Consider Your Victims

Posted on July 29, 2021 by admin

We are probably all born with a certain focus on our own needs. The first job of a baby is to survive, but ideally, we learn from parents, especially, but also from others around us that somebody else cares and takes care of us when we most need the help. With any luck, we learn to extend that same concern from ourselves to others, and as we grow, we learn how we can support and cooperate with our fellow human beings. Empathy must be taught, and not everyone learns, or learns well.

I would like to believe that this article will reach someone and cause them to think about any potential victims of their actions. Maybe it will, but I also doubt that the most violent among us are reading my blog. I have good reason to suspect that my content over the past eight years, while apparently attracting more than 31,000 subscribers, has not provided much raw meat for those who feel the need to attack others to get what they want. They may not read much at all. But I can hope.

But I must wonder sometimes whether perpetrators of violent crimes, especially those involving theft, give much consideration to their victims. The overwhelming majority of victims of violence mean something to someone. In some cases, they may have networks of friends upon whom they are positive influences. They may be positive assets for local communities, whether those be neighborhoods, religious congregations, schools, or extended families. They mean something to other people, and the community will be weaker without them.

Or do their attackers just see them as vulnerable prey, much as a bobcat might view a rodent when the cat is hungry?

I keep wondering about one such recent victim in Chicago. We have plenty of victims in Chicago, often of gun violence, though in this case no gun was involved. His car was the object of desire, and a 73-year-old man, moving slowly, became the target of an attempted carjacking. The two youths hit him in the head, then pushed him in the chest, and he died of a heart attack. Two young men, 18 and 17, now face serious charges and may end up sacrificing many years of their lives in prison. Their future looks bleak.

Keith Cooper at a 5K “Ditch the Weight & Guns” walk & run in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. Photo provided by Keinika Carlton.

Keith Cooper, the victim, was a member of Augustana Lutheran Church, to which I belong, and a vital, active part of the Hyde Park neighborhood that surrounds it. He was a proud Marine Corps veteran, having joined in 1968 at age 21 and served in Vietnam. When you needed a volunteer, he was likely to be there.

Keith with daughter Keinika, her husband Curtis Carlton, and granddaughters Alyna and Mikayla. Photo provided by Keinika Carlton.

“He just loved to help,” his daughter, Keinika, says. “He was a community-based individual.” When she was growing up, she recalls, he taught his children that “you can’t complain if you don’t do anything.” Ever seeking to mentor those he loved, he brought granddaughter Mikayla, now 11, to Sunday school when he came to church. Keinika said he joined Augustana about ten years ago. He was, however, already familiar with the church from growing up in the neighborhood near 54^th and Kimbark on Chicago’s South Side.

But it was more than growing up near the church. Keith told the current pastor, the Rev. Nancy Goede, that he had been baptized there as a child. Keinika had Sunday school attendance slips from 1959, when he was 12. Later, as a teen, he served as an acolyte. He drifted away in his teens, but returned as a mature adult. In recent years, I often served with him as an usher.

Keith Cooper with daughter Keinika. Photo provided by Keinika Carlton.

He joined the church shortly after two heart surgeries that were necessitated by a torn aorta and involved heart valve replacement. Keinika describes her time in the waiting room as “nerve wracking.” Her father underwent rehab to rebuild his body. For this very reason, she says, when she learned of the nature of the attack the day it occurred, she knew why his heart failed. She knew, she says, that he would not survive.

That is, however, part of the problem with random victimization of an old man the attackers never knew. It probably never occurred to them that their physical assault could result in death. They knew nothing of this personal history, or why he seemed to be moving slowly, if that was their perception, but now they own the consequences. As Judge Charles S. Beach II said in addressing Frank Harris, the 18-year-old, as they were charged in court with murder, “To say that it’s painful for me is an understatement—because anytime that I see a young man such as you before me with such a terrible thing on their shoulders, it’s painful for us and society and just about everyone.”

As Keinika asked during an interview with me last week, “Did you all even think this through?”

Kimbark Plaza at E. 53rd St. and Kimbark in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

What is stunning about the entire incident is that it occurred in broad daylight in a busy commercial strip, Kimbark Plaza. It occurred roughly between 12:30 and 12:40 p.m. in a crowded parking lot, with numerous surveillance cameras. There were reportedly dozens of witnesses in nearby stores, many of whom came out, including an off-duty paramedic who tried to revive him as he lay on the ground, unresponsive, until police arrived. Sadly, he was already dead when an ambulance brought him to nearby University of Chicago Hospital. He had been at Kimbark Plaza to run errands. He often shopped for groceries at Hyde Park Produce.

Meanwhile, having failed to open the car, a Hyundai Santa Fe SUV, the two young men fled but were identified and arrested by police about a half-mile away, trying to change clothes in a synagogue courtyard. Harris was about to become a senior in high school, but the two had some prior arrests, including other carjackings in May and last December.

Keith will be sorely missed by those who knew him—and there were plenty who did. As the Hyde Park Jazz Festival grew as an area attraction each summer, it was Keith who helped arrange for some artists to perform at Augustana. When volunteers were needed to park cars for events like the Jazz Fest or the 57^th St. Arts Fair, earning parking fees to support the church, it was most often Keith who could be found collecting the fees and directing people to available spaces. For his 74^th birthday, which would have occurred July 22, his Facebook request was to raise $500 for his beloved church. My wife attended one of his AARP-sponsored driver skills refresher courses at the church for seniors who could then get small discounts on their car insurance. Keith was the host. Keinika says he was involved in a recent Juneteenth festival. I could go on, but you get the idea. Church, school, neighborhood, the city of Chicago, he loved them all and supported them all.

From years of passing conversations with him, I gathered the impression that part of his motivation may have come from his own struggles. At one point earlier in his life, he was briefly homeless. He knew what that felt like and gladly assisted with a monthly community breakfast for disadvantaged people. Bill Tompsett, a retired attorney and long-time member of Augustana, says he helped by greeting people as they arrived, but when he was missing for a few weeks, Keith asked him why. Bill explained that he had hurt his back and could not stand for two hours to greet people. Keith assured him that he could still greet people sitting down, and he resumed his duties. Little things like that mattered. Keith did several jobs in his life, including driving trucks and selling jewelry and books. His daughter told reporters he had “tons of books,” among which he particularly liked black history and science fiction. In retirement, he was driving a Lyft car to earn extra money. Keith knew from personal experience that there are many people struggling to survive in our community, and he sought to help where he could.

It is noteworthy that more than 100 people gathered at Kimbark Plaza on Friday evening, July 16, two days after Keith died, to honor his life and offer prayers, holding candles while West African drums were played.

“Talking drums” performing at the visitation for Keith Cooper, July 24, 2021.

Those “talking drums” were also present a week later, on Saturday, July 24, for a visitation in the Augustana fellowship hall, at which members of the U.S. Marine Corps also presented a flag to honor his service. Dozens of participants in the event responded to Keinika by offering one-word descriptions of Keith such as “kindness” and “commitment.” Two days later, following a moving funeral service, his ashes were interred in the memorial garden outside the fellowship hall, where he joined other saints who preceded him.

Augustana’s memorial garden

The city of Chicago and Hyde Park lost a valuable, generous, and committed citizen because, once again and too often, some people, too often too young, chose a path in which they failed to consider who their victim might be, what he meant to those around him, and what they took from their community as a result. It was all very sad, and I kept thinking during the funeral, all very unnecessary.

Jim Schwab

Like Water Flowing Downhill

Posted on July 25, 2021 by admin

The Major League Baseball team long known as the Cleveland Indians will rename itself at the end of this season as the Cleveland Guardians. The change will surely draw criticism from traditionalists, but it is long overdue. The logo is outrageously racist and derogatory. The name could conceivably be neutral in intent if it honored Native Americans, but the logo has always belied any supposed good intentions. Conservative fans in Ohio long defended the name and the logo, but time is up, and it is just as well. The image has worn out its welcome.

