Automatic captions, reformatted for reading: sentence case, paragraph breaks, and
timestamps at their original cue positions. Word order is unchanged. Caption
mishearings are left as recorded.
[00:00:00]
Hi, and welcome to another episode of the bottom up revolution podcast, where we share the stories of the strong towns movement in action. I'm rachel, a program director at strong towns. Spencer Gardner is an urban planner and strong towns member who moved to Spokane, Washington a few years back because it offered him and his family an affordable place to live where they could find a traditional neighborhood where they were able to walk and bike. Everything was going great, but since that move, the City, like so many across the us, has become increasingly unaffordable, and spencer has stepped up to try and help change that. An opening in City leadership led him to apply to be Spokane's planning director, and he was hired to the position earlier this year. He's been part of several important reforms in the City, including significantly some substantial modifications to their accessory dwelling unit, or ADU code, which is allowing a lot more of these small homes to be built at a time when greater housing options at lower price points are so desperately needed. Spokane also undertook a unique interim zoning ordinance to allow up to four units to be built on any lot in the City. A change that happened in record time compared with how fast these sorts of reforms usually take in the typical community, often years or even decades. Spencer will go into detail about how and why that could occur and the way that he sees it as a special pilot program that they can learn from, which may pave the way to more permanent change. In this conversation, spencer also shares prescient insights on urban planning and how those in the profession might need to find ways to move past talking. It can be more comfortable to continue to plan as a planner, he says. We need to turn that planning into action. So here's my conversation with Spencer Gardner. Spencer Gardner, thank you for joining me for this episode of the bottom up revolution podcast. It's so great to talk with you today. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and especially how you ended up being a planner? How did I end up being a planner?
[00:02:22]
I asked myself that quite often. My introduction to planning was really at the university of wisconsin. That's where I got my master's degree. I did my undergrad in utah and had a job for a year and it wasn't a job that I wanted to be in permanently. And I just didn't realize until that time that you could actually have a career studying cities. It didn't occur to me. So I don't really remember how I first kind of learned about planning as a career path, but I was hooked and went on, got my master's degree at the university of wisconsin, worked in chicago for a few years, came back to madison and I worked there for a few more years. But I grew up out west and eventually we wanted to be closer to our families. So I started looking for places out west to live and settled on Spokane. So I moved here and continued working for the same firm. Sometime last year, the opportunity came up to apply for the position of planning director here in the City, Spokane. I took advantage of that opportunity and they hired me on. So here I am. Excellent. Well, yeah, I want to get into more about your current role, but first, I'm curious if you can remember how did you get connected with strong towns? You've been a member for seven years, so it's been a while and you've written for us over the years. You've been a really important presence with the organization and the movement. How did you get drawn to strong towns? I don't actually remember. I'm sure I just came across the blog like most other people do. Somebody shared an article or something.
[00:04:18]
It was early days at that point. But the usual story, you read the message and it really put a lot of pieces that didn't make sense to me fell into place. So I really felt a home there and just tried to be involved ever since. You've been in Spokane, Washington for the last few years. For people that aren't familiar with that City, can you tell us a little bit about Spokane and maybe some of its best assets and greatest challenges these days? Sure. I've actually written a little bit about this on strong towns. So this might be duplicating content to some extent, but I spent the better part of the year once we decided that we were going to move out west trying to figure out where to move. There were some good options. I had the ability to work remotely, so I wasn't quite as constrained geographically. And I grew up in idaho. My wife's from alaska, but her parents now live far near portland. So we wanted to be somewhere kind of in the northwest, but we didn't have any specific location in mind. I really wanted to find a place that had not become overly expensive like Seattle or portland. But I also wanted to find a place where we could enjoy a more urban-oriented lifestyle, I guess, for lack of a better word. And unfortunately, because of the development patterns across the western united states, even in some of the older cities, it's just hard to find those opportunities. So much of the growth here was in the auto-oriented era. The neighborhoods that really fit that bill are few and far between.
[00:06:09]
So Spokane was on my radar. Other kind of mid-sized cities like reno, nevada, or boise, idaho, those were cities that we definitely looked at. Being from idaho, boise was a natural choice, but at that point, it had already kind of been discovered and the prices were really going crazy there. One of the things that really drew me to Spokane is, I jokingly call it the western most rust-belt City in the united states. Its primary growth era, when it really exploded, was in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And economically, it was oriented around forestry and mining, so extractive industries. But it brought tons of people. We had between 1900 and 1910, we added 70,000 residents. We basically grew from a village of a few thousand people to over 100,000 people within, I believe, a 20-year period. So if you imagine being born in a tiny village and graduating high school in the largest metropolis between Seattle and minneapolis, it was just crazy growth during that era. The advantage that gives to the City of Spokane is that growth all happened, oriented around street cars and walking. So we have a number of legacy neighborhoods that are built or were built during that pattern of development, what we call now street car suburbs and classic american urbanism. So on strong towns, I actually compared it to the City of boise and showed some of the different eras of growth. But you can really see it if you drive around here. There are probably eight or nine different neighborhoods that are oriented around a small commercial center. You can find those walkable neighborhoods here. When you look at the City of boise, there's one or two or maybe three that are hopping along. And in some ways, that's worked to boise's favor because a lot of that interest has really concentrated on the one or two neighborhoods that are there. So if you're looking for that walkable environment, you can find it. Those who have found it have really concentrated and made those extremely successful. The City of Spokane, because it has so many, and also I think just some of the economic stagnation with the decline of mining and timber, those neighborhoods were preserved and retained their affordability, and you haven't really had the same extreme concentration
[00:09:01]
In one or two of those neighborhoods. Although we're starting to see that change, the housing market here has changed rapidly in the last couple of years. That history is one of the things that really drew me here, just knowing that we had the opportunity to buy a house, that it was an affordable market, and also that it offered us that lifestyle that we were looking for. Yeah, I'm picturing the photo that we've used for many years when we run an article by you, which is you with some of your kids in a cargo bike, which I'm sure they're all much older now. Did you find yourselves in a neighborhood where you all can bike and get around fairly easily and safely without needing a car for every trip? I think so, for the most part. There are enough different growth patterns here that I think, depending on who you talk to, they'll have a different story about whether you can bike safely in Spokane. We live in sort of an inner neighborhood close to downtown, and the street grid here is very, very reliable, so it's very easy to find a neighborhood side street and bike around on the low traffic residential streets. When you get to a busy street, that can be a challenge for crossing sometimes, and I'm definitely more comfortable than my wife is with biking around everywhere, but I don't have a hard time biking to pretty much anything here because of that. When you get to other parts of the City, the street grid's not maybe not quite as strong, but the area where we're at is just really well built for that, and we're making some improvements on the major streets in terms of bike facilities, so that is that we're making improvements. That's great, and I imagine Spokane, as compared with madison, is a place where you're more likely to be able to bike year-round without having to contend with really bad weather and snow and all that. To some extent, although in madison, because of the bad weather and just a commitment to making biking a year-round thing, they plow their paths really well, they plow the streets really well, so winter biking was not that tough in madison, if you didn't mind the cold, which I didn't mind.
