A General Plan for the 21st Century - Part 1

On Monday we looked at the General Plan and on Wednesday we did a critical analysis.

WEAKNESSES

Some of the major weaknesses in the proposed General Plan are -

• The principles are either meaningless platitudes or contradictory.
• There is no empirical rationale for the focus areas
• Substantial data on the focus area is missing. This includes data on crime, sales tax revenue, and traffic uses.
• Some of the data being used need to be better defined. For example, “jobs” should be better defined in terms of how much they pay, not merely that there are “jobs”. All things equal, the City should be interested in creating better paying jobs, not merely jobs. In a similar fashion, “nonresidential square feet” should be better defined in terms of sales tax revenue and jobs created, not merely square feet. All things equal we want to attract businesses that generate jobs and revenue not merely fill space.
• Data being used in this report is based on different years for different measures (2016 for jobs, 2013 for population). The data should all be based on the same year, and given that we are in 2019, and experiencing rapid growth in jobs and population, this earlier data is unacceptable.
• There are many false assumptions in the report. Among the most grievous, the assumption of linearity, the failure to account for changes in quality as quantity increases, and the use of “business as usual” for a city that has experienced dramatic changes as a result of external factors that are unlikely to continue.
• There are worrisome uses of figures. For example, the population for Lake Forest in the report is 81,000 while the City itself uses 85,000 as the right number. The report co-mingles household size for single family and multi-family residences, yet the differences are 15% which is a significant difference when applied across 30,000 housing units.
• The most popular theme is something labeled “GPAC Additional Considerations” for which there is no description.

More problematic than all of these weakness is the paper and pen approach to planning. The time for static 20 year plans has long since passed. The report should have been developing principles, relationships, and algorithms to allow for dynamic planning in a world where changes in regulations, macroeconomics, retailing, and housing preferences are rapidly changing. The authors of this report promised, publicly and privately, that they would produce a report that met the 21st Century challenges, but they failed miserably.

21ST CENTURY APPROACH

A 21st Century approach to a General Plan isn't a map on a wall with multi-colored parts of the City. Things change. Today they change rapidly. Within the past 10 years, anyone who designed a big-box retail shopping center is in trouble because of the use of the Internet to significantly impact the way that people shop. Developers who designed big luxury homes on large lots had to scale back or face high inventories as demand changes. The auto market and those businesses associated with it, especially sales marts, have been changed by the introduction of Uber and Lyft. Traffic models have had to change as more and more people work from home. Online purchases of autos has changed the auto-buying industry and online buying of homes is right now changing the way that real estate brokers make a living.

In the 20th Century, the time between introduction and wide scale adoption of new habits took decades. Here in the early 21st Century it takes a decade, and sometimes less. Going forward, future shock will only speed up. Cities must adapt.

How can we do it?

INFORMATION

The first step is to do a better job managing our information. The sad truth is that the City officials know almost nothing about what's going on in the City. I worked on this by trying to get information about crime on the city's website , but in other areas we are not doing the job. For example -

• What areas of the city are underperforming in terms of generating sales tax revenue?
• What parts of the City are growing in businesses and where are we losing ground?
• What are the trends? If they exist, what are the structural challenges facing us?
• What areas of the City is crime on the increase? What types of crimes? What are the trends?

Talk to anyone on the Council and you'll get a blank stare. Talk to most highly paid City officials and you'll get the same blank stare.

How can you run a business without adequate information on your best and worst performing assets?

The woefully inadequate General Plan just presented shows just how little is known, and more damning, how little is sought to be known.

What are some of the key indicators we need to be looking at on a geographic basis -

• Crime (Part 1 and Part 2, not merely Part 1)
• Sales tax revenue (expected and actual)
• Jobs (total and type)
• Businesses
• Traffic
• Population (overall and daily)
• Residential units
• Public amenities
• Schools

This information needs to be up-to-date and in addition have a 5 and 10 year trend in order to give us some guidance. With this information at hand, we would have a basis on which to create a General Plan. Right now we have almost none of this information available to us.

Next time we'll look at a possible model.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner was on the Lake Forest City Council from 2014 to 2018 and Mayor in 2018. Under his leadership the City became the first debt free city in the U.S. with a population over 25,000 people and the first city to live broadcast City Council meetings that allowed residents to participate online (Click Here). Dr. Gardner is a former University Professor. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook