“It used to be that jobs and economic opportunities drew migrants.  No longer.  Today’s populations are more mobile than ever.  Armed with information and freed by technology, today’s migrants choose their communities much more carefully than ever before.  Therefore, communities must be savvy in the retention and attraction of people.  In fact, if communities don’t inspire their citizens, they run the risk of becoming failed communities.”
- From “Beyond Economic Survival” by Centre for Innovative & Entrepreneurial Leadership.  Taken from the Rurban Fringe.

I’ve talked about the importance of making a community desirable.  Studies have found a strong link between residents’ attachment and economic growth.  The first step is to watch out for behaviour that kill organizations and municipalities.  Second, figure out a proper Urban Plan that aims to transform a community into one people would pay a premium to be a part of (read Mississauga’s Mayor McCallion’s regret).  Third, identify businesses that would be loss leaders for the community.

Then just sit back and enjoy stable property values, higher quality of life and strong economic growth. 

Full report here.

Please explain why, or why not.

This is a follow up to my loss leader post.  You should read it before voting. 

A very quick summary is this :-

• New growth costs money.  New growth should pay for itself. However, all new growth is not same
• 1 million sq ft office complex employs 25 times as many people as an industrial compound of same size.   However, they both pay same development charge (should they?)
• Other municipalities already do this.  Development Charge in Guelph for above structure is around $3 million.  In Halton it is $17 million
• Employers don’t just cost money. They pay higher property taxes, and bring in much needed jobs and economic growth.  All this leads to higher property values and quality of life for all of us
• Business pay a much higher property tax rate (residential tax-rate is < 1%.  For Office buildings it’s ~2.25%.  Industrial it’s close to 3.5%)

So the question is, should these “high employers” (office complexes, not retail spaces) pay less development charge than other commercial constructions considering all the benefit they bring in to the community? 

Walmart, Superstore and other retailers sell hardcover books for less than the cost.  Why?  It gets people to the store.  Specifically, it is better than selling toasters or socks at a discount because it gets the right customer in the store. Customers who buy hardcover books (which is arguably a luxury item) buy other items too. 

Does your municipality have a loss leader?  Something it offers in a discount to attract desirable businesses or residents?

The Region should do this for high quality employers.  A one million square foot office building employs about 25 times as many people as an industrial compound of the same size.  Is it anything less than insanity that both pay same development charges? Should we not look at the benefits office buildings bring to the community, in the form of employment and property taxes, and subsidize their development charges?

For comparison, DC on such a building in Guelph is only $3 million while in Halton they pay around $17 million.  

Walmart is smart enough to know that some customers are more valuable than others.  It willingly loses money on hardcover books to attract these customers.  Is Halton smart enough to recognize that some businesses are better than others?  Is Halton smart enough to lose money on DC up front for these businesses, knowing that it will more than make up for the loss later in extra property taxes and economic growth?

Every so often I have to send a fax.  Rarely do these places accept a scanned copy as an e-mail attachment (it’s the 21st century, can’t they just print it out?) 

As annoyed as I get at businesses refusing to let go of an antiquated technology most people don’t have access to (fax machines) and adopting technology virtually everyone in Urban Canada uses (e-mail), municipalities are worse.  Much worse. 

Here are some things municipalities must do to modernize their affairs:

1. Put all documents and meeting minutes online, promptly.
2. Do virtual public input session online to complement normal ones that require people to show up at 7:30pm on a weekday (that mere mortals with day jobs, family commitments and other obligations find hard to do).
3. Create and maintain a moderated discussion forum where issues can be discussed. Milton is bursting with talent, only if the town would tap into it.
4. Stream (live) all public meetings.
5. Maintain a strong presence in social networking sites.  Business are using it, why not municipalities?
6. Start an official town blog where the Mayor, Councillors and different subcommittees take turn posting.  Why not? 

None of these initiatives cost much at all.  In fact, some may save money in the long run. 

