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- [00:00]
Abby Newsham
Foreign. This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned. Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzone, a show where we take a big story that touches the news and we upzone it each week. I'm Abby Newsham, a planner in Kansas City, and today I am joined by my friend, Chuck Marone. Hey, Chuck, how's it going?
- [00:37]
Chuck Marone
Hey. Fantastic. How are you doing?
- [00:39]
Abby Newsham
I'm doing great. Just trying to stay warm from this newly frigid weather. We're not quite as cold as Brainerd right now, but you know me, I'm not. I'm trying very hard to be the kind of person that appreciates the. The cold. And I like the idea of being that kind of person. And it's very difficult to be that kind of person.
- [01:02]
Chuck Marone
I am. I am proud of you in some ways. In some ways, I feel bad for you because no one can see you right now who's listening to this, but you are literally inside a building. So you are not outside, but you are dressed the way we Minnesotans would dress if we were going outside, you know, on a. A brisk day. So you have a stocking cap on. It's a nice looking stocking cap, but it's a stocking cap nonetheless. You have a. A winter jacket on.
- [01:28]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it's arteries. It's very warm.
- [01:32]
Chuck Marone
I'm guessing you took the Gore Tex gloves off to do this.
- [01:36]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, no gloves. No gloves. Yeah, I just, you know, this is the kind of. It's newly cold. Right. And I just. I feel like I need to stay as warm as possible right now. I was in a sauna the other day and, you know, in a steam room. I just. I just need to stay warm right now.
- [02:03]
Chuck Marone
Well, you're. You're. You're having. It's fading away from me, the idea that I will ever get you to move to Minnesota, but I'm still going to work on it.
- [02:13]
Abby Newsham
People change, you know.
- [02:15]
Chuck Marone
People do change. Yes.
- [02:18]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. I'm. I'm certainly striving, so. Yeah.
- [02:21]
Chuck Marone
Well, we got our first. We got our first snow this week, and it was, you know, welcome. Like, I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm so excited. And now it's gone because, you know, it's. We're not. It's not cold enough yet. Needs to get a lot colder. And that's weather talk. Abby and Chuck.
- [02:39]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. Sorry, everyone.
- [02:42]
Chuck Marone
It's okay. We have a weird article today, don't we?
- [02:45]
Abby Newsham
We have a weird article, and it's actually not as recent as I thought it was originally, but it's still kind of interesting. So I think we should talk about it.
- [02:57]
Chuck Marone
Can I throw Norm under the bus?
- [02:59]
Abby Newsham
Yeah.
- [03:00]
Chuck Marone
So, Norm, one of our co workers here.
- [03:04]
Abby Newsham
Shout out to Norm.
- [03:06]
Chuck Marone
Yeah. He's like, hey, you guys should review this article. And I know how this works for you. I'm assuming it's a lot like how it works for me. You look at it and you're like, oh yeah, like this looks interesting. And there were a couple of things that jumped out to me and I'm like, let's talk about it. And then before we're going to go on, I delve into it a little bit deeper and like pull some, you know, things out of it. And then I looked and it's like from last summer. So. No, we should have talked about this six months ago. We can talk about it now. It's not news like we like to usually do. But that's because, Norm, you know, in Canada things go a little slower. Right? I mean, like they, they still use like a pony express kind of system and, you know, you still got, you know, news just takes longer to go around. That's, that's what it is. So I'm, I'm assuming that Norm just. Just found this out and shared it with us this week because it just got out in the Canadian system.
- [04:07]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. The town crier just announced it after running several kilometers to make it to wherever Norm lives. Sorry, Norm, we're not being very nice. Okay, well, let's cover it. I think it's actually pretty interesting and worth talking about. So this is from CBC Ottawa and written by Arthur Wright Crummey. And it is entitled to wins $590 million infrastructure bill locks IN FOREVER sprawl so the Ottawa City council approved a $1.5 billion infrastructure plan over the summer. And this article explores some dissenting opinions that some of the council members have concerning how costs will be financed.
- [04:59]
Chuck Marone
Much of the degenerate way to say it.
- [05:02]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, much of the debate is really centered around this satellite community that is called Tuin. I think that's how it's pronounced. This is an approved suburban development plan that is in the city's southeast end. It's about five miles or eight kilometers from the edge of the existing kind of urbanized developed areas of the city. And it is expected to cost about $900 million to service the the area with new infrastructure as part of that bill. Proponents of the project have argued that Tubin will pay for Tuin, ensuring that this will be a balanced and self sustained approach to growth. Proponents also say that the development project is critical for tackling the housing crisis. It's expected that it'll be home to about 35,000 to 45,000 people within 20 years. Opponents are concerned that this will basically become forever sprawl and that even if the developer pays for the initial build out, the city is still on the hook for long term maintenance and operations of the community and that it should not be pursued. So, Chuck, before we started recording, you mentioned that you were interested in talking about some of the psychological aspects of how you're perceiving this story. And I'd really like to start by digging into that.