In my college days at Cleveland State University, I recall the American Indian Movement challenging reenactments of Cleveland founder Moses Cleaveland landing on the shores of the Cuyahoga River in 1796. A few years later, a friend of mine, Legal Aid lawyer Joseph Meissner, was suing on behalf of American Indian clients who claimed the name and logo were racist in intent. The lawsuit was undoubtedly ahead of its time, but Joe had a way of making a point. One day, he had a variety of posterboards in his office, done by a local artist, depicting various minorities in the same manner as Chief Wahoo, with names like the “Cleveland Negroes” and “Cleveland Italians,” among others I no longer recall. His point was that, if these other logos seemed offensive (and believe me, they were), then why was it any more tolerable to accept the Chief Wahoo logo for the Cleveland Indians? To this day, there has never been a good answer for that question.

But I know many Cleveland fans will be annoyed or angry. For years, relatives of mine argued with me in defense of the team when I said it was a matter of time before they would have to confront the reality of what the name and logo represented and accept change. I am not picking on them by saying that. Their reactions were quite typical, and part of that was a natural defensiveness about a city that had suffered depopulation, industrial decline, job losses, and the embarrassments of past mayors Ralph Perk and Dennis Kucinich in the 1970s. For my part, I moved to Iowa in January 1979, so I guess I was a turncoat in the eyes of some, but lots of people find new paths in life. It’s just that in Cleveland, every departure felt like another blow to the city’s pride.

Progressive Field in 2019

Gradually, the city adjusted to its setbacks of that era, grew a large medical services industry, bult a new stadium for its baseball team, replacing the cavernous Municipal Stadium (where a new Cleveland Browns stadium now sits on the lakefront), and cleaned up its once badly polluted river. Cleveland State and other universities grew to serve the city and the region. The Cuyahoga Valley became the site of a national park. As an urban planner, I might add that there is some good planning happening in the region. Although the Cleveland Indians lost the World Series in the tenth inning of the seventh game in 2016 to the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Cavaliers, with the incredible efforts of LeBron James, won the NBA title over the Golden State Warriors. So, there’s all that.

Cleveland’s Rock n Roll Museum on the Lake Erie waterfront, one of the city’s huge tourism attractions

In a brilliant way, the new name, Guardians, is a perfect fit for this mindset. It allows this defensive posture regarding a historically great American city to become a positive virtue, as protectors of its civic virtue and community reputation. Clinging to the moniker of Indians, especially with Chief Wahoo as a mascot, could never do that. It would merely ensure the need to defend a highly questionable tradition. Instead, fans can shift their attention to protecting and promoting the city’s future.

But back to the name change. Long ago, when I was in Iowa City as a graduate student, Pastor Roy Wingate of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church once commented in a small group conversation over lunch that, “Much prophecy is little more than knowing that water flows downhill,” which is to say that prophets often are simply observing what others refuse to see. (In a more literal sense, this point was not lost on me later as a planner involved in disaster recovery and hazard mitigation talking to people about floods.)

My occasional debates with Cleveland friends and relatives about the eventual demise of the Cleveland Indians logo was little more than Rev. Wingate’s observation about prophecy. Water flows downhill. Changing a racist logo was just a matter of time, and finally, the ownership of the team has recognized that the waters of justice have overflown the utility of calling a team the “Cleveland Indians.”

It was never if, but when. The time has come.

Jim Schwab

Private Costs of Disaster Prevention

Posted on July 6, 2021 by admin

Champlain Towers collapse. photo from Wikipedia

The recent collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, has cast a spotlight on numerous issues concerning building maintenance, private and public decision-making processes, potential (but highly uncertain) corrosive impacts of sea level rise, and even the continuing exposure of rescue workers to COVID-19, in addition to environmental and occupational hazards. That is all in addition to the governance questions surrounding condominium boards, given the news of past debates about deferred but expensive maintenance once consultants revealed structural deterioration in the 12-story complex.

I wish to be clear about my purpose in writing this post. As an urban planner and researcher, I have doggedly sought to focus on known facts and accurate assessments of hazardous situations of any type. Sometimes, the truth is clear enough. In others, it is wise to withhold judgment while raising questions that deserve thoughtful answers. In this instance, there are so many aspects to the story of the condo building collapse that caution is the appropriate approach because new facts seem to emerge daily. One question—why the North Tower did not collapse while the South Tower did—may compel further inquiry on the role of condo boards in driving decisions about investing in maintenance before catastrophe strikes, but further investigation may reveal many nuances to that story as well. Complete answers are not always simple or obvious.

I have no intention of rushing to judgment on the tragedy in Surfside. But I do wish to focus on one issue that I know is endemic to housing development on a nationwide basis: the roles and responsibilities of homeowners associations (HOA) for managing and maintaining property. Condo boards are one specific subset of HOAs, based on the nature of the buildings. But the issues are not limited to such buildings; they can easily affect the management of townhouse developments and gated subdivisions as well.

Five years ago, when the American Planning Association (APA) and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) collaborated to produce a Planning Advisory Service Report, Subdivision Design and Flood Hazard Areas, we confronted one ticklish issue that concerned us greatly, albeit with regard to flood (and some other natural) hazards rather than structural integrity of tall buildings. The underlying issue, however, dealt with the capacity of privately governed homeowner associations to manage, finance, and maintain hazard mitigation infrastructure over time. Of course, one can easily broaden the definition of such infrastructure to include structural integrity repairs in a situation where buildings can potentially collapse, just as it might include the need to maintain the structural integrity of bridges to prevent such tragedies as the collapse of the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities in 2007. There is considerable room for flexibility in defining the issue so long as the focus remains on public safety.

Our concern at the time was the potential for a financially challenged homeowners association or special district to fail to maintain critical infrastructure before a natural disaster leads to catastrophic failure, whether because of flood, landslide, earthquake, or wildfire, among other possibilities. Chad Berginnis, the executive director of ASFPM, alerted us to an article published by two lawyers involved in owner association litigation in California, Tyler Berding and Stephen Weil. They offered several examples of such situations including Bethel Island, which sits in the Sacramento Delta and includes about 2,500 residents whose homes are protected by more than 11 miles of levees that

USGS photo of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California

circle the island, just 12 miles from the Greenville Fault. Throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the potential cascading impact of an earthquake triggering massive flooding with failed levees is a nightmare of major proportions. However, residents had defeated a proposed parcel tax to finance improvements through the Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District (BIMID), leaving the district broke and laying off staff. Berding and Weill offered a series of suggestions for better planning and management of these situations.

Whether the case involves a special district like BIMID or special assessments imposed by an owner association board, the issue is the local or private responsibility for financing and maintaining the protective infrastructure to avert such tragedies. Disasters are almost never solely a function of natural forces affecting human communities. They are also a function of the location, condition, and resilience of those communities, and the greater the exposure, the greater is likely to be the long-term cost of restoring that resilience over time to prevent catastrophic loss. In many cases involving floods, landslides, or earthquakes, insurance may be unavailable or financially problematic. The ultimate result can be a bankrupt association and property owners who cannot recover their losses, let alone rebuild, yielding a combination not only of loss of life and property, but of financial calamity as well.

Pad-mounted Transformer in a floodplain not elevated. Photo by Chad Berginnis from PAS Report, used with his permission.

In the report, we sought in several ways to address the issues posed by these dilemmas. We noted, for instance, that as of 2016, the Community Associations Institute reported that 66.7 million people, about 20 percent of the U.S. population, lived in some 333,600 common-interest communities, 55 percent of which were homeowners associations, the rest either condominium or other community associations. One result is the transfer of responsibility for infrastructure within a subdivision from the municipality permitting it to the HOA itself. The long-term problem is that association leadership not only changes over time but often lacks expertise pertaining to the significant risks and responsibilities involved. We suggested that local planning and other agencies extend technical assistance to overcome this gap. This gap, however, remains a serious problem in many communities. When disaster strikes, the idea of having shifted responsibility will become transparently short-sighted because the city or county will be providing emergency response and assistance, just as is happening in Surfside. It is impossible to ignore a disaster.