I have done all my banking online for at least a decade.  In fact, all my financial accounts (from RRSP to regular investments) were set up without ever setting foot in a bank.  Every major electronics in my house, including my TV, fridge, stove and dishwasher, were purchased online.  For my generation, I am more of a rule than an exception.

Yet municipalities, including Milton, insist on conducting business the way it was done decades ago. Is it any surprise that younger residence no longer participate?

A little less than 3,000 people died on 9/11. The world united.  What would happen if 5 times as many people were killed by terrorists tomorrow?  The world would unite again.

That’s how many children are killed by hunger (and hunger related diseases) every day.  Every. Single. Day.  Yesterday.  Today. Tomorrow.  12,000 to 15,000 children starve to death everyday. That is the world we live in.  Yet the world doesn’t unite.  Conundrum! 

About 20 children starved to death in the time it took you to read this post.  We cannot single-headedly eliminate hunger, but every little helps. I am not going to recommend a specific charity, but there are many great ones out there.  Lets take a moment to share our good fortunes with those who are less fortunate. 

I must add, you do not have to go very far.  Each month over 700,000 Canadians receive food from a food bank, over a third of which are children. 

We really don’t need terrorists attacks to unite us. 

I was in a week-long training on Agile Development.  I spent a weekend thinking about it and something totally struck me: when a project stutters then going back to square one and restarting is the right thing to do.  After all, if one goes down the wrong path then it makes no sense to continue progressing.

This can be further extended to starting projects on an experimental basis knowing that it may fail.  Sometimes people are hesitant to do something until they are certain it is the right thing to do.  The problem is that often we don’t know if something is worth doing until after we have tried it. 

Companies take risk all the time. They experiment, start projects and happily cancel them when their bet doesn’t pay off.  Very few people remember Apple Newton, its first handheld platform that it experimented with for a decade until finally giving up in 1998.  It’s hugely successful iPhone would never have happened without that risk-taking. 

Now the question is, how should we extend that attitude to municipalities? Specifically, what are some areas Milton can experiment with, knowing that it’s experimenting?  How should Milton communicate that to the residents so a failed experiment is seen as a success (since it teaches something)?

A city or a town is nothing less than a brand name.  Some brands matter while others do not. 

Why should Milton (or any town for that matter) care about its brand?  First, property values (of course). Second, strong brands create strong attachments and municipalities with stronger attachment experience better economic growth.  A recent study confirmed it.

Will Milton be a vibrant, growing brand in GTA or an irrelevant one?

This is inspired by Seth Godin’s Blog (I am compressing his 12 traits to 4).  This is precisely why I stopped watching news.  Does your organization:

1. Focus on urgent instead of important
2. See trees instead of the forest
3. Resist changing course
4. Confuse opinions of a loud minority as desire of the majority

To paraphrase Seth Godin, if I wanted to hobble an organization (or even a country), I’d wish these traits on them.  Does this sound like your municipality?

So I am driving down on Scott Blvd at 50km/hr from the Main Street towards HVE with my family last week after thanksgiving dinner when I noticed a black Acura TL tailgating me.

The driver then went to the right and started to pass me. I noticed cars were parked on the right, but that didn’t stop the driver. He got very close to hitting parked cars and suddenly moved right in front of me, cutting me off (fortunately I knew he was going to do that, so I slowed down pre-emptively).

Honestly, what the heck is wrong with people? First, I was driving a minivan full of kids. Second, it’s a single lane road. Third, if you must pass anyway, pass on the left, not right. Fourth, it was a residential neighbourhood. What if a kid came from behind a car, not expecting an idiot to be flying down the street so close to the curb.

When a lady zoomed passed me (a couple of months ago, on Scott) crossing the street with my 5 and 2 year olds, I thought I had seen it all. Unfortunately, I hadn’t.  I am tempted to just publish the license plate number.

Slow down people, seriously, it’s not worth killing someone over.

