The Challenges of Building Policy Consensus and Civic Cooperation

Let me begin by confessing that I find this to be an intimidating task. To a conservative from California, Minnesota is a scary place; after all, it is the only state in the country that never voted even once for Ronald Reagan.

On the other hand, Californians these days are looking at your Governor Jesse Ventura and saying, "Damn—why didn’t we think of that?"

Finally, I should like to add by way of introduction that as a part-time political historian, I have a great fondness for the memory of the namesake of this Institute, Hubert Humphrey. It has always struck me as a misfortune of history that the practitioner of the "politics of joy" should have reached his apogee at the same moment that the politics of anger and discontent was also reaching its zenith, which essentially foreclosed his prospects. I have always liked the description of Humphrey that James Jackson Kilpatrick wrote in 1968: "He pours out speech like a Tastee-Freez.… If God had made him a canine, he would wiggle around like a hound dog having his belly scratched."

This panel is devilishly clever, focusing on issues of governance and public persuasion rather than substantive aspects of the issue of sprawl itself. This throws me off my game, but it is a worthy challenge because it is the knottiest aspect of the problem, much exceeding my capacity to sort it out. This aspect of the issue awaits its Tocqueville, someone of broad gauge to put the problem in the larger context of the American character at the present moment. I am not sure I can begin to approach this standard, but I’ll give it a try.

I am here to offer a jaundiced view of things. I am put in the frame of mind reminiscent of a line by Woody Allen: "I’m sorry I can’t say something positive—would you take two negatives?" Actually, I’ll do the reverse and start with two negatives, and, in the spirit of comity, end with a positive.

In good academic fashion I should begin by challenging the premise of the question—the question of consensus itself.

Although I happen to agree with many of the principles and observations of the smart growth movement, my contrary nature leads me to worry, because the conventional wisdom—what passes for consensus—is so often wrong, or greatly distorted. And whenever there is so much heated agreement about an issue, there is a need for a few of us cranky souls to call for a time out. That "we are all smart growthers now"—even the National Association of Home Builders is for smart growth—is something that should cause a bit of pause.

Twenty-five years ago Richard Nixon remarked that "we are all Keynesians now," which was the surest sign that Keynesianism was about to expire as the dominant economic doctrine.

We don’t hear that much anymore, do we? And why not? Because it was
totally wrong, that’s why.

In the area of land use it is helpful to recall that when Jane Jacobs criticized the conventional wisdom of the segregation of land uses in American cities in 1961, urban planners bitterly attacked her, while one of her earliest champions was William F. Buckley, Jr. Today Jane Jacobs is revered as a guiding light among urban planners in the smart growth movement, which is why I often feel justified in saying to smart growth advocates, welcome to the party—what took you so long to get here?

The best way to begin putting the problems of governance into some context is to make recourse to that  proverbial barometer of the American soul, the taxi driver. About two years ago I went to St. Louis to study the dimensions of the sprawl issue in that metro area. I took a taxi from Lindbergh Field in St. Louis to an appointment in St. Charles County, which is where the suburban sprawl of the greater St. Louis area is taking place. Looking for some local insight, I asked the driver what he thought about what was going on there. "Man," he told me, "they’re building so fast out here there isn’t going to be any land left." So I asked where he lived. "I live in the City of St. Louis," he told me; but then, without any prompting from me, he added: "But I’m going to move out here. The quality of life is so much better; you get more value for your housing dollar."

This is what social psychologists have long termed "cognitive dissonance"—the ability to keep two contradictory thoughts in mind and be relatively untroubled by it. Oregon’s Tom McCall is credited with having first observed that the American people are against two things—they’re against sprawl, and they’re against density. This makes "solving" the problem of sprawl extremely problematic, since the only serious remedy for most of the problems associated with sprawl is higher density.

This also makes "consensus" of any kind an elusive beast, not unlike Sasquatch—frequently sighted, but never captured.

After a public hearing dominated by negative testimony, the Berkeley Planning Commission has rejected a proposed smart-growth land-use plan.

Planners say that the plan is needed to maintain a walkable community and to "encourage sufficient new construction to meet Berkeley’s fair share of regional housing needs." Local residents maintain that the plan will "destroy" Berkeley "by over-building in the name of progress."

Local activist Becky O’Malley blames developers for the plan. "Speculators hiding behind the smart-growth banner have started drawing their bullseyes on attractive viable cities like San Francisco and Berkeley," she says.

O’Malley admits that the smart-growth goals and strategies identified in the plan are "laudable." But she says that "What it should say, however, is that ‘we’re proposing a massive increase in population and density for much of Berkeley, and we want to build some really tall buildings all over town to make it possible.’"

Now, if the smart growth agenda encounters this kind of opposition in Berkeley, then it is going to face an uphill fight almost everywhere.

To invoke the overused therapeutic language of our time, too many smart growth advocates are in denial about this. And so they resort to a number of burlesques to try to get around this inconvenient fact.

One popular method is a formal consensus process, in which officially recognized "stakeholders" are convened to work out not a consensus, really, but a lowest-common-denominator compromise. There are a lot of things wrong with the formalized process of stakeholder representation that I don’t have time to get into today; suffice it to say that I think formal stakeholder representation is profoundly undemocratic.

Of more use at the moment, however, would be a look at the problem of consensus itself.

