On the Park Bench - CNU29.Design for (Policy) Change

welcome everyone we're going to get started in just a few minutes um we're going to let people enter the zoom room first though so give us just a minute to let folks join and we'll be kicking off all right everybody we're going to go ahead and get started uh welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation my name is mallory batches i'm the director of strategic development for cnu and i want to welcome you to our webinar today on the park bench presents interactive conversations that thought leaders in urbanism and allied industries uh can have it provides a platform and it provides the opportunity for the audience to engage in real time with with these speakers this webinar series is intended to be a platform for cnu members to debate and collaborate on pressing and emerging issues that we're all facing right now so we welcome feedback and suggestions on topics that might be relevant that you'd like to hear uh in this webinar series so please reach out to us today's conversation however is called cnu 29 design for policy change i'm here with harriet tragonian hayden blackwalker and mark wuters and i'll be moderating the session today and the purpose of today's topic is to get folks excited about cnu29 uh if you aren't already registered cnu29 design for change is our uh upcoming congress and um in that congress we have three tracks of sessions that we'll be offering those tracks are policy change physical change and social change and today's webinar is an opportunity to get you excited and talk a little more about why there is a need for design for policy change and why we have a track based on this at the congress cnu 29 design for change will be our last virtual congress knock on wood and it offers five days of programming around the new and ongoing issues that cities face in these extraordinary times of change the registration rates are the lowest they have been you'll be able to collect professional continuing education credits as you always can and you'll have access to the session archives for six months afterwards so it's an incredible opportunity to connect with fellow nervousness to learn and to share and i hope everyone will join us may 17th through the 21st registration is on the cnu website i also want to let you know about upcoming webinars that we have for the on the park bench series next tuesday april 27th we'll be holding cnu 29 design for physical change and we'll be doing this same uh this same sort of preview of what to expect of the topics and conversations at cnu29 that session will be moderated by garland woodsong and will include nathan norris from the new urban guild and camille cortez of the place initiative both of which will be participating in the congress this year on tuesday may 4th i'm very excited about this the authors forum will celebrate the 50th anniversary of life between buildings young gayle's very well-known uh book uh jan is a athena medal winner for from cnu and is an extraordinary speaker and author and thinker and i think you'll really enjoy that webinar and then finally on tuesday may 11th cnu 29 design for social change will be our topic todd zimmerman will be moderating that session and karen parolic marquez king and jennifer hurley will be participating and talking about the ways in which theirs the sessions they're participating in at cnu29 will tee up those conversations uh you can always as always you can register for these future on the park bench webinars at our website as you can see on the link on the screen so today let me tell you about who we have with us i'm very excited about this harriet trigoning is the director of numo the new urban mobility alliance hosted by the wri ross center for sustainable cities harriet has been deeply engaged on planning smart mobility disaster resilience housing and community development issues over the past two decades working with organizations around the country to help states and localities prepare for a range of future challenges prior to nemo she served as principal deputy assistant secretary of the office of community planning and development in the obama administration and before that was the long tenured director of the dc office of planning hayden black walker is director of planning for black and bernoulli architecture and urban design together with sinclair black she co-founded reconnect austin a community-based call to lower the main lanes of i-35 through austin's urban core creating a vision of a reconnected city fabric which provides multimodal housing to a multimodal access to housing jobs medical facilities and transit hayden is a 2016 fellow and mentor for the national walking college and mark wuters is a leader in the design process for new communities downtown master plans resiliency planning affordable housing and various architectural projects he directs mark wuters studios his body of work includes empire state development's downtown revitalization initiative the brooklyn queens expressway transformation the city of saskatoon city center master plan the brooklyn navy yard resiliency plan and the award-winning columbia heights washington dc master plan as well as south jamaica cloudburst plan he previously served as a partner at cooper robertson and partners and torti gallison partners and i'm going to stop sharing my screen and hand this over to harriet who's going to begin with a bit of a presentation or conversation really about the the reasons that she's bringing these topics uh to cnu 29 and uh her perspective on the need for design for policy change harriet thank you so much i'm really excited to have this conversation with hayden and mark and uh and you mallory uh this you know i i can't tell you maybe it's the spring maybe it's the our rate of vaccination i'm just getting very excited about the corner that i hope we're about to turn um and it has been a really really long 13 months with covid uh you know really being uh such a phenomenon that uh most of us have never the likes of which most of us have never lived through um it's been an accelerator of so many trends that were already underway think about uh you know the precarious nature of uh of uh on street retail um a bricks and mortar retail think about uh you know deliveries and e-commerce think about uh the ability to work from home just things that we thought couldn't be possible so quickly have really happened and how so many cities have uh have transformed streets uh and land uses at a speed that we never would