Modeshift

How mainstream has the greening of the world become? Fortune Magazine this month joined the lengthening list of big dog old media publishing “green” issues. Car companies, especially the Japanese, tout their energy-efficient vehicles. Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is busy cementing his legacy as the George Wallace of this era, the man who stood on ideology and misguided principle to deny an undeniable fact of experience and history: The earth is warming.   

And then there’s one more measure of mainstream penetration: whether the wealthy are engaged. And by that measure green is hot, and advocates ought to be worried. ”Hot” like this has a three year life-span in the industrialized world.  The first year is infatuation. The second year is close engagement. The third year is when hype and celebrity are shredded and society casts the new, new thing back into the cultural shadows.

But while we’re hot it’s worthwhile to consider how the authentic American elite now engage with things green. Here are two striking examples:

First are the healthy, environmentally-sensitive, energy efficient domiciles for the rich in downtown Las Vegas. The capital of America gone berserk has fabulous places to cry over your losses, “0ffering the best in high-end luxury homes and condos built with green eco-friendly technolog and materials.” Transform Real Estate says this about the properties it represents: “There are three new, beautifully conceived and extraordinarily comprehensive condominium projects being built in Las Vegas right now—each with all the luxuries and amenities expected, plus leading green design,  technologies and materials. They are CityCenter, Sullivan Square (see pix) and Green Valley Lofts.”

Second is the opportunity to throw a swanky party, benefit, conference, or some other lavish gathering and have the peace of mind that human excess can be minimized, detoxified, recycled, and reused. How? Talk to dvGreen, which ”designs sustainable events without sacrificing style. We show our clients that they can reduce their ecological footprint while still throwing a beautiful party – one that just happens to be Green. By featuring organic food, flowers, and table linens; tree-free paper invitations; donating or composting leftover food; purchasing carbon offsets, and more, dvGreen creates incredible events that you can be proud of forever.”

It’s essential to stay abreast of what opponents to a reasoned development strategy have to say about Smart Growth. And there’s no more unreasonable voice on these issues than the social theorists at the libertarian Reason Magazine. This week Sam Staley and Ted Balaker published their newest assessment of the value of public transit, why Americans won’t ride new trains and buses, and how to relieve congestion. They come to this conclusion: “The planning gurus who are supposed to solve our transportation problems are in the grip of transitphilia and autophobia; their beliefs about how cities and transportation work are grounded more in nostalgia than in a realistic view of the world we live in now. The public policies they design and try to enforce make it harder for us to get to work, pick up our kids from school, or go shopping. They are deliberately fostering congestion.”

Staley and Balaker’s solution: Erase transit funding and focus on building more roads.

The weakness of this thesis falls into four categories:

• The vehicle population is increasing faster than population growth. It’s impossible for America to build its way out of congestion.
• At well over $30 million a mile for a new urban highway, and sometimes three times that cost to rebuild old ones, neither state nor local governments have nearly the money to do both.
• American patterns of development, fostered by fast-rising energy, vehicle, and housing costs, is starting to change in many metropolitan regions, which are gradually growing more dense. That is making it much more difficult to build or widen new roads, and much easier to link neighborhoods with new transit lines.
• Americans are falling back in love with rapid transit. The American Public Transit Association just reported record increases in transit ridership. In dozens of communities — Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, Dallas, Minneapolis, Seattle, Charlotte to name a few – taxpayers are digging into their own pockets to pay for new lines because the federal government won’t.

Reason Magazine has long viewed building pavement as a more appropriate activity for Big Government than constructing mass transit. The distinction fits their view that Big Government means less personal liberty, but if you’ve got to choose, cars provide more freedom than trains.

That frame, however, is obsolete. It’s been replaced by the powerful civic consciousness about quality of life and security, and that a life spent in personal vehicles to do everything diminishes freedom in the most substantive way. The civic movement to build more rapid transit reflects an important Mode Shift in how people want to design their communities to enhance their choices, and provide them a right to the good life.