The issue of transit came up on a hawthornevillager forum.  Transit absolutely needs to be part of the larger infrastructure plan (which takes into account not only roads, but also walking and cycling). That infrastructure plan itself needs to be a part of a larger Urban Plan.

This upfront planning will allow Milton to consolidate townhomes and condos (low to mid-rises) around major arteries.  Cities that have successful (and financially efficient) transit systems do so by increasing population density around major transit routes. 

Derry is a major artery into and out of town and yet if you drive on Derry, most construction you see around Derry is single family homes. New subdivisions have condos, village homes and town homes, but these are scattered all over the subdivision instead of being consolidated around transit routes.

That means two things:

1) either most people have to walk a lot to get to a bus, which isn’t always practical (and is a disincentive)
or
2) The town has to make buses to inside neighbourhoods to reach more people, which makes transit inefficient (and is a disincentive)

A lesson for Milton?

“At times, we have to look back and say what could we have done better.  We’ve got a crisis in waste management in the GTA and we have a crisis in gridlock.

“We had our heads in the sand when we approved developments and located jobs wherever people wanted to put them, rather than doing some planning on where the employment should be. … It is an awakening, that we could have done things better and we’d better not make the same mistakes in the future.”

- Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion in a 2002 interview

Lets hope a Milton Mayor does not have to show regrets in the future. 

When we purchase a car, we do not evaluate every possible feature of the car.  Instead, we hone down on a handful of things we care about. For some its brand name, others performance.  Some care about price while others worry about efficiency.  Our brain gets rid of all the noise and focuses on a tiny amount of information that we care about.

However, does that work in politics?  I think not. In fact, this skill of taking shortcuts that helps us survive in the real world likely make us horrible voters.  In real life if I do not know anything about subwoofers then I ask my buddy who does.   In politics, political parties become our buddies.  You no longer need to know the candidate, just check the party. 

It’s worse.  When we buy a car, we use the shortcut to simplify Math.  In politics, we use shortcuts to skip Math altogether! 

People are not very gifted when it comes to critical and logical thinking.  Our brains evolved for quick and crude decisions, not for deep analysis.  After all, we are a species who actually get cured on placebos if we are told these are expensive drugs.  We find that same wine tastes better when we pay $90 for it than when we pay $10 for it.  We just aren’t as rational as we think we are. 

In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Alchen and Larry Bartels estimate:

2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns.

Any one of these States would have given Gore the presidency.  Sounds weird?  It’s not:

Eighty-six per cent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favoured the death penalty. It’s not that people know nothing. It’s just that politics is not what they know.

I had to stay in Washington, DC for a couple of months in 2008.  To be efficient, I got a short-term lease with a roommate, a very conservative one.  He cornered me one day about the Canadian Healthcare system: “I just don’t want a bureaucrat telling me what doctor to use”.  I tried to explain that actually it’s the American system where the insurance company tells you who you can use, not the Canadian system.  Then he went off on other misconceptions and how the US system was the “best” in the world.  Being annoyingly patriotic, I corrected him on some stats (Canadians have lower child immortality rates, live longer, have almost no medical bankruptcies [largest cause of bankruptcy in the US] and yet the Canadian government spends less on healthcare than the US government does.  That does not even include what private businesses and individuals spend [my employer paid $18,000 / year in healthcare insurance for my family]).  He wrote off all the stats and the conversation turned to how ‘immigrants were stealing American jobs’ and since I fit that profile (being a Canadian working temporarily in the United States), it was my cue to take off. 

It was a truly insightful conversation for me.  Here was a person who considered himself informed making completely uninformed stereotypical comments.  I do not think he is in a minority.  Facts did not matter, buzz words did.  People truly do vote based on anecdotes, personal impressions, buzz words or completely arbitrary and irrelevant points.  Check out some posters in my other blog here and here and here.  These are people protesting Obama’s healthcare proposal.  

