Author's Forum on Urbanism – The Climate Planner:Overcoming Pushback Against Local Mitigation & Adaptation Plans

so we're going to give a couple of minutes for people to come in and then we're going to start the the webinar once again we're we're letting people come in and then we're going to start the uh on the park bench webinar in a minute okay we're going to get started here i wanted to welcome everybody to on the park bench public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing issues of the day and the author's form is a series within on the park bench which discusses recently published books by and for urbanists today's author's forum is on the climate planner overcoming pushback against local mitigation and adaptation plans with author jason king and the illustrator of the book pamela stacy king in discussion with yours truly robert studiville so share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and i wanted to remind everybody seeing you 30 at oklahoma city it's coming up now in in approximately four months and it's going to be cnu's first in per person congress since 2019 the virtual congresses for the last two years have been great but everybody is is uh quite eager i believe to get together with friends and colleagues and learn from some of the best planners in the business walk the city have a drink at the bar and do all those fun things that we've done at past in-person congresses and oklahoma city is really an amazing place they have done so much to transform their city that other cities can learn from over they've done that over the last 30 years it's really going to be a a good place to hang out and visit and learn from oops and today's thought leaders jason king is the author of the climate planner and he's principal and senior senior project director dover colon partners he has directed multi-disciplinary teams around the country and has served as the project director and prime author on over 200 plans for cities towns neighborhoods and corridors that's not a typo 200 plans that's a lot that sounds like a career jason but you're clearly a long way from retirement um and many of those projects and maybe all of them uh pamela stacy king aka pam stacy took part in as a studio director dover cole she's uh the book illustrator for the climate planner and she focuses on form-based codes comprehensive plans master plans and architectural standards jason and pam have worked on local and regional plans across the us that have dealt with the climate problem they have lots of war stories to tell about how they navigated the political and practical issues at stake in a global problem with local ramifications i'm rob studiville editor of cnu's public square i'm the interviewer today and the climate planner overcoming pushback against local mitigation and adaptation plans is published uh was published recently by rutledge and it's a book on how to prepare communities for climate change we all know we're supposed to think globally and act locally that's the mantra for local communities acting on climate change begins with a plan which makes urban planners a linchpin in this issue the climate planner demonstrates how urban planners can make a visible and important difference through local community actions that address the climate problem we're going to have a brief presentation from both jason and pam followed by discussion with me followed by q a from the audience so please use the q a function of zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you and now i'm going to pass this along to jason i can stop my share well thank you rob yep so my name is jason king with doable cone partners and i'm pamela stacy king the studio director um thanks for the opportunity to talk about the book and uh thank you for for all these park ben sessions let's um let's so let's get into the book if you open up the cover there's the table of contents and it tells you what the book is about and it's about dealing with pushback pushback against uh climate mitigation and adaptation and it's structured with the 10 objections that we hear the most often right climate change is a lie it can't be proven there's no will there's no money it's climate change isn't that bad it's just a few degrees what about china what about india what does it matter what we do we've got bigger problems retreat isn't an option it's a lost fight it's too late someone will fix this some new technology is going to come right around the corner and fix everything i'll be dead when this happens these are the these are the things that we hear we can't even begin to start climate planning until we can maneuver our way around these in the public forum and host a conversation about international politics in a lot of ways we're not able to do that um without a little bit of background knowledge and this book has been that for me and the next part of the book is talking about how to create great climate plans and this works for creating all kinds of plans it's the shrek method that the cnus know so well part three is about two cities we look at a very dry city and a city coastal city el paso and miami and um and we imagine what these cities will be like in 2015. and the bottom line is really you know the cities that start the earliest will survive the longest even if they have a lot of natural disadvantages um you know the book talks about how this little concept a theory by professor chapman of fsu that you can divide urban planning into four different eras and i'm not sure if it's true but it is definitely fascinating because my career i started with growth controls right tdrs and concurrency wetland protection and rate of growth ordinances and open space ratios it was stopping growth then comprehensive plans the most important thing i could do as a planner was to create the comprehensive plan and then it seemed like it seems like other plans are so much more important urban design plans climate adaptation plans affordable housing plans um and at smart growth i think this the cnu and the new urbanism is the best articulation of what smart growth really is uh it's part of our work i hope it continues to be into the future but but now we're talking more about sustainability and we're talking about um climate planning and we're talking about equity we're talking about trying to avoid the big twin catastrophes of of climate change and the continued stratification of our society you know so i think we are important to the degree we know how to be the planners of sustainability you know the big news recently is the trillion dollar infrastructure and investment and jobs act out of buying administration the federal government and it's it's very exciting it's just that that money comes down to the local level it's the local level where climate planning really occurs it's critical to avoid um catastrophes and all of you know this at the local level there isn't consensus that the climate is even changing you know the conversation out there that we have is not what you'd read about in the new york times or the or the guardian or even the usa today there's not consensus uh in texas and florida and virginia in maine you know in oregon in idaho where we work um there's not a consensus that something needs to happen nor is there an agreed-upon approach and so this is very messy very difficult um work and so i was honored you know liz potter zeiberg talked about how the book was war stories you know and and it being messy work it is war stories there weren't we did do 200 projects we work all over the place um and we have been working during this period of uh of denial and skepticism and so um so what we're gonna do today is uh we're not gonna do the the 101 stuff i think liz did a phenomenal job talking about what climate change is and how uh and what it means to our profession instead i think it might be useful just to tell a couple war storms like one appears in the book dauphin islands uh alabama described as the most unlucky island in the world because just about every hurricane that hits the united states through the gulf hits dauphin island and dauphin island is two pieces right it's the west end area the big long sandy spit the peninsula with the big uh beautiful houses and then it's sort of the core of the island and the problem with dauphin island and the problem with all of our coastal