From Knoxville to Las Vegas, Los Angeles to Portland, Maine, there are few communities left in the United States that view more  roads, more outer suburban growth, more parking lots, and more cars as an improvement. And all over the United States, wherever rapid transit has been built, people flock to the new lines, seek to build their homes and businesses close to station stops, and view the new way to get around as a decided step forward in economic development, achieving prosperity, and responding to the new market signals of the 21st century. Building rapid transit is a choice people make to improve their lives.
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Monica Evans, who co-founded and oversees the regional chapter of the Sierra Club in northwest Michigan, reminded us this week of the Step it Up rally to accelerate action on global climate change. She and her colleagues are hosting a regional event in downtown Traverse City on the afternoon of April 14, starting at 1:30 in the Chase Bank Courtyard across from Horizon Books downtown. There’s a parade and a potluck dinner afterward.

The Traverse City rally is part of a national day of action organized by environmental writer Bill McKibben, the author of the 1989 best seller on global warming, ”The End of Nature,” and his students at Middlebury College in Vermont. The frame for the national action is to pressure Washington to begin aggressively cutting carbon emissions and protect America’s right to an optimistic future. The energy behind the campaign was drawn initially from Bill’s capacious mind and especially his expertise on global climate change.

But Step It Up also is a quintessential example of the power of social media. It’s grown into a national event due in large part because the communicating and organizing reach of the Internet is linking so many people together who care about the warming earth. Bill took a page out of MoveOn.org’s playbook and deployed what are now routine online information and advocacy tools — email, digital photography, video, audio, YouTube, blogs, action alerts, and archives. He stayed on message, persisently sending focused appeals to gather on American street corners. People responded. One of those corners is the place where Front Street and Park intersect in downtown Traverse City.

For those of us who live along the northern coast of Lake Michigan this is personal. Lake levels have been low for several years and are dropping again. We just ended the warmest of the 15 winters I’ve been around this place. Crystal Mountain, where my wife works as a ski instructor, closed today, 10 days ahead of schedule. During the week between Christmas and New Years Day, traditionally the busiest ski days of the year – and the most economically important – there was no snow at all. My daughter and I ran the snowless cross-country ski trails in our shorts and tee-shirts. The resort laid off over 50 employees. Jim  MacInnes, Crystal Mountain’s general manager, says the ski season starts a week later and ends a week earlier than it did in the 1980s.

When President Bush and his fellow warming skeptics argue — there are a bunch of those folks sitting on county and township boards around here – that reducing global warming gases affects the economy I’ve always wondered whose economy is he talking about? The struggling snow sports industry of the Upper Midwest? The Colorado Plateau ranchers and farmers challenged by a nearly decade-long drought? The small stores and family businesses in New Orleans drowned by Hurricane Katrina?

Bill McKibben and his colleagues are performing a public service. Step It Up is a model for the kind of home-grown, street level campaign that online tools and techniques are able to turn into a mass movement.  Frankly, it’s essential. In a world with climbing energy prices, rising land and housing costs, declining incomes, record population growth, battled hardened political intransigence, and several potential environmental calamities converging at once, expecting leaders to do more than talk is folly.

A quick tour through the presidential campaign Web sites of Barack Obama (see yesterday’s post), Hillary Clinton and John McCain makes that point clear. All talk about the global climate, and all have proposed fixes — like promoting ethanol production and “clean” coal — that have no promise other than making favored constituencies richer and global conditions worse. 

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It’s understandable that many Democrats are enthused about Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He’s young, hip, smart, and charismatic. He’s an African American in a race that also features a woman and a Hispanic man. And he talks a good line about energy, the environment, the economy, national security and global climate change that intelligent progressives have accepted uncritically, including those at ThinkProgress.com.

But from this vantage his candidacy feels like it’s wrapped too tightly in the see-through cloth of hope and hype.

What leads to this conclusion? The good Senator’s mixed message about global climate change and energy. Here’s what his official campaign Web site says about global warming:

“We need to take steps to stop catastrophic, manmade climate change. If we do not act, the consequences will be devastating for future generations, especially for the poorest global populations. Barack Obama believes the U.S. must act decisively and creatively to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.”

In the very next paragraph, under the heading “Increasing the Clean Use of Illinois Coal,” here’s what Senator Obama says about energy: “Barack Obama worked with Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) and others to promote research into a process that turns Illinois-basin coal into clean-burning fuel for cars and trucks and using advanced technology to limit carbon emissions. Today, fuel produced from coal powers a third of South Africa’s cars and trucks. The research could help us one day satisfy our energy needs from Illinois’ coal mines instead of Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. In 2007, Obama passed an amendment to a budget package to provide $200 million to research reducing carbon emissions from coal.”