[00:11:25]
But yeah, the winters are milder here, so you can bike even through most of the winter. So you're settled in Spokane, and then I know that you were working for tool design previously, which is planning for them that we have a lot of respect for at strong towns, you guys do a lot of great work at tool design, but then you decided to move into this role as a planning director for the City. How did you decide to make that switch, and what's it been like to be working for the City government as a leader? It's been a really interesting learning period for me. I applied because the City had been looking for a long time. There's been, there's a lot of history to the planning department here. They cycled through several different directors, and then for about four years, they didn't have a permanent approved planning director. They were working under interim directors for a variety of reasons, and they had advertised for the position and hadn't found any satisfactory candidates. And so I kind of just thought I'd apply and see what happened. I'd gotten to know my, now my boss, who is the director of economic development, and he encouraged me to apply, and so I did, and eventually was offered the position. It's been, I had not had experience in City government before that, which I think in the unique circumstances that the City of Spokane found itself was actually a benefit, at least in my favor for hiring me. I can't speak for the hiring decision that happened, but I think that it had a lot to do with needing to bring in some fresh perspective and fresh thinking on some of the planning issues that we faced. And so the fact that I had not, you know, didn't have prior history within the department or within the City, and that I was brought in some experience from around the country rather than being focused in one single place for a long time was one of the things that was probably, probably made me attractive as a candidate. The downside to that is that I've had a very steep learning curve. So I've had to learn about, you know, a lot of the public process that happens behind the scenes that people don't really think about from the outside. And fortunately, we've got great staff. We've got amazing planners in the department, and they're very capable, and they understand
[00:14:06]
The system really well. And so they've been able to kind of make up for some of my gaps and experience, and we've been able to do some great things. What are some of those issues or things that you've been working on so far? A lot of this was underway before I started, so I hesitate to take too much credit, but we did pass reform to our accessory dwelling unit code, and that was a great effort. We removed some constraints on accessory dwelling units that we felt were making them hard to build. So as an example, we got rid of the requirement for the owner to live on site in order to build an ADU. That's one that a lot of ADU advocates really push for. We also increased the allowable size, so it gives you a lot more flexibility in the size and the layout and the type of unit that you build, and we increased the locations where they can be built by removing limitations on lot sizes. So even if you're on a small lot, you can build an ADU now. So it was a lot of just removing barriers, and I think the end product is one of the better ADU codes, at least in the pacific northwest and perhaps around the country. There's a lot more work I think we need to do on our code, and we're undertaking that now. One of the big things that just happened, in July, our Council passed an ordinance that allows up to four plexes on all residential lots. That was a big deal. The way that we did that was through what's called an interim zoning ordinance. So for those who aren't familiar, an interim zoning ordinance is like the flip side of a moratorium. So a moratorium is passed in order to stop development as a result of some emergency or some significant problem, and an interim zoning ordinance is a way to allow something or to make a change to your zoning ordinance in response to a crisis. Our Mayor a year ago had declared an emergency around housing. House prices have increased dramatically over the last couple of years here in Spokane, to the point now where a large portion of the population really just can't afford a regular house. And that's a big change from the way things have been for a long time here. Spokane was generally a very affordable community, and that was one of its selling points, is
[00:16:44]
That it was the place where you could go to get away from the high prices in Seattle and buy a house and live there with your family and have a great quality of life. So that was impacting that image and obviously making it difficult for people to find housing. So in response to that, we had the declared emergency, and then a month ago passed the ordinance that allows the variety of housing types. And that as an interim ordinance, it lasts for a year. So that law is only in place for one year. And our commitment to the community has been that we will work during that one year period to make the permanent changes that we need so that this isn't just a stop gap solution, but it's a permanent solution to our housing crisis. Huge accomplishments. That's fantastic. I'm guessing maybe it's a little bit too early, but have you seen any results of this so far? Any new adus or duplexes, floorplexes being built? We have seen some permitting activity for adus. That passed earlier in the summer, and so there's been a little more time for the market to respond to it. In addition, as we were working on the ADU ordinance, a lot of interested ADU builders or homeowners looking to build an ADU had come forward expressing interest in building an ADU and were running up against limitations based on the prior ordinance. So we shared with them some of what we were working on, and there were a number of homeowners who opted to wait. So they filed their permits as soon as that ordinance passed. So we have seen some effect on the ADU side. On the floorplex side, we've heard a lot of interest from the development community. I don't think we have any permits that we could strictly chalk up to that ordinance yet, but we've filled out a lot of inquiries, and we are just getting started with some major outreach push to educate developers, builders, and the public on what exactly is possible now. Yeah. So we're really teasing out an important issue when it comes to housing reform, which is it's not enough to just say, okay, adus are allowed, or we want more housing. But actually, you have to lift a lot of these constraints that are effectively preventing those things from happening if you actually want to see the impact.