communities is that uh the land is washing away the storms are more turbulent and for for dauphin island which is its own municipality these houses that uh rent you know at five thousand dollars a month these five thousand dollars a week these are the houses that pay um the for for local services and it's getting you we can imagine a future in which they will not be around any longer the um this graphic you see the ocean coastline used to be where it is blue and now it is where it's red a lot of our coastal communities are simply disappearing and um and so how does the community pay for itself how does it survive dauphin island's got a downtown that looks like this when we started working there desoto ave um i've been pretty hard hit by hurricanes 40 of small businesses don't survive extreme weather events and desoto ave had seen a lot of weather events that little blue building in the foreground that's not even there anymore so if they lose the property taxes and the sales taxes on the big houses and they have to they have to survive based on what they have in the downtown um then they're in trouble right and this is this is where the new urbanism comes in so dauphin island like a lot of places received money through a big settlement it was a deep water horizon spill 20 billion went out to communities over 300 went to mobile and baldwin 16 or so went to dauphin island and that was tiny tiny tiny fraction of that got us to the island virtually to start working on the plan and during the pre-charette we picked the small harbor area it's called aloe bay and i imagined what a truly resilient place would be lifting the land bulwarking the land um creating real fortifications in a way i wanted to imagine a place that would last no matter what happened into the future these small businesses lifted 15 feet up on a kind of super levy which is still attractive still interesting still a nice place to be anyway these wood um these wooden door and and you can imagine what the reaction was you know really quick 3 500 views on our little youtube film and for a very small community that's right for a small community uh that's a lot of attention really fast people said no this was the pushback they said they like dolphin ellen because it's underdeveloped it wouldn't go there anymore this was this was too much and so this is the form that pushback comes in when you really want to solve the problem and you you know how how do you get everyone to come along with you the first thing that we do is we try to find uh sort of compromise we created three different scenarios which pulled back from the idea of big infrastructure a main street scenario xu xiang in our office came up with a living shoreline rob piatowski imagined everything up on stilts and just like liz was talking about during her presentation we gave people options we let them vote and during the charette we had you know conversations with nearly 250 people it was virtual because this was just done last year people wanted accessibility sustainability green beautiful and vibrant place we did the community image survey and when we showed the shoreline they were less interested in the big bulwark and they were more interested in the natural edge with boardwalks over over natural areas they were interested in kayak launches they liked the idea of dining on the water but they wanted new development to happen in the form of small shops right it's very different than the three to four story um mega investment that i had drawn originally development should fit in should i destinations economic development should encourage and build the town's tax base these are the big five ideas from the project increase access to nature build sustainably see balance of culture community commerce and nature and so so that so then came the compromise new solution our team worked on a design kenneth garcia did a phenomenal job of illustrating it here it's a much lighter touch the buildings are smaller but the buildings are lifted the water would flow right underneath them and it would hit desoto ave ass soto av itself would be lifted five to seven feet it would be a kind of breakwater and what that allows for is uh the small town um charm that people like about doc nylon there's still hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial and uh and there is still a strong tax base here but we designed it uh in a way that um that was had a light touch when it comes to nature right it's uh it'll flow above the water we worked with the community and with other members of the team to pick the specific uses for this place it's still a lot more resilient both physically and economically um but it's a design that that made sense um and with a whole lot of public open space spots for people to see the sunset now the hard thing about designing coastal areas is everything has to be lifted but you do have a lot of leeway the bottom floor as long as they are breakable walls as long as air conditioning systems are lifted and heating systems and cooking systems or not as long as that's all um below freebor as long as that's all i'm sorry above free board above where the water will come you are able to put in bars and ice cream places and small temporary restaurants right so one challenge for an urbanism is that interface between the building and the street how do you design that in a place that will one day see 11 feet of water sue did a great job of designing a new west end and it's it's walkable mixed use it's built this is what the charter is about and this is what new urbanists do best there will be a lot of retreating from areas of town and moving to places like this you know we want to think about migration regionally people leave the coast and go inland but a lot of our work is happening at the local level what part of town will they retreat from and what part of town will they resettle at higher densities and how can those higher densities be you know elegant nice places where people want to be and then the other bit here um important i think is uh is you know what happens you know when the the category 5 rolls in people have been thinking about alabama and dolphin island for a long time this is a sketch that was done by a local architect that involved floodgates that would close um for us we took a more natural but still very strong approach we didn't build the land up and out like in my first iteration but we did build uh restore wetlands there's a new coastal bluff system there's a peninsula that sticks out in order to protect the bay you have to think about the wave activity and the winds and um and we've got a design we're more resilient in order to be a new organist we've all had to learn how to become traffic engineers landscape architects and illustrators and form-based code experts we uh we know enough about economics and equity and sociology for us to function we can argue with the department of transportation um the other thing that we're gonna need to become i think in order to adapt is uh is coastal engineers right um so take seaside for instance our mecca most important thing the new urbanism is created in a lot of ways i've been there in a long time but everybody loves seaside um and the new design for the downtown seaside done by uh demprolic and opticos the question is is what does happen to that beach uh the oceans are gonna rise two feet by twenty fifty what's the plan for that beach you know the rendering stops at the water um is it gonna be beach renourishment replenishing sand is it gonna be structural reinforcement these perpendicular structures are called grinds they catch the sand they hold it or is there going to be offshore underwater breakwaters we're going to be asked we have to have some idea and if are those break waters going to be natural are they going to be the oyster beds these break waters stop the wave action they stop erosion or is it going to be um big engineering you know what is the approach these instead of quarry granite what's happening now is more often we're using these concrete armor units to protect the shore um or where what happens on the land you know do we stabilize with vegetation uh will that be enough or will it take levees and super levees we'll have to know we'll have to have an answer or and what are we planning for is it the short term the midterm at what point do we need