to rethink how we commute and how we consume if we are to create a more sustainable and connected community.
I encourage you to look more into Mr. Shepherd, his firm Verdunity, and the Strong Towns movement, but that was not my only point in writing this blog post. The information that was presented has potential to spark cultural shifting conversations, but there have to be people there to hear and process the info. As insinuated earlier in the post, most of the room were city planning employees or investors. I, at 31, was one of the younger people in the room. The people who were there attended the lecture because they care about the city, but also because they are financially invested in the city and creating a strong city is a way of protecting investments. A large reason that we are facing these problems in infrastructure is because investors have been the only ones represented in these conversations, so naturally, the main concern is private short-term return on investment. Blue collar people who care about a city, not for financial gains, but for quality of life are drastically underrepresented when considering how a city is designed. This means public funds are used to create a platform for private enterprise to prosper, not for private citizens to live. Our towns reflect this sentiment. Developers and investors main motivation is return not long-term functionality.
I never left Amarillo after I graduated from high school, but a lot of my friends did. I can still remember my deep envy as, one by one, my friends moved off to “bigger” and “brighter” things. What was it that Amarillo lacked that these other place’s offered? I can remember conversations with many friends who felt trapped by circumstance and dispiritedly sought a way out. I too felt this way off and on throughout my 20’s. I now see the city differently. Now I have a wife and two young boys and what I am looking for has changed. I have new, older eyes, and I see Amarillo not for what it lacks but for what it is and what it can be. The city is primed, like many aspects of our society, for restructuring. We can identify the concepts that contributed to Amarillo feeling like a cage. With intention and forethought Amarillo can become a town that attracts young people. I hope in 20 years when my boys decide to adventure out into the world they are running towards new opportunities not away from decaying ideals.
This was the first lecture of a series that Tim Ingalls is hosting to get this conversation started. (Link to full lecture here) I would encourage everyone to get involved in this conversation because what we do locally can reverberate out into the national culture. Monte Anderson from the Incremental Development Alliance will be speaking more on these concepts at Mr. Ingalls’ next community education event on November 21st.