[00:19:18]
So that's really impressive, and glad that you're there in Spokane to get into those nitty gritty details. Yeah, we have a lot of other things on our radar related to housing. So there's a lot more work to do. Yeah. What are some of the things that you're kind of looking forward to working on in the future? You may be familiar with Seattle's ad universe. It's a great website. I'd recommend anybody to go check it out. They've put together a really fantastic resource for building adus. It's sort of a one-stop shop. So as a homeowner, you can go to the website. They have pre-approved standardized ADU plans that you can select, and then you have sort of a glide path to permitting that gives homeowners all the information they need and really is just a great resource for encouraging adus and lowering the barriers. I'd love to get to something like that. That might take a long time. We don't have the same resources that they do over in Seattle. And so that's something that we're going to have to build up to little by little. But certainly a first step, I'd love to get some pre-approved ADU plans off the ground. We've had some early conversations about that. In a similar vein, we've had some conversations about introducing pre-approved missing middle housing plans. So these would be townhouse duplex and foreplex plans that have already been vetted by our building department and are ready for people to use off the shelf. So we've done some early work on that too. And given our short timeframe for this interim ordinance, we'd really like to get that off the ground as quickly as we can so that hopefully at least a few builders are able to take advantage while there's a favorable regulatory climate for it. And then obviously as we make those permanent changes, we would continue that program as well. Another one that I think is really important, there's a nonprofit here in the northwest that does housing related work. And one of the programs they have that they operate in portland is a loan program for adus. So one of the traditional problems with adus is that if I'm a regular homeowner with a
[00:21:33]
Normal bank account, my opportunity for building adus is very limited. You're basically stuck with either a rich uncle who could loan you money or enough equity in your house through the appreciation of the value to then take out a home equity line of credit and build the ADU because banks traditionally wouldn't finance based on the anticipated rent coming in from the ADU. So financing has been a gap in the ADU world for a long time. And this organization has stepped in to bridge that gap, essentially. They can provide the bridge loan to let you build the ADU. And then once that ADU is constructed, banks are generally fine with loaning on the value of the expected income of the ADU. So it's really just that hole in the middle that was needing some kind of bridge. And there are groups that are out there doing that. The one that operates out of portland is called casa, c-a-s-a. So anybody that's interested should definitely check that out. We would love to bring something like that here as well. Something that we talk about a lot at strong towns is making sure that the work that our cities are doing is in response to what residents on the ground need and want and what their concerns and struggles are. How do you incorporate that into your work as a planning director, like listening to resident needs and concerns? I've pondered this question a lot. I think being now on the other side of the table within City government has given me a new perspective on the challenges that planners face in the public sector. We talk within the department regularly about how we actually understand what people want.
[00:23:29]
That is the challenge. I think a lot of the standard mechanisms for allowing the public to weigh in are simply inadequate for getting the kind of information that you really need. The systems that we have in place, so the City of Spokane, for example, has a very robust neighborhood program. We have neighborhood councils that are created by the City and the leaders of the neighborhood councils interact with each other and they interact with the City. I think the theory behind the neighborhood Council system makes a lot of sense. It's a great way to get City government closer to the people. In practice, I think it introduces some challenges that we have had a lot of discussions about in particular that the neighborhood Council system is not necessarily as inclusive as we'd like it to be. I don't think it's a result of any desire to exclude people. It's just that it's the same problems that any democratic system suffers, which is that most of the people are just busy with other things. They don't have the time or the inclination or the desire to be involved in the affairs of their neighborhood at the level of spending a few hours a week participating in neighborhood Council activities or going out and even just attending their neighborhood Council meetings. It's not something that a lot of people have the capacity to do. We struggle with how to make that system of representation more truly representative of the people in the neighborhood. We've not settled on a good answer for that. Maybe that's not answering your question, but that's been, I think, the biggest challenge is answering the question, what is it that the public wants? Yeah, there are no easy answers to that for sure. I'm guessing, though, the work that you were able to do on passing some of these housing ordinances had some general public support to make it happen. Is that accurate? I think so. One of our messages with this interim zoning ordinance is that we have been having conversations around housing for years here in Spokane, ever since prices started to escalate. Last year, a little over a year ago, we completed and Council adopted a housing action plan.
[00:26:11]
That was the culmination of over a year of work around housing and really convening that community conversation. Then in the year since the housing action plan was adopted, we spent time on our accessory dwelling unit ordinance. We spent time on a few other little parts of our code that we felt like were barriers to housing. It took us that whole year just to get the accessory dwelling unit reform done. The speed of change that we were able to accomplish using our regular process was really just not up to the task. As we went out to the community and talked about the interim zoning ordinance, we moved extremely quickly from the time that the proposal was made by the Mayor and Council during a press conference to the time that it was passed by City Council was less than a month. In planning world, that's light years. That is unheard of. That's because the interim ordinance is designed to address an emergency. We genuinely felt we were in an emergency. We are in an emergency. We moved very quickly and we did so deliberately. We sidestepped a lot of our usual process. Just as an example, we didn't even speak about it with our planning commission. Our Plan Commission didn't, they just happened not to meet during the time when we could have brought it up. It wasn't that we were trying to lock anybody out of process. It was just recognizing that we couldn't wait around for the usual gears of government to work. The message around that part of it was this interim ordinance is part of the outreach process. We didn't make any permanent changes to our code.
