Safer Streets Now!

How America can make the long term short term…

Patience is a virtue, but not for most Americans! We want problems to be solved now. Right? How many long term problems can you think of that are facing America and the entire world? Climate Change? The National Debt? That street full of pot holes in front of your house? Let’s be real, you or someone in your neighborhood has complained about it over and over again, maybe a few months later the city sends out an inspector and maybe, just maybe, they’ll vote to fix the street but it will probably take a few years to get done. When, in reality, all you had to do was organize a few folks of the neighborhood, buy some cement supplies at Home Depot and fix the project yourselves. But who has the time or willpower to do all that? Well that’s what Tony Garcia from Street Plans Miami does for the community. 

Street Plans Miami is an organization founded in 2009 in Miami, dedicated to urban planning, design, architecture, and transportation planning. They focus on using a strategy called tactical urbanism, using short term low cost materials to make a long term change. Tony expresses frustration with how cities often spend insane amounts of money conducting urban studies for capital improvement projects that never really go anywhere and nothing gets done to improve the community. Tactical urbanism helps bypass the politics and unlocks the potential of what people need. The projects are easily applied but temporary so that they can be easily reversed if the political powers rule otherwise. Tony uses the example of a cross walk being built by your street, and how these projects are usable by the members of your community. If the city observes positive change in the standard of living among the people of the community, they can decide to keep the project at no cost to them, if they want to change it for some reason the project can be easily reversed, so the cross walk can be taken out or just open the pot holes back up, although why anyone would want that is beyond us! 

During COVID, municipalities realized they needed to use tactical urbanism to open up safer streets because more people were at home, not at work. There were more people in parks and public spaces and those places needed to accommodate that increase in public use. Street Plans Miami seeks to implement temporary solutions so that the city itself can decide to handle the long-term solution. It sounds like these guys are on the same page with what we at Endow America believe in. We also want to solve long-term problems through Safe Streets Great Streets or Safe Schools Great Schools that use the power of what we call Social Secharity. We need real solutions to real problems that won’t take decades to get done, but can be handled on the local level without depending so much on the government. To learn more visit www.socialsecharity.org or like us on Facebook and watch our show Route 664 @SocialSecharity.