to retreat that's another question and the reason the nervousness have to know about this is because if we don't then the army corps of engineers steps in and liz and her presentation showed this design to protect miami big ugly wall cheap easy to build um uniform along the whole coast what's not to like about this but but locally edsa working with swire properties they came up with a just as resilient but attractive amenity of an approach something that people could like we're going to have to learn how to do that too we're going to have to learn uh revenants and sea walls and coastal armoring we're going to have to learn how to design with nature but cognizant of the fact then a lot of times nature's out to get us um anyway yeah all right so um pamela stacy king and i edited and edited and illustrated the book but i was also a part of all of these different projects and the push and pull that comes and i think one of the big things is just not getting discouraged as you're going along um and don't recall we often start our days with a little bit of sketching everybody together this is an idea from victor dover and james doherty you know because when you can put it down on paper you can draw it then you really understand things a lot better and so the climate planner really talks about a lot of places like miami beach and the florida keys that are in dire threat due to sea level rise that's one of the things you hear about a lot um it's one of the main topics that people talk about with this but miami beach is not a disposable city you know there are billions of dollars of investment in the city and there's things that you know you just don't want to lose like the park central hotel and the historic district and miami beach is a place that has been combating climate change for a long time even if that wasn't uh their stated or intended purpose those big wide sandy beaches are not natural they are replenished they are built they are levees that are protecting the further inland areas you can see old black and white movies and you can see lummus park which is across the street from the art deco district and the waves are just on the other side of the wall just lapping and now you've got a quarter mile of sand that can be used for event space and moving people and so that is a protection that the city of miami beach puts a lot of money into um but they've gone further as well in more recent years they've been installing new pumps and backflow preventers and raising roads um that some people like and some people don't um but they've really been forward thinking and willing to have action but they don't always um you know once things are implemented people start to resist they want to reorient there is new administrations that come in that want to do their own planning and people get tired of living in construction zones you know it takes a lot to raise a road and put those pump systems into place you're rebuilding your infrastructure and that also costs a lot of money which people don't want to spend they don't want to have new taxes so after a long pause and several years of not doing anything and just doing more and more studies all of those studies kept pointing to the same thing you can't just sit and do nothing or the city of miami beach which then protects the city of miami is just not going to survive with all these storms so you need to do something to at least help it last longer but one of those things in the pause that happened was that there was a new cra a redevelopment plan that was done and what that did is it took taxes that were already being generated and instead of sending them back to the whole county they are now staying in miami beach specifically to put in resilience infrastructure and so you know during the pause trying to do what you can to make things more habitable or not acceptable to people you know so it's less money coming out of their pocket but still getting the infrastructure that's needed the climate planner also talks about places that are very arid and don't have enough water places like laredo texas when we were there we stayed at the la posada hotel it's right across looks across the rio grande into mexico and it's on this beautiful uh square with these big trees but the rest of the downtown is losing its trees uh it's losing its shade um it it's not just the fact that it's an arid place but when trees got old they couldn't be replaced the codes that were in place said they were very suburban standards and so you needed eight feet with the tree at least four feet from the road in order to plant a tree even in the downtown so where you already had your infrastructure and streets in place these were suddenly illegal and couldn't be done there was a lot of push and pull as to exactly why that happened but there's a new code now um being done by able cities that is trying that is fixing that and allowing street trees to be replaced in the downtown to give them back their tree canopy and that's going to help reduce you know the the heat effects that less heat island effect and storing some carbon and helping keep the downtown a habitable place the book one of the other big cities that the book talks about is el paso and our firm has been there for a long time working starting with plan el paso more than 10 years ago or just about 10 years ago and although the climate discussion now is so prominent in everyone's mind it wasn't in 2012 there were some people talking about it but they were more on the edge and plan el paso el paso took it on there is a chapter that is just about sustainability and being resilient and looking at what they can do to keep their city livable now they're in texas so they kind of had to go it alone you know they had rick perry as a governor at that time who doesn't believe in climate change denying it downplaying the effects of humans and even though rick perry is no longer the governor they're still in texas and this is a very common belief but they forged ahead working with both mitigation and adaptation uh el paso looking at adaptation is a very dry city they are in the desert uh one of the things they've done for a long time is really a campaign to help uh just individual consumers use less water it's both a public campaign of letting people know but also increasing water rates so that you feel it in your wallet with the true cost of this resource is and how important it is they also have the largest desalinization plant that is inland in the country but they also are you know reusing and reclaiming every drop of water they can they are one of the few cities that have a toilet to tap program you know they are re-drinking their water they haven't gone quite as far as dune but you know we may all end up you know going that far and just making sure we don't waste a drop because it is a precious resource looking at mitigation they have a very extensive bus rapid transit system going to the different outskirts of the city and bringing everyone back into the downtown but it's not just the bus system when we were there in uh to work on the plan there were these posters going up um by peter sfarvian they were saying the trolley is coming there was a trolley that connected the inland neighborhoods or sorry the close-in neighborhoods to the downtown as well as across the border to juarez mexico and we're like well what's going on with this trolley well there was nothing going on with the trolley it was just an art campaign um of peter scorpions but it made it into the plan it's a great idea um and peter sparring became city councilmember and so plan el paso the comprehensive plan for the city talks about how you need to connect the university to the downtown with these trolleys those trolleys still existed they were out in the desert um of the on the outskirts of the airport and they were refurbished and the lines were laid and wherever those lines were laid you see construction cranes and reinvestment happening [Music] that is you know bringing more people back to those inland cities but also just repairing the city where it had been skipped over for a long time in addition to that there's many new uh bike facilities and bike routes as well as el paso had a similar tree story to laredo uh where trees were no longer planted they were kind of outlawed and so trees are back uh even in these dry areas