Strong Towns

            Mark and I have been reading Strong Towns by Charles L Marohn, a chapter at a time. It becomes the focus of our walking conversations—a vast improvement over the latest corona virus details or fuss over local politics. Right now, Mark is ahead, so he keeps dropping tantalizing hints as to what is to come. Last Sunday, we walked out to the edge of the city to deliver some quick breads. On the way back, right at the edge of town, we passed a patch of untrimmed blackberries about to take over the sidewalk. “That’s exactly what he’s talking about!” I realized. Here, in Corvallis, we have infrastructure that we cannot maintain over the long haul. 

            The basic premise of Strong Towns is that we have broken our old development patterns of incremental growth and slow upgrading of “infill” in favor of building out entire neighborhoods far from the economic centers of towns and cities. Even if developers pay for the original infrastructure (roads, pipes, storm water run-off, parks), the city will be paying for the upkeep and maintenance for hundreds of years. And, because we have sprawled over the landscape, we do not have the money to do so. He is also worried that these neighborhoods will all “fail” at the same time; every house on the block will need major repairs within five years of the first house.  Just think of 25 year roofs; even if a few last longer, they will all need to be replaced at about the same time. If the repairs are not done, the housing stock will degrade very quickly, as will the tax base. It’s a grim future he sees for many cities and suburbs in the United States. I am a little over half way through, so I am hoping that he has a glimmer of hope for us all.

            The blackberry vine taking over the sidewalk encapsulates the problem. First, it is on the public side of a backyard fence of a house that was built on a cul-de-sac, a recent development pattern.  Cul de sacs are “good” for families because they provide a “safe” place for kids to play, but they are bad urban design because they reduce connectivity, which supports walking and biking, thus discouraging community interaction. They also create some nasty sidewalks, because people want privacy, so they build fences along the back yard, which is often along the sidewalk of the larger collector street. It is not comfortable to walk long blocks of fences in various states of repair, dodging overgrown shrubbery that belongs to everyone, thus no one maintains it.  That aggressive, thorny Himalayan Blackberry, grown from a casual seed dropped by a bird, becomes a menace.  And, because we have so many collector streets in the newer parts of town, it is impossible for the city to trim them all back in a timely fashion.

            The blackberry is only one example of this problem. Keeping all of our streets maintained to a decent level to reduce even more costly repaving projects, fixing leaky pipes so that we waste less water and the energy needed to clean it at both ends, planting and pruning street trees, keeping the park bathrooms open….the further from the town centers we go, the more expensive it becomes to do all of this. Marohn argues that we have to acknowledge this problem and make some hard decisions. What areas of our cities do we need to hold onto? What areas will be let go? His primary audience, I believe, is me, as a city councilor wrestling with budgets and policy decisions, but it’s a clearly written, if not frisky, piece of work. And it will change the way you view that blackberry that just snagged your sweater as you walk by.