Like
a lot of people, Neil Jaschik has his e-mail set up to append a quote to each
outgoing message.

Jaschik’s,
attributed to the second-century Rabbi Tarfon, reads this way:

“It
may not be your obligation to finish the task; but neither are you permitted to
refrain from beginning it.”

They’re
fitting words for anyone engaged in the often Sisyphean task of promoting
healthy land-use planning. But they’re doubly so considering the contents of
the e-mail that accompanied them to our inbox:

“I
am sorry to have to inform you,” the opening sentence read, “that due to loss
of funding and staff, the Common Good Planning Center will no longer be
functioning as it has in the past, effective July 1, 2006.”

The
e-mail takes a Tarfonian twist, assuring its readers that the center is working
to bequeath its mission — “developing communities in ways that are
ecologically sustainable, economically productive, and socially equitable” —
to like-minded organizations in Rochester.

Still,
it’s not hard to feel as though this marks the end of an era. Sprawl hasn’t
stopped; between 2000 and 2004, MonroeCounty added more
than 6,000 housing units while losing nearly 27,000 people, according to the US
Census Bureau.

And
while sprawl continues, one of the few local organizations focusing on growth
and planning policies is folding.

Despite
what Jaschik describes as a growing awareness of the problems associated with
sprawl, the CommonGoodPlanningCenter never gained
a financial foothold.

“The
foundations had been very generous to us in getting us started,” Jaschik says.
“But all foundations have a basic policy that they don’t continue with
operating funds indefinitely, so the challenge to find other sources of funding
was always in front of us.”

That
support never materialized. Part of the reason was that the center never had
the time or staff to create the kind of innovative programs that large national
foundations will fund. But Jaschik lays some of the blame on the complexity of
the issues at stake.

“People
see the stuff at the top — the dependence on the car, the concentration of
poverty, and all the other ills that bad development brings — and they focus
on dealing with those issues — which they ought to, certainly,” he says. “But
the foundational problem of the way that we develop, which is the underlying
driver of this, is not something that people get all lathered up and excited
about.”

Jaschik,
a planning associate who’s been with the center since its inception eight years
ago, is uniquely positioned to talk about what he calls “the built environment”
in Rochester. With a
bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s degree in planning, he
spent his career working on growth and related issues for Monroe County and the
Genesee Transportation Council. The conditions he sees today don’t please him.

In
a recent interview, he talked about those conditions, and what the community
ought to be focusing on. Following is an edited transcript of that discussion:

City:
What’s changed in terms of the built environment and how it affects people, and
what hasn’t?

Jaschik: Well, probably
the problem is what hasn’t changed. We still continue to sprawl, build in the
suburbs — not only build in the suburbs but do it in a way that increases
housing size, increases land that’s being used, increases our dependence on the
automobile, continues to screen out affordable housing except in very limited
instances, and continues to concentrate poverty. And there’s just been very
little attempt to turn these forces around. So it’s been a frustrating eight
years.

I
worked on a very good report called Benchmarking Greater Rochester that was done
with the assistance of the Center for Governmental Research. We looked through
a whole host of indicators — demographic, economic, transportation, social,
and other indicators — of what’s going on in the Greater Rochester area,
vis-ร -vis about 30 other metropolitan areas. And we sort of did a US News and
World Report ranking thing. We showed how in certain measures, the Rochester area was way
behind and in other measures we were very good.

In
basic resources, Rochester was really
ahead of the curve, particularly in terms of brain power. And one of the
measures of that was patents per capita. I think we were like second or third
in the country, just behind Silicon Valley. So on the
input measures — the relative education, the kind of companies we had here
— we had it.

But
on the output measures — the growth in income, the environmental condition
— we were down in the bottom third. What that told me was that we have
tremendous resources, but we are not using them effectively. And one of the
main reasons is that we do not cooperate as a community. We don’t put it
together and plan as a single regional entity. And that has been one of the
main messages the CommonGoodPlanningCenter has tried to
get across.

You
do have occasional cooperative efforts where towns and villages might plan
together jointly or under the Quality Communities Program. The three western
towns and OrleansCounty, for
instance, put together a joint planning effort. But it’s just hit or miss, and
there’s not real pressure or persuasion to maintain that.

That
report, which came out in late 1999, did have a little bit of buzz attached to
it, and people did look at it. Unfortunately, as with so many of these reports,
after the initial buzz nobody used it as we hoped it’d be used: as a focus for
a plan of action.

You’ve said
you hope some other organizations will pick up some of this work. What are some
of our biggest challenges?

