PATRICK SISSON

Curbed

February 2020

If you think you have meeting fatigue at the office, try attending a public meeting. Last September in a Brooklyn church basement, a meeting over new bike lanes spiraled out of control when cycling advocate Doug Gordon was shoved by a guest speaker and filmmaker. In October, during a hearing over a proposed homeless shelter in Queens, one frustrated resident said of the shelter, “I hope someone is going to burn the place down.” At a Seattle hearing on affordable housing development last February, one resident, priced out by rising rents, attacked the “tech trash” who have been “strip-mining Seattle.”

The public meeting has become enshrined in this nation’s local politics as the conduit for the opinions of the common citizen and an essential part of grassroots democracy. Roughly 97 percent of local governments utilize some form of local meetings, according to a 2004 article by Harvard professors Abby Williamson and Archon Fung. They trace the origins of these gatherings back to the town meetings held in colonial New England as early as the 1630s, when informal assemblies of adult males used such meetings to govern themselves.

In many ways, the public meetings we hold today to discuss local zoning policy, approve a proposed development, or otherwise shape the evolution of our neighborhoods haven’t shifted very far from that original format. Sadly, that includes the part about older, white males, especially homeowners, tending to have outsized power in these settings.

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A 2018 paper by a trio of Boston University researchers quantified the feelings many attendees have about modern public meetings: They’re simply not very reflective of the public. The paper “Racial Disparities in Housing Politics: Evidence from Administrative Data,” which analyzed records from such meetings in nearly 100 Boston-area communities, found that while 80 percent of the area population is white, an estimated 95 percent of meetings attendees were white. Another of the team’s studies found that the vast majority of comments delivered during public meetings opposed new housing projects: 63 percent of attendees said no, whereas just 15 percent said yes (the rest were deemed neutral). The researchers concluded that “the incentives to show up and oppose new housing are far stronger.”

Katherine Einstein, a member of the Boston University research team and author of Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis, says the overrepresentation at these meetings of those who espouse an anti-development, NIMBY (not in my backyard) mentality is a national issue, especially since white participants were much more likely than black ones to oppose new housing. (Her team’s research found that the difference couldn’t be explained away by differences in homeownership rates.) See the infamous “zucchini-gate” example from Berkeley, California, where a homeowner argued the shade cast by a two-story building would (gasp) harm her vegetable garden.

Part of it comes from the way the benefits and downsides of a development are distributed. The benefits of, say, a new affordable housing project may help a citywide housing shortage, but downsides such as increased local traffic are concentrated in the immediate surrounding area, galvanizing neighbors to make their voices heard. As Williamson and Fung noted, this leads to meetings dominated by special-interest groups and those with an immediate stake in the project. That means local land use decisions, fundamental to shaping neighborhoods, don’t properly reflect the will of those who live there.

“You can find neighborhood defenders everywhere,” Einstein says. “Anywhere you go, you’ll find people in privileged places fighting against new housing.”

Empowerment within messy direct democracy

The problem of misrepresentation at public meetings, neighborhood councils, and other such hyper-localized public forums stems from their design. While the United Kingdom and Australia have similar issues around public meetings, representation, and locals pushing back against development, says Einstein, the U.S. has “unusually strong local control,” and the passage of sunshine laws, which mandated meetings be public, has resulted in more opportunities for local voices to be heard.

Held at times of day that can make it hard for many people to attend without missing work, usually without day care options, and sometimes in locations not favorable to those with disabilities or who rely on transit, these meetings already exclude many groups before they even start. Then there’s the matter of format: Experts and officials typically sit behind a table and give speeches and make presentations, with a microphone set up to take comments from neighbors who can spare the time to spend hours waiting for a few minutes on the mic. No surprise that a Knight Foundation study from 2010 found that attending a public meeting didn’t make residents feel more or less connected to their communities.

“The dynamic is just so unproductive,” says Sara Aye, a designer and executive director of Greater Good Studio in Chicago, which focuses in part on improving public engagement. “It’s just asking for your opinion and encourages you to think for only yourself and advocate for only yourself. This is a format that rewards the squeaky wheel, rewarding those who are comfortable making grand, sweeping statements.”

As much as the already privileged tend to benefit from meeting scenarios where they’re stopping a project from moving forward, the opposite tends to happen when marginalized groups want their voices heard. Neighborhood activists pushing back against new developments, afraid a new project might encourage gentrification, often end up feeling ignored. As Harvard researchers Williamson and Fung noted, local governments have been accused of using meetings to “decide, announce, and defend” instead of actually getting feedback and altering plans in response.

“The spatial arrangement of these meetings, with experts and government officials in the front, just subtly says, ‘We, the outsiders with power, know best,’” says Aye, especially when those in the audience are of people of color or renters. “It makes residents feel like they’re only here to listen, and if they didn’t show up, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference, because they’re anonymous.”

The power imbalance at public meetings is hard to ignore. And yet, Einstein, Aye, and others believe that’s not really the root problem that needs to be addressed.

“Not holding your meetings at noon on Tuesday, providing childcare, and working to get a gender and age diverse audience, I applaud those efforts,” says Einstein. “Reducing the cost of participation is key. But that isn’t helping people get interested in politics. That’s the other problem. A more convenient time isn’t going to solve the interest part of the equation.”

“Meetings can often become one of two nightmare scenarios,” says Damon Rich, an urban planner and co-founder of Hector, a design studio in Newark, New Jersey. “One is when a small group of people talks too much, and the other is when the public is there and engaged, but it becomes an empty formality. If there’s one trend we’re seeing, it’s creating even more manicured mechanisms to supposedly gather people’s opinion. Citizen engagement is an industry today, and it’s often trying to hide antagonism, and put it under the rug.”

If you want authentic responses, starting with the event isn’t the right approach, according to Aye. Officials need to convince people their voices will actually be heard. And the architects and designers need to connect with the community before such an event to truly claim they have community buy-in.

“It’s not going to be possible to convince people who have been let down so many times that this initiative is different, that they should place their trust in this event and get their hopes up that they’ll have real power to change their community,” she says. “It’s a real barrier everywhere, especially places that have experienced gentrification and disinvestment.”

To make a meeting work, you need to get started before the event

Aye’s own experience designing public input processes suggests that effective public engagement can’t begin with who shows up at the event. In 2018, she and her team at Greater Good Studio designed designed a public engagement plan for Raising Places, an initiative by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to enlist community members to design their own programs to promote healthy childhoods.

Greater Good approached the project like organizers. They reached out to the community, held lots of one-on-one conversations, and enlisted community groups to take leadership roles and help with outreach. The nine-month outreach program focused first on diagnosing and understanding the issues, with weeks of events focused on observation, immersion, and the discussion of root causes with the community, as well as framing goals. For instance, Megkian Doyle, a representative of one of the groups, the Bighorn Valley Health Center in southeastern Montana, an organization that serves a large Native American population, told Curbed they felt they were reaching new people, and going beyond formalities to having deeper conversations about providing health care with community members. All this interaction took place before a single meeting dedicated to solutions. So far, of the six groups that participated in 2018, Aye says, five have already successfully launched community-developed programs.

“The message this format says is we’re going to listen to you,” she says. “That’s why you talk to people, so they can understand the message loud and clear. It’ll be different because we’ll listen to you.”

Damon Rich and his firm Hector had a similar experience designing neighborhood plans in Detroit. When they started working last year on a framework for a new neighborhood plan for Cody Rouge and Warrendale neighborhoods—basically a planning document for what comes next—they started by employing a team of teenagers two days a week to work with the design team.

“These 13- to 18-year-olds led the event, and were on the mic from the jump,” says Rich. “The city wasn’t necessarily comfortable with it.”

Greater Good Studio has also experimented with meetings that turn what’s normally a staged, one-at-a-time conversation into something more freeform. As part of ideas workshops around health care policy they staged in five California cities for the state government, Greater Good organized feedback events into something more akin to a science fair. Different stakeholders and local coalitions set up at tables spread around the room, and community members circulated around the stations all night, chatting and delivering feedback and having conversations.

“The power was distributed around the room, so anybody can engage with them,” she says. “This reinforces the message it’s a project the community owns.”

Is local control a good idea in the first place?

There’s another school of thought that says the best meeting may be not having a meeting at all. If the benefits of building certain projects are diffuse, says Boston’s Einstein, it means assembling a supportive coalition at a neighborhood level may be too high a bar to set. Maybe the better process is setting more policy at the city or even state level, to allow more projects to move forward to benefit the community as a whole.

This is one of the arguments in favor of the recent wave of upzoning legislation in states and cities across the country; if the dense, affordable housing projects the city needs keep getting shot down by neighborhood councils and legislators, should we change the rules so they don’t have the power to stop those projects?

“We found that so many people who shoot down projects at meetings complained about parking, yet the evidence suggests we have an oversupply of parking in nearly every city,” she says. “I wish more cities were serious about eliminating parking minimums.”

Of course, losing that kind of power looks a lot different if your neighborhood was the victim of urban renewal, or fears gentrification and displacement. This is one of the reasons California’s transit density bill, SB50, which sought to supercede local control over zoning near transit lines, was defeated for the third time last month. Some neighborhood groups from low-income areas feared losing the power to push back against unwanted developments, and having their voice shut out.

