Local Politics and the Development "Problem"

Why real estate development matters in a mayoral race, and why that frustrates some

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

I’ve become a major fan of the Kansas City architect and designer Kevin Klinkenberg’s “The Messy City” podcast. I don’t know Kevin—I met him once, briefly, at a Strong Towns gathering in Tulsa years ago, and I made use of the material he presented at that gathering a couple of times, but most of what I know about his work and ideas I’ve learned from listening to him over the past several months. His approach to thinking about land use, city design, and our built environment—all central concerns to anyone who lives in any kind of urban polity, and I would say especially a mid-sized polity like Wichita—is not my own, and I appreciate the challenge that presents. His perspective on the sustainability or affordability of the places in which we live and move and play and work is profoundly practical; his defense of the local and the incremental is rigorously apolitical and empirical, with next to no engagement with the policies and theories (both political and sociological) which I would argue undergird the ways in which we even conceive the local and the incremental. Which is fine—I don’t think it’s imperative that everyone who cares about our places have critical takes on urban growth or municipal democracy! But sometimes, I think, it’s helpful to bring some theory in, particularly when you’re trying to make sense of the way developers are characterized, especially around election time.

Mayoral candidate Celeste Racette and Mayor Brandon Whipple

So, a brief excursus. There’s a mayoral election in Wichita this year—and the incumbent candidate, Brandon Whipple, a former Democratic state legislator, won back in 2019 in this very-slowly-purpling-but-still-by-no-means-blue city in part by harping on the hidden costs and likely corruption involved in the development deals which the previous mayor had either signed off on or actively embraced (specifically involving a new water treatment plant and a new baseball stadium). Since being elected though, Whipple’s bona fides as a capable opponent of sweetheart deals for developers has come under attack by his opponents, particularly Celeste Racette, an accountant and fraud investigator who built her movement around successfully fighting a major riverfront redevelopment plan that would have involved the destruction of Century II, an old, in some ways limited, but nonetheless widely recognized and at least somewhat-beloved performing arts center along the Arkansas River. Yet his opponents’ challenges regarding business as usual in City Hall hasn’t stopped Whipple from making use of similar language about challenging “development insiders” and “Wichita’s wealthy developer/business caste” as he builds his campaign—though now, of course, as the incumbent insider himself. That’s not to say that arguments over builders and developers and construction interests are going to loom as large this year as they did in the 2019 race (I kind of doubt it, actually)—but why is it so regularly present, in Wichita and elsewhere?

Because it is present, almost constantly, in most cities. And this brings me pack to Klinkenberg, who had a long, insightful, somewhat ranty discussion about this very point with the developer, historic preservationist, designer, and journalist Aaron Lubeck on a recent podcast. I’ve transcribed the relevant segment here:

Lubeck: Have you ever read Daniel Solomon's book Global City Blues?

Klinkenberg: I love that book. I used to actually require have that as reading for when I taught urban design.

Lubeck: It's such a good book. And the thing I'm going to pull from it, which I think really should be taught at these seminars, is [something] I'll test you on it. Do you remember what Solomon's three tribunals were?

Klinkenberg: Oh, God, no. I haven't read it in probably 20 years.

Lubeck: Well....[i]t's probably been five years for me. But basically he says every [building] project has to clear three tribunals....[O]ne is it has to be compliant with code, building code and zoning code, or you can't build it. Second is that it has to be loved. It has to clear a market tribunal. If nobody wants it, you can build it and it'll be useless. Right? So it dies. And then the last one is the financial; like, it has to pencil, it has to cost less than whatever rent or sale you get from it. And so this can eliminate 90% of the conversations you have with people with no skin in the game about, hey, why aren't we building affordable housing? It's like, well, let's load test it against the three tribunals and we can find out what's going wrong and then we can maybe solve for it. But people don't understand that. They just think, hey, we get to get together and decide what we want you to build and you'll build it and none of these things matter. And it's like, no.

Klinkenberg: And you've probably run across this in Durham and that area. But one of our constant sources of frustration in my city, and frankly, in a lot of places I work in, is you get people who maybe are well meaning about development and about their community, about regulations. They sit on a city council or a planning commission and they construct rules that they think are going to do something positive. But number one, they don't have any skin in the game, so they're asking somebody else to do something. But really, more importantly, they don't go through this exercise to do the math and actually understand who are the real people, who are the real humans, who are actually going to do this thing that we say we want to do and how are they going to actually do it?