We noted that many such associations assume responsibility for stormwater infrastructure, such as detention ponds, seawalls, and levees, or even private dams. If they fall into disrepair, the flooding consequences can be severe, so provisions for inspection and maintenance are critical. It is vital for such association boards to understand, for instance, that levees are never totally flood-proof and failure can have various causes. Privately built and owned levees exist across the nation, many in poor condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

In short, these owner associations have assumed responsibility for some key areas of local flood risk management, including ponds, spillways, erosion and sediment control, flood control structural repairs, drainage improvements, managing vegetation that reduces flood risk, bridge maintenance, and open space management, among other possibilities. Given the potential financial and expertise limitations of these private associations, it may be incumbent upon local governments, in approving development, to assert some degree of control over the standards for approval, for which we offered several major recommendations for requirements related to maintenance costs and final plat approval.

There is, in the end, no perfect way to ensure adequate protection against disaster, but we were hoping to raise the level of concern and discussion, and attention to detail, in the relationships between local governments and owner associations as a way to avert tragedy and financial meltdown following disaster. It is not my intent here to explore the issue in depth but to introduce readers to the depth of the questions that these situations entail. Those wishing to learn more can follow the links to additional resources.

Jim Schwab

Softly Persuasive Planning Pioneer

Posted on June 2, 2021 by admin

Photo from David Topping’s Facebook posting of his father’s passing.

I first met Ken Topping at the American Planning Association (APA) office in Chicago on a cold day in January 1994. Chicago was suffering one of its classic Arctic blasts at something like -20°F. Ken, a tall, very polite, and articulate gentleman, had his heavy winter coat for the ride back to O’Hare International Airport toward the end of the day. On January 17, just a day or so before he arrived in Chicago, the Northridge Earthquake struck Los Angeles, an area where he had worked for many years. Ken, who was already developing a significant history of advancing what was then the nascent role of urban planning in responding to disasters, became immediately involved. Exactly one year later, on January 17, 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake leveled much of Kobe, a major city in Japan. With his extensive acquaintances there, Ken was again on the scene.

At the time, I gently needled him that trouble followed him wherever he traveled. But the reality was that Ken took the lead in planning solutions to some of the world’s most vexing environmental challenges: natural disasters. It took years for me to understand the degree to which that initial meeting with Ken changed my life and my perspectives on what I wanted to accomplish as a professional planner. Ken lured me into the world of disaster recovery and resilience planning in a way no one else did.

When we met, it was Bill Klein, then the research director at APA, who introduced us. Just a few months before, Bill, who had somehow negotiated a modest contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to produce a Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Report on planning for post-disaster recovery, offered me the opportunity to manage the project. This was not because I had any great expertise in the subject. It was because no one else at APA did, either, but I at least had a strong background in environmental planning, and disasters are, at least in part, an environmental problem. Actually, I learned, they are many problems rolled into one, and what I was about to undertake was a challenge well above any I had encountered before, even though I was already completing a book—my second—about environmental justice. But that left the question of why Ken Topping, with noteworthy contributions to the disaster field behind him, should be dealing with a greenhorn like me.

That’s not the way he saw it. Or ever saw it. If Bill had confidence in me, then for Ken it was a chance to mentor someone new to the field and help shape the project at its roots. Over the next few years, as the project grew and expanded from its original ambitions, Ken introduced me to numerous players in this then small arena of planning to reduce the impacts of natural hazards. I did not fully appreciate the significance of some of the people I met, a fact I still regret, but it was all such new territory that I did not always fully understand who was who.

Leaders of Tomorrow

My experience with Ken was far from unique. He mentored, nurtured, and influenced the professional development of people who became some of my best professional friends and colleagues in the growing subfield of hazards planning.

Ken and US-Japan team members meeting with community leaders of the Shin-Nagata North neighborhood that was heavily damaged in the 1995 Kobe earthquake. On the front row from left to right are: Robert Olshansky, Laurie Johnson, Kazuyoshi Ohnishi, and Ken Topping (U.S. team leader). Photo provided by Laurie Johnson.

Robert Olshansky, now professor emeritus at the University of Illinois and living in the Bay Area, met Topping and Laurie Johnson, then a young planner with a bachelor’s degree in geophysics, at a conference of the Central United States Earthquake Consortium in June 1994 in Louisville, Kentucky. The conference, which I also attended, drew mostly engineers, so these three planners “stayed up late in animated conversation,” Rob recalls. Frankly, I don’t remember much of what I did there, but I do recall meeting Laurie either there or a month later at the Natural Hazards Workshop in Boulder, Colorado. I was very much the newcomer to this business back then, in any case. But Rob, Laurie, and Ken engaged in a round of post-Northridge earthquake research meetings in California, which led to a proposal, led by Topping, to compare the Northridge and Kobe earthquake recovery experiences. Eventually funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), their work began in 1998, but the important facet was that it involved extensive international collaboration between this American trio and four Japanese researchers. It was Ken who introduced Rob and Laurie to Japanese planning. Rob confesses he had never been to Asia before the Kobe earthquake, but he and Laurie developed close connections in Japan who remain good friends 25 years later. Rob says it was Ken who insisted on the close collaboration with the Japanese and helped select the neighborhoods they chose for comparative study.

Ken with the US-Japan team conducting a long-term comparative study of rebuilding in Los Angeles and Kobe following the 1994 and 1995 earthquakes, respectively, during a team meeting in 2000 in Kobe. Left to right are: Robert Olshansky, Laurie Johnson, Ikuo Kobayashi, Hisako Koura, Yoshiteru Murosaki (Japan team leader), Kazuyoshi Ohnishi, and Ken Topping (U.S. team leader). Photo provided by Laurie Johnson.

The remarkable aspect of all this for Laurie Johnson, now a prominent hazard planning consultant based in San Rafael, California, was Ken’s acceptance and support though, she says, “I was barely in my 30s and had only a few years of relevant professional experience” when they first met. Their first contact, she says, came in 1990, when Ken spoke at the International Symposium on Rebuilding after Earthquakes, hosted at Stanford University by Spangle Associates, the firm for which she was then working. Spangle had produced a study that was among the first I studied in this emerging field, examining four case studies of post-disaster recovery. It profoundly influenced my view of what happens to communities in a disaster.

Ken, says Laurie, “wowed the group with his presentation on LA’s efforts to prepare a first-ever, pre-disaster recovery plan for the city before a major disaster like an earthquake struck.” Ken was then the planning director of Los Angeles. Fortunately, a draft of what became the Los Angeles Recovery and Reconstruction Plan had been completed when the Northridge earthquake occurred. The city formally adopted it a year later. Another NSF study led by Spangle Associates, in which Laurie was involved, found “that the plan was instrumental in contributing to the high level of staff performance” after the earthquake, helping most city departments to understand their responsibilities and prepare to perform them.

Innovations

By the mid-1990s, Ken was a tall, white-haired gentleman in his 50s, a strong intellect with a gentle voice. In coming years, in part working on the project I was leading, he made a significant impression on our colleagues at FEMA. Terry Baker, former National Team Leader for Hazard Mitigation Planning, recalled him as “always generous with his time and thoughts. A luminary in the field, although you wouldn’t know that from his kind and down-to-earth demeanor.” Similarly, Cecelia Rosenberg, who served as both project officer and grants manager at FEMA, recalls his “softly persuasive ways and quiet wisdom.” He was never a loud voice, but people knew they were speaking with someone who mattered.

He mattered because of a history of innovations, a willingness to try new things to solve emerging problems. He was well ahead of most planners in recognizing how planning could be used to reduce disaster risk. In a career that that was already well underway amid the environmental planning revolution of the 1970s, he consistently found ways to generate meaningful change. By 1973, he was planning director in San Bernardino County, California, where, as California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) Professor William Siembieda notes, he “created one of the first wildfire mitigation programs and an overlay zone on 19,000 square miles of desert land for future regional conservation.”

Ken’s spirit of innovation was not limited to southern California. It was a hallmark of his career. Working with me and a team of contributors to Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction (PAS 483/484, 1998), his singular contribution lay in crafting a model ordinance for post-disaster recovery that is still in use today. The model offers local governments a means of structuring governance of the recovery process after a major or catastrophic disaster, assigning responsibilities among city agencies and empowering them to handle such urgent tasks as post-disaster demolition and intergovernmental coordination. It helps them create order out of chaos with a management structure for long-term recovery that can be activated as soon as the city declares an emergency. It expedites recovery by saving precious time after disaster strikes. I can state with certainty that no more than a handful of jurisdictions had adopted any similar approach prior to the release of our report.

