I picked up an anonymous flyer about theNeighbors Project recently, apparently an attempt to engage Chicago’s citizens in placemaking political action. Their mission sounds promising:

bq. Our mission is to activate and organize members of the urban generation in cities across the nation. We will strengthen and invigorate city neighborhoods one neighbor at a time throughout our lives. Our grassroots movement will make diverse cities with a healthy grassroots culture rooted in public streets and institutions the preferred place to live for Americans of every kind.

Yet it’s all quite nebulous right now, perhaps by design since it’s young. They’ve contacted my garden group and we’ll find out what they’re about soon.

Promising examples abound, like “City Repair”:http://www.cityrepair.org/wiki.php/projects in the Northwest, the “Toronto Public Space Committee”:http://www.publicspace.ca/elections/about as well as the various quasi-party public action committees (and affiliated candidate slates) that other cities have (particularly in Canada, with good examples like “COPE”:http://www.cope.bc.ca/issues-city.htm in Vancouver and “Projet Montréal”:https://westnorth.com/2005/11/28/urban-green-politics-arrives-in-montreal).

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.

Downtown Vancouver made the covers of _Governing_ and _Urban Land_ in July, not long after CNU gave a Charter Award to Larry Beasley in recognition of the 1991 Living First plan. Indeed, Alan Ehrenhalt writes in his Governing piece:

bq. If one event can be said to mark the beginning of the downtown revival that is moving across North America, it is the rezoning in Vancouver.

Since the new downtown residents pay high taxes and cost little to service municipally — they rarely have children and have private services like health clubs that relieve the strain on parks, libraries, etc. — their fiscal impact has been mostly positive to date. However, _Governing_ zooms in on the city’s looming shortage of commercial land, raising the specter that the city will become merely a resort town.

Personally, I think such fears are a bit overblown: the condo wave, like all others, will eventually pass; Vancouver’s east side is both adequately transit served and has plentiful vacant industrial land for expansion; and opportunities for further densification do exist on the downtown peninsula, perhaps by refilling low-rise areas with mid-rises or inserting taller point towers on sites identified for high-rises. Current mayor Sam Sullivan has launched “the Vancouver EcoDensity Initiative”:http://www.mayorsamsullivan.ca/ecodensity/ecodensity03.html in an attempt to get a conversation going about further densification (framing such as the path to a more sustainable city); many looking at the new downtown overlook the fact that upzoning downtown was part of a grand 1980s political tradeoff that also resulted in downzoning most of the city’s single-family residential neighborhoods.

However, part of the goal of planning is to balance future needs against current opportunities, and given Vancouver’s global desirability, it needs to ensure that future economic development has a place in the city. Similarly, I wonder whether new residential development in the very near West Loop is a good thing, given that the area may be better suited to offices.

More broadly, what are all these jobs being created out in the suburbs and why do they do go there? Holding the commute constant, many employees (especially younger ones) prefer the convenience and choice that a downtown location bring — and those concentrations of human capital (particularly as certain dense cities pull well ahead in education) should result in “Jane Jacobs externalities” of innovation and creative destruction. Trophy towers in the CBD may not appeal to the next generation of job creators, but not all urban spaces are that fussy and expensive. What kinds of buildings (and neighborhoods and regulations and ideas) _should_ planners and developers be concocting to house today’s entrepreneurs? During the dot-com boom, the obvious answer was the lofty flex space or maybe the biotech lab (as seen in office parks in Palo Alto and around MIT’s campus alike), but those were extenuating circumstances. Yet today, many of the surviving technology giants (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Sun) have large suburban corporate campuses, while others (like Adobe, in San Jose, San Francisco, and Seattle) fit into urban towers.

