Charles Buki

<p>It is often - and very inaccurately - said that people hate change.  When people get married - they are overjoyed.  When they hold the winning lottery ticket, or have children or get a raise or a promotion or a new car, they are thrilled.  These are forms of change that illustrate the point that change is not what people hate; what people have trouble with is certain forms of change.  This becomes especially relevant to planners and designers and community developers who are part of processes - shaping, facilitating, leading, participating in, or otherwise advocating for one form of change or another.</p>

<p>I recently posted an open-ended question on facebook to my <em>friends</em> about Governor Palin, asking for their views. It was remarkable how condescending many of those views turned out to be, just as Gerard Alexander noted in his excellent February 4 Washington Post editorial. </p><p>Herewith are my thoughts on the tea party thing - whatever it is - and how it relates to the challenges faced by the New Urbanists and advocates for Smart Growth....</p>

<p> By any measure, the HUD that is now emerging from the shadows of eight years of amateur hour, is focused on the right things: markets, coherent roles for public and private sector alike, and energy efficiency. Indeed the emphasis on &quot;urbanism&quot; and &quot;regionalism&quot; illustrates that this administration &quot;gets it&quot;. </p>

In January 1992, The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a piece by Columbia’s Nicholas Lemann, titled “The Myth of Community Development”.  It was then - timed to provoke critical thinking about the Clinton Administration’s vanilla urban policy of Empowerment Communities (EZ/EC) - a poignant evaluation of community development, and it asked hard questions.<br /> <br /> Questions about the capacity of local organizations, the wisdom of economic development efforts in the hands of anemic CDCs.  Neither wholly right nor wrong, the piece put on the table a necessary skunk:  was it sensible to try to revitalize the inner city using the tools and thinking then at hand?<br />

<p> Community Development Work Avoidance </p> <p> Local government across the nation is knee deep in the work of figuring how to do with less.  No community is immune from the challenges posed by reduced sales and property tax revenue and the constant if not increasing demand for services.  Invariably, and appropriately, locating the proper balance between the two becomes a matter of setting priorities.  And to do that, criteria are needed to rationalize why one municipal activity should be funded, but not another.  It was ever thus, of course.