Tag Archives: APA

Gratitude on Parade #7

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GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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The size of the American Planning Association‘s loss when Stuart Meck departed can be measured easily by the size of Rutgers University‘s gain when he joined their staff, a fact immortalized by the Rutgers decision to name a lecture series after him. Marya Morris, who probably worked most closely with him at APA, got the opportunity recently to present the eulogy at the opening of that series. She shared some memorable stories, including his near death in the early 2000s when he was struck with an intestinal infection while they both were in Prague. It seems the Czech government felt it could learn a great deal about planning law reform by having Stuart Meck lead a 12-session workshop on the subject for high government officials. Pretty heady stuff.

I also worked with Stuart, though not as much as Marya. But we teamed up on hazard mitigation content for his pet project, funded by seven federal agencies and a few foundations, on statutory reform of state planning laws, known as Growing Smart. We also teamed up on a PAS Report, Planning for Wildfires. That may have been more in my wheelhouse, but trust me, Stuart was no slouch in mastering new topics and contributed very substantially to the final product.

Between all these major efforts, he found time incessantly to mentor the younger research staff at APA and was an indefatigable cheerleader for his profession. Did I mention he also co-authored a tome on Ohio Planning and Zoning Law? His productivity was a miracle to behold, as was his willingness to defend what he believed in. He died sooner than most of us who knew him would have liked, but he still deserves his day in the sun. The photos below, of various phases of his life, were provided by his daughter, Lindsay Meck. Thanks, Lindsay, for your help in this regard.

Stuart was also a jazz fan.

Posted to Facebook 2/10/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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It’s been a couple of weeks, and I’ve been busy, but I have a great one today. I visited with Eugene Henry last Thursday and Friday while in Florida. On Friday, February 22, Gene’s dedication drove him across the state to West Palm Beach to hear my lecture for Florida Atlantic University on “Recovery and Resilience,” followed by a panel discussion and reception. Mind you, it’s a four-hour drive from Tampa.

But the day before, he hosted my wife and me on a personal day-long tour of Hillsborough County to show me the work they have done on hazard mitigation to reduce risks from hurricanes and floods. In a day or two, I plan to post a blog article on this subject, but Gene for some time has been the hazard mitigation program manager for Hillsborough County, a large urban area that includes Tampa. Gene is, as my friend Lincoln Walther, one of the panelists in West Palm Beach, said, “one of the best.” He has pushed the program forward, and he was a force behind the development of a very progressive Post-Disaster Redevelopment Plan that Hillsborough County pioneered several years ago. Gene is looking forward to retirement in a few years, but his contributions have been outstanding and deserve serious recognition. He is a true leader in the mitigation field. Let this tribute be a beginning, followed by the upcoming blog post.

Posted to Facebook 2/26/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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Today, I’d like to thank my long-time friend and high school classmate, David Taylor, and his wife, Linda, for their hospitality in sharing their home and time with us during our recent visit to Florida. David is the person who spurred me to come to Sarasota in the first place. He is also a photographer who used his resources, time, and energy, to film the entire two-hour program that I keynoted in West Palm Beach for Florida Atlantic University on February 22.

A Purple Heart Vietnam veteran, Dave is passionate about some subjects, including respect for veterans, and shared his stories with me and others about fighting his way back from serious injuries. He’s generous to the core but wise in his years. He was the emcee for our 50-year reunion last June in Brecksville, Ohio, for the Class of 1968. There is a lot I can say. He is currently taking film and history classes at State College of Florida with both students and professors younger than us, and enjoying it thoroughly because he has so much to share.

Most importantly, perhaps, he has gotten so excited about what he heard from listening to me that he wants to take all that talent and use it to help document disasters photographically, even as he gorges his brain on all that I have produced. Here’s to a good friend still finding his energy and a new mission in life as he nears 70.

The photo below? I cropped it to show him and Linda more closely, but the larger version, well, they’re standing under the Kissing Sailor statue in downtown Sarasota, which replicates that iconic photo from the end of WWII.

Posted to Facebook 2/27/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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In the year after Hurricane Katrina, I met a young professor at University of New Orleans who was teaching transportation planning–John Renne. Soon, he had invited me to provide a closing keynote at a conference with a distinct theme: Carless Evacuation. Using a federal DOT grant, John was focusing attention on the central question of emergency management in the Big Easy: How do we move those people to safety who are the most vulnerable and lack independent transportation to just get out of town?

John has continued to raise vital questions like that ever since, even after moving in recent years to Florida Atlantic University. Florida faces plenty of its own questions concerning hurricane safety, and at 44, it would seem we can expect his contributions to keep coming. Recently, he and FAU hosted me to keynote a program on “Resilience and Recovery: Facing Disasters of the Future,” and I appreciated the chance to interact with planning professionals on what is known in Florida as the Treasure Coast. Bringing a hazards focus to transportation planning has been John’s unique and valuable asset not only regionally but nationally. FAU should be, and probably is, glad to have him.

In the photo below: Hank Savitch, Alka Sapat, myself, Lincoln Walther, John Renne. Hank, Alka, and Link joined me on the discussion panel that followed my talk in West Palm Beach a week ago. John was the moderator.

Posted to Facebook 3/2/2019

Reducing Risk from Natural Hazards

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Eroded hillsides have helped push New Zealand to adopt its own approach to risk reduction.

Late in 2017, I received an inquiry from Oxford University Press. Professor Ann-Margaret Esnard at the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University had recommended me for an assignment they had in mind to add an article to their growing specialty encyclopedia on natural hazards, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. They needed someone to write a peer-reviewed article about “Planning Systems for Natural Hazard Risk Reduction,” using roughly 10,000 words plus appropriate graphics and illustrations. We discussed why they saw me as an appropriate candidate for the job, and I accepted the assignment.

Over the following few months early last year, I spent many hours over several weeks fashioning the article. Although I started out with a clear vision of my subject matter, I also explored and sought more international material than I had ever previously examined. By the spring of 2018, I submitted my draft. Over subsequent months, it underwent editing, peer review, revision, and proofreading, and then final preparation for online publication. Today, I received the announcement. It is online and available to the public.

So, the question for most readers, even those already immersed in the subject matter of natural hazards, is, “What do you mean by planning systems”? Oxford did not venture a specific definition of what they had in mind; they left that to me. I decided that the answer was “essentially a layer of guidance or legal requirements that sit atop plans of any type at any governmental level at or below the source of that guidance.” In other words, the system describes what a plan should look like, or what is expected of a plan that complies with the framework that is established. A planning system is a statutory or programmatic framework for a specific type of plan, in this case, one that aims to reduce losses from natural hazard events.