have thought possible but one of the really striking things was how vividly kovid highlighted the inequality of our economy and the growing disparity uh you know across the country it was you know visible in every community and while kovid certainly made it visible for decades that's a trend that had uh had been in existence and and been accelerating transportation uh is is one of the fields where this really played out i mean just kind of think about it um uh the covet really exacerbated people's existing transportation challenges but also created a whole bunch of new ones you know the the crisis in public transit uh the fear of transit uh concerns about health and safety but also the the dramatic drop in transit service uh in so many places and and and we had that vivid reminder of who relies on transit well turns out most of the workers that are critical to uh to our functioning especially during the pandemic um the you know who got to work from home uh you know who got to see their stock portfolios increase in value who lost their job or lost their hours who saw their kids struggle without reliable access to any broadband keep up in school um you know those differences are are really big people lost jobs lost hours lost vehicles that that they were that they were paying on you know bottom line who prospered who fell behind it's the an exacerbation of that of that uh of that existing trend and and and greater disparities um much um much of the job loss uh associated with with uh with the covid pandemic uh was among hourly wage workers whether that's an actual job loss in industries that were hard hit like hospitality or whether that was a reduction in hours a diminution these are the same workers who are who are much more likely to be dependent on transit who are much less likely to own reliable vehicles if they own them but it also means that their access to jobs as they look for new or better uh jobs is so much more limited so i think a big challenge is how cities are going to pivot from reacting to covid to really refocusing on how to provide transportation how to organize our neighborhoods while prioritizing more equitable outcomes and taking into account some of the things that we've learned from the past year about how we can do things differently how we can do things more quickly and i'll just say one of the things i hope we can really talk about that i'm very excited about is that in the new administration both with the american rescue act and now with the american jobs plan we see an administration who seems to get that these things are really connected um and i'd love to have a little bit of a policy conversation going forward about what those connections are what does this have to do with the cnu and how can cnu members get really involved in helping their communities prepare for the opportunities that are already uh appearing even before there's a any bill or appropriation associated with the american jobs plan this is the blueprint that the biden administration looks poised to fully uh implement uh with their existing funding with their existing programs so i think we'll have a lot of fun talking about those opportunities thanks so much harriet um and and so leading straight from that uh hayden do you want to give a little bit of your thoughts and and uh overview of your your why to cnu 29 design for policy change yeah i would be happy to do that um i'm hayden blackwalker thanks for having me here today can everybody see the screen okay um so i put together a little bit of a slide deck just to kind of talk through past highway policy and future highway policy that is needed going forward um so uh for almost a decade reconnect austin um has been proposing a better solution for i-35 um the texas department of transportation txdot intends to completely rebuild it so i'm gonna use i-35 is a little bit of a an example of what's going on here but really we find that the same issues are happening in all cities in texas and really across the country each dot and state are a little bit different but we really need a better set of policies to shift the paradigm around highways so it's really important that we're talking about highways now because we really have this we have this situation where we have these big highways through american cities they're reaching the end of their lifespan something needs to be done and we need to be making a better um set of choices before we lock ourselves into another 60 years of major infrastructure so um we have this once in a lifetime opportunity and this is what uh you know in austin we used to have primarily streets this is east avenue that eventually became i-35 um and given all that we know about um past policies and um the damage that we know that highways do to cities and really climate change it's we really question why we're still continuing to build highways and why at least in texas we're continuing to significantly widen them so um i was going to do a little bit of history of the highway system it was the biggest single um capital improvement project ever in the history of the world at the time we made the same mistakes basically everywhere we built the same thing everywhere in a short period of time we um made it really difficult to get around without a car we intentionally exported wealth to suburbs we um polluted the air and we devalued adjacent land and we induced a whole lot of demand to create sprawl so we're finally starting to acknowledge some of those racist policies i was going to show this just as an example this is what was east avenue in austin so you can look at any redlining map in the united states and see where highways were going to be placed so in the prior to the 1920s in austin there were freedmen's communities all across the city this is east austin all black people were forced by the 1928 plan to move into this neighborhood it was then red lined and i-35 was put right here along this edge and most of the property taken from for the highway was taken out of east austin and so we really need to have a conversation about the generational wealth that was lost in this scenario um land along this corridor was bought for less than a dollar square foot and that land is worth over two hundred dollars a square foot today so you can see here the land that was taken for the highway and this is what it became today and we are making some better choices across the united states and we can all learn from these projects in the united states and around the world to create better policy so i want