by James A. Bacon
American society is buckling under the strain of health care costs. The debate, as I have often opined, is stuck on the question of who pays those costs rather than how we can bring costs down. Improving Americans’ health is not a job we can should relegate to Congress and the General Assembly. It is a job for all Virginians — including the real estate industry, as Maureen McAvey with the Urban Land Institute noted at a meeting of ULI’s Richmond branch Wednesday morning.
Chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes reflect 21st century lifestyles marked by too many calories and too little exercise. Exhorting the populace to work out more has not proven terribly successful. But there is a growing conviction that we can design our communities to make moderate activity a routine aspect of our lives. During her presentation, McAvey hit the highlights of a recent ULI publication, “Ten Principles for Building Health Places,” which outlined several approaches to making our communities more hospitable to healthy living.
The publication contains many ideas that should appeal to fiscal conservatives and free-marketeers allergic to the social engineering impulses of the do-gooders who normally champion such things. Designing communities to encourage people to get more exercise should not be an ideological issue. If anything, conservatives should applaud any approach that encourages individuals to assume more responsibility for their own health.
Here are some of the ideas I plucked from the publication and McAvey’s remarks that philosophical conservatives should embrace.
Build complete streets. Conceptually speaking, there is a critical difference between roads and streets. It is OK to design roads with the primacy of the automobile in mind; their function is to increase mobility between cities, towns and major activity centers, which is usually best accomplished with cars. Streets should be designed with the idea of accommodating pedestrians, bicycles and motor scooters in addition to cars for the purpose of providing local access. Reconfiguring the public right of way in accordance with “complete streets” principles makes it safer and more convenient for people to conduct more of their business and run more of their errands on foot. Not only does that take cars off the streets, it builds light exercise into peoples’ daily routine.
Mix it up. Mixed-use development combines the functions of daily life in a concentrated area rather than mandating the separation of housing, jobs and amenities in separate pods. As the report states, “ULI has concluded that mixed-use development makes people much more likely to walk or use transit to run errands, go shopping, or go to lunch than does spread-out, automobile-oriented, single-use development.” Combine mixed-use development with complete streets and mass transit, and you get a winning formula for getting people to walk more.
Conservatives, please note: No one is talking about shutting down the suburbs and herding people into buses and apartment complexes. All we need here is for local governments to meet the large unmet demand for walkable communities. The idea here is to allow more freedom, not less, by freeing builders and developers from restrictions imposed by local zoning codes in order to build the kinds of communities people want to live in.
Ensure equitable access. Cars are expensive. Not everyone can afford them, and not everyone can drive them. Children under 16 cannot drive. Many elderly and handicapped people cannot drive. Many poor people cannot afford to own a car. Conservatives should aspire to build communities that allow more people to be more self reliant and not to rely upon others for their transportation. People who use mass transit also walk. By necessity, if you ride the bus, you walk to the bus stop.
Another note to conservatives: Supporting mass transit through complete streets and mixed-use development need not entail writing a blank check to money-losing municipal transit authorities. Rather than abandoning the idea of mass transit, we should strip away the subsidies, regulations and politicized decision-making that makes mass transit a financial loser. Conservatives should champion profitable, self-supporting mass transit.
Energize shared spaces. Humans are social creatures and they like to socialize. Creating great public spaces encourages people to get outside, walk and mingle with others. As ULI explains, “the residential street should be regarded as a primary public space, not merely a conduit to meet travel needs. A living street is a street … where people can meet and children can play safely and legally.” Best practices include zero-grade separations between sidewalk and street to create a plaza-like feel, wide sidewalks, installation of trees, planters, public art and ground-level retail.
Local governments can create pocket parks out of existing rights of way and encourage restaurants and other retailers to put chairs and tables on the sidewalk. Authorities can encourage local groups to create “pop up parks” that temporarily use vacant or underutilized space, and they should not be afraid to experiment with inexpensive ideas that might end up as failures.
Make healthy choices easy. Traffic conditions and poor street design can discourage cycling. Dirty and dimly lit streets can feel unsafe and uninviting to pedestrians. Simple measures can encourage street use: design sidewalks with appropriate width, lighting, shade trees, street furniture and buffers from traffic; protect bikeways from traffic through striping plants, street parking and curbs; create refuges for pedestrians through raised and buffered islands at wide intersections; install planter boxes or bollards to separate bikes, pedestrians and cars.
None of these ideas require the expenditure of massive funds. Many streets can be re-worked as part of routine maintenance funded by the public works budget. All it takes is reallocating slivers of existing right-of-way from space devoted to traffic and parking to space for bikes and pedestrians. Indeed, attractive streetscapes can often pay for themselves by bolstering property values and stimulating retail sales. We can design healthier communities without social engineering and without busting the budget. Let’s go!
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