Leaving the picket fence behind

Original Reporting | By Kevin C. Brown |

Thompson also emphasized the way that social media and an online presence more broadly could facilitate such a campaign by letting people who are already living in the city “become advocates for it and do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of talking about [the benefits of] it.” She suggested using blogs where citizens can articulate what they love about city life, because “It is going to be much stronger coming from people who believe in it than from people who are selling it.”

Along similar lines, Goldstein suggested that a city or developer could put some marketing dollars not into traditional media like newspapers and television but into a smartphone app that could let families find out what is going on in the target neighborhood, thereby letting community events serve as advertisements for the place.

 

Eliminating governmental barriers

“The big challenge now is supply,” argued John Norquist, the president and chief executive officer of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an urban advocacy organization, and the former mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “because there are so many constraints on building urban, walkable communities.”

What about the housing units themselves?

Though Matt Herrmann of BBDO San Francisco emphasized that focusing on the environment rather than the types of dwellings is a stronger strategy than focusing on housing itself because “selling a concept of the city” allows you to “deliver a clear message,” Joseph Molinaro of the National Association of Realtors also suggested that “a developer needs to look at the actual product mix they are building.”

In particular, Molinaro pointed to the importance of privacy to consumers and “so if you are building higher density I think one thing you have to think about a lot, is how you build units where people feel like they do have privacy and they are not hearing everything their neighbors say.” Additionally, urban developments are well placed, he suggested, to take advantage of the interest in green building, providing an advantage over “existing house[s]…out there on the market” in large quantity.

Norquist suggested that both federal transportation policy and home financing discriminate against creating mixed-use and walkable spaces in cities. Transportation departments at the state and federal level, for example, “only want to pay for big roads that concentrate traffic on just a few giant roads, and the net effect of it has been to expunge Main Street” — the places where people can walk, bike, or take transit — “from the American landscape.”

Likewise, loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and loans made by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac each place caps on the percentage of commercial floor space that can be a combined with a residence and on the percentage of a residential buildings income that can be derived from commercial rentals. “The government shouldn’t be forcing everyone to look at urban mixed use as automatically more risky than any other type of development when the market right now says it wants it,” Norquist said.

These policies, Norquist said, “are obstacles to cities functioning well, in ways that really create a high quality of life.” If they were altered, “the consumer preference for more urban living would manifest itself.”

When Remapping Debate asked Christopher Leinberger what could be done by local governments to encourage urban-like places, he replied: “Make it legal.” In his experience as a developer, he has found that in “most jurisdictions in this country it is illegal to build walkable urban places.” Separate use zoning and limits on density make it difficult to build the kinds of places that Leinberger likes and sees as necessary in order for an “urbanization of the suburbs.”  Changing density limits and allowing mixed use development could appeal to consumers who “want to live in a walkable urban place, but they want to have their kids go to a suburban school.”

Residents of Montgomery County, Maryland and Fairfax County, Virginia — each a suburb of Washington, D.C. — have recently succeeded in getting their respective county councils to pass codes allowing for higher density construction and mixed-use development in areas previously known for their sprawl. Leinberger attributes these changes to an “upward spiral” resulting from suburbanites visiting nearby walkable urban neighborhoods in their region and asking themselves, “why can’t my neighborhood be like this?”

Rebranding at work

When Matt Herrmann worked at the advertising firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), he participated in the rebranding of Johnnie Walker scotch whiskey. During the 1990s, Johnnie Walker, along with other “brown spirits,” was being consumed “less and less and less, and it was seem as being something for an older generation.” Previous Johnnie Walker advertising campaigns had used “the kind of trappings of success that were very staid and traditional — leather wingback chairs in libraries and that sort of thing.”

BBH conducted research “among younger consumers and found that for them…the material trappings of having made it when you are in your fifties and sixties weren’t as relevant.” BBH began to focus Johnnie Walker ads on what Herrmann described as the “the minor successes and the everyday triumphs that happen along the way to becoming a successful man.”

The new campaign, which launched in 1999, was called “Johnnie Walker, Keep Walking,” Herrmann explained, and it “used the ‘striding man’ as an icon and as an image of forward movement and progression.”

As reported in 2008 in The Guardian, the campaign won three Institute of Practitioners in Advertising Effectiveness Awards, having resulted in a 48 percent growth in total sales over the previous eight years.

 

Send a letter to the editor