to fast forward to today and talk a little bit about some of the problems about where we are and what we need to be thinking about um txdot well you know i already said but we need to understand the severe impacts on these communities including the laws of generational wealth um this is feedback from um a scoping working group on i-35 that's made up of primarily of communities of color and txdot is not listening to anything that was said here they're completely ignoring what's going on they need to listen and we need policies that make dots listen to local communities austin's one of the fastest growing cities in the country and we have a severe housing shortage and yet we rarely step back and look at the inefficient ways that we use land for highways and the amount of housing and city that we could put in those same spaces uh txl likes to say that this project will solve congestion we know that it won't the congestion con report is a really great tool to show people that in every case where highway lane miles were added congestion actually got worse this is the katy freeway in houston which txdot spent billions of dollars widening to 26 lanes congestion is worse than ever and recently txdot said they're going to add more lanes to this highway and the modeling that's used to justify these projects is really way off i've put a link up here to um a smart mobility report about i-35 and modeling machines basically they're just projecting traffic will increase two percent every year at infinitum um and you can see that even though they project over 300 000 trips a day over and over again you can't fit all those cars on this highway unless you actually widen it so this is what they want to do they want to lighten to widen to 20 lanes i see mark laughing through the urban core of austin and through the university of texas and they say that that will solve congestion um now and and we have policies in place austin has a really great vision zero policy the state has a great vision zero policy but widening to 20 lanes with a design speed of 70 miles an hour through a highly urbanized area a new university is not likely to reduce traffic fatalities uh 25 of the fatalities we have in the entire city of austin happened in this single corridor and txdot is a state where the fhwa the feral highway administration has ceded all their environmental authority to the state so the state creates the project they hire the environmental consultants and then they approve their own project which is turning out to be a real problem in houston i-45 is a very similar project to i-35 they take txtop plans to bulldoze over a thousand homes and businesses five houses of worship and two schools all primarily in communities of color this is in the 21st century um in houston uh has did propose a community plan textile has ignored it so now the county has sued txdot and fhwa has stopped the project to investigate civil rights violations and we really need policies in place where we can actually consider community alternatives there are three community alternatives including reconnect austin for i-35 and txdot is ignoring all of them and has for the last over eight years we're hoping that a better better federal policy will be put in place secretary beta judge is definitely saying really great things and the bills that are being put before congress will have a really big impact but we uh we need a lot of policy change at the local state and federal levels so um i hope you'll join us for the two highways to boulevard sessions at uh cnu29 and with that i'll say thank you and hand it over to mark thank you um i'm mark wooters um i actually wasn't planning on sharing this but after seeing hayden's presentation um we actu i actually also have been looking at highway transformations um and this is the brooklyn queens expressway um which um it carries you know one and and uh 150 000 vehicles a day goes through a lot of minority uh neighborhoods um and really in a lot of highway discussions we've been looking at the impact on minority neighborhoods if you make a nice boulevard there's a lot of discussion about displacing existing minority neighborhoods that are there and so that leads me um to what i'm really here to talk about today is affordable housing and community land trusts um we've always noticed um in the major cities this amazing period of immigration into our big cities and it's been great in terms of job creation but what has been extremely difficult for so many is the rise in housing costs the lack of affordability and it's particularly been stressful on minority communities low-income communities um and um you know we've been looking at strategies to really protect them i hear the screaming i've worked in in minority communities for 20 years i've worked with public housing residents and i and i really keep tabs on people on on you know what people are saying um and people are saying it's just not that i'm afraid that i'm gonna have to leave my neighborhood they're seeing their whole neighborhood being eliminated everything they've invested in that neighborhood the small stores so for me as an urban planner it really is distressing to see you know really interesting neighborhoods um that just can't keep up with the economic pressures of the city um um and you know what one event particularly that impressed me is i went down after hurricane maria to puerto rico um and were people talking about flooding yes were people talking about the power outage you know of happy island yes people were talking about gentrification and i thought wow even here and um in san juan there's a lot of sort of waterfront communities that have displaced the minority communities and what they did was they established a community land trust and there's been one functioning here in new york city for 60 years it was set up when robert moses threatened to bulldoze over part of the east village and it's healthy and it's in operation um so what a community what a community land trust does is a community can actually own a group of the ground under a group of buildings or maybe it's many buildings you know it depends on the city and the situation but it sets up a non-profit and what that means is that um if you rent in it even though there's land speculation around you in your neighborhood your rents don't go up because it's a non-profit the community sets what the rents need to be and so the rents only really need to go up in order for increased maintenance costs or things like that that start going up over time but