John Rahaim on the California Housing Crisis: What are planners to do?

In the past decade, San Francisco has become the poster child for income inequality, housing costs, and homelessness. The regional growth that fueled this national attention has been caused by a perfect storm of two factors: renewed interest in urban living combined with the explosive growth of technology companies. This has led to a worsening condition of economic inequality largely along racial lines. While the same phenomenon is also occurring in other coastal cities, the exorbitant cost of housing in the Bay Area has made the situation more acute. As a planner, urban designer, and former Planning Director for the City of San Francisco from 2008–2020, I was a key player in managing dramatic changes to the city, which saw the most growth in nearly a century during my tenure. It seems clear that in the Bay Area, the price of housing and the associated repercussions are both a cause of, and an almost direct result of, economic inequality and homelessness. In this politically charged environment—where housing policies, homelessness, and housing costs factor into almost every dinner conversation—the task most often put to planners is how to make more housing happen, and happen faster. There is broad agreement that California, and the Bay Area in particular, has fallen woefully behind in housing production. In 2018, Governor Gavin Newsom set a state goal to produce 500,000 new housing units per year. The state has only produced about 100,000 per year since (and only some of that shortfall can be blamed on the pandemic). It is not hyperbole to say that California is in the midst of a housing crisis. And in spite of the changes in living patterns brought by the pandemic, the housing shortage will likely continue. What are planners—and state and local governments—to do? First, cities must revise single-family zoning to allow multiple units. If cities don’t make this change, the state should require it. Single-family zoning was largely intended to keep out people of lower incomes, and therefore people of color. It largely worked, and still does. Today, the typical rationale for resisting changes to single-family zoning is to “maintain neighborhood character.” Minneapolis and Portland, which recently revised single-family zoning, are receiving a lot of attention in the planning media for taking this bold step. Low-density, detached housing zoning must change to open all neighborhoods to a variety of incomes. As any Black resident of San Francisco can tell you, the lower density neighborhoods are those with access to quality public services, especially parks and better schools. If the physical character of the neighborhood is truly the concern, alternative types of housing can be produced through better design and a robust design review process. But we must not kid ourselves into believing that changing single-family zoning will result in significant new housing production. It will not. Land assembly, delaying tactics by residents, and the cost of existing houses will hamper production. Further, residential neighborhoods, even in dense urban neighborhoods, are removed from public transit. Change zoning for the right reasons, but don’t assume it will increase housing production. Second, create minimum zoning requirements along all commercial corridors—but not more broadly. There have been several efforts in recent years by the state legislature to mandate higher density zoning around transit stations and other public amenities, regardless of the existing underlying conditions. These efforts caused enormous public backlash, and have generally failed. If the goal is housing production, the vast majority of production will, and should, occur along commercial corridors where there are public services, better public transit, wider streets, and more eclectic design conditions. In the Bay Area, zoning provisions in many suburban jurisdictions do not allow housing on commercial corridors. But based on building codes, the most economical housing type is a structure of 6 or 7 stories, allowing for wood frame construction; this is a building type and size well suited to commercial streets. Third, speed up the approval process—but don’t expect this to magically produce a lot of housing. The approval process is absurdly slow, and time delays are a factor in housing production. Among other delaying tactics, the California Environmental Quality Act has been turned on its head and used as a tool to stop housing production in precisely the locations where it is the most environmentally friendly—urban areas with access to transit and services. But let’s be clear: housing approved is not housing built. As of two years ago, San Francisco had 60,000 entitled housing units in the pipeline, with only 10,000 actually under construction. The housing approval process is the bogeyman cited by every real estate reporter and elected official in the state, because it is far easier to blame public sector agencies than to cite the private development industry which—even in the hottest economic climate in a century—was unable to produce the housing that was already approved. Finally, and most importantly, get government at all levels back in the housing business. President Biden has acknowledged that housing is an essential component of our infrastructure. We don’t think of our roads, sewers, and transit stations as private commodities—they are available to all. In America, housing is a commodity to be bought and sold like a car. The result is that those with means have a place to live, and those without means do not. We must change this paradigm. In San Francisco, 6 percent of housing is controlled by the public/nonprofit sectors, and that is higher than in most US cities. In Hong Kong and northern Europe, the comparable number is about 50 percent. In Singapore, it’s 80 percent. The provision of social housing in these places is based on a fundamentally different paradigm—that housing is indeed part of necessary public infrastructure. This combination of public and private provision of housing accommodates all income levels, which the private market alone simply cannot do. Further, governments must get involved in private housing production after it is approved, and not assume that the private market will simply take care of it. Why are so many approved projects stalled? Could the state provide revolving loans, via a mechanism such as an infrastructure bank, to kick-start horizontal development on large projects? More provocatively, should the state restart a form of redevelopment to allow cities to take control of large sites? The California housing crisis is a key, if not primary, component of economic inequality in the Bay Area, and many other regions. As the most populous state, California has on outsize impact on the national economy; and the state’s policy initiatives have often set the stage for other states and on national policies. If we are to realistically address this crisis, it is time for California planners to work with communities and elected officials at all levels of government to change our housing policy paradigms. John Rahaim is an urban designer and city planner. He was the Planning Director for the City of San Francisco for twelve years, the longest contiguous tenure of any Planning Director in the city’s history. He serves as a Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard GSD where he led the studio “Building Respect on San Francisco’s Third Street” in the spring of 2021.