This had long been important to me. As far back as 2002, while I was at the American Planning Association (APA), I had arranged a contract between APA and the Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) under which APA researched and described state laws that related to planning for natural hazards, updated annually until 2010, when IBHS decided to discontinue the contract. An elaborate matrix detailed which states prescribed planning to address hazards and what they required, suggested, or allowed, supplemented by explanations of specific items in a key code and by color-coded maps. In 2007, I convinced the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to underwrite an APA project that examined how communities could better integrate hazard mitigation priorities into local planning processes. The result was a 2010 Planning Advisory Service Report, Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning. That has led to elaboration of FEMA guidance on this point, as well as playing a role in more recent guidance to communities from the State of Colorado on resilience, spurred by the September 2013 “mountain monsoon” flooding that afflicted the state. The point is that I have been pursuing this subject for nearly 20 years. I understood why Oxford had approached me for this task.

The encyclopedia article allowed me to expand the subject in new ways, and for those readers curious to explore the topic, I hope it proves useful. Just follow the links in the first paragraph of this post to my article or the encyclopedia more generally, which provides a wealth of knowledge on the larger subject of natural hazards. I hope it provides planners and others in the professional community engaged with natural hazard issues an analytical framework for thinking about how we can tackle these issues.

But that is not all. The concept behind the APA/IBHS work has been revived. Immediately after leaving APA, under a short-term consulting contract, I helped APA prepare a new grant proposal for FEMA’s Cooperating Technical Partners program to revive the state statutory summary in an updated and expanded framework. Although that is not yet complete, PDF summaries of the state-level planning framework for all 50 states are available. Click here for the landing page with an introduction to the overall project. Then stay tuned for the findings and overall summary of the project, which are yet to come.

Jim Schwab

Gratitude on Parade #3

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GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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[Partners of] the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s Digital Coast program are hosting a meeting in Washington, D.C., today of the Digital Coast Partnership, an assortment of eight national nonprofit organizations willing to support geotechnical services to coastal communities across the U.S. The Digital Coast staff have been leading this effort for more than a decade, and the result is better decision making on coastal land use and resource management among the communities using Digital Coast tools and resources.

I attended these meetings and participated in Digital Coast projects until I left the American Planning Association, one of those partners, in 2017. But as of 2010, when APA joined the partnership, I found the entire enterprise a magnificent example of positive federal engagement with local governments and user communities in need of better data and easier ways to access data. And I made some fast friends because of the quality of the staff.

Leading that effort was one remarkable human being, Miki Schmidt, who has been with NOAA that entire time. Miki has a positive, can-do attitude, and helped me learn a great deal about what positive federal outreach could look like. We had numerous valuable conversations about how to move forward, and Miki repeatedly expressed his gratitude to APA for becoming part of the entire effort. But he deserves recognition for doing a top-notch job year after year, and empowering a staff that couldn’t be better. Near the end of my era, also, as depicted in the photo below, he organized a retirement “roast” at a restaurant during a NOAA Coastal GeoTools Conference. I could not have asked for a nicer tribute.

James Schwab CORRECTION: I did not realize that NOAA was caught up in the federal government shutdown and NOAA staff are not present at the meeting mentioned in the first sentence. it is a tribute to the success of the partnership, however, that the National Association of Counties, one of the partners, is hosting and the partners are proceeding with the meeting on their own. I just did not realize that was the case. Let us all hope that, one day, these shutdowns will be a thing of the past that is no longer an acceptable practice.

Miki, at right, prior to dinner that included a retirement roast.

Posted on Facebook 1/15/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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I am not done singing the praises of Digital Coast nor of expressing my gratitude to outstanding staff of that program. If I had an opportunity to nominate someone for Liaison of the Year, someone with an outstanding sense of customer relations, it would surely be Susan Fox, who actually works with the Baldwin Group on behalf of NOAA, and has served for several years as a Digital Coast liaison with the American Planning Association. I had the honor to work with her while managing APA’s Hazards Planning Center into 2017. She is enthusiastic, positive, very well-organized, and incredibly supportive. Just like Miki Schmidt, about whom I wrote yesterday, she is a pillar of the Digital Coast program. Thank you, Susan, for all you do.

Susan in Manhattan for dinner during APA National Planning Conference, 2017.

Posted on Facebook 1/16/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

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Continuing with my tributes to Digital Coast staff, I must now know mention the invaluable Josh Murphy, who works from NOAA’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. Josh was the creative soul who helped negotiate a HUD-funded, NOAA-sponsored project led by AECOM but involving Digital Coast partners (APA, NACo, ASFPM) to work with two pilot communities (Brevard County, FL, and San Luis Obispo County, CA) to help operationalize concepts for integrating resilience and hazard mitigation priorities into the local planning process. This is rather advanced stuff and requires some real skill to manage, but we all did it together, advancing the frontiers of planning. And we had Josh to thank for making it all possible. He is one of NOAA’s truly valuable assets.

Courtesy of Shannon Burke

Posted on Facebook 1/17/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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As I complete this round of gratitude to Digital Coast staff, I wish to make clear that there are many others at NOAA for whom we should all be grateful beyond those I have highlighted. But I do want to close by mentioning the remarkable Lori Cary-Kothera, whose consistent demonstrations of enthusiasm, high intelligence, and dedication have also helped the partners to succeed in their efforts both to support the Digital Coast program and to advance their own respective projects and services to coastal communities. Lori is one of those rare people you can count on for positive advice and support. She is also a welcome beacon of warmth and humanity.

Courtesy of Shannon Burke

Posted on Facebook 1/18/2019

Jim Schwab

Gratitude on Parade #2

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GRATITUDE ON PARADE

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Today’s late-night entry has no photo because I have none from so long ago, certainly not digitized, anyway–or easily found. That makes Lynn Saunders’s contribution to my career no less seminal or memorable. An English teacher at Brecksville High School, she was the willing and required faculty member who became the adviser to our budding Writers Club, a new entity in 1967 that was the brainchild of a handful of aspiring student writers, including me as I entered my senior year. With her encouragement, we produced our own literary journal, “The Tenth Muse Recently Discovered in Brecksville.” We young literati were probably not the most popular types in our Ohio school, but we may have been among the most visionary. I have spent the last half-century refining those writing skills, and for this foundation I express today’s moment of gratitude.

Posted on Facebook 1/6/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

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Shhh. I’m waiting until she goes upstairs so she doesn’t see this now and can be surprised in the morning.

