west north

(The usual winter travel schedule means fewer updates. Flickr is probably the best way to follow me around; see the photostream at right.)

A follow-on. “Even if you don’t move, the city will move around you.” — Mary Schmich on Chicago Public Radio, 7 January 2008

1987. My mom looks up from under a wide straw hat to scan the horizon for her two sons, romping with buckets amidst rows of strawberries planted atop sandy little ridges. I grabbed fat berries, sure, but mostly focused on plucking out the vigorous, blossoming runners that had taken root in the aisles — the better for propagation at home. (To this day, the occasional strawberry pops up as a weed in the back lawn.) Scrubby pine trees frame the farm on all sides, except for an old farmhouse with a gravel apron, now serving as gas station and general store.

The year I was born, the census counted 21,763 people in Cary, the sleepy town four miles down the road from this strawberry patch. The strawberries themselves were a sign of creeping urbanization. Years ago, this land was so prized for tobacco that J.B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company built a short-line railroad down this way from their Durham factories. However, the land was now too valuable for commodity crops, so the Sears family went with strawberries instead — aiming to profit off the burgeoning numbers of young families swelling the school ranks in town.

While I was in middle school, the adjacent forests began melting away to make way for development: hundreds of culs-de-sac lined with thousands of houses with brick fronts and gas grills behind, sand traps lining 7,011 yards of golf links, brown stormwater detention ponds tinted an inviting blue on maps displayed on model-home walls; long lines of brake lights arrayed at stoplights, obstructing a daily stampede of network operations controllers, plant geneticists, and copy-machine repairers to and fro their respective cubicles.

All through the Bush I economic downturn, Wake County chugged along with unemployment below 3% — a siren song calling across the land. The moving trucks kept pulling up to driveways, with the cinder-block walls of supermarkets, banks, and schools following close behind. Magazines proclaimed its charms in cover stories; later, eager refugees sought out answers to their thousands of questions on online forums.

Today, the country crossroads that I vaguely remember sounds more fiction than distant memory. The town of 20,000 now finds itself in the middle of a vast metropolis with nearly two million residents. A clock tower, fountains splaying at its base, announces the completion of the second of a planned quartet of shopping “villages” arrayed around the corner of High House Road and Davis Drive. Stone Creek Village takes the elements of a small strip mall and explodes them into an array of one- and two-story buildings surrounding a traffic circle, a broad boulevard, and other finely detailed if overly geometric public spaces. The entire ensemble squeezes into narrow downslope between the street above and a retention basin below — hence, perhaps, the ostentatious clock tower.

Across the way, the same architect placed blue gables atop Cornerstone — the first, and least fancifully embellished with urban ambitions, strip mall here — recalling nothing so much as the Magic Kingdom as they peek out from over the now-mature trees out front.

At the southeast corner and directly on the strawberry farm’s site, SearStone takes a more integrated approach (they even splash “New Urbanism” across their web site) to a senior development — with a few shops, a small hotel, and a continuing care facility among the walking-distance amenities promised to residents.

The newest, perhaps to begin construction soon, even provoked some dramatic political intrigue in what I had remembered as a town so sleepy and well-governed that the cops did away-on-vacation courtesy checks and pulled people over if their brake lights didn’t work. Charlotte-based Crosland, whose success with the Birkdale Village lifestyle center in Huntersville led CEO Todd Mansfield (recently appointed chairman of ULI’s board) led it to embrace mixed-use development, has plans for a similar development, although lighter on retail, at the northeast corner of the intersection. It went through months of acrimonious hearings as neighbors objected to its size. Ultimately, the threat of political backlash predicted at the final hearing came true: the ultimately approved development, even though it largely conformed with the existing comprehensive plan, became a contentious issue in the town council election and helped to contribute to swing the town’s political pendulum back towards slow growth.

It all sounds, and sometimes feels, completely random — countless other farms just outside countless other American towns look almost the same as they did 20 years ago. These farmers hit the lottery; but actually, they didn’t: the “instant city” was the work of many thousands of hands over several decades. How did this one intersection get to be the way it is? Why do cities arise in the places they do? Why do some regions prosper while others falter; why Cary, N.C. and not Napoleon, Ohio? And if smart people (of which the Triangle has no shortage) could design an instant city to house one million residents, to be built over the span of 20 years, would it look anything like what the Triangle looks like today?