- [06:31]
Chuck Marone
So as I'm reading this, the thing that jumps out to me is what I'm going to say psychologists would call the motivated self interest of the people proposing this. Right. And I think it's important I want to be careful with this because I'm not saying these people are self interested, greedy, doing this for their own good, looking after themselves at the expense of the community. I'm not suggesting any of that. I think good, honest, decent, caring, compassionate public servants can make this recommendation. Even though I think it's a horrible, horrible project. Right. I think you can do it. One of the problems I think we run into when we're looking at projects like this and when we're getting advice from people on projects like this is just the psychological reality that you're not kind of open to the risk, you're not exposed to the risk and you're less sensitive to it. So 45,000 people, $900 million, that's $20,000 a person for the upfront capital costs, right? This is not long term O and M. This is not development costs. This is not land costs. This is just like the city's ante for a family of five, you're talking 100 grand just to like, you know, exist. These are not viable numbers. I remember back in my engineering days, we would write these studies, we would sit down and we would project out population in the future and we'd project out traffic demand and we project out sewer and water demand. And we would do this with all earnestness, right? Like using the tools that we had, which were very coarse, right. This stuff is hard to predict. And you know, especially when you're looking 40, 50 years in the future, it's almost impossible to get right. But we would sit down and do these projections and then we would come up with cost estimates and the cost estimate, always included here, is the estimate of future engineering costs and future engineering fees. And basically the Stuff we would get paid to do this, and that was always like a percent of the size of the project. Every now and then, someone would bring up, and usually someone from the public who didn't like the project we were proposing and say, well, you're proposing this $10 million thing and you're going to get one and a half to $1.8 million in engineering fees for this. Like, how can you propose that? And I remember the reaction, and I'm saying this, like, I shared in this, right? The reaction was, well, our recommendation is not tainted by the fact that we're going to get 1.5 million in fees. Like, that's not why we recommended this. We recommended this because we believe this is the best thing. The fact that we're going to get one and a half million dollars in fees to do this project, or some engineering firm will do it, but likely ours, because we're the best position to do this. The fact that we would get that is no relation on our recommendation in any way. I honestly believe that, and I think the engineers around me honestly believe that. It took me a while stepping away to recognize that I could still believe that and still be, in a sense, motivated by it. And I'll maybe say it this way, and then I'd like. I'd love to hear your reaction to this. I feel like in those. In those early engineering days of mine, when I was learning the profession and having people like, here's how it's done and here's how we do this and do that, and I kind of believed all this stuff about how we. How we would do things. What I wasn't motivated to do was to find alternatives. What I wasn't motivated to do was to ponder the risk I was asking people to take based on my recommendations. I wasn't motivated to discern. Okay, if I'm suggesting you make a $20,000 per person projected commitment to this, is that gonna work out? And what is the downside to everybody if I'm wrong? I really wasn't motivated to figure that part out. But what I was really motivated to do was to make sure that the project was big enough that the project encompassed everything we could possibly think of, that the project had enough slack in it so that if something did go wrong, we could tap into that budget and fix it. While we were doing the project, I realized that the questions I asked and answered and struggled with were very much influenced by, in a sense, the payout and the size and the scope of the thing I was involved in. And that There was this whole series of other questions that I was never called upon to ponder and struggle with, partially because the answers to those would have been very inconvenient to me and everybody else involved in this undertaking. That's what I, that's what came out to me. Reading this article. Does that make sense?
- [11:47]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it does make sense. And it's interesting because when I was, I was reading other articles to try to get a little bit more context and understand the project and what was going on here. And one of the articles that I read talked about how I guess the developer is somehow paying for some of the public staff people's salaries or there's questions about that. And it brings up that issue of motivated self interest for people within the public sector. Because people, citizens, whether. I have no idea if that's true. That's what one of the articles said.
- [12:25]
Chuck Marone
It is true. This is common. Common. Everybody who's listening to this, your city has people on staff that are in a sense paid for by developers.
- [12:35]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, okay, interesting. Well, that's not good. But that brings up this issue of motivated self interest. Because I think certainly when you look at consulting and consultants, there's motivated self interest and fulfilling the scope of a project. And I think when you have a project in front of you, there's a lot of assumptions baked into the scope that was put out in the initial rfp, for example. And I think it takes, I think it takes bravery both for public staff people, consultants, people who are involved in these sorts of things that have financial interest in something moving forward as initially proposed by whoever is directing a project. It takes bravery to assert discernment and to propose something different or ask questions and to even acknowledge the existence of motivated self interest that may not be outrightly conscious. So I think that's kind of a point of reference for me for people who are both in public sector planning, development and within consulting as well. Because when money is involved, there's always some level of motivated self interest, even if it's really not very conscious. And it's important to understand the path and assumptions that are baked into a direction. And I would think for this project, it's very much like it's a political, we need to grow, we need to build housing. Here's a place we can build housing. And I would imagine there's people who are championing this project. And I think there's, you know, there's motivated self interest and people may not be motivated to ask questions or assert discernment, but there's also a question of Whether staff or people who are involved in this project, if they are empowered to do that, if they feel like they just, it's not their place to do that and they just need to carry out their role.