Einstein believes there should be more public participation focused on the citywide level, not just local decisions. Having a meeting on every two-level building going up will just attract certain stakeholders. Getting people to come out to a city-wide event focused on building more housing via zoning reform might get more participation.

“California and Los Angeles have had a tough time with this since taking away local control in Beverly Hills also means taking away control in less privileged areas,” she says. “Those areas may still want to use local control and there are very good reasons for them to want this. They’re often the same areas that were railroaded during urban renewal and see local control as a protection against developer and government overreach.”

“There’s a lot driving the narrative about pushing back on local government,” says Rich. “People are co-opting Jane Jacobs, saying it’s us the people against big government, not that we’re the government.”

Meeting the public where they are

Some cities have begun to overhaul their systems for taking public feedback: Pittsburgh is one that has instituted a participatory budgeting process, to provide more grassroots input on city spending, and Seattle broke up its Neighborhood District Councils in 2016, which were seen as dominated by activist homeowners, replacing them with a Community Involvement Commission and Seattle Renters Commission, aiming to get more diverse voices engaged in local planning decisions. But amid the constant battles, one success story about a city reform effort showed the potential of getting cities to see the value in better public outreach.

Minneapolis just passed its 2040 plan, a progressive vision for land use that upzoned the entire city, which supporters believe will create more density and affordable housing, and have spillover effects on transportation, sustainability, and equity. The plan was passed by a progressive city council. But what really made it possible, and what gave the council the backing and support to enact such a big shift, was the constant grassroots support generated by the city’s extensive public outreach plan, masterminded by planner and city council member Lisa Bender.

“Minneapolis decided to do engagement in a different way,” says Janne Flisrand, part of the Neighbors for More Neighbors civic group that supported the plan. “They made it a point to go to communities that tend to be underrepresented—less educated, parents, people without cars, immigrants, young people, and people of color. They made a real effort to provide many different ways to engage.”

There were the standard “shouty meetings,” says Flisrand. But there were also events at city festivals that met people where they were, instead of the other way around. The city hired artists to attend and organize events to gauge citizen feedback; poets would summarize someone’s response at a meeting, or improv crews would host game shows, asking contestants to answer trivia soliciting their thoughts about what Minneapolis should look like in 2040. The city also launched an easy-to-use mobile site to garner feedback, asking for anonymous comments that made people feel comfortable expressing their ideas. The main thrust of the program was values; residents understood how values informed policy, and vice versa, making it easy to see the value in specific policy.

Most importantly, says Flisrand, the city provided a space for advocates to get involved.

“We as advocates needed the city to give us space to show up, and I would argue the city needed us to organize to show everyone that there was broad support for a city where all citizens could thrive,” she says. “The city recognized there were processes that helped those who were already being served, and designed something for everybody else.”

Curbed San Francisco

March 2020

Canceled events, lost work, shuttered stores, empty public spaces, and panic shopping: Life during coronavirus has rapidly, and overwhelmingly, changed.

Now San Francisco, which was one of the first cities to declare an emergency over the spread of the disease, and the greater Bay Area have become the first to institute shelter-in-place restrictions. These orders now cover Napa and Sonoma counties as well as the six-county area that went under shelter-in-place orders on midnight Tuesday. On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered all of California to “stay at home.” Other cities in the U.S. are considering similarly serious policies.

What does it mean to live under shelter-in-place restrictions? Officially, the order mandates that “all public and private gatherings of any number of people occurring outside a household or living unit are prohibited,” and that “essential businesses,” like pharmacies and grocery stores, will remain open, with restaurants and cafes on takeout-only status. But that hardly captures the upheaval, perspectives, and creative problem-solving that come with life under a form of lockdown.

Curbed spoke with Bay Area residents to get a sense of how their lives have and haven’t changed since these orders were announced earlier this week, and the advice they’d provide to other Americans who may soon by living under similar restrictions. If you’d like to share your own stories, please reach out to Curbed San Francisco at brock@curbed.com.

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“It’s hard to shift your priorities so quickly and dramatically.” —Beth Spotswood, 42, Novato

A freelance writer for Alta Magazine and a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Spotswood, who lives with her husband and her 16-month-old son, Leo, says the shelter-in-place order has “dramatically changed her lifestyle,” with child care quickly becoming an immediate, pressing concern.

“My parents live 20 minutes away, they’re both in their 70s, and the plan was once day care closed, they would be primary babysitters for my son and nearby niece,” she says. But that plan has been upended by increasing restrictions on travel and movement.

“We need to get our work done,” she says. “We’re all concerned about our jobs and having income and making mortgage and car payments, and affording the overpriced toilet paper at the store, and keeping our fridge stocked, and we need to work. And it’s impossible with a 16-month-old pulling at your leg and wanting apples. Right now, I’m finding things to worry about. He’s at an important stage of his social development. If he can’t interact with kids for a number of months, will he be like a feral child who came out of the woods after being raised by wolves?”

She notes upfront that the family is healthy, that they have a roof over their heads and food in the fridge, and that she’s lucky to have a job, especially one with coworkers with kids who understand her struggles. But she still needs to get the work done. And it’s difficult to balance competing impulses, especially around health and safety.

“One of the things I’m considering is should our parents stay with us,” she says. “Will that protect them? It’s hard. They’re pretty stubborn… they want to see their grandkids, and I totally understand. And I’m selfishly thinking, I need child care, but we need to have a discussion moving forward. Staying healthy is the most important thing—if we’re bored, lonely, and not the best at our jobs for a couple of months, it’s going to be okay.”

When the order came, she says, the family was already doing their own version of shelter in place. She says that the idea of an emergency, as a general concept, wasn’t unfamiliar in a part of the country that prepares for wildfires and earthquakes. But what took a while to sink in was the projected length of time these social distancing orders will be in place. Neighbors are still going for walks in the wilderness near her home, and now keeping a safe distance, but there’s a new sense of loneliness.

“It’s hard to shift your priorities so quickly and dramatically,” she says. And the unknown is difficult to process right now. Two weeks ago, she was wondering if the family would still be able to take a planned cruise to Vancouver later this year on the Grand Princess. Concerns are much more immediate now. “I can’t plan right now. I just need to sit in the discomfort of it. I can’t shop it out, meet my girlfriends, do playdates … so much of our life is up-close social interaction. It’s a very uncertain time, and people have survived far worse and we will get through this. But I look forward to getting through to the other side.”

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“The stress of that has started to prepare me for what’s coming.” —Emily Chapman, 42, Alameda

This isn’t Emily Chapman’s first experience with a shutdown. Her husband, who works as a helicopter pilot for the Coast Guard, wasn’t paid during the most recent government shutdown.

“The stress of that has started to prepare me for what’s coming,” she says.

But now, with the shelter-in-place orders, she’s the one without a job. The orthodontic office where she works as a treatment coordinator closed indefinitely Monday, and with economic uncertainty ahead, her family is about to dip into savings. It’s challenging, and she’s filing for unemployment.

It’s also challenging for her entire family. She’s been watching and teaching her two children, a 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter, and trying to stick to the curriculum her first-grader’s teacher emailed all parents. Her husband has also been incredibly busy, working with the cruise ships that recently docked in Oakland with passengers who tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The family is taking all the necessary safety precautions.

She’s starting to see the effects of people hoarding food when she shops at nearby stores..

“I hope other people think about others, especially those who really need it,” she says. “All of my coworkers are putting on a brave front and we’re pretty stressed out, especially the single moms working in my office, who aren’t sure what they’re going to do. This could last into the summer, who knows?”

She says the challenge so far has been finding ways not to drive yourself crazy. Organizing around the house has helped, giving her something to do to pass the time. FaceTime conversations also help. The lack of social interaction has been hard, especially for someone who works with the public for a living.

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“We’re already all connected online.” —Robert Gatdula, 29, Sunnyvale

A hardware engineer working in Silicon Valley, Robert had already prepared for working from home before the shelter-in-place rules went into effect. He took a few spare monitors from the office and set up a cubicle-like workstation on a table in the living room of his one-bedroom apartment. But since Tuesday, he’s become much more aware of every inch of the unit’s 676 square feet.

“I tend to be on the more homebody side, when it comes to regaining my energy throughout the week, so in a sense, I haven’t been negatively impacted too much,” he says.

Like many, he’s found new ways to interact and socialize using technology. He’s been meeting with friends via video services like Zoom; they’ve even experimented with watching movies together via screen sharing, and may move to playing board games together remotely (though that means everyone needs to buy their own board). He says that while we should certainly abide by the spatial guidelines provided by health officials, in this time of physical isolation, we should retire the term social distancing, since “it implies we’re all going to be socially inept.”

“The thing we need to realize is that we’re already all connected online,” he says. “This is how we primarily interact ever since smartphones have become ubiquitous in our lives. People already know how to use these things—they maybe just need to do it more often.”

Gatdula has gotten into his hobbies, too, especially swing dancing. There’s a community of thousands of swing dancers in the Bay Area, and the two- or three-night-a-week events can’t happen anymore, a realization that “sunk” Gatdula. But that doesn’t mean the community has disappeared; it’s just moved online. Many of the musicians who play at larger dances have create virtual events where they stream music they play at home, and dancers have performed “together,” dancing on video with each other along to a streaming soundtrack.

