Return to the November 2007 Newsletter | Return to the NextGen Site "Real Relevance is the Cumulative Effect" It is for this reason that I tell you a little story about my friend Keith Bartholomew, a lawyer who teaches planning at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Earlier this year I had breakfast with Keith near his office. “The stuff that matters, especially when it comes to the environment, is not the big flashy stuff,” he said. “It’s the small actions. Environmental damage is an accumulation of 1,000 cuts. So repairing it means applying 1,000 Band-Aids. Each one is important. It’s the many small Band-Aids that matter. Real relevance is the cumulative effect.” If you’re young, intelligent, idealistic, and energetic, which essentially describes every student I met at Notre Dame in early October, you’re likely to immediately see the irony in Keith’s thought. Authentic progress takes time, hard work, commitment, and patience. Yet the millennium generation, raised by Baby Boomers, has been marinated in cultural values that are often at odds with all of these principles. The central challenge of young New Urbanists, it seems to me, is not only to how to apply your considerable skills over the length of time it takes to get good stuff done in the 21st century, but also how to answer members of your generation who ask “why bother?” Here’s why. I hadn’t seen Keith Bartholomew in 10 years, ever since he accepted our invitation to come to northwest Michigan to help the tiny, two-year-old Michigan Land Use Institute think through a particularly troublesome problem. The Grand Traverse County Road Commission, the business community, and several townships were desperate to build a new highway and bridge across the Boardman River south of Traverse City. We were convinced that was a terrible idea. The road and bridge was a waste of money, would make traffic worse, encourage more sprawl, and wreck a spectacular river valley so wild bald eagles nested there. Keith knew a couple of things that made sense. As a young lawyer at 1000 Friends of Oregon in Portland, the granddaddy of non-profit American land policy organizations, Keith developed the legal and advocacy strategy that killed a $1 billion freeway proposed for Portland’s west side. In doing so, Keith helped to open a political, cultural, and economic space large enough for Portland to consider alternatives, including the regional light rail system that eventually was built. <http://www.friends.org/resources/lutraq.html> His story is an exceptional example of how clear thinking and a lot of moxie can produce a truly great outcome. Portland’s reputation as one of the outstanding cities in America has a lot to do with how its regional rapid transit system encourages more energy-efficient, environmentally-sensitive, neighborhood enhancing patterns of development. <http://mlui.org/pubs/glb/glbsu97/GLBsu9708.html> The lesson we learned from Keith in 1997 was simple. In order to beat the Boardman bridge we needed to develop a credible alternative, and we needed to stay with the campaign for as long as it took. A decade later, the bridge died and the alternative is gradually taking shape in the form of a $1.36 million regional land use and transportation project paid for with federal funds. Keith hadn’t heard the whole story so I spent a few minutes relating all that’s gone on in my home region since his visit. See: http://mlui.org/transportation/trans.asp?key=8&sub=32&proj=82 Now Keith can claim three places in America where his good ideas made things better. Portland, Traverse City, and Salt Lake City. He recently joined the governing board of the Utah Transit Authority, the agency that is building the second largest regional rapid transit system in the West. By the time it’s completed in 2015, Salt Lake City and its suburbs will add 26 miles to the 19 miles of light rail line that are already operating, and roughly 88 miles of commuter rail. Only Denver, which is building a 172-mile system, will have more. And just as in Portland, the economy supported by the UTA trains is booming. See: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE5DE1F39F934A35752C1A9619C8B63 Keith is 46 now, the married father of a handsome young boy, and a scholar in law and planning anxious to prove himself worthy of achieving a tenured faculty position. He’s tall, slim, funny, and loves trains and cities. “In order to create a quality place it has to have iconic features that attract people,” he told me. “It’s hard to beat a train. Trains promote centrality, vitality, and sustainability. That’s what they represent. They make cities work better.” __________________________________________________ Keith Schneider, a journalist and public policy specialist, is writer-in-residence at the Michigan Land Use Institute, which he founded in 1995, and a special correspondent for the /New York Times/. Reach him at keith at mlui dot org. |