[00:28:05]
This is a one-year, essentially a pilot. That will hopefully give everybody in the community an opportunity to interact with this change, to understand the change, and also to see with their own eyes the impacts. Now, one year is not a lot of time for the kind of changes that we need in our housing market and the development market moves pretty slowly. We can tell that to people in advance of a change all we want, but they're still going to conjure up their worst nightmares for what introducing, for example, duplexes in single family neighborhoods might do to their neighborhood. When we can come back at the end of a year and say, duplexes have now been allowed in your neighborhood for a year, did things change substantially? The answer in 99.9% of cases is going to be no. To us, that's a message that the changes that we've made, the positives in terms of the possibilities for a variety of housing types and meeting different segments of the market in all of our neighborhoods, those positives far outweigh the downside, which is very minimal because these changes happen so slowly. We see this pilot, as we've called it, as part of that outreach process and really a way to get around some of the limitations of our standard process. Yeah, that's a really interesting and helpful framing as a pilot project. It's fascinating. I don't know if that sort of thing is possible in other cities, but I hope if people are listening and there's a possibility of doing an inter-immortance like that, they would consider it because that definitely sounds like an interesting way to work around some of the slow gears of bureaucracy. It is definitely possible in the State of Washington, so we did a lot of research on that. To close this out here, what advice would you give for someone listening who is involved in City government or planning specifically that wants to take some steps to make their town stronger as you have done? What advice would you offer? It's hard to not resort to the same kind of core strong towns principles that you can already find on the website, so I'll try to think of something perhaps more original
[00:30:35]
Than that. Going back to what I was talking about with our interim zoning ordinance, I really felt strongly that we had so much conversation as a community about what needed to happen, and people were frustrated. People across the City, that was the main thing I heard before I became planning director, and I felt it myself was that I'm tired of the talk. It's been so much talk. We've talked for years and years now about our housing needs and changes to make development easier and introducing different housing types in our neighborhoods. We talked it to death. I don't know if this is a unique thing here in our region or in the State of Washington, or if it's just a planning thing everywhere, but it's so much more comfortable to continue to plan. It was time for action. So as far as making your town stronger, I think a lot of the issues that we face now have ceased to be planning problems, and they are political problems, and that doesn't mean the planners shouldn't be involved, but I don't think most planners seriously question now the value of housing diversity and introducing new housing types in our traditionally single family zones. That's not even a planning issue at this point. We were lucky enough that the politics aligned, and our City Council felt strongly enough about that as one solution to our housing crisis, that we were able to move ahead. But whatever that issue is, and wherever that alignment is, it's time to act. I think that's the message. We were able to find a way to do it in sort of an increment, I mean, it's incremental in the sense that it was a temporary change, it was a pilot change, as a way to open the door to permanent change. If your issue is street safety in your community, road projects, temporary road projects, or rapid installation road projects, that might be the area that you need to do something but road safety is also not, that's no longer a planning problem. We know that our roads are dangerous, so I get frustrated, I think, with planning as a profession, because we tend to hide behind studies. City Council expresses concern about, at tool, for example, we do a lot of safety planning,
[00:33:20]
Road safety planning, when I was there, and I often felt that the safety plans that we worked on, we knew the answers going in. We know where the dangerous spots are. It's obvious to anybody, a five-year-old child could point out that a road is uncomfortable and dangerous. So all of the planning money that gets spent on doing study after study, it's frustrating to me that it's almost, I don't think it's deliberately to stall action. I think planners genuinely want to see change, but they're stuck in this holding pattern of not knowing how to actually make the change. And I guess part of that is recognizing that, as planners, we're not actually the decision-makers. So what we need to do is work with City Council, with mayors, with politicians at whatever level they're elected, and get them to understand the issues and then act. That's ultimately what happened here in the City's bookend. These changes, the introduction of foreplexes in our single-family zones, that wasn't me. That was our City Council that voted unanimously to do it. That was our Mayor who came forward with the proposal and supported it. I didn't snap my fingers and make this happen. We had elected officials that were willing to make those decisions. So find those people in your community who are empowered to do that and give them the tools they need to do it. Yeah, well said. Well, thank you so much, spencer, for coming on the show. I'll make sure to share some links to the resources and some of your past articles that you mentioned. But just really appreciate the chance to have you on the show today.
[00:35:02]
Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it. So definitely make sure to check out spencer's articles for strong towns. He's written a lot of really powerful stuff over the years, and I'll include some links to his best pieces for sure. I also want to mention that throughout this week at strong towns, we've been publishing updates and information about the ongoing lawsuit that has had the engineering licensing board of minnesota attacking strong towns and chuck morone. So we've got an update that we've shared on the site and a lot more information about how we are fighting back against the problems in this professional capacity and really trying to push back against so many of the issues in the engineering profession that allow them to build streets that kill people and ruin neighborhoods and ruin communities, and we are stepping up against that. So please check those articles out if you're interested. You can go to strongtowns. Org slash support reform to get all of the information. And also if you'd like to support the ongoing lawsuit, now we're in the appeal process, you can make a donation there. Thanks so much to everyone for listening, and we'll see you back here next week. Take care.