In the parlance of public interest campaigning, this is what is commonly referred to as double talk. The idea of “clean coal” technology is a chimera, a kind of “holy grail” adventure periodically offered to the American public to justify the continued mining and combustion of the dirtiest energy source on earth. Coal is a mess to extract, producing acid mine drainage and all manner of other forms of water and land degradation in the Midwest and East, and ripping vast scars on the lands of the West. It’s even more hazardous to burn, emitting mercury and heavy metals, and producing enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and other warming gases.

The federal Department of Energy has wasted a lot of money to promote “clean coal” technology for 30 years. All that can be said is that the latest practices may burn a little less dirty, but that’s a long way from clean.

We should expert more from Senator Obama, and any other candidate for president, Democratic or Republican, on energy and global climate change. International scientific panels have reached consensus on the causes of global climate change — combustion of fossil fuels — and its solutions — develop much cleaner energy alternatives. Replacing coal with a national research and development program aimed at building an inventory of ecologically-sound energy sources should be a priority goal of any 2008 candidate. Voters have a responsibility to reject anything less, especially a candidate that masks his support for a state industry behind technological double speak. 

A final note. Voters ought to ask Senator Obama about his economic priorities. The Illinois coal industry, still the nation’s ninth largest, produces 32 million tons annually of some of the dirtiest high-sulphur Midwest coal, the type that already was causing the acid rain that has been diminishing the forests of the South and Northeast. According to the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, the industry has been steadily consolidating for 30 years. In 1978, 70 mines in 10 Illinois counties employed 18,000 people. In 2006, there were 20 mines with 3,900 miners. In some southern Illinois counties coal jobs have disappeared completely. Doess Senator Obama really stand for the future, as he says? Or is he just one more articulate politician showing false compassion for a dangerous industry and a fading constituency?

Harriet Tregoning, who’s one of the smartest and most capable Smart Growth advocates in the United States, just took command of Washington, D.C.’s Office of Planning, among the most visible planning jobs in the country. And as the better half of the uniquely well-positioned leading couple of Smart Growth — her husband of 17 months is Geoffrey Anderson, the director of the EPA’s development, community and environment division — Harriet brings her brain and moxie to positioning the nation’s capital to prosper in the 21st century. 

I first met Harriet in Toronto 10 years ago, during one of the early meetings of the Congress for the New Urbanism. She sat in the row ahead of me on a bus tour of Toronto’s New Urbanist developments. When I started talking about Michigan’s sprawling patterns of development in the late 1990s, she leaned around the seat and asked about the new group she’d heard about that had just gotten started in Michigan. “The Michigan Land Use Institute,” she said. “You’ve heard about them?”

I introduced myself as the Institute’s founder and executive director. She said she directed the EPA’s Smart Growth program, which started at the urging of Al Gore and Carol Browning, the EPA Administrator. We spent the next few hours engaged in animated conversation about Washington, the Clinton administration, and the potential for Smart Growth to become a new organizing principle for the nation’s economy. I found her much more knowledgeable than myself, so articulate, and possessing a surprising amount of idealism. She was fun to be around, and as I learned over the years Harriet just inspired confidence and attracted friends.

I’ve crossed Harriet’s path in many states since then, at Smart Growth national organizing meetings in San Francisco, Idaho, Chicago, and during a 3-day gathering in Seaside, Florida hosted by Maryland Governor Parris Glendening. I met with her and her staff at the EPA, where I also met Geoff, who was one of Harriet’s aides at the time. I learned last year that they’d wed in 2005 and I thought that makes sense. She’s a tiny woman, quick-witted and not all shy. He’s a big guy, earnest in his professional manner, committed to his division and its mission. He’s also a funny man who knows how to tell a joke, likes to laugh and doesn’t take himself too seriously.  

Harriet’s big break came in 2000 when she was hired by Governor Glendening to serve as the Secretary of Planning. When Glendening’s two terms ended, Harriet joined the former governor in starting the Washington-based Governors’ Institute on Community Design and the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, where she served as executive director. She was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University in 2003 and 2004, where she studied real estate development, game theory, affordable housing, and drawing.  

