Curated Book on Urban Design

A close friend lent me the book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery after a lengthy policy conversation. He told me I needed to read it; he was right. You should read it, too!

Note that Happy City is not written by social scientists so the objective of the book is not to prove or disprove a hypothesis. I loved and recommend Happy City because it is an exercise in out-of-the-box thinking. It is a catalyst for innovative problem-solving. It provides case studies of cities across the world, told as stories, and patched together for a wholistic and human-centered approach to the complex challenges of urban areas. Happy City highlights the successes of Vancouver, Canada, Bogota, Colombia, Siena, Italy, and Paris, France, and it uses history and exceptional scholarship to make arguments about what makes a city great and how to improve the quality of life for all city residents.

“And what are our needs for happiness?... We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality." (pg. 6)

Montgomery introduces concepts like challenged thriving (pg. 37), the relationship between happiness, economists, and urban design, unintended negative consequences of urban sprawl (beyond the damage to the environment!), and on page 111 Montgomery references a relevant psychological study at the University of Rochester. 

We spend so much time reading about the challenges of the City of Rochester and perhaps you find yourselves talking about those challenges in your networks. Consider reading Happy City to catalyze more creative thought about what urban transformation could look like.

Consider Happy City for your brain food - it's high quality nutrition for healthy thought! 

Source: Montgomery, C. (2013). Happy city: Transforming our lives through urban design. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Interview with Robert Putnam

A friend of ACT Rochester passed along this interview with Robert Putnam and the associated article from The New York Times. (Thanks, Barb!) The interview talks about Putnam’s famed book Bowling Alone, rampant loneliness, and the social circumstances of our society. Dr. Putnam is a political scientist and social capital expert.  

Dr. Putnam is no stranger to our community, as he worked with RACF on a social capital survey in the 1990s. He thinks, talks, and writes a lot about “joining” and its opposite, social isolation. This topic is particularly relevant post-COVID and has many correlations to upward mobility. 

Consider this interview and Robert Putnam’s work as our political landscape lights up preparing for November elections.

Curated Post: Next City Covers Rochester as featured case about banking efforts

On June 3rd, 2024, nonprofit resource Next City posted a story titled “Why a Rochester Credit Union Wants the Local Government to Create Its Own Bank” as a case study for lenders meeting residents’ and small business owners’ needs. The Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union is featured as part of a push to create a Bank of Rochester, a “public bank” intended to hold only government deposits and partner with local private lenders. 

The article outlines how the idea of a public bank would work and makes the argument for the potential of such a program. This idea is also a spark for thinking about alternative lending, alternative banking options. 

As we learned in Dr. Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America, the banking industry is a particularly institutionalized impediment for upward mobility. Consider this alternative, or come up with your own ideas, as you engage in conversations about banking equity, and the potential of this community to encourage home ownership, small business development, and our general upward mobility efforts. 

Testing a Guaranteed Basic Income

In Rochester, one in four people live in poverty. Imagine how our community might change if everyone had enough money to cover living expenses, as well as enough to manage urgent or unexpected ones.

That’s part of what the City of Rochester is exploring in its 12-month Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot Program, which began in 2023. The idea is to see how a guaranteed payment of $500 per month will help residents who live at or below 185% of the federal poverty level. Payments are unconditional — participants do not have work requirements or restrictions on how to spend money. 

Other cities across the country are exploring similar programs to find ways to address poverty.

Pilot programs like these are valuable because they allow us to test novel approaches on a small scale in the real world. The key is that these projects last only for a prescribed period of time. Fears of failure and loss of funding can bring the temptation to let them go on indefinitely without analysis, but it is essential to stop and evaluate the data.

Rochester’s Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot made its first payments in October 2023. As the program unfolds over the coming months, city officials and their community partners will be examining its impacts. We will all have to stay tuned!

Who gets in to college, and why does it matter?

On July 26, 2023, Economists Raj Chetty of Harvard University and John Friedman of Brown University published a paper examining the impact of college admissions on upward mobility. They used admissions data, income tax records, and SAT/ACT test scores to study whether a change in admissions policies at the most prestigious colleges could increase socioeconomic diversity of US leaders.

Their work finds that current admissions policies perpetuate privilege, emphasizing legacy status, extracurricular activities, and athletics — all of which are biased toward affluence. The takeaway is that a change in policy toward a focus on other factors could improve socioeconomic diversity in accepted students and therefore improve upward mobility.

For a deeper dive, read the paper and check out this Brookings Insitute webinar.

Living Wage Calculator

A living wage is defined as the income that a full-time worker requires to cover or support the costs of their family’s basic needs where they live. It often exceeds the minimum wage, which is the lowest pay rate allowed by law, and the poverty wage, which is the minimum amount of pay that would put a worker below the poverty line.

The Living Wage Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a living wage calculator to factor in the cost of basic needs in different localities. The calculator features geographically-specific costs for food, childcare, health care, housing, transportation, other basic needs – like clothing, personal care items, and broadband, among others – and taxes at the county, metro, and state levels for 12 different family types. 

What is the living wage where you live?