Yes, there are no public policy unicorns

Fascinating.  Richard Florida is the Paul Ehrlich of urban planners.  Always quoted but usually wrong.  But always a bellwether of the bien pensant of public intellectuals.  From What’s the Future of Cities in the Aftermath of COVID-19? by Trey Barrineau.  

Urbanist Richard Florida sees downtowns evolving from destinations for work into “better neighborhoods.”

The COVID-19 pandemic had significant impacts on cities around the world. Many suffered economically and socially, with downtown areas hit particularly hard. Despite that, urbanist Richard Florida says the crisis also created opportunities for municipalities to reimagine their central business districts as more than places for work.

Urbanist Richard Florida says it is critical for cities to transform their central business districts into places that offer a wide range of amenities.

“We are entering a new era,” Florida said during a recent webinar hosted by The Business Journals. “It took us a long way to get here, but it’s finally dawning on people — city leaders, chambers of commerce, advocacy groups, landlords, real estate owners, banks — that we’re going to have to change the way we create our downtowns. We’ve done this a lot over the past century, and I think we can do it again.”

However, cities face many challenges as they enter the post-pandemic phase. The current economic uncertainty, driven by inflation and higher interest rates, is colliding with a profound transformation in how most white-collar businesses run their day-to-day operations. This has significant implications for office markets and the vitality of central business districts.

“Our downtowns are uniquely troubled,” Florida said. “People aren’t going back to the office. Offices have high vacancy rates.”

Several of Florida's weaknesses on display in these passages.  The most important one is his overweening conviction that urban planners are superior to distributed decision-making occurring in the market.  Who is the we in "we’re going to have to change the way we create our downtowns."  Its always central planners.  

Closely related to his faith in urban planners is Florida's routine obliviousness to quality of governance.

Public safety, education, and transportation infrastructure tend to be identified as the most important governance responsibilities by residents.  Florida has nothing to say about about well or badly cities are doing in terms of delivering quality education to attract residents (News Alert - Badly).

Instead he focuses on public safety and transportation where cities are also, surprise, doing badly.

Florida says nearly every city today is facing challenges around safety and crime, both in reality and perception. While crime rates are nowhere near the levels seen from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, they have gone up, and there is a widespread sense that they are getting worse. Cities need to ensure that essential functions such as police and social services are funded.

Another challenge facing cities is the need to rethink transit systems. Many were built decades ago around a 9-to-5 model, which no longer applies in the aftermath of the pandemic. According to Florida, people now use transit for many functions, including leisure, and this means that the systems must be more flexible. Governments will have to make hard choices about how to maintain existing transit infrastructure, and he suggested that many municipalities should consider holding off on big investments for now.

What attracts people to a product, a brand, a place?  Usually some variation on Faster, Cheaper, Better.  Is there any center city whose government is delivering Faster, Cheaper, Better in any fashion of normal measurement?  On virtually every measure in all three categories, suburbs, exurbs and smaller cities and towns do better than large city centers.  

There is no discussion about actions which would lead to better governance or to better policies to create Faster, Cheaper, Better.  Instead, there is the waving of a magic wand.

Florida believes that the key to success for cities is to focus on innovation.

Urban innovation has been Florida's schtick for years but there is a vast gulf between the theory and the practice.  

And even the magic wand of innovation won't fix bad public policy.

Much like in the past, the way forward through the current crisis will require significant investment and innovation. Florida believes that building more affordable housing will be crucial to the success of cities in the future, especially multifamily units that are suitable for families. This means overcoming the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) attitude that often blocks affordable residential development.

Reducing the cost of housing, the cost of living in a city, fits the Cheaper goal.  But does "building more affordable housing?"  Sounds like the normal Big City corrupt schemes where government money goes into private pockets and produces little of what was intended and none of the imagined benefits.  Building residential units of a size, price and features would certainly be desirable.  But I am pretty certain that is not what is being promised here.  At least, that is not what has ever been delivered anywhere where cities have undertaken to "build more affordable housing."

And the authoritarianism and class disdain which makes City governance so unpleasant and ineffective is right there embedded in the plan.  Whenever you see or hear an authoritarian talking about "the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) attitude" you know you have someone who is about to advance a proposition which does not make sense, is unlikely to deliver, and will require coercion and suppression.  NIMBY is not a barrier.  NIMBY is a signal that government is not delivering what residents want.

The rub of the interview is that Florida acknowledges that Cities and their governance structures are not currently delivering on Faster, Cheaper, Better.  Further, he acknowledges that Cities are not delivering on Public Safety or on Transportation (commute times).  While unacknowledged, we also know that Cities typically spend an exceptional amount of money to achieve markedly sub bar K-12 results.  Further, Cities are in economic peril.  

“Cities will take a revenue shortfall,” Florida said. “It’s going to be hard to make up the revenue. 

Other than the fire, Mrs. O'Leary, how are things going?  

Under this avalanche of failure, incompetence and bad governance, what can be done?

Apparently more of the same that got Cities into these problems in the first place.  Progressive policy pieties portend poor performance.  

Finally, Florida said that the biggest key to success for cities is to focus on the people who live there. In addition to creating affordable housing and investing in education and training, it also means providing opportunities for everyone, regardless of their background or socioeconomic status. Florida believes that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are not just ethical imperatives but also economic ones.

“You cannot afford to waste any person’s talent,” he says.

If you focus on your residents and what they want, you will ignore building public housing (while focus on reducing the cost of residential building) , ignore doubling down on the already failed public school systems, ignore DEI, and ignore the call for class warfare.

What would work would be to hold K-12 to standards and switch out leadership and teachers till those standards are achieved.  Beef up policing, courts, and the judicial system so that criminals are separated from residents.  Improve governance policies to make them faster, cheaper and better.  Faster building permits.  Faster service at DMV.  Quicker responses to 911 calls.  Fewer regulations.  And so on.  

And overall, a laser-like focus on creating an environment where commerce can flourish with well-paying jobs and consequent tax revenues.  

It is a truism that you can only do one or two things well at the same time.  You can focus on creating a friendly commercial environment and focus on delivering reasonable city services.  You cannot do that minimum and do the other things that progressive policy demands such as reducing income inequality, and subsidizing public housing, and using city employment as a make work scheme, and eliminating incarceration disparities, and decarbonizing the city, and reducing traffic deaths to zero, and forcing recycling, and constructing bicycle paths no one uses, and building mass transit nobody rides, and relaxing education standards so that there are performance disparities, and  . . .

Too many goals.  And too many goals which do not deliver what residents want - Faster, Cheaper, Better and a commerce friendly environment.  

Waving the innovation wand has no effect.  There simply aren't any policy unicorns.  There is simply the hard work of effective governance.