- [14:57]
Chuck Marone
So let me, let's circle back here in a minute to who should pay for the staff time because I know there's a bunch of people listening who are like, so what you want the taxpayers to pay to subsidize these developers? Shouldn't they pay? I'm not making the argument that they shouldn't, but let's circle back to that in a sec. I do think that if we to illuminate this, it's helpful to think in like a different domain. I think we all understand that if you have a bundling agency, a bank who is creating mortgage backed securities and they want them rated, they send the bundle to a ratings agency and the ratings agency says these are triple A or these are double A or these are rated B minus. That has a huge effect on how they're priced. I think we all see and understand that when the bank wanting the rating pays for the rating directly from the group and can pick between three different ones, the one they're going to pick is the one that's going to be the most lenient in the ratings. Not because they are necessarily corrupt, not because they are necessarily greedy, not because they necessarily want to rig the system, but because they have a lot of motivation to get a better rating. And I think you can be an honest player in the system and end up in a sense corrupted by it. Because each step in the process you do have like certain motivations to think certain things. We can look back at this and say this is an incestuous bad relationship. And even if 95% or 99% of the people in here are not corrupt, the one corrupt player is going to in a sense drive everybody to bad practices. Because if, if one person's corrupt and will write whatever rating you want for the money, I'm going to give them my securities because, wow, every time I give it to them, they come to the same conclusion I do, which is this is an awesome security. If I give them to that person over there, they're camrudgeon and they have all these questions and they get up. In my business, this person's great. So this person's going to get all my business. The other person needs to like get with the program or they're not going to get. This is how like this kind of soft corruption starts to like wreck systems. Let me give you an example now, in city government, cities don't have bond agents, at least not that I've ever seen on staff. Usually if they're going to bond, so they're going to go out and say, borrow $1 million, borrow $100 million, borrow, like, whatever it is, they will go and find a bond agent, and the bond agent will come in and give them advice, often financial advice, on how to structure the security, what the market looks like, how to go through this process. I've been in these meetings where the engineer, I'm there, you know, I'm working with a project. I've got a project team. Here's the project. We're looking for financing. And the bond agent comes in almost like a banker would, and says, oh, yeah, I can finance that and I can finance that, and I can get you funding for that. And I can do that. And almost like smooths over the transaction, right? Like you're looking for funding. I can get that. Here's what it is. Here's the structure, here's your payments. You can do this. I'm analyzing your capacity. You rated this much, like, yes, you can do this. There's two things that are going on there at once. The public officials often, and this even includes, like, city managers who should know better, are hearing this advice the way you would hear, like, advice from a financial advisor, which is actually what they're getting advice from a financial advisor who is analyzing them on whether this is a smart financial move or not. But the bond agent, they get paid generally only if you do a transaction. You go to the bank and you talk to a banker about doing a loan. You're not paying for that banker's time and advice. The only way the banker gets paid is if they do a loan for you. And so it does create this thing where, like, okay, I can ask the banker for advice. Can I afford this? Should I do this? The banker doesn't want you to default because they're making you the loan. They're going to be on the hook. They'll work with you. But what if the banker wasn't keeping the loan? What if the banker just brokered the loan, got a fee for brokering the loan, and then someone else took over that risk? You would think differently about their advice. Their advice, in other words, their own interest as a bank would not necessarily be aligned with your interests. They're not going to give an honest evaluation. Well, this happens all the time for cities. I mean, this is really like when cities take on debt. This is kind of the primary person giving them advice are people who are literally debt brokers who make money off of that specific transaction. I know a lot of these people. I think they're really good, decent human beings. I don't know any of them that would say, hey, I'm just out to get as much money as I can out of cities. But here's the reality. If cities aren't doing projects, if cities aren't keeping that churn going, they go out of business really, really quickly. And so it's hard to, I mean, it would be hard for me to say that these brokers have the city's interest in mind primarily when they sit down to do a transaction. They are human. They can't possibly have that. Does that make sense?
- [20:48]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Like, we have a lot of. There's tons of jobs right in this, in this world, in this economy that are very transaction oriented, right? They, they rely on people, they rely on facilitating transactions in order to make a salary, to make money. I mean, realtors, that's a, that's something that comes up immediately, immediately for me. And I mean, thinking about people who are facilitating these loans they don't necessarily have, I would, I can't imagine they would have like a code of ethics that says you have to be looking out for the best interests of the general public or the public dollar. To me, it's like if, if I were to go to a bank and ask them for a loan and they feel like they could facilitate that loan and they would do that. But maybe it's a horrible financial decision for me. It's not necessarily their responsibility to make sure I'm making a good decision for myself. That's really the responsibility of the city. Right.
- [22:02]
Chuck Marone
I feel like it goes one step beyond that, though. So let me read a quote from the article. This is from the CEO of the Greater Ottawa Home Builders association. And he's being asked about oversizing all this infrastructure because this infrastructure is massively oversized. Right? And he says, quote, oversizing gives you the flexibility to increase housing, whether it's through density on the plots you have or if you end up adding more land. It's the most cost effective way of ensuring that you have capacity in the system, whether you end up using it or not. Okay, I think that that is bs. Like, I think that is crap. I think that is not true. Like, I think that is really, really bad advice. But I am willing to say that I think this person probably believes this. I've heard many, many engineers make this case like, hey, build it all now it's way cheaper on like a per foot basis. It's way less. You know, you'll always have the capacity. Whether you use the capacity or not, you're going to want to have it. Here's what I can say though, unequivocally, whether this person is motivated by greedy self interest or altruism for the entire community, which I think you can have that motivation either way and still make this statement. Here's what is true about this statement. It could be both or either or. I'm not questioning his sincerity or whether he believes this or not. Here is what is true, inarguably true. This person has no downside risk if this thing goes bad or has no proportional downside risk if this thing goes bad. If this thing goes bad, this person will not suffer anywhere to the degree that the people who wind up buying into this will ultimately suffer. That's the problem.
