When we do planning and design charrettes for a project, people do show up convinced that we have the plan in our back pocket and we are just doing this for show. That is not an unreasonable way to look at what we are doing if you assume our process is like what they have seen before. Nobody wants to be made a fool.

That's why we have to start with a debrief of everything we know about the site and the community and ask for what's missing. We also have to explain our basic approach to placemaking and what to expect over the course of a week of focused work and responding to feedback.

Through trial and error, we have learned logistics of the physical charrette space are really important for communication. The studio space where everyone is working is dynamic and cool. Most folks have never been in that kind of environment. But it is neither fair nor reasonable to just throw a first time visitor/participant into the deep end of the pool. We have to prepare a separate room or hallway to post each evening's work to date in chronological order. The charrette team and the folks who showed up every evening know how the potential solutions to the constraints and opportunities have evolved day by day. It’s not reasonable to expect someone to show up on day 4 and just “get it”. We have to provide a transparent road map or the late arrivals can easily default to the “You had the plan in your back pocket, this is all just play acting” frame.

The timeline of drawings showing the evolution of solutions is critical for helping anyone arriving for the first time in the middle of the charrette. They are trying to figure out what is going on and absorb a lot of information. We typically draft someone from the client's team a a guide to walk people through the chronology from the start. It is best for that guide to be someone local rather than one of the team members who is in the middle of figuring out a design assignment to address the issues of the moment. They can be kinda intense. We need to meet people where they are and not expect them to run fast and jump onto a moving train. The progression of the drawings helps a person get up to speed at their own pace.

It is important to annotate and redline the drawings that are pinned up each night to capture the refinements or the need for a fresh approach for a rough part of the project. Showing that we tried something and it did not work can build trust in the overall process for the week. Members of the team areskilled, but they’re not witches.

When people understand that they really are seeing the sausage get made, that we are struggling to resolve conflicting agendas and physical issues on the ground, they open up a lot. Their body language changes. We get to know folks by name and they get to know us. That’s the time when local folks often show the team our blind spots or faulty assumptions. That’s when the sausage making works best.

At the end of the final presentation, we assign members of the team to go stand with the various large format boards for conversations with smaller groups of local folks with interests in a particular part of the plan or a particular issue like traffic, parking, tax base, etc.

If we want people to actually trust the process we are using to plan the site and address the inevitable challenges, we have to be as transparent as possible. The final presentation and the charrette report always has a bulleted list of issues that need further rigorous attention. The work we produce is usually 70% to 80% there, so it is important to capture the stuff that still needs to be addressed.

For a deep dive into how a good charrette can be planned and executed Michigan State has absorbed the foundational work of The Charrette Institute and has lots of resources: https://www.canr.msu.edu/nci/resources/#:~:text=A%20complete%20desktop%20reference%20for,and%20hold%20a%20successful%20charrette.

The charrette lasted 6 days. On the last day the final presentation was well received. That was 2 years ago. Since then, the project has been approved by the town as a preliminary plat and site engineering is moving forward.

I have been thinking a lot about efficiency and productivity. I see a lot of folks developing conventional sprawl projects looking for ways to be more efficient. Finding more efficient ways to build the wrong thing seriously misses the point.
You could focus on getting really good gas mileage as you drive the wrong direction. Having the right compass heading is going to be much more important. In this analogy gas mileage is a measure of efficiency and the compass heading you are following has a lot to do with how productive you are going to be achieving your goal of getting to a specific place.

Productivity is more important, more strategic than efficiency.

Ideally, we should engage in work that embodies both, with productivity as the key metric. Gathering a great team to design a neighborhood and showing your work to members of the community every evening is both productive and efficient. Opportunities for course corrections were there every evening. It is also helpful for local folks to see the design evolve as the basic idea encounters reality in a real place.

If you brought the same great team to town and they worked long hours without those public pin ups and discussions, the result would not be as good. Everyone working in the same room close to the site is efficient, but the interaction with the community made the effort productive and efficient. The combination produced work greater than the sum of its parts. (-and we got to meet some wonderful people).