Chris Leinberger’s new Footloose and Fancy Free “Field Survey of Walkable Urban Places” study isn’t exactly of the highest scientific caliber: I won’t begin listing his omissions, since that’d be tiring; and I personally prize a “streetcar urbanism” of continuously enjoyable expanses of urban fabric rather than periodic episodes of frenzied activity focused around rapid-transit nodes. However, it does try to put some background behind one curious observation about LA: “there are 10 million people who have, between them, maybe five places to go for a Sunday walk.” Therefore, those five places (now up to 15, by Leinberger’s rather more lenient definition) are absolutely thronged with crowds (1.13 million Southern Californians apiece, by his calculation).

His most interesting conclusion:

If the bottom 10 metropolitan areas developed as many walkable urban places on a per capita basis as the top 10 have done to date, there would be approximately 40 additional walkable urban places developed in these metro areas, probably representing tens of billions of dollars of real estate development.

Some worry that such developments appeal only to a small slice of the population — and that the market for retail of this variety is especially thin — and therefore that cannibalization will inevitably occur when new developments attempt to create walkable places. However, the demand is apparently quite a bit deeper than skeptics suspect; if demand warrants at least one walkable place per 500,000 residents (and the D.C. area apparently supports twice that level), then, say, the Twin Cities could support six or seven such places — far above the three in existence today.

Today’s award for best acronym goes to SWIM: Storm Water Infrastructure Matters, a group advocating natural approaches to water management in New York. Stormwater on its own is a little too esoteric, but swimming — most people can get behind that.

It comes to mind because this month’s Landscape Architecture magazine has three great articles on stormwater, about integrating natural drainage into the layered history of Minneapolis’ Grand Rounds necklace; restoration trial and error along a mostly buried, slag-lined stream in Pittsburgh’s East End, and a call by longtime smart growth advocate Lisa Nisenson for municipalities and regions to think globally, not site-specifically, about stormwater. The new stormwater regs popping up, while well intentioned, have already started adding yet another layer of regulatory discrimination against infill projects — which must be stopped before they proliferate much further.

Locally, I’m pretty confident in the efforts of MWRD board member Debra Shore’s ability to work with CNT to bring this research into Cook County’s future regulations — and maybe eventually transition to the bold “eco-boulevards” concept that would finally heal Chicago’s breach in the Great Lakes watershed.

Alby Gallun from Crain’s reports on a potential “creative industries” focus for the heroic loft buildings of the Cermak Bridge landmark district:

Yet the property’s prospects are brightening as city officials consider a proposal that could fill Mr. Mumford’s buildings with a new class of tenants: graphic design firms, fashion designers, dance companies and other artsy businesses. The plan would turn the gritty neighborhood into a “creative industries district,” potentially employing as many as 1,600 people.

They also provide the full PDF report, from ULI’s panel.

Interesting follow-on by David Gonzalez in this an NYT piece:

Such is the New York factory in the 21st century. The smokestacks are gone, taking jobs (and pollution, sometimes) to places where hands are cheap. But according to advocates for industrial development in the city, newer specialty companies like Mr. Horgan’s occupy a growing part of the city’s industrial landscape, along with makers of food products, especially for the burgeoning ethnic market. Many other firms that make construction materials, furniture or lighting have also grown in response to increased demand for environmentally friendly buildings.

“The most important thing we found was the need for more and smaller industrial spaces,” said Adam Friedman, executive director of the New York Industrial Retention Network, which assists manufacturers with space and advice. “Big guys like Farberware and Swingline left the city. What survived here are the niche manufacturers where proximity to their market makes a big difference…”

“We’re thinking of a trust for industrial space,” [Ron Shiffman, a veteran planner and chairman of the Industrial Retention Network] said. “The same way we realized we have to save small farms, I believe we are going to need to save places for manufacturing in urban areas.”