- [23:48]
Abby Newsham
Right? The oversizing of infrastructure is something that I specifically wanted to ask you about because of your background, because I've heard people say this before as well. You know, engineers say that it's pragmatic to approach a project by upsizing the infrastructure or you know, initially paying up front for these oversized facilities so that you can grow or accommodate all levels of growth, I guess, rather than upsize it later. But if this is an approved development, isn't the housing already planned? The idea that you would redevelop it into something more dense or accommodate more. It's, it seems like that doesn't make any sense if they've already planned out the development. Because if they're talking about 50 years into the future, that's kind of silly because you could strategically upsize infrastructure as needed down the road. So I, I didn't really understand that argument personally and I wasn't sure if it was just because I'm, I'm not a civil engineer. But to me that seems like it's, it's a huge bet to take up front for a huge development project. I mean, these are, this is 45,000 houses in this area, in this satellite town, essentially.
- [25:10]
Chuck Marone
So let me give you, let me try to simplify 10 years of mental anguish and struggle on my behalf into just a couple minutes because this took me a long time to decipher. So the engineering mind is very, very conservative. And please, you know, to the audience, don't hear that in a political standpoint. I mean that in like risk averse, right? An engineer is like really, really risk averse. My kind of theoretical sense of what I would be doing when I got out of college as an engineer would be finding kind of like the most efficient, most effective way to do something. And that risk averse meant that you would essentially like, err on the side of efficiency or err on the side of prudence or pragmatism. Like, I'm not going to overstretch in. In reality, when I started working as an engineer, being conservative meant at every single opportunity you overbuilt, oversized, over engineered things because then you would not ever have the embarrassment, the backlash, the negative feedback of having undersized something. So if you could get by with one lane in each direction, better to have two lanes. If you could get by with 11 foot lane width, better to have 14 foot because you just got like, you've got more room. This is a byproduct of a mentality that says we have unlimited money. So money is not the constraint. We don't have to be conservative about money. We have to be conservative about the, in a sense, the downside risk of having something be undersized. I started to struggle with the idea of what it, you know, what, what actually pays for itself because none of these projects I was working on ever made sense. What pays for itself. I wound up basically looking at like traditional, like, here's the core downtown, here's the surrounding neighborhoods, here's how they built the neighborhood first before infrastructure. And I got to this point where like, well, that's not very efficient because if you're, if you're starting the neighborhood first and then you're coming in with infrastructure later, you've got the cost of retrofitting. And it's way more expensive to build a block when the houses are kind of halfway there and are in this state of maturing. And I realized that that transaction cost was the downside risk premium. It was basically like the price you pay to be conservative. So being conservative in your design, if you are sensitive to money, means that you actually wait until things are proven to put collective public dollars behind them. That is the opposite of the post war development pattern. And I think you see in instances like this where the post war development pattern gets crazier and crazier and crazier as we go out in time. Like, let's put bigger, more public money at risk, more public money in play. Let's extend it out 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. If we look at traditional development patterns, there was a lot of public money in play and the public money was really aggressively deployed, but it was always aggressively deployed in a sense to Follow successful private sector endeavors. It was never like the risk premium. It was never the heads, you win, tails I lose kind of thing. It was never that scenario. It was never. I say a lot when I'm giving public talks today. In our system, we ask local government to be the dumb money at the card table, the player that will lose every hand so that the game goes on. Local governments can't do that. They literally don't have the money or the capacity to do that. But that is what we call on them to do over and over. And when you get advice from consulting engineers, consulting finance officers, people who come in and are giving you advice to do this, that advice is filled with conflict and motivated reasoning that you cannot, in a sense, detangle. Even if you have good people, even if you have honest people, even if you have people you trust, you cannot detangle it.
- [29:53]
Abby Newsham
Well. And I think what we often forget too is that we are the city. This isn't just the city as some other entity like we, we are the city. We like all of the people within the city. We're the people paying for this. And if you plan to be in a place for a long time, you are going to feel the impacts of these decisions. So that's why it's so important. Another thing that I wanted to talk with you about is just this idea of building satellite towns as a way of addressing the housing crisis. You know, every city these days has some number, 20,000, 10,000, 100,000 housing units that they, you know, quote, unquote, need to build in order to address the housing crisis. That's kind of, I feel like what everybody is saying right now and in Ottawa, it sounds like they're just saying rather than building within the existing system by upzoning, by building different kinds of housing, redeveloping, or even expanding on the existing edges of where their infrastructure exists. They. This proposal is just building a satellite town, which I suppose it sounds like. I can't find any actual development plans that show what this town is supposed to look like in any kind of detail. But the complaints are that it's, it's going to be a suburban subdivision, essentially. But even if it was designed as a new town, you know, in a much more dense format. Do you see either of those approaches? I mean, obviously the first one is problematic, but would you see it as just as problematic if it were designed as essentially a new town as a way of addressing the housing crisis?