I had a young colleague ask me about putting pricing for their services on their website. (Their services are more involved than, say, providing an oil change).

There is a difference between pricing for purchases like items or more prosaic services like getting your lawn mowed, and higher level services where you don’t want clients to making really consequential decisions based strictly upon price.

I am a developer, urban designer, and development advisor with an ADHD brain and Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria ( RSD). Add a history of people pleasing to the mix and you might see why I struggled with pricing for years. Really struggled.

A couple years ago, my coach explained that iy you are providing services that can greatly help a client, many clients will see price is a secondary or tertiary concern if they are confident you may be able to solve their problem. One reason for this is they typically don’t seek you out until they become painfully aware of their important problem (and have tried several ways to fix it -or ways to avoid dealing with it).

When they are ready to take action and look for help, they need to _already_ be aware of you and your capabilities. They have registered the possibility that you could solve their problem. Even better, if they hear about you from someone they trust, they are aware of the benefit you can provide.

When a client is ready to explore how to solve the problem, their focus shifts to figuring out if you really can help them, and if they really can trust you enough to admit to a relative stranger that they can’t seem to solve the problem and need help.

This is why your marketing can’t be broad superficial hype. Few of us are smart enough to keep more than one story straight, let alone communicate the story in a compelling consistent way.

If you have capabilities to offer, contribute to your field and adjacent fields where your clients operate. Create habits that force you to organize your thoughts. Publish, blog, write a SubStack, do public speaking about stuff tthat is important to you personally/professionally. Hone your ability to explain useful insights and experience. In essence, get practice giving away your general insights for free.

(That’s different from solving peoples’ specific problem before they start paying you).

When you frame a proposal for a client, establish two distinct scopes with different prices. This helps the client prioritize which parts of the problem would give them the greatest benefit. Price those tow different scopes so that you would be completely comfortable with either one. Don’t put your thumb on the scale.

This is much better than quoting one price you might think is pretty much okay, without seriously exploring the real reasons a client needs to solve the problem, followed by the client quickly asking if you would do the work for less, putting a lot of weight on price.

In a simpler purchase, clear pricing shows that you respect a customer’s time and attention You are not requiring them to jump through bullshit hoops before they can finally give you their your money.

In a more complicated services relationship, the scope that will solve problems is kinda murky to both you. and your client. The client can benefit from connecting a lower price with some basic benefits and a higher price for more comprehensive benefits.

If you recognize that a colleague may be a much better fit for what the client needs, make the referral and explain why. Why would you turn away work?

For one reason, you want a reputation for being genuinely committed to helping people. Make the referral even at a time when you really need the work/money.

The second reason for doing what seems like a counter intuitive thing is because when you are marginally competent at doing work you don’t like and are ill-suited for, you will quickly get more of it and that is not good for anyone.

I went looking for a public domain image that illustrates trust. I gave up. Here is a photo of me with my trusted dog Trouble.

I recently saw a Slack post wondering “What universal metric could help municipalities to see the need to change the rules on the books that shape their pattern of development?”

The key metric deployed in MoneyBall that allowed the Oakland As to shape a wining team with no money, was the statistical likelihood of a batter getting on base. I suspect that the key metric for small developers is the ability to build trust with their neighbors as the foundation for building trust with the elected officials and building trust with the city staff.

If your neighbors don’t trust you, they show up and push elected officials to deny any discretionary approval needed for your project. Even if your efforts are supported by the town’s adopted policies, elected officials will find some excuse to deny approval. If they can’t deny your application outright, they can table the decision and ask the staff to give them more detail. That can easily produce a 60 to 120 day delay.

In an environment where the existing zoning is terrible, at some point you are going to need to ask for a variance, a text amendment to an ordinance, or some frustrating Planned Unit Development (PUD) approval. Those changes and exceptions will require a noticed public hearings and votes by the elected officials. You may be able to build within the terrible zoning rules, but if the rules are bad enough you will probably push to change the rules. If you have not built substantial trust with the local residents, (your neighbors) you are vulnerable to being denied when it comes to a vote of the planning commission or city council.