While he’s found new ways to maintain social ties, he also says the shelter-in-place order has made him take the disease even more seriously. He’s shopping on off hours, trying to go during the week or very late at night to stay away from crowds. He’s also seen friends who even a few days ago weren’t taking the novel coronavirus seriously suddenly be much more diligent about keeping their distance. Still, when he’s at home looking off his balcony, enjoying the relative quiet of less traffic, he feels things will work out.

“This area is full of smart and creative people, so I think we’ll get through this,” he says.

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“We smile more, and I hope that stays as a norm.” —Kate Aishton, 37, San Francisco

When Aishton first heard about the shelter-in-place order, it didn’t change how her family reacted to the new coronavirus. An attorney, she works remotely from their home near Balboa Park as her husband, a writer, watches their two boys, 2 and 5 years old. But it did change her mentality. She’s been stress-baking a lot, and the combination of the new order and the release of federal recommendations earlier this week caused her to think a lot about her parents, who live in Florida and Georgia.

“I moved from the south to this city that shares my values and views toward community and taking care on each other, and has enacted concrete policy steps, such as putting a moratorium on evictions,” she says. “I left behind all these people I love in a place that doesn’t value the social safety net as much.”

The pace of life has shifted, she says. It’s been nice to work from home, and her company has been supportive. This week has been “leveling” for people at the office. Day care is closed, nannies are on lockdown, public and private school are shuttered, and everybody has accepted that not having child care makes many things impossible, and not as much is getting done.

“This would be a lot more painful at a typical law firm,” she says. “I can’t imagine trying to bill hours for clients, or meeting for the sake of meeting right now.”

Norms have also shifted in the neighborhood and in the city. Aisles in grocery stores “look like the apocalypse,” while staff remain thoughtful despite customers being on edge. Over the weekend, the city turned into a ghost town. On family walks, they’d see maybe one other person walking a dog.

“People are extra friendly because it feels bad to physically avoid your neighbor,” Aishton says. “We smile more, and I hope that stays as a norm. ‘Don’t touch me, just make it clear with your face you’re a nice neighbor.’”

Fortunately, her kids haven’t run into any of their school friends on walks, an inevitability she feels will be difficult. How to explain the situation in a way that doesn’t make them feel bad, or isn’t scary?

Sheltering in place has been, if not easy, at least consistent, says Aishton. They have the luxury of being able to do this without a tremendous financial burden or immediate risk of losing their jobs. With her local government making explicit policy choices, it’s easy to communicate the social limitations to kids. Nobody is allowed to meet outside the house, and kids look out the window and see everybody is in the same boat.

Another norm she hopes changes? People stay home if they’re sick.

“It’s just so clearly this cultural more that’s helped lead us here,” she says. “I’m hoping that this will lead to things like better public health care.”

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“We’re in a particularly difficult time period.” —Cary Gold, 63, San Francisco

As the director of litigation and policy for the Eviction Defense Collaborative, Cary Gold is used to helping those going through tough times. Right now, however, she’s facing her own challenge at home. Her older husband was recently diagnosed with Stage 3 esophageal cancer, and is scheduled to start treatment at a cancer hospital on March 30.

“We’re in a particularly difficult time period,” she says. “I think my husband’s deepest fear is that he’s not even going to make it to get his treatment for cancer. It’s hard enough to have hope when faced with this diagnosis, and we’re working hard to keep that hope, so our children feel hopeful. But when you overlay it with COVID-19, it’s very hard to keep that mindset.”

The family has been overly cautious at home, so the shelter-in-place order hasn’t significantly shifted their everyday. The dog still needs to be walked. Her son, who’s now living at home after in-person classes shut down at City College, wakes up and attends classes virtually in his pajamas. Her daughter, who had been working as a waitress, was terrified she’d get exposed and bring the virus home, putting her father at risk, but now that she’s not going in to work anymore, that’s not as much of an issue. Gold is also still busy at work. Despite the eviction moratorium, it’s still legal for evictions around health and safety issues to proceed, so her office remains open, working with a skeleton crew of three or four workers, rotating staff so people aren’t taking risks.

“The world didn’t shut down,” she says. As we spoke, she received three texts from clients inquiring about support services and what the new regulations meant. She’s now working from home, but last week, it was tough to decide to go into the office, due to the existing health concerns at home. “I felt like I was being torn between my commitment to my family and my commitment to my community.”

She has no idea how busy her office will be going forward; a third of eviction cases typically fall under the health and safety category.

“This is very hard,” she says. “I’m asking staff to go into the office and take these risks every day. But we do need to keep the clinic open.”

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“We’re already on a crisis baseline.” —Anonymous nurse, 36, San Francisco

The anonymous medical staffer who spoke to Curbed works in an outpatient capacity as a nurse practitioner at an area hospital, meaning she doesn’t treat emergency cases. She lives alone in her apartment, and instead of seeing patients at work right now, she holds endless telemedicine appointments with those not directly affected by the pandemic, carrying on the regular work of the health care system as COVID-19 cases surge nationwide. She’s been slammed, working nonstop, and has been completely alone for the past five days.

But that doesn’t mean she’s not intimately aware of what her colleagues have experienced.

“I’d say 50 to 75 percent of us are working on coronavirus,” she says. “It’s literally survival mode every day. The rules keep changing as we go.”

Up until a few weeks ago, she was working with patients without any personal protective gear. When one of her patients showed symptoms and got tested for COVID-19, she began to worry she’d unknowingly passed it to friends (thankfully, the test came back negative).

Stockpiles of necessary supplies are running low at her hospital, she says, and staff has been told to reuse masks and plastic gowns. The CDC says to use bandanas in lieu of masks; she says it’s “crazy,” like they’re doing “cowboy medicine.”

“The U.S. health care system operates at max capacity as it is,” she says. “We don’t have tons of excess space, supplies, or human resources. We’re already on a crisis baseline. Our health care system was already under-supported.”

Her grandpa was a physician who voluntarily enlisted to serve in World War II, leaving his wife to take care of wounded soldiers overseas for two years. That example, which inspired her to get into medicine, is one she’s been channeling lately, trusting that if he could do it, she can do it.

“People are in a constant state of adrenaline rush right now,” she says. “They’re putting their heads down, taking it one step at a time, and know this is a huge sacrifice. If we don’t do it, nobody else will; there isn’t much of a choice. It just feels alone, like we’re not being supported, and it’s scary. I feel supported by my local government. San Francisco led the way in the shelter-in-place order. But not by the federal government.”

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“Worry is a conversation you have with yourself.” —Carol Gordon, 75, San Francisco

An older adult living alone in a subsidized apartment near Union Square, Carol Gordon, like everyone, is coping with a new social reality. The street outside her home has grown quiet, and even in her building, which consists mostly of single-bedroom apartments for seniors, most of whom are Cantonese-speaking Chinese-Americans, options for interaction have shrunk. Management canceled the twice-weekly morning coffee hour.

“I appreciate the quiet, but it’s taking a terrible toll economically,” she says. “I’m on a small Social Security benefit, and I’ll be able to cover my rent. I worry about the coffee shop and the New Delhi Indian restaurant next door. The owner said he’s never been so scared in his life, now that everything he’s worked for in his life is in danger of being lost.” But she still finds ways to stay connected. She talks to family on the phone, and says she’s been practicing playing her penny whistle, or tin whistle (a common instrument in Irish music).

After her sister died unexpectedly seven years ago, she joined a choir—“I couldn’t afford therapy, so if you can’t scream, sing, it’s good for your cardiovascular system”—and while she hasn’t performed in years, she’s still in touch with friends from the ensemble. Since the coronavirus arrived and shelter-in-place was mandated, she’s started sending the group periodic emails, collecting things she’s seen in the paper that were interesting, including COVID-19 news as well as short videos, cartoons, memes, and GIFs. She read part of her March 19 letter: “I hope you’re doing well and using your indoor time for all the things you always wanted to do: read, relax, talk with friends, study other languages.”

She’s a bit of an insomniac, and says she’s found herself up at 3 a.m., laughing at stand-up videos posted by a comedy club in Utah.

“I’ve never watched so many comedies in one night, there are so many on YouTube.com,” she says. “It’s so important emotionally to find some humor now.”

She notes that there’s no use right now in panic, and “worry is a conversation you have with yourself.” Food is being delivered to the building, so she hasn’t gone out, and she really doesn’t want to, at least until people stop being crazy. She’s read stories about people running out to gun shops and buying guns and ammo and wonders what they’re going to do, rob someone for toilet paper?

“I’m 75, life expectancy isn’t very long anyway, and I’ve pretty much concluded that I’m going to die alone, which is very different from being lonely,” she says. “From the moment you’re born, you’re headed toward death, the only question is how and when. I’m sort of a fatalist in that respect. I’m not going to panic about this. Once we all get through this, we can look back and collapse, or maybe play our penny whistles. I do consider myself fortunate.”

Curbed

December 2018

A year ago, a warehouse filled with rows of electric scooters might have seemed a little dorky, maybe home to a company trying to show fanny pack-wearing tourists local landmarks. But today, in Santa Monica, California, an old industrial space filled with hundreds of electric scooters with purple and pink stripes represents one of the hottest innovations in urban transportation.