- [31:46]
Chuck Marone
No. I mean, this is, Everything about this is absurd to me. First of all, Ottawa is a Million people. Right. This is not like a small place. It is a city that struggles for vitality even with a massive population. Its neighborhoods struggle, its downtown core struggles. We've done a little bit of crash analysis studio work here. We've got a couple. We've got someone in our accelerator course who has been from here. I've spent some time looking at parts of the city kind of intimately. This is a place that if you said we're going to get 50,000 new residents, I would be like, if you put 50,000 new residents in the existing framework, you would still be about a million residents short of what should be in that existing framework to actually make the city function and work. And so the idea that we're going to have $900 million of public money that we're going to put in play, we are going to optimistically assume we're going to get that money back, but not for decades into the future. I think that's a really optimistic, bad assumption. But let's say that we're going to start with the premise that we're going to put $900 million public dollars in order to generate housing opportunities, and we're going to try to get that money back over the next three decades. There are, there are many, many ways to deploy that capital to build housing that would actually benefit Ottawa, allow their existing system to work better, make it more productive, make it more viable way, way, way. Before you get to, let's go build a new version of something that's not working real well out here, way outside of town and hope that that works better. And by the way, our projections for capital require it to work way better than what we're doing now. I don't, I don't even get. I mean, at some point, the thought process behind that lacks any credibility, Right? Like, I don't. It's like you diagnose your problem like, okay, this isn't working. It's not generating enough housing. It's not paying for itself. Taxes are going up, services are going down. We got this huge backlog of deferred maintenance. Like, this isn't working. I tell you what we should do. Let's go copy the least productive part of this, the part of this that is working the least well. Let's go copy that out here with a bunch of money that we're going to, in a sense, not deploy here, but deploy somewhere else.
- [34:34]
Abby Newsham
Yeah.
- [34:34]
Chuck Marone
How does that even, like, resemble a solution?
- [34:37]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. And as a satellite town, like, it's not even on the edge of the developed area. It's like five miles away from it. And I think something that is really important in this equation is how the people who are living in this development project are going to be, you know, living their lives, spending money. I would imagine this is the perfect area for a bunch of kind of sprawling corporate businesses to just start popping up all over the highway and, and nobody's going to be coming into the city to, to go to any of the existing businesses. So it doesn't make any sense.
- [35:19]
Chuck Marone
The city could use this vitality. Right?
- [35:21]
Abby Newsham
Exactly. Like, why would you not take these 45,000 housing units and find ways to sprinkle them all over the existing framework? Right.
- [35:32]
Chuck Marone
Not hard to do either. I mean, this is the thing is, like your zoning codes get in the way. The fact that you're only working in these big projects with these big developers, not the incremental variety that can actually build this stuff quickly at scale. Ottawa is paying to rob themselves of massive amounts of vitality and energy.
- [35:56]
Abby Newsham
Well, it's the moonshot approach, right? Of, of quote, unquote, tackling the housing crisis. Like, oh, we need X number of housing units. Here's a big chunk of land that is unrelated to anything with our existing city. And we're just going to build them in the middle of nowhere, essentially, with no context, rather than actually building a city and, and integrating the new housing that you need into an existing framework, which is what I would say building. That's what building community is.
- [36:29]
Chuck Marone
Yeah. I've taken to recommending the last couple of years to people that we look to, social workers as opposed to, like technical professionals, to actually lead some of these efforts. I've said, for example, if you're going to build a street, if you're going to redo a street, put together a team and put the engineer on the team, put the planner on the team, put the finance people on the team, but have the team be run by a social worker because they will ask like a different set of questions and they will not be, in a sense grounded or hung up with the dogmatic thought processes of these technical professionals. Because you can see how, like a technical professional looking at this problem, how do we get 45,000 new units of housing in the city? If you said, like you, you just said, Abby, we're going to layer them in across the framework, across the neighborhoods of the city. Guess what? As an engineer, I can't do that at scale. I can't do it as a planner. I can't do that at scale. Because you know what it Requires? It requires 45,000 different individual conversations, nuanced interactions. It might require 10,000 single family homes to convert into duplexes, which is 10,000 applications and people who I've got to talk to and work. Okay, that is nuanced. Complex, human, messy. Organic. Yeah, kind of.
- [38:07]
Abby Newsham
It's organic. It is, it's organic. And our politicians can't point at something that happened organically and say, look what I did. They can look at a new town of 45,000 houses in a subdivision and point to that and say, you know, you can work with one bank, you can, you can work with one developer. It's simpler. And you can point to it and say, I did that. Enabling policy and regulations that allow for organic city building is not easy for someone to take credit for.
- [38:47]
Chuck Marone
I. That's interesting because I tend to. I think I tend to be harder on the technical people because I don't know, maybe because I am one and I am not a politician. And it's been funny all these people nominating me for cabinet posts and stuff on whatever websites you do that because, like, I would be. I would be a horrible person. And I'm like, not a politician. I really like in D.C. oh, yeah. You know, with the new. No, there, there are this. I guess they put out some solicitation where, like, who should we have as like the HUD secretary and who should we have for dot? And I've been getting like all these people like, hey, I nominated you for this. I'm like, no, please, please stop. Like, that's not good for anyone. It would not be good for. It would not be good for anyone. It takes a different kind of person. Right?
