12/08/2022
No person, no business, no institution, no city, no nothing ever improved by diminishing standards. This is simply not the way things work. We never think to ask less of someone and expect them to produce better results. This is not the way people operate, and always remember, that a business, a hospital, a university, and a city, function the same as people. Any entity that is managed by people will tend to behave the same as people.
A university doesn’t lower its GPA requirements in hopes of attracting better students. A ball team doesn’t expect to win more games by asking less of its players. A hospital doesn’t plan to improve by lowering qualifications for incoming employees. It is only with our cities that we somehow think we can improve them by asking less of everyone involved.
Cities have been under a lot of pressure to lower standards, but it is not something that had to happen, and those municipalities, that have avoided doing so have reaped the rewards. I look at the neighborhoods and districts in my region and across the country that have fared best in recent years, and they are the ones that have changed the least. While some may have succumbed to the pressure to lower their standards, they have raised them again. Some of those cities never relented.
There is a lot of magical thinking when it comes to how we manage our places. We tend to throw out all the lessons we know about how things operate and apply new mysterious ideas to our cities as if they operate outside the rules of economics and logic. And despite all the proof that our towns operate in the same fashion and are subject to the same rules and tendencies as the rest of the world, we have a very difficult time learning those lessons. All the proof to the contrary doesn’t seem to shake certain myths we perpetuate on Main Street.