More than a dozen years later, after I had convinced FEMA to fund an overhaul of the original post-disaster study, adding a bevy of online resources to a new report (Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, PAS 560, 2014), Ken sought to update the model ordinance as part of the project. When I directed his attention to what I considered an important innovation by the city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after its massive 2008 flood, he did not hesitate to contact former Community Development Director Christine Butterfield for details. The new model thus included language requiring municipal licensing of building repair contractors to prevent the sort of fraudulent repairs that had been rife in places like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Ken knew a good idea when he saw one, and Cedar Rapids had done something important. A major contributor to the later PAS Report was Laurie Johnson, who produced two of the most important chapters, dealing with the recovery planning process and implementation of recovery plans. Like me, under Ken’s influence, Laurie had come a very long way in the planning field since first meeting Ken.

Bill Siembieda says this focus on innovation was also evident in Ken’s relationship with Cal Poly, which began in the spring of 2000 and lasted two decades. Ken was a part-time lecturer and George Hasslein Chair in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, City and Regional Planning Department. His efforts included an international symposium on risk reduction, multidisciplinary courses focused on mitigation and risk reduction, and work with state agencies, most notably on the 2010 California Multi-Hazard Mitigation Plan, in which “he created a set of working groups within the state government” to discuss topics of mutual interest. He believed strongly in the value of cross-disciplinary discussions to achieve a more integrated approach to solving problems.

This focus on integration led to Ken’s involvement in what I regarded as my own signature project, which resulted in the PAS Report, Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning (PAS 560, 2010). For his accomplishments and leadership in city planning and management, environmental and hazard resilience planning, Ken was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2000 and honored with a special session at the 2019 conference of the California chapter of APA.

Multiple Dimensions

Ken died on March 5 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease at 85. He and his wife, Phyllis, spent the last year or so in San Clemente Villas in a seacoast town in Southern California. I had a few last conversations by phone with him after that move from Cambria, California, where he had served at one point as the general manager for the Cambria Community Services District and later chaired the San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission, where he demonstrated his penchant for conservation by helping establish the Fiscalini Ranch as a Pacific Ocean coastal bluff park. Siembieda credits Ken’s “great persistence” and a “willingness to put time and energy into each work product” for his vision to support large solar farms in the county and his opposition to a “large petroleum industry oil train project.”

In one of those calls, he shared with me that he had recently fallen while trying to maneuver his walker in a parking lot. It was clear that time was taking its toll, but in a later call, ever cheerful, he gently told me how much he admired my own career path. He seldom missed an opportunity to encourage the people he had mentored.

Ken with Phyllis, his wife. From David Topping’s Facebook notice about his father’s passing.

One of the more fascinating aspects of his own story, however, was his birth in 1935 in Kobe, Japan, to a pair of American Baptist missionaries. Before the outbreak of World War II, his family found it necessary to return to the United States, where he grew up in San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado, before the family returned to Japan after the war. He later returned to the U.S. for college at the University of Redlands in California, where he met Phyllis, with whom he had two sons, and earned a degree in sociology, followed by further studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They returned to California, where Ken began a career as a regional planner in Los Angeles but also earned a Masters in Public Administration in 1972 from California State University, Los Angeles. That led to his becoming planning director for San Bernardino County in 1973, and later the city of Los Angeles, appointed in 1986 by Mayor Tom Bradley. One of his achievements was Los Angeles’s first zoning update using geographic information systems (GIS), then a new technology.

The environment was clearly one of his high priorities, something readily apparent in April 2012, when he and Phyllis walked my wife, Jean, and me through the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve before treating us to lunch at a local Cambria restaurant. But he also had a deeply empathetic personal side. I had been in Los Angeles the prior week at the APA National Planning Conference (NPC), much of which became for me a daunting experience as I suffered an attack of prostatitis, though I did not know the diagnosis before visiting a local urgent care center. Exhibiting my stubborn streak, on a Saturday evening early in the conference, I showed up in a hotel meeting room after getting dressed, despite feeling drained and weak, to lead a meeting of the project team for the Next Generation project. Ken took one look at me and would have none of it. His personal touch was evident as he turned to Kathy Smith, our FEMA project officer, and said, “Look at him. He’s in no condition to run a meeting.” At Ken’s urging, It was rescheduled subsequently for a remote meeting from Cal Poly the day after our visit to Cambria.

Ken seated along with children and staff at the Morioka Kindergarten in 2013. Photo provided by Laurie Johnson.

Laurie Johnson believes many of Ken’s finer traits can be attributed to his exposure to Japan. She recalls “a beautiful tribute to Ken and his family’s ties to Japan organized by Professor [Haruo] Hayashi (Kyoto University) and colleagues” in March 2013. They were documenting recovery efforts in northern Japan following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, but the group visited a kindergarten founded in the city of Morioka by Ken’s grandmother more than a century earlier. “The kindergartners assembled and tried to sit patiently as the history was explained and Ken was honored,” she says. “They then sang a song, “Small Garden,” that his grandmother had taught her classes many years ago and which classes still sing today.”

From David Topping’s Facebook notice of his father’s passing.

Ken tapped a beat, she says, which reminded her that Ken had taught himself to play the bass and guitar and had played before for the joint research team at home in Cambria in 2002. Music was another element of his humanity and family life (including a family band), and that focus influenced his two sons to pursue careers in music. Ken went on that day at the school to remind the children to continue to learn as they grew up, how he was there himself to learn about the earthquake, and about the value of friends around the world. “So please be my friend, too,” he told them, “and keep learning all of your lives so that you can help make the world a better place.”

Connecting People

As that vignette illustrates, there was nothing more important for Ken Topping than connecting people, particularly people of talent and determination, with the resources and networks they needed to succeed at making the world a better place. And that mission spanned international boundaries.

Professor Norio Maki of Kyoto University was one of those who benefited. He describes Topping as “my mentor on planning.” In addition to working with Ken in Japan, he learned greatly from collaboration on a project in Marikina, a city in the Philippines. The goal was to develop an earthquake mitigation plan through workshops with city staff. In what he describes as “real on-the-job training,” Ken advised him on workshop presentations and the use of GIS. Despite his university degrees, he says, “I think I got my degree in planning from Ken.”

Rob also facilitated Rob Olshansky’s now permanent connection to Japan. Ken helped arrange for Rob to follow him in a one-year visiting fellowship at Kyoto University, with Professor Hayashi. The cultural shift could have been deeply challenging, but Rob brought his children along for “a life-changing year at school in Japan.” Ken advised him on “important Japanese etiquette do’s and don’ts, in addition to navigating the Japanese train system.” Eight years later, Rob was able to pay it forward by doing the same favor for another visiting professor, Jim Goltz. And so the waves of influence move forward. Rob also believes that a book he and Laurie co-authored, After Great Disasters (reviewed on this blog), “would never have happened without Ken’s influence.”

I could go on, and Rob, Laurie, Terry, Cecelia, Bill, and Norio submitted numerous and extensive comments for my use, but the overall point seems clear. Ken is gone, but as with all such special and creative people, the lesson for the rest of us is simple—to continue to extend that positive influence into future generations in our chosen field. And beyond, wherever possible. I hope we are still doing that, in our own ways.

Jim Schwab

Outthink Wildfire—a Podcast Conversation

Posted on May 12, 2021 by admin

It is evident with each increasingly serious and increasingly long wildfire season in the West and South that American still has serious public policy work to do in confronting this hazard. Recently, the National Fire Protection Association unveiled its new policy initiative, Outthink Wildfire, aimed at highlighting the need to move beyond current reactive strategies to widespread adoption and enforcement of building codes, adoption of wiser land-use regulations, and building substantial public pressure to make changes happen quickly.

The American Planning Association has released a new episode in the Resilience Roundtable series of podcasts, sponsored by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, in which I interview Michele Steinberg, Wildfire Division Manager at NFPA, about this initiative and what results it may produce in reducing wildfire hazards.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Jim Schwab

In Harm’s Way or Dodging Disaster?

