This blog explores ways to use our natural and manmade resources more efficiently so that, as a society, we may retain and spread wealth, reduce our dependence on distant places, and limit our impacts on the planet. I’m addressing my cohorts in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York, centered on Rochester, a population of about one million people, with many of these ideas coming from elsewhere.
I believe that our region can thrive by keeping more of its money local, by being watchful over waste, and by better using what we’ve already built. We live in an area rich in resources, with clean air, plentiful fresh water, abundant cropland and forest land, fertile soils, ample electricity, educated workers, and on and on. With these riches, we should be better off than what the economic measures show, which implies that we have inefficiencies in the supply-demand system.
As my family knows well, I’m attracted to optimizing the utility of what we’ve already got, an ethic unquestionably founded in my Dutch and German heritage. There’s something in my DNA that dislikes waste, a suitable ethos in this era of climate change and resource conflicts.
I want to underscore that I’m not promoting scarcity, parsimony, limits to growth or neo-luddism. I believe it’s the opposite: there’s abundance in conservation and efficiency.
I came to this view roughly in five steps. I began with an architecture education partly in Europe, where I was attracted to the dense, lively, people-centric urban environments I experienced there. Communities of all sizes across the continent were mixed-use, walkable, low-rise, clean and safe. People lived in close proximity but were always near a variety of outdoor gathering places and usually near farms and forests. There was bearable automobile traffic, mostly involving delivery vehicles.
I admired the European way of life, so upon returning home, I looked for such an existence here. No luck. Given our devotion to motor vehicles, it was clear that no place in America could mix people, places and nature as attractively and efficiently as done in Europe.
Step two involved practicing architecture for nearly 20 years in Milwaukee, New York City and Rochester, working on projects from healthcare to historic preservation. For years I saw how readily people passed over existing buildings in urban neighborhoods in favor of something new and shiny, often in outer suburbs. Even though a renovated building could have met a client’s needs at lower costs to the client—and by extension, to society—a new building was considered a better investment and a safer bet. Granted, some owners, developers and architects attended to urban areas, but many more were drawn to literal greener pastures. Similar decisions made by enough people thus required new infrastructure like roadways, sewers, schools, fire stations and police forces. And this was happening, as it has been in Rochester for 6 decades, when population growth was low or stagnant. Sure, there was plenty of work for us architects, but weren’t we simply abetting a growing problem?
I felt that we were helping to bankrupt society, because without growth boundaries, communities would expand ever outward, diluting as they went. Sooner or later, the ability of the population to afford the infrastructure would end, but the sprawl would not.
Step Three was to focus on historic preservation, choosing to get involved in the policy and advocacy side, with an eye toward eventually returning to a practice in adaptive reuse. [Twenty years later, that has yet to happen, but time will tell.] My purpose here was to help strengthen the historic cores of communities in our region, attempting to fend off sprawl by making the old seem attractive again. We had some victories, particularly when successfully lobbying for a state tax credit to support the rehabilitation of historic structures and when helping create the federally-sponsored Erie Canal Heritage Corridor.
Foreseeing no more weighty policy opportunities, I made Step Four into the regulatory side of community development and historic preservation by becoming a preservation planner for the City of Rochester. With one of the oldest preservation ordinances in the country, Rochester has been able to retain and strengthen 8 neighborhoods and dozens of individual landmarks. Using the ordinance and the state and federal tax credits, I hoped to help preserve more of the city, including some of the larger buildings downtown. Success is evident, as property values in historic neighborhoods are highest in the city, and people have moved back into many rehabilitated downtown buildings.
Similar in-migration has occurred in cities across North America, so downtowns are coming alive again. Sprawl, though, has continued unabated almost everywhere, even in places like Rochester where population growth is negligible or worse. So we see population growth in downtowns and in the suburban fringe, meaning that without more citizens, other areas are emptying out. On a larger scale, people continue to migrate toward southern states, offsetting growth in the urban north.
The result of all of this is that we’re underutilizing paid-for infrastructure and buying new. In the City of Rochester, we’ve closed historic school buildings while suburban school districts expand. We have acres of parks that are devoid of children and families while new playfields are built in the outskirts. We filled in a sunken highway ringing downtown because of minimal traffic at the same time that new interchanges were built on the suburban beltway. We’ve been demolishing hundreds of houses each year that have gone empty and fallen into the public’s lap while hundreds of new homes are built at the urban periphery. We treat rainwater that falls on streets that have few houses left on them because of our combined sewer system.
Tax dollars pay to maintain all of this public infrastructure and more, including things we don’t see like sewers and water lines. On top of this, we pay utility companies to maintain gas and electrical distribution systems throughout the city, even those serving empty schools and streets.
How stupid is this?
So Step Five is to educate fellow tax- and rate-payers about our wastefulness.
That’s what this blog is all about.