Who Says We Need Walkable Cities? A Former Republican Presidential Candidate.
American cities are too dependent on cars. Americans experience walkable urbanism when they travel and lament they can’t have it where they live. The expansion of infrastructure puts a costly fiscal noose around municipalities’ necks.
Who says so? North Dakota Governor and former Republican presidential candidate Doug Burgum. He joined several other governors of both parties at a forum to discuss their respective housing challenges at the 2024 National Governors Association Winter Meeting.
The plenary session, moderated by Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D), brought together leaders of several states to discuss their respective housing challenges. Despite great diversity in political leadership, geography, population, economic base, etc., the governors all described a similar struggle with an inadequate housing supply, especially in the middle and lower ranges of the market, and the cascading problems spawned by that shortage.
Burgum delivered a no-nonsense history lesson on 20th century development. “In America, we invented zoning,” at first in a reasonable response to the Industrial Revolution, but those rules dictating where housing and businesses could be built later morphed into “a one dimensional map and you draw it out and say, everyone, all these things [have] got to be separate. And that was great for people that build roads and was great for the car companies,” says Burgum.
The end result of committing to that new development pattern was that, “We built cities all over America that are designed for automobiles and not designed for people,” said Burgum. The governor went on to describe several scenarios that Strong Towns members grapple with when trying to improve their communities.
Pedestrian and Cycling Infrastructure:
“You can't find a place like that in the U.S. because we don't put the investment into building the infrastructure for multimodal transportation. So I think one of the things that we have to look at in this country, our housing costs are high, in part because of the way that we've designed our cities.”
Zoning Reform:
“We've got to get the coffee shop, the barber shop and law firms back into residential neighborhoods in ways that can help lower the cost and (offer) great services where you don't need a car for everything.” Burgum identified form-based codes as an effective way to enable such development.
Fiscally Irresponsible Development:
“The cost of running a city is the linear feet of sewer and water and sidewalk and roads. And then when you get more of that you need to have more fire stations. You've got school districts that independently decide to build greenfield elementary schools out on the edge. So you drive all this linear cost, the cost of that infrastructure … we're making developers rich, and we're not helping the people in the workforce that we're trying to.”
Several governors praised the efforts of Montana Governor Greg Gianforte (R) in passing substantial zoning reform last year. Gianforte said those efforts, which sought to encourage development within existing city limits, had resulted in rental rates decreasing by 20% and vacancy rates rising from 1% to 6% in Montana’s largest communities. He credits a diverse constituency that came together with great urgency. “It was a really broad cross-section of bipartisan people, folks from the building industry, realtors, county commissioners, city officials, state officials, nonprofit leaders, from places like Habitat for Humanity, we got everybody at the table,” said Gianforte.
That political alignment gives policy makers many tools to try, including zoning reform to allow more housing types, smaller lot sizes to enable starter homes (a policy championed by Utah Governor Spencer Cox), and eliminating parking minimums. Charlie Anderson of Arnold Ventures, who co-hosted the forum, noted, “These are really popular things across the aisle … Republicans, Democrats, independents, they want people to address the supply challenge.”
Gianforte connected housing policy with an end goal that has almost 100% approval: “We want our nurses, teachers and police officers to live in the community where they work.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.