The importance of regional planning in New Mexico

I work doing green, urban in-fill real estate projects that enrich communities, make them more walkable and reduce car use. I believe this is important because creating places where people can meet and interact with their neighbors face to face and take care of their shopping and errands on foot or bicycle or by public transportation not only increases social capital and improves the lives of the people in those communities but it also is one of the best ways reduce our energy use, global warming emissions and dependence on unrewable and diminishing fossil fuels. I think it is a high leverage strategy for creating more of what we want and less of what we don't.

Doing these projects is complicated because there are a lot of stakeholders, rules, laws, etc. that need to be negotiated. This means it takes money and time to make them happen. Successful projects also require density: you cannot have walkable multifacted neighborhood centers without density. As Jonathan Rose of the Rose Companies likes to point out it is not density that people don't like, it is bad design. And addition to density we also need connections, and that generally means public transportation.

So it takes money, time, good design, density and connections to make these projects work. Are there any problems presented by these things in New Mexico? I would say yes. We are fortunate that are beginning to have more investment in public transport like the Rail Runner. That is great news.

But the key challenge we face here in creating these kind of great neighborhoods is that land is too cheap. What?! you say? How could that be our biggest problem. I will explain it.

Mesa Del Sol, on the southwest corner of the Albuqerque, and the Sun Cal development west of the city represent 68,000 acres of new land that is being planned for development! Setting aside the potential water problems these projects may create, there is still the problem of the amount of land being brought into development.

I should first say that both Mea Del Sol and the Sun Cal project are being master planned to be "green" and to have some of the walkable, community oriented design I was talking about early, which is great. They are to be commended for this commitment.

But the problem is that developing that may new acres around a city of Albuquerque's size is bound to depress land prices. It is simple supply and demand. Unless there are millions of people who want to move here in a matter of a few years, this oversupply of land will depress the value of existing land. This will not only keep existing home prices depressed, it makes it very hard to build dense infill projects that improve existing neighborhoods.

This is because when land is too cheap, a developer cannot justify spending the money on design or density to make the project really work as well as it should. They are forced to skimp on design in order to meet the higher costs that come with dealing with a complicated infill site. AND, at the same time, they cannot increase density because few people will pay the same or more for a dense urban home than a detached, sprawling home with land. They are forced to compete with other low density projects being built more cheaply on the new land. It's an unfair situation that's stacked in favor of sprawling "greenfield" sites. This keeps the whole metropolitan area low density and promotes more sprawl.

This is why I am in favor or regional planning that looks at what people really want for their region and makes some decisions about how land will be used at that level. Envision Utah was very successful with this process. People actually choose more density and public transporation than the sprawl model when they look at the impacts at the regional level.

I am actually most in favor of an urban growth boundary: I believe this creates the right incentives for promote good places people will enjoy living for years to come and work at the city and regional level by increasing land values in the city. It's the reverse supply and demand situation than before: less supply drives land prices up without driving home prices up. It promotes quality, well designed dense walkable neighborhoods.

But I trust that a regional planning initiative will come up with some variety of this naturally.

Deep thoughts on the nature of experience

This post is just a little food for thought.

I am sure we are all familiar with the way birds fly into windows, or bugs scorch themselves on a hot lightbulb. Both of these are examples of how the birds' and bugs' perception fails them. The poor bird thinks it has a clear flight path, and not understanding the idea of glass because it did not evolve with anything like glass in its environment, it slams into it. Perhaps some birds learn about glass, but I'm sure it's a hard thing for them to understand. It may take many generations because they really "get it."

And the bug that burns itself to death on a lightbulb is similarly ill equipped to deal with a new phenomena in its experience. It is used to the only light sources being the sun, the moon and the stars. It is able to use thse fixed sources to navigate. When there is a lightbulb nearby, it tries to navigate by it but ends up actually hitting the bulb! What a shock!

We can feel sorry for these poor birds and bugs, but I would like to suggest that we may not be any different. The world is changing so fast environmentally, socially, economically, etc. that there are certainly lightbulbs and windows out there we don't know exist. We may be vaguely aware that we seem to be having certain problems, but we are unable to figure out what to do about them.

Think how different the world is from only a generations ago where the only people you could know were the people in your town, which you may never have left. Your environment would have been pretty similar for many generations back, so it was small, comprehensible and navigable. Not so today.

Or, have you ever had the experience of feeling bad for no good reason? Perhaps you may have even noticed that others around you were having similar trouble? Maybe it's just random coincidence, but also maybe not. Maybe there is something happening beyond our ability to perceive it. This certainly seems possible.

What if astrology is like this? On one level it seems absurd that the motions of the stars and planets could affect our experience. On the other hand, these stars and planets are extremely massive objects in our universe, and it could be possible that they influence our lives. For example, we already know the moon affects both the tides and womens' menstral cycles. When you think about it, these are two major impacts caused by something relatively small and far away. It's something to think about.

Or, here is something even more mindbending to think about. A number of cosmologists, physicists and mathematicians are now suggesting that the universe may have 10 dimensions. For example, read The Elegant Universe or visit http://www.tenthdimension.com/. I know it sounds like a crazy idea, but this website makes it somewhat conceivable.

If there are 10 dimensions, then there are 6 dimensions (if you exclude the 3 dimensions we can see and time as the fourth) we have no way to perceive with our five senses. That's more dimensions we CAN'T perceive than we can perceive! That starts to be a little scary. What if there are things happening in those other dimensions, and there certainly are bound to be, that we don't know are going on. It's like treading water in a deep ocean: there may be a whole world of life and activity that can see us but that we can't see. You feel something on your leg, but what is it? You don't know.

In this scenario, it could be very possible that major things are happening all around us without our knowing that affect us every day. What if some of our bad moods or good moods or success or failure or other experience is strongly influenced by these other dimensions?

Or maybe this is all just a crazy thought experiment. :) But it seems prudent to at least see if we can find out what else is going on that we don't know about. It might help explain alot that now seems random or beyond explanation.