Lyft set up this operations center as part of its bet that the future of the company involves replacing lots of car trips with rides on electric scooters and electric bikes. Eventually, a Lyft spokesperson told me, the idea is to create a “Netflix of transportation,” offering scooter, e-bike, and car rides with a single subscription, as well as guidance to link trips to public transit.

A late entrant into the dockless scooter craze, Lyft is doing its best to catch up. This facility is the first of what the company, valued at $15 billion, expects will be a string of scooter depots, repair and recovery operations for the company’s foray into micromobility. As a participant in Santa Monica’s electric scooter pilot, the company is allowed to place 250 scooters on the street at any one time. Everything else happens under this roof. (The company provided an exclusive tour on the condition the warehouse location wasn’t revealed.)

Inside empty offices on the second floor, piles of scooters sit in different states of disarray or disrepair, ready to be refurbished by a team of mechanics. On the main floor, nearly a dozen operations managers monitor the fleet 24 hours a day, staring at two large monitors that track the location of every vehicle in service.

A data team crunches usage and trip data to find the best locations to place scooters throughout the day, and contract workers fan out multiple times a day to keep everything humming along. Rows and rows of hundreds of extra scooters, lined up across the warehouse floor, quietly power up, chargers blinking.

Why Santa Monica is scooter city

While San Francisco, thrust into the media spotlight early during “scooter-geddon,” has become more of a sidenote, no other city has been more central to the rise of the dockless electric scooter craze than Santa Monica.

It’s the birthplace of Bird, a startup that hit a billion-dollar valuation in a little over a year, three times faster than Airbnb. It’s also currently operating a scooter pilot program, pitting the four biggest players in the game—Bird, Lime, Lyft, and Uber, under the Jump brand—against each other in a battle for the right to operate within city limits.

“Santa Monica is important because it’s popular, congested, and has all the problems our scooters attack,” says Thomas Lord, the general manager of Lime’s Los Angeles-area operations. “It also had a progressive view of scooters. A couple operations managers have told me that if the first scooter didn’t go out in Santa Monica, the industry maybe would have died last year.”

The luck of being Bird’s home, paired with receptive local leaders, means the rise and regulation of dockless electric scooters in this wealthy, seaside Southern California city of 93,000 helped set the tone for a potential transportation revolution. That may seem overwrought, since these are electric scooters we’re talking about. But this is an industry that, in the space of a year, has sponged up hundreds of millions in venture-capital funding and spread to hundreds of cities across the globe. Lime and Bird are valued at more than a billion dollars.

When you talk to transit experts, planners, and transit companies—Curbed spoke to representatives of all four operators in Santa Monica, as well as city officials—they see nothing less than a chance to break the country of its car addiction, reduce carbon emissions, reshape our streets, and change how people get around cities. Turns out those small scooters make a hell of a soapbox.

“Are cities going to choose to help solve the climate crisis and get people out of cars?” says David Estrada, Bird’s chief legal officer and head of public policy. “If you look at the IPCC report, there’s some serious language about cutting out the use of fossil fuels. Are cities currently treating the climate as a crisis?”

Estrada’s response is typical of the industry’s communications strategy. Focus on solutions. Bird, for example, tries to highlight the fact that cities need to invest more in bike lanes, not that a private company is crowding public streets with vehicles earning the company money.

Rick Cole, Santa Monica’s city manager, says the City Council has taken the long view, looking to be a seedbed for experimentation. “We don’t want to be the city that squelched a promising mobility innovation, we want to be the city that found a way to domesticate it,” he says. But that has come with significant growing pains, and what Cole calls “white-hot political opposition.”

Santa Monica’s experience with scooters offers insight into the key conflicts driving the popularity and continued growth of these companies: cars versus pedestrians, regulations versus technological revolution, and hype versus helping people better navigate the places they live and work. Do scooter companies—and the micromobility revolution their success could usher in—represent a real chance to create a human-scale transit network?

The appeal of electric scooters

According to the rules outlined in Santa Monica’s Shared Mobility Pilot Program, 2,500 scooters and e-bikes, split between the four operators, can be found on city streets at any one time. A quick trip through Santa Monica today shows scooters have taken root. Take a walk down Main Street, a strip of shops and restaurants that runs parallel to the Pacific; stroll through downtown near the city’s Promenade; or stop by Metro light-rail stops on the Expo Line during rush hour, and you’ll see clusters of scooters and electric bikes on sidewalks, or streaming down the street.

Wake up early enough, before the sun rises, and you’ll see teams of contract workers setting up scooters at busy intersections, unloading them out of vans or pickup trucks and lining them up in perfect rows, all tilted in the same direction, like actors taking a bow at curtain call.

Scooters became popular in Santa Monica due to a combination of factors: downtown density, the fun of riding on beachfront paths, a great climate, a growing network of protected bike lanes, as well as the presence of Bird founder Travis VanderZanden—a former executive at both Uber and Lyft who, disillusioned with the ride-hailing industry, left Uber and moved to Southern California in 2016.

But, in many ways, the rise of scooters boils down to two facts about U.S. transportation: Car-dependent Americans really, truly hate traffic, and 40 percent of car trips in the United States are under two miles. Commute times and congestion are increasing, and ride-hailing, initially promoted as a solution, is consistently proven, in studyafter study, to be making the problem worse. Or, as Lyft’s head of bike, scooter, and pedestrian policy Caroline Samponaro says, “There’s far more demand for mobility in a city than there’s mobility in a city.”

Deploying drivers for these short trips and navigating congested streets for little return is making less and less financial sense for Uber and Lyft. Dockless electric scooters offer an energy-efficient way to tackle these short trips without getting into a car.

Of course, there’s already a widely available vehicle that excels at short, car-free trips: the bicycle. But bikes aren’t nearly as seamless as a portable scooter. They take effort, can leave riders sweaty and tired upon arrival, and offer challenges to older riders or those with physical disabilities. There’s no special gear or effort, no lycra shorts, and no virtue signaling with electric scooters; nobody calls themselves a Scooterist.

“Based on our data, dockless bikes were not seeing utilization rates that were as high as dockless scooters, once scooters were introduced in late 2017 and early 2018,” says Regina Clewlow, co-founder of Populus, a mobility data platform for cities. “Utilization rates for scooters range from four trips to as high as 12 trips per day, depending on how many competitors are in a city. The average appears to fall closer to five trips a day in most major markets.”

That ease of use had made electric scooters, as well as electric pedal-assist bikes, take off. A Populous study found that scooters have “unprecedented” and “remarkably high adoption rates given their recent arrival.” Bird and Lime hit 10 million rides in less than a year; Uber took three years to hit that milestone. And, while they’ve been tagged as dangerous vehicles irresponsibly ridden—a class-action lawsuit accuses scooter operators of gross negligence, and two riders in the U.S. have died in accidents—a study conducted in Austin found scooter riders there were injured at half the rate of bike riders.

Evidence also suggests scooters can help increase ridership of other forms of shared mobility. Data from Portland, Oregon, which has dockless scooters as well as the docked Biketown bike-share service, found that between late July and late November, a period during which 700,000 scooter rides were taken, bike-share usage actually increased 6 percent year over year.

Ideally, scooters can serve as a low-cost, last-mile solution and connect riders to public transit; in Santa Monica, usage is already clustered around light-rail stops.

“It’s changing people’s perspectives on how they can get around,” says Cynthia Rose, the leader of Santa Monica Spoke, the city’s bike advocacy group. “It’s moving people to look beyond getting around by car.”

Even if scooter usage cannibalizes some existing transit trips, it’s a numbers game, argues Carter Rubin, a mobility and climate advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a Santa Monica resident.

“If, within a group of 50 scooter trips, just a few of those eliminate a car trips, based on the energy used for both, it’s a net positive in terms of emissions,” he says.

How the scooter craze started in Santa Monica

When the idea for a dockless scooter system arrived at City Hall in the summer of 2017, the request to start the company was unorthodox. VanderZanden launched his startup by ordering 10 scooters off the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, having a skeleton crew of coders put together an app, and leaving the scooters around Santa Monica with tags attached, explaining how they worked.

Early communications with the city were slightly improvisational. At one point, VanderZanden sent the city’s Mayor Ted Winterer a message via Linkedin as a way to communicate his intentions. When he first applied for licenses for the scooter, VanderZanden was told the only city permits that even remotely fit his needs were permits for vending machines.

Francie Stefan, the city’s acting chief mobility officer, wasn’t surprised by the technology. Santa Monica has its own Breeze bike-share network, and had been tracking changes in transit tech, watching the rise and fall of dockless bike-share systems, such as Ofo and Mobike. Stefan also felt a scooter network was worth trying because she already had the data that showed it might work.

Santa Monica had started conducting its own resident travel survey the previous year, a relatively expensive process for a city of its size. The city found the same data point that so intrigued scooter companies and their investors: More than 40 percent of the city’s trips were two miles or less, most of which were solo drivers in a car.

Stefan saw scooters as a way to turn these short car trips into something less energy-intensive, freeing up road space and helping the city meet its climate goals. The transit network is an ecosystem, Stefan often says, and, like any ecosystem, when a single species dominates, it isn’t healthy.