once a tree can establish its roots it's a local tree a drought tolerant tree then they really can survive on the small amount of water that these places get and there's stories throughout of you know both where there's been success and where there hasn't uh south miami florida it was a forward-thinking city that requires solar panels on all new construction uh fort lauderdale had you know saw the dramatic effects of a storm event when a1a was washed away and looking at building it back higher and bulwarking it in order to protect the adjacent properties and the rest of fort lauderdale but they're not all coastal sandy woods rhode island which is a project by union studio architecture they are using wind in order to power their community as well as growing their own food and new field is a up an up-and-coming project that is really looking to preserve uh 30 percent of the site just as natural as well as preserving agricultural lands into perpetuity along with the development of the community they go for stories go further afield to thailand where the bleaching corals were studied back in the 80s and 90s and even though you couldn't necessarily test the temperature of the water in order to see the difference it you could tell the water levels were rising the temperatures were rising because of all the bleaching corals and again the mission trail in texas which was historically an agricultural community that planted in the flood plains of the rio grande uh that it just isn't flooding because it's controlled um but they're now doing uh hydroponics in order to continue and keep alive that tradition of growing food and using less soil and less water so just you know if you can talk about the different problems and you can report on different solutions and the more ideas and solutions and ways to come about attacking the problem and how things can be addressed locally the more likely you are to get people to move forward on it yes thank you that was a lot awesome that's really cool i wanted to remind everybody to ask your questions in the q a function of zoom rather than the chat and uh um we will get to those questions uh soon enough we're going to be having a discussion here with uh with myself and jason and pam and thank you very much uh for excellent presentations um i wanted to touch on adaptation the difference between adaptation and mitigation and uh it seems like to me and uh there was i thought that there was evidence of this in the book that there's like there's a tension between adaptation and mitigation um uh some people want to address adaptation other people want to address mitigation and think uh you know it's a mistake to uh to do adaptation um can you describe uh how these two things you know if you see the tension between these two um uh if uh you know what what urban planners can do to resolve that tension yeah that's right so the conversation about climate first we couldn't have the conversation right and then when we could we could talk about mitigation we could talk about decreasing our carbon pollution but but the people the early adopters of the climate conversation environmental community they didn't like to talk about adaptation because talking about adaptation felt like you were giving up right and and the way they saw it there was no adaptation that was going to solve the world's problems you had to eliminate the core issue the carbon pollution itself so when we first started drawing sea walls or even lifted roads um there was a lot of pushback at that you know you're changing the environment how can you design with nature we kept being asked and still prevent against a 15-foot wave and um now it feels like we're able to talk about both and both are important how we can mitigate and how we can adapt sadly i think we've gotten used to the idea that even if we stopped all carbon pollution right now at this moment we've still got 30 years of uh of drying rivers and rising seas that we need to deal with and uh and here's the here's the thing right the new urban is the greatest we're able to draw dense walkable places we're able to adapt we're able to move people from the hinterlands which the charter talks about and into the centers which the charter focuses on and give them actually a better life so what we need to think about i think is is the the heavy infrastructure that we'll also need the desalinization plants the coastal armoring i think this is what we need to learn a little bit more about as nervous and and and uh the adaptation um is much more varied is it not i mean mitigation seems like a problem that um is fairly similar worldwide how to mitigate for uh uh for climate change although there could be differences in local communities but adaptation is really quite different for every community and it's top right being a traveling consultant so on one coast you're working with rising seas and on another coast you're dealing with wildfires you know you're dealing with places that have too much water and um where the rain never stops and you have places where it never seems to rain at all and so and the the solutions are very very local so as out of town consultants as traveling experts we've got to know generally how to approach it um but we really have to rely on our local a local understanding we're working in martha's vineyard last night a presentation was given to us by a non-professional climate planner which was so smart about the vineyard and its particular challenges that we took a lot of notes it'll be a big part of our plan um you guys did a plan for uh panama city florida uh to recover after uh hurricane michael which was a catastrophic storm that hit i think category five hit in 2018 [Music] and you know i don't know what the source of this was but you talk about in the book that there was a reluctance to actually address climate change and after some soul searching dova cole decided to take it head on and this was a plan that won a charter award in 2020 but this seems like a major theme of the book that you're urging planners to address climate change head-on even in places that perhaps aren't imminently in danger like panama city can you talk a little bit about uh you know that process of going from not wanting to drive reluctant to address it to addressing it head-on and what happened and how that relates to other communities that's right yeah so it's easy to forget but you know just 10 years ago we were not allowed to write climate change or sea level rise you know um and panama city is one of a bunch of projects lubbock texas and rico county virginia the florida keys laredo texas places where the words climate change and sea level rise were felt to be political those were democrat words right we had the obama re-election we had the uh the trump uh uh political contest and uh and the whole country was so divided that you could talk about resilience and you could talk about sustainability you could talk about oscillations and weather and and you could talk about but you could never name the the thing itself like the harry potter reference lord voldemort you weren't allowed to say his name even though everybody knew that's what was going on and we had to work under those conditions you we were you know we could uh we had clients saying don't please don't say this we had uh governors and elect and state senators not allowing us to use these words in our reports um a lot's changed uh since then but yeah that's right it was a difficult period and it just reminds you that there's a lot in our profession we don't we just can't talk about uh and but yet we have to proceed right we've gotta we still have to create plants um that that help communities so yeah that's it's interesting part of that is the book we're talking about how we dance around these topics how we deal with these things head on without appearing to deal with them head-on well i think also we still have some of that pushback where we will present ideas because now you know we are committed to making sure we do present you know what can happen and what can you do for it and we still get the pushback of like well maybe you shouldn't talk about that in at least in public and it's like all right well we can't talk about it in public we still want to talk about it with you our client the city um so at least it's not the first time you the next time it