It is hard to find a more devoted mother and grandmother than my wife, so here’s to Jean Schwab. Whatever parenting mistakes we made, individually or combination, like every human being out there, Jean nonetheless remains committed wholeheartedly to the welfare of her family. Over time, she has learned how to make the tough decisions and say the tough things to say when we needed to, all while making clear she is doing it out of love.

Most people who know us know that we adopted children out of foster care. This was mostly because Jean expressed early in our marriage the feeling that we had too much to share not to reach out to children who needed a home. I am not sure either of us envisioned that future when we married, but it became a big part of what we will leave behind. And we have learned so much along the way. We have embraced the challenge. Here’s to the future, and a salute to my life partner.

Jean with grandson Emanuel James, aka EJ Schwab

Posted on Facebook 1/7/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

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Tonight I was in downtown Chicago at the Harold Washington Public Library for a Society of Midland Authors presentation of women authors writing about the Vietnam war. Their interesting perspectives caused me to think about my own experiences during that time. I attended Cleveland State University from 1968-1973, the heart of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history.

I started college with a student deferment just before President Richard Nixon introduced the draft lottery. My number was 135, but the year I gave up my student deferment they went to 125, and so I was out of the draft forever. Fighting a war I did not respect was not part of my future. But it does not mean the events did not affect me.

Tonight’s tribute is to someone I have not seen in 45 years. I have no idea if he is alive or dead, or where he is living, but I would not mind hearing from Peter Damok. By 1970, I think, I had founded the first student environmental group at CSU, right after the first Earth Day. Peter, a Vietnam veteran attending college on the GI Bill, joined us at some later point. This was during a time when Vietnam veterans often returned to an uncertain welcome. Peter, I think, was drawn in part to my lack of judgment, open mind, and willingness to listen and learn. He had much to share.

One thing I distinctly remember made a permanent impression on me. There were often anti-war marches down Euclid Avenue, past the CSU campus, in downtown Cleveland. I joined more than a few (though I seldom shared that information with my more conservative parents). Peter, who hoped to become a journalist, had some friends in the news media and joined some in watching one of the demonstrations from the upper stories of one of the buildings along the march route. Later he told me that one of his reporter friends scoffed at the protesters and asked, “How many of them have ever been to Vietnam?”

Peter stopped him cold in his tracks. “How many more do you want to send over there before you listen to them?” he asked.

I learned to separate service in the military from the automatic assumption that a veteran supported the war. Many came home embittered by what they saw and determined to end the madness. And I learned it straight from the mouth of one veteran–Pete Damok.

Posted on Facebook 1/8/19

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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There are those who quietly do the less glamorous tasks that make things run. Being the secretary/treasurer of a member division of the American Planning Association is among those tasks. As the chair-elect of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, thrust into an acting chair position because of Chair Allison Hardin’s unfortunate accident, I have come to appreciate the value of Jennifer Ellison, a Polk County, Iowa, planner who is also our secretary/treasurer. We have responsibilities to hundreds of members who work at making our communities safer and helping them recover from disasters, but Jennie makes sure the bills are paid, the dollars add up, and the proper reports are filed, all without asking for any special attention or credit. But I couldn’t do it without her, and so she is tonight’s focus of gratitude.

Jennifer Ellison

Posted on Facebook 1/9/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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When I first met Richard Roths, he was a planner working for FEMA. As I recall, he was detailed to southern Ohio for flood recovery sometime in the late 1990s, and I was completing work with my team on Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, a path-breaking FEMA-supported guide published by the American Planning Association in 1998 as a PAS Report. I learned that Rich was among dozens of FEMA personnel asked to review it, many of whom were similarly on duty away from home and living out of a suitcase in a hotel room. Rich was doing his reviews, he told me, while washing his clothes in the laundromat each week. Other people might have idled the time with a good book, watching television, but not Rich.

It did not take long with further encounters back in Chicago for us to team up teaching a graduate course on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery in the spring semesters of 1997 and 1999 at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s urban planning program, part of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. Over subsequent years, Rich attended a number of my infamous backyard barbecue parties, usually bringing some beer to help out. It is amazing to think we have known each other now for well over 20 years. During that time, Rich moved on to URS Corp. as a consultant and then retired. He is now active as a volunteer with the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am Chair-Elect. In that role, I recruited and organized the division’s Professional Development Committee.

Sure enough, Rich has become a leading player in the committee’s endeavors. When Kehla West was unable to take on the role of interviewer for a series of podcasts on recovery in major recent disasters, Rich stepped up and did a fabulous job. He has completed three since last fall and is not done yet. These are all now on the APA website as part of APA’s Resilience Roundtable series. Rich is also heading up an effort to develop a program of outreach from the division to university planning schools. In his semi-retirement, he has carved out a meaningful role that has made the rest of us proud. He is a model of productive volunteerism in retirement.

Richard Roths in the APA broadcast booth recording his first podcast.

Posted on Facebook 1/11/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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I have lost the name of my sixth-grade teacher in the mists of time and do not wish to ask anyone to search the archives of the elementary school to find it. Her name is beside the point. What matters is what I and others learned.

The school year was 1961-1962. Unlike other teachers at that level at that time, she believed that young people our age could understand and digest more than her contemporaries thought. During reading time each day, she introduced us to the works of Dr. Tom Dooley about Vietnam and Indochina. I am well aware of the mixed and ambiguous history of Dooley before his untimely death of cancer. He may well have exaggerated descriptions of Viet Minh atrocities and fed intelligence to the CIA. But when one student questioned whether some of Dooley’s stories were propaganda, our teacher concede the possibility.

Still, we gained a vivid mental image of a part of the world that soon would dominate the news of the 1960s, yet of which most Americans had only minimal awareness. The moral ambiguity of the mess that became the Vietnam War was illuminated in my teenage and then college-age mind by the memory of what she had read to us. It took some courage and imagination to think we could digest all this and that somehow, within a few years, it might deepen our perspectives on the world. Her own views may have been equally ambiguous, for all I know, and I will probably never know. But I can be grateful that her audacity at the time left an indelible impression of the importance of learning about faraway places and the moral and developmental challenges they face–and which we face along with them.

Posted on Facebook 1/12/2019

Gratitude on Parade

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Gratitude on Parade #1

Okay, call me a copycat. If an idea is good enough, why not copy it proudly? On New Year’s Day, I read in a Chicago Tribune column by Heidi Stevens about a woman, Jen Kramer, who began a daily effort on Facebook a year ago as #yearoflove. Every day she posted about someone who meant something.

