Learn from Peers but Think for Yourself
“If your friend jumped off a bridge, would you?”
The maternal advice I and many others received in youth was not always intuitive. Or helpful. We learn most of our positive social behaviors by interacting with our peers, picking up on the complex and subtle cues given off by other humans. We rely on their feedback and, for the most part, it’s valuable.
Often the parent scolds the child with: You don’t see other children acting like this, do you? The honest answer is, of course, “Yes, they all do it at some point,” but the correct answer is to look around and notice that pitching a fit in the store isn’t socially acceptable. We learn a great deal about how we should act by observing how others act.
The momism of following your friend off the bridge is meant to impart the need to learn from others by also thinking for yourself, to discern where the feedback from your peers serves you well and where it leads you astray. You wouldn’t follow your friend off the bridge because you can see it will cause you harm and you’re not stupid. Modeling the behavior of others is good, but with some limits.
Learn from your peers, yes, but also think for yourself.
I serve on the planning commission in city, and we have been discussing lighting regulations, with all the typical back and forth of regulatory sausage-making. Our zoning code is the typical patchwork of misapplied standards copied from other municipalities we know little about. Our lighting standards are straight out of a DOT spec manual where the goal is to light up a space at maximum intensity with the lowest cost.
This is problematic for anyone concerned with quality of life. The negative feedback loop — cheap land creating a proliferation of surface parking, further cheapening the land, further degrading investment — is reinforced by the proliferation of obnoxious lighting.
Our local governments are the worst offenders. When the county government built their multi-million dollar complex in the downtown core, the most prominent feature is the acres of parking, all mindlessly lit up every night — at huge cost, for no discernible benefit — with towering poles.
The school district is about to do the same, albeit with a touch of tempering. They will soon tear down a Depression-era school — a gorgeous brick building our descendants will hold us in contempt for not finding a respectful use for — and, in its place, pave a parking lot.
Their professed desire to save money on lighting has inspired them to reduce the number of poles by increasing their height. But it has not inspired them to pursue even rudimentary steps to phase their application. Apparently, there is only one way to provide a safe environment for students: light up the city like a World War I battlefield. The environment they are illuminating will be, except for brief moments, similarly desolate.
It’s in this context that my fellow planning commissioners and I have been conducting a conversation about how we should experience lighting in our city. In a city desiring minimal regulatory touch, how do we create standards that are easy to understand, simple to apply, respectful of all parties, and meet the needs of those who want to install lighting? The way many cities start to address this question is by asking two others — both of which can be problematic.
What do others do?
The first thing most cities do is to look around at what others are doing. Which city has an ordinance that looks good to copy or modify? Indeed, at our last meeting there were copies distributed of codes from other municipalities — places none of us had ever been — which seemed coherent and maybe even applicable.
I’m not trying to discredit this standard practice, although I would provide some caution. It makes a lot of sense to not recreate work that has already been done, to use as a basic framework for discussion an ordinance that’s already been vetted by another community. Innovating completely from scratch would be counterproductive.
Yet, copying standards from other places transmits the good DNA along with potentially a lot of junk DNA. I remember one time I was working with a very rural county on a variance request. The applicant wanted to add a porch on the side of their house that would encroach five feet within the required fifty-foot setback. One of the variance criteria called on us to evaluate how this encroachment would impact the ability of sunlight to shine on adjacent buildings as well as the circulation of air.
What an absurdity! This was an agricultural county where the smallest lots were 40 acres. The standards on sunlight and air circulation come from Manhattan where skyscrapers can sometimes block natural light and impede air circulation. Why were we being asked to ponder an impact that could never be experienced in such a rural place?
Because someone copied the variance criteria from Manhattan, which were then copied by someone else. They were then copied and shared over and over until at some point this Minnesota farming county adopted it as part of their land use regulations, without ever understanding what they were doing.
Most importantly, this was done without any sense of how the requirement related to something important to life in the county. I see this often, and it’s indicative of the ways bureaucracies easily morph to serve process over people. Most zoning officials are far too comfortable, shielded from the impacts — many invisible — of their work.
What is development friendly?
There is another spin, however, on mimicking what others do that I ran into at our last meeting. It is perhaps even more pernicious than creeping bureaucracy, and that is the push to be competitive by being the least restrictive.
Towards the end of our discussion on lighting, one of our prominent local leaders asked the planning commission to examine the regulations of neighboring cities to make sure our new code would not be more restrictive. He called on us to not put the city at a competitive disadvantage by having regulations that might be considered by some to be more restrictive. He suggested this would create an unfriendly business environment and that, as a result, the city would lose investment.
“ We will not become beautiful to someone else by becoming ugly to ourselves.”
This is, of course, a race-to-the-bottom mentality. It’s the same rationale given for opposing clear water regulations, child labor laws, and other practices that we’ve decided provide a baseline of decency in this country. If we don’t allow businesses to exploit underage workers like they do in Mexico, our businesses are just going to pick up and move there. This thinking is reactionary and silly, and few residents of the community would support it.
I generally think that 90% of all zoning codes could be repealed and we would all be better off, but that remaining 10% is critical to curbing excesses and ensuring a high quality of life. I’m not a fan of regulation, but I’ve also spent plenty of time as a consultant on the applicant side of the equation and I know the pressure to churn out standardized work, and the lack of any incentive for thoughtful design.
I once worked on a permit for a fast food franchise. They insisted they had one building formula and could not vary from it. It was corporate policy. If we didn’t accept their demand for the rote design, they would go somewhere else. I knew this was false and showed the decision-makers pictures of sites where this franchise had used other models. It didn’t matter; the franchise didn’t back down and the city leadership was fearful of losing out, so they gave in. Thousands of cities have done the same.
My city needs new lighting standards because the mindless industry of professionals feeding us standardized lighting packages is not serving anyone. Most of us have been to places where lighting has been done well. It’s subtle, targeted, effective and — this is critical — generally cheaper to build and operate than the rote approach we generally get from our applicant’s consultants. We’re not serving anyone by being held hostage to such low expectations.
And even more so, my city’s path to prosperity is not in becoming the cheapest commodity in the race-to-the-bottom. We will not become beautiful to someone else by becoming ugly to ourselves. To the extent we are trying to attract outside investment (we should be more focused on growing and retaining our existing investments), we do that by being the place people want to be, not the place most easily exploited.
Lowering regulatory burdens is essential to a Strong Towns approach, but more important is a need to build stable wealth throughout the community. Thoughtful, respectful, and tasteful lighting is a big part of that effort. Don’t hesitate to demand it.
If your friend jumped off a bridge, you should not follow them. If your neighboring city doesn’t grasp the need for good urban design, you should not follow them either.