comes up it's not the first time you've heard it and so it can kind of sink in and maybe eventually then they'll be more willing to take action and they are generally willing to do this i mean they're after all paying you for your time and you're wanting to spend your time on talking about this and if they're reluctant um so there's that tent there's a bit of tension there too yeah and you know the thing is i don't want to spend my time talking about climate change it's so grim i want to be an urbanist i want to talk about cafes and sidewalks and bike paths and really cool mixed-use places but we but we have no choice um there's a responsibility there and uh and so there we are we find ourselves we've got to do the plan people want but we also have to do the plan that they need at the same time now panama city was a recovery plan um and uh so obviously that place has a future um but there there are some places that i think you think that maybe don't have a future i mean there was one place mentioned in the book you said that you didn't think that there should be a plan um uh for for rebuilding um so where do you draw the line and where should communities draw the line in the future as to uh um you know what should be recovered and and what not and you know that's going to be a difficult question don't you think yeah what a good point so there's no one rule yeah we have to take every case individually um there are communities that cannot survive the next 50 years two feet of sea level rise um the desertification of certain parts of the country there are certain neighborhoods where the wildfires will just never stop so there's no one rule we can bring into the situation we've got to take each case and uh and and give our best uh advice yeah it kind of leads to the the question of migration and this is kind of a theme throughout the book and there are some places where perhaps people will be migrating out of because there's a greater threat there's going to be other places people are going to be moving into maybe some uh there might be a combination um it seems like there is less of a discussion on how climate change deals with uh places where people are going to be moving in um where the in migration is occurring uh and um what are the and some of these are far away regions of the country some are close by and as you mentioned in your talk and what are the places that are likely to see in migration why is it important to plan for that and how do these new urbanist ideas apply to the places that are getting in my going to be getting in migration yeah good questions i guess um you know we like to think about northern aries where the land is higher and temperatures are cooler we like to think about the great lake areas where there's plenty of water and when we become futurists we think about people moving but but the reality is there's probably going to be a lot less global migration than we want to admit because it's expensive and it's hard for people to leave behind their home and people are able to deal and live in very dangerous and almost intolerable circumstances for long periods so that's the thing i like the idea of all getting on the train um let's go and uh revive detroit but the reality is people won't be leaving and we need to dig in uh there's just not the money to quite often personal level or the municipal level um so we're going to have to contend with these issues um more than i think we're comfortable talking about personally nevertheless we do plans for communities we do one for hammond louisiana we did one for upstate new york these are uh these are in-migration plans these are getting these places ready for big new populations we did one in henrico county virginia uh we're doing our best to get other places places that are a little further away from harm and getting them ready for higher densities but still uh no less good quality of life right we we need to design uh density in a way that it's desirable and choice-worthy giving you thoughts on migration pam and how to address that well i mean yeah you here you know eventually everyone's going to have to leave florida but it's not going to be something that happens overnight and so just looking as jason mentioned how to work with those kind of cities early and how do you get them ready for i can't think of anything other than jason said he said it so well with the choice-worthy places and it's just going to be really hard for people when they do need to move but in a way we already are seeing it you know it's not just people within the united states moving into the united states it's people in central america who are living in bad conditions and the foods that they used to grow and have their livelihood off of are no longer growing and that's why we're seeing a lot of the migration happening coming up through mexico and the border issues that we have it's definitely a big concern and where are those people going and the locals and you know montana and places where people are heading they're going to push back because they don't want to change and so it's another part of the conversation that hasn't been talked about enough um but it's definitely going to cause a lot of strife for a lot of people and just really quick rob you're seeing in our plans like playing nobody applying for north speech that pam was really a prime author of she has short term midterm and long term in the short term there's things we do we're digging in we're bulwarking in the midterm probably also but in the long term of our plans you're starting to see retreat and re-vegetation um so you got to think about that when you're doing these coastal plans short term midterm and long term i'm going to get to some questions from um from the audience and um this one's uh probably pretty quick but uh um and i think if this question was asked by aaron um uh uh back when you're talking about dauphin island and what is the basis that you're looking at for sea level rise in these communities yeah so when you go into the community you need a rule of thumb uh over simplification we tend to say two feet of rise by 2050. now the reality is more complicated the ipc gives us ipcc gives us a range and the water levels will be different in different places but generally because it's got to be simple you've got to be able to communicate and you've got to draw fast two feet of of rise by 2050 is what we use um mark uh asks um about a small town in indiana where he lives he's he's uh they're doing a lot of work on downtown revitalization and design but there is no focus on efforts to develop a climate action or mitigation plan what advice do you have to get the community and local leadership to start thinking about these things and planning yeah um you know just so you can just start the conversation light right the world's getting warmer and drier in indiana just like everywhere else you can start the conversation hopefully there's a bike hopefully people are interested um sometimes that's the only thing we can do we're the first ones that say climate change and we've got to leave it to someone else you know three administrations later to commission a climate action plan if we do that we're still doing something we're starting the conversation we're still making a positive contribution uh pam talked about one project where no one wanted to talk about climate change because they didn't because the solutions were expensive in miami beach well when we came up with a local sales tax tax capture mechanism that would pay for resilience when we created a new redevelopment agency with a new funding mechanism which meant it wasn't going to be higher property taxes if you can create a new way to pay for resilience then you might find it easier to have the conversation so that might be where to start how can you how can you start a fund which eventually you'll be using you know to to adapt your town i think it's also just doing some um a little bit of research on your own i haven't worked in indiana but you know what are the things you're really gonna see there you know in some places it's easy to tell it's either arid or it's on the coast or it's got wildfires you know what are the big concerns uh in your town or is that a great place that you're gonna see more migration which actually doing the downtown plan and revitalizing that is a great