Source: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/9/1/spencer-gardner-bottom-up
Audio: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/9ubbjr/BUR_-_Spencer_Gardner9h2se.mp3
Automatic captions, reformatted for reading: sentence case, paragraph breaks, and
timestamps at their original cue positions. Word order is unchanged. Caption
mishearings are left as recorded.
[00:00:00]
Hi, and welcome to another episode of the bottom up revolution podcast, where we share the stories of the strong towns movement in action. I'm rachel, a program director at strong towns. Spencer Gardner is an urban planner and strong towns member who moved to Spokane, Washington a few years back because it offered him and his family an affordable place to live where they could find a traditional neighborhood where they were able to walk and bike. Everything was going great, but since that move, the City, like so many across the us, has become increasingly unaffordable, and spencer has stepped up to try and help change that. An opening in City leadership led him to apply to be Spokane's planning director, and he was hired to the position earlier this year. He's been part of several important reforms in the City, including significantly some substantial modifications to their accessory dwelling unit, or ADU code, which is allowing a lot more of these small homes to be built at a time when greater housing options at lower price points are so desperately needed. Spokane also undertook a unique interim zoning ordinance to allow up to four units to be built on any lot in the City. A change that happened in record time compared with how fast these sorts of reforms usually take in the typical community, often years or even decades. Spencer will go into detail about how and why that could occur and the way that he sees it as a special pilot program that they can learn from, which may pave the way to more permanent change. In this conversation, spencer also shares prescient insights on urban planning and how those in the profession might need to find ways to move past talking. It can be more comfortable to continue to plan as a planner, he says. We need to turn that planning into action. So here's my conversation with Spencer Gardner. Spencer Gardner, thank you for joining me for this episode of the bottom up revolution podcast. It's so great to talk with you today. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and especially how you ended up being a planner? How did I end up being a planner?
[00:02:22]
I asked myself that quite often. My introduction to planning was really at the university of wisconsin. That's where I got my master's degree. I did my undergrad in utah and had a job for a year and it wasn't a job that I wanted to be in permanently. And I just didn't realize until that time that you could actually have a career studying cities. It didn't occur to me. So I don't really remember how I first kind of learned about planning as a career path, but I was hooked and went on, got my master's degree at the university of wisconsin, worked in chicago for a few years, came back to madison and I worked there for a few more years. But I grew up out west and eventually we wanted to be closer to our families. So I started looking for places out west to live and settled on Spokane. So I moved here and continued working for the same firm. Sometime last year, the opportunity came up to apply for the position of planning director here in the City, Spokane. I took advantage of that opportunity and they hired me on. So here I am. Excellent. Well, yeah, I want to get into more about your current role, but first, I'm curious if you can remember how did you get connected with strong towns? You've been a member for seven years, so it's been a while and you've written for us over the years. You've been a really important presence with the organization and the movement. How did you get drawn to strong towns? I don't actually remember. I'm sure I just came across the blog like most other people do. Somebody shared an article or something.
[00:04:18]
It was early days at that point. But the usual story, you read the message and it really put a lot of pieces that didn't make sense to me fell into place. So I really felt a home there and just tried to be involved ever since. You've been in Spokane, Washington for the last few years. For people that aren't familiar with that City, can you tell us a little bit about Spokane and maybe some of its best assets and greatest challenges these days? Sure. I've actually written a little bit about this on strong towns. So this might be duplicating content to some extent, but I spent the better part of the year once we decided that we were going to move out west trying to figure out where to move. There were some good options. I had the ability to work remotely, so I wasn't quite as constrained geographically. And I grew up in idaho. My wife's from alaska, but her parents now live far near portland. So we wanted to be somewhere kind of in the northwest, but we didn't have any specific location in mind. I really wanted to find a place that had not become overly expensive like Seattle or portland. But I also wanted to find a place where we could enjoy a more urban-oriented lifestyle, I guess, for lack of a better word. And unfortunately, because of the development patterns across the western united states, even in some of the older cities, it's just hard to find those opportunities. So much of the growth here was in the auto-oriented era. The neighborhoods that really fit that bill are few and far between.
[00:06:09]
So Spokane was on my radar. Other kind of mid-sized cities like reno, nevada, or boise, idaho, those were cities that we definitely looked at. Being from idaho, boise was a natural choice, but at that point, it had already kind of been discovered and the prices were really going crazy there. One of the things that really drew me to Spokane is, I jokingly call it the western most rust-belt City in the united states. Its primary growth era, when it really exploded, was in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And economically, it was oriented around forestry and mining, so extractive industries. But it brought tons of people. We had between 1900 and 1910, we added 70,000 residents. We basically grew from a village of a few thousand people to over 100,000 people within, I believe, a 20-year period. So if you imagine being born in a tiny village and graduating high school in the largest metropolis between Seattle and minneapolis, it was just crazy growth during that era. The advantage that gives to the City of Spokane is that growth all happened, oriented around street cars and walking. So we have a number of legacy neighborhoods that are built or were built during that pattern of development, what we call now street car suburbs and classic american urbanism. So on strong towns, I actually compared it to the City of boise and showed some of the different eras of growth. But you can really see it if you drive around here. There are probably eight or nine different neighborhoods that are oriented around a small commercial center. You can find those walkable neighborhoods here. When you look at the City of boise, there's one or two or maybe three that are hopping along. And in some ways, that's worked to boise's favor because a lot of that interest has really concentrated on the one or two neighborhoods that are there. So if you're looking for that walkable environment, you can find it. Those who have found it have really concentrated and made those extremely successful. The City of Spokane, because it has so many, and also I think just some of the economic stagnation with the decline of mining and timber, those neighborhoods were preserved and retained their affordability, and you haven't really had the same extreme concentration
[00:09:01]
In one or two of those neighborhoods. Although we're starting to see that change, the housing market here has changed rapidly in the last couple of years. That history is one of the things that really drew me here, just knowing that we had the opportunity to buy a house, that it was an affordable market, and also that it offered us that lifestyle that we were looking for. Yeah, I'm picturing the photo that we've used for many years when we run an article by you, which is you with some of your kids in a cargo bike, which I'm sure they're all much older now. Did you find yourselves in a neighborhood where you all can bike and get around fairly easily and safely without needing a car for every trip? I think so, for the most part. There are enough different growth patterns here that I think, depending on who you talk to, they'll have a different story about whether you can bike safely in Spokane. We live in sort of an inner neighborhood close to downtown, and the street grid here is very, very reliable, so it's very easy to find a neighborhood side street and bike around on the low traffic residential streets. When you get to a busy street, that can be a challenge for crossing sometimes, and I'm definitely more comfortable than my wife is with biking around everywhere, but I don't have a hard time biking to pretty much anything here because of that. When you get to other parts of the City, the street grid's not maybe not quite as strong, but the area where we're at is just really well built for that, and we're making some improvements on the major streets in terms of bike facilities, so that is that we're making improvements. That's great, and I imagine Spokane, as compared with madison, is a place where you're more likely to be able to bike year-round without having to contend with really bad weather and snow and all that. To some extent, although in madison, because of the bad weather and just a commitment to making biking a year-round thing, they plow their paths really well, they plow the streets really well, so winter biking was not that tough in madison, if you didn't mind the cold, which I didn't mind.
