Recycling and Buying Local

Recycling used to be kind of a fringe activity reserved for "crazy" people roaming highway ditches seeking aluminum cans. In contrast, buying local used to be something everyone did. In many cases there were few alternatives for getting what you needed.

Today this has changed. Recycling is ubiquitous, but few of us truly "buy local". There are some important lessons that BUY LOCAL advocates can learn from the recycling movement, lessons that have strong land use implications.

Two decades ago, I did not know many people who recycled. We collected cans in third grade and used the money to have an ice-cream party at the end of the year. My dad volunteered his truck to haul cans, which made me feel really cool. When I got married, my thrifty wife got on my case to recycle. I'd throw my pop can in the garbage. She'd fish it out.

My argument for not recycling at the time was that it just didn't make sense. I pointed out to my wife that, in order to recycle, we had to essentially live in a world of garbage. My garage became a transfer station of used cans, bottles and newspapers waiting to accumulate enough mass to justify the trip the recycler. When we did accumulate enough, I had to load this leaky trash into my nice car, take time off from work to drive it to Zeke's who practically charged me to take it. 

Just throw the can in the garbage and save all the hassle. I love the environment, but you can't convince me I was saving it by recycling.

Today (yes, December 16) my wife and I celebrate our 14th wedding anniversary. A lot has changed in the near decade and a half since we were married, including the fact that we now jointly recycle. Is this because I am somehow a "new man", borne again in the religion of environmentalism? Or is it more simple than that?

Recycling always made sense to me. Why would we put something in a landfill when we can reuse it. Duh. This is a no-brainer. What I always resisted is how difficult it was to do the common-sense thing. What has changed now to make me a recycler is how easy and convenient it is.

Today, I throw the paper in the paper bin. Cans in the can bin. Bottles in the bottle bin. Once a week we take out the trash and, what do you know, there goes the recycling too. Easy. Easy. Easy. I'm the same man I was fourteen years ago in this regard, only now I recycle.

When we are out working in communities and are talking about economic development, someone inevitably stands up and extols everyone in the room to "do their duty" and BUY LOCAL. The thought goes: If we just all bought local and supported each other, we'd be so much better off economically. Applause all around.

Then the meeting ends, everyone leaves, gets in their car, drives to Wal-Mart, McDonalds or Super America and talks about the great meeting. The purist in the group curses those that don't practice what they preach, but everyone else understands that BUY LOCAL is great in theory, but very difficult in practice.

Kind of like recycling used to be.

We get a lot of pressure to support efforts to fight against Wal-Mart and other "big box" retailers. We always resist and point out to people that Wal-Mart and other big boxes are the symptom, not the disease. The disease is bad land use practices. Specifically, those land use practices induced by inefficient transportation and infrastructure subsidies.

Big box retailers today are simply responding to the land use pattern we have created. When we force EVERY trip to be an auto-based trip, we make it uncompetitive to be a local business. We are also providing massive advantages to those businesses that can draw people by car from a large area. Today, BUY LOCAL is something crazy people do. Why pay more and have more hassle when you can simply drive to Wal-Mart and get everything you need?

The key to economic development in Strong Towns is adopting a land use pattern that strengthens local businesses, local investments and local competitiveness. As our small towns continue to devolve in a highway-oriented suburban fashion, not only do the local businesses become less convenient and thus less competitive, the competition on the periphery of town gains all the advantage.

A new model of development is needed if we want to support local small business, create jobs and grow Strong Towns. Our land use pattern needs to make BUY LOCAL as easy as recycling if we are truly serious about the effort.

Notes

Some related reading from the Strong Towns Blog includes: 

• Understanding Downtown, which takes issue with our current approach of building "cute" downtowns and instead talks about what it takes to build financially viable downtowns. 

• The Reality of Brainerd's Parkway, which points out the implications of an auto-first development strategy.