What’s cool about the Smart Growth movement is how some of its leading figures are moving into positions of prominence around the nation. Robert Liberty, who served as the executive director of 1000 Friends of Oregon, is now an elected member of the Portland Metro Council. David Cieslewicz, who helped found 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, is the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin. Elaine Clegg, the co-director of Idaho Smart Growth, is the president of the Boise City Council. Here at home, Chris Bzdok, an environmental and land use attorney with Olson, Bzdok, and Howard, the Michigan Land Use Institute’s general counsel, is an elected member of the Traverse City city council. 

Throughout her influential career Harriet has advocated for the public policy steps that are producing the American Mode Shift. Her definition of what that looks like in Washington, where she’s owned a home for nearly two decades, looks a lot like my own. The Washington Business Journal put it this way:

“As the District’s new director of the Office of Planning, Tregoning hopes to carry out her vision of D.C. as a transit-based, walkable community with plenty of retail. A place, she says, where middle-income people can afford not only to live — but also to have enough spending money left over every month to prime the city’s economy. ‘The District needs to reframe itself as a sustainable, green city,’  she says. ‘We need to have the kind of growth and development in our city and region that benefits the environment, enhances our economy, makes it stronger and more robust and engages more of our city in the economy and in civic life. We want to be a place where quality of life and community is so attractive that everybody wants to be here.’”

I can see already that one of the principal activities of Mode Shift is to make a difference in the 2008 presidential campaign, not by convincing readers to vote for a particular candidate but by helping to make the case for public priorities that deserve to be treated seriously. Resource conservation, public transportation, metropolitan patterns of development, global climate change, healthy food, and land conservation merit attention. And it’s our responsiblity as writers to frame the issues in a way that people understand and leaders can’t avoid. 

This month an Internet event that stirred millions of Americans and the political community provides solid evidence that things will be very different next year. The event,  a video critical of Hillary Clinton that borrowed heavily from Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial introducing the Macintosh, attracted more than two million viewers in 15 days. The video provides more evidence of the eagerness of creative and politically involved  people at the grassroots to shatter conventions. The power of their ideas and their access to social media indicates that it’s not going to be possible for candidates, regardless of political party, to wave their hands at “energy” or “health care,” or “education”, or even “security” and think that’s going to be sufficient.

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The Associated Press summarized today’s events this way: ”A copy of the original commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, has been remade into a satirical attack piece against presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, replacing the Big Brother figure with the Democratic senator from New York instead. It then ends with a message supporting her opponent Sen. Barack Obama and a fruity Apple-like logo that has been converted into an “O.” The woman runner in the commercial has also been modified so that she’s wearing an iPod. The creator of the so-called online video mash-up was identified Wednesday as Philip de Vellis, a strategist who worked with a digital consulting company that has ties to Obama. The Illinois senator’s campaign has denied being behind the ad.”

The more durable point is that a clever video with a powerful message broke through to reach people. It apparently was produced by one guy with a brain, a computer, an editing program, access to YouTube, and a bit of a marketing strategy. 

The same is possible for people interested in transportation, the environment, housing, energy, land, and infrastructure investments. The convergence of record population growth, declining family incomes, and rising energy, land, housing, and living costs is eroding the right of a majority of  Americans to a good and decent life. These trends threaten our national security and our economic well-being. They are the threads of a national emergency hidden in the complex tapestry of our economy, culture, and business practices. Concern about these issues turned them into top public priorities in Michigan and some 40 other states. It’s our responsibility to tease them out, display them in creative and visual ways that get to the point, and to do so with persistence and clarity of mission that can’t be ignored at the national level. 

The tools and technology of social media, particularly YouTube, provides thinking people access to the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. We have brains and creativity and passion. We also have computers, cameras, recorders, mixers, editing software, and access to mass dissemination platforms, all available at a reasonable cost. Look for much more out of the grassroots in exploring the American Mode Shift. We have the opportunity to break open the conventional packaging and make the 2008 race something special. Neither the parties nor the candidates will be able to fully control the message. You and I will have our say.      

In case you missed it, Al Gore spoke to both houses of Congress today about global climate change, calling it a “planetary emergency.” As a reputation boosting, global elevating, and upcoming book promoting exercise, Gore’s confident stroll through the various hearing rooms that he once occupied as a sitting member was terrific theater.