[00:11:25]
But yeah, the winters are milder here, so you can bike even through most of the winter. So you're settled in Spokane, and then I know that you were working for tool design previously, which is planning for them that we have a lot of respect for at strong towns, you guys do a lot of great work at tool design, but then you decided to move into this role as a planning director for the City. How did you decide to make that switch, and what's it been like to be working for the City government as a leader? It's been a really interesting learning period for me. I applied because the City had been looking for a long time. There's been, there's a lot of history to the planning department here. They cycled through several different directors, and then for about four years, they didn't have a permanent approved planning director. They were working under interim directors for a variety of reasons, and they had advertised for the position and hadn't found any satisfactory candidates. And so I kind of just thought I'd apply and see what happened. I'd gotten to know my, now my boss, who is the director of economic development, and he encouraged me to apply, and so I did, and eventually was offered the position. It's been, I had not had experience in City government before that, which I think in the unique circumstances that the City of Spokane found itself was actually a benefit, at least in my favor for hiring me. I can't speak for the hiring decision that happened, but I think that it had a lot to do with needing to bring in some fresh perspective and fresh thinking on some of the planning issues that we faced. And so the fact that I had not, you know, didn't have prior history within the department or within the City, and that I was brought in some experience from around the country rather than being focused in one single place for a long time was one of the things that was probably, probably made me attractive as a candidate. The downside to that is that I've had a very steep learning curve. So I've had to learn about, you know, a lot of the public process that happens behind the scenes that people don't really think about from the outside. And fortunately, we've got great staff. We've got amazing planners in the department, and they're very capable, and they understand
[00:14:06]
The system really well. And so they've been able to kind of make up for some of my gaps and experience, and we've been able to do some great things. What are some of those issues or things that you've been working on so far? A lot of this was underway before I started, so I hesitate to take too much credit, but we did pass reform to our accessory dwelling unit code, and that was a great effort. We removed some constraints on accessory dwelling units that we felt were making them hard to build. So as an example, we got rid of the requirement for the owner to live on site in order to build an ADU. That's one that a lot of ADU advocates really push for. We also increased the allowable size, so it gives you a lot more flexibility in the size and the layout and the type of unit that you build, and we increased the locations where they can be built by removing limitations on lot sizes. So even if you're on a small lot, you can build an ADU now. So it was a lot of just removing barriers, and I think the end product is one of the better ADU codes, at least in the pacific northwest and perhaps around the country. There's a lot more work I think we need to do on our code, and we're undertaking that now. One of the big things that just happened, in July, our Council passed an ordinance that allows up to four plexes on all residential lots. That was a big deal. The way that we did that was through what's called an interim zoning ordinance. So for those who aren't familiar, an interim zoning ordinance is like the flip side of a moratorium. So a moratorium is passed in order to stop development as a result of some emergency or some significant problem, and an interim zoning ordinance is a way to allow something or to make a change to your zoning ordinance in response to a crisis. Our Mayor a year ago had declared an emergency around housing. House prices have increased dramatically over the last couple of years here in Spokane, to the point now where a large portion of the population really just can't afford a regular house. And that's a big change from the way things have been for a long time here. Spokane was generally a very affordable community, and that was one of its selling points, is
[00:16:44]
That it was the place where you could go to get away from the high prices in Seattle and buy a house and live there with your family and have a great quality of life. So that was impacting that image and obviously making it difficult for people to find housing. So in response to that, we had the declared emergency, and then a month ago passed the ordinance that allows the variety of housing types. And that as an interim ordinance, it lasts for a year. So that law is only in place for one year. And our commitment to the community has been that we will work during that one year period to make the permanent changes that we need so that this isn't just a stop gap solution, but it's a permanent solution to our housing crisis. Huge accomplishments. That's fantastic. I'm guessing maybe it's a little bit too early, but have you seen any results of this so far? Any new adus or duplexes, floorplexes being built? We have seen some permitting activity for adus. That passed earlier in the summer, and so there's been a little more time for the market to respond to it. In addition, as we were working on the ADU ordinance, a lot of interested ADU builders or homeowners looking to build an ADU had come forward expressing interest in building an ADU and were running up against limitations based on the prior ordinance. So we shared with them some of what we were working on, and there were a number of homeowners who opted to wait. So they filed their permits as soon as that ordinance passed. So we have seen some effect on the ADU side. On the floorplex side, we've heard a lot of interest from the development community. I don't think we have any permits that we could strictly chalk up to that ordinance yet, but we've filled out a lot of inquiries, and we are just getting started with some major outreach push to educate developers, builders, and the public on what exactly is possible now. Yeah. So we're really teasing out an important issue when it comes to housing reform, which is it's not enough to just say, okay, adus are allowed, or we want more housing. But actually, you have to lift a lot of these constraints that are effectively preventing those things from happening if you actually want to see the impact.