it gives people relative stability so i find it very interesting and alongside then highway projects well and so we'll talk about this maybe a little bit later it provides an opportunity for people to participate in newly you know improved transportation corridors and really establish you know a full picture of a community um i thought a great idea would be for people to hear directly from stakeholders and i've made a little film um where you can really hear from people what they're experiencing firsthand better than secondhand for me [Music] one and a half million people the entire city of philadelphia is 1.5 million people we added that in 20 years in new york the immigration room that we're still going through is bigger than what happened during ellis island the wealth of the world focused on new york while so many have benefited from this growth the intense competition over land and housing has proved extremely challenging for many existing communities the history of communities of color throughout the history of the united states are very similar to what occurs now right with like displacement moving um not having a choice um establishing community having it become cool and like awesome and giving birth to movements like hip-hop and then having other people be like i want that and then just them being able to have it i've been this place before i've been in a situation where i was told you had to leave this place even though you were born and raised here and you can never come back here again it's not our neighborhood anymore no it's not the bronx is the last reasonably priced area and the cheapest borough where people can find reasonable places to live and everybody's flocked here when they were pushed out of the other areas whatever other borrowers no they're coming for the bronx this affordability crisis threatens who we are threatens the very soul of this city many older communities created social networks support systems and cultural activities that connect them everybody knew everybody everybody used to sit out on their front stoops old people young people well now it's 100 different people change here every day people move in they're here for six months six months later they're gone and someone else is here it's a whole world down residents gather to develop ways to stabilize their communities we are not opposed to fundamentally opposed to growth in east new york that's not what this is about but the question always has to be who benefits from this book right like if you have new folks in the neighborhood and folks from the older neighborhood or who've been here for a long time you know what do you do you meet each other you build trust you have conversations you um share stories you know like you build with what you have now do you think there's anything that new york city government planning agencies could help you with i'd like to be able to find a place where i could stay and know that i don't have to in six years it's going to change one potential strategy is the community land trust the community should be owning their communities a community landris is grounded in the idea that you want the land to be owned and controlled by the people who live in a community by the people for the people okay so that gives you a little bit of a sense of you know what i hear uh pretty frequently um and you know um before we get to questions you know i just want to impress upon people but job growth is really great and beneficial but you know you think of members of the community who um not only are they personally concerned about being displaced they're seeing all of their neighbors starting to leave and it's happening relatively quickly and then they're small stores starting to lose um on top of that many of these communities have invested in building those communities for 30 years they built those small stores and everything that's now perceived as cute lets me and let's move in so the stress level um is quite high and you have to think of the toll it takes on emotional health of people think of seniors who lose their support systems think of children who benefit from being in a stable home so you know that's um and so for at cnu on the 21st of may we will have four expert panelists who run community land trusts and they're going to tell you everything about them that you need to know they're from atlanta they're from new york there's a national organization that fosters them so i'm really looking forward to it thank you mark that was great um and it uh teased up a question i want to ask but i am going to remind all of the audience that if you'd like to ask questions of the panelists please use the q a function at the bottom of your screen and you can send your questions directly i'll be helping to tee those up to our panelists today but the first question i wanted to ask in it um to the group and mark you you sort of set it up well with uh with that that video that you shared there at the end you know we're on the one hand this session and and y'all's expertise comes at the level of policy which which can be very much you know the 30 000 foot view of these challenges and then at the same time as the video you showed mark points out that these are real people's lives that are being impacted by these policies and uh it made me think of uh in our prep call yesterday uh harriet you you brought this up the challenge of investment that you know even something like a bike lane can be destabilizing for a community and and yet the policy itself of adding bike lanes is something that many communities would strive to to include and so i i wanted to tee up this question of how new urbanists many of us work in the realm of design and that design may reach towards policy or it may reach towards the individual community or both and i wanted to ask you all in what ways in each of your own expertise you see opportunities for change in policy and ways that new urbanists as in that realm that we work in in very many different industries uh within the big umbrella of new urbanism could you talk about the ways that you see new urbanists being able to participate more successfully in the policy changes that we're talking about and for the sort of outcomes the better outcomes for communities as mark's video pointed out that that we want to see as a result of policy change i'll start to break the break the silence i mean there's policy at so many levels um so you might really want to think about approaching it from you know a local community level the federal level you know