…which reminds me of an idea that I had, to buy development easements from artist-studio buildings so that they can remain artist studios in private hands, not to be resold for other purposes and without the public necessarily buying the building or land. (A land trust could work the same way, but sounds more expensive.) I’m not sure exactly how this works — perhaps just through a standing purchase option? — but it’s an interesting thought.

Recently, at CNU XV, 2030 °Challenge founder (and longtime solar advocate) Ed Mazria outlined the beginnings of a 2030 °Challenge for city planning — what we’re tentatively calling the 2030 Community Challenge. Elsewhere, I’ve brainstormed a few ideas on how planners can help to save the world from global warming. Mazria has been focusing on how architects can save energy for decades, so it’s taken a bit of education to get him to agree that planning can also have a huge impact on global warming. Here’s what Mazria had to say at CNU XV:

• When planning a new or in an existing neighborhood, town, city, or region, planners should seek an immediate 50% reduction in fossil fuel consumption (greenhouse gas emitting energy), vehicle miles traveled (auto and freight), water consumption, materials (embodied energy), and “anything else you can think of that you deal with.”
• Since planners are “larger scale folks,” they can have a broader impact than architects.
• The targets should slide up: by 2010, a 60% reduction, etc., up to 100% (carbon neutral communities) by 2030.
• How to get there? The first step is to implement a variety of design solutions [many of which are covered in LEED-ND]: density, infill, land reuse, location efficiency; transit- and pedestrian-oriented development and mixed-use; stormwater catchment and wastewater reuse; microclimate management; efficient infrastructure; and 2030 Architecture.
• The second step is through community scale energy initiatives, particularly microgeneration.
• The third step (a last resort) would be to purchase “green tags” or carbon credits. This, of course, is no substitute for real action.
• Planners must also begin to think about many other environmental issues which architects haven’t had to consider, including wildlands conservation, wildlife migration corridors, and how to adapt to the major catastrophes (floods, hurricanes) that await us.
• Most importantly, we have 5-10 years to start cutting emissions — or else we as a species probably won’t make it.

A follow-on speech by Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, added to the call for urgent action. Fully one-half of the built environment is infrastructure — that is, publicly built — and thus out of the reach of average architects, but well within the purview of planners. Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, in their influential Stabilization Wedges scheme [outlined here], have listed “doubling fuel efficiency from 30 to 60 MPG,” “decreasing VMT by half,” and “using best efficiency practices in all building” as three of their fifteen billion-ton wedges. (Seven of the fifteen need to be implemented to stabilize CO2 concentrations; another is “install 700X current solar capacity.”)

Although trends are moving in the wrong way — bigger homes house smaller households, VMT growth is still positive, although it has dropped off lately — groups like CNT have pioneered ways of combatting these trends. High-speed rail has the capability to displace many air trips. Research into last-mile connections (those highly dispersed trips between nodes and homes) has revealed a wide appetite for choices like car sharing — whose users “use the city, not just the cars” — and streetcars. Last-mile freight movement remains a challenge, but CNT is working with inner-ring suburbs around Chicago to capitalize on underused rail freight facilities. These tools and techniques could easily double the magnitude of Mazria’s 2030 °Challenge.

Beyond Austin (which we’ll undoubtedly cover in a future post), one city that has initiated a citywide dialogue about how New Urbanism is progressive, green, and responds to the environmental challenges of our day — not just global warming, but One Planet Living — is Vancouver, fittingly the birthplace of the ecological footprint concept. There, Mayor Sam Sullivan has moved his EcoDensity campaign into a new gear by hiring Brent Toderian as the new planning director, following on Larry Beasley. Bob Ransford writing in the Vancouver Sun:

The focus of new urbanists is changing, just as concern for global warming and peak oil is suddenly engulfing public opinion in all circles. New urbanist planners, like Toderian, are leading the way, reminding us that livability may be an important pursuit, but that livability means little if the planet no longer exists as a habitable environment for humans and all other creatures. Toderian has already come out and told developers, politicians and citizen advisors — and anyone else who wants to listen to his message — that livability will no longer be the first indicator used to measure the quality of development in Vancouver. He is leading the way in replacing that benchmark with what he believes is a more urgent measure of our commitment to sustainability. Ecological sustainability will now be the measure of expected performance when judging new proposed developments in Vancouver… neighbourhoods are going to change and change will be measured not by how much or how little they disrupt current lifestyle in a neighbourhood. Instead, proposed change will be measured by how much it influences future lifestyle decisions that have the potential to impact positively or negatively our natural environment and its ecosystems.

