This is first installment of my commentary on the 2011 Richardson City Council elections.

The first thing I want to do is present a discussion of where I am coming from before I talk about candidates and the election. All of my opinions spring from my view of where Richardson has been, where it is, and where it can go. It does not come from a specific political ideology, or a group, or some narrow issue. 

I have no doubt anonymous cynics on blogs will suggest some sort of allegiance riddled with insults in order to poison opinion before it gets a hearing. My roots are far deeper than that, and now my wife and I are raising a third generation here. Those roots are far too deep to simply be subverted by some kind of short term political gain. This is my home. My life is here and Richardson is in my DNA. That is my motivation and it is that from which my marching orders emerge. Any claim otherwise is someone selling ocean front property in Kansas. We will address negative attacks in a later commentary.

Richardson, The Post War Suburb
Richardson is a post war, sunbelt suburb. Its bones are entirely built around that blueprint. Richardson was a classic placeless suburb with an emphasis on was. Now it isa place set apart from other places including other suburban places with its own strengths and weaknesses. Since its post war boom Richardson has grown to embody its own traditions, and its own sense of place. Those qualitative ideas are what makes Richardson what it is. It is those ideas that are at stake in this election because it is those ideas that can revive its old areas and make Richardson better than it ever was.

American suburbs grew from central cities after World War II. The two explanations which are traditionally used to explain this are an explosion of highway building including the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 and the expansion of easy home loans especially for veterans. Richardson has been no exception. Central Expressway and boom neighborhoods like Heights are perfect expressions of this. 

That said Richardson with a little bit of accident and a little bit of foresight got two boons which left an inedible stamp which we live with today: Collins Radio and Texas Instruments. Many sunbelt suburbs grew up for other reasons. Some were spurred by universities and some for odd reasons like suburban Houston areas like Clear Lake coming out of the space program. Some because they were nice natural areas that were not in the central cities with little going for them other than that. Richardson was spurred on by these two industries.

Unlike many suburbs (which would later be called first tier suburbs) Richardson did not grow because its urban population fled to the suburbs. Its population grew by mobility within the United States so Richardson then began to get filled with people from all over. In fact author Anne Rice, who graduated from Richardson High School after moving from New Orleans recounts this in videos she made while recently revisiting Richardson. My folks came from Wisconsin. The kid across the alley from Michigan and so the story goes. 

So with that backdrop something else happened. Richardson embraced its role and embraced the future. It began to sell itself and identify itself with a kind of post war Modernism. That is, Richardson began to sell itself and identify itself with a kind of futurity with a passion and then it combined it with a very traditional Americana. We had/have our white bread churches but the future was great and we were going to it with gusto. Its motto became "A Growing City with a Planned Future." It called itself "The electronic city" and "A city of science" in promotional literature. The RISD adopted a logo with the classic atomic orbital symbol with two children standing on a book superimposed on top. The City had a crest with a church, City Hall (or school depending on who you talk to), a ranch style home, and a circuit diagram. These symbols went on letterhead from the City and on symbols of authority as the Police Department had them on uniforms and cars.

So I and many others grew up in the presence of that spirit and that spirit resonates today in Richardson as an economic center. 

Richardson compared with other American Suburbs
In the lives of cities all of that was rather fortunate for Richardson in dollars and cents. Why? Because other cities with Richardson's age have not fared so well. Much of that owes itself to the suburbia we spoke of earlier. Many suburbs thought they could survive with job locations being in their adjoining central city and "economic development" meant local retail and later shopping malls. Richardson avoided that funk early and that is why -- to a great degree -- Richardson has fared well compared to many U.S. first tier suburbs and even local ones like Garland and Mesquite. I might recommend taking a glance at William Hudnut's instant classic Halfway to Everywhere: A Portrait of America's First Tier Suburbs. When you see the lives of other suburbs which were once as fashionable as Richardson was and that are now reduced to hulks, empty buildings, crime, poverty, and declining populations that we normally think of as being inner city problems then you get an idea of how lucky Richardson was in its early years. It should also scare the bejeezus out of you when you realize "that can happen here."

But everything isn't sweetness and light. As well all know Richardson has aged and in some places not well. That aging -- as is now proven by data from thousands of U.S. suburbs -- is apparently common. Of about 2500 suburbs in the 35 largest metro areas in the US about 27 percent lost population between 1990 and 2000. That's the same phenomenon that occurred with white flight of the 1950s. More stunningly in about half of those suburbs, the relative income of its residents declined between 1990 and 2000. Contrast that with central cities in these metropolitan areas where 70% of those cities gained in Median income in the 1990s. This puts a black mark on the stereotype of the suburb as a place where someone goes to get out of the poverty of the city.

Urban studies and architecture professors William Lucy and David Phillips have done some of the best work on the subject and David Phillips guided me in producing the following chart.

What are you looking at? This is a chart of the ratio of Median Family Income (MFI) for census areas compared to the MFI of the DFW area from 1970 to 2008. This source data is the biennial U.S. census. In other words if a measurement of MFI for an area is 20% higher than the MFI for the entire DFW area then it would be 1.2 on this chart. This way of describing things shows local conditions and trends compared to the trends of the entire area. The red line is DFW compared to itself and therefore it will always be 1.0. The blue line is Richardson as a whole but its the green and grey line that are interesting. Those lines are for the two southernmost Heights neighborhoods in Richardson. You can see that these areas start wealthy and then they decline each decade.

This, my friends, is a very typical suburban pattern for a first tier suburb and any claim to the contrary is political theatre. The interesting thing is that Richardson as a whole remains fairly stable. While it shows we have internal stresses and issues, the overall picture is good. In many first tier suburbs that blue line goes down for the entire city. Not so for us. 

So I started by saying I wanted to tell everyone where I was coming from. In a nutshell this is it and this is a nutshell because I could probably find a few thousand more words on this. We haven't gotten to aging buildings, commerce, and schools.

Richardson can build on its strengths
So what about where we go? Forward. While that may seem obvious there are those pushing ideas in Richardson that suggest our problems are caused by persons or policies and that we can return to a purely post war suburban mode. As data from thousands of suburbs attests.... ain't gonna happen. They will blame budgetary issues when there are few such issues there and the issues that do exist are shared by cities in North Texas, State, and the nation as a whole.  

This is not doomsday. We have structural strengths such as good schools and incredibly rich commercial environment that many first tier cities will drool over. What is required is a 21st century solution to a 20th century problem. What will help us succeed is adopting a forward looking attitude of the kind we had in 50s and 60s. That is, ask the question "What is the 21st century equivalent of that forward looking attitude of futurity we had and how do we implement what it tells us?"

So when I talk to you about my thoughts about the council race in 2011, you now know my mindset.

Thank you for reading and I will be back in a few days.

I hope you will keep reading these updates and I hope you will pass them to friends, colleagues, church associates, neighbors and anyone else who might be interested. As always you can subscribe to this list by writing to richardson2011@digitalchicken.net.


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