The
biggest is this: Don’t let any more of our precious resources go away. Make
this an attractive community to maintain. There’s been a whole lot written
already about the brain drain, so I won’t beat that into the ground, but that’s
real, and that’s a major concern.

Because
we are not growing, we actually have an opportunity. There’s no reason to
continue additional development at the scale that it goes on. The reality that
we’re running out of fossil fuel will make an impact on people’s psyches — to
understand that we have to rethink the way we live and travel and work and
relate to one another.

Whether
there’s enough time for that to affect what actually goes up on the ground: it
could go either way. We’re still inundated with those messages from corporate America and others,
that you can continue to aspire to your 4,500-square-foot McMansion on 5 acres
of land out in the boondocks, to have three Hummers in your garage.

You’re
always accused in this business of trying to make people feel guilty about what
they’re doing. That’s really not what we want to do, but we want people to use
their heads a little and think about the impact not only on their lifestyle but
on the community at large.

If
we go down the path that we’re on right now, this will not be the community
that attracted me and many others. I still love this place. It’s still got
resources that are unbeatable. My family and others live in relatively big
cities: Baltimore, Washington, New York, Boston. They’re
wonderful places, but they don’t have the accessibility of Rochester. They don’t
have the intimacy of Rochester, and [other
cities] don’t have the quality of the kinds of professional things that people
look for. It’s here, and it’s here at a wonderful level, and we’re going to
lose that.

What would you
identify as the underlying driver? Planning?

Yeah,
planning and development. The way we let our communities grow and increasingly
segregate ourselves both racially and by class and income. We’re all in this
together, and until our environment and our own actions reflect that, we’re not
going to get out of [our problems]. It’s the same thing with the structural
problems of New York. People are
not going to be: ‘Wow, I’m really excited about changing the rules of the New York state
legislature.’ But those are foundational issues, and if you don’t deal with
them, you’ll never be able to come to grips with the problems you’re concerned
about.

Along those
lines, what are the most disturbing trends that you’ve noticed over the past
eight years?

I
think the lack of interest in trying to come together as a region — because
none of these problems are going to be solved unless we cooperate. And it’s
going to take more than just entering into these so-called voluntary
arrangements. Because it’s like a cartel: as soon as one entity sees its
advantage to break out of the system, it will.

I
know this is heresy in New YorkState, but you do
need some requirement, some mandate from on high that says certain levels of
decisions can only be made at a regional level or at a county level.

David
Rusk [the nationally known regionalism expert] put out a report a couple of
years ago that made the point that waiting for New York to come together and
try to create the regions like they did in Ontario is going to be like waiting
for Godot. But counties, at least in Upstate, could serve as very real proxies
for that regional government if they got off their duffs and tried to exert
some more authority. So, yeah, I think there’s some hope that can happen.

What are the
most positive things you’ve noticed in the past eight years?

Well,
I think more people are certainly aware of the importance of this issue.
Unfortunately, not enough to keep the CommonGoodPlanningCenter going, but
enough to start making noise. And some of the towns are beginning to pay
attention to these concerns. They are updating their master plans. They’re
talking seriously about bringing their zoning into the 21st century to deal
with those issues. There’s some realization that if we don’t support the
central city, we might as well just cash it in, because you can’t be a suburb
of nothing. I mean, you have a lot of these catch phrases and clichรฉs, but
they’re true. And slowly but surely people do catch on.

David Rusk
talked about Rochester reaching a tipping point, where once you get beyond a
certain point, you can’t recover. Do you think we’ve reached that point?

I
think using the measures that he used in defining that, and using more current
data than when he came here back in the late 90’s, you might see that. I don’t
know for sure. I think it had to do with the percent minorities living in the
central city, the difference between the median income of the central city and
the suburbs….On all of those measures, we have certainly gotten worse. But I
don’t think that tipping point was an absolute thing. If you use that kind of
stuff to say, ‘Well, we’re over the falls; we might as well throw it in,’ it’s
not going to be very helpful.

Why is there
is a visceral reaction in this country against smart growth or centralized
planning?

Because
it’s against the American way. This country was founded on individual liberty:
‘my home is my castle,’ ‘don’t tell me what to do,’ the fear of government —
some of which is legitimate, but not all.

It
may have changed over time, but the difference between the way an average
Canadian or British citizen views their government and the way an average
American views their government is the difference between night and day.
Obviously they also complain about taxes and corruption and incompetence.
Unfortunately, people don’t get that lathered up about the corruption and
incompetence within corporate America, but that’s
another story.

This article appears in Jul 12-18, 2006.