Lubeck: Yeah, somebody wants to describe it is that the world is filled with people who want you to execute their vision at your risk, right? Yeah, of course. There's a general problem, I think, in the discourse now, which is sort of a result of the dark way that participatory planning has gone, which is demonizing and being demagogic towards the people who build things. There is almost like a second-class citizen. I mean, often hear people…refer to the people who are not in the [construction and development] trades as “the real people.” It's pretty disturbing. And I think that's the starting point that sort of feeds into this entitlement, right? That we're better or we're more important and you guys are just here for whatever reason. You have to listen to us and do what we say. And of course, because of the three tribunals and politics and human nature, and there's not a lot of people who want to willingly work for people like that, it creates that tension. I'm not sure we're close to solving those problems, but they're very real and they're pretty unique to land use. I mean, this is not you don't see this in restauranteering. The restauranteur doesn't filter his menu through the neighborhood list-serve.

Klinkenberg: There seems to be a weird relationship with real estate and development in general and politics versus almost any other line of business I say here. Like if our city was going to put in place new regulations for barbershops and hair salons, they would never do it without consulting dozens of people who do that kind of work in their city and really trying to understand it because people have direct experience with getting their hair cut and doing those things. But when it comes to real estate development, it's almost just like, well, we can just kind of make this thing work. And somebody in another city told us this was a good thing to do, so we're just going to do it and we're not going to sit down with the people who actually do this every day and figure out if it makes sense.

Lubeck: It's a huge problem, and I think it's worse in progressive cities because there's that us versus them bifurcation is really real and sort of a demagogic approach towards the people who build the community. It's a huge problem and I think it's gradually being solved….[A] lot of this is a reestablishment of property rights that just circumvents this. It sort of gives up on the process of working through modernist planners, but it's a slow process. It's a knife fight to do, I really think. And it's accelerated by things like the YIMBY movement, which, as you know, I've been involved with. I really think so much of it's generational. Like if you look at who's protesting new housing at any city USA, it's almost exclusively baby boomers. And it's generally us Gen Xers are kind of the Jan Brady generation. We're just in the middle, and it's usually Baby Boomers who are well-housed versus Millennials who aren't. And the Gen X is sort of the fulcrum on this. And we had in Durham when we were doing zoning code fights. Gen X basically showed up into a creative class city where most of us moved here or lived here because we're like, no, we actually chose to live in a diverse community, which we want to have opportunity. A lot of us rejected the Chapel Hill model, which is very exclusionary, and most of Gen X was like, yeah, we have our house, but we actually don't want to spend time, like, preventing others from having theirs, so let's get on with it. So I think that there's a demographic shift that, for me, this clearly has a watershed moment no later than 2030, which is when Baby Boomers kind of drop off a demographic cliff. Something is going to happen. And a lot of the activity that's going on now in Texas, California, all these states that are doing these reforms are just accelerating that. But if it's not accelerated, it's going to happen. The writing is on the wall.

There’s a lot in there, to be sure, which is one of the reasons I’ve come to like “The Messy City” so much; the discussions which Kevin hosts always tend to be thick with smart ideas and arguments. Their observations about the lack of practical zoning, environmental, or financing knowledge when it comes to many of those (myself included!) who call for more affordable housing to be built are, of course, incontestable, and their thoughts about generational change and the YIMBY movement are worth further exploration. But what I want to focus on here is Kevin’s and Aaron’s perplexity at the “weird relationship with real estate and development in general and politics.” Why do people—like people running for mayor!—dive into arguments over who is building what, and where, and how, and with what levels or forms of municipal or state or federal support, when they have “no skin in the game”?

Well, they recommended Daniel Solomon’s Global City Blues, which I should definitely read; in turn, I would recommend to them, and to anyone who has read this far, any number of historical, political, and/or sociological studies about how cities grow (or don’t): in particular, I’d recommend two nearly 40-year-old books, Stephen L. Elkin’s City and Regime in the American Republic, and John Logan and Harvey Molotch’s Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. It’s likely that anyone as smart as Klinkenberg or Lubeck (and I’d like to believe that the same would go for Whipple or Racette) is familiar with the whole concept of the “growth machine” and all its different uses in arguments over municipal politics, but in case not, its core insight—however much it has been debated, challenged, and refined over the decades—is well presented in these two texts.