what what can the states do um and you know if there's any public private partnerships that can be structured to sort of you know um you know leverage investments money to help some some of this work um you know at the at the local level um new york city is looking at a number of programs to support affordable housing um well like i said while there's a lot of different types of ways to fund affordable housing it really is about the neighborhood as well you really have to look at that neighborhood scale because that's sort of you know having that person wave to you on the street when you walk when you're walking to work or getting something that you know all that sort of knowledge and support system that you get is critical for people um you know we've been looking at things like putting flip taxes on various districts so that people can't just buy a home flip it and get take all the money some of that money has to be reinvested in the community um you know we've been looking at public-private partnerships to build more affordable housing we have a mandatory inclusionary housing requirement for several zones here in new york city but i do wonder [Music] at a federal level since there's going to be a probably federal funding needs to be for a lot of these bigger highway projects does there need to be something done so that we really are engaging multiple agencies to look at the whole neighborhood not just the highway transformation and really be supportive of that whole neighborhood i think this i think this starts um you talk about federal policy and i'd love to have that conversation about what are the things that the federal government has announced that will be driving their own funding decisions but i do think the things that places could be doing right now to get themselves organized really helps to prepare those those units of government whether they're state regional or local for uh for federal funds and that does mean probably organizing conversations that are um that cross sectors so if you're going to be looking at removing uh a freeway or making you know uh making part of it a boulevard right that that is likely to spur a particular kind of investment right um so what can you do to look at who's vulnerable to who's already uh who has tenure in the land uh that is likely to be affected by that decision and what can you do uh by partnering with uh with a with the community land trust by partnering with uh government what are the government-owned parcels you know what could be used to um uh to ensure that that folks could stay there or have a stake in whatever is coming so i mean i think in the obama administration hud epa and dot had a sustainable communities partnership and they probably talked more closely with each other uh you know shelley peticia led some of that effort um then then at any other time uh in uh in the federal government i think that around climate and around uh uh equity uh and racial justice there they're going to be very similar uh conversations and discussions and that and i think that in some ways it's kind of good to think about the money right so there are enormous amounts of money as finally associated with climate mitigation doing things to invest in in in things that prevent the really most dreadful impacts of extreme weather associated with climate change a lot of the things that help prevent damage are things that also can make communities more stable long-term that might mean it diversifying your transportation offering so if the katy highway is uh is jammed with cars or flooded uh that that is uh that people can be on bikes to get where they need to go or they have other means of transportation um i think it's very telling in the american jobs plan that the discussion is involves no expansion of roads but lots of expansion of transit right one of the things that new urbanists understand as well as anyone is the degree to which we've substituted automobility for proximity and there's nothing like proximity both for creating the kind of neighborhoods hayden and mark are talking about but also for really lowering your transportation costs increasing your affordability in a community and making it possible to access your daily needs in a way that doesn't require you know buying uh you know a 20 or 30 000 depreciating durable good right in order to to be part of the economy so i think some of the organizing around it you could start to do right now and make the connections between resilience between uh climate change between new infrastructure investment between housing security because i think the the ears of the federal government have never been more open to that but i do have one caution you know hayden showed us some redline landing maps you know one of the things that's absolutely coming climate change and disaster that is both the new redlining and the new urban renewal because poor people in every city and every community live on cheap land the cheapest land the lowest lying land the most vulnerable land even if their communities are wonderfully intact there could very well come a point where it's not possible not tenable for them to stay there and where's the big open land that's conveniently located to transit jobs and amenities that we can move neighborhoods to well there isn't any right plus we think now about how to look for those obsolete land uses look for those opportunities to get people to safety on higher ground who are most vulnerable but that is a challenge that's absolutely ahead of us that i think almost nobody is thinking about yeah i would um agree with all of that this is a really thorny situation and when we talk about rebuilding i-35 and potentially mitigating some of the impacts or even you know there's a group that proposes to remove it through the urban core which would probably be even you know a better solution um you know we could we could build affordable housing we could put people closer to our thriving downtown and our state capitol complex and the university but you know in texas at least we're so limited we aren't even allowed to have inclusionary zoning you know the tools and our toolbox are so limited east austin has already been heavily gentrified there's been an enormous amount of displacement and doing anything better in this corridor has a lot of pros and cons you know it probably will accelerate displacement unless we put the right tools in place and i don't know about other states but here our d.o.t you know basically says our job is to build highways don't talk to us