Power and Justice in the Lone Grid State: Abby Spinak and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre on the crisis in Texas

Newspapers this week are swamped with headlines like, “What Went Wrong with the Texas Power Grid?” To anyone not intimately concerned with the details of American electricity distribution, this may seem like an odd way of referring to the current electricity crisis in Texas. Isn’t there one national grid? Actually there are three: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and Texas. Energy scholars sometimes refer to this, tongue-in-cheek, as an infrastructural form of “Texas nationalism.” This week, the apocalyptic images coming out of Texas of icicles hanging from ceiling fans and long lines for grocery rations show the limits of Texas isolationism, but also the ways its energy sovereignty has been steadily undermined since the 1970s.   The reason that Texas is a lone grid state is both a fascinating political history and mind-numbingly bureaucratic. In the mid-20th century, electric utilities were the corporate giants of their era. Flush with capital and the perception of unlimited growth, these companies began to consolidate into multistate “holding companies”—or “octopuses,” as pro–public power politicians maligned them—and they learned to take advantage of their ability to shift costs and profits across state lines. Ultimately, the federal government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded with legislation to govern interstate electricity sales and, ideally, maintain electricity as a reliable and affordable public good. Texas avoided much of the federal oversight that came with these new regulations by agreeing not to sell electricity across state lines. In place of federal regulation, in 1970, the state created the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to manage the Texas grid. While ERCOT does maintain some connections out of state, Texas has largely remained a power island. As Rice University Professor Dan Cohan recently told CNN, “When it comes to electricity, what happens in Texas stays in Texas.” By the end of the 20th century, however, Texas’s infrastructural borders could no longer keep financial investments from flowing across state lines. New federal legislation starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s steadily eroded the “regulatory compact” that had normalized government oversight of private power monopolies and encouraged competition in both electricity generation and distribution. This new deregulated power landscape unsurprisingly drew the attention of investors from outside the state. Financial partners from elsewhere in the country and Europe began to reorganize the Texas grid according to market logic. New investments in wind, “natural” gas, and other energy resources began to generate and sell power for a just-in-time model–driven ERCOT that then allocated electricity to customers through a myriad of competing private retail providers. By the 2010s, electricity in Texas had earned the reputation (at least locally) for being “the most volatile commodity in the world.” While energy deregulation was championed in Texas for everything from making renewable alternatives more competitive to reducing prices for consumers, it has had mixed results on both fronts. Though it has made both renewable energy and distribution sales more profitable for corporations, the physical infrastructure connecting producers to consumers in Texas has received decidedly less attention. Texas is actually one of the leaders in the country in energy generation, both renewable and otherwise, but lack of investments in cold weather protection has limited its ability to act as an energy safety net in extreme weather conditions. Again, the (infra)structural condition demonstrates how, in the deregulated grid, corporate cost-accounting eclipses public safety. Thus, as profits from electricity sales move freely out of the state, the physical risk of grid failure has remained territorialized within Texas. Last week, in the GSD Urban Planning and Design seminar “Experimental Infrastructures,” students debated the logic of redundancy in public utilities. On the one hand, it’s good to have legislation that prevents the massive tangles of wires that competing power companies enthusiastically built over each other in the early 20th century. On the other hand, lean, just-in-time production for critical infrastructure seems destined to fail catastrophically. Excess capacity may not be “efficient,” but maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have the ability to keep millions of people alive in extreme winter weather events. Calling for reinforced or duplicated energy infrastructure may seem like an argument that is antithetical to climate action. But it actually reflects recent thinking on “energy justice” as a multifaceted problem that has to balance action on energy poverty with historic accountability for the production of high-energy lifestyles, or “luxury emissions.” What is fascinating and horrible about the current Texas blackout is that it shows that these two manifestations of energy injustice—energy poverty and energy luxury—can occur in the same location. The lean market reorganization of Texas’s historic energy abundance has created a landscape where, in a climate of increasingly volatile weather events, the line between luxury emissions and energy poverty has grown very thin. Dr. Abby Spinak is an energy historian and lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is also area head of the GSD’s Master in Design Studies Risk and Resilience area group. Spinak’s current research ties the history of electrification in the rural United States to the evolution of twentieth-century American capitalism and alternative economic visions. Dr. Sarah Stanford-McIntyre is an assistant professor in the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Trained primarily as a U.S. historian, her work focuses on how new technologies impact communities, shape social worlds, and change local environments.

