Generations of Change
I love listening to Storycorps to hear the often small but heartfelt stories shared between loved ones. It can help us step out of the tumult of the everyday, which is quite tumultuous at this particular moment. This month’s newsletter is inspired by that format, except the loved one I’m interviewing, my paternal grandfather, passed away 35 years ago. I never really got to know him, so this is primarily from my own imagination. It is a sequel to the last newsletter about “zooming” through policy scales, which focused on geographic levels, but alluded to time scales as well. I thought an imagined conversation with my grandfather could highlight the long-term nature of cities by touching on the experiences of five generations.
So what do you think of the fact that I started a newsletter?
You didn’t think we could get newsletters in the afterlife, did you? It just takes a bit longer to get here. While I was an advertising man, not a urban policy person, I enjoyed your first newsletter on Kairos and the nature of our changing cities. What a time to think about big, Kairosian change, given all you are going through down there: climate change, economic upheaval, and, I almost hate to mention it, the election and all that comes with it. I can see how it can all feel so existential and lead to a sense of dread.
I lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the unleashing of a nuclear bomb, and the ensuing idea of “mutually assured destruction,” so also I know something about existential dread. It is quite rational to lose hope and become despondent.
But I look at what we faced and what you are facing and I see that our lives are long, history is big, and humanity is surprisingly resilient. We create plans and invest in our hopes and dreams for a brighter future. Then the world changes. Sometimes we have Kairosian moments of big positive change. Sometimes our energy may be devoted to holding the line or strategically retreating from negative change. Often it’s some combination of both.
We are all just doing our best to move toward a future that is hopefully better. I dreamed that your father would have a good life. I know he had the same dreams for you and you for your son. Through it all, we keep ticking forward in time.
The idea that humanity has survived through lots of eras and turmoil reminds me of an idea related to place that I share when people invoke the downtown or urban doom loop: cities have been around for millenia so are unlikely to go away anytime soon. But while I don’t think they are looping, they are constantly changing. How do you see this change over so many decades?
Cities change slowly, after all it takes a while to build a building. And even longer to build a bridge or subway tunnel or cathedral. That means places are the manifestation of many generations. Cities become physical embodiments of our greatest accomplishments, like the Brooklyn Bridge or the interstate highway system, or Union Station in Saint Louis, where I am from. My father was an architect there and your father built buildings there, both of which you and your son can still visit today.
But zoom out further. While the United States is a comparatively young country, many of its roads and highways follow the native indigenous roads, settlements, and trading paths. The I-81 corridor west of the Blue Ridge Mountains was the Appalachian Warriors’ Path. Even in new tract house developments, the shape and layout may be defined by the much older farm that it was built on.
A library designed by my great grandfather (and funded by Carnegie) that is still going strong. I should send my love letter to civic infrastructure to him in the afterlife.
That permanence of the built environment means it can pass on wondrous accomplishments as well as fossilize our mistakes across generations. As we were updating DC’s Comprehensive Plan (or Comp Plan), I spoke with many residents about how we were working to address some of those negative policies that we inherited from our grandparents. What do you think about these bequests I blame on your generation?
With everything there is good and bad. Trust that you and your generation are making mistakes now that your grandchildren will scold you for (perhaps quite publicly in public meetings as well as newsletters.) But yes, we should learn from the mistakes of urban highways and single-use office downtowns. Some say Brutalist architecture is another of your less savory inheritance.
On the policy side, exclusionary zoning, which has some of its roots in my father’s generation in Saint Louis is now embedded in the laws of almost every city. It is now cross-generational. I am struck by how the bad policies of my time (and before) have evolved into accepted norms for following generations.
For example, the zoning regime that was created in my lifetime has fostered an assumption in many neighborhoods, in my lifetime and in yours, that they should not change. I don’t think you can choose not to change. Every person ages and demographics shift. Trees grow and die. Roads and buildings wear out. The effects of technology and climate change continue to change how we live and what we need.
But this expectation that you can set places in amber is now built into policies, laws, and plans that make it much harder to change. They are a major reason why you cannot build enough housing. Overly restrictive land use comes out of a natural instinct to focus on you and what you have now, but that can come at the cost of the future generations, as the current housing shortage is showing.
I think it’s important to realize that the living don’t own the present: you are leasing it from your predecessors and stewarding it for your successors. What are you doing as stewards? How are you making decisions to pass on opportunities to the next generations?
For those interested in the legacy of Brutalism, I highly recommend the National Building Museum’s exhibit “Capital Brutalism” on view through February 17, 2025.
One goal of comprehensive planning is to help places think longer term and answer those questions about stewarding the built environment for the better. The built environment often changes quite slowly (and land use regulations like zoning often exacerbate that slowness.) But last weekend, I went to the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn for the first time in 7 years. While I followed all of the rezoning efforts and knew what much-needed housing would be coming, I still felt disoriented walking around. I imagine there are lots of places you would walk around with confusion and wonder and others that look very similar to when you were there last.
That is an interesting exercise. In the context of my hometown of Saint Louis, a place that has greatly changed, even in your lifetime, is the neighborhood where I was born, which is now called Cortex. I would be quite lost and disoriented in that area today. But I would be amazed and happy to see an area that used to be warehouses transformed into a new, more vibrant neighborhood. I watched St. Louis slowly decline over my lifetime, so would be pleased to see a place, where two of my daughters still live, reviving.
Cities are always changing, but usually at a time scale slightly slower than humans. That’s why the places that do change quickly are so notable. It reminds me of the biological notion of allometry, where different organs in a body grow at different rates. In this case different parts of a place change at often very different rates.
But the vast majority of places are not changing or are actually becoming poorer. In Saint Louis, there are many single family neighborhoods that look very similar to when I was there, perhaps with larger trees. Sometimes the spectacular but limited change tells a more resonant story than the broad, slow change, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the latter.
A photo from my recent visit to the Gowanus Canal, which had been referred to as “the venereal disease of a body of water” in one of my favorite podcast episodes.
Do you have any advice to close us out?
Getting back to where we started, you all have a lot on your plates whether at your individual or broader societal levels. I think taking a step back and trying to connect with a bigger picture can help you cope with some of that. I encourage everyone to interview your grandparents or grandchildren, even if either or both must be imagined, as in your case. I think connections across generations are quite valuable, maybe even therapeutic.
Some Links
Following up on setting big housing goals, I have a very specific suggestion for linking federal transportation funding to housing needs.
In a housing policy double header, the Urban Institute has an overview of housing policy recommendations in their “Road Map for Affordable and Stable Housing for All” while the National Housing Crisis Task Force released their Federal Housing Policy Agenda (pdf).
In late October, DC’s Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development shared some inspiring visions for the future of the city’s economy.