Posted on April 27, 2021 by admin

President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill aims to fix much that is ailing in America, and its sheer size is drawing predictable—and short-sighted—fire from Republicans in Congress. The nation has a great deal of aging infrastructure, which will eventually pose a massive challenge to economic development. But the American Jobs Plan also takes aim at a growing, urgent, and critical need for infrastructure to cope with the impacts of climate change. These affect many kinds of infrastructure, including transportation, water, wastewater, and energy and communications systems. There is nothing patriotic, it seems to me, in being so oppositional as to allow our nation to deteriorate, Texas-style, in the face of changing climate conditions. There is also nothing about what happened in Texas with frozen energy systems that contradicts “global warming.” The research clearly shows that climate instability, including seemingly less predictable winter storms, is part of the overall impact of a generally warming climate. Nobody but a charlatan ever promised that climate change would be a simple topic.

Earlier this year, I reviewed a book by a former Toronto mayor about what cities are doing about climate change. Later, I reviewed Doug Farr’s elaborate tome on how the design professions are providing solutions to climate challenges in new forms of housing and urban development. In addition, a year ago, I reviewed a new Planning Advisory Service Report by the American Planning Association on planning for infrastructure resilience. I remain committed to highlighting resources for planners, public officials, and interested citizens on issues of climate resilience.

In this post, I feature a new book on community solutions to climate resilience. In Harm’s Way, by John Cleveland and Peter Plastrik, provides a set of detailed ideas for building climate resilience in our communities. In my view, its dominant values in contributing to the discussion of climate change and community adaptation center on two crucial issues: first, how to finance investments in climate resilience, and second, how to build the policy foundations for managing retreat from the most vulnerable coastal areas as a means of avoiding major “natural” disasters. The two co-authors bring interesting backgrounds for such discussion. Cleveland is executive director of the Innovation Network for Communities (INC) and a member of the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, a group of business and civic leaders supporting the Boston Climate Action Plan. Plastrik is vice-president of INC and co-author of an Island Press book on networking for social change.

The Biden plan faces a challenging uphill climb toward passage in Congress. The money it promises for what it offers to do is heavily dependent on changes in corporate taxation that may face daunting opposition in Congress. In any case, even passage of the plan does not necessarily mean that every valuable potential investment at the local level in more resilient infrastructure will be assured of adequate funding, nor does it mean that local leaders will always agree with federal priorities for their own communities. The struggle to implement the plan will face years of challenges. In short, this is an important time for the vital discussion by Cleveland and Plastrik on how we can best find the money for essential investments in climate resilience.

Financing climate resilience is essentially an exercise in risk management. The first ingredient in successful risk management is recognition of the problem, which at a national scale has been a political football because of right-wing denial that a problem exists. For four years, this denial was centered in the White House, but the nation clearly chose a sea change on climate policy in the 2020 election. But that does not mean that nothing was happening outside the Trump administration—far from it. Local financial innovations were afoot in numerous American communities, including large cities like Boston, Miami, and San Francisco. Indeed, networks of such cities have been exploring avenues for fostering climate-related investments. The issue in many cases, because local governments seldom have large stores of cash awaiting brilliant ideas, is hunting for money in the financial markets. In many ways, the hunt for climate-resilient investments is a race against time for cities that may face climate-related disasters that may cost far more in damages than the investments they are contemplating to prevent such outcomes. Misalignments between resources and needs are commonplace, the environmental burdens of climate change, particularly on low-income and minority neighborhoods, are often enormous, and public revenue is often insufficient to address the problem. The authors thus focus on the need for innovations in climate resilience finance to meet this challenge. Given the likelihood that at least some of the Biden plan will require some level of local and state matching funds, this issue will remain potent. The authors outline a range of tools for creating these new financial structures. This task is far from impossible, however. Bond-rating firms and others are already recognizing the inherent risks involved in ignoring climate change. Why not invest on the positive side through mitigation and adaptation?

Case studies are always helpful in making clear that some community, somewhere, is at least testing solutions, many of them proving successful. The authors outline a playbook for paying for climate resilience, using eight examples in which communities have generated local revenue, imposed land-use costs on unwise development, leveraged development opportunities to achieve climate resilience, and pursued equity, among other options. Local governments in fact have a range of regulatory tools and incentives they use to leverage many other decisions by businesses and residents, many of the options, such as floodplain management rules, are already common. What is needed is the imagination for new ideas on how to use those tools, as well as accessible guidance on how well those ideas are working and under what circumstances. One city highlighted in this chapter is Norfolk, Virginia, a low-lying city on the Atlantic coast that faces a future laden with nuisance flooding due to sea level rise. Its system of four color-coded zones indicates relative levels of safety or vulnerability as a means of directing redevelopment to safer areas while demarcating those in need of protection. Zoning may not seem like a financial issue, but it is a quintessential financial tool in dictating what sort of development is permissible in what location, thus channeling investment to those areas the city deems acceptable for certain purposes. The problem is that the power of zoning has not always been used with a vivid awareness of the environmental hazards that are tied to urban geography.

In the U.S. system, municipalities are creations of the states, which establish the rules under which cities operate. Notwithstanding the magnitude of federal largesse, it is thus also fitting that the book contains a chapter on how states can help communities invest in climate resilience. States can serve as both barriers to and intentional supporters of local innovations in financing climate resilience.

Collapsed houses after Hurricane Sandy on the Jersey shore. The results of climate-driven disasters are seldom pretty.

In the end, however, all of this depends to some degree on political will, a subject addressed in a final chapter on managed retreat under the caption, “Can it happen here?” Communities have long shied away from open discussion of retreat from the shoreline or highly volatile riverfronts. Seashore land has historically been some of the most valuable real estate in the nation, and not only because it can become a haven for rich owners of second homes, but because beaches attract tourism and harbors attract economic development and transportation infrastructure. What public official wants to say no to new shoreline development, let alone talk of managing retreat from existing settlements? Yet the sheer long-term cost of such reluctance to lead with courage is something I discussed in another book review early last year. The Geography of Risk was a book that detailed wave after wave of catastrophic destruction on the New Jersey barrier islands as a result of investments by entrenched real estate interests that resisted risk-based land-use reforms.

But Cleveland and Plastrik insist that retreat will happen, and the question is not if, but when, and under what circumstances. Basically, they say, in coastal areas threatened by climate change and sea level rise, retreat will be driven either by disasters, or by the market, or by plans. In the first instance, nature itself will make decisions that force painful choices that we cannot control. In the second, recognizing the inherent dangers of such stubborn persistence, market forces will withdraw investment from areas that are no longer viable as a result of climate change, with major losses for those who either lack the means to move or who fail to read the tea leaves. The final choice, plan-driven retreat, is the only one that allows the community some degree of sovereignty in the matter, deliberating about the direction of retreat, the means of financing it, and ways of mitigating financial consequences for those involved. The problem is finding articulate, visionary leadership that can lead the community to its moment of truth.

Jim Schwab

Acting in Good Faith

Posted on April 13, 2021 by admin

How does one portray the life of a man whose ultimate fate was a hanging at the hands of the Gestapo, with just four weeks left until the German surrender in World War II? Even an experienced professional actor might find that role daunting. I played that role last Friday evening in what amounted to my amateur acting debut, complicated by a Zoom platform in what we all hope are the latter stages of a pandemic. I’m certainly accustomed to being on a stage in front of an audience as a public speaker, but in those situations, I am speaking for myself. Portraying a historical figure of the magnitude of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a very different matter.

The collective performance of volunteers mostly from Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park in Chicago occurred on the anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s execution in 1945, at the Flossenburg concentration camp near the German border with Czechosolvakia. One suspects the SS, whose Judge Otto Thorbeck condemned him to die the day before the hanging, must have been in a hurry. Just two weeks later, American troops liberated the camp.