But having been a Gore watcher since the 1980s, when he was a young congressman and I was a young correspondent, I just have this instinct that more may be operating here, if that’s at all possible. In a year when Gore has already won an Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth” and could win a Nobel Peace Prize, you might think it intemperate to ask more of the man. Nevertheless its still fair to wonder whether a man of such remarkable ability has one more great turn in him. And that is another run for the presidency. 

I can only tell you that Gore is making a difference and his message is heard where it counts. This weekend, at the urging of my 15-year-old son, who’d seen “An Inconvenient Truth” in school, we changed out every single one of the 88 lightbulbs in our home with energy-saving compact fluorescents. The project began with this question. “What kind of light bulbs do we have?” Cody asked. ”The old kind,” I replied. ”You’re the environmentalist,” he continued, an eyebrow arched. So off we went on Saturday to Traverse City and dropped $320 to save energy and make our latest contribution to reducing greenhouse gases. The political point, though, is that Gore capably reached a 15-year-old with an important message and that kid responded. 

The other side of why Gore could be considered to have a duty to run is how the wing nuts in the other party respond to him. One of the earliest indicators of whether you are winning or losing a public interest campaign is how much vitriol you attract from your opponents. When they start calling you names you know you’re sitting pretty. Gore prompts his opponents to lose their minds. Call up Technorati.com, type in Gore, and read the right wing response to his Congressional appearance.

A last point: Though the news media are stirring around the idea that the Democratic field of 2008 presidentiial candidates is more seasoned and adept than the Republican candidates, it’s not all that clear. The Web sites of the Democratic candidates, even New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s, are pretty lame at this point, even on the issues that tens of millions of voters care about, including energy and global climate change. Gore on the other hand has a clear message, expertise, and the courage of his views on a momentous issue of his time. And that issue melds into so many others that challenge the country and the planet: clean government, efficiency, fiscal policy, transportation, and energy-wasting, time-consuming metropolitan development patterns that are challenging in substantive ways the rights of Americans to lead productive lives.  Hillary may not survive her unconvincing explanation of why she voted to approve the war. Barack’s peak may be right now and he has only one way to go, and that’s down. Bill Richardson has to do more than be viewed as a rumpled commoner. Al Gore tread confidently into Congress today and he was the smartest, most politically astute, and hottest politician in the place. There’s more happening here than just a couple of hours of earnest testimony.  

The Los Angeles Conservancy, the largest local historic preservation group in the United States, produced a terrific online multi-media exhibit of Wilshire Boulevard called Curating the City. Using motion graphics, mapping, text, photographs, and digital hotspots, the program explores the history and geography of one of the nation’s iconic roadways, the West Coast equivalent of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue or Philadelphia’s Broad Street. 

What’s so cool about this example of multi-media storytelling is how quickly it loads and how easy it is to use. The prompts are readily visible, and the graphics are strikingly good. The public interest measure of this application, moreover, is how Curating the City invites viewers to consider visually how much of Wilshire Avenue has resisted decades of change even as it’s undergone momentous transformation. It’s that knowledge of place that drives how metropolitan regions react to the myriad forces of change that are ever-present. Using multi-media tools to enable people to see the context of change is vital to making measured decisions in all the realms of urban design. 

Not long ago, in Denver, a Douglas County Commissioner told me that one of the impediments voters faced in approving a nearly $5 billion sales tax increase in 2004 to build the West’s most extensive regional rapid transit system was old attitudes about trains. “The critics, including our governor, kept saying nobody would ride a train,” she said. ”This is the West. You have to pry the keys out of people’s hands before they’d get out of their cars.”

Well, every year since then transit ridership has climbed in the United States, including in every western city that has built a modern rail transit system. That includes Dallas (see pix) Denver, Portland, Phoenix, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, San Jose, and San Diego. And ridership is climbing in the East and Midwest, too. This week the American Public Transportation Association released its latest annual report on transit ridership that confirmed the trend. ”Americans took 10.1 billion trips on local public transportation in 2006 – the first time in 49 years,” said the association. “Over the last decade, public transportation’s growth rate outpaced the growth rate of the population and the growth rate of vehicle miles traveled on our nation’s highways.”

“This significant ridership milestone is part of a multi-year trend as more and more Americans ride public transit to get to destinations important to them, while realizing the benefits of saving money and avoiding congestion,” said William W. Millar, president of APTA.