Bold moves and equally bold words are needed to jolt North Americans into the reality of our climate challenge. Canadian cities have set up informational sites, like One Day Vancouver and Zero Footprint Toronto, but will have to follow up these calls for citizen action with equal civic action. (Forthcoming posts will discuss cities’ efforts to date — but let’s just say that the US Conference of Mayors signed on to the 2030 °Challenge without implementing many action steps.)

One important final point to make about the wedges: they clearly demonstrate that humanity will need to use every possible approach to this leviathan challenge. Our lives will have to change; they will change regardless. No silver bullets, no magical breakthroughs, no panaceas will save us from ourselves; it’s far too late for those. We will not be able to choose between two different ways to cut emissions — that means no “either/or” arguments pitting factions against one another — because we will need to do “both/and” if we are to survive.

Transit: it’s just a way to get there. Many transportation projects become infrastructure driven, building rail for its own sake. In Charlotte, though, the leaders recognize that transit is only half the equation. What’s really needed is a different way of living, one that transit is an integral part of — and viewing transit as an isolated solution won’t get you there.

Debra Campbell, planning director for the city of Charlotte, interviewed by Zach Patton in Governing magazine:

Transit is a means; it’s not the end. The end is high-quality development and a way for us to promote better development to make sure we’re better stewards of our community and the environment.

It’s also about giving lifestyle choices. Charlotte had gotten to the point where there was really only one lifestyle: suburban half-acre lots. We will never ever do away with our suburban cul-de-sac communities. They’ll always be a choice for our residents…

We never, ever, ever said transit was going to be a panacea. It’s just about providing a choice. A big part of that was bringing in the transit folks, the engineers, the planners and the developers to talk to the public, so it wasn’t just seen as a transit project.

That monoculture of suburban half-acre lots will ultimately drive many more people away from Sunbelt cities — I’m certainly not the only one.

Pretty ambitious, too.

The Urban Society of Kansas City promotes excellence in several crucial areas for making a great city: urban design, architecture, effecient government and grassroots economic development…

1. Promote a pedestrian environment throughout Kansas City’s urban core.
2. Achieve within twenty years ubiquitous, convenient and continuously-running public transportation and break the city’s dependence on the automobile.
3. Increase urban core density, especially through a dramatic increase in housing units serving all income categories. Within twenty years, see all vacant lots in the urban core filled in.
4. Through modification of laws and tax policy, create an environment where grassroots efforts of all types flourish.
5. Raise architectural standards and encourage adherence to appropriate urban design principles.

Disappointment

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Catesby Leigh, “California Dreaming” in Princeton Alumni Weekly, 15 Sep 2004:

Another disappointment for Moule, Polyzoides, and other New Urbanists is the Playa Vista project in Los Angeles’ Westside section. In 1989, the couple was invited to join the project by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, whom Polyzoides had encountered as a teaching assistant at Princeton’s architecture school. Moule and Polyzoides wound up leading a team of high-profile architectural firms in the design of a new community on this 1,087-acre site fronting on the Pacific Ocean. Their models were cities like Beverly Hills and Pasadena.
Playa Vista was intended to relieve the acute housing shortage in Westside, known for its concentration of high-end, high-tech industries and services. Though the design produced by the architects assumed restoration and preservation of 300 acres of wetlands on the previously industrial site, environmentalists resisted any development at all, a contributing factor in the developer’s loss of the property. The project has gone forward under new management, and the amount of land set aside for conservation has been doubled. But while Playa Vista’s mixed-use character has been retained, Moule and Polyzoides express bitter disappointment with the project’s quality. “It’s unrecognizable to me,” Polyzoides says sadly of the portion constructed to date. “It’s absolutely unlike anything we ever imagined.” Unfortunately, New Urbanist knockoffs are not an uncommon phenomenon.