Script cover for “The Beams Are Creaking”

My intent in discussing this in a blog post is not to review the play, The Beams Are Creaking, by Douglas Anderson, but to reflect on what I learned from taking on this role in the first place. It is also the case that several rehearsals—and rereading the script a few times—occupied enough of my time to explain my hiatus from blog writing in recent weeks. It was only as we practiced our parts that I began to realize what I was trying to accomplish, but I was hooked. The play begins in 1933, with Bonhoeffer returning from the United States to Germany at the dawn of the Nazi rise to power. There are several biographies of Bonhoeffer, the most notable probably being that written by his close associate, Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, originally published in Germany in 1967, and later translated into English.

The necessary brevity of a play, if done well (and this is), condenses essential points and makes them more visible not only to the audience, but to the actors as well. I quickly realized from the full scope of the script that Bonhoeffer was not entirely the same man in 1945 that he was at the outset of the drama, when a streak of naivete about the German future still shaped his outlook. Born in 1906 in what is now Poland, Bonhoeffer returned from America with decided impressions about the injustice perpetrated on the American Negro, but not disposed to compare their situation with the plight of Jews in Germany, in part because he simply did not believe that Germany could succumb to the appeal of Adolf Hitler. Confronted early in the first act by Hans von Dohnanyi with the possibility of the Nazis gaining power, Bonhoeffer simply replies, “It couldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen in Germany.” By now, of course, the most observant among us are aware of a few too many historical developments that “could not happen” but did.

Photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reproduced from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was soon disabused of his initial perspective, particularly when he dares to give a radio speech implicitly criticizing the Fuhrer. The Nazis silenced the radio station before he could finish. And that is the first of many steps that lead him steadily, inexorably, into a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler—a conspiracy that failed with dire consequences for those involved. When the play ends, he is sitting in Tegel prison, but Gestapo agents have come to transfer him to Flossenburg, which all around him know to be a death sentence.

The challenge for me in playing Bonhoeffer was to transfer to a Zoom screen that sense of the gradual but inevitable shift from a 27-year-old idealist, steeped in faith as a trained theologian and pastor, to a 39-year-old man who has come to terms with the deepest meaning of faith at the darkest moments in anyone’s life.

This struggle for almost anyone involves a powerful mixture of personal circumstances and challenges and some sort of deep faith that undergirds the transition that his life undergoes. One key turning point, midway through the play, involves the planned emigration of his sister, Sabine, and her Jewish husband Gerhard, to escape the coming Holocaust. In the play, this is the point when, having been approached by others who are involved in the plot against Hitler, he decides, “I will be a conspirator.” This is not a line that I shouted from the rooftop; it was one that I delivered with a heavy heart, realizing what will likely be demanded of Bonhoeffer in the coming years.

The second and final act opens later with Bonhoeffer in prison, chatting with a friendly guard, musing over his role as a thorn in the side of the Gestapo. The middle of the act consists of a monologue, Bonhoeffer with a mop talking to the floor, articulating his frustration with the official church in Germany, its betrayal of principles and purpose, ultimately concluding that it has driven the thinking man from the church because, “It honesty doesn’t know what to say to him.” One might call it a sense of despair, but it is also a lonely note of defiance.

One cannot gainsay the role of faith in Bonhoeffer’s life and how it affected his decisions. For a 39-year-old man facing death, he left behind some of the most meaningful spiritual writings of the 20^th century, including his letters from prison, but also the classic The Cost of Discipleship, which begins with the theologically famous line, “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.” Bonhoeffer was not about to lie to anyone about the high cost of confronting evil power.

That is the background. What did I learn from this volunteer dramatic effort? First, there was the challenge of presenting this on Zoom, as pandemic restrictions made a live stage presentation problematic. We practiced on Zoom, which was never designed for presenting plays, and learned to work with its limitations. These included the need for all of us to wait at strategic points to deliver our lines until Nancy Goede, pastor of Augustana, who conceived of this operation in the first place, secured the licensing rights to present it, and acquired the scripts for all of us, could produce sound effects (such as knocking on a door or a phone ringing) at points where that otherwise would have been a background stage noise. On Zoom, however, our talking would have filtered out such sounds, so we had to master the timing to allow those sounds to occur. There are scenes where the historical context emerges from radio announcements, and certain people had to provide those, speaking into makeshift microphones of the era, and so forth. In many ways, despite the visual presence on Zoom, our production resembled an old theater of the radio, and with a story set in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps that aided the dramatic impact. But taking all the emotional impact of the story I mention above, and framing it within Zoom, was an interesting challenge and ate up a significant amount of time in rehearsals.

Given that almost no one had the spare time to learn every line by heart, this was “Readers Theater,” in which people used the script during the performance. However, to increase the impact of Bonhoeffer’s presence, I mastered the art of essentially hiding the script below the screen, that is, out of sight of the webcam, while also anticipating lines that I could deliver without even looking at it. On stage, all of this would have been impossible, but then Zoom made other things impossible, such as Bonhoeffer hugging or kissing his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, when she visits him in prison. Live theater online involves its own fair share of compromises.

I would love to provide some photos here of the performance, but licensing rights prohibited recording. I have chosen to make do with other approaches to make this more visually interesting.

Me, as Bonhoeffer, in “studio” in clerical garb for scene with Hermann Goering and Bishop Ludwig Muller

In addition to the invisible but important influence of people like the pastor, I must mention that no performance like this operates without serious teamwork. Much of what I did gained from the adroit counterplay of other actors. Dan Friedrich, who played multiple roles, was a remarkably cynical Hermann Goering, making very effective use of Goering’s perverse sense of humor, as in a meeting between himself, Bonhoeffer, and Bishop Muller of the German national church. When Bonhoeffer offers to show that his opposition movement has some 6,000 pastors objecting to some new Nazi policy declarations, Goering laughs it off by noting ominously that “we already know who they are.” Both my role and Dan’s demanded an effective foil on the other side. I learned how to use such foils to the benefit of the portrayal of my own character. On

Theresa Fuchs in downtown Chicago

the other hand, Theresa Fuchs, a visitor from Germany working at the Goethe-Institut, played a very convincing and sincere Maria. Her soft German-accented English lent an air of linguistic reality to the play, but more importantly, she also schooled the rest of the cast on the proper pronunciation of German names (though it didn’t always take, as one might expect).

Andrea Holliday

Dan Friedrich played both sides: General Hermann Goering and the anti-Nazi conspirator Schlabrendorff. That is, when not also playing an American correspondent at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

As for Dan, a software developer who has a serious sideline hobby in comedy improv, he can take credit for introducing us to Andrea Holliday, who provided the narration where Zoom made certain stage effects either difficult or impossible.

In the end, this experience taught me a deeper respect than I already had for what professional and even community theater actors attempt to do all the time. It involves investing some of your own emotional energy in the portrayal of the character, and in the case of a character like Bonhoeffer, some significant willingness to try to achieve an understanding of that person’s world view and faith. Frankly, after this 2 ½-hour online presentation was over, I felt a significant need to unwind and recover from what I had just done. Acting is a unique artistic enterprise in the way it demands that you embrace another person’s perspective, especially when that person is a historic figure, rather than the product of a creative author’s mind. It stretches one’s mind and heart in special ways.

Jim Schwab

P.S.: For a blog perspective on the presentation by Pastor Nancy Goede’s husband, Jim Vondracek, click here.

Podcast on Hawaii Volcano Recovery

Posted on March 15, 2021 by admin

Volcanoes pose a unique challenge for hazard mitigation and post-disaster recovery in the parts of the world where they occur. In the United States, these regions are along the Pacific Rim and in the middle of the ocean itself—in other words, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii. In Hawaii, an archipelago that grew from volcanic eruptions over millions of years, all active volcanoes are located on the island of Hawai’i, also known as the Big Island because, as Hawai’i County planner Douglas Le notes, the land area of all the other major islands could be fit into this one land mass.

As I have done with previous installments of the American Planning Association’s Resilience Roundtable podcast series, for which I have been host for the last year and a half, I am providing this brief introduction with a link to the podcast on the APA website. The series is sponsored by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am currently chair.

The subject of this podcast is Hawai’i County’s planning for recovery from the numerous impacts of the 2018 Kilauea volcanic eruption, which buried homes in its path and disrupted life in several subdivisions on a largely rural and agricultural island. The issues involve displacement, social equity, native land rights, environmental quality, and economic recovery, to name a few. Please take time to listen to this 52-minute exchange between me and Douglas Le, disaster recovery officer for the county planning department, and learn more than you may have imagined about how planning can help address this fascinating problem.