How Not to Write About Design: A guide for anyone looking to move beyond form, space, order, and structure

Architects are often reluctant writers, choosing instead to express themselves in other ways. Perhaps this is because architectural education strongly emphasizes graphic over verbal communication, or because the proliferation of overly complex prose in architectural theory engenders distaste for writing among architects. There are many reasons, but one convincing argument is that it is the result of intentional neglect—a symptom of modernist thinking in architecture. Adrian Forty argues, in Words and Buildings, that modernism developed a deep suspicion, even a “horror of language,” in all of the visual arts. “The general expectation of modernism that each art demonstrate its uniqueness through its own medium, and its own medium alone,” he says, “ruled out resort to language.” In other words, modernists insisted that their work should speak for itself. Modernism therefore developed a very limited vocabulary (Forty lists “form,” “space,” “design,” “order,” and “structure” as its key words) and a distinctive “new way of talking about architecture” that was extremely taciturn. It made the difficult task of writing almost superfluous for architects, and they simply chose not to do it. Clearly, though, written language is essential for architects. Architectural drawings do not speak for themselves: any set of drawings is full of essential labels, descriptions, explanations, and disclaimers. And in professional practice, Forty emphasizes, “Language is vital to architects—their success in gaining commissions, and achieving the realization of projects frequently depends upon verbal presentation and persuasiveness.” Much of this happens orally, but client communication, project documentation, press releases, and advertising copy are all routine, indispensable forms of writing in architecture. What might not be vital to architecture, however, is a specifically “architectural” language, vocabulary, or writing style. In a 2013 Arch Daily article, “Why Good Architectural Writing Doesn’t Exist (And, Frankly, Needn’t),” writer Guy Horton asks, “If writing about architecture is to serve the profession on some level, wouldn’t it be best if it reached out to the popular imagination, beyond the confines of institutionalized insularity where architects and ‘architectural writers’ merely talk amongst themselves?” So, he proposes, “Let us posit that there should be no architectural writing, but merely writing that happens to be about architecture.” This might eliminate the jargon and excess complexity that plague architectural writing. It might also embolden architects’ thinking. Sociologist Howard Becker claims that in his own discipline, excess verbiage is a symptom of uncertainty: “writers routinely use meaningless expressions to cover up” weak claims, and timid thinking leads almost inevitably to bad writing. Reluctance to take on the task of writing, suspicion of the communicative potential of language in the arts, and unease with making bold assertions about design all intensify the difficulties of writing about and for architecture. This is especially acute for students in design courses, where writing is rarely a priority. Faculty in three GSD courses in spring 2020 challenged this model, pushing students to face the task of writing boldly. Mack Scogin, Merrill Elam, and Helen Han’s studio, “King Tut’s Skull,” George Legendre’s “Digital Media: Writing Form,” and Pier Paolo Tamburelli and Thomas Kelley’s seminar, “Book Project Number Zero,” each encouraged students to consider writing from a starkly different perspective, but they all started with the assumption that writing plays an essential role in architecture. At the first meeting of “King Tut’s Skull,” students were asked to recall and describe their first spatial memory. Scogin marvels at the results of this simple assignment: “It’s really remarkable what comes out of that writing exercise—the memory and how it’s constantly visited and revisited. . . it’s probably one of the most defining elements in the course.” The extended exercise works two ways: the students build a clear, sophisticated vision around a vague impression, and the faculty establish mutual trust with the students. They “develop a belief in us,” Scogin says, “and we’re really serious about trying to understand them as individuals.” The writing is so remarkable, Han notes, because the students “know that it’s not like ‘Oh, make a form of a building or anything like that.’ It relieves that pressure.” The writing is not “architectural,” in other words. “And so then,” Han says, “they just [write] what they instinctively want to write or how they want to write.” Through the process, the students use writing to understand their own thinking. It becomes, Han explains, “an initial very intuitive way for them to expose themselves in terms of both their interest, but also how they see things.” The writing “opens their mind up . . . . It’s a way for them to discover their own architecture,” Scogin says. However, when they must produce more discipline-specific writing later in the studio—a design thesis statement—the students struggle. “It becomes a hurdle,” Scogin explains, “and they freeze up a bit because all of a sudden: Oh! You’re talking about architecture.” And the challenge for the faculty is to remind them of their fluency. “We just keep putting it back in front of them,” Scogin says, and Han laughs, “Yeah, we keep telling them to write it again, write it again . . . .” Writing about “architecture” was hard until it became, instead, writing about what they know, which is more natural, more powerful. If “King Tut’s Skull” demonstrated that fluency with one kind of writing can help with other modes of expression, “Digital Media: Writing Form” amplified that notion, challenging students to understand architecture by using deeply unfamiliar idioms. They put themselves “in the mindset of the software designer, looking under the hood” of software, Legendre explains. Their task, he says, is more like “writing things” than sketching or modeling them, and they have many ways to do this. The course used calligraphy, haiku, statements in simple mathematical terms, and other modes of writing. Legendre compares the students’ effort to the Exercises in Style, by Raymond Queneau, “where a meaningless incident is retold 100 ways, using a completely different idiom, and the only idea is to help you focus on the variation.” The course therefore approached “computation as a problem of comparative literature.” Legendre asked students to position their writing somewhere between machine language (“which is gibberish to us,” he says) and the user interface of “buttons and sliders” (“which enable us to do whatever we want”). In this unfamiliar place, “the struggle with the opacity of instruments is somehow bringing back the question of literacy,” Legendre says. The students used a language in which they could invent things, where they could get at “the essence of what we are trying to do” in design. They reached this position gradually, first becoming attentive to how architects read space, and moving “through the process of understanding how to write space in all three dimensions.” They struggled in this territory between incomprehension and free expression to learn again how to use writing to say important things in architecture. Meanwhile, in “Book Project Number Zero,” students focused on a largely unwritten, imaginary text to develop a richer understanding of architectural design. The seminar began from the assumption that “architecture is inseparable from bookmaking,” that “books are the main instrument of architectural propaganda.” And, despite the challenges they might face as writers, “It’s quite important for an architect to write,” Tamburelli explains, because “it makes his or her architecture better—more conscious, more intellectually sophisticated.” Students wrote a short introduction and an index for a book they envisioned (themes varied broadly, from ideas about the personhood of rivers to the lamentable state of architecture in China). However, the main concern of the course was not the writing—it was the book itself, as a designed object, an object “with weight,” Kelley says, “stronger” in some ways than a building. Through the process, the students came to understand the book as “a sort of a tool to actually make architecture,” Tamburelli observes, as well as a tool of self-reflection. Whether architects are bad or excellent writers is immaterial to the understanding that emerged in each of these courses: that a “horror of language” inherited from modernism is deeply misguided. Writing is an essential creative medium and a vital tool for making architecture.

Will urban life recover when the pandemic is finally over? Alex Krieger on the fate of the American city after Covid