“We’ve spent decades widening roads and accommodating cars, and now is the moment where we’re reflecting and thinking, ‘Is that really working for everyone?’” she says.

Bird’s scooters arrived in Santa Monica to little fanfare last fall, but over time, especially after Lime arrived last April, they became ubiquitous, for better or worse. Residents complained about scooters blocking sidewalks—which is still the most common complaint—users joyriding down city streets and on the beach path, and riders leaving stray scooters in front of building entrances. Lime’s manager, Thomas Lord, remembers the team finding a scooter hanging over a bluff in Palisades Park, which required a grappling hook to recover. (“We Batman-ed that scooter,” he says.)

Stefan says the past summer’s rush,“having thousands of people from LA County trying scooters for the first time on our streets every week,” was a learning experience for the city and scooter companies.

Cole, the city manager, called it a “punishing experiment,” as a wave of first-time riders, and their behaviors, created a response unlike anything he’s seen working in government.

He jokes that during that period he spent a third of his time running the city, a third of his time answering emails from those who thought scooters represented the end of Western civilization, and a third of his time responding to Twitter posts that he was clamping down on the best invention since the iPhone—and one that would save the planet.

The staff members in charge of regulations were often left scratching their heads trying to figure out fining and enforcement structures around driver’s license verification, helmet usage, parking scooters safely, and restrictions around riding on sidewalks. These issues also became tech and education challenges for the startups.

The public backlash—and the reaction of other city leaders to the arrival of scooters—has shown the “beg for forgiveness instead of asking for permission” policy won’t work in the long run. Scooter companies tried to rebrand, seeking to be better partners with governments (including hiring away many transit advocates and public policy experts, and creating tech tools to help cities manage scooters). Stefan said operators worked fast to find technical fixes when the city decided to ban scooter usage on the beachfront path.

Spoke’s Rose, the bike advocate, feels the initial rollout was a wasted opportunity. The scooter companies could have capitalized on better planning and safety, working with the bike and pedestrian advocates who have been at it for years. Instead, the operators have continually worked to gain public trust around safety issues. In February, Bird paid more than $300,000 to settle safety complaints and permitting issues with the city, and other operators have continually invested in safety-education programs, notably Lime’s recent $3 million Respect the Ride campaign.

“I understand this mentality: Ask for forgiveness, not permission,” she says. “Disrupting is not new. When the car came, it was a disruption, it was hated and vilified. But it seems like nobody thought about what’s going to happen after they disrupt.”

An attempt to regulate in the age of disruption

In June, as summer tourist traffic—and scooter rides—peaked, the city decided to take more formal control of scooter operations by introducing rules for a flexible scooter pilot program. Over a 16-month period beginning in September, companies would compete for the right to operate vehicles within city limits, judged on criteria including maintenance, education, safety, customer service, and data sharing. Stefan says the program was set up to be flexible and adjustable as the city sees fit, using a similar administrative framework previously utilized to test out medical marijuana.

After the city released preliminary rankings of the dozen startups that had applied for a spot, ranking Uber and Lyft above long-time scooter operators, Bird and Lime felt slighted, and would later stage a “day without scooters,” when the two companies removed their fleet from operation and persuaded dozens of supporters to protest at City Hall.

“No one has operated scooter and bike sharing on the scale Lime and Bird have,” said Sam Dreiman, Lime’s director of strategic development, recalling the frustration over the low ranking. “The city didn’t fully understand what it took to run a scooter-sharing operation. This isn’t something you can throw money and a team of engineers at. This takes real people to implement and fix problems, to make it an effective and reliable transit service, as opposed to some joyride thing.”

Eventually, Santa Monica announced all four companies would be part of the trial. Bird and Lime would have 750 scooters each, and Uber and Lyft would each be given 250 scooters and 500 e-bikes (Lyft has yet to roll out its e-bikes). Each startup would pay $20,000 for the right to operate, $130 per device, and $1 per device per day for the privilege of parking on the public sidewalk, money that the city would invest in infrastructure and safety improvements. Over time, as the companies proved their vehicles were being utilized at a high enough rate, they’d be given permission to operate more vehicles.

The template of this deal—companies play by the rules and help fund the infrastructure they benefit from, while the city lets new technology prove itself—has been influential for other cities looking to introduce their own pilots. It’s also an attempt to establish regulations for an age of disruption, or as Cole says, not merely an attempt to regulate micromobility, but an effort to figure out how to protect public safety and make rules in an era of rapid change.

“Our goal is to create a level playing field and see what the different operator responses are,” says Stefan. “It’s not a trial period, it’s a learning period.”

Since the program officially started in September, city staff and the four operators have kept in close contact, with regular emails and check-in meetings, including a Shared Mobility Pilot Community Advisory Meeting that held its first meeting late last month. The city’s bike-share coordinator is monitoring the program full time.

Stefan says the program has started to find its rhythm. Last month, when the American Film Market, a big industry event that annually generates more than $1 billion in deals, came to town, the scooter operators, in concert with event organizers, set up scooter-free zones along the event’s shuttle bus route.

The scooter caps have emerged as the most contested part of the program. As Santa Monica has acted proactively to try to establish better riding and parking conditions for scooter riders—adding scooter signage and even removing parking spaces to provide on-street scooter parking—the unwillingness to allow more scooters has frustrated operators. Before the trial, Bird had 3,000 vehicles in the city. Now, capped at 750, it’s had to pull back, losing some of the network effect.

“When you’re in Starbucks and see a scooter, and can rely on its availability, people begin to use scooters regularly,” says Estrada. “We had reached closer to a level of ubiquity where people were relying on them. Due to market dynamics, we’ve had to shrink the service area to focus on a roughly two-mile rectangle around downtown. We’re not servicing the outer areas as much, which would help us convert more car trips to scooter trips.”

Those caps may soon be changing. Recently, Santa Monica adopted the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), a micromobility data standard created by Los Angeles’s Department of Transportation, and will begin monitoring usage and utilization. As of mid-November, Stefan says most scooter companies average three to four rides per device per day, with a cyclical pattern of usage, rising from Monday throughout the week and dropping on Sunday. More than 500 individuals have ridden more than 30 times.

Santa Monica’s pilot program welcomed disruption, albeit a slow, steady, and well-monitored kind.

Racing climate change, at 15 miles per hour

Two months into the pilot, Cole says that he’s seen a real difference on the streets, as more first-time riders become regular scooter users. Amid the shock of the new, there are more users with helmets, more obeying stop signs, more acting as responsibly as any everyday driver, biker, or pedestrian.

As the operators begin designing their own vehicles, they’re counting on technology to help fix the problems of profitability and operations. Lime just introduced a Gen 3 scooter, with GPS capabilities that’ll eventually be used to more accurately park vehicles (an LED display will light up when the vehicle is in the right place to park).

“It’s important that we design the scooters, because the manufacturer doesn’t know what you’re doing,” says Lime’s Lord. “We understand the full picture of what’s being used.”

Bird, which is also designing its own scooters, is developing beacon technology to keep scooters off sidewalks (it’s currently looking for a test market). Small Bluetooth beacons, the size of poker chips, which can be embedded in the road, will detect when a scooter is close to the curb, warning it to stay away, and to set up beacon parking spots. In addition to its new Community Mode, which basically allows users to rat out scooters left outside of approved parking spaces, it’s a high-tech solution to the long-term problem of parking.

But even as it provides a model for how cities can balance innovation while supporting their own self-interest, has Santa Monica truly shown what scooters can do? More scooters, companies argue, mean more opportunities to replace car trips. Bird has even introduced a commuter program, which delivers a scooter to a rider’s front door. “The very first vehicle you need to see in the morning should be a scooter, not your car,” says Estrada.

Over and over, advocates and scooter companies point out that the real value here is deploying at a scale that the city isn’t yet comfortable with. Scooters, some argue, are being asked to navigate a lot more red tape compared to vehicles that have a much higher social cost. In their hometown, are scooters still being held back?

“There’s a lot of things Santa Monica is leading on,” says Bird’s Estrada. “But it’s a program that’s very much taking its time.”

To reshape transportation, and cut down on emissions from cars, rapid and radical change—even if it comes on two small wheels—is required.

“We don’t have a year to wait,” says Estrada.

Curbed

March 2020

On a small farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, perched on the edge of the sugarcane fields that run through the state’s midsection, married couple Carmen Franz and Tripp Eldridge look perfectly cast as hip millennial farmers. They’re tan, trim, and gregarious, ready to talk composting or crop rotation at a moment’s notice. They could be American Gothic 2020. The pair even occasionally posts video on their YouTube channel, Farmers on Bikes.

They represent a modern spin on farming in large part due to where they operate. They don’t work the land in a rural hamlet surrounded by empty fields. They grow fruits and vegetables within a 1,209-acre real estate development, Arden, a subdivision in western Palm Beach County. Arden is an agrihood: Instead of being built around a golf course, the heart of Arden is an organic farm where residents are allowed to till the soil and reap some of the bounty grown on-site. At Arden, a moderate-sized development which will eventually boast 2,000 single-family homes, the five-acre farm and big red barn sit a few hundred feet from the development’s clubhouse, which boasts terraced pools and waterfalls straight out of a resort.