One of the rare project with participation from four CNU founders, unrecognizably dumbed down by a new developer.

A friend sent along these recent Gallup Poll results, from a poll taken Mar. 23-25:

Steps the Government Can Take to Reduce Global Warming (by party identification):
|Dem. | Ind. | Rep. | (percentage saying “should be doing”)|
|72 | 64 | 58 | Starting major research effort to develop new energy sources|
|72 | 60 | 47 | Requiring government office buildings to use renewable energy sources|
|59 | 43 | 36 | Requiring surcharge on utility bills when energy use limits exceeded |
|59 | 44 | 26 | Banning vehicles that do not average at least 30 miles per gallon |
|47 | 35 | 26 | Setting land-use policies to discourage suburban sprawl |
|46 | 40 | 28 | Imposing tough restrictions on U.S. industries and utilities |

While Americans, especially Democrats and Independents, were quite enthusiastic about taking individual steps to combat global warming (over 75%, and over 80% of Dems and Inds, said they should be “spending thousands of dollars to make [my] home energy efficient” and “riding mass transit whenever possible”), they’re much cooler towards government (”We the People”) “making these choices for them.” Not even a majority of Democrats want to discourage sprawl, and Independents seem quite wary of government intervention.

The Dem vs. Ind gap is especially strange given that another Gallup poll found that just under half of both Dems and Inds think that “Immediate, drastic action [is] needed to address environmental problems.” So, what kind of “immediate, drastic” action is palatable to those elusive centrist independent swing voters? Or is this impossible until civil society is restored from its current sad state? (Sorry, but we can’t wait for that.)

Perhaps we should focus on teaching people that urbanism means higher quality of life, wiser investment of scarce resources, and greater choices — while saving the world, of course.

I earlier mentioned the “positive feedback loops”:http://westnorth.com/2007/04/19/how-we-got-here/ for “people-friendly” transportation modes, like walking and transit; in short, more people = better performance. Cars, on the other hand, have a negative feedback loop: one car makes life convenient, many result in congestion which inconveniences all.

Sometime-developer, sometime-think tank-er Chris Leinberger’s forthcoming book _The Option of Urbanism_ extends this analogy to the built environment surrounding each mode:

bq. [A]s you build more drivable sub-urban development, you get less quality of life, In other words, _more is less_. The more that is built, the more the very qualities that attract the households to suburbia are degraded or destroyed, setting the stage for further development on the ever-expanding fringe. The American Dream, based upon drivable sub-urbanism, is elusive if growth is assumed to continue; the more you build, the more the promise is denied…

He goes on to point out that this treadmill implicitly devalues existing suburbia, and that this “disposable cities” approach to growth lays to waste vast sums of capital tied up in the existing built environment.

bq. In walkable urban places, when more development and activities are added into the stew, more people are attracted onto the street, thereby increasing safety with numbers. The restaurants are more crowded, encouraging more restaurants and other retail, increasing rents, making buildings more valuable, raising property taxes and on and on and on. In walkable urban places, _more is better_. Adding more density and uses makes life better and real estate values climb higher. It is an upward spiral of value creation. If a new housing development is built, this self-re-enforcing spiral creates value for the entire district.

Two completely different paradigms of urban development — but shifting from the NIMBY former to the YIMBY latter (and avoiding the equally extremist “skyscraper fan” position of BEAN: Build Everything, Anywhere, Now) seems either difficult or impossible.

John King, the Chronicle’s urban design critic, recently wrote “a two-part series”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2007/04/09/MNGPBP56AD1.DTL on New Urbanist suburban infill in/around Denver and the Bay Area — pointing out that Denver is far further along than self-congratulatory San Francisco in creating good urban fabric in suburbia. He has this response to the elite critics of NU:

A cynic would look at projects like these and dismiss the lot. They’re not Paris in the 1920s, or North Beach in 1950s, or SoHo in the 1970s. Cue up the intellectual scorn.