first step because you're re-inhabiting your downtown you're making places where more people can come into your community and thrive without a big impact on the rest of the city so i was trying to see what are the big issues in your area that you're going to need to address and then kind of working those into the work that you're already doing that's a really good point downtown revitalization is itself climate adaptation because you're you're you know resettling an area with probably not a lot of people you're getting it ready for more people that alone is his client work got a question from mary who's an architect in el paso really appreciates the work that you uh folks have done there and she is actually working on the advanced water purification facility under design um but she is wondering how much work you're doing with el paso on an ongoing basis to see the implementation of all these ideas that you came up with in the comprehensive plan yeah so we've spent 11 or 12 years working in el paso we've always we've always got some project in el paso um so after 10 years you can look back on your plan and say what happened you know did it get implemented did it not so we're working el paso now especially almeida corridor and we're bringing up plan el paso from 10 years ago and hey how come this hasn't been implemented why isn't this committee created you know um so you know we're often hired to do vision plans but if we have a continuing relationship like we have in el paso we keep the conversation about implementation going el paso is about to pass a new quality of life bond the last one was 500 million dollars we're part of the conversation to make sure that the next one is about adaptation it's about water it's about shade it's about micro climate so anyway you just continue you just continue to have a relationship with these communities and you continue to remind them of what's in the plan and you and you help them find funding sources and and it's not just you know the official relationship with the city you know um especially in texas and el paso and other communities we find local partners that we're working with and you know they you know kind of become our friends and we're constantly having conversations and so you know carlos galinar uh in the city of el paso as well cea group you know they are parts of each of the projects that we work on and they're they're locally able to advocate for them and in order to keep things moving forward and sometimes you know you you hit a wall and you gotta put it aside for a while i know um like uh carlos who i mentioned a moment ago you know was working with the city and then he moved and he was working with the school board and trying to make advancements on ideas from planet el paso as far as making uh smaller local schools but the way the school system was set up he made some progress but not a lot and so then he moves on to other topics really trying to push that implementation nancy asks if it did it used to be the people who lived in a community that was heavily damaged or destroyed by a natural disaster they wanted to build back the same and she was wondering whether this attitude has changed if people are more willing to look at significant changes and how they build back yeah it's the book talks a lot about that when the urban planners come in we want to get everyone out of the flood zones right we want to get everyone to the center of town we want to retreat and reorganize and redesign but well on a personal level if you if your house was trapped was knocked down all you want is to get back to normal you know that's what everyone wants they just want to rebuild back as fast as possible they're in it's a state of trauma um and so this is a hard thing also our policies our fema policies used to require you to build back right in that same spot they've only started uh to try to to move we're only starting to to read about uh communities that are being bought out relocated there's only a couple that have you know ever so so it was always hard for us after we did the mississippi renewal character a lot of the new urban sun were part of that we went to gulfport we went to ocean springs we said we went to biloxi we said you guys have to do everything completely different so that way this doesn't happen again and that's not what they wanted at all they wanted everything back to normal um and so what do you do it's just a kind of compromise it's it's it's up zoning the downtown so there's a place to go to when when it finally comes the day they've given up you know they don't want to leave the community there's a condo in town that they can move to um eventually in gene lafitte louisiana they'll get tired of replacing the rugs and the furniture so we designed a center that they can move to that can be reinforced that can be protected um so you've got to be sympathetic to the desire to not you know to just build back exactly like it was but at the same time as urban planners we have a responsibility to pick areas that will densify and will receive people i think you made a good point jason too um you kind of quickly went over it that um the systems we had in place after you know disaster recovery and fema monies and insurance monies those are to build back what you already had and it is just more recently that the conversation on those has been changing in what if it doesn't make sense to build back is that money just gone or it can you use that money another way because traditionally it's to replace what was lost and so that incentivizes people to stay where they are and to not move on and so figuring out how to allow people who have had the worst thing happen to them have the option to not build back to build somewhere else because otherwise they build back but they don't want to be there and they move but they sell that house to somebody else and then that person is in danger and so it's still an evolving conversation on how this migration can even happen power tasks if there's any unique or interesting city regional scale climate action plans that you came across in your research uh i think we've been talking about some already but you know probably the biggest case study in the book is is a regional plan uh can you talk about uh that scale of planning with regard to climate action plans yeah sure you know i learned a lot from cpex the center for planning excellence located in baton rouge because they're planning louisiana louisiana is the front line you know um they're planning regionally um and cpex has been doing this for a long time so when i think about when i think about regional planning i always go to them what the problems that louisiana is dealing with the rest of us will have to deal with in time and cpex has been brave and innovative through all of this but yeah the book talks about 750 playing for southeast florida um dover cole dwayne potter zeidberg marcella kembler a bunch of great firms got to work together on the plan for southeast florida and and that was a regional plan and it's a regional plan for new transportation systems for um for adaptation for retreat we learned a lot liz potter's ivor uh and andrew giorgiotis with big parts of that um so you know it's hard to summarize so as to say a big part of the book is regional planning for vulnerable place it's the 750 case study i think it's the most interesting part of the book because it isn't straightforward we were fought by every by every tea partier and uh anti-government group in the books divisive politics the whole thing was was born in florida and uh and we had to deal with it we were accused of being agenda 21 conspiracy um i don't know minions of the un it's an interesting pro it's an interesting case study because it was just such a hard project i mean yeah it really does make a great story i should tell people that we're at the one minute i mean one hour mark it's one o'clock and uh eastern time and typically these go on for an hour but can go on longer and there there are more questions to answer if you if you folks are willing to uh to keep on talking um uh uh for those who need to leave we will be posting this video probably in a day and you can see your answers your answers to any questions that we didn't get to but if it's okay do you want to continue to talk uh and about this topic yeah we had lunch already we're