about racism and displacement and gentrification and housing policy and all that other stuff you know so it becomes a very thorny issue to try to figure out how to solve and i don't think we have any good answers yet really yeah i think i think it would be a great conversation we had a great commissioner polly trottenberg at a transportation here in new york city who now has just been confirmed and she's sitting alongside pete but a judge and um when the brooklyn queens expressway really was at a crisis point a couple of years ago to prepare um and there was a plan proposed that was not community friendly in any way shape or form i was trustful that we could have a discussion with her at the helm about how to do something that was more sensitive to neighborhoods but i do find there's there's a um an element of our transportation uh engineering force which people are responsibly doing their jobs we've been trained to convey people and not have traffic jams because if there's traffic jams then they they call the poli everybody calls the politicians and and you know they're all fearful of those calls so it is um we all have to look at this period as educating um people who are going to be working on these infrastructure projects to think you know more broadly or do partnerships with you know urban planning and and other aspects so let's not forget well like i said start at the local level i didn't say end at the local level so one of the big things that's happening is the federal government is saying you know what there's not enough money even in the federal government even when we're taught we're using you know dollars that end with teas right our dollar amounts you know in the trillions of dollars it's not enough to do even the infrastructure part of what we're talking about so they're really looking to try to swing formula dollars right so they'll have discretionary money but they want to swing the formula dollars like money that currently goes by formula to states in the highway program they want to swing state and local dollars one to two to three percent depending on the year of gdp is spent by states and localities on their capital budgets and the federal government is basically saying we have enough money to put on the stump you know that we can really reward the places that are pulling in the same direction and not reward the places that are going at uh doing something that's at odds with what we're trying to do so that is influential to local governments to states you know and one of the big problems is in federalism the federal government gives money mostly to the states a constitutionally recognized entity not so much to local governments right i mean when i worked at hud you know the only reason hud does disaster recovery is is not because uh people care so much about the housing although they should it's because we already have relationships at hud with every basically every unit of local government right so that that pathway exists to send the money post-disaster but the you know but the states aren't ever sub-allocating their money in a way that that encourages localities to use their land use tools well at the end of the obama administration some of you might have seen something that came out of the white house about uh housing development toolkit it was a way of talking about zoning and restrictions on land use that that only kind of touched on the issue of redlining or or or i'll put it this way exclusionary zoning practices in every in every city virtually in the u.s no matter how urban an enormous quantity of land is zoned for single families only on large detached lots and that that practice began to exclude you know to exclude families of color to exclude jews to exclude immigrants and that that legacy exists and continues and a lot of places the map that hayden showed um you could show it for baltimore it looks exactly the same you could show for st louis the land plant pattern is the same today as it was at the end of the 1920s right so so what um what the federal government is trying to do is to use their money right to both show people a different way to do things a more inclusive way to do things to invest in the transportation that we need that will increase access instead of worrying just about congestion so all the things hayden you were talking about those are the very attitudes that they want to try to overcome so i think you know preparing some enlightened part even if it's only to hedge you know like uh like let's submit two proposals one the old way one the new way let's see what's what gets funded and that will send a really important signal about how uh how people want to do it differently and no matter what texas could do in the next four years or eight years it can't reverse you know the incredible auto centricity of the state so maybe they're willing to try something you know you know in specific places that's a little different if it means that they can get some funding um and and honestly getting people out of their cars would do a lot to solve congestion problems in in many many parts of texas but i'm just saying that that everybody has the issue you're talking about but but for a change the federal government is interested in actually using carrots big enough to be sticks you know to get changes in state and local policy that's how i'm reading it yeah it definitely gives us hope yeah definitely i wonder too uh harriet about the integration of these topics that that also is something that i think you know we're seeing the federal government see the connection between the infrastructure you know it's the joke that's going around the infrastructure is so many more things than just roadways and and that that misunderstanding and that infrastructure touches so many more industries or so many more applications so many more ways of implementation than just d.o.t than just highways and i i wonder if that is a little bit of that you know as you pointed out there isn't just the federal level of policy there are all of these levels below and perhaps that sort of integration that we're seeing at the federal level maybe that also is something that can trickle down to to state and then to local uh to local policy makers of seeing the connection between where you put your roads and where you need your housing and where people work you know that that sort of integration so what's interesting to me like i would say looking at this administration looking at the american jobs plan i would say there are two over three overriding issues