Basically, cities are, almost be definition, sites of pluralism, which means there are going to be, among the populace, many different groups contesting for influence. But the political tools available on the municipal level in the United States for those groups to contest over are limited; urban polities for the most part have historically lacked the kind of sovereign authority which, on the state and national level, groups and parties organize around in order to democratically capture and wield on behalf of their agenda(s). But what is available to municipal governments is questions of land use. So inevitably, though in numerous different ways, different factions within urban polities come to focus on what they can do with land; similarly city governments, looking to reward or win the votes of or pursue for electoral reasons the interests of one faction or another regularly turn to land use—that is, the building and expanding of a city’s economic footprint, in the form of taxable and productive properties—as a way to accomplish that end. The “growth machine” is a way of talking about this kind of political regime, in all its varieties: it is Wichita’s former mayor Jeff Longwell in the article linked to above, who—when defending the secret land give-aways which made it possible to get a commitment from a AAA minor-league baseball team, which thus made it possible to secure financing for loans, which thus made it possible to build a new baseball stadium without any (at least not any immediate or direct) tax increases—put it pithily: “If we’re not growing, we’re moving backwards.” Growth über alles, in other words. Race and culture and environment and religion and every other type of issue that might arise in any pluralistic polity are obviously often present in city politics as well—but given the constitutional and economic restrictions cities operate under (for all the talk of “home rule” in Kansas, Dillon’s Rule is still definitely in control here), and given the factional push to find some way to advance one’s agenda regardless, fights over how to grow the productive, job-creating use of a city’s available land, over construction, zoning, tax-increment financing, and all the rest, often become subject to, or entwined within, an overall development-centric regime.

It shouldn’t be hard to recognize that under such regimes, the frustration urban dwellers have over the power of developers, whether merely perceived or—far too often, in my view—actually real, is going to manifest itself in political blowback. Such blowback may not always be defining of the political (to say nothing of the social or fiscal) environment through which all those attracted to idea of making homes, buildings, or any kind of places of residence or commerce or entertainment or whatever, must move; as I said above, I actually don’t think the arguments over development and construction interests and “the trades,” as Aaron put it, will play as large a role in this mayoral race as they did in the last one. But it will definitely be present—and not just because Wichita is becoming more “progressive” (a debatable claim in any case). Yes, it is reasonable to expect that the frustration with growth machines throwing their weight around in cities with a large left- or progressive-liberal-leaning population will be particularly intense—but as Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns movement has demonstrated, a desire to push for more fiscal, environmental, and social health and sustainability in our built environments often cuts across political divisions. I know Klinkenberg is a major supporter of what Strong Towns stands for, and I presume Lubeck is too. I wonder, though, if their obvious focus upon—and, frankly, defense of—the work of the developers, the architects and business-people and designers and financiers and construction engineers who have “skin in the game,” sets them up for a greater degree of frustration with the larger political realities of the municipal environments they operate in than Marohn’s more critical engagements otherwise point towards.

The one of the greatest values of Strong Towns, and one of the reasons that I wish more than just a couple of the mayor candidates (Celeste Racette being one of them) would seriously engage with what Marohn has written about community, transportation, and more—particularly in the ways its been applied to the challenges which Wichita faces today—is that it opens up something as straightforward as “building” and “land use” to a thoughtful, historical critique. Keep in mind that the “three tribunals” which Lubeck originally mentioned—the tests of code, of the marketplace, and of financing—while all practical and real, are also products of regulatory and fiscal arrangements that came into existence for specific reasons, and have had specific, controlling, often negative effects on who builds what and where and how and for how much. It is worth staying cognizant of the arbitariness of those controls, and even acknowledging the degree to which a frustration with them might empower political responses, whether that be something as small as a land bank (such as is struggling to get off the ground here in Wichita) to take control of abandoned properties and make them available to those in need of affordable homes, or something as large as outright limits upon what builders can construct and how and where. Simply put: in a democratic society, political inputs are going to be everywhere, so it seems practical to simply recognize that those who involve themselves in the provising of a product that invariably partakes of a political reality are going to have some of those inputs pointed in their direction. (After all, despite Lubeck’s comment, a restaurant owner who genuinely never responds to the equivalent of “the neighborhood list-serve” probably won’t be in business very long.)

I’m not a developer, and I appreciate being able to learn from people like Klinkenberg who are. Their perspective on matters of urban life and its challenges is one I value very much; it certainly has far more relevance to people trying to improve Wichita’s neighborhoods than my theoretical reflections! But larger theoretical concepts can be helpful in figuring out the lay of the land, sometimes. Wichita’s mayoral race is, perhaps, one of them.