Community engagement and “neighborhood defenders” were a hot topic at the YIMBYtown conference that I participated in last week.
One example of a city that’s improved their public involvement was Cambridge, which does… a biennial, statistically valid resident survey. Council members said that the survey gives them something to point to when they make unpopular decisions, like a recent upzoning specifically for affordable housing.
Surveys don’t take as much money as you think, and certainly a lot of money gets spent on existing engagement. It would be better for the public to set priorities, not policies – to ask what government should be doing, not how to do it.
When we hire plumbers or doctors, we tell them what’s wrong, and they know the “how.” Planners also are trained in know-how, but somehow our government never trusts them and instead always asks an untrained public to second-guess them.