It is IncDev canon to tell emerging developers to start small and build as of right project, to operate within the system, (no matter how lousy and counter productive the rules are). There are two reasons to start small.

1. Learn the system and the players under the current rules.

2. Build trust with your neighbors.

Structural change happens at the speed you can build trust. Why would you need trust if you are doing what is so obviously the right thing? Because people are afraid of change. Humans are incredibly emotional creatures driven by feelings. They are at the same time, capable of rational thought and analysis if they feel like it. Someone breaking with the way things have been done has to have the trust of their neighbors.

I don’t know how you would clinically measure how much your neighbors trust you like an on-base percentage.

A municipality can test the metrics of infill would be to count up the vacant properties within a given neighborhood and measure what if anything gets built, then figure out who is building/rebuilding and how they are getting on base. Then they can start looking at what obstacles limit those intrepid souls.

The city is rarely the active ingredient, the catalyst, in creating a culture of relentless incremental improvement, because it takes a lot more time, attention, and consistent action for a municipality to gain the trust of their residents than it does for an individual who is building/rebuilding well and communicating effectively. Think about it. How many of your elected officials actually understand basic developer math? Face it most of them still don’t understand the city budget they vote on after two or three terms on the council.

How many of the senior city staff have a working knowledge of developer math? When would they have learned that? In some university class? On the job at the city? The basics that drive our ability to build/rebuild are just not available to them.

If the folks in charge of running things don’t understand the relentless math, and practical day to day realities of building, how are they going to understand what pieces of the zoning ordinance or the parking requirements kill good projects? Where would they ever learn that math? They might get a clue on the math by attending an IncDev training, but more realistically, they will probably need to learn it from a trustworthy local small developer (who has the support of their neighbors). If the local culture has established that developers only care about money and are morally compromised people, city staff and elected officials are likely to feel like it is their job to protect the public from the sleazy machinations of all developers. Given the activities of some developers, that is not unreasonable.

Elected officials come and go. Senior members of the city staff come and go as well. An effective staffer is often recruited by another town. Who does that leave? The residents. If your neighbors don’t trust you as their local small developer, they will continue to be the critical constraint on your efforts.

The feelings of your neighbors are a serious constraint to move beyond building as-of-right projects. If they don’t feel like they can trust you, you will be seriously limited in any effort to change the rules on the books and the local culture of building. In other words, you are not likely to score runs if you can’t get players on base. What are the constraints interfering with your ability to get players on base?

The key metric that is deployed in MoneyBall is the statistical likelihood of a batter getting on base. I do not have the data to back it up, but I suspect that the key metric for small developers is the ability to build trust with their neighbors as the foundation for building trust with the elected officials and building trust with the city staff.

If your neighbors don’t trust you then they show up and get the elected officials to deny any discretionary approval needed for your project. The elected officials will find some excuse. If they can’t deny your application outright they table the decision and ask the staff to give them more detail.

In an environment where the existing zoning is terrible, at some point you are going to need to ask for a variance, a text amendment to an ordinance, or some frustrating Planned Unit Development (PUD) approval, and approval that requires a noticed public hearing and a vote by the elected officials. You may be able to build within the terrible zoning rules, but if the rules are bad enough you will probably push to get an exception or change the rules. If you have not built substantial trust with the local residents, (your neighbors) you are vulnerable to being denied when it comes to a vote of the planning commission or city council.

It is IncDev canon to tell emerging developers to start small and build as of right project, to operate within the system, (no matter how lousy and counter productive the rules are). There are two reasons for this.

1. Learn the system and the players under the current rules.

2. Build trust with you neighbors and from their trust with the elected officials and city staff.

Structural change happens at the speed you can build trust. Why would you need trust if you are doing what is so obviously the right thing? Because people are afraid of change, so being right is never enough (no matter how right you are). Humans are incredibly emotional creatures driven by feelings. They are at the same time, completely capable of rational thought and analysis if they feel like it. Someone breaking with the way things have been done has to have the trust of their neighbors.