[00:19:18]
So that's really impressive, and glad that you're there in Spokane to get into those nitty gritty details. Yeah, we have a lot of other things on our radar related to housing. So there's a lot more work to do. Yeah. What are some of the things that you're kind of looking forward to working on in the future? You may be familiar with Seattle's ad universe. It's a great website. I'd recommend anybody to go check it out. They've put together a really fantastic resource for building adus. It's sort of a one-stop shop. So as a homeowner, you can go to the website. They have pre-approved standardized ADU plans that you can select, and then you have sort of a glide path to permitting that gives homeowners all the information they need and really is just a great resource for encouraging adus and lowering the barriers. I'd love to get to something like that. That might take a long time. We don't have the same resources that they do over in Seattle. And so that's something that we're going to have to build up to little by little. But certainly a first step, I'd love to get some pre-approved ADU plans off the ground. We've had some early conversations about that. In a similar vein, we've had some conversations about introducing pre-approved missing middle housing plans. So these would be townhouse duplex and foreplex plans that have already been vetted by our building department and are ready for people to use off the shelf. So we've done some early work on that too. And given our short timeframe for this interim ordinance, we'd really like to get that off the ground as quickly as we can so that hopefully at least a few builders are able to take advantage while there's a favorable regulatory climate for it. And then obviously as we make those permanent changes, we would continue that program as well. Another one that I think is really important, there's a nonprofit here in the northwest that does housing related work. And one of the programs they have that they operate in portland is a loan program for adus. So one of the traditional problems with adus is that if I'm a regular homeowner with a
[00:21:33]
Normal bank account, my opportunity for building adus is very limited. You're basically stuck with either a rich uncle who could loan you money or enough equity in your house through the appreciation of the value to then take out a home equity line of credit and build the ADU because banks traditionally wouldn't finance based on the anticipated rent coming in from the ADU. So financing has been a gap in the ADU world for a long time. And this organization has stepped in to bridge that gap, essentially. They can provide the bridge loan to let you build the ADU. And then once that ADU is constructed, banks are generally fine with loaning on the value of the expected income of the ADU. So it's really just that hole in the middle that was needing some kind of bridge. And there are groups that are out there doing that. The one that operates out of portland is called casa, c-a-s-a. So anybody that's interested should definitely check that out. We would love to bring something like that here as well. Something that we talk about a lot at strong towns is making sure that the work that our cities are doing is in response to what residents on the ground need and want and what their concerns and struggles are. How do you incorporate that into your work as a planning director, like listening to resident needs and concerns? I've pondered this question a lot. I think being now on the other side of the table within City government has given me a new perspective on the challenges that planners face in the public sector. We talk within the department regularly about how we actually understand what people want.
[00:23:29]
That is the challenge. I think a lot of the standard mechanisms for allowing the public to weigh in are simply inadequate for getting the kind of information that you really need. The systems that we have in place, so the City of Spokane, for example, has a very robust neighborhood program. We have neighborhood councils that are created by the City and the leaders of the neighborhood councils interact with each other and they interact with the City. I think the theory behind the neighborhood Council system makes a lot of sense. It's a great way to get City government closer to the people. In practice, I think it introduces some challenges that we have had a lot of discussions about in particular that the neighborhood Council system is not necessarily as inclusive as we'd like it to be. I don't think it's a result of any desire to exclude people. It's just that it's the same problems that any democratic system suffers, which is that most of the people are just busy with other things. They don't have the time or the inclination or the desire to be involved in the affairs of their neighborhood at the level of spending a few hours a week participating in neighborhood Council activities or going out and even just attending their neighborhood Council meetings. It's not something that a lot of people have the capacity to do. We struggle with how to make that system of representation more truly representative of the people in the neighborhood. We've not settled on a good answer for that. Maybe that's not answering your question, but that's been, I think, the biggest challenge is answering the question, what is it that the public wants? Yeah, there are no easy answers to that for sure. I'm guessing, though, the work that you were able to do on passing some of these housing ordinances had some general public support to make it happen. Is that accurate? I think so. One of our messages with this interim zoning ordinance is that we have been having conversations around housing for years here in Spokane, ever since prices started to escalate. Last year, a little over a year ago, we completed and Council adopted a housing action plan.
[00:26:11]
That was the culmination of over a year of work around housing and really convening that community conversation. Then in the year since the housing action plan was adopted, we spent time on our accessory dwelling unit ordinance. We spent time on a few other little parts of our code that we felt like were barriers to housing. It took us that whole year just to get the accessory dwelling unit reform done. The speed of change that we were able to accomplish using our regular process was really just not up to the task. As we went out to the community and talked about the interim zoning ordinance, we moved extremely quickly from the time that the proposal was made by the Mayor and Council during a press conference to the time that it was passed by City Council was less than a month. In planning world, that's light years. That is unheard of. That's because the interim ordinance is designed to address an emergency. We genuinely felt we were in an emergency. We are in an emergency. We moved very quickly and we did so deliberately. We sidestepped a lot of our usual process. Just as an example, we didn't even speak about it with our planning commission. Our Plan Commission didn't, they just happened not to meet during the time when we could have brought it up. It wasn't that we were trying to lock anybody out of process. It was just recognizing that we couldn't wait around for the usual gears of government to work. The message around that part of it was this interim ordinance is part of the outreach process. We didn't make any permanent changes to our code.
