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`When we look at a town or a city, do we consider what we want or what we covet? The Lancaster Metro is at a crossroads for planning, and the County Planning Commission has been gracious in providing Envision workshops, regular meetings, and the like. They’ve been renewing old town facades and giving workshops. There’s one quid pro quo: if many of the workshops are whole-day and aimed at professionals and municipality managers already in these fields, how can we ensure that planning will be at the same level or exceed it for the future?
My main question is, how do interested students actually get into the field, and get on projects that put food on their tables and pay more than their rent (which makes this situation an ugly paradox)? Some say, “Go to Temple or Pitt and get a Master of Planning degree.”
Others say, you can get an entry-level position with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission with any degree, but that’s if you can afford any daily commute to Philadelphia. Others claim it is necessary to get several years experience after an MP and take the AICP exam. Regardless, of what has been said, it has become clear to me that Millersville University or Franklin and Marshall should offer a clearer window into this field, otherwise we will have a “brain drain” in this area.
It has been nearly 10 years since Professor Dirk Eitzen of Franklin and Marshall got long-time activist Tom Hylton to create “Save Our Land, Save Our Towns” for PBS. One of the themes therein was that instead of trying to travel around the world to see a good neighborhood, we should try to build those types of neighborhoods here, and that the types of development and forms can be adapted to the zoning. If we want better planning here in Lancaster, and not for just Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, we need to have a real program here, not segregated citizens’ and professionals’ workshops.
One example of how inaccessible the field is to visionaries is evident in the massive collection at the County Planning Commission’s library, which is open to the public. There are hundreds of professors’ worth of information in those stacks, rendering “Save Our Land, Save Our Towns” a mere introduction to the field of planning, rendering our geography degree insufficient to put a foot in the door or create more planning jobs in the Commission, and making economically-blocked apathy the standard for our students, as they gather debt to escape working poverty.