But the fact is that American expectations are being redefined — and the suburban landscape where most people live is following suit. This is, after all, a world where people want what they want when they want: music on their iPod, old movies or television shows on their DVD player, newspapers via the Internet.

Why shouldn’t urbanism be available on demand as well?

The thing is, there’s a difference between buildings and megabytes. One is ephemeral, the other isn’t. You can watch a grainy snippet on YouTube and move on, but a poorly designed building stays right where it is, looking more faded and false by the day.

The suburbia of the future will be more dense than today, with a more varied set of options. And that’s a good thing: There’s a limit to how far a region’s population should sprawl, or how much land should be consumed. Fighting change is absurd. Sneering at it is equally absurd.

On my long-term projects list is an effort to catalog today’s “historic, gritty” urban neighborhoods when they, too, were brand spanking new — with shiny new buildings and tiny trees, they, too, looked pretty silly.

A reader on pro-urb was concerned about the Smart Location prerequisite in LEED-ND as it might apply to rural or exurban sites. As I see it, option #5 is a way out for greenfield developments. Option #3 might encourage developers to consider “town extensions” adjacent to existing settlements — a town of 500 consisting solely of a John Deere store, Chatterbox Cafe, post office, and volunteer fire station qualifies (and if the town doesn’t have a cafe, the developer’s free to open one) — rather than buying up cheaper greenfields further from existing towns. Similarly, a developer can provide transit service to meet option #2.

Quite a lot of thought went into hammering out the prereqs and credits, and it is indeed quite intentional that LEED-ND tries to exclude isolated, leapfrog development. As I see it, greenfield developments have an easier go of everything else; why not create just one document that explicitly favors infill and reinvestment at every step? LEED-ND also tends to favor mixed communities, and I’d argue that isolated luxury resorts and retirement havens are neither environmentally nor socially sustainable.

Not a week later, a young reporter from a well-known Colorado ski town called about a major new resort proposed there. I ran what I knew about the project (assuming they do best practices with the buildings, which given their forecast budget seems possible) through the system and found that it could potentially qualify as ND Gold. It would be possible for a resort built in this location to collect most of the points under Green Construction/Tech and Innovation, half the Neighborhood Planning/Design points, and a plurality of the Smart Location/Linkage points.

The key is that this site is an infill site within a compact town of 5,000, with many amenities (including a popular bus system) already in place. Even more so than beaches (and much more so than golf), ski resorts have land constraints that funnel growth into reasonably compact corridors along the river valleys separating mountains. Indeed, Colorado DOT’s draft EIS evaluating capacity enhancements in the I-70 corridor found potential mode shares of 25-30% for fixed guideway transit.

Yet, it still raises the question of how sustainable an isolated ski resort can possibly be. A ski slope is a clear-cut, more or less, of erosion-prone slopes; snowmaking exacerbates an already precarious water situation; nearly all of the patrons will either fly across country or drive through the notoriously congested Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70, an interstate which ruined formerly wild canyons; and ski towns have perhaps the worst jobs-housing imbalances in America. (Maybe mining towns in southern Africa have it worse — but in any case it’s ironic that said resort gets points for addressing jobs-housing balance when the waiters and ski instructors get $10/hr and the condos start at $1M.)

Suffice to say, now that LEED-ND is out of the gate, people will surprise even its authors with how it’s used. Personally, I’d have thought that these developers would go for LEED-NC Multiple Buildings (much easier to achieve), but whatever.

Posted as a response to: New Urbanism is great, if you’re rich by Adam Gordon at Planetizen:

Let’s put this into perspective. The median asking price for houses now on the market in Warwick is $495,000; for new houses in Plainsboro, $458,657. The asking prices, although certainly high, are not out of line.

These developers have already spent many long, grueling years to get their “ten times better than what’s being developed around them” projects out of the ground, and our thanks to them? “Good, but not perfect enough. You should have spent an extra five years of your life trying to convince the evil NIMBYs who run suburbia to accept even higher densities and poor folks.” Do we really expect New Urbanist developers to be not just idealists, but masochists as well — even while we give their competitors, the sprawl-builders, a pass?