Light rail had the highest percentage increase among all modes, the association reported, with a 5.6 percent increase in ridership last year. Some light rail systems showed double digit increases in ridership: San Jose (36.6 percent); Minneapolis (18.4 percent); New Jersey (20.1 percent); Saint Louis (16.2 percent); Philadelphia (10.8 percent); and Salt Lake City (14.2 percent).

As a guy born and raised in White Plains, a railroad suburb north of New York City, I never understood the cultural reluctance to rail outside the major cities of the East Coast. My buddies and I used the Metro North line to get into the city. I rode Amtrak to Philadelphia and the Paoli local commuter train from 30th Street Station to get to college in Haverford, a Main Line suburb. After graduation I lived in Boston, Charleston, and Washington and regularly rode Amtrak to New York, where my employers were based. Riding the commuter lines and Amtrak reduced my costs for maintaining a car, and when I left Washington in 1993 the precipitous rise in the value of my Bethesda home was largely the result of its proximity to the Medical Center stop on the Washington Metro’s Red Line, about a mile walk away.

Now there’s mounting evidence that many more Americans who were never raised to ride commuter rail lines are growing more comfortable with this transportation mode shift. A major national infrastructure investment in rail construction needs to be part of the energy, environmental, and national security platforms of every candidate for the presidency. There’s nothing about many more miles of rail in the United States that doesn’t make plain sense. 

Last week the Traverse City Record-Eagle, which does a decent job reporting on northwest Michigan’s population growth and business development, published an article with these facts. In 1997, shoppers in Grand Traverse County spent 58 percent of their money for retail sales in the Traverse City. Last year, according to a new economic analysis, the city attracted just 12 percent of those sales.

As a measure of the quality of life, the percentage of retail sales held by a central city is hard to beat. As the percentage of retail sales falls in the central city so does the quality of life in the region. That’s because traffic, water, and air pollution, family costs and stress increase in the surrounding suburbs. Safety, security,  and the sense of place that drew people to northwest Michigan in the first place decline. The transition is steady, almost episodic, like standing in a river and trying to hold back the current. And after 10 years people pause just for a moment and wonder what the hell happened. The pace of life quickened. Costs went up. Their time got tighter. The good life they’d promised themselves gradually evaporates in the hothouse of the new congested and expensive suburb they’d allowed to be built.   

Over the last 10 years, it’s not as though Traverse City’s Front Street, the main business district, developed an acute illness, though the new economic study indicates that with its high rents and boutique stores, the downtown business and retail district could be in trouble. The more significant trend occurred in the surrounding townships, particularly Garfield Township which used its master plan and zoning to design an auto-centric place, complete with requirements for parking, ample setbacks, sewer and water extensions, and expanded roadways. Orchards that once supported cherry trees were converted into shopping centers and hotels and big-box stores. Tens of thousands of new residents headed in their cars to a sparkling new array of national retail destinations. Garfield and its neighbor, Blair Township, attracted them all — Wal-Mart, Menard’s, Lowe’s, Home Debot, Best Buy, MC Sports, Kohl’s, Rite Aid, Borders, Staples, Office Max.  Garfield is the place you go to buy lightbulbs and see a movie. Traverse City is where you can find a candle lit meal  and gourmet chocolates. 

Traverse City has managed to keep most of its downtown businesses open because over the last decade the regional market expanded. But Michigan’s stagnant economy is catching up with the small downtown stores, many of them family-owned and not as capable as they once were of competing with the national chains. Money is tight. And the regional and national markets are tilted in the favor of the big boxes. We taxpayers build the road and sewers, set the zoning, and award the real estate investment tax loopholes and global trade agreements that make Wal-Mart and the rest tick. Meanwhile we tax the family-owned businesses, charge high rents, and discourage housing investments that make it possible for working adults and their families — shoppers in other words – to live anywhere close to downtown. Traverse City, for instance, is getting set to once again prohibit people from renting out granny flats above their garages, which would encourage students and young families to live downtown. 

Much has been written about the phenomenom of purposefully aiding the big-box companies that need it least. Stacy Mitchell’s new book, The Big-Box Swindle, tells much of the story. You wonder when this big-box phase of metropolitan development will begin its sunset, and a new and more intelligent form will take its place. People have a right to expect more. We deserve more.