• Rethinking Economic Development, which contrasts the current approach to economic development used by most cities with a Strong Towns approach modeled on the ideas of Jane Jacobs.

You can continue this Strong Towns conversation by posting a comment or by joining us on Facebook. You can also follow Strong Towns on Twitter. We appreciate all of the support.

STOP

As a Tuesday bonus, we are going to share a couple of pictures to follow up on yesterday's post on our short trip to Celebration, Florida.

The first is something we all see every day - the back of a stop sign. I had a hard time finding a picture of one on Google since very few people would ever take a picture of the back of a stop sign. Why would you - it's not like they are an attractive element of a neighborhood.

Now check out this pic from downtown Celebration. 

Here is the caption posted in the Facebook album we created to document the tour.

Massive attention to detail - note how they paint the rear of the stop signs, along with the fire-hydrants, a dull and inconspicuous shade of green (instead of shiny tin on the sign and red or yellow for the hydrant). The idea here is that they don't want to draw your eye to the ugly back of the sign, so they just paint it something that does not draw the eye.

On the Community Growth Institute fan page on Facebook we have posted forty photos along with a frame-by-frame narrative of our recent walking tour of Celebration. On off-days in the coming weeks (we typically post Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays here at STB.org) I'll continue to post tidbits here for those not on Facebook.

While we won't change the fate of humanity simply by painting the back of our STOP signs, changing the small ways in which we look at our neighborhoods is a first step towards building Strong Towns.

Tomorrow's post will be on the concept of "buying local". In the meantime, continue this Strong Towns conversation by posting a comment or by joining us on Facebook. You can also follow Strong Towns on Twitter. We appreciate all of the support.

Celebration in Photos

Last week I went with some of my colleagues at Community Growth Institute on a two-day retreat so that they could see what I consider to be a brilliant application of neighborhood design principles. While you can study good design through text and pictures, immersion it is a completely different  - and most beneficial - experience. With that in mind, one of the stops our team from Minnesota made was in Celebration, Florida.

By way of some context, at Strong Towns we are advocates of making better use of our massive infrastructure investments. Increasing our public Return on Investment (ROI), so to speak. While there are a lot of elements to this, in more cases than not it includes increasing the density of our current development pattern.

When you start talking at a public meeting about increasing density, the typical reaction is fairly negative. And understandably so. If you look at our current development pattern - which most people would agree is uninspiring at best and depressingly ugly at worst - and then imagine squishing it closer together, it is not a pretty sight.

If all you know is our modern pattern of development, you can't imagine more density. Low density is the way we all "escape" the blight that is the American public realm. The reason people commute for hours in congested traffic through miles of asphalt and billboards is because at the end of it all is their own private oasis. Their own personal place where they can escape the blight of the landscape they travel day after day. We all understand this. It is the current version of the American dream.

The only problem is, we can't afford this style of living any longer.

If more density in our development pattern is financially inevitable, than we have two choices. We either choose to live in a harsher reality, or we adopt a new and affordable development pattern that provides a higher quality of life, even with a greater density. At Strong Towns, we choose the latter.

Our Placemaking Principles for Strong Towns are a place to start to envision a new model. Another place is on Facebook where, on the Community Growth Institute fan page, we have posted pictures along with a frame-by-frame narrative of our recent walking tour of Celebration.

For those of you not on Facebook, I'll post some of those photos here over the coming months as part of our ongoing Brainerd/Baxter Strong Town series as a way to contrast the harsh elements most of us encounter in our daily lives with those present in a well-designed community. And if you are interested, Community Growth Institute and Strong Towns are planning to offer an annual tour for placemakers of sites like Celebration. If you want to receive information on our 2010 tour, you can email me at marohn@strongtowns.org.

One other fun fact about Celebration: When we were envisioning the streetscape for the ideal town we feature on our home page, we incorporated a bit of Celebration's Market Street. Here is how it looked last week.

Market Street in Celebration, Florida