Meanwhile, let’s also congratulate the many New Urbanists who have made a commitment to unsubsidized affordable housing: from Del Mar Station in Pasadena [an infill TOD, I might add], which voluntarily set aside affordable units even before the city adopted inclusionary zoning, to New Town at St. Charles, which brought sub-1,000 sq. ft. (Lilliputian by Middle American standards) cottages and rental apartments to suburban St. Louis, to the valiant efforts that resulted in the Katrina Cottage (a whole house for $30K!) being the first handsome affordable housing sold “ready to wear” by a national retailer since 1940, to the city planners nationwide who are attempting to craft ways to subtly add density to existing neighborhoods without raising NIMBY ire.

Affordable housing is a dilemma that we as a nation cannot hope to solve through good intentions alone — and unaffordable housing (aka “rising property values”) is something most Americans will readily vote for. The sad reality is that it’s neither cheap nor easy to build houses in most of the country, and that “market” prices will reflect that reality.

That said, CNU will shortly publish a report on a meeting held to discuss unsubsidized ways of producing affordable housing and has formed a committee to continue to advocate for innovative solutions. Stay tuned.

PS. It seems that there are misconceptions about what New Urbanism is. May I suggest a short refresher?

Robert Sullivan got a prime op-ed page placement for this paean to PPS’s principles. The irony is perhaps that his research was funded by Saturn, the GM division, and written up for Dwell magazine. Hmm.

The simple and elegant cure for the loss of New York’s inner pedestrian is to open up car-clogged streets and public spaces. Another of Mr. Schaller’s surveys, sponsored by the citizens’ group Transportation Alternatives, showed that 89 percent of people questioned on Prince Street in SoHo got there by subway, bus, foot or bicycle, and that the majority would gladly give up parking for more pedestrian space.

With a million more New Yorkers scheduled to arrive by 2030, true sustainability requires the city — or at least its residents — to make a bold move. Some neighborhoods are already working on it. The Ninth Avenue Renaissance Project, sponsored by a coalition of residents and businesses, has held community workshops on converting Ninth Avenue from Lincoln Tunnel access ramp to boulevard.

The now chic Meatpacking District plans to bring back a space that, since the area was a Native American village, has been a natural gathering place for people without combustion engines: wider sidewalks, public seating and a piazza in the restaurant-surrounded open field of paving stones could be more like Campo dei Fiori in Rome and less a spot for crazed U-turns. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the city’s Department of Transportation has replaced parking spaces near a subway station with rows of bike racks.

But these are tiny steps. Boston’s mayor has endorsed converting Hanover Street in the city’s North End into a car-free pedestrian mall. Why don’t we do the same in part or even all of SoHo? In Los Angeles, some traffic lights are programmed to change for approaching buses (a signal in the bus alerts the light). Why can’t the same happen on 14th Street?

Virginia Tech researcher Arthur C. Nelson argues in a JAPA article that, shockingly, the end of suburbia (by the mid-21st century) will not necessarily be foretold by Peak Oil — but by the momentum of America’s current monumental (if somewhat under the radar) demographic shift towards smaller households living closer together.

To get from where Americans live today — 54% in larger-lot single family houses, 21% in townhouses and small-lot singles, and 25% in attached housing — to where they’d prefer to be living (assuming an increase in 34 million housing units by 2025), will result in net demand for 53 million attached houses, 52 million townhouses, and negative 22 million single family houses. Yes, negative. By some accounts, many cities are already oversupplied with single-family houses on larger lots.

This transformation of Americans’ cities by 2025 will cost our nation $30 trillion. The result:

[O]ver half of all development on the ground in 2025 will not have existed in 2000, even more important is that by 2025 much of society will have been spatially rearranged. An increasing number of empty-nesters, young professionals, and others will choose the city and first-tier suburban locations over outer suburban ones. According to Fishman (2005), they will drive up housing prices beyond the reach of many existing residents who may then be pushed to the suburban fringe and exurbs. Rising energy prices and declining demand for suburban homes on large lots may reduce the value of these homes, yielding important implications for the future.