- [39:37]
Abby Newsham
It's a different kind of person for sure. Yeah.
- [39:40]
Chuck Marone
I feel like I am harder on the technical professional because I feel like they have a moral and ethical obligation to deeply think these things through and to in a sense recognize when they are in a situation where even if they don't personally feel like they are compromised, like they are giving good advice, they should recognize that the situation itself doesn't allow them to think clearly or, you know, it doesn't allow them to clearly make that analysis and judgment. I feel like the politician is a politician. Right? I mean, of course the ribbon cutting is going to be better for them, but I feel like the best politicians are the ones who can say, look, we created 5,000 new units and I didn't add a foot of pipe. We created 5,000 new units and it just made our neighborhoods better. I created 5,000 new units and look, we got 200 new shops. And businesses out of it because they now have the capacity in the neighborhoods to support a coffee shop where you didn't have enough people before and a restaurant where you didn't have enough people before. Look, it, I was able to improve the transit system because of this. There is a way, I think politically to make this argument.
- [40:50]
Abby Newsham
Well, yeah, the best kind of. The best kind of politician are the ones that I think are sophisticated enough to communicate that message and convince people of why that is so important and more important than just the simple solution that quickly delivers a project. Right.
- [41:13]
Chuck Marone
And I think what you see, I'm not going to also pretend to speak for voters, particularly not Canadian voters.
- [41:22]
Abby Newsham
You know, I feel like I have no idea.
- [41:25]
Chuck Marone
Yeah. I feel like I have less, you know, even awareness there. And I wouldn't pretend to speak for American voters, let alone even like Minnesotan voters. Right. But it does seem like there is at least a healthy level of skepticism. I mean, the articles that you're seeing, this one, other related ones about this project, there's a healthy level of skepticism amongst the general public that I think is keyed into the obvious fact that this is a big project with a lot of downside risk without really a lot of upside potential for the community, where the people making the recommendations, paying for the staff, paying for the consultants, paying for the advice also stand to be the only ones to really gain all that much. And at the very least, we don't seem to be doing a arm's length third party kind of what's in the interest of the community analysis. We do seem to be doing stuff that is expedient and beneficial to everyone there. And you can be ethical and still do unethical things if you're in a bad system.
- [42:39]
Abby Newsham
Absolutely. Yeah. I think, I think that pretty much sums up the core of the problem. And I'm glad we went down the psychological rabbit hole here because that is what I think is driving these sorts of outcomes.
- [42:54]
Chuck Marone
Can I say how I would fix this? I feel like. Because I feel like there's a lot of people probably listening today who are consultants who are mad at me now. Right. And be like, we're not unethical. And I hope none of them walk away saying that I think they are personally unethical. Even the bond consultants and the finance people and all that. I think what cities need to do at the core of it is they need to have people who are. I think people who are working on the staff need to recognize that the city is the entity that they serve. And I'm going To say this, and this is going to come across a little weird because it's not how we talk about it. But I don't think we serve the public in the sense that like the customers always write and run around and like what does the public want? And let's respond to everything that they want. Because I can tell you what the public wants. The public wants high services and low taxes. Right. I think are the people who work in city hall have to look at themselves as the stewards of the municipal corporation on behalf of the public, which, which in a sense are like the shareholders of the corporation. Right. Like you don't respond to each individual shareholders needs, but you look out as a steward of the direction of the, the municipal corporation. I think if you, if you have that mentality, the way you use consultants is very different. You say, I want a consultant to come in and give me advice on the financial direction of the city. I want someone to come in and give me advice on how we solve this problem of needing 45,000 additional housing units. I want someone to come in and help me figure out where my city's making money, where my city is losing money, why we're having these fiscal problems. And that person I will never ever, ever hire to do any of the work. I'm just not like that's the relationship we're going to have. I will pay you a premium to give me good advice. The other consultant who's going to then get the work later is going to charge me less. I'm not going to pay that person. I'm going to actually. Because if you've got two consultants and let's say you're doing a road feasibility study and one consultant builds roads and one consultant just does studies, the one who does studies is going to charge you more because they're not planning to make money from building the road. That's just how the economics of the project works. I want the person who's not going to do the work. And if that means I gotta go two providences away or four states away or whatever it is to bring in someone from the outside, have them sit down with me, work through this, give me advice that is not at all tainted by what I do next, that's the person I want the relationship with, that's the person I want to talk to. And if that's a local engineer, that's great. If that's a local person, that's awesome. I mean, even better. But then that person does not get to be the person who then does the work that is recommended.
- [46:16]
Abby Newsham
Yes. That makes a lot of sense.
- [46:18]
Chuck Marone
I feel like that's not a hard place to get to. The consulting firms hate that. The engineers, the planners, the architects. Everybody doing it hates that. But I actually think that that is a system where you will get good, professional, thoughtful advice without, you know, the entanglement of everything else.
- [46:41]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. Of future work. And. Yeah. It helps to untangle some of the financial incentives that are inherent in that relationship between consultants of all. All types and the public sector.
