Urban3 Decoder: Let's Peek Under the Hood of A Shiny Oklahoma City

Near the suburbs of Oklahoma City, OK.

On the plane to the wilds of Oklahoma from the mellow suburbs of Connecticut, I’d been reading Boomtown, the great Sam Anderson profile of the wild swings in the development history of Oklahoma City (OKC) since the late 19th century. So I was ready for what the cab driver told us: “Every single good thing that ever happened here was a gift from the oil companies.” 

The cabbie was a kindly grandfather who cherished lunches with his grown grandchildren, so it was hard to push back against his view. But I have to admit I was dying to know more about the only place I can think of, outside of Texas, that experienced the tragic boom and bust economy of my home state of Alaska. 

Anderson’s book subtitle, The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis, is like one of those too-long movie trailers that threatens to tell you the whole story. But the part about becoming a world class metropolis is where my primary interest lay. I was attending a staff retreat in OKC, but also planning to attend the Annual Congress for the New Urbanism, where some of the most innovative thinkers about city design were gathering. 

For years, OKC has been doing a lot of heavy lifting to become more attractive as a place to live. An innovative Tax Increment Financing (TIF) program puts 1% of the city sales tax base into funds to create new amenities and services. This program, organized into 14 different districts, resulted in a lot of cool things in the city, like streetcars, urban river walks, beautiful public art, gardens and a shiny downtown where parking is $10.

No large bonded indebtedness is required to create these projects in Oklahoma City, because it pays cash on the barrel head with the TIF mechanism. There are interesting, gentrifying neighborhoods with cool restaurants in former auto service garages. And there is the sheer, shocking difference between the spread-out 300 square miles of the suburbs and a very concentrated downtown of one large oil company skyscraper, some office buildings, a convention center, and a lot of federal buildings. 

There is no gradual density as you approach downtown. It goes immediately from one-story gridded residential and light commercial lots suddenly to a multi-story downtown. It’s much like my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska, which spreads about 300,000 people out in a spray of development encompassing 1,000 square miles. In both cities, there are seemingly endless stretches of parking lots, roadways, and highways.

In times of boom, OKC and its oil-fueled economy literally tore down massive portions of its downtown to remake itself. It has done a good job becoming more attractive and many people are proud of the city…but I wondered about how sustainable it is.

Near the suburbs of Oklahoma City, OK.

Downtown Oklahoma City, OK.

Josh McCarty of Urban3 explains the yearly Congress for the New Urbanism as a “comic con for urbanists” in a webinar produced by the firm whose mission is to look “beneath the surface of municipal finances to unearth economic potential that can create sustainable futures for communities of all sizes.” Urban3 has developed sophisticated graphic tools for economic analysis, which Strong Towns has leaned on heavily to evaluate the fiscal implications of different urban design approaches. In Urban3’s Decoder webinar, the latest version of a quarterly series, McCarty says he has yet to find one solvent city in America, based on the firm’s analysis. 

At 10:25 into the video, Urban3’s Phillip Walters presents “Urbanism on the Plains,” a slide deck using the firm’s sophisticated graphic modeling to show which urban design approaches in OKC and which areas in Edmond, Oklahoma, make the most financial sense. Join Walters and the Urban3 team as they wade past the glittering amenities of river walks and streetcars to take an up-close view of the real economic engine under the shiny enamel hood. Not all that is gold glitters and certainly not all that glitters is gold. 

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