The ironies of the concept become immediately apparent. At the grand opening celebration in November—where I visited model homes on streets with names like Wheelbarrow Bend, Tree Stand Terrace, and Heirloom Drive—I learned the farm, new homes, and manicured lakes stand on what was once entirely farmland. Arden was keeping alive the tradition of American suburbs being named after that which they bulldozed.

But talking with residents, the attractions of Arden and the lifestyle it claims to promote also become apparent. Amid the carnivalesque atmosphere of the grand opening, a mini street fair featuring tents, live music, games for kids, and food trucks, guests could tour the grounds of the farm, where Franz and Eldridge prepare a farmshare every four weeks for every family in the development. They grow an incredible assortment of food, 30 varieties of fruit and 100 varieties of vegetables, including mangoes, mamay, papaya, bananas, coconuts, and avocados. Inside the barn, a small market features products such as honey, hot sauce, and eggs from local farmers and makers (alcoholic fruit popsicles, I was told, were far and away the best-sellers). Baskets of fresh produce set out on wooden tables glistened in the humidity. In front of the barn, community herb gardens lining the main drive were open to all comers; many residents said they stop by on their way home from work to pick herbs for their evening meals.

“I don’t think anybody is making a claim that…agrihood farming is going to provide an alternative means of feeding large populations,” said Eldridge. “We’re not trying to feed 2,000 homes and replace their grocery bill. We’re providing a meaningful connection with nature that resonates with all the other amenities. Natural, healthy living, that’s what we’re trying to celebrate.”

That Truman Show-esque feeling of entering a staged environment hit me as I drove into the development. I was told the sculpted, curved road on which I entered, lined in native purple grasses swaying in the wind and pointing straight toward the development’s large central lake, was planned by landscape architects to help me decompress. Like so many suburbs past, Arden is a simulacrum: in this case, an artificial version of a healthy, farm-fresh lifestyle that, due to housing patterns and commercialized agriculture, is far from the norm in modern America. Arden doesn’t challenge that. Farming isn’t communal or even expected (though volunteers are invited to lend a hand); it’s merely another item in an amenities checklist that includes bike trails and tennis courts.

Many large-scale property developers see this combination of residential design, farming, and healthy living as a selling point. According to the Urban Land Institute, as of this past October, there were 90 agrihoods finished or in development across the United States, including Aberlin Springs near Cincinnati; Prairie Crossing in Grayslake, Illinois; Agritopia in Gilbert, Arizona; South Village in South Burlington, Vermont; and Hidden Springs in Boise, Idaho. These kinds of developments work for multiple reasons, said Kevin Carson, northern California president for the New Home Company, developer of the Cannery, a “farm-to-table”-themed development in Davis, California. Agrihoods offer residents an organizing principle and community gathering places.

Franz and Eldridge think the appeal is in a return to basics, even if that shift is happening somewhere that’s as much a theme park as it is a working farm.

“You need to unplug for a small moment and have meaningful connections, and get your hand in the dirt,” said Eldridge.

The more I spoke with residents at Arden and guests who attended the opening celebration with an eye toward moving in, the clearer it became that there was something significant behind the sales pitch. Many homeowners spoke of adopting healthier living habits. Nearby farmers felt the educational component was a great way to promote locally grown agriculture and help out struggling community farms. Arden is still a suburban housing development, and the rows of single-family homes built new, and farther and farther from job centers, are the opposite of a truly sustainable lifestyle. But it’s also true that Arden suggests that if suburban housing developments are going to continue to be built, there are ways to make them better.

Dan Rawn, a senior project manager with Freehold Communities, the national builder behind the project, said he’s never seen a reaction from buyers like the one he’s witnessed at Arden.

“I’ve been doing golf communities all my life, and they’re like mausoleums,” he said. “This place is alive.”

During my visit, the main highway leading to the development was lined with “Welcome to the Agrihood” signs. But when executives and planners at Freehold began envisioning Arden, which broke ground in 2017, farming wasn’t as central to the sales pitch as it is today.

According to Suzanne Maddalon, the company’s vice president for marketing, the other healthy-living features, including the clubhouse and pool and extensive trail network, were the initial focus. The farm was an add-on, something that played up the surrounding agricultural stronghold of west Palm Beach. As it has been for other developers experimenting with the agrihood concept, it was also a matter of the bottom line. Residents would pay just $20 per month, which is already included in HOA dues, to fund the farm’s operations, which include a box of fresh produce every four weeks. Farms use less land and require less maintenance than golf courses or swimming pools, and offer a point of differentiation in a crowded market (nearby megadevelopments will add thousands of new homes to West Palm Beach county over the next few years).

But Freehold quickly discovered that all potential buyers could talk about was the farm.

“It’s so unexpected to realize you can have this farm be a part of everyday life,” said Maddalon. “You see people get really engaged, and the word of mouth drives traffic.”

The other part of the equation, Maddalon said, was Carmen and Tripp, whom Freehold hired in early 2018 after coming across their YouTube videos. The couple took the farm concept and ran with it, building out the general store and adding events and cooking demos.

“They were incredibly gregarious and very engaging,” said Maddalon. “When I met them in person, it’s like they could have an HGTV show, 100 percent. They are very good at this.”

Freehold reps said it’s a little too early to call the development a success. Phase I has just finished; roughly a quarter of the site, and the main amenities, are complete. Three homebuilders, Lennar, Kenco Communities, and Ryan Homes, are building and selling models on-site, which range from roughly $300,000 to $900,000 and have sold faster than expected, according to Freehold and agents for the homebuilders. The rest of what will become Arden is currently covered in white gravel, construction equipment, and piles of shingles and supplies sitting at dead-end roads waiting to be turned into more homes.

During the grand opening party, Franz and Eldridge were in top form, giving farm tours despite the punishing midday sun. They led groups through a horseshoe-shaped collection of raised beds behind the barn. Smaller 60-foot beds held chard, kale, lettuce, and radishes, with larger beds set aside for slower-growing crops like okra, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Eldridge cut me bits of roselle hibiscus and picked berries from a strawberry tree (a plant native to the West Indies, also known as a Jamaica cherry), which tasted like cotton candy. They explained that the operation works off a complex master spreadsheet; to provide food for the entire development, they need to plant new seedlings in the greenhouse on a precise schedule.

The tours were second nature for the couple because at Arden, the education and public-facing part of the job is just as demanding as growing. That’s why they call their farm “the fishbowl.”

“You have to have the right personality type to do this,” said Eldridge. “We feed off the support and love of that relationship with the residents.”

During the grand opening weekend, I met a number of Arden residents, all of whom sang the praises of the farm and farmers. Helen Bouek, 61, who sold her horse farm and moved in in early 2018, volunteers to help plant vegetables. She enjoys riding her bike to the farm to pick up exotic veggies such as star squash, and uses the recipes provided with the farm share.

“I’m learning how to cook healthier,” she said. “Now I start looking at the supermarkets or the specialty stores for the things they grow here.”

Her friend Brenda Helman, who runs the community’s Facebook page, said she’s lost 25 pounds since moving here, which she attributes to healthier cooking and eating.

“They’re making the dream come true here,” she said. “They hyped it up as the farm-to-table, and it truly is.”

Arden’s developers expected most of the residents to be like Bouek and Helman, older adults and retirees looking for healthy, active living. But to their surprise, many younger families with kids have also moved in. Bobby Humphrey, a sergeant in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office, 36, and his wife, Christine, 35, who have a young son, Ethan, 5, said they came because the schools are fantastic. Just about every home on their block has kids Ethan’s age.

“Everyone gets together, usually on the weekend, and all the kids are playing out front,” said Bobby. “There are a lot of block parties. The whole family lifestyle is fantastic.”

Arden underscores the rapid growth of the exurbs, areas once on the rural/suburban border that have now been fully developed. Look outside the manicured entryway, and you can see how what developer brochures and hand-outs call “the natural choice” seems somewhat unnatural in its surroundings. The main roadway to reach Arden, Southern Boulevard, is lined with huge pits and earthmoving equipment, part of a widening project bringing even more development to the region. Just northwest of the development sits the massive West County Energy Center, a 240-acre natural gas plant run by Florida Power & Light.

But the development also suggests, if not a rejection of sprawl, at least better-intentioned sprawl. The entire site contains 85 percent native landscaping, and Franz and Eldridge have said that since they arrived in 2018, they’ve seen the landscape come to life. What was once a stretch of gravel and fire ants now contains rolling hills and lakes boasting rabbits, amphibians, reptiles, and possums.

“Other places feel like a fake tropical escape,” said Franz. “Here, it feels like the real Florida.”

At the grand opening celebration, a number of local farms and farming groups, many of which sell goods at the Arden store, set up displays. All of them agree that the agrihood concept—which they saw as a distribution center and educational asset for quality food—was a benefit to the local agriculture community.

Allison Linn, a farm manager with CoLab Farms, located 40 miles northeast in Indiantown, said she supports Arden and the “responsible growing” Eldridge and Franz promote.

“We want people to understand the struggles of farmers,” she said. “Trying to change how people eat food is important, and they’ll pay more when they know.”

Chris Miller, an extension agent at the University of Florida-Palm Beach County who provides assistance to local growers, said that Arden offers a new market and messaging tool for famers who already have their hands full.