- [46:57]
Chuck Marone
Yeah. And again, if you don't mind, Abby, I just want to. I'm not saying that anybody is unethical or anybody is corrupt or anybody, like, sets out to screw over the public. I'm just saying the range of things that you are motivated to question or deal with or struggle with is way different when you're not going to get paid for one and you will get paid for the other.
- [47:21]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. Well, that's just motivated self interest. Yeah. It's. It's just. It's a fundamental. It's a fundamental reality of psychology. So I think that your argument is sound.
- [47:33]
Chuck Marone
Well, let me get the Upton Sinclair quote, because it's one of my favorite. It's difficult to. Let me. I've got it right here. It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- [47:50]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. Boom.
- [47:52]
Chuck Marone
And I. The reason why that is a powerful quote is because it's. It is not a quote about corruption. It's a quote about human nature.
- [48:03]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, yeah. It's not. It's not a quote about good versus bad or anything like that. It's just human nature. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we should leave it there, Chuck. That was a good mic drop right at the end. But before we wrap today, we're going to do the down zone, which is part of the show where we share anything that we have been reading or watching, anything that's been taking up our time these days. Chuck, what have you been up to?
- [48:33]
Chuck Marone
You said that watching. And I'm like, oh, I just started to work on my Christmas baking, and I have a certain watching and listening to things routine that I do when I do that. So I'm starting to get into that, like, frame of mind. My wife actually asked me if I would make a pie for Thanksgiving, and I've been dabbling in pies the last few years. And so I'm kind of getting excited to do that now because I think I'm getting. Okay, I'll say this. You can either back me up or disagree. I feel like I've gotten really good over the last two decades at Christmas baking. Like it is something that 20 years ago I was okay at and I think I've gotten really like, I figured it out.
- [49:21]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it's a craft.
- [49:24]
Chuck Marone
Is it a craft? And I have gotten to where I've a master of certain parts of this craft. Pies are so much trickier and I've struggled with them, but I'm getting, I'm getting now better at it and I'm kind of anxious for the challenge of doing one for Thanksgiving because usually when I do pies it's in a low stakes environment and if it works out is great and if it doesn't work out, it's not great. There's not people who are like living or dying on like whether their Thanksgiving is complete because you have the right pie. You know, it's like part of the tradition. This year I'm actually creating the pie. So I'm, I'm, I'm excited about the challenge. I'm a little bit nervous about falling short and I guess we'll see where it's ends up.
- [50:06]
Abby Newsham
Well, I'm very excited to hopefully receive some of the cookies that you make coming for me, so.
- [50:15]
Chuck Marone
Of course.
- [50:17]
Abby Newsham
Awesome. Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. It reminds me that I probably need to make some plans to do some baking and bring it home to St. Louis over the next few weeks. Well, I, I've actually been reading a really fascinating book that a friend gave to me called How Forests Think Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Have you read that?
- [50:40]
Chuck Marone
It's absolutely.
- [50:42]
Abby Newsham
It's so good. Yeah. So it's by Eduard. Eduardo. Eduardo Cohn I believe is his last name. And basically this book reconceptualizes human and nature relationships, demonstrating how thought and thinking is not just confined to humans. And the focus is really specifically on forests and forest ecosystem, non human entities that are within forests and how they basically possess a form of thinking that is beyond human cognition. And the field work is rooted in his work with the Runa people of Ecuador who live in really close relation to the forest ecosystem. And yeah, it's, it's a fascinating book. I'm. I kind of figured that you've read this book, Chuck. When I started reading it, I, I immediately thought this is a Chuck Marone book. So I'm glad to hear that you've, you've read it.
- [51:42]
Chuck Marone
We should, we should spend some time, just you and me offline, talking about it because I do feel like you, I mean, obviously you and I have a Lot of overlap in how we think about things, but we also are very different and have very different sensitivities and experiences. I think it would be interesting for me. I mean, it would be interesting for me to hear your take on some of this because the way you described it was a little more. I'm going to use the word mystical than I have described it or I think about the book because you know.
- [52:14]
Abby Newsham
Me, I like mysticism.
- [52:16]
Chuck Marone
I know, I know this is the thing. It is. The book is beautiful, but to me, the book is beautiful. And I have a more like. I'm not going to say I'm more scientific than you, but I think I have a more. You are less mystical, more scientific mind or approach. And so to me, the. Just the way the trees interact, the way you have responding to each other in ways that are kind of unexplainable at times, you know, to me, it brought up mystery that I want to answer. In a physical world, recognizing that there is like a mystical sense that is maybe beyond our capacity to detect, but we're so arrogant to believe that we could possibly understand it. Right.
- [53:11]
Abby Newsham
Chuck, I wanted to say something along those lines. Not to be kind of too far out there, but I. I feel like you can't detach this idea of mysticism from science. I think it's just. I don't think that mysticism is necessarily like non physical or non scientific. So I'll put that there.
- [53:35]
Chuck Marone
Physicists look out into space and they're like, here's what we understand about, you know, here's what we understand with Newton's laws, here's what we understand with Einstein's laws. We look out into space and then we're like, wow, it's way different. There must be black matter and black energy that warps everything in ways. And so it's just like. It's like we can see this far and then beyond that we don't know. So we just fill in our theory with stuff.