Yes, the pandemic (somewhat understandably) and the protests for justice (sadly) are leading to a partial withdrawal from our cities. Of course, such departures have occurred a number of times over the course of American history. Americans have not needed much encouragement to seek a bit of space between themselves and the “rasping frictions” of big city life. Prior to the pandemic, American cities were on a roll. Since the turn of the millennium at least, America was actually witnessing an urban revival. Suburbia had lost much of its appeal for the generations that grew up in it, and memories of mid-century urban decay had largely faded. Editorials in urban newspapers announced “the cachet of a city zip code.” Pundits welcomed the arrival of the creative class, and promised an extended era of urban fortune assured by the commitment to city life by the millennial generation. Even some empty nesters were happy to part with lawn mowers in exchange for more convivial urban contexts. Now in 2020, many people are again falling prey to anxieties about cascading urban problems. We have been reminded that density aids in the spreading of disease. Street protests—even on behalf of just causes—remain somewhat unnerving, especially when they turn to destructive actions. Urban crime rates, after falling for several decades, are once again in the news. More than a few political leaders are stoking fear and divisiveness. In cities, the cost of living, especially for decent housing, seems to increase faster than population gain. Then comes a new possibility: the untethering of work from the places designated for work. Companies forced to vacate offices due to the pandemic are beginning to question the necessity of ever fully returning to downtown office towers. Employees are assessing the personal and financial benefits of cutting out commutes, having greater daily flexibility, and enjoying more family time while working from home. Should we succumb to urban anxieties? Or, will cities recover their appeal (unaffordability aside) when the pandemic is conquered? History makes those of us who love cities maintain some optimism. After all, we have become an urban species. Neither devastating fires when cities were made of wood, nor the cholera of Dickens’s London, nor the urban bombardments of World War II, nor the postwar fears of nuclear holocaust, nor even the shock of 9/11 fundamentally altered the pull to urbanize. Neither will COVID-19 over the long term (barring arrivals of COVID-20, 21, etc.). Cities have been, and will remain, in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s memorable phrase, “the human invention par excellence.” There are advantages to living in a city that are not replicable with digital software. Days filled with Zoom calls and on-line shopping are not an adequate replacement. Today’s global institutions and economies advance with a metropolitan bias—powered by the concentration of innovation-minded talent and entrepreneurial zeal. Some 60 million people have been annually migrating to the world’s cities. They do so, as people have done for centuries, in search of opportunity, economic security, and the promise of a better life. Today’s anxieties will not lead to half of the seven billion inhabitants of earth who currently live in urban regions to all flee to exurbia, or Montana, or the steppes of Russia. (But some rebalancing between immense urban concentrations and smaller and mid-sized cities may be a good thing.) Will there be adjustments as a result of our current crises? Absolutely. Since the Industrial Revolution—and the accompanying prodigious migrations to urban areas from subsistence farms and across oceans—Americans have viewed cities as sources of congestion, pollution, crime, undue class competition, the spread of infectious diseases, and too harried a daily life. The idea of the garden suburb emerged in reaction to the squalor unleashed by industrial urbanization. And at least since the Transcendentalists, a bucolic setting has been considered ideal for family life. Now that the possibility of enjoying a hospitable setting while remaining connected to jobs and centers of enterprise has finally become a reality (after having been predicted since the earliest days of the digital revolution), decisions about where to live and commercial investment in city centers will surely be affected. But even as we’re discovering that we can live and work “anywhere,” the inadequacies of life tethered only to home and computer monitors are being revealed. A rebalancing of the domains of work and life will continue, and will affect the planning of cities, especially with regard to density, but to what extent remains uncertain. Predictions about the future rarely come to fruition. Oscillation between the allure of the city and the allure of living free of city stress has recurred throughout American history. The pandemic will certainly cause some people to seek a haven away from the hustle and bustle, or over anxiety about future pandemics. Still, since global institutions and economies will continue to advance with that metropolitan bias, many more people will continue to partake of all of the cultural riches found in great city centers than will flee for the promise of a safer, if less full, life. Alex Krieger, Principal, NBBJ. Professor of Urban Design, Harvard University. Author of City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America From the Puritans to the Present.

All Together

Optimism in America is in short supply. Could it be otherwise? A fearsome pandemic has taken an intolerable number of lives, with many more people succumbing daily. Livelihoods are at stake as millions remain out of work, and the economy is suffering. The particularly shocking murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of white police officers—and shootings since—have awakened wide-ranging cognizance of persistent racism, a much longer national crisis than the pandemic. And some political leaders are still shamelessly stoking divisiveness rather than speaking out for tolerance and unity.

In truth, national unease was present prior to the arrival of COVID-19. Among a gathering of worries was climate change inaction, growing environmental harm, housing unaffordability, health care insecurities, and accelerating economic and social inequalities. Unlike prior generations—who trusted in a better future for their kids—today’s parents believe that the prospects for their children’s lives seem not as promising as were their own.

Throughout American history, a reconfiguring of society following a crisis often catapulted the nation forward. Shouldn’t today’s interrelated crises do so as well?

