Two unrelated articles in today’s Washington Post got me thinking about government’s role in planning and the nature of unintended consequences. I’m no specialist in urban planning or government, but I am trying to make sense of what I’ve seen go right and go wrong over the course of my lifetime.
The first article was about former Mayor Anthony Williams who is given credit for helping spark the revitalization of Washington, DC, over the past 20 years. The article speaks generally about his current work with the Federal City Council which has (somewhat worryingly) “worked as a behind-the-scenes player in local government” and now seeks to “give something back.” I don’t know how much credit Anthony Williams should personally get, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Certainly DC has seem very significant and mostly positive change since his time in public office from 1996-2007.
I first arrived in Washington in 1976 when the city was still suffering echoes of the riots of the ’60s, and there was at least another decade of decline into an era of drugs and crime through large swaths of the city. There were many areas that felt unsafe to drive through, much less walk in, from the White House to the east, south and north. We’d visit Pattie and Lee’s townhouse on Capitol Hill in the 1980s and felt like it was in a war zone. It is remarkable now to see the turnaround and growth in areas like Chinatown, NOMA, H Street, the southeast waterfront, Nationals Park and I’m sure many other areas I don’t know about. But, as the article notes, it has been done at the cost of displacing thousands of families that cannot afford to live in those neighborhoods — or anywhere nearby — anymore. The DC case is also inextricably wrapped up in questions of race but I’m not trying to address that volatile topic at the moment. And is it really the case that “white households in the Washington region have a net worth that is 81 times greater than black households”? That’s a topic for a different discussion.
I’m trying to come to grips with the timeframes involved in large-scale social changes. Often the pace of change seems glacial, and we appear to be dealing with many of the same problems now that we were 50 or 100 years ago. Some problems and locales never seem to change. The transformation in many areas of DC show that meaningful change can and does accrue and become visible over a lifetime, and gives me hope for what may come. There seems to be a parallel with personal investing and the power of compound interest: if you save and invest with some discipline, foresight and a reasonable level of risk you can see favorable results over the span of decades.
Then there’s wholesale government sponsored and induced change like in China or Dubai, where whole landscapes, cities and regions can transform in what seems to be a blink of an eye, or visibly within a few years. Government-directed change can be fast, but can be brutal like the razing of Beijing’s hutongs, and now evidently the razing of the first generation of post-war communist housing. There are some positives to be said for wholesale change, but its deliberate disruption is almost inevitably done without consent or much concern for the local inhabitants.
In the U.S. it seems like changes often occur randomly through market forces, local greed or graft, or larger unseen forces like local and foreign investment laws. Some folks on the “inside” force decisions and get rich much more quickly than the rest of us. I’m reminded of local developers in the DC region like Til Hazel and Kingdon Gould. Too little attention gets paid to the people and lives that are disrupted in the process. Or decisions get made hyper-locally with little regard for regional growth or better distribution of resources across wider populations. Is there a recipe for getting the right balance, or even a reasonably fair one?
The second article about Hawaii’s agricultural sector seemed unrelated but triggered some of the same questions. The sugar and pineapple plantations of Hawaii are dead and some of the most valuable agricultural land in the world is now fallow. Meanwhile, as the money quote from a Maui councilman says, “We have put all our eggs into one basket, and that is tourism. But not everybody who lives on this island wants to work in the hotel industry.”
Here again I think of the changes I’ve seem since first visiting Hawaii in 1971. The pineapple and cane plantations were dominant features of the landscape when we flew over each of the islands. Those monocultures themselves had wreaked havoc over Hawaii’s natural landscape and native human agriculture, not to mention their societies. The complete shift to tourism brings a wealth of consequences, some good with a flow of dollars, but many for ill. How does a society make reasonable, educated choices under those circumstances?
Change is inevitable, goes the cliche, but we are not doomed to wander into those changes blindly. There is the possibility of educated foresight and planning, and that seems to be the role of government and to some extent the press.
Hawaii is in some ways a Garden of Eden, one of the world’s perfect places. I’m not sure what the Bible says happened to the Garden after Adam and Eve left. Probably it was redeveloped eventually. For the better? Cue Joni Mitchell.