An even bigger question: how can cities foster organic, entrepreneurial economic development within neighborhoods? After all, small businesses create more jobs than big ones, but only big business is capable of snagging big tax breaks in the name of “job retention.” The “Center for an Urban Future”:http://www.nycfuture.org/content/policy_areas/policy.cfm?area=ecopol consistently advocates such an approach (“a five borough economic development plan”) in place of corporate subsidies in NYC; closer to home, it’s interesting to see how the public-private “Midtown Community Works Partnership”:http://www.midtowncommunityworks.org uses microfinance, cooperative marketing, local hiring agreements, infrastructure investments (like an enclosed public market, light rail, and a rail-to-trail), and public finance (much through EZ grants) to help start and sustain small businesses.

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The Logan Square Chamber of Commerce is advancing a Parking Improvement District along Milwaukee Avenue. Preliminary studies indicate that quadrupling parking rates would raise over $300,000 for local improvements, even after turning 50% over to the city general fund. Aldermen Colon, Flores, and Preckwinkle have introduced “a resolution”:http://www.loganchamber.org/Docs/Resolution.pdf directing city staff to research ways to implement the program.

This program has much to offer the neighborhood: shop owners will get better turnover of spaces, visitors will be further encouraged to consider not driving, meter maids will provide additional “eyes on the street,” and the new revenue will allow the SSA to invest more in the area while reducing its property tax burden.

One wrinkle: unlike Wicker Park & Bucktown, much of Logan Square currently has side street resident parking permits. I’d prefer to go without the “insanely underpriced RPPs”:https://westnorth.com/2006/06/28/parking-on-my-street/, but mitigation techniques (requiring permits only in the evenings, creating a mechanism to grant permits to businesses [allowing pay stubs from companies with city business licenses as proof of “residence”], creating one large permit district instead of many small ones, raising permit prices overall and for large cars in particular) could make them palatable.

Somehow, I missed this the first time around, but Hilkevitch had a column in August about a tiff between Daley and the council over devoting city resources to enforcing traffic laws. Sounds like those of us who worry about criminals on wheels might have some allies on Council.

bq. The City Council subsequently passed an ordinance that [Ald. Thomas] Allen (38th) proposed to hire 100 more police officers to handle traffic duties citywide, using fines collected from drivers running red traffic lights, who were caught by cameras. Only 32 police officers are on the traffic detail currently, and mostly downtown, Allen said…. Daley is balking, however. Daley accuses aldermen — including former Chicago police officer William Beavers (7th), who has said traffic enforcement is as important to public safety as fighting crime — of overstepping their authority about how the administration budgets city resources. Daley said he thinks more police officers are needed to catch drug dealers and other criminals in the neighborhoods instead of blowing whistles on street corners.

Dancing in the street #2

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Last week, The Space/Movement Project occupied a metered parking space as part of the Park Yourself performance art event, which temporarily liberated parking spaces all around town for human leisure activities. Once rid of the hulking, momentarily abandoned steel boxes (renting the space at absurdly cheap prices), parking spaces can become colorful, joyful extensions of too-crowded sidewalks — here, just as wide as the walk itself.

Similar, citywide parking space occupations took place in SF and NYC this week.
Of the San Francisco exercise, John King wrote:

All of which made for good fun and a mild case of sunburn. But is also makes a point about what constitutes good public space in a city. Size doesn’t matter; the important thing is to craft something that people can cherish — and more often than not, the snug spots are the ones that work best.

“StreetsBlog”:http://www.streetsblog.org leaks a Sneak Preview of Bloomberg’s 21st Century Urban Vision, wherein consultant Alex Garvin (former czar of LMDC and author of the encyclopedic _The American City_) recommends that New York build upon its competitive advantage as a lively urban destination by enhancing public space — including reducing traffic through congestion pricing and street closures — and welcoming another million residents in new neighborhoods built in opportunity areas, like decked-over railyards. However, as with many Bloomberg initatives, the public process appears to be, well, lacking.

Also, trying to post proper (non-cameraphone) Flickr photos while I’m still in NYC.

InOut Designers in Switzerland brings you a bike rack (for six) in the size and shape of a car (just one). Imagine what an SUV