MasterPlanning!: Fairness to Futureshock
by Tony Chavira
Economy disparity is rampant. The fact that there are people who are forced to take out subprime loans in order to live in a house is proof of it. The American dream is a lie when your kids aren’t given the exact same opportunities as children in a wealthier neighborhood. Any decisions you make regarding your financial future are yours alone and shouldn’t be something that affects your children’s potential to work hard and do whatever they want with their future. But schools in poorer neighborhoods are physically falling apart, despite the efforts of teachers and administrators who are forced to work with what they’re given. Public works and services have such a history of uneven dispersion that we can walk through areas of Los Angeles and Orange County and come to expect derelict buildings, decaying streetscapes, and a significant lack of public services.
When you compare these to brand new schools and brand new developments in Los Angeles better-off neighborhoods, you experience a sense of futureshock. Futureshock is the idea that stepping into the future will put you into an overwhelmed state, that we need transitions from one era into another so that people can see the physical and technological changes in the landscape as they happen. It’s already starting to become noticeable: you can see when a public library was built in the 1970s versus one built today. If all you’ve ever known was your 1970s-era library, how will the new one feel? Now, what if the entire neighborhood was fully-modernized? Would you feel out of place?
What may work in one place may not work in another. We’re not Anchorage, Alaska. An isolationist, libertarian attitude just doesn’t work when such a disparity exists, and even community organizers need to make a living in order to live in a city with roughly $1,000 per month average spent on housing alone. I’m sure they’d love to do their jobs for free for the sake of community involvement, but it’s just not a reality.
This is how Americans live today, built on the planning and development decisions made without proper foresight in a year long past. Now we are smarter, have better research, and are far more goal-oriented in the dispersion of government funds. I don’t want to think it’s “too little, too late,” but not everyone starts on the same playing field. We can already see the difference between how areas like Santa Monica, Huntington Beach and Palm Springs have been designed to best suit smart planning goals. But what chances will you have of buying a house in Santa Monica if you’re renting in Boyle Heights? How about a house in Huntington Beach if you’re renting in Santa Ana? Buying a house in Palm Springs if you’re renting in Hemet? On the other hand, what are the chances of any bailed-out Wall Street banker purchasing a house next to Frank Sinatra’s in Palm Springs?
Yes, these questions are all rhetorical, but I’m not getting angry at the wealthy. It’s cool, they do what they want. They’re rich, can you blame them? They’re not the issue, and more power to you if you want to live near Frank’s ghost.
Aside from the old planning inconsistencies, you can already see the brave new disparities of the future. Full-electric public transportation, police on Segways, digitally-coordinated traffic signals, fully-sustainable government buildings, sensors on streets for foot and car traffic, three-dimensional city maps on handheld devices. This is not science fiction, and was all implemented in about ten years time. But neighborhoods are not created equal, and what’s prevalent in Silverlake is non-existent in certain areas of the North Valley (despite it still being the city of Los Angeles).
To prevent futureshock, we need to ask ourselves a planning question that will define the 21st century: what hope do lower income families have as years pass by and new developments in technology and urban planning are implemented into wealthier, more connected neighborhoods first? If you have the money, there’s no way that you’d move to a neighborhood that didn’t have these services available at the very least. We may, in fact, bear witness to individuals literally redistricting themselves along these lines, and sadly these greater, more obvious disparities are already beginning to rear their ugly heads.
As amazing as a futuristic city full of smart planning and technological integration sounds, it won’t come without its price. As a developer, imagine having to choose (right now) a neighborhood in Los Angeles to build your sustainable, mixed-use, “smart” building. It’s everything a resident could want in a building, so who gets to have it? And at what rate?
There are parts of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, Ventura, and San Bernardino counties that look almost exactly the same as they did in the 1950s. It’s one thing if residents don’t want to change their neighborhoods in a NIMBY way, but even NIMBYs deserve the benefits of smart technological integration and effective planning efforts. Part of the reason they’re NIMBY is that they don’t want their homes to devalue, although that seems hard to avoid in today’s economy.
There is a great debate on the horizon, as our city officials and politicians begin to wake up to the dramatic changes in the way that people are using cities in America. Policy-makers will essentially have three real options here:
- To let the chips fall as they may and watch as the wealthier neighborhoods become more accessible, more autonomous and everything that a modern planner could dream of at a far faster rate than a lower-income neighborhood.
- To forcibly restrain and equalize planning efforts through policy that is so stringent that it’ll be practically impossible to make changes to building and zoning codes in well-off neighborhoods until everyone else is caught up.
- To attempt to establish policies that will seek to guide development without stifling potentially great planning ideas.
Not every neighborhood is the same, but could you imagine experiencing futureshock when stepping from one neighborhood into another? Not only is that not democratic, but it establishes a precedent for more and more dramatic disparities between the haves and the have-nots.
Now that FourStory articles have a comments section, what do you think the best path is? It would be great to hear some insight from our readers, and I thank you in advance for leaving a comment.
www.racaia.com | tony@fourstory.org
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