Author Archives: payton

Sprawl’s pathology

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Jeff Speck interviews the CDC’s Richard Jackson in Metropolis Magazine about the ongoing effort to portray sprawl as a public health issue.

It has been asserted that I’m too negative when I describe this situation [the sprawling built environment], and it’s true that we doctors tend to focus on pathology. But we know the treatment for these problems. We know how to build communities with central commons surrounded by civic buildings, with sidewalks, parks, and transport, with kids and old folks being able to get back and forth to their daily destinations. I think we are at the right moment to reinvent American communities back to what they were at their absolute best.

In fact, the focus on pathology — on those big, ultimate causes of death rather than the smaller causes leading up to it — has played a large role in blinding medicine to the problem for decades now.

Still no grand green plan

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A mole at the recent Clinton Global Initiative conversation reported that Chicago was being held up as an example of a “green city,” a theme echoed in the Massive Change exhibition now up at the MCA. It’s quite fashionable to talk of Chicago as a deep-green city, but the real accomplishments to date have proved rather scattershot. As with the nascent approach to obesity, there is no approach, just photo opportunities.

Why? It’s a classic case of hacks vs. wonks, as Bruce Reed calls it. The way machine politics works — “I’ll create a little exception for you to get your vote, and your people’s votes” — inhibits Chicago politicians from thinking, much less acting, in a manner which considers broad impacts and bigger plans. Its deep skepticism of technocrats leaves no room for cold policy analysis, whether of the celebrity-driven “green ribbon commission” sort used to develop the climate action plan for Seattle or even for a Comp Plan (sure, it’s mandated by state law, but we’ll let that slide) or a regional plan that has about as much authority as Houston’s.

Hence, the biggest polluters — like the ancient coal power plants or the rivers of cars flowing oh-so-freely down freeways and through downtown, unimpeded by flitting concerns like pedestrian lives — get off scot-free, while expensive solar panels sprout in conspicuous locations and the transit system rots. This results in odd scenarios, like Daley championing a
Climate Protection Agreement at the recent US Conference of Mayors convention that he hosted, effectively signing on USCM to Kyoto (as he already has for Chicago) — even though there’s not even been discussion of how to even begin planning for the agreement’s 2010 deadline. (Pertinent text of the Agreement below the fold.)

A few years ago, some photo opportunities might have been sufficient to proclaim one’s green-ness, but thankfully most other places have moved their sustainability initiatives beyond symbolism. Even other old-line cities are doing so. NYC (which similarly has no comp plan and, unlike Chicago, allowed a zoning rewrite to die on the vine a few years ago) recently recruited away former Massachusetts smart-growth czar Doug Foy to lead a new Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability. In Providence, a rare city with more corruption per capita and even more hardened white-ethnic politics, the mayor has convened Providence Tomorrow, a weeklong charrette to guide a comp plan rewrite.

Indeed, ICLEI, an international organization that helps countless local governments with sustainability plans, defines planning as absolutely crucial to every step of achieving sustainability:

We help local governments generate political awareness of key issues; establish plans of action towards defined, concrete, measurable targets; work towards meeting these targets through the implementation of projects; and evaluate local and cumulative progress toward sustainable development.

So far, the Environmental Action Agenda is a start, but outlines mostly basic purchasing decisions: switching solvents, adding hybrid vehicles, starting capital projects. In the “mobility” section, the only “good” goal (5% of short trips by bike) comes from the Bike Plan, not the EAG. It doesn’t add up to the big goals that the mayor has set by adopting Kyoto, nor does it attempt to work backwards from that goal to create quantifiable near-term targets. Viewed as a response to the Agreement, it’s skipping straight past the Big Picture items that start the list and jumping right to the small-bore items — not what we expect in the city of Big Plans That Stir Men’s Blood.

Continue reading →

Green housing in NYT, sorta

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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.

Steamy side of town

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The Sun-Times has published a map (PDF) of the urban heat island (using infrared satellite data) that DPD and the Park District are apparently using to prioritize tree-planting efforts. The west side is indeed the hottest part of town; oddly, many areas along the river are pretty consistently warm.

NOTE: I’ve disabled comments, as this post gets an inordinate number of spam attempts (perhaps due to the suggestive title). If you really need to comment, please leave a comment at the CCC blog linked to below.

Complete streets

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The Chicagoland Bicycle Federation‘s “Healthy Streets Campaign”:http://www.healthystreets.org/ released a brief statement about a new policy that apparently goes beyond the current “must include” policies — but how? Well, sounds promising if vague:

bq. Chicago’s Complete Streets Policy envisions streets where “even the most vulnerable–children, elderly and persons with disabilities–can travel safely within the public right-of-way…” The Complete Streets Policy is part of the city’s Safe Streets for Chicago program, which calls for stepped-up traffic enforcement, crosswalk awareness campaigns for motorists, new crosswalk safety technologies, researching and identifying trouble spots to be rectified and reducing statutory speed limits on low-volume residential streets.

Mississippi

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For the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, _Governing_ sent Christopher Swope to the Mississippi coast to evaluate how far the region had come in the intervening year. “His assessment”:http://governing.com/articles/9miss.htm (not very far, largely due to continuing federal incompetence) is the fairest I’ve seen, and the fairest to CNU’s role. In an “interview”:http://www.governing.com/articles/9missqa.htm he says that he was initially skeptical that the charettes (sic) were more publicity stunt (although even if they were that, taking such substantive action early on did establish the appearance of momentum) than an actual commitment, but was glad to find otherwise.