Think quickly about the first image or impression that comes to your mind when you hear “Conservative politician” or “Liberal Political Activist”?  In these cases we are perhaps better off dropping the labels altogether.  Scientists have found that once people make an impression, for whatever reason, their brains does everything it can to reinforce that impression. Our subconscious goes as far as to find patterns when none exist and make us ignore patterns when they do exist. 

Neuroscientists actually talk about ‘Bill Clinton’ cells.  They exist in medial temporal lobe and fire whenever one sees a picture of Bill Clinton, hear his voice or read his name.  We have similar neurons for other people we are familiar with.  This combines with the fact that the brain only computes with probabilities while we consciously do not understand probabilities very well turn us into species well suited for quick decisions that optimize survival but poorly designed for deep analysis of complex policy issues. 

It may be worth going on a little tangent to see how brain actually deals with complex information:

[The brain] makes important decisions by having sizable groups of neurons compete with each other—a shouting match between the lion neurons and the tabby cat neurons in which the accidental silence (or spontaneous outburst) of a few nerve cells is overwhelmed by thousands of others.  The winners silence the losers so that ambiguous, and possibly misleading, information is not sent to other brain areas. 
[Source: Discover Magazine]

In fact, Sejnowski, in a paper, concludes that “the evidence is overwhelming that the brain computes with probability.”  Why is that a bad thing? For survival it is not.  When early humans encountered a Saber-tooth Tiger for the first time, those who survived were the ones who quickly judged the Tiger for its teeth (essentially stereotyped it), rather than getting to know it better before reaching a conclusion.  However, in the modern world this ability to take quick shortcuts make us very poor decision makers.  This is why stereotyping and prejudices is so deeply entrenched into our societies. We are hardwired to make quick judgements without investigating facts. 

This leads to people supporting inconsistent policies.  Often people who argues for assault rifle ownership based on individual rights (over community safety) has no problem with the government spying to enhance security (an act that requires giving precedence to security over individual liberty).  It is because their parties (buddies) tell them to.  A recent article for The American Project states:

When people are asked whether they favour Bush’s policy of repealing the estate tax, two-thirds say yes—even though the estate tax affects only the wealthiest one or two per cent of the population.

There is nothing wrong with that belief, except the article also states:

Repeal is supported by sixty-six per cent of people who believe that the income gap between the richest and the poorest Americans has increased in recent decades, and that this is a bad thing. And it’s supported by sixty-eight per cent of people who say that the rich pay too little in taxes.

Numbers do not add up.  Is it a wonder that Americans constantly complain about the gap between rich and poor and yet continue to choose policies that transfer wealth to a small fraction of the population?  Canadians are a bit better, I think, but not by much.  I am specifically picking American examples because I do not want to offend people by citing Canadian examples (it’s not that I am not okay with offending people, it’s just that once people feel like I have done a personal attack, they will stop reading my arguments and get defensive).

I think that’s why labels are used so often (and I hate labels).  “Liberals”, “conservatives”, “right winger” etc. are all terms used to lump people into pre-defined buckets because most of us are too lazy, or too tired, to spend much effort really understanding policy differences.

“Brown” is a very popular name in Ohio politics. An unknown candidate a few years ago controversially changed his last name to Brown and, wait for it, actually won the election.

Cialdini in Influence talks about how studies have found that people vote for candidates they identify with. This association can be racial, professional, culture or any of a number of factors that do not have anything to do with real political policy issues.  Heck, taller candidates get more votes than shorter candidates.  Candidates with names that are similar to voters get more votes.  It’s all bizarre, but it’s all true. 

What is the solution?  As a society we educate our children in Mathematics, science and language from an early age.  We must also educate our children in politics from earlier on as well.  If we are to have a vibrant democracy then we must change our education system to create a vibrant, informed and involved constituency.  Otherwise we will continue to have masses that are easily controlled by political parties.