Looking forward, looking back: Howard Decker at TEDxRochester
this past June I heard Rochester's Z Gary Jacobs tell us this Rochester 2.0 is about looking forward Not Looking Back Stop This is incorrect especially in these times and we need to have a conversation I am an architect and an Urban designer and so you would naturally expect me to talk about buildings and cities and so I will in a way but I also want to talk about Urban and Regional economics because among other things cities are physical expressions of economics and commerce why economics well if we are to build a usable future in this this city or in any City we are going to have to begin with a city that makes sense economically and ours doesn't we're broke and why are cities like ours broke well one of the main reasons is because our favored pattern of spraw development costs us more than we can afford costs us more than any real value that it offers for our community let me give you an example at long last we are about to begin to fill in the Inner Loop yes you can applaud but why are we doing this because we've learned that it costs us more to maintain the damn thing than it will cost us to fill it in simple math Rochester struggles we have budget gaps and dwindling public services at the same time that we have Skyhigh taxes we live in in a region we're surrounded by a region that doesn't seem to really give a damn whether we sink or swim to their parel I might add we have a 20 minute commute which ensures indifference to any alternate form of mobility and we are tearing the city down as fast as we can and as we relentlessly pursue our Salvation in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways let me give you three examples I know low hanging fruit the new Wagman's on East Avenue what a golden opportunity build a prototype Urban Grocery and show the world how it should be done in front the streets invite Shoppers in from the sidewalks and be a great City neighbor and what did we get a Suburban Supermarket plopped under this Urban site and though the store is much larger and has more than twice the parking we now know that it also only has 100 lineal feet of additional shelving at least the cars are happy next the $100 million State and federally funded redo of the Kendrick Road interchanges at I 390 intended to allow a much greater volume of traffic to enter the rapidly expanding U of our campus more autod dominated development tens of thousands of parking spaces will follow on from these revisions but if the University of Rochester really wanted to lead us might they have considered new ways to connect our city to reconnect Rochester for example a $100 million could buy us a sixmile Long Street car system it's it's all true and finally a personal favorite the citygate Costco project at Henrietta and West Fall roads in an ocean of parking this is precisely the same kind of autod dominated retail development that has plagued our city and cities like ours for more than half a century and just think about what we get in return for this more than half the site in parking and nowhere to walk ignorance of the site's historic and natural resources traffic that we can complain about and spend fortunes trying to repair for decades to come scores of deadend jobs shocking environmental waste and a whole host of other problems that we already can find all around us these projects are not showing us the way to the next Rochester instead they are examples of what we have been doing wrong for a long long time but take heart there is a Rochester that can show us the way we had it right here in Rochester a century ago I don't say that nostalgically or sentimentally because that city of that that golden age was messy and it had all kinds of problems but it was an amazing Place dense walkable bustling with life and far more sustainable than the city that we inhabit today let's look this is Franklin Square at the intersection of Andrews and Franklin streets taken in a spectacular aerial photograph dating from 1918 I want you to take a moment and enjoy this extraordinary view of our fabulous City and I want you to enjoy it because this is what we did to it or this the noisy clanging Lively intersection of Main and State and in 1922 and today so I want to take some time to look at that older City and I want to take some time to look at our city of today but first the part about economics that old city of a century ago had all of the big businesses that any City needs to be well big and then it had a middle ground of Commerce the rochester-based medium-sized employers but best of all it had a foreground of smallscale business and local Commerce that served the neighborhoods and downtown and today well we have the bigs University of Rochester Wegman's uh Unity Healthcare Rochester General Xerox and others and we have the middle um paychecks for example excuse me or gleon Works to a lesser extent which is to say insufficiently we have a foreground of smallscale Commerce but in Rochester and in many cities our Middle Ground of Commerce and our foreground of Commerce are tied to International and National chains and franchises and this means that the capital that once stayed here now flees here and the jobs dead ended transitory low peeing so let's go back to that city of a century ago where everything was local well almost everything and small small scale business and local Commerce held the life of the city together in those days unemployment in Rochester was less than half of what it is today and federal expenditures which are today pegged at $3.6 trillion a year were in those times $720 million a year so that meant that whatever supported our economy had to come from here not from Washington not from Albany from here and that also meant that our economy had to make sense at every level background Middle Ground foreground there was no choice and that's in contrast to the economy in Rochester in 2013 which really doesn't make nearly as much sense so I think we need to change the way we think about our urban life and the City of 1913 looking back may be the most important thing we can do in order to look to our future not to replicate but instead to learn about what sustainability self-sufficiency looked like and how they worked and to discover how rochesterians once lived a more walkable more robust more locally centered life in a place that was Lively and far more economically sustainable than the city that we live in today so what is the question that we should be asking ourselves in these times of dwindling resources and declining wealth just this I think what can we build Envision or construct that preserves and restores the best that we have ever been the best that we have ever made so that we never again have to face the kind of fiscal social and environmental Urban drama that is intensifying all around us we need a new pattern for our city life we had one once perhaps we should look there first to find our future so I've cheered you up right and now you say what are we supposed to do well I have three suggestions first we have to go local there is not one city on the face of this planet that is today 100% self-sufficient and we all know that self-sufficiency is a key to environmental or economic sustainability we have to go local we have to travel differently we've got to get our butts out of our cars if every American drove one mile less a day we would save $31 billion dollar a year in fuel and in infrastructure costs and finally we have got to speak out for our city each one of us needs to become an activist and an advocate in favor of being in full contact with our meaningful past looking back as an essential foundation for our usable future looking forward thanks very much