“It’s tough to be a farmer, especially since you need to grow and sell to consumers, and nobody can do it on their own,” he said. “And in most stores, farmers get a little less than 15 cents on the dollar of every retail food dollar.”

Franz and Eldridge believe the Arden job is perfect for them. Farming has always been a passion—they started a teaching farm in North Florida, worked for the Peace Corp, and worked at a nonprofit encouraging people to spend food stamps at farmers markets—and a difficult way to make a living. The cost of land, equipment, and student debt leaves many aspiring farmers of their generation in debt.

“Tripp and I always call ourselves landless farmers,” said Franz. “We’ve done a good job finding ways to grow without having to make the capital investment.”

Their current job provides stable salaries and health care, as well as the ability to advocate for healthy eating and other local farmers. Eldridge believes the agrihood concept represents the next iteration of local food movements, a logical leap from community-supported agriculture and the mainstreaming of health food stores. Healthy, organic food has been getting closer and closer to your home; why can’t it be part of your neighborhood?

“This agrihood is accessible right outside your door,” he said. “You can have a direct relationship with the people who grow some of your food, something you just can’t get in Whole Foods. I would love to see this concept evolve so everybody has a farm in their community; it’s like a hyperlocal professional you trust, like your dentist.”

Other developers see hyperlocal farming becoming a significant real estate opportunity over the next decade. Matthew Redmond runs a company called Agriburbia that has been experimenting with developments incorporating high-tech, small-scale farming projects for more than a decade. Recently, Agriburbia helped install an open farm on the top floor of a new residential development in Denver called Lakehouse. Tenants can wash, prepare, and grill veggies raised on-site, or use the industrial-grade juicing station to enjoy the produce on the go.

But Redmond’s ultimate vision would be to bring agrihood-like concepts—which he calls “agriculturally augmented business enterprises”—everywhere. By using different technologies, including computer-aided growing systems, specially made trellises, drip irrigation, and geothermal heating, Agriburbia wants to make real estate and agriculture inseparable. Dentists’ offices could grow mint to make fresh toothpaste. Day care centers could have demonstration farms for kids and send them home with fresh veggies at the end of the day.

“The surest path to sustainability is using some of the land in larger developments, both commercial and residential,” he said. “It’s impossible to make a farm at a place like Arden that completely feeds a neighborhood and competes with existing commercial farms and supply chains. But you could get to a point where 40 or 50 percent of all food eaten is grown in the community itself, which would lower carbon emissions from shipping and truck traffic, and get rid of packaging. Almost all single-use plastic is related to food in some way.”

As the Arden celebration was winding to close, I took a walk past the clubhouse and pool, down to a dock that stretched into a man-made lake. I sat at a bench overlooking the water, staring at huge clouds moving across the horizon, listening to the sound of kids running up and down the docks. A group of moms were helping them put baitfish on fishing poles, snapping photos of each cast with their phones.

All of the developers I’d spoken to said they felt the agrihood concept would grow. Freehold’s Maddalon said they were already trying out different concepts in different areas: Orchard Ridge in North Austin has community gardens, and Miralon in Palm Springs features olive groves instead of a golf course. Carson, who works for the firm behind the Cannery, said they hope to do another farm community. But he said it’s also important to think beyond the farm itself.

“Not everyone living at the Cannery is getting their hands dirty, getting in the dirt, and farming,” he said. “They are living there, and the farm is something that’s nice to have nearby. It’s about the site plan. The ability to ride your bike right by the farm and go past the barn or meet at the ranch house and at your outdoor fireplaces, sit, talk, connect that way, makes the farm portion of it even more attractive.”

Everyone just wants a nice story to tell about home. While the American suburb has continually changed, what hasn’t shifted is that search for narrative. The kids and parents on the dock, and many of those I met over the weeknd, certainly found some of that at Arden. I looked out across the water to an island where cranes landed and stretched on perfectly placed palm trees. It was a fantastic view, helped by the visible number of straps landscapers had used to position each tree just so

Curbed

January 2020

For Roni Wood, it happened just two blocks from her house. While walking with her 13-year-old son, J.T., to a local Citibank branch in Orlando, Florida, in February 2018, the mother of five was hit by a driver in a Jeep Laredo taking a right on red. Even though Wood had the signal and was walking her bike in the crosswalk on a sunny afternoon, the driver claimed he didn’t see her. He smashed his car into her left side, rolling her face up the windshield—then braked, tossing her six feet in the air and leaving her “mangled to her bicycle,” as she put it, in the middle of an oncoming lane of traffic. Luckily, J.T., who was behind his mom and out of the car’s path, quickly called 911 and stepped out in front of his mother to protect her.

Wood’s smiling demeanor as she describes the scene belies the seriousness of her injuries, which she says resulted in the “most pain she’d ever had in her life.” She ended up with four broken leg bones, which had to be held together by a plate and 10 screws; spent three months in a wheelchair; and ended up with $120,000 worth of medical bills, which were covered by insurance. She lives with the injuries every day: She can’t bend down to clean the filter of her backyard pool, and she can’t wear certain shoes because her feet will swell. The driver, whom Wood says she forgives, because everybody makes mistakes, didn’t receive a ticket; it was up to the discretion of the officer on the scene to write one, and even though Wood complained to his superior, no ticket was issued. The driver’s insurance premiums likely didn’t even go up.

The week before Christmas 2011, Wendy Goodrich received a call from a nearby hospital. They said they were looking for the daughter of Rex Ammerman, her father, but no need to rush. The last part, about taking her time, made her think the worst, an assessment confirmed when she arrived and found her dad had already died. A recently retired engineer, he had been taking his daily 30-mile bike ride on the Cross Seminole Trail when, as he crossed the eight-lane State Road 436 with the light, he was hit by a driver who didn’t notice the signals and later told officers at the scene that “I simply did not see him.” He was killed on impact. A monument now sits at the crosswalk he used, a single bicycle wheel topped with a white circular sign reading “drive safely.”

“Nobody wants to be in a situation when they need to receive that phone call because someone made a stupid mistake or was a distracted driver,” Goodrich says.

Orlando’s deadly reputation for unsafe streets

These horrific crashes only hint at the toll that traffic takes on pedestrians and cyclists in and around Orlando, which Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design reports have ranked most dangerous for pedestrians in all but one edition since 2009. There are roughly 25 to 30 collisions involving pedestrians every day in the greater Orlando region, according to Florida Highway Patrol Corporal Brian Gensler, who works for a unit that specializes in traffic homicides.

Like other American cities, Orlando has distracted drivers, drunk drivers, traffic congestion, suburbanization, SUVs, and sprawl. But it also suffers from a design problem that’s worse here than elsewhere: Its streets are meant for cars and for speed.

“Florida was built with the idea of minimizing congestion and maximizing vehicular speed,” says Louis Merlin, who teaches urban and regional planning at Florida Atlantic University. “Most streets are designed for fast speeds and no pedestrian or biker access. Those two functions just don’t go together well.”

Orlando may be the worst example of what’s become a national crisis in pedestrian safety. In 2018, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 6,283 walkers were killed on American roadways, a 28-year high. U.S. children are twice as likely to die in traffic fatalities as those in other wealthy nations, according to a 2018 study in Health Affairs.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer admits his city is facing a crisis, though he notes that the vast majority of local pedestrian crashes aren’t in Orlando proper, but in the wider region, where the city doesn’t have jurisdiction. He also notes that the total number of pedestrian fatalities in Orlando is relatively low; the Dangerous By Design rankings place the metropolitan area higher because so few people in the Orlando region walk to work, meaning even a small number of crashes will involve a relatively high percentage of pedestrians. And the city is growing at an incredible rate, roughly 1,500 residents per week, while also coping with the tourist influx of Disney World and nearby theme parks, where 75 million annual visitorstraverse the region utilizing the world’s largest fleet of rental cars; he argues the additional traffic isn’t factored into budget requests for state and federal money to upgrade roads.

In 2016, Dyer appointed Billy Hattaway, an urbanist reformer who had helped reshape the state department of transportation, as the city’s transportation director. Dyer is also supporting a penny sales tax initiative, proposed by Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings, that would raise $600 million annually for transportation, and Orlando has joined the ranks of U.S. cities adopting Vision Zero, a campaign to eliminate traffic fatalities.

“If we have even one pedestrian accident, that’s one too many,” Dyer tells Curbed.

But pledging something and doing something are very different, especially when it comes to the multifaceted challenge of making our streets safer.

“Any other epidemic, we’d be putting money into vaccines and treatments,” says Kate Kraft, executive director of America Walks, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting safety and walkability. “For some reason, this isn’t getting the same attention.” And, Kraft says, we already have enough information to take action. “We can tell where people are going to get killed.”

How the roads in Orlando—and Florida—became so unsafe

When Orlando first topped the Dangerous by Design rankings in 2011, the media took it as a given that Florida wasn’t a great place to walk or bike. The New York Times wrote, “As any pedestrian in Florida knows, walking in this car-obsessed state can be as tranquil as golfing in a lightning storm. Sidewalks are viewed as perks, not necessities. Crosswalks are disliked and dishonored. And many drivers maniacally speed up when they see someone crossing the street.”