I don’t know how you would clinically measure how much your neighbors trust you like you can measure an on-base percentage.

One possible way a municipality could test the metrics of infill could be to count up the vacant properties within a given neighborhood and measure what it takes to get anything built, then figure out who is building/rebuilding and how they are getting on base. Then start looking at what obstacles limit those intrepid souls. Consider the scale local infill builders are operating at compared with conventional large scale developers. The rule passed to limit what the big operators do can be disproportionately impacting small operators. A $20,000 development impact fee per dwelling unit means a 4,000 SF house has to pay $5 per SF. The same development impact fee paid by someone building a 500 SF apartment pays $40 per SF.

The city is rarely the active ingredient, the catalyst, in creating a culture of relentless incremental improvement. That active ingredient is more likely to be the small local developer. It takes a lot more time, attention, and consistent action for a municipality to gain the trust of their residents than it does for an individual who is actively building/rebuilding well and communicating effectively. Think about it. How many of your elected officials actually understand basic developer math?

How many of the senior city staff have a working knowledge of developer math? When would they have learned that? In some university class? On the job at the city? The basic math and risk assessments that drive our ability to build/rebuild are just not available to them. When would residents have access to this knowhow if local developers they encounter are not sharing it?

If the folks in charge of running things don’t understand the relentless math, and practical day to day realities of building, how are they going to understand what pieces of the zoning ordinance or the parking requirements kill good projects?
Where would they ever learn that math? They might get a clue on the math by attending an IncDev training, but more realistically, they will probably need to learn it outside formal council meetings from a local small developer (who has built the trust of their neighbors). If the local culture holds developers are morally compromised people only care about money, city staff and elected officials are likely to feel like it is their job to protect the public from the sleazy machinations of all developers. Given the past activities of some developers, that is not unreasonable.

Elected officials come and go. Senior members of the city staff come and go as well. An effective staffer is often recruited by another town. Who does that leave? The residents. If your neighbors don’t trust you as their local small developer, that will continue to be the critical constraint on your efforts.

The feelings of your neighbors are the key to moving beyond as-of-right projects. Neighbors who don’t feel like they can trust you, will constrain any effort to change the rules on the books and the local culture of building. In other words, you are not likely to score runs if you can’t get players on base.

I have met way too many elected officials who really do not understand their town’s budget and the the town’s financial position (even after 2 or 3 terms on the council…)
The best metric for helping elected officials, senior staff, and residents to get a handle on their town’s money is the Finance Decoder produced by Strong Towns.
https://www.strongtowns.org/decoder

Building a simple alley delivers a number of benefits.

Garage doors come off the front of the house and go in the back. Driveways go in the back and another parking space is now available at the curb in front of the house where the driveway used to be. Electric, gas, phone and cable TV services (“dry utilities”) go in the alley. That means there isn’t a transformer and a clutch of green/grey utility pedestals in the front yard.

Unfortunately, just because something is simple doesn’t make it easy. Some fire departments would like to reserve the possibility they could drive fire trucks down the alley. They would like the alley engineered to handle the movements of a 40 foot ladder truck.

No. Do not turn an alley into a formal Fire Apparatus Access Road. (The technical requirements for such a road are found in Appendix D of the fire code). You don’t need to over-build the alley. The street in front of the house is Fire Apparatus Access Road It already exists, so you don’t need to build a second one.

The fire hydrants are in the front. The fire can be fought from the front, just like firefighters do in places without alleys.

An alley may have to accommodate the local garbage truck. If your municipality will collect garbage in the alley, the turning radius of the garbage truck should guide the geometry of the alley pavement. Some places have trucks with a hydraulic loading arm on one side of the vehicle. That can require two trips through the alley. Instead of two trips, all the cans to be arranged by the residents on one side of the alley.

Stay tuned for more technical particulars on alleys. (photo by Sandy Sorlien)