It occurred to me that we all have many people for whom we should be grateful, and we may not always do a good job of saying so. I thought hard about whether I could sustain a daily effort for a year as Kramer did, and then I thought, you’re a professional writer. How hard can one paragraph a day be? So I decided to take the plunge, starting that day, with #gratitudeonparade. Friends will begin learning why I am grateful and to whom. Some of it may be random, and some may be well planned. It’s a daring commitment, so I’ll see how it goes. But I have a feeling I may learn much about myself by trying.

Once a week, I will compile these short entries into a composite blog post to expand the audience. So, if you miss the daily feed on Facebook, feel free to visit www.jimschwab.com/Hablarbooks.

Posted on Facebook 1/1/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
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Gratitude should start in the most logical places. My mother, Hazel Schwab, who has outlived almost all her peers, would probably prefer that I not state an age on Facebook (she does not own a computer and has never used the Internet), but I want to state that she has shown me and three siblings the power of determination and the will to live and resilience many times over. She and my father early on made sure that we were in a good school district and encouraged education, even though they finished high school but never attended college. When I moved to Iowa, later married in Nebraska, and ended up in Chicago, I knew she would rather I had stayed in Cleveland. Reluctantly at first, however, she learned pride that I had spread my wings and soared professionally, even if she never fully understood exactly what I did–it was a bit esoteric by her standards, not easy to explain to her friends. (Even my wife wondered what an urban planner was when she first met me.) But she was tough of mind, and if we did not always agree on some things, we learned to disagree. But by now I have watched her survive and surmount so many challenges, it is hard to escape the conclusion that I owe some of my own dogged persistence to my mother. Thanks, Mom. You get the first tribute.

With my brother, Jack, his son, Kyle, and Kyle’s two young sons, Ryan and Dylan, at Christmas.

Posted on Facebook 1/1/2019

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I suffered a disappointing discovery yesterday while composing my blog post. Long-time friend and former University of Iowa professor Michael F.  Sheehan had died on May 30. I was mentioning his role in my career and searched for an appropriate link only to find a May 30 obituary. He was 72. A physically fit ex-Marine, I expected he would live longer, and the obit does not say how he died. I had not talked to him in a long while, but I still felt a loss. He was the pivot point in a vital decision that changed my life.

In late 1981, I was pursuing options for graduate school after two and a half years as the executive director of the Iowa Public Interest Research Group. Mike was a fierce advocate for the environment and knew me in that role. At lunch one day, I mentioned that I had just explored a Ph.D. program in the University of Iowa’s political science program, but had a disappointing conversation in which I had told the head of the department’s MPA program that I had lobbied in Des Moines in my Iowa PIRG role. He responded, “That wouldn’t be relevant here. If you had done a study of lobbying . . . .”

Mike reacted to this curt dismissal of real-life experience by simply asking, “Why don’t you apply to our urban planning program? We love people like you.” I did, and the rest is history, so to speak.

But it was more than that turning point. In his classes, Mike had high expectations for me and tolerated no flimsy excuses if I fell short. That was of a piece with his approach to life. He never hesitated to be a thorn in the side of polluters, the powerful, and the pompous. By the time I completed my degree, he was entering law school so that, as they say, he could “sue the bastards.” The advocate in his soul triumphed over the academic. Several years later, still in his needling mode but living in Oregon (where he remained), he joked that I was the best of a “mediocre lot” in my class. But this time, I was ready with a verbal ambush. My first book was out, and the reviews were appearing.

“Do mediocrities get their books reviewed in the New York Times?” I asked.

I could hear the chuckle over my one-upmanship. “You know, I’ve been bragging on you, Schwab,” he replied. It was like that with him, and it was always fun. Today’s tribute of gratitude may be too late for Michael Sheehan to read, but it is owed nonetheless. Here’s to the man who guided me into a career I have never regretted.

Posted on Facebook 1/2/2019

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Yesterday, I offered tribute to Michael Sheehan, who persuaded me to try a career in urban planning. Today’s honoree gets to enjoy reading his tribute, fortunately. University of Iowa Professor John W. Fuller followed closely on Mike’s heels by quickly hiring me as a research assistant as soon as I was accepted into the program. I worked with him year-round for more than three years in the Institute for Urban and Regional Research and in the Legislative Extended Assistance Program, neither of which remains extant. The latter produced policy studies each year from four-year colleges and universities for the Iowa legislature at the request of its leaders. In my final year of graduate study in both Urban and Regional Planning and Journalism, John sold those leaders on my combination of writing and analytical skills to produce what he promised would be a plain-English assessment of the farm credit crisis, arguably the biggest issue facing the state as the 1985 legislative session commenced. John knew I could also draw upon research I was doing for my master’s project in journalism, an oral history of the farm credit crisis, to humanize the report’s conclusions.

As the due date in February 1985 approached, I was so grateful for this remarkable opportunity that I pulled an all-nighter in the LEAG office at the Oakdale Campus in order to ensure that the 100-plus-page report could be printed and delivered to Des Moines on time. As for that master’s project, it eventually became a book—Raising Less Corn and More Hell—published by the University of Illinois Press in 1988. Just a few months later, he and Kathy regretted missing our wedding in Omaha because they were on an academic exchange at Universidad de los Andes in Venezuela, but later that summer they returned with a beautiful Andean marital blanket as a wedding gift.

But John was never done manufacturing opportunities. Two decades later, when the 2008 floods were swamping Iowa and the School of Urban and Regional Planning was seeking expertise to add some hazards training to the curriculum, it was John who spoke up and asked, “Why don’t we bring back Jim Schwab?” That was the beginning of an ongoing relationship that has allowed me to teach and mentor my own crop of students ever since then as an adjunct assistant professor, teaching an annual course on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery.

John and Kathy have offered their own home as a place to stay when I visit. This is not at all unusual. He and his wife, Kathy, have hosted and housed innumerable international visitors, students, and others for decades. They are among the most generous people I know. John is a profile in professional dedication and has been a powerful asset for the students he has taught for nearly four decades.

John Fuller (left) with me at his daughter Libby’s wedding near Cedar Rapids, April 29, 2017.

Posted on Facebook 1/3/2019

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Last night, I failed to post my daily installment of Gratitude on Parade, but I will make up for it. My excuse is that a groin muscle strain flared up late in the day, making it uncomfortable to continue working, so I sat back and watched television instead. Jean was watching the Joy Reed town hall on MSNBC with Nancy Pelosi, so I joined her.