Margaret Thatcher once described consensus as, "the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?"

The attempt to reconcile competing factions is not without its merits, and not without some promise of being helpful, as I will return to in a few minutes. The biggest problem, however, is that consensus is much overrated, and when elevated to a principle may be a detriment to improved urban planning.

In the context of urban planning, it strikes me that consensus in practice will mean a smaller field of action for people of true genius and drive. Neither Robert Moses nor Frederick Law Olmstead would fare very well under the constraints of modern-day consensus.

Maybe that’s as it should be, and I’ll be interested in hearing some discussion from the audience. There is no easier way to divide a gathering of conservative intellectuals than to invoke the memory of Robert Moses. Some praise him as a can-do urban visionary, while others—including me—find him reprehensible in many ways, especially the less than subtle racial segregation that his plans often entailed.

Likewise, the case of Olmstead tends to divide environmentalists and some smart growth advocates, who see in his urban designs not just some of the great features of urban life such as New York City’s Central Park or Cherokee Park in Louisville, but also some of the early seeds of sprawl.

The point is, if you think, as I do, that most great innovations, whether in city design or other fields of human endeavor, are the result of individual insight, then a consensus solution to the problems associated with urban sprawl probably entails a loss of the trial-and-error spontaneity that genuine breakthroughs require.

A more elaborate and slightly more inclusive method is the "visioning" process that is underway for all kinds of things these days. The problem with visioning processes is that they tend to encourage an unrealistic extravagance among the participants, by eliciting an unconstrained vision that downplays or ignores real-world tradeoffs. A good case study of this can be seen in Utah just now, where an official "Envision Utah" process is holding hundreds of community forums and surveying thousands of Utah citizens for their vision of Utah’s future.

The technical work about the various scenarios for Utah’s future is fairly good in most respects, but the tradeoffs that are explicit in their forecasting models are not being presented to the public in any meaningful way. So these visioning processes tend to produce vague and unspecific recommendations that represent only very modest progress, reminiscent of Woody Allen’s line about looking for a framework to turn a concept into an idea.

But even for current residents there is the general problem of a self-selection bias.

Consider this political fact: Thousands of people spontaneously turned out for Harry Truman’s whistle stop campaign in 1948; yet today, with a much larger population, presidential campaigns have trouble turning out a crowd. How much harder is it to turn people out for community workshops on suburban growth? Oscar Wilde’s great comment that the trouble with socialism is too many meetings comes into play here. After you have put in a workday, you can either go home, play with the kids, paint your bedroom, read a book, or watch TV … or, you can go to a community workshop on smart growth. And even if you do go, there is a significant problem of the asymmetry of knowledge and expertise about the subject matter between planners, activists, and yourself, an ordinary citizen.

So visioning processes are, I think, the public policy equivalent of a fixed fight or a professional wrestling match, though one obviously hesitates to invoke professional wrestling as a simile in Minnesota these days.

The other half of the topic for this panel is how do we foster civic cooperation—a subject that is central to Myron Orfield’s concerns. I want to suggest that whether you are seeking consensus through a stakeholder process or trying to elicit public participation in a visioning process, the biggest impediments to progress are not the differing views and interests of various parties, but the levels of distrust that exist between different points of view and, above all, the public distrust of government.

Before any kind of new civic vision can be implemented, those of us with radically different views of how the world works or should work are going to need to learn to trust each other. This, I suggest, will take years, and requires breaking down the civic agenda into its constituent parts.

One thing that we did reach consensus about in the California Growth Management Consensus Project, with the partial exception of the environmentalists, was that the linkages between all the aspects that go into the urban problem are too intricate to sort out altogether. I have a hypothesis that the difficulty of reaching a genuine governing consensus about an issue is multiplied by a square or a cube of the number of discrete factors that comprise the issue. In the case of urban sprawl, we usually take into account traffic congestion and mass transit, open space, the quality of schools, the aesthetics of retailing (i.e., strip malls and Wal-Mart), affordable housing, water and other resource issues, and even crime and racial integration. When all of these factors are bundled together, you have a complex puzzle that resembles the public policy equivalent of Rubik’s Cube—trying to solve one part of the puzzle will generate changes and challenges for other parts of the puzzle, and getting everything to turn out the way we want is exceedingly difficult.

Here the example to look at more closely is the Quincy Library group in northern California. I don’t have time to tell the whole story, but the Quincy Library group was a community-based consensus effort to resolve the logging controversy in Plumas County in northern California. The reason it is called Quincy Library is that the parties involved didn’t even trust each other enough to meet at one another’s offices, and had to use the library as a neutral site. People who had never spoken to each other except in a courtroom spent four years working out a compromise that allowed logging to resume, but with enhanced environmental protections to satisfy the environmental community. There are several similar locally-based examples of what is being called "civic environmentalism."

I want to suggest that the most important lesson from the Quincy Library project is trust—those of us with differing viewpoints don’t trust each other even to be speaking the same language, or mean the same thing with the same words.
If we look a little closer, however, I think we can see a basis for optimism about this particular issue. What surveys show is that people are most distrustful of centralized government, and on the particular issue of sprawl believe that it is best handled by local governmentWashington. This means that genuine locally-based efforts to forge a public compromise, like the Quincy Library project, are promising. But like Quincy Library, they will take time, patience, and a lot of willingness to engage in practical give-and-take.

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