“The City Should Put a Trader Joe’s There” (and Other Muddled Thinking About Development)

(Source: Flickr.)

There’s a certain type of uninformed public comment—seen on social media, heard in neighborhood conversation, submitted to city planning departments, and voiced at public meetings—that is the subject of frequent derision among those who closely follow city planning and development decisions. My favorite shorthand for this genre of comment is, “The city should put a Trader Joe's there.”

This is an exaggerated-for-laughs case of a much larger set of sentiments in which people complain about some development or some change happening near them by saying, “Well, I would rather it be such and such. Why didn’t they do that, instead?”

Any response to this ought to begin with, “Who’s ‘they’?”

To spell it out in a way that isn't condescending (because the purpose of this piece isn’t to mock anyone): The reason the city can’t put a Trader Joe's there is because the city doesn't make that decision at all. What would have to happen for a Trader Joe's to go into that spot in your neighborhood where you’d love to see one? Well, the private landowner would have to be interested in developing a retail space that meets all of Trader Joe's specifications. Simultaneously, Trader Joe's would have to be actively looking to expand in your region. And they would have to be made aware of and interested in that particular site, which for a large chain grocer means a market study that checks several obligatory boxes regarding factors like population density, demographics, spending power, and the presence of competitors. And then Trader Joe's and the property developer would have to agree on terms of a lease, and neither party opt out of the deal for some better option.

At some point, peripheral to all of that, might be a permitting or rezoning process in which the city grants its approval for a grocery store to occupy the space. But it’s very rare that a local government actively recruits a specific business to occupy a site, let alone when that site itself is private property. Lobbying city hall on a decision that city hall doesn’t make is an exercise in futility.

On a superficial level, the cause of this kind of complaint is simple ignorance of how planning for development works. Such ignorance is almost universal. Much to my chagrin, it’s rare to find a high school civics class that engages with the workings of local and state government and not just the federal one.

But there’s something deeper going on: a flaw in the basic mental model that people use to describe how their neighborhood takes shape.

We’re Clear on “What,” But Less Clear on “How”

The “Why didn’t they make it a Trader Joe’s?” crowd may be unaware of how decisions about land use are made. But they’re not wrong to take a specific interest in what is built near where they live, or to voice their preferences and hopes. It’s just that the way they voice that interest reflects muddled thinking. And those of you in glass houses who know a whole lot more about local government and city planning should refrain from throwing stones, because I've seen a lot of you exhibit the same muddled thinking in more subtle ways.

By “the same muddled thinking,” I mean that many of us—almost all of us, at one time or another—are keen to express opinions on the “what” of the built environment we’d like to see, but unwilling to think rationally and clearly about the “how.” Instead, we seem to default to a mental model for how cities are created that implicitly imagines a master planner or designer, or an omnipotent guiding hand, where in reality there isn't one.

Because we live in a society that prizes the ideal of democracy, and that ideal is woven into all of our discourse, this imagined master designer is almost always some version of “us.” “The community.” Except when we don’t like their decisions. Then it’s “them.” The unaccountable government or powerful elite that is failing to answer to the community.

The telltale sign of this fallacy is the lazy, unspecified use of the pronouns “we” and “they.” Or equally non-specific signifiers such as “the community” or “the city,” to which actions, decisions, and interests are imputed. We all know that there isn’t actually somebody sitting up there playing SimCity with our lives. But then we go right ahead and talk as though there is somebody pulling all the strings, or who could choose to do so on our behalf if they would only listen. (This piece is indebted to a couple recent threads by Twitter user Wayne Burkett, who refers to this fallacy as “central planning mindset” and cites examples of it.)

It’s not that people literally believe that our cities are centrally planned like in a communist state. Nor, if pressed, do I think very many Americans would find that idea desirable. Rather, my belief is that we default to a mental model in which there is some collective manifestation of “us” capable of deciding what kind of world we want to live in, because it is easier to accept than the truth, which is that there are many things we—as a collective—don’t get to decide. Individuals make decisions, and those decisions add up to the world we experience, but there is simply no mechanism by which We-with-a-capital-W get to choose the world We want. That is profoundly uncomfortable to many people, and so we don't ask the questions that would result from that recognition, and politicians and opinion leaders find ways to talk around that reality.

There is a sitting elected official in San Francisco (i.e., not someone you can accuse of not understanding how local government works) who frequently makes the argument with regard to housing construction that the unmet need in San Francisco is for low-income housing and that therefore, the city should “prioritize housing for the working class” and not “prioritize housing for the wealthy.” In context, one of the things he seems to mean by this is that the city of San Francisco should not relax zoning or other regulatory restrictions on market-rate development, or otherwise seek to make market-rate housing easier to build.