right that are that are the the focus of the plan one is climate right like knowing we have a narrowing window to to avert permanent and catastrophic changes and that and that we have a lot that we have to do because for four years we haven't we haven't done anything right so there's a lot that has to happen on climate and that includes the mitigation side as well as the adaptation side uh because most of our communities are climate and risk blind they they don't they don't know what their risks are you know they they they rely on fema flood maps that look only backward right most of the damage in our modern disasters take place outside the flood the map flood zone right because our climate is getting more extreme so so climate is overriding and uh and and growing disparity is overriding and that both of those things cut across every program right so so the third thing is a robust recovery from the pandemic and economic recovery and that also means investing in the industries of the future and and continuing to disinvest in the industries of the past and and having policies that we've never we haven't had in this country in decades about shoring up particular industries about really seeding r d and really getting much more involved in in investing in those industries especially because it's become clear that we can't have battery operated anything if we can't get those uh those those elements those rare earth metals and other things that are important part of batteries or other components like uh you know like computer chips uh then then we're kind of stymied so so those are the cross-cutting inter um issues but the funny thing is infrastructure is the how you know they're basically saying we can make these investments and let's be clear you know if we want to reduce reliance on on uh on on on fossil fuels and we want to increase access so that people can have uh jobs and and grow wealth and we can reduce our disparities it really means that infrastructure has to include things that enable people to come to work that means that means we have to expand transit that means we have to expand broadband that means we have to have child care you know we have to make sure schools are in good shape so yeah it's a whole bunch of things but in some ways oh no this is the stuff that we've learned people need to be able to access the economy so yeah we gotta invest in it you know that's yeah so anyway that's how i'm seeing it it seems pretty clear i would say if people get a chance to read the uh or listen to the podcast ezra klein uh with brian deese from about a week ago it's really good and it explains all of this kind of in a very good way um and and i'll put in the chat there's a there was also a uh a question um maybe i'll put it in the q a so others can see it i don't know where to put it but there was a great article in the post about how cities like los angeles are preparing because even before there's any money from the american jobs plan every agency is looking at their own discretionary funding and using that kind of criteria to put that money out there so there's already opportunities to uh to use those that this framing uh for to compete for existing federal funds so i'll try to put that in the chat or or something wherever you tell me to put it i think the chat is correct um you know it's it's interesting that you talked so much about climate it's been you know i think there's certain cities that are in places like new york city um san francisco and and houston where there is flooding and are going to come under increasing pressure as you were saying um and so many others the um and yet at the same time they're probably all experiencing growth and in the short term it's a very difficult political conversation like you're saying that knowledge of just what's going to happen after the year 2050 in some of these cities how much land could be too risky to live on um that's it's not really out there it's very difficult i think for elected officials to really lead because going out and saying well your neighborhood might go under water and you're 250 does not get you elected you know it's it's you know people need to be armed with with with data um so and you're and in fact in you know the opposite is happening as there's these growing pressures of people to move into cities there is more development in areas that are somewhat risky some some area some cities are taking more progressive action to try and restrict that building than others but a lot of people are saying well you can just put your building up on stilts and that'll solve everything and that's not going to solve everything um so go ahead i think that's i think that's true i think i think that uh most localities don't states too they don't want to know what their climate risk is because they don't think they have the money to fix it but in fact if what we're doing with our existing capital budget is locking in for decades stuff in the wrong place that's vulnerable stuff that that increases the risk of properties that surround it like that is a terrible mistake to be making and so i think that um you know you know what if what if uh what if an agency using infrastructure money that had that had some amount of federal dollars in it what if they were to have to certify that that that infrastructure will withstand the knowable risk through let's say 2050 you know that would force people to actually do something about this so i do think that that i don't want to know is not going to is not going to fly going forward because it costs us too much and the simplest thing to do is with land use land use is free to say no we're not going to develop here right no we're going to prohibit that and instead of doing that the federal government has just come along behind with its uh with its you know barrels of money to clean up the mess time after time that can't go on so no so anyway yeah that's one of my frustrations with with this project and i think we see it happening everywhere is this is 4.9 billion dollars for eight miles right when we know it's not really going to solve climate change or congestion or anything else you know and and i we we need to be having a very different conversation about we how we use these vast amounts of money to to really prepare for the future instead of building the same thing over and over again so mark and i worked we both were involved a little bit i got to do a wonderful thing in the obama administration which was around a billion dollar national disaster resilience competition