Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1209

Kate Downing was formerly a planning commissioner in the City of Palo Alto. She recently resigned from her position and, about about a day ago, she posted her resignation letter on Medium . It has since gone viral.

The reason it has spread so quickly, I think, is because it addresses the very same issues that so many cities around the world are facing: a lack of housing supply and eroding affordability.

As a developer, I obviously have a vested interest in this matter. But to the extent that I can put that aside, I really do believe that our goal should be to build inclusive, rather than exclusive, cities.

For instance, when I think of great cities such as New York and Toronto, I think of their history of taking in a large number of immigrants and then empowering them to climb the socioeconomic ladder. There’s something magical about that. One of my best friends likes to talk about this potential as “immigrant hustle.”

But when we sterilize our cities by allowing only the incumbents to survive, I believe we place that socioeconomic potential in jeopardy. So for that reason, I am reposting Kate’s entire letter. I have bolded the points that stood out for me. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Dear City Council Members and Palo Alto Residents,

This letter serves as my official resignation from the Planning and Transportation Commission. My family has decided to move to Santa Cruz. After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here. We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year — an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer.

It’s clear that if professionals like me cannot raise a family here, then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits. We already see openings at our police department that we can’t fill and numerous teacher contracts that we can’t renew because the cost of housing is astronomical not just in Palo Alto but many miles in each direction. I have repeatedly made recommendations to the Council to expand the housing supply in Palo Alto so that together with our neighboring cities who are already adding housing, we can start to make a dent in the jobs-housing imbalance that causes housing prices throughout the Bay Area to spiral out of control. Small steps like allowing 2 floors of housing instead of 1 in mixed use developments, enforcing minimum density requirements so that developers build apartments instead of penthouses, legalizing duplexes, easing restrictions on granny units, leveraging the residential parking permit program to experiment with housing for people who don’t want or need two cars, and allowing single-use areas like the Stanford shopping center to add housing on top of shops (or offices), would go a long way in adding desperately needed housing units while maintaining the character of our neighborhoods and preserving historic structures throughout.

Time and again, I’ve seen dozens of people come to both Commission meetings and Council meetings asking Council to make housing its top priority. The City Council received over 1000 signatures from Palo Alto residents asking for the same. In the annual Our Palo Alto survey, it is the top issue cited by residents. This Council has ignored the majority of residents and has chartered a course for the next 15 years of this city’s development which substantially continues the same job-housing imbalance this community has been suffering from for some time now: more offices, a nominal amount of housing which the Council is already laying the groundwork to tax out of existence, lip service to preserving retail that simply has no reason to keep serving the average Joe when the city is only affordable to Joe Millionaires.

Over the last 5 years I’ve seen dozens of my friends leave Palo Alto and often leave the Bay Area entirely. I’ve seen friends from other states get job offers here and then turn them down when they started to look at the price of housing. I struggle to think what Palo Alto will become and what it will represent when young families have no hope of ever putting down roots here, and meanwhile the community is engulfed with middle-aged jet-setting executives and investors who are hardly the sort to be personally volunteering for neighborhood block parties, earthquake preparedness responsibilities, or neighborhood watch. If things keep going as they are, yes, Palo Alto’s streets will look just as they did decades ago, but its inhabitants, spirit, and sense of community will be unrecognizable. A once thriving city will turn into a hollowed out museum. We should take care to remember that Palo Alto is famous the world over for its residents’ accomplishments, but none of those people would be able to live in Palo Alto were they starting out today.

Sincerely,

Kate Downing

I have argued before that hosting major events, such as the Olympics, can serve as a catalyst for completing meaningful public projects. But there is also an argument to be made that it’s not entirely worth it. The economic legacy is weak. The ROI simply isn’t there.

Recently Harvard Business Review interviewed a gentleman named Chris Dempsey. Dempsey was a former Bain & Company consultant and the cofounder of the No Boston Olympics organization. He played a big part in Boston withdrawing their bid to host the 2024 Summer Games. Los Angeles ending up taking its place.

His rationale is as follows.

The International Olympic Committee was founded on June 23, 1894 by a Frenchman by the name of Pierre de Coubertin . At the time of its creation, the World’s Fair had already pioneered the rotational model of traveling to different cities.

The most famous of these exhibitions was arguably “The Great Exhibition” held in London in 1851. Indeed, the plate-glass Crystal Palace structure which actually hosted the event was later seen as an important turning point in the history of architecture. It was designed by Joseph Paxton , who was an English gardener and architect.

Of course, the world was a different place at the end of the 19th century.

The events weren’t being broadcasted around the world in HD. We didn’t have social media. And transportation costs were high (economist Edward Glaeser reminds us of this in the talk I posted yesterday ). So rather than ask people to spend weeks traveling the world by boat, it was decided that the show should travel to them. It should rotate places.

This made sense then, but does it make sense now? I would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comment section below.

I don’t always agree with economist Edward Glaeser, but I really enjoyed the talk that he gave at the Vancouver Urban Forum back in 2012 (at least part 2 of it). I came across it on Twitter today and, since it only has about 300 views, I figured that some of you also haven’t seen it.

The argument he makes is that knowledge and education are the bedrock of cities. And since we continue to cluster in cities, despite all of our technological advances, knowledge is clearly more important than space. One of the ways he defines cities is by their lack of space and the closeness of the people.

Of course, this isn’t anything new. If you’ve read his book Triumph of the City, you’ve heard all of this before. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying his talk. It’s a great overview of declining transportation costs, locational advantages, agglomeration economies, the importance of urban density, the impact of small and large firms in a city, and so on.

I also really liked this idea that knowledge is worth more than space. So if you have 20 minutes and you want to get geared up about cities, have a watch.

Click here if you can’t see the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg7aITkTNe8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]