It’s either a genius bit of deliberate misdirection, or simply very confused messaging. It sounds compelling at first glance: after All, who wants to argue the converse? “Yes, actually, we should prioritize housing for the rich over housing for the poor!” The unanswered questions here are, “What does ‘prioritize’ mean, anyway? Who is the ‘we’ who would be doing that? And what would ‘we’ be doing?”

In this case, he identifies “we” as “the city,” which I take to mean the government. The way local government addresses unsubsidized development is through the regulatory process: proposals to build have to go through planning and permitting, which take up city resources and staff time. Through that lens, the best way to actually deprioritize market-rate housing in San Francisco would be to simplify the approval process, relax zoning restrictions, and allow much more to be built as-of-right. Do that, and San Francisco planners will spend much less of their time thinking about market-rate housing, reviewing applications or public comments related to it. Fewer public resources will go into it. More of it might be built—by the private sector—but it won’t be a bigger “priority” within city hall in any meaningful sense.

Meanwhile, the best mechanism for producing housing affordable to the working class in San Francisco in the near term is through inclusionary zoning, in which the proceeds from new market-rate apartments subsidize a certain percentage of low-rent units within the same building. Whether you like this mechanism or not (it has problems), it is clear that one way to “prioritize” low-income housing in San Francisco would be to encourage a lot of market-rate housing to be built with these inclusionary requirements attached.

There are plenty of defensible reasons to put limits on market-rate development, and those arguments are beyond the scope of this piece. My point is that saying “we” shouldn’t build market-rate housing because “we” should build affordable housing is completely incoherent. These things are not only not in opposition to each other; in most cases, they don’t even involve the same “we”! For local government, in particular, there is no clear or direct trade-off between the two. The only way the supervisor’s comments make sense is if your mental model is that it is “we”—the community—who build housing, and that all housing that is built is the product of the “community” and a reflection of “our” priorities. And that is nonsense.

When “We” Don’t Get to Choose

On the opposite coast, where I live in fast-growing Florida, conversations about development are often dominated by variations on the following sentiments:

“Why are they putting in all these new buildings?”

“Why do they keep approving more growth when our schools, our roads, and our ecosystem can’t handle it!”

“Shouldn’t the community be able to decide how much we want to grow?”

Again, this line of thinking sounds reasonable until you start asking the simplest of questions. Like: Who is “the community”? And what would it mean for “the community” to choose how fast or slow “we” want to grow? What is the actual mechanism by which we would make that choice?

I've spoken to many slow-growth advocates here, people who think that there should be much less new housing construction, and I ask them, “What is your plan to slow down population growth? What do we do about all of the people who decide to move here?” Not once have I gotten an intellectually honest answer to that question. There is no plan, because there is no mechanism for the citizens of Florida, acting as a collective or through the power of government, to convince a bunch of people in Ohio and Michigan not to shop for real estate in Florida. They will if they want to. Some of them will likely have a lot of money and will outbid others who want that real estate. Some of those others will be longtime Florida residents, indisputably members of “the community” here.

The rub is that there will be dramatic change here if we build. There will be dramatic change of a different sort if we don’t build. The fantasy advanced by the control-growth crowd is that “we” the community get to opt out of dramatic change, through the democratic process. They are very good at articulating the “what” they want for Sarasota and other growing Florida communities in 20 or 30 years: much the same as now, with neighborhood character intact and few additional drivers on the roads. They have no coherent answer for “how.” The only answer they offer is platitudes about people power: “We” must simply elect leaders who will enact “our” vision.

This is, again, nonsense. There is no “we” capable of this. There are too many “I”s involved in the story.

Getting Beyond “We Should” or “They Should”

All of us have—as groups and as individuals—profound stakes in what our built environment looks like. We have every right to be invested, and we can and should have highly specific visions and preferences, especially at the intimate scale of our own neighborhoods.

If you’re invested in a future for your place, you need to get serious about the “who” and the “how” of getting to it. Don’t speak in platitudes about what “we” should do. Ask yourself:

• What is a concrete, specific outcome I would like to see realized in the near term? (Not an abstract reality or systemic change.)

• Who is involved in the relevant decisions?

• What are their interests, as individuals or institutions?

• What do each of those actors’ decision-making processes look like?

This is what every serious advocate should discipline themselves to do. Figure out who has the power to effect the outcomes you care about, and then figure out where you have some leverage over those decisions. Kvetching about what an unspecified “we” or “they” ought to do will always be a waste of time.

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