but i think it's an interesting model for how the process of allocating federal dollars can be the very change we want to see with how those dollars get used so you know that was a competition that that took a year a two-faced competition that had these things it was it was around disaster recovery money the last tranche of sandy dollars 48 states were eligible to compete with dozens of localities um and territories and um and the deal was that you had to um you know you had to know your risk and vulnerability uh and you couldn't bring a project you couldn't bring a 30-year-old project that everybody has hoping for federal funding to the competition you had to only design an approach and demonstrate you that you understood your risks and vulnerabilities and that you were bringing partners and funds so that that really changed a lot of things and a ton of the projects that never got federal funding still went ahead because people had organized themselves to do a really amazing project found the money had the partners and were able to go ahead so i think that is the kind of thing that uh that that this administration needs to be doing as well to get the kind of change you know that we're talking about yeah it'd be interesting to see that type of uh academy series of academies happen again maybe in a different format exactly and i'd love to play that role in my new job from the outside because it would you know that's what the federal government isn't necessarily good at all of these things but you're an example of someone who was from the private sector who participated for free as a resource in those academies but i also got 26 federal agencies to send people to those academies to teach people about you know coastal risk to be able to read noah's maps to be able to talk to the corps of engineers about what might be feasible you know all kinds of different uh different expertise that you wouldn't normally be able to access in a single room right right well i think harriet you made a point yesterday about the the reframing of thinking and how that can that can focus work i think that's something that you know for thinking about members of cnu and the way that we want to embrace change and and to affect change those sorts of programs that can help collectively change thinking in a direction that is more productive more efficient is going to lead to outcomes that normalists uh already seeking is is a great sort of you know step forward it's something that can be momentum to help the sort of work that each of us i was an urban designer for for 20 years we're working on our smaller pools but seeing that sort of momentum and groundswell grow around the principles underlying that the sort of work each of us might be trying to do is really the sort of impact that for me why i think uh designing for policy changes is such an important track and why i think it's such an important approach to to our work overall and i i note that we're here at the end of the hour and i just wanted to give each of you sort of you know a minute or two if you had any final thoughts about the conversation today about what you're looking forward to at the congress about what you're looking forward to in terms of the policy changes that you discussed today and that you're seeing on the horizon i wanted to give you each a couple of minutes to just sort of reflect and hear it maybe i'll start with you i'll be really brief since i've spoken so much in the last 15 minutes in particular but i just think seeing you as perfectly poised as the organization that is already multi-sectoral and that already looks across types of impacts and types of partners and that uh you know every community is going to need this kind of leadership um and inclusion that uh that uh that cnu members could really help to instigate so i challenge everybody to uh you know roll up their sleeves and and get started on some projects thinking about this anything that is going to be going for any kind of federal funding any piece of it that gets federal funding should uh should be looking at this kind of an approach climate economy equity altogether hayden you want to go next sure um i'll just say that you know it's congress is always a great place to learn from each other and hear creative solutions and and band together and have great conversations so um you know i think that's you know we've got some really big issues to solve and and i would agree with harriet that cnu is very well um positioned to do that and um congress is a great place to make those those connections and learn more about what's going on in other places so looking forward to it thanks um yeah i would echo that you know cnu is is a great place where all these different disciplines that make up our communities have a chance to talk to each other and really coordinate and just our conversation today has just you know it's just reinforced how highways can connect to community land trusts and dealing with uh you know issues of displacement um it's fascinating um um you know i would just say what's also been interesting in seeing you in in in in urban planning is that what i started out as someone who really looked at the physical form of cities like it was just the highway transformation to a boulevard or it was the form-based code and now you see an opportunity to leverage funding that may come from some of these projects into if you're dealing with neighborhoods that are already existing how do you support the social infrastructure that piece of it the you know the stuff the actual people who are really making everything come alive so i think that's really the an opportunity out of all of those that's great mark uh well i want to thank all three of you harriet hayden and mark thank you so much for this discussion today i knew it would be lively and and i could mostly hand it over to y'all and and you certainly did so i really appreciate it i'm looking forward to all of the sessions each of you are bringing to the congress um i want to thank our audience for participating today and let everyone know that a recording of the session will be available on the cnu website within 24 hours we get those up and remind everyone to join us next tuesday at noon eastern time we're going to have a similar session but talking about the talking about design for physical change that i think will be just as robust and exciting so with that i want to thank everyone for their time today and we'll see you next week on the park bench thanks everyone thank you all thank you