Click here to listen.

Jim Schwab

Climate Solutions, Off the Shelf

Posted on March 10, 2021 by admin

About six weeks ago, as the Biden administration was first asserting its priorities regarding climate change and the environment, I reviewed a book about the positive actions already being taken by cities around the world in addressing the climate crisis. The important takeaway was that, while climate policy languished or moved backwards under the Trump administration, cities and their mayors had not waited for national governments to act. They had instead taken the initiative.

But city governments are not alone. Architects, planners, engineers, and even developers have innovated in their own ways. In late 2019, Chicago architect Douglas Farr provided me with a copy of his book, Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future, and I promised to review it. It is a sizeable, oversize, 400-page tome, but don’t let that intimidate you, even if I got sidetracked for numerous reasons and only a year later decided to devour the book from cover to cover. That is not necessary for everyone. The book functions much like an encyclopedia, reference work, or anthology. Farr solicited specialized contributions from numerous practitioners and experts. Pick a chapter, pick your favorite subtopic, or dive in randomly. You won’t fail to learn something, as I did, despite my general familiarity with Farr’s subject matter.

My timing in finally reviewing the book has proven fortuitous, in a way. It allows me to expand the message of the review of David Miller’s Solved, a much shorter book by a single author. Miller essentially is a success storyteller; Farr is a documenter. Both serve a purpose.

For 650,000 years, global carbon dioxide emissions have never been above the read line. They are now. All graphics courtesy of Farr Associates

Farr starts his book with a “Where We Are” section that includes color-coded maps documenting the huge disparities around the world in longevity (50-59 years in much of Africa, 70-79 in the U.S., above 80 in Japan, Australia, Canada, and Europe, in poverty, gender inequality, and so forth. A simple chart of global CO₂levels demonstrates that, within our lifetimes, we have nearly doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to levels not seen in the last 650,000 years. A parade of such graphics makes clear that ours is a planet on a collision course with natural reality.

The Bullitt Center. Copyright Nic Lenoux for the Bullitt Center.

But such searing images also clarify the importance of examples of what can be done. Farr leads us to the specific example in Seattle of the Bullitt Center, which he terms the “most sustainable office building in the world.” Composting toilets use an average of two tablespoons of water per use. There are no parking spaces, but there is 243 square meters of rooftop green space. The Bullitt Center earned designation as one of the first eight buildings to achieve full certification under the Living Building Challenge, and the first office building.

But no one in Seattle wants it to retain such titles. They would rather see new buildings and new developments claim new titles and surpass the Bullitt Center’s achievements as we move toward an entire new sustainable society. Farr takes us from “our default world” to “our preferred future,” with a procession of examples of how this can be done, then leads readers to a theory of change that discusses how we make change happen, over what timelines, and how we can step on the gas with “acceleration strategies” to make practical impacts on climate change happen more quickly.

But it is in the final section, “The Practice of Change,” which dominates more than half the book, where Farr enlists a variety of expert contributors to share the methods and designs that will carry us forward to reduce climate impacts and ultimately create a more livable society. This is not just about innovative building design but about human relationships. Mary Nelson, president and CEO emeritus of Chicago’s Bethel New Life Inc., and one of the pioneers of Chicago neighborhood change whom I most admire, discusses how we build strong relationships between people and place (spoiler alert: it involves hard work). Others describe the value of participatory art in communities or the need to transform public spaces into welcoming places (Fred Kent, president, Project for Public Spaces). Get the point? Architectural or planning solutions that have no human connection of involvement beyond an elite are dead letters in promoting real social change that will have any impact on our climate crisis. It’s all about us, whether the subject is local food culture, local planning checkups, ore re-envisioning underutilized space to promote equitable prosperity. Every single example has its champion in this book, someone who has worked on solutions and involved people in finding answers.

For a moment, I’d like to focus on contributions by two colleagues with whom I have worked, David Fields and Tom Price, to make the point. Fields is a veteran transportation planner now working in Houston as the city’s chief transportation planner, who discusses how elements of the urban setting such as residential density and mixed land uses that put homes within walking distance of retail, or put homes above ground-floor retail, can reduce vehicle trips by up to 90 percent, thus helping to reverse the tremendous negative impact of the automobile on the world’s climate, to say nothing of air quality. Price, on the other hand, is a civil engineer, instructs us on how to use “every project as an opportunity to process rainwater and stormwater,” while demanding beauty through improved design. His articles remind me of a lesson I learned years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, through a project in New Orleans called the Dutch Dialogues, in which the American Planning Association and others engaged with Dutch planners and engineers to promulgate the idea of seeing water not as the enemy but as a resource for enhancing urban quality of life. We need to find ways to help move water elegantly through the city instead of constantly finding ways to bury it, hide it, or divert it.

Whether the subject is community theater, transportation, or architectural styles that build housing affordability and reduced heating and cooling demands to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the overall point is not only repetitive but cumulative: For many of the challenges that climate change poses to our communities, we already know the answers if we are willing to explore the most innovative, effective, and creative approaches that others have already used. Yes, we have a new administration willing to rejoin the Paris climate accord and invest in solutions to climate change. That is important, as we need to push envelopes constantly and with urgency. But we dare not ignore the answers that are all around us in the innovations that are already helping our communities adapt to a carbon-neutral, democratic, more equitable future. They embody the lessons that, through replication, will accelerate our shift to a green future that eases the existential climate crisis of our planet.

The sweet-spot scale in action in Oslo, Norway. Copyright Jason F. McLennan.

Perhaps two points in Farr’s book, side by side, will help illuminate the point. One is a segment by Jason F. McLennan, founder of the Living Building Challenge. He defines something he calls the “sweet spot” in the sustainable urban fabric, buildings between four and eight stories high. These are buildings not so high as to isolate people on upper floors from fellow human beings at ground level. The building is also not so tall that reliance on energy-consuming elevators drives high energy demand for the building merely to function. There is a place for taller buildings, but the combination of density and manageable energy demand with the potential to minimize demands on the environment exists in that “sweet spot.” Subsequent examples in the same section

The sweet spot defined. Modified by Farr with permission from Jason F. McLennan.

proceed to elaborate on ways we already know to produce affordable, carbon-neutral housing. At the end of the book, in contrast, Farr makes his plea, in large part to fellow architects, to “end the race to build the world’s tallest building,” detailing the negative effects of such edifices on public health, safety, and welfare, and ending with a quote from Sherrilyn Kenyon, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Indeed. That is the fundamental point of stranded carbon, that is, leaving fossil fuels unburned, in the ground, and shifting to a renewable energy economy.

Much of the secret of achieving this goal lies in knowing when to stop doing the wrong things and how to enable our society to do more of the green things. This being merely a blog post, I cannot attempt to share all the specific points Farr and his contributors make concerning street design, building envelopes, solar power, social equity, and commitment to environmental health. But I can urge you to seek out his book, in a library, online, or in a bookstore, to find the examples you need for the situation your own community faces in crafting a more sustainable future. This is the activist’s and practitioner’s manual to help get you started. Let’s all engage in some creative thinking and problem solving.

Jim Schwab

Our Collective COVID Cabin Fever

Posted on February 28, 2021 by admin

I am not a doubter when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines. All I want to do is sign up and let them put a sharp needle in my arm and inoculate me. Do it twice if the vaccine demands it. Even my experience in early February with the shingles vaccine cannot deter me. On a Tuesday afternoon, a pharmacist at the local Walgreen’s provided a shot that I requested at my doctor’s suggestion. It has been two decades since I experienced my second episode of shingles, but I vividly recollected the piercing pains in my shoulders and arms that made it nearly impossible to exercise my fingers on a keyboard, one of the most basic things I have long done to earn a living. I told the pharmacist that I “noticed it but did not feel it.” He put a bandage over the location on my upper left arm, and I left, thanking him.