The spine of the region’s highway system, Interstate 4, was sliced north-south through the middle of Orlando in 1956 at a cost of $1.3 million per mile ($12.29 million per mile in today’s dollars), creating an eight-mile gash through the center of town that divided the city along racial and class lines. At a massive town hall where 2,000 citizens voiced concern about being bulldozed out of their homes, officials told residents the highway was needed in case the population had to evacuate to escape a Soviet missile attack.

Interstate 4 and its associated highways and ring roads were the crowning achievement of a group of pro-growth politicians and business leaders, including Martin Andersen, then publisher of the Orlando Sentinel. Walt Disney decided to build Disney World in Bay Lake, roughly 20 miles southeast of Orlando, in large part because of the road system Andersen and his allies had established.

Orlando exploded outward in the 1970s and ’80s: the city’s population remains just 280,000, but the region’s is 2.1 million. As in other Sun Belt cities, development grew up where land was cheap, namely large plots adjacent to state and federal roadways. That left suburban residents with only the equivalent of rural highways to connect them to nearby homes and shopping centers. In 1998, the Orange County Commission rejected federal money for a light-rail system, which urbanist and professor Bruce Stephenson wrote would ensure “the spread of a fragmented mass of paved mediocrity designed to SUV dimensions.” Lynx, a regional bus system that covers a three-county area, barely has enough vehicles to adequately provide service (nearly half the routes run just once an hour).

With no truly reliable public mass transit to speak of, it’s no surprise that those without a car find it challenging at best to get around. Smart Growth’s report has consistently found that people of color, older adults, and residents of low-income neighborhoods suffer the highest fatality rates amid Florida’s already poor pedestrian safety record (an interim 2020 Dangerous by Design report found the state the worst for pedestrian safety from 2009 to 2018).

Craig Ustler, a local developer who is working on the $1 billion walkable downtown Creative Village project, notes that even he can’t get around parking minimums and the need to devote significant land to parked cars. Existing infrastructure makes it hard to see walkability as something that can be done on anything more than a project or neighborhood level.

“We’re making I-4 wider to the tune of $7 billion, and building a loop around the city,” he says. “It’s an investment in sprawl. The urbanists see it as refortifying the Great Wall of China.”

Local safety activists point to the road systems, not the users, as the main causes of crashes and casualties. Wide streets with multiple lanes, narrow or nonexistent sidewalks, and high speed limits all contribute to the problem.

“Excessive speeding and running red lights are often more a result of design,” says Merlin. “Many times, designers and engineers have dodged responsibility and say it’s the driver’s responsibility to drive safer. We can design streets that take into account that people make mistakes.”

Billy Hattaway’s crusade

When Billy Hattaway and his college girlfriend escaped a head-on collision in New Hampshire without injury, he chalked it up as just one of those things. But later in life, while working as a road design engineer in Florida, he was presented with the death toll on U.S. roadways in the ’70s. It was roughly 45,000 people a year, an unbelievable figure; in the entirety of the Vietnam War, the country lost just under 60,000 soldiers.

“It’s a public health crisis,” he tells Curbed. “Forty thousand deaths every year and yet nobody, not the media or elected officials, seems to care. It seems to be an accepted cost of the freedom to drive.”

To Hattaway, the answer was to prioritize safety over ease of commuting, and to put himself in a position to lead on the issue. Over decades working multiple stints with FDOT, he amassed a record of pushing for safer road design, more roundabouts, and new policies, even implementing one of the state’s first complete-streets projects in 2004 and establishing a statewide pedestrian and bicycle strategic safety plan. Jeff Speck, an urban planner and city design consultant, calls him a “hero” for his work.

Hattaway also left FDOT multiple times, feeling that at certain points, safety wasn’t being taken seriously enough, or that engineers weren’t following his orders. Two years ago, when he was working as FDOT’s secretary for District One, he saw that Mayor Buddy Dyer was looking to re-establish the role of city transportation chief, reached out to City Hall, and got the job.

“It’s remarkable how Florida DOT has slowly but surely reformed itself, in recognition of its murderous past,” says Speck, referencing the department’s moves to shrink the width of lanes and adopt a complete-streets design manual. “I’m aware of no state in the U.S. that has made more changes in its policy in recent years than Florida DOT, and they are to be congratulated and thanked for that.“

Hattaway’s multifaceted solution for solving the city’s traffic safety crisis starts with the sales tax increase, which would increase his current budget of roughly $3 million for safety projects. He wants to spend that on enforcement and road redesign for high-crash corridors across the city, implementing road diets (reducing the number of lanes to limit speeds, improve pedestrian safety, and provide access to non-car alternatives) and speed reductions from the 40 mph speed limit many roads were designed for to as low as 25 mph.

Hattaway has already used funding from red-light cameras to add more raised crosswalks and flashing lights to increase pedestrian safety. He also tested a road diet this past spring on a half-mile section of Curry Ford Road, a few blocks from where Roni Wood was hit, that has seen 16 bicyclists and eight pedestrians struck by cars in the last five years. Despite some complaints by neighbors—61 percent of emails received during the first two weeks of the demonstration were opposed to the project—he says it was a successful learning experience for future projects.

“Everything he says is what local residents hate,” says Amanda Day, a pedestrian safety advocate for Bike/Walk Central Florida, one of the region’s most active groups around traffic safety, which counts Wood and Goodrich as members. “It’ll add five minutes onto the commute, but they’ll love it when it comes to it.”

Next year, Hattaway will start an even bigger process with potential for greater impact, rewriting development guidelines for the city. Hattaway showed me an infamous photo of a series of homes on cul-de-sacs designed for cars and not walkability, resulting in two adjacent homes requiring seven miles of roads to get from one to the other.

“All the activists and politicians have blamed transportation as being a source of the problem,” says Hattaway. “This is equally a land development problem. It’ll actually save us money, but it requires political will to stand up to the development community.”

The problem with Pine Hills

When Amanda Day took me to see the intersection of Pine Hills and Silver Star roads, a confluence of six-lane streets and strip malls on the near-northwest side of Orlando, it was to show an example of how poor street design and car dependency hurt less affluent neighborhoods. “It’s one hot mess, everything you can do wrong with a corridor,” she said.

Day pointed out where mall workers and students at the nearby high school cross in the middle of the next block, ignoring crosswalks at the intersection because they felt unsafe there thanks to cars making turns. She showed me the crosswalk where Bike/Walk Central Florida works with local cops to do sting operations for safety. The roads tell a story, she says, and it’s not that it’s safe to ditch your car and walk to work.

Within an hour, we’d seen a man with a cane nearly get hit while shuffling across the road. Then Day herself, crossing with the signal, was almost struck by a car taking a right on red.

“This is why people don’t even cross at the main crosswalk,” she told me after recovering from the shock. “People simply gun it when they drive here. It’s safer to wait and cross in the middle of the block—at least they can see when cars are coming.”

Day pointed out numerous design flaws and safety issues amid the constant din of cars speeding by. The wide lanes and large median give cars and trucks more room, and more of a reason to speed, plus make it more arduous for walkers to get to the other side. Then there was the midblock location of the bus stop, a mere sign without real benches or shade structure; its distance from the intersection leads riders to sprint across traffic to catch a ride.

There are solutions, Day says: Reduce the width of the lanes, make one a bus-only lane, move the bus stops, then prioritize signals for bus riders and pedestrians. But where does the will and the funding come from? It’s also an engineering challenge, and none of Hattaway’s road diets or traffic-calming efforts thus far have tackled a road as large as this. (Hattaway says there are engineering solutions to these roads, but that behavior and culture are harder to change.)

“There’s no dedicated funding for our transit system here,” she says. “They have to figure out a way to move about, like, a couple hundred thousands of people a day without knowing where their funding will come from next year.”

Dyer agrees about the need for dedicated funding, and believes the sales tax proposal can begin to solve the problem.

“While we are still in the early stages of determining how the funding would be allocated in the city, we know the needs are great,” he says.

Bike/Walk Central Florida’s Best Foot Forward Campaign for pedestrian safety, founded in 2012, now includes roughly 43 cities and counties in the Greater Orlando region, as well as law enforcement agencies. While the growth of the coalition is heartening, a campaign for crosswalk safety seems like a small-scale project, considering the scope of the problem.

But Day says the project has the potential to change the larger conversation. “It’s huge when people, like FDOT, work in the same jobs all their lives and suddenly have different conversations,” she says. “Now they have bike and pedestrian safety champions.” This can help get transportation planners out of the driving mindset: “How can you ask people to change if they don’t also view themselves as pedestrians?”

Day points to shifting public perception as another sign of success. Candidates discussed the issue during the recent mayoral election. It’s a legislative policy priority. Traffic reporters are now talking about crosswalk enforcement. The state and federal governments have also shown slow signs of awareness, despite the overwhelming directive to build and expand highway infrastructure. Recently passed Map-21 legislation mandates that new transportation plans measure safety, and that transportation agencies do a better job of tracking safety statistics. But changing infrastructure is a slow, grinding process.

“It’s going to take about 30 years to normalize biking and walking, so those people aren’t looked at as being crazy,” she says. “That’s how long it took for people to adopt seat belt usage. We’re being sold on autonomous vehicle and tech, but they aren’t going to solve the problem. It’s about changing human behavior.”