Alex Krieger on optimism in the face of the current crisis

Along with optimism, expressions of ideals are in remission. Yet even amidst individual anxieties and the anger of the multitudes, one can sense a desire to reassert certain ideals. Let’s look again to the ones embodied in the opening sentence of the Constitution, “to form a more perfect Union,” and in our oldest motto, e pluribus unum. Would not the desire for equality, well-being, respect and acceptance of others, shared prosperity, valuing those who serve, caring for the environment, and access to health care be embodied in such aspirations? Add happiness, too, as in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Ah, but you are thinking that such hallowed statements—voiced by the privileged—were not actually intended for all, despite the phrase “All men are created equal.” No, we have never fully met the challenge of America’s lofty aspirations. But should we not continue to try, especially now? That oft-repeated phrase—We are all in this together—heard both in relationship to fighting the pandemic and among the marchers for justice, is not unrelated to an intention to form a more perfect union.

Can we all together transition from marching in protest to overcoming racism and other inequalities? And while we’re at it, can we all insist that fresher air remains over our cities once the pandemic is conquered? Can we collectively distribute less carbon into the atmosphere? Continue to enjoy congestion-free, pedestrian-friendly streets throughout urban America? Keep a healthier balance of work and life? Prolong that respite from incessant travel demands? Continue spending more time with family? Maintain daily walks with a loved one when social distancing mandates abate? Why not commit to keeping those Himalayan peaks visible from broader regions of India? Such shifts have been, pardon the expression, breaths of fresh air, illuminated by a crisis.

Throughout American history, a reconfiguring of society following a crisis often catapulted the nation forward. Shouldn’t today’s interrelated crises do so as well? For inspiration, recall the earliest colonists, finding not the Eden they imagined while sailing to a new world, but confronting a harsh wilderness instead. They persisted to fashion a version of Eden in which to prosper. Against odds, their descendants defeated a mighty empire standing in the way of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now remember the establishment of a Homestead Act in 1863, enabling any citizen to acquire a quarter-section of America—160 acres—at minimal cost, simply by occupying it and providing minimal improvements. Talk about affordable housing! Or, recall the Morrill Act, also passed in the midst of the Civil War. It required states to establish a public university with the proceeds from the sale of land granted by the federal government. Sixty-nine such land-grant institutions were founded, greatly expanding access to education and the “useful” skills necessary for a modernizing society. Among these were Texas A&M, the University of California, Cornell University, and MIT.

Now consider the determination to overcome distance: Construction of a transcontinental rail system was completed within a couple of decades during the second half of the 19th century. Concurrently, thousands of acres of parks and greenswards were “planted” in rapidly industrializing and increasingly harsh cities, in order to make them more humane for all those arriving from subsistence farms and across oceans. Remarkable environments such as New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace were the result.

And we haven’t yet gotten to the 20th century, during which America prevailed in two world wars; invented a social security system and Medicare for the elderly; reconnected the country with roads, telephones, and the internet; increased the percentage of families attaining their measure of the American dream; and finally established civil rights in law (if not always in reality). We even landed a person on the moon, and even more remarkably returned him safely to Earth—a catalyst for major public commitment to scientific research in multiple fields.

To summon either aspirations or accomplishments of American culture is not to ignore, much less excuse, the many dystopic aspects of American history: the near total destruction of Indigenous cultures; the horrors of slavery and systemic racism; the conceits of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism; the continued corporate and political restraints on economic parity; the despoiling of the environment in the name of progress. Mere voicing of ideals have not led to their attainment. But to live and flourish in company with others—in more perfect union—requires shared ideals.

Summoning ideals during a period of crisis is hardly naive. Re-read John Lewis’s letter written right before his passing, imploring us to pursue “the next chapter of the great American story.” A lifetime of struggle against racism and for civil rights did not lead Lewis to abandon America’s ideals. And back in 1859, at an event in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, scene of revolutionary foment a century earlier, Carl Schurz—senator from Missouri, 13th secretary of the interior, and an immigrant appreciative of his adopted country—spoke to the value of following national ideals. “Ideals are like stars,” he said, “you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but… you choose them as guides, and following them will enable you to reach your destiny.” Sound advice.

The pandemic will be conquered. The economy will rebound. City streets will return to some life even as citizens better balance spaces for work and life. But instead of returning to a prior normal, let’s commit, all together, to a destiny that enjoys the necessities of clean air, justice, and equality for all.

Alex Krieger, Principal, NBBJ, a global architecture and planning practice. Research Professor of Urban Design, Harvard University. Author of City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America From the Puritans to the Present.