It was that evening that I noticed my reaction as muscle aches spread from that left arm across my upper chest. Then the chills set in, and I pulled the covers over me in bed. I repeatedly felt my forehead, testing for a fever. Nothing happening. The next day, the muscle aches diminished, but the chills persisted, and I sat in a leather chair with a blanket pulled over me, doing little but reading a newspaper and then falling asleep. I had slept all night, but it mattered not; the fatigue overpowered me. Late that afternoon, I struggled through two online meetings, and my energy again failed me. I spent the next day feeling slightly more energetic until about 3 p.m., when I fell into a deep sleep, again with blankets covering me as I accomplished nothing. My wife says I turned white, but I wouldn’t know. I lacked the energy to look into the mirror.

By Friday, I at least posed a question to my primary physician on the patient portal: Is this normal? He wrote back to say that about 20 to 25 percent of people getting the shingles virus experience such a reaction, which mostly proved that the vaccine was beneficial. My immune system was relearning how to fight the shingles virus. That was vaguely reassuring, and I knew he knew whereof he spoke, but it took one last development to convince me.

Late that Friday afternoon, with the better part of a week lost to malaise, I suddenly felt the fog lift and the fever break, though it was not really a fever. All within an hour. It just stopped. My immune system had learned what it needed to know, and it ceased fighting what was not there. And I was fine. That’s part of how vaccines work, but I could not recall ever experiencing such a reaction to any previous vaccine.

Our backyard after the Presidents Day blizzard.

Amid this experience, however, the snow piled up in Chicago. First came a snowstorm that covered our yards and streets in blinding whiteness. Often, in Chicago winters, these snows come, sit around for a few days until the sun comes out, and they melt away as the temperatures rise.

But not this time. Until February in this season, we had seen little more than timid flurries of pixie dust that barely covered the ground, with green shoots of grass still poking out from below. Now it came to stay, as temperatures soon plunged to zero and slightly below, solidifying the growing accumulation of snow even as we struggled daily to clear a path down our gangway and along the sidewalk in front of our home. I shoveled in front of a neighbor’s home as well, knowing he had recently had hernia surgery. And the very next day, we had to do it again.

Jean wanted her turn at shoveling as a way to get some exercise. She got her wish.

The three weeks of persistent snow culminated in a 17-inch overnight debauchery on Presidents Day that left us staggering and feeling quarantined by virtue of a simple inability to move a car down the alley, or the challenge of climbing over hip-high snow piles at intersections. During those three weeks, our cumulative snowfall mounted to 40 inches.

Our somewhat metaphorical confinement by way of extensive pandemic restrictions now took on major physical dimensions, leaving us feeling imprisoned. Not only was there nowhere to go because the restaurants were closed, but there was no way to get out, either. In place of my brief fatigue in reaction to a shingles virus, I now felt a very real spiritual and emotional fatigue at the mere thought of needing boots and a heavy coat just to step outside. Staying at home felt more like incarceration than refuge. Even the mail, which provides some tangible connection to the outside world, was no longer arriving. The carrier on our route, and probably on many others, was not braving the snow piles and frigid weather, and the mail piled up at the post office until, one day, I simply walked the mile to get it, standing in line for more than half an hour for a pile of paper surrounded by a rubber band, partly containing bills to pay. The process took long enough that, by the time it was over, I needed to use a bathroom and home was too far away. I opted for the nearby Cozy Corner diner, and showed my gratitude by staying for lunch. It’s a very decent eatery, actually, and I enjoyed my California melt with fries. And then I walked home again, through the very snow piles that had impeded its delivery. Watch where you walk when you cross the street.

After weeks of erratic service, the mail came all at once, and not again so far.

By the following Sunday, temperatures rose and stayed above freezing. The snow began to melt, removing the impediments to delivery. Nonetheless, in the past week, delivery occurred only on Tuesday, when the mailbox was suddenly full, but it was an aberration rather than real change. No mail arrived for the rest of the week. This has been an ongoing problem across Chicago, for systemic rather than purely weather-driven reasons, and even more so in some South Side ZIP codes than ours, which is itself bad enough. The Chicago Tribune ran an article about the Trumpian mess in which U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush expressed his impatience on behalf of his constituents about the staffing excuses, saying there were plenty of unemployed people in the city, so “if you have a job, do it.”

The as yet uncollected recyclables in a bin filled to the brim.

That comment formed an interesting backdrop to the other event the same day all mail arrived. The city recycling pickup occurs on our block on alternate Tuesdays, and our bins were full, if somewhat piled around with snow. The trucks seemed to be very selective, leaving our stuff uncollected, so that we are now storing recyclables in paper bags in the garage. I complained to the city Streets and Sanitation Department in an online forum that left little room for comment, then forwarded the complaint and further explanation to our 1^st Ward alderman, Daniel La Spata. I noted that the previous week, the regular garbage pickup occurred without a problem under worse circumstances. He informed me that a private company had been hired for the recycling, similar problems had emerged elsewhere, and added, “Honestly, that’s the difference between public employees and privatized ones, and why we’re pushing back on the latter.” Some might question that comparison in light of the post office problems, but I would suggest that the U.S. Postal Service, to a significant degree, has been the target of efforts to undermine it as a means of justifying privatization and subverting the integrity of mail ballots. In any case, I still want them to empty those blue recycling bins.

During all this, I nonetheless wanted to access the COVID vaccine so that I could move beyond the sense of limitation that nearly a year of closed stores and restaurants, and mask wearing and social distancing, has instilled in all of us. For compulsive extroverts like me, the compounded effect of long-term pandemic restrictions followed by a month of being buried in frozen precipitation is producing a profound restlessness. Put simply, I want out.

I have not yet mentioned that five grandchildren have been studying remotely in our home since September. We are guardians for one, and the others are here as their mother engineers a major change in her life, and besides, my wife is a retired public schools teacher who can mentor them. Throughout February, the Chicago Teachers Union engaged in a vociferous public debate with the Chicago Public Schools and Mayor Lori Lightfoot about reopening schools, arguing over the adequacy of the preparations for protecting teachers and staff from coronavirus exposure. This took place against the backdrop of the larger national debate over online versus in-person education, but I know what I see. The kids are noticeably glazing over and tuning out, and listening to a teacher on a screen is getting old. Students, particularly students of color (most of our grandchildren) and those with working parents, are falling behind, and the schools will have a major challenge in coming years of reversing the impacts of online education. Students in the early grades need human contact to remain fully engaged. None of this is to deny the necessity that drove the schools to close, but the national failure to manage the pandemic has greatly exacerbated the consequences.

We need to get our national act together, and moving millions of doses of vaccines to sites where people can get some sense of relief is the most important step right now. Instead, I’ve found myself checking online daily, sometimes multiple times daily, only to find no availability for vaccine appointments. But my wife finally got her call for March 2, so I remain hopeful. I have no other choice.

That expression of patience is at the heart of our dilemma. I could live with the snow, however impatiently and with some humor, because I knew that warmer days lay ahead, and snow cannot outlast St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. Unlike Texas, our infrastructure is designed to handle winter. A slow, steady rise in temperature would allow snow to turn to water at a steady pace without triggering floods. We will be fine.

What has been less certain has been the ability of our national public health infrastructure, as disheveled as political neglect has allowed it to become, to respond to the pandemic. But I can also feel a steady warming trend since January 20, however halting it has seemed at times. The big snowstorm, which jostled its way through Kentucky and Tennessee and Arkansas all the way down to Texas and Louisiana, slowed distribution of vaccines, but maybe for a week. My wife learned that she got her appointment because PrimeCare, a local health care provider, had just received a big shipment.

Snow recedes to a manageable level as the weather has warmed.

My turn will come, and so will yours if you’re smart enough to get vaccinated. My outlook will change with the warm breezes of spring, and I will start to think about where I can go and what I can do. We will end this year-long cabin fever that has been induced by a tiny virus with protein spikes that latch onto receptor target cells in a microbiological process most of us do not understand.

But it may be a long time before we stop talking about it. Our collective COVID cabin fever does that. Let’s all talk about what we as a nation can do better next time. Do it over beer or coffee or tea, but make it a productive, meaningful conversation. I’m tired of gripes. I prefer solutions.

Jim Schwab

Home of the Brave

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