- [54:04]
Abby Newsham
Exactly.
- [54:06]
Chuck Marone
And I think we. Because we are a scientific. Because of the Enlightenment, which is, you know, I'm not gonna sound like weird like I'm trashing the Enlightenment because of the scientific method and the way we approach things, we sometimes feel like we have to fill in those gaps, like, hey, it's dark energy. Well, what is dark energy? Well, we have no idea, but it warps everything in these ways that we can't even explain.
- [54:30]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it's a mystery and it's wonder and it's imagination, but. But the imagination becomes, you know, theory, and it's things that people we test, things we become. We develop a more solid understanding over time. But I think if something is rooted in wonder and imagination initially, that's kind of the creativity that gets us to fact.
- [54:57]
Chuck Marone
I think humans of the past would have just said, instead of saying black dark matter or dark energy, like, you know, something that we will scientifically define at some point, they would have just said mystery and been good with that. And I actually find that more beautiful.
- [55:16]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it is very beautiful, I think.
- [55:19]
Chuck Marone
Yeah. And I. I find it comfortable to sit with that. Even coming from a scientific standpoint, I find the idea of mystery to be more beautiful and inspiring than dark matter. Right. Like, I like, it's the same thing. It's just stuff that we know is there, that. That changes things in ways that we perceive oddly. There's a. There's a book I read around the time of how forests think, which was one of those. It was. It was related, but it was about animals and how, like, how animals perceive things.
- [55:56]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, you told me about this.
- [55:58]
Chuck Marone
It made me very sad because you realize that our senses are so dull compared to the potential number of things that we could perceive. And you're like, oh, you know, the world is so beautiful and so full of things, but we're perceiving, like, this tiny slice of what actually is there. And we're incapable of perceiving these other things that would also be so beautiful. The one that haunts me even today, it kind of depresses me, is that when birds are singing, we hear the birds singing and we think that's very beautiful. But we're hearing the notes that we can hear, and in between the steps that we are able to hear. There's all kinds of notes in beauty that they're able to pick up. Imagine like eight, you know, eight keys on a piano. We hear each one individually, but there's a modulation, an infinite modulation between each of them. Imagine that there was like four notes in between each note on the piano. We don't hear it. Like, it's not part of what we hear, but the birds hear it. And not only do they hear it, they sing within that complex songs. And you're like, oh, I'm like the person who's listening to something in mono where it has this beautiful stereo version of it. But I'm hearing, like, the bad one on a bad transistor radio. And if I heard, like, the real good one with great headphones in full stereo, it would just make the song so much more alive. That's what being Human is Chuck.
- [57:42]
Abby Newsham
I feel like even in that example, that's a story where I could see it starting as seeming very mystical and moving into scientific. When we can actually measure that and detect it in other ways beyond our hearing. You know what I mean? So that. That's kind of. That's where I think that connection is, is that things kind of start one way and eventually we learn how to understand these ideas and disprove them or prove them, change the way we think about things. And it takes that. That wonderment and imagination to even start to ask the questions.
- [58:20]
Chuck Marone
Absolutely.
- [58:21]
Abby Newsham
And I think I want to go back. Yeah. This book in particular is just really cool because it even makes you wonder about the implications of what it means to think because it's talking about anthropology beyond, like, human cognition and thinking more about humans within broader ecosystems and what thinking actually is in that context, which I think is fascinating. So right up my alley. I know it's up yours. And hopefully it's trying to remember what.
- [58:56]
Chuck Marone
Year I read this book, because I do this book list. I'm working on it right now for this year, and I'm trying to figure out when I would have read this book, because it was very meaningful to me when I did.
- [59:12]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. Well, I think the book that you told me about that had to do with how animals perceive things. I think you told me that dogs perceive, like they. They enjoy smelling things more than they enjoy going on walks. And they perceive smell in a way that actually, like, uses their mind. And it completely changed the way I approach walking my dog. And I think you told me about that a few years ago.
- [59:45]
Chuck Marone
It's communication. Yeah. They actually are communicating with their nose in the way that we would with. With ears. And. Yeah. The book that I read last year that made my top five was called An Immense How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. And it's by Ed Young. Y O N G. And it was just. It was so beautiful and so depressing at the same time because you realize that you are so limited, you know? But, yeah, very cool.
- [60:23]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. Well, I guess we'll end it on that note.
- [60:28]
Chuck Marone
Thank you, Abby. Nice to meet you.
- [60:29]
Abby Newsham
We're all very limited in our perceptions.
- [60:33]
Chuck Marone
Hey, I think this is coming out before Thanksgiving. If it does.
- [60:36]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it is.
- [60:37]
Chuck Marone
Happy Thanksgiving to everybody.
- [60:38]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, Happy Thanksgiving. Hopefully everyone has safe travels and enjoy. Is eating a lot of food. That's what I'll be doing.
- [60:48]
Chuck Marone
Me too. And pie.
- [60:50]
Abby Newsham
Awesome. All right, well, thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Upzoned. And thanks, Chuck. I'll talk to you later.
- [60:59]
Chuck Marone
Thanks. Bye.