[00:28:05]
This is a one-year, essentially a pilot. That will hopefully give everybody in the community an opportunity to interact with this change, to understand the change, and also to see with their own eyes the impacts. Now, one year is not a lot of time for the kind of changes that we need in our housing market and the development market moves pretty slowly. We can tell that to people in advance of a change all we want, but they're still going to conjure up their worst nightmares for what introducing, for example, duplexes in single family neighborhoods might do to their neighborhood. When we can come back at the end of a year and say, duplexes have now been allowed in your neighborhood for a year, did things change substantially? The answer in 99.9% of cases is going to be no. To us, that's a message that the changes that we've made, the positives in terms of the possibilities for a variety of housing types and meeting different segments of the market in all of our neighborhoods, those positives far outweigh the downside, which is very minimal because these changes happen so slowly. We see this pilot, as we've called it, as part of that outreach process and really a way to get around some of the limitations of our standard process. Yeah, that's a really interesting and helpful framing as a pilot project. It's fascinating. I don't know if that sort of thing is possible in other cities, but I hope if people are listening and there's a possibility of doing an inter-immortance like that, they would consider it because that definitely sounds like an interesting way to work around some of the slow gears of bureaucracy. It is definitely possible in the State of Washington, so we did a lot of research on that. To close this out here, what advice would you give for someone listening who is involved in City government or planning specifically that wants to take some steps to make their town stronger as you have done? What advice would you offer? It's hard to not resort to the same kind of core strong towns principles that you can already find on the website, so I'll try to think of something perhaps more original
[00:30:35]
Than that. Going back to what I was talking about with our interim zoning ordinance, I really felt strongly that we had so much conversation as a community about what needed to happen, and people were frustrated. People across the City, that was the main thing I heard before I became planning director, and I felt it myself was that I'm tired of the talk. It's been so much talk. We've talked for years and years now about our housing needs and changes to make development easier and introducing different housing types in our neighborhoods. We talked it to death. I don't know if this is a unique thing here in our region or in the State of Washington, or if it's just a planning thing everywhere, but it's so much more comfortable to continue to plan. It was time for action. So as far as making your town stronger, I think a lot of the issues that we face now have ceased to be planning problems, and they are political problems, and that doesn't mean the planners shouldn't be involved, but I don't think most planners seriously question now the value of housing diversity and introducing new housing types in our traditionally single family zones. That's not even a planning issue at this point. We were lucky enough that the politics aligned, and our City Council felt strongly enough about that as one solution to our housing crisis, that we were able to move ahead. But whatever that issue is, and wherever that alignment is, it's time to act. I think that's the message. We were able to find a way to do it in sort of an increment, I mean, it's incremental in the sense that it was a temporary change, it was a pilot change, as a way to open the door to permanent change. If your issue is street safety in your community, road projects, temporary road projects, or rapid installation road projects, that might be the area that you need to do something but road safety is also not, that's no longer a planning problem. We know that our roads are dangerous, so I get frustrated, I think, with planning as a profession, because we tend to hide behind studies. City Council expresses concern about, at tool, for example, we do a lot of safety planning,
[00:33:20]
Road safety planning, when I was there, and I often felt that the safety plans that we worked on, we knew the answers going in. We know where the dangerous spots are. It's obvious to anybody, a five-year-old child could point out that a road is uncomfortable and dangerous. So all of the planning money that gets spent on doing study after study, it's frustrating to me that it's almost, I don't think it's deliberately to stall action. I think planners genuinely want to see change, but they're stuck in this holding pattern of not knowing how to actually make the change. And I guess part of that is recognizing that, as planners, we're not actually the decision-makers. So what we need to do is work with City Council, with mayors, with politicians at whatever level they're elected, and get them to understand the issues and then act. That's ultimately what happened here in the City's bookend. These changes, the introduction of foreplexes in our single-family zones, that wasn't me. That was our City Council that voted unanimously to do it. That was our Mayor who came forward with the proposal and supported it. I didn't snap my fingers and make this happen. We had elected officials that were willing to make those decisions. So find those people in your community who are empowered to do that and give them the tools they need to do it. Yeah, well said. Well, thank you so much, spencer, for coming on the show. I'll make sure to share some links to the resources and some of your past articles that you mentioned. But just really appreciate the chance to have you on the show today.
[00:35:02]
Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it. So definitely make sure to check out spencer's articles for strong towns. He's written a lot of really powerful stuff over the years, and I'll include some links to his best pieces for sure. I also want to mention that throughout this week at strong towns, we've been publishing updates and information about the ongoing lawsuit that has had the engineering licensing board of minnesota attacking strong towns and chuck morone. So we've got an update that we've shared on the site and a lot more information about how we are fighting back against the problems in this professional capacity and really trying to push back against so many of the issues in the engineering profession that allow them to build streets that kill people and ruin neighborhoods and ruin communities, and we are stepping up against that. So please check those articles out if you're interested. You can go to strongtowns. Org slash support reform to get all of the information. And also if you'd like to support the ongoing lawsuit, now we're in the appeal process, you can make a donation there. Thanks so much to everyone for listening, and we'll see you back here next week. Take care.