A comprehensive plan update will suffer from later inattention
until it is linked to a city’s economic welfare. In other words, a city is a
farm and every acre within its boundaries combines to produce an average yield
per acre. This yield must meet or exceed a city’s average expense per acre as
operating, maintenance, improvement, and debt service expense increase with
age. Annexation of acres for new revenue often repeats past mistakes by
assuming that the new income will not be reduced by the increasing expense of
aging. As expense increases, a city with fixed income is often accused of
profligacy when seeking to increase revenue in response. Budget cuts ensue and
decline takes one more step toward blight.
As the journey continues, decline becomes visually obvious
and flight from fear begins as annexation attempts to surround disease. The
disease expands and the city fights to protect annexation corridors and avoid
encirclement by surrounding suburbs. This occurs time and again across the
nation because a city does not recognize that it is a farm and must understand
the yield from each of its acres over time. It becomes more severe when a city
is surrounded by suburbs and must meet the increasing expense of aging with
inadequate development capacity and activity allocation. At this point
redevelopment and increasing taxation become unwelcome visitors met with skepticism,
cynicism, assumption, opinion,
prejudice, disrespect, and obdurate behavior resistant to change. A
comprehensive plan cannot meet these objections with credible solutions until
it can explain and correlate land use allocation, shelter capacity, occupant
activity, and economic productivity. A new mathematical language and science of
city design is required to credibly defend comprehensive plan recommendations.
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