When such days occur for me, and they are rare, I think about people with much more serious illnesses or injuries, and how they demonstrate personal resilience. They all have lessons to teach the rest of us—to be grateful for their examples, and for our own generally good health. One of those people, who I know thinks the gratitude should run the other way because I have filled in for her as acting chair of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division for much of the year, is Allison Hardin. Allison, a planner for the city of Myrtle Beach, SC, was doing fine as the real chair through April, had the misfortune of nearly being killed in a serious auto accident in which a young man drove into the sports car Allison’s son Robert was driving, and in which she was a passenger. A long string of examinations, surgeries, and treatments has followed for both, and Allison has shown great courage in moving from wheelchair to walker to her own two feet while nurturing her son back to health as well, with the help of her husband. Through it all, she has coped with mountains of delayed e-mail on her job, tough decisions about her own future, and the usual major insurance and medical issues that accompany such a calamity. Allison has occasionally reminded me that she is aware that, while we planners talk about community resilience, it really all starts at a personal level.

I remain happy to be her “acting chair” of HMDR because, frankly, I have never faced a predicament like hers, hope I never do, and have no clear idea how well I would handle it But at least I have an example if I ever need one.

Allison, second from right, after presenting me with my “retirement” t-shirt at the HMDR reception at the APA National Planning Conference in New York, May 2017. Miki Schmidt and Susan Fox of the NOAA Digital Coast staff are to our left and right.

Posted on Facebook 1/5/2019

Housing the Needy after Disaster

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This post will be brief. Rather than ask you to read my thoughts, I want you to listen–hard. It has long been known among disaster recovery planners that lower-income citizens are considerably more vulnerable to disasters largely because of the marginal resilience of most low-income housing. The affluent can afford to build fortresses, some of which may still be lost to the elements, but those in second-rate housing, poorly maintained multifamily buildings, and most certainly the homeless, face life-or-death dilemmas when disaster strikes in any form. They live with mold without the resources to make expensive repairs. They face shortages of affordable housing. Federal programs designed to help them often fall short.

Few people have worked harder to remedy these problems than John Henneberger, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow and the executive director of Texas Housers, a nonprofit advocacy organization that has been working with low-income communities in tracking recovery from Hurricane Harvey. This link will take you directly to a podcast page on the American Planning Association website to hear a 46-minute interview with Henneberger about this experience.

The podcast, the first in a series called Resilience Roundtable, is the product of collaboration between the APA technical staff in Chicago and the Professional Development Committee (PDC) of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am currently chair-elect. In that capacity, I organized and have led the PDC. More such podcasts will be released in coming weeks, but this is the first, and we are very proud to introduce John Henneberger to a new audience. His message is detailed, highly informed, and eloquent. Please check it out.

Before I leave the soapbox, I wish also to provide you to a link to a recent study detailing why minorities are more vulnerable to the impacts of wildfires, a subject that has not been explored widely in the past. “The Unequal Vulnerability of Communities of Color to Wildfire,” available online as linked, was printed in the journal Plos One, and enriches our awareness of equity issues in disaster.

Jim Schwab

The Predictable Impact of Florence

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Flooding in Rosewood in Horry County, SC, September 24, 2018 (All photos by Allison Hardin with exceptions of FEMA photo from Hurricane Floyd and Charlotte image.)

It has been a few weeks of drought on this blog, but just the opposite in North Carolina, where Hurricane Florence dropped up to 30 inches of rain in some locations, and floods migrated downstream via numerous rivers to swamp cities both inland and near the coast. Now, Hurricane Michael threatens to compound the damage as it migrates northeast from its powerful Category 4 assault on the Florida Panhandle, with storm surges up to 14 feet in areas just east of the eye, which made landfall near Panama City.

The blog drought was the result of both a bit of writer’s block, mostly induced by a busy schedule that included two conference trips over the past three weeks, combined with a bit of fatigue and a few significant diversions of my personal time. But that may be okay. My intent was to write about the recent hurricane along the East Coast, and sometimes letting the subject ferment in the mind results in a more thorough and insightful perspective. I hope that is the result here.

Storms never happen in a vacuum. In a world with relatively few uninhabited places, their impact is the result more of patterns of human development and the legacy of past choices in land use and building practices than of the storm itself, which is, after all, simply a natural and very predictable event. Hurricanes were part of the natural cycle on this earth long before humans took over the planet (or thought they did).

Hurricane wind warning at bridge in Socastee, South Carolina

But they appear to be getting worse, and climate change, most of it almost surely attributable to human activity, is an increasingly evident factor. Meteorologist Ken Kunkel, affiliated both with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and North Carolina State University, stated that Florence produced more rain than any other storm in the last 70 years except for Hurricane Harvey last year. According to Kunkel, five weather stations over an area of 14,000 square miles in the Carolinas recorded an average of 17.5 inches. Harvey’s average was 25.6 inches. By comparison, Chicago averages about 37 inches for an entire year. Such heightened precipitation levels are in line with expected impacts of climate change.

What became obvious to me early on was that Florence would rehash a certain amount of unfortunate North Carolina history regarding feedlot agriculture. I am familiar with that history because 20 years ago I authored a Planning Advisory Service Report (#482) for the American Planning Association, titled Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. (In that same year, APA also published PAS 483/484, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, for which I was the lead author and project manager.) I want to emphasize that what happened in North Carolina was not unusual. Nationwide, many states have laws dating to the 1950s that exempt all or most agricultural operations from county zoning ordinances. Most of these were intended to create a friendly regulatory environment for family farms, and they were often followed by other “right-to-farm” laws designed to shield farmers using conventional farming methods from nuisance lawsuits. Only later, as the large feedlots known also by the acronym “CAFO” became widespread, did it become clear that such exemptions, by then fiercely defended by industry groups, became giant loopholes for the detrimental environmental impacts of such operations. This story has been repeated in Iowa, Missouri, Utah, and numerous other states.

In North Carolina in 1991, State Senator Wendell Murphy, who owned a direct interest in the growing Murphy Family Farms, engineered passage of a law widening the state’s exemptions to include CAFOs. Within two years, as I noted in the report, North Carolina’s hog population shot up from 2.8 million to 4.6 million. Today, the number is at least 9 million. A public backlash at the impacts of CAFOs resulted in a new law in 1997 that included a moratorium on new waste lagoons, but by then, although the hogs were firmly ensconced in a growing number of feedlots, the figurative horse was out of the barn. Many counties in eastern North Carolina, where the industry was concentrated, were slow or reluctant to use their newly regained powers. In any case, various large operators were effectively already grandfathered into continued existence. Today, consolidation within the industry has left Smithfield Foods in possession of most of the business in North Carolina, yet Smithfield itself was acquired by the Chinese-owned WH Group several years ago.