Larry Frank’s SMARTRAQ research in Atlanta, examining one of the poster children of 20th century sprawl, finds that “about a third of metro Atlantans living in conventional suburban development would have preferred a more walkable environment.” Re-housing one-third of suburban residents would get us a long way towards the built environment that Nelson foresees a generation from now.

Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Manhattan Institute’s “Center for Rethinking Development”:http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter01-04.html writes:

bq. Speaking of the problems of development to Newsday in 1989, Charles Moerdler, former city housing and building commissioner and a partner in the law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, said, “There are two schools of thought. One is for a developer to present a chamber of horrors and then compromise to make people think they won something. And the other is not to get them aroused and united in the first place.” Moerdler thinks the second strategy is preferable.

Dwell editor Allison Arieff recently wrote on her “TimesSelect blog”:http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com about sustainable homes, noting Sonoma Mountain Village (seeking LEED-Platinum for all 1800 DUs) at a former Agilent corporate campus in Rohnert Park, Calif.; prefab sustainable homes from three companies; and calling “even better” two green multifamily developments in Southern California.

She defines New Urbanism thusly:

bq. “founded in reaction to sprawl, is based on principles of planning and architecture that work together to create human-scale, walkable communities.”

My response:

The next big leap in new sustainable homes will come later this year, when the USGBC and its partners, the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Natural Resources Defense Council, plan on launching a new LEED rating system for Neighborhood Developments (LEED-ND). Currently, LEED doesn’t look far beyond a building’s exterior walls, even though a building’s neighborhood context vastly influences its occupants’ abilities to lead sustainable lifestyles.

The irony of LEED-certified suburban houses is that Americans consume a third more energy driving to and from their houses than they consume while inside their houses, according to the Energy Information Administration. Thus, a car-free, urban family living in a drafty old bungalow might still tread lighter on the earth than a family driving hybrid SUVs to an off-grid exurban home. Even better, as Allison says, would be a family living car-light in a townhouse or apartment, which offers inherent advantages over single-family houses in terms of insulation, walkability, and affordability. That’s exactly the kind of development choices that LEED is agnostic to but that LEED-ND will reward.

bq. “A lot of times these buildings are replaced with multi-unit buildings that are limited in space,” said Ward Miller, president of Logan Square Preservation. “Couples move in, find themselves running short on space and within a short period of time, leave. We’re looking for long-term stakeholders.” (quoted by Johnathon E. Briggs in Chicago Tribune

I know Ward and have long supported his efforts to preserve key buildings and areas within Logan Square, but this notion — that those who live in single-family buildings (vs. condo owners) or owners (vs. renters), stay in the neighborhood longer, are more invested in the community, and thus are more deserving — is a myth, plain and simple. Oddly, the wealthy north-side neighborhoods with higher rates of homeownership also have much higher rates of transience; in Bucktown, the millionaires in the single-family houses are not necessarily in for the long run and most definitely do not have the time to spare to get involved with the community. Heck, they don’t even add “eyes on the street,” as they just drive in and out, hiring others to deliver their pizzas and walk their dogs. I’d hazard that a high-rise housing low-income seniors would bring in many more involved community residents than an entire block of million-dollar McMansions.

The Greenbelt Alliance offers up a few turn-by turn “self-guided outings… through neighborhoods around the Bay Area, highlighting “good developments”:http://www.greenbelt.org/whatwedo/prog_cdt_projectsummary.html and pointing out opportunities for even more” — a good template for those wanting to do a “Tour de Sprawl”:http://www.northstar.sierraclub.org/tour-de-sprawl (Twin Cities link, or try “Athens, Georgia”:http://www.bikeathens.com/activities/tds/index.html)

I’d talked with local Sierra Club people about doing one, but the requisite two or three meetings never happened or the right people just didn’t come together; it might be fun to assemble one for next year’s Spaces & Places.

bq. The Alliance [for a Livable Los Angeles] uses several strategies to achieve its mission including candidate forums during election times, bringing the “Making Los Angeles More Livable” presentation to community groups, and organizing the Y.I.M.B.Y (Yes-In-My-Back-Yard) Brigade.

(I realize that I have a couple of incomplete posts from last year about reurbanizing L.A. Maybe soon.)