good okay good um so uh uh calendra asks uh what okay i hope i got that right what policy interventions do local leaders in climate migration hot spots need to consider to protect long-term constituents from green gentrification and climate change migration good impacts yeah so um i think the first time i read about uh climate gentrification was miami because um we've got a city pam and i live in miami um we've got a city real divided uh rich and poor uh and the rich always lived along the coast and the poor always lived inland and now there's a movement right so the wealthier moving to the upland inland areas uh and it is displacing um poorer people so this is miami so it goes back down on the other side towards the everglades yeah that's right poor getting pushed out that way and flooded because of the everglades yeah it's true so miami we're really in trouble because we got the ocean on one side we got the everglades on the other so there's a little ridge that you can live in and your home will flood zone x it won't be flooded all the time and of course there's a lot of competition to live in that area and it's increasing and we can just imagine the climate you know making our gentrification problems much worse um and the only solution is just the whole toolkit of anti-gentrification and affordable housing and affordable uh commercial spaces it's public subsidy it's nonprofits it's redevelopment agencies it is a topic of another book and another talk i think um brian asks if there are recommended resources for info on migration destinations that's something i've been interested in there's been a lot of talk um about receiver cities but i haven't ever seen a list of what they are so i i don't do you have any resources on that uh no i yeah there isn't a book called receiver cities i've actually these um these park benches is where i've been learning about welcoming cities and receiving cities i think i think the normanism is at the beginning of this conversation i don't know what the guidebook is yet to designing your receiver city we need to have a uh on the park bench um topic receiver cities yeah um yeah just really quick the tough thing about the receiver city is a lot of times you're designing a city for a new density and the locals don't want it right so that's the difficulty how do you design places for for greater density to receive refugees and when chances are the there's going to be a huge just don't want yeah there's a huge huge nimby backlash against that it's going to be an interesting topic to our whole sphere to learn uh that we're gonna have to learn um right it might be slower though it might be a slow process where there's sort of a demand that rises for housing and then they'll have to respond right i mean it could be a fast process or it could be a slow process what do you think rob you're probably the expert on this now because you've been the moderator on these sessions what do you think about receiver cities where what what's the next steps for us where do we learn more uh well i would like to i mean it's difficult to sort of have a list of receiver cities because you know it's there's going to be a lot of places on that list but i would like to see a list put together of perhaps examples of receiver cities of various types of receiver cities and one thing that was made clear clear to me in your book is is a lot of these places and are going to still be uh very close to where people are perhaps retreating from um you know they're not necessarily going to go to detroit i mean they may go to uh hammond uh louisiana as opposed to detroit um or some of them might go to detroit as well you know or pittsburgh or buffalo right yeah the other the other hard thing is after a place gets wrecked it becomes cheap real estate and in a country where the real estate is so expensive and the housing crisis is so dire i think you're actually going to see a strange migration into dangerous places just for a want of a place to live yeah uh very it's a very complicated discussion um this is just a quick uh question from aaron um did panama city adopt any uh ordinance ordinances code reform off of your planning effort well they did they adopted a great plan the strategic vision for panama city's historic downtown and waterfront uh led by victor dover and amy groves is a great plant and uh and there's a section on resilient infrastructure there's a section on sustainable buildings uh and i don't know if they've moved into the code phase yet but they've got a great uh framework for doing that and and the plan calls for a code right yeah it does every one of our plans right every one of our vision plans says we've got to update the land development regulations um and it's especially true now with climate um a guy named victor you may know asked the question i think for louisa have you been involved in any conversations about racial environmental justice as it relates to adaptation planning and retreat i think he knows the answer to that yeah that's right you know liz said it elizabeth platter-zeiberg said something really interesting the other night she said or during her park bench talk she said we've got to plan for climate and we've got to plan for equity with the same plan and at the same time because there isn't resources for two plans and there isn't the time to do both and so every project has to be both climate and equity or equity and climate they have to be interrelated and yeah i mean every one of our projects now has resilience and equity at the core of uh and and at the same time racial and socio-economic justice um these are topics we're learning about and we're we're it's exciting time to be a planner because we're we're trying to undo the the mistakes of the past when it comes to equity uh um but at the same time it's a it's a developing field for us we're learning from people um there's a question for miranda on on transfer of development rights uh do you have any experience with that use those in your plans like el paso other other plans that are dealing with climate yeah i think every project has transfer development rights as part of it we used to transfer in order to preserve the environmental health of places now we're transforming now we're transferring in order to get people out of dangerous places and we know that tdr programs don't work more often than they do unfortunately there's a lot of great examples the pinelands in new york the coastal protection and um in cape cod there's a lot of examples where tdrs worked uh but um there's so many more examples where they didn't but i'm you know the pro but some so you got to do tdrs yourself without actually using tdrs and i'm prairie was that right paul and prairie newfield was moving people from one spot to another without ever using the word using the acronym tdr right yeah with the new field um it was really taking a spot that was surrounded by development it was farmland and with that process really putting a focus on densifying certain areas and were the best spot for the neighborhoods were while at the same time keeping intact these large tracks of um environmental area you know the whole property had a certain density that was permitted but there were also a lot of wetlands and so working on taking the rights from those areas in order to permanently preserve them and put them into the areas that were better suited to be developed and then along with the uh process of getting that coded and the first layer of development rights with these densified areas it then puts those preserved plans into a trust in perpetuity so that someone can't come back later and decide that oh well we really are gonna develop these areas they are now legally um preserved in perpetuity so there's that kind of thing where using the densification to preserve right where you are um not necessarily the larger city-wide uh tdr programs and then pam talked about how sandy woods a tnd in tibberton rhode island is away from the coast so in rhode island everyone wants to live near the water but it's getting more dangerous and newfield is a tnd away from the coast of florida um and it's a beautiful design and a great place to live and people will will move themselves without a tdr program making that happen i think those are both examples you know setting up new places but more densely than normally would