For the most thorough coverage, of course, the Biloxi “Sun-Herald”:http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/special_packages/renewal/ and New Orleans “Times-Picayune”:http://www.nola.com/recovery/ continue their well-deserved Pulitzer-winning coverage of how plans are proceeding.

After a fashion

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Wow, I’ve inadvertedly written law for Daley. Gary Washburn in yesterday’s Trib on Daley’s latest inclusionary housing compromise:

bq. “In projects of 10 units or more, 10 percent would have to be moderately priced if any city land is acquired; if zoning is changed to permit residential use; or if residential zoning is changed to increase the number of apartment and condominium units that can be built.”

As a policy analyst for CRN in 2002, I was tasked with finding some quick and dirty ways of getting a precedent for mandatory inclusionary housing into city law. I thought of upzones — hundreds of times a year, the city showers windfall density upgrades on developers and gets nothing in return. I then spent most of a week in Harold Washington Library combing through council minutes, tracking every single upzone passed in 2001 to calculate the potential impact of exactly these proposals. Indeed, after I’d drafted these proposals in a memo, a copy of said memo was literally given to selected City Council members, who offered them up as floor amendments (a very rare move at council) to the Mayor’s ordinance on 9 April 2003. They were, of course, defeated after much procedural intruige — they’d almost forgotten how to deal with floor amendments. (Any substantive change to a bill almost always happens before it’s even voted on in committee.)

Much of that memo was reprinted on page four of “this testimony given to the council’s Housing Committee”:http://www.chicagorehab.org/policy/pdf/1stQuarter2003Report.PDF (which I wrote on behalf of CRN):

Next we would like to present a few points regarding Mayor Daley’s Affordable Housing Commitment Ordinance that passed on April 9. With minor revisions, the ordinance has the potential to create thousands, not just hundreds, of additional affordable housing units every single year. Our analysis of the impact of these amendments is provided in order to inform you before they are considered in Committee.

Four amendments to the ordinance were introduced during City Council floor discussion:

1. Extending the 10% commitment to all zoning map amendments which create 10 or more housing units. In 2001, the City Council approved 216 upzones which increased permissible residential density: 142 residential and 114 mixed-use. We estimate that this would have created commitments to build 1,500 affordable units in 2001 alone – which would triple the Department’s annual creation of homeowner units.

2. Extending the 10% commitment to all Planned Developments approved by the City Council. In 2001, the Plan Commission approved 36 Planned Developments that included residential units. This would have created commitments to build 1,248 units in 2001 (excluding Planned Developments which already committed to providing more than 10% affordable units). This amendment would more than double the Department’s annual creation of homeowner units.

3. Extending the 10% commitment to all sales of city land, not just those at below market prices. As of 2001, the city owned 8,568 vacant lots. At two units per lot, this is enough land for 17,136 units as lots are built out, of which 1,714 would be affordable. Attached is a map showing where the city currently owns vacant land – predominantly on the west and south sides of the City in areas struggling from years of disinvestment. Though we know those communities in fact need good quality affordable housing, it seems incongruous with other city policies that promote mixing incomes and de-concentrating poverty. If the city is serious about creating affordable housing opportunities throughout the city, it will have to focus on more than just subsidized city-owned land. At a minimum, this ordinance should apply to all city owned land, regardless of value.

4. Lowering the income targets so that households earning less than 80% or 50% of AMI can benefit, instead of the current 100% or 60%. As mentioned above, the city’s average income is approximately 80% of AMI; targeting resources above this level (as the ordinance does by setting a 100% of AMI target for homebuyer units) makes little sense. Also, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit already generates rental units at 60% of AMI, but few under 50% of AMI.

The Chicago Rehab Network estimates the above noted amendments could result in a net increase of 1,600 affordable units produced annually, over and above those created under the ordinance as
currently written.

Ostentatious

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The November issue of Dwell (and, it turns out, a NYT blog entry by Dwell editor Allison Arieff) gives a big ol’ wet kiss in a story by Frances Anderton about Steve Glenn and his LivingHome, a company selling prefab wooden boxes, er, houses designed by a SCI-Arc avant-gardiste that come designed to LEED Platinum standards — “Zero Energy, Zero Water, Zero Waste, Zero Carbon, Zero Emissions” is the mantra. And yet:

bq. Glenn has carefully targeted his customers: They are not back-to-the-earthers, but relatively affluent people who want to consume guiltlessly — people who, in his words, “drive Priuses, buy Bosch appliances and Design Within Reach furniture, shop at Whole Foods, and give money to the Natural Resources Defense Council.”

Ugh. Someone has not been thinking outside the wooden box lately, and it shows; if going green just becomes another luxury lifestyle choice for consumers to define themselves by, then the entire project will deservedly fail. Put simply: “We can’t shop our way to sustainability.”:http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//004343.html

FSC certified hardwoods everywhere may be certified, but still consume vastly more resources than wood alternatives. The Prius has highly toxic heavy metals in its batteries and achieves a tiny fraction of the fuel economy that the driver within could achieve if he just walked away from the car. Bosch, DWR, and Whole Foods are all overpriced, marginally greenwashed (if at all), and shipped from thousands of miles away. And the house, as with all of the dozen-odd modern prefab options presented in the magazine’s 300 glossy pages, has no visual relationship with the street; heck, none of them even have a visual relationship with the _ground_.

Unfortunately for America, the rise of green building in the Aughts has coincided with both a growing national obsession with overinflated housing prices and with a government controlled by ideologues who want to kill all remaining federal housing aid to the poor; hence, almost all of the flagship attempts at green building have been not only “market rate” but obnoxiously expensive. Contrast that experience with the UK, where the Labour government has focused national attention on green building at the same time that it has advocated a muscular growth-management and housing policy.