DID YOU KNOW That over Seventy Five Years Ago Abraham Maslow Proposed a Theory to Prioritize Our Needs?

In 1943 the psychologist, Abraham Maslow, wrote a paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in which he proposed that humans had a hierarchy of needs. This theory although not originally proposed as a pyramid but now commonly depicted as one was based on an understanding that there were levels of needs that built on each other. In other words before someone could appreciate or consider something like art, he or she needed to have more basic needs such as food and shelter taken care of.

Maslow’s hierarchy has five levels: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. Physiological needs are things like food, water, sex and sleep. Safety needs are things like security of body, employment and family. Love and belonging refers to friendship, family and sexual intimacy. Esteem relates to self-esteem, confidence, achievement and respect from others. And finally self-actualization relates to items such as creativity, spontaneity and morality.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is helpful when one is trying to prioritize a lot of different options. For example this past week, the Redwood City Planning Commission held a public hearing regarding what it should do for Community Benefits. Community benefits are meant to essentially replace redevelopment funds that cities such as Redwood City used to have. At the meeting community benefits were defined by Senior City Planner Diana O’Dell as a way to derive greater benefit from the granting of planning entitlements, increase the value of private property creating an economic justification for additional benefits, and must be reasonably related and proportionate to the project so as not to end up being so costly as to discourage the development altogether.

Some of the programs proposed were affordable housing, a prevailing wage, green building, pedestrian and bicycle facilities, recreational access to the bay, art programs, child care or something else. Affordable housing and a prevailing wage are fairly low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as they are basic safety issues. Art programs and recreational access to the bay on the other hand are higher needs more in the realm of self-actualization.

While it would be nice to have all of one’s needs met, to the extent that government has limited means and I don’t know any government that isn’t in that position; I would expect government to first assure all its citizens the more basic needs and only once those needs have been properly satisfied for all its citizens to move on up the hierarchy and devote resources to higher needs.

Clearly art programs and recreational access funding should be commensurately lower than the funding and support of programs that address affordable housing and a prevailing wage. In fact to the extent that community benefits are being funded through development dollars, art programs and recreational access bring added value to developments and could be self-funding and not really need additional government support.

What do you think? How do you think government should prioritize and allocate funding to different community benefits?