Grenville, NC, September 24, 1999 — The livestock loss and potential health hazard to Eastern North Carolina is huge. Here volunteers have towed in dead and floating cattle from a nearby ranch at Pactolus, NC (just North of Greenville), trying to remove them as fast as possible to lower the potential health hazards associated.
Photo by Dave Gatley/ FEMA News Photo

Along came Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The low-lying plains of eastern North Carolina, always vulnerable to flooding, were deeply awash, but worse, filled with millions of pigs and poultry and their excrement in manure lagoons. Hurricane Dennis just weeks earlier had dumped 15 inches of rain on the region, and Floyd dumped even more in some areas. The Tar and Neuse Rivers, among others, badly overflowed their banks and inundated numerous farms. More than 110,000 hog carcasses, and more than 1 million chicken and turkey carcasses, floated downriver while waste lagoons were breached, creating a stench-filled public health disaster only partly solved when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought in huge incinerators to burn carcasses, though most animals were buried. It was a fiasco that did not have to happen at the scale on which it occurred.

Fast forward to this year and Hurricane Florence, presuming a surfeit of lessons to be learned from the 1999 disaster as well as later storms. As Emily Moon notes in the Pacific Standard, North Carolina has had opportunities over the past 20 years to introduce serious regulatory change, but various factors foiled those chances, and North Carolina remains the nation’s second-largest hog producer, having pushed aside every state but Iowa. The industry has evolved, but the problem remains. The state has bought out 46 operations since 1999 and shut down their lagoons, but the vast majority remain in operation. The numbers changed in Florence—more than 3 million chickens and 5,500 hogs dead and afloat in the flood waters—but the devastation rooted in CAFO practices continued. Coal ash landfills associated with power stations added to the environmental impacts. And the beat goes on, in a part of the state heavily populated by African-Americans, many too poor and powerless to challenge the system effectively without outside help.

I mention all this aside from the obvious human tragedies of lost lives, ruined homes, and prolonged power outages affecting some 740,000 homes and businesses.

Flooding at Arrowhead Development in Myrtle Beach, SC, September 26, 2018

Still, there are significant lessons available from Hurricane Florence outside the realm of mass production of poultry and hogs, and I want to offer a positive note. One is that, while only about 35 percent of properties at risk of flooding in North Carolina have flood insurance, which is available from the National Flood Insurance Program, neighboring South Carolina ranked second in the nation with 65 percent coverage. While I do not know all the details behind that sizable difference, it seems to me there is surely something to be learned from a comparison of these results and how they were achieved. They come in the context of a “moonshot” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to double flood insurance coverage nationally by 2022. That will happen when South Carolina becomes the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes we can use these events to push in the right direction. Texas, for instance, has added 145,000 new flood insurance policies in effect since Hurricane Harvey; the question will be whether the new awareness wears off as memory of Harvey fades, or whether the state can solidify those gains. For that matter, can the states in the Southeast—the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida—leverage the lessons of Florence and Michael to push in the same direction?

Hidden Valley drainage restoration project, Charlotte, NC. Image courtesy of Tim Trautman.

Recently, Bloomberg Business News offered an example within North Carolina of how differently floodplains could be managed by highlighting the case of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. I worked for several years in a series of training workshops on flood resilience with Tim Trautman, the manager for the engineering and mitigation program for Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, so I am familiar with their intriguing story. The county for many years has used a stormwater utility fee on property owners to fund its own hazard mitigation program, using the money to buy out flood-prone properties and increase open space in its floodplains. The result has been a significant reduction in flood-prone land and buildings. The question is not whether Charlotte is successful, but what state and federal programs and authorities can do to encourage and support such efforts and make them more commonplace.

Every serious disaster offers lessons and opportunities, and I am not attempting here to pick on North Carolina alone. Other states face their own challenges; Iowa, for one, is undergoing a somewhat muted debate about the impact of its own farm practices on downstream flooding and water quality, in part as an outgrowth of the 2008 floods. What is important is that we use these windows of opportunity, the “teachable moments,” as they are sometimes known, to initiate the changes that are surely needed for the long term in creating more resilient, environmentally healthy communities. What we do not need is a natural disaster version of Groundhog Day.

Jim Schwab

Knock Me Over

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From left: Larry Larson; Maria Cox-Lamm, ASFPM Chair; myself; Ingrid Wadsworth, ASFPM Deputy Director

I confess: I was taken totally by surprise. Most of us, if we have a level head on our shoulders, do not do our work with the thought that we will some day be presented with a major award because of it. Especially those of us in the world of public service and nonprofits, where dedication to the greater good is a primary motive, even though we are not immune to thinking about raises and promotions, which, after all, may enable us to be more effective in what we do.

Consequently, when the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) asked me to attend the annual ASFPM conference in Phoenix last week (June 17-21), I naively accepted the rationale that, since they had recently contracted with me as an independent consultant to lead the production of a Planning Advisory Service Report on climate resilience and capital improvements planning, under a Regional Coastal Resilience grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), they needed me there to discuss the project. I had helped write the grant three years ago while still leading the Hazards Planning Center at the American Planning Association (APA), which became the major partner to ASFPM in conducting the three-year project. Although I retired from that position a little more than a year ago, there was a great deal of logic in bringing me back to see at least that part of the project to a successful conclusion.

There was only one problem in Phoenix. No one seemed all that concerned about spending time talking to me about the NOAA project. I was certainly learning a great deal by listening to presentations, and I certainly enjoyed networking with colleagues at receptions and in hallways at the Phoenix Convention Center, but the question was bugging me: Why did they really want me out here?

On Thursday morning, June 21, before the morning plenary began in the Ballroom, I approached David Conrad and Larry Larson at a front table after initially parking my belongings at another table further back. David Conrad was once with the National Wildlife Federation and wrote a path-breaking report following the 1993 Midwest floods. Larry is the former executive director of ASFPM and now a policy advisor working with current executive director Chad Berginnis. Both are prominent in the field of floodplain management.

I patted David on the shoulder and with self-effacing humor said, “I used to sit at the front table before I retired from APA, but now I’m nobody anymore.” They chuckled, and ASFPM’s public information officer, Michele Mihalovich, said from across the table, “Jim, you’ll never be nobody.” We all laughed, David invited me to join them, and I moved to the front table for the plenary. All good for a laugh. Afterwards, Larry made a point of asking me to find him at a front table, off to the side, for the awards luncheon at noon. Still clueless, I assumed he was simply being friendly but honored his request when the time came.

Lunch was served, and Doug Plasencia, president of the ASFPM Foundation, and Diane Brown, retiring from her post as outreach and events manager at ASFPM after 35 years of excellent service, introduced award recipients and their achievements one at a time, with images on the screen, and each winner stood with presenters for a photo. Interesting, I thought, in considering the various prizes, but routine. I was happy for the winners, some of whom I knew. Almost every national professional organization does such things. Meanwhile, I ate my salad, the roast beef entrée, and the dessert. In a little while, it would all be over, and we would move on to an afternoon of presentations and discussions in a variety of concurrent sessions. I flipped through the program to see what looked interesting.

Finally, Diane Brown began to describe the winner of the highest honor ASFPM bestows, the Goddard-White Award, described thus on the website:

“The Goddard-White Award is named in honor of the contributions made to floodplain management by Gilbert White (1911- 2006) and Jim Goddard (1906-1994). This award is given by ASFPM to individuals who have had a national impact carrying forward the goals and objectives of floodplain management. It is an indication of the level of esteem the association holds for the two namesakes as well as the recipients and is ASFPM’s highest award. It is not necessarily presented every year.”

I’m not sure because one does not time such things. I believe it took about 30 seconds of Diane’s narration of the story behind this year’s award before it suddenly dawned on me that I was the person they were talking about. I had never spent one minute before that contemplating this specific award or how I might have anything to do with it. The revelation that I was a recipient struck me like a lightning bolt. Larry was looking toward me, and I pointed to myself silently as if so say, “Moi?” He kept his Cheshire cat smile and waited for the emcees to invite me forward. Larry, by the way, was in 1985 the very first recipient of this honor. He had known all along precisely what was coming. Diane invited me to the podium to say a few words. A few tears started to run down my cheeks, so I struggled to get them under control. At the podium, Diane asked, “Are you okay to talk?” I nodded yes.

I cannot repeat verbatim what I said because it was all spontaneous, but I know that I began by saying that we in the hazards world are “supposed to be prepared. I am not. You caught me off guard.” I took the crowd on a two-minute tour of what we had achieved together in the partnership of recent years that I helped construct between ASFPM and APA, and said, “Eventually, you look back and ask, ‘Did we do all that?’” I then explained that it was not just me. I had learned a great deal over the years from many other people, that big achievements require collective effort. And I thanked everyone for this high honor before stepping over to the curtain for a photograph that you see above.

I checked later and found that only 24 people have received this award, including former NOAA Coastal Services Center administrator Margaret Davidson, a truly memorable individual, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, a perennial warrior for better disaster legislation, and French Wetmore, who helped create the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Community Rating System for the National Flood Insurance Program. All I can say is, Wow. What a band of high achievers and visionaries I have apparently joined.

It is hard to top such an honor, except in one way: It is important not to rest on these laurels, but to continue to contribute, to encourage others to find their passion, and to remain an effective voice for positive change. I hope I am doing that and can remain part of the action for many years to come. Thanks, ASFPM. I hope I can prove you right.

Jim Schwab

Disaster Guidance for Rural Communities

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Planning for long-term community recovery after a disaster has never been an easy task, but in larger communities with significant planning resources, it can be less daunting. For rural communities that may not have local planning staff or that may suffer from inadequate training and experience, it often seems that the path ahead is strewn with land mines. When there has been no advance preparation for the day of reckoning  produced by a serious natural disaster, the swirl of demands surrounding such an event can lead to burnout and confusion. State and federal assistance can often seem as problematic as it is helpful because of paperwork demands, auditing concerns, and the sheer complexity of the overall challenge.

It is extremely important that communities learn from their peers, and that those peers share lessons from similar circumstances. Even in the same state, what works in a large city may have little bearing on the compelling needs of a small town or rural county. Rural communities need to learn from the experiences of other rural communities. They rely far more on the work of volunteers and part-time staff than is typical in urban areas.

For those reasons, it is refreshing to see a new publication from Texas, Emergency Preparedness and Recovery: A Toolkit for Rural Communities. It is available online. At 89 pages, it is not overly long, and sticks religiously to a mission of practical advice. Particularly interesting is how it came about. I have had some involvement in the project that gave birth to this document but was not involved in producing the guide itself. Instead, I served as the keynote speaker for a disaster recovery workshop last October in rural Van Zandt County, about which I wrote in a previous blog post.

Planners4Health, the project that produced the guidebook, is a collaboration between the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA) and the Texas Public Health Association (TPHA). The two organizations came together in response to an APA program, funded by the Centers for Disease Control, that sought to produce such collaboration on common public health issues between planners and public health officials. In two previous rounds, the two Texas organizations had received the sub-grants from APA’s Planning and Community Health Center to work on healthy foods issues in North Austin and Fort Worth.

Photo from Texas Planners4Health

For their third project, however, they dramatically shifted their focus to work in a rural area about an hour east of Dallas. On the evening of April 29, 2017, Van Zandt County experienced seven tornado sightings including one EF-3 and one EF-4, both high-powered storms that fortunately did not strike any of the county’s small towns. But the storms inflicted serious damage, and the project to assist the county led to the October 29 disaster recovery workshop in Canton. Much of the work was done by public health student interns from the University of North Texas, in Fort Worth, and planning students from the University of Texas-Arlington campus, under the overall guidance of Melissa Oden, a public health professor from UNT and former president of TPHA. Those students were the backbone of the workshop and collaborated closely with local officials from Van Zandt and neighboring counties.

Much of what this team produced consists of highly usable principles and checklists that are accessible to professionals and volunteers alike. These people need to understand quickly and succinctly what needs to be done. But not just after disaster strikes—the document makes perfectly clear that the wisest strategy for any community, rural or otherwise, is to organize and empower a long-term recovery group before disaster strikes, to avoid wasting valuable time after the event finding the right people, training them on essential procedures, and establishing the legal channels for raising and accepting donations to help the survivors of disasters. In most disasters, the events that follow move too quickly to allow the community to afford such a luxury. Major opportunities can be lost forever while a community is trying to organize its response. Having a long-term recovery planning group in place to meet, discuss scenarios, and become prepared for the eventuality is a much wiser strategy.

The guide also delves into a variety of practical considerations that will then confront this leadership group and others working with them: conducting a needs assessment, case management for disaster survivors, managing volunteers and finances, spiritual and emotional care, animal care, and measuring outcomes, among others. By and large, it is a thorough, sensible document, with which I have only minor quibbles. I do wish they had noted the need to document volunteer hours, whose monetary value can often help in establishing a local match for grants that require such. In discussing long-term disaster impact, I wish they had added environmental impacts to social and economic impacts, though I can also understand being wary of overloading the responsibilities of rural volunteers. The substantial section on animal care is particularly apt for rural communities, where these can include livestock, horses, and other animals in addition to the dogs and cats that dominate more typical urban pet concerns. There is no substitute for knowing your audience.

