Doing Worthwhile Work in City Building

Over the past twenty years of my career, I’ve slowly started to understand what I want to accomplish in my work life. While in college, my goal was broad, to do worthwhile work (thanks, Kevin Salwen) that makes the world a better place. Through circumstance, I ended up in real estate. It has taken me this long to understand the industry well enough to start to see where an individual can focus their efforts to make the greatest positive impact on our built environment.

Like most industries, the work in city building falls on a spectrum between worthwhile and harmful, with the vast majority of jobs in the thick part of the bell curve that’s mostly neutral. I’m only interested in the jobs in the long tail on the worthwhile side of that spectrum.

There are four main career paths for city building: policy making, civil service, development, and advocacy. Each of these interact with the others, but no one person can do all of these things simultaneously.

Policy Making

Becoming a policy maker is by far the most difficult route to improving city building, but also can be one of the most impactful. At the absolute far end of the spectrum of people who have done the most worthwhile work and made the largest impact are policy makers like California State Senator Scott Wiener. The legislation he has authored and had enacted over the past few years will reshape the urban landscape in California for the next century. But we can’t all be Sen. Wiener.

Most people who become policy makers with an interest in building better cities are either appointed to their local planning commission or zoning board, or are elected to city council. Policy makers who understand how cities work, and who want to improve the quality of life for residents, are key to making worthwhile changes to our built environment. It will be impossible for anyone working in other areas of city building to make worthwhile improvements without policy maker’s leadership on, or at least acceptance of, better development policies.

However, individuals can’t change policy alone. They need to be able to lead their colleagues to support these worthwhile policies. That leadership, as with all leadership, can be done through charisma or technical excellence, or some combination of the two. However, without a solid understanding of how cities work, it will be hard to know if the policies a policymaker champions are actually worthwhile or not.

Civil Service

Many people who get a degree in urban planning end up working for a city in their planning department. This certainly isn’t universally true, urban planners also work for consulting firms, architects, and engineers, and some even go on to be developers, but many work in the civil service.

While I’ve never worked for a city, I’ve worked with many cities and their staff in a variety of roles. I’ve seen how city staff can help make their cities better, make their cities worse, but more often than not, how they don’t affect their city in the slightest.

The best staff I’ve worked with focus on how new developments impact actual people, and not just whether they comply with the zoning code or not. These staff also tend to be more receptive to new ideas and make opportunities for developers and advocates to make the case for these new ideas to the policy makers.

As an individual, if you want to work in local government to make your city a better place, work in the planning department with a focus on how new developments in the city make residents happier and more prosperous. Make room for new ideas, and as you move up, you’ll be able to lead a complete reorientation of your city’s urban planning to focus on those key metrics of happiness and prosperity.

Development

Of these paths, developers are the only ones that directly change the built environment. (Traffic engineers and public works departments also directly change the built environment, but as an individual, that seems like a hopeless avenue to go down to make worthwhile change.) Many people who grew up playing SimCity or Cities: Skylines who go on to become urban planners really want to be developers, because they get to make tangible changes to their communities.

It’s easy to be a bad developer, and it’s hard to be a good one. All of the incentives are to make bad projects. John Anderson talks about how the common perception of developers is that they’re Darth Vader, but to be welcomed into a community developers don’t need to be Ghandi, but just need to demonstrate that they are significantly better than Darth Vader.

However, even good developers can’t make positive changes to our built environment without the support of civil servants to bring forward their proposals and policy makers to approve their designs. While many people view developers as having too much power over the decision-making process, my experience is the exact opposite. Developers are often very constrained in what they’re allowed to build, and as often as not the developments they want to pursue don’t move forward because of opposition from city staff, city leaders, or community concerns.

Advocacy

For people who haven’t made a career in city building but still want to positively impact the built environment, one of the most powerful roles anyone can play is that of an advocate. I’ve seen many good projects that serve an urgent community need get killed because of community opposition. Cities need advocates for good projects to counter those members of the community that oppose any change.

The easiest way to become an advocate is to just show up to planning commission and city council meeting and share your thoughts about what’s happening in your community. But one lone voice in the wilderness is often not enough to sway decisionmakers. To do that, you must find others who share your views and can amplify your shared message.

However, even with a group of community members advocating for a better city, it is often too easy for policy makers to ignore. For advocates to be successful, they need receptive civil servants that will incorporate their aims into staff recommendations, they need policy makers that will listen to them and use their comments as justification to support developments even in face of opposition from other members of the community, and they need developers that are proposing quality projects they can get behind to support.

But what about all of the other folks who work in city building, such as the architects, civil engineers, and planning consultants such as myself? The short answer is that we’re all just agents of the folks paying us. We may be able to pick our clients or the projects we work on to ensure those projects are worthwhile, but if we’re hired by a city, our powers to do good are the same as those in the civil service, if we’re hired by a developer, our powers to do good are the same as the developers (and let’s be honest, most of the time the advocates and policy makers aren’t hiring us.)

There is a lot of good and urgent work city builders need to be working on right now. Our urban form helps determine our health and happiness, it drives our homelessness epidemic and climate change. Solving these problems will take changing our built environment, and that won’t happen unless folks pursue worthwhile work in city building.