be to allow more people into the area um just more housing smaller areas but that people will choose yeah it's a really good question from uh jody i'm going to just read it verbatim um do you have any recommendations for gaining buy-in for municipal staff to step up and take a leading role as the coordinating body for a community-wide climate action plan when they are used to only addressing things that have jurisdic that they have jurisdiction over through municipal operations for instance most community emissions emanate from residents and businesses not the city operations directly yeah right so number one we see a lot of towns and cities developing caps climate action plans which is exciting right um and the way they start is just like jody's talking about first they start with the city itself what's the city's you know fleet these vehicles how can we turn them into electric how can we put more electric charging stations how can we put photovoltaics on top of our public buildings that's where it starts um getting the city itself to uh to carbon zero but then it can't stop the the problem with the climate adaptation plans is when they stopped there because just like jody points out the city itself is just a small small actor given you know all the people that live there and so the the newest climate action plans the best ones that we're seeing they start with the municipality and then they apply those lessons citywide town wide and and how do you get municipal planning staff to want to do that if there's a trend it's happening you know um our climate adoption plans are going from very narrow focus to much larger i think the climate adaption plans of 20 years from now are going to be even regional so we're watching it we're watching these plans get more and more uh wider in scope and more and more important and more and more effective so um maybe one final question um and uh this has to do with um uh with something that i've i've been thinking about uh and you address in your book and and in your uh in in your talk and that had to do with trees and they seem like a sort of a miracle drug for for climate uh that can be employed on a local level and uh they're um you know they can be done uh you know ordinary people can make a difference with trees um uh you had a good quote about uh you know plant a tree in your yard plant a tree on the street um forget the exact quote but you know um basically you know if they if they tell you you can't do that you can ask forgiveness and say ask them to change um and change the law that says you're not allowed to to plant it on the street if there is one but um tell me a little bit about trees why they're such an important tool for for urban designers to address climate change but yet uh this it seems like um like laredo it's it's hard it's sometimes getting harder and harder to plant these trees why is that happening and what can we do about it pam's the expert on the radio she should tell us about laredo but um so trees are the one thing that both political parties can agree on right um both are everybody is for trees and um and even across the world you see north korea planting millions of trees they're committed to it and scotland africa south america all over just read about these massive tree campaigns that countries are involving themselves in no matter what their politics because everybody can agree that that on trees and uh and the interesting thing that's happening is on the municipal level on our local level it's getting harder and harder to plant a tree so the book talks about how just in in our front yard um i applied for a tree permit uh the city said yes i'll bring we'll bring you trees we'll bring you oak trees we'll plant them for you we waited a year and a half and the trees never came and so we went and we planted a small forest of street trees in the uh in the uh right away in the planting strip up and down our street uh and um and uh and that's illegal um so nobody said anything yeah that's right one night someone drove by and said to pam what are you doing planting this tree don't you know the roots are gonna break the sidewalk but pam fearlessly watered that tree that night anyway what we're starting to do is we're putting into our codes that the that the property owner is allowed to plant a tree in the right of way and if the city has any problem with it they can themselves move that tree to the backyard and thomasville george is the first community that has this it's a basically a tactical urbanism gorilla tree planting intervention which is in the code it's allowed for more municipalities have to adopt that otherwise they end up in laredo you want to talk about laredo yeah seems everyone in laredo at the municipal levels all musical levels were against trees for so many different reasons um first there was uh the planning board uh didn't want trees they wanted or when they had trees they needed enough room to grow so they needed to be four feet from the street and they needed to be in the center of a planting area so that means you need eight feet but if you already have an existing street it's very rare that you have eight feet between the street and the sidewalk or the street and the property and so if you had less than eight feet you couldn't plant a tree um one of the reasons they wanted this besides just giving it enough room to be watered is the development community didn't want to add trees and if they didn't make the street wide enough to have a eight-foot planting strip and they didn't have to provide trees and so then that could be a way to save costs on making affordable housing only the cost didn't really get moved on to the uh the cost of the house it just added to their profit margin but then we had the power company and the power companies you know you can't plant a tree near a power line and the power companies want to be able to put their power lines not just where they are but wherever they may be needed in the future if there's a tree in the way you can't have it you can't let those branches grow into the trees because then they come down in storms and they have to be repaired water conservationists sometimes don't want trees because you have to water those trees especially when they're first planted and they're establishing their roots and if water is already a precious resource why waste it on a tree the fire marshal doesn't like big trees because then they can't get to the buildings from the road and the tree warden didn't want trees because they had no money in their budgets in order to maintain them or to plant them and so it's all these different areas it's coming from oh and there was another one they didn't want the trees because when you did water them the water got on the street and that destroyed the street um although coming from florida i don't really believe that one because then your street must have also been sub-par because we get water all the time so much less than they do in laredo and so there's all these attacks on trees for other reasons um and so it's trying to figure out how can you fix that and resolve that you know if there was a tree there before a new tree will grow it might not be the perfect specimen of a tree it might live a few years less but for the length of that tree is going to be there it does have such great benefits providing oxygen providing shade providing a carbon sink increasing property values you know and so it's just each one of these different reasons um to be against something you know there are 10 million more reasons to be for it and so it's just working on what is that one thing this person has caught up on and how can we find a solution or you know if we can't put the tree on here can we put it over there and so just trying to figure out how do you get past all of these different objections the book talks about that how to do that well um jason and pam we really appreciate this discussion it's been great uh and uh um uh uh appreciate your expertise and and all the people who have been participating in this and asking great questions we're going to have more clearly more on the park bench discussions on on this issue and planning for climate change um so with that i will um bid everybody uh do and have a good rest of your week and thanks once again thank you rob thanks a lot thanks for the opportunity okay bye bye