The guide includes some very useful appendices, one of which outlines roles and responsibilities for local officials. While the guide is already useful beyond Texas, it would be welcome imitation if similar collaborative efforts in other states produced similar guides. Some of the language, for example, that refers to county judges, who are actually chief executives of county governments in Texas, could then be translated to whatever terms apply in other states to make them sound more relevant. I suspect that the Planners4Health organizers in Texas would welcome such flattery as both sorely needed and a high compliment (and complement) to their efforts.

Jim Schwab

Make No Small Memories: A Tribute to David Godschalk

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You tend to know when someone is a huge influence in his field. You can sense the gravitas when they speak, and you can find the books and articles, or major projects, that trace the impact of that person’s career. Urban planning lost such a person on January 27 when Dr. David Godschalk, 86, died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It seemed not that long ago when Dave was still a looming presence, contributing major ideas and shaping the thinking of his fellow professionals, but illness intervened. I recall the comment several years ago of a former co-worker at the American Planning Association, Joe MacDonald, one of Dave’s doctoral students at the University of North Carolina (UNC), who said, “Retirement for David Godschalk is a 40-hour week.” Looking at his remarkable productivity suggests that Joe was not exaggerating.

Dave Godschalk, whom I knew personally as a friend and colleague for at least the last 20 years, left what may be his most indelible impression on the subfield of hazard mitigation planning. When Dave first got involved, sometime in the 1980s, this was at best a nascent field of interest and disasters were a long-neglected focus of the urban planning profession. As a professor of urban planning at UNC for 45 years, Dave would have understood if he had heard me say, as I have on many occasions, that as a graduate student in urban planning at the University of Iowa (UI) in the early 1980s, I never heard the words “disaster,” “hazard,” or “floodplain” once despite a concentration in land use and environment. Thanks in part to the path Dave plowed for decades, I am now an adjunct assistant professor at the UI School of Urban and Regional Planning, teaching hazard mitigation and disaster recovery and using those and related words in just about every hour of classroom time.

Rather than recite his many accomplishments, which would fill pages, I will direct those interested in the full story to Dave’s recently published Searching for the Sweet Spot: A Planner’s Memoir. I confess he died before I got a chance to order it, so I am still awaiting delivery. But I read plenty of his professional work, and I would rather use this space to share my own personal memories of working with him because he was a huge influence on my own growth and rise to leadership in planning for natural hazards.

David Godschalk with APA Executive Director James Drinan (left). All photos reproduced courtesy of UNC Department of City and Regional Planning.

For one thing, he was an easy person to learn from. I do not mean that he was not intellectually demanding. If he thought your idea was off the mark, he would tell you, but he never disrespected or condescended. There are those in this world who want you to know they are the smartest person in the room. Dave simply supplied the right idea at the right time. I know because, in my capacity as manager of APA’s Hazards Planning Center, I often organized and led symposia that solicited guidance from leading thinkers on the projects we were undertaking. When invited, he always delivered. For instance, in the 2008 symposium that helped develop our project outline for Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning, an effort underwritten by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, we were all looking for tools to advance the integration of hazard mitigation priorities into the local planning process when Dave suggested developing a “safe growth audit” for communities, a set of guidelines for assessing their plans, policies, and ordinances. Facilitating the meeting, I Immediately knew a seminal concept when I heard it, and jumped on the idea, inviting Dave to help us develop the concept. He followed up with articles we published and incorporated the idea into the chapter he subsequently wrote for the Planning Advisory Service Report. His chapter became a cornerstone of what became a highly influential publication that has continued to make an impact since we released it in 2010.

Such contributions to the field were regular occurrences in Dave’s long career, which began following his service in the U.S. Navy in the 1950s and included studying planning and architecture at the University of Florida, work as a local planner in Florida, earning his Ph.D. and teaching for 45 years at UNC, and publishing 15 books and hundreds of journal articles. One of his significant contributions was his involvement in the 2004 study by the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), in which he helped reshape public thinking about the value of public investments in hazard mitigation through the finding that $1 of federal money invested in such projects produced, on average, $4 in long-term savings from reduced losses from natural disasters. In a coming blog post, I will review the recent update to Hazard Mitigation Saves, which now boosts that estimate to $6 in savings for every dollar invested. There are, of course, numerous details behind these findings, but it is not hard to understand the salient influence of this pithy projection. Dave knew how to help sell an idea.

He was a major figure in hazard mitigation long before the NIBS study. His involvement merely reflected his long-standing preeminence. My bookshelf holds two items I gathered from him as I was mastering the details of hazard mitigation in the 1990s, before establishing any significant reputation of my own. One was Natural Hazard Mitigation, a 1999 Island Press book that I am still mining for material that will help with a current book project. The other, also dating to 1997, is a substantial three-ring binder, Making Mitigation Work, for which he was the principal investigator for a UNC Center for Urban and Regional Studies project supported by the National Science Foundation. Once David understood my own aspirations in this field, I could not have found a more supportive friend. He wanted to make sure that my every undertaking at APA succeeded if he could have anything to do with it.

I am sure I was not the only person who ever got such treatment. The planning field is full of people with their stories of mentoring by David Godschalk because it may well have been the aspect of his job that he enjoyed most. He took pleasure in the growth and success of those whose careers he affected. Dave understood professional success; there were many awards bestowed on him over the years. One of the more important for any planner is being inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners (FAICP). In 2015, as Robert Olshansky, professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois, another AICP Fellow, helped guide my nomination for this honor, we discussed the people from whom we could request letters of recommendation. Dr. Godschalk was at the top of that list. When I wrote to him with our request, I referred to him as a “dean of hazard mitigation.” In accepting the invitation, he stunned me with his humility. “If I am a dean,” he wrote, “you are the chancellor.”

Now, there is no way that I see my career even matching his, let alone outshining it, but I also do not think he was merely engaging in fatuous praise. There was no need for it. He wanted me to know that he believed in me. And while I did not necessarily learn this lesson from Dave, he certainly confirmed it for me: As a teacher and mentor myself, I realized some time ago that there is no better way to guarantee the continuity of your own work than to demonstrate your faith in those who will follow.

Dave’s ability to inspire, to motivate, and to guide and empower will ensure that his legacy and his contributions will continue to matter for many years to come. All those people he taught and mentored will see to it.

Those desiring to sustain David’s work have been asked to contribute online to the Godschalk Fellowship Fund in Land Use and Environmental Planning.

Jim Schwab