All Roads Lead To The Sidewalk
Three takeaways for the lazy. Buy the book.
The sidewalk is the smallest unit of government we never talk about, and that’s exactly the point.
Michael’s whole career circles around understudied legal spaces, and the sidewalk might be the most understudied one of all. It’s this small thing with an absolutely outsized impact on our lives, and once you start looking at it, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere. That’s basically how this book happened: a law review article wasn’t enough room to fit everything he found once he actually went out and traveled to look at how different states and municipalities handle the sidewalk.
Sidewalks don’t fail in isolation; they fail because of everything around them.
The Houston chapter is the one that really got me. Houston has decent, patchwork sidewalks, no real Euclidean zoning code, and almost nobody walks on them. Why? Zoning, parking minimums, and decades of underfunding and regulatory fights over the right of way matter just as much as the concrete itself. Whether you’ve got too much regulation or basically none, you can still end up with a place that isn’t walkable. It’s a bell curve, there’s a sweet spot, and most places aren’t anywhere near it.
There’s another crazy Houston land use fact that shouldn’t surprise you or me, hidden in the book (and in the interview). You’ll be gobsmacked.
Right now, we {often] hand sidewalk responsibility to private property owners, and that’s a historical accident, not a real policy choice.
We don’t ask people to plow their stretch of the car-oriented street, but we do ask them to shovel and fix their stretch of sidewalk. That’s one reason why wealthier neighborhoods have decent sidewalks nobody uses, and undernourished neighborhoods have a patchwork of bad sidewalks everyone depends on.
A Department of Sidewalks idea isn’t about more bureaucracy; it’s about consolidating the mess of agencies that already touch the sidewalk into one accountable one. All roads lead to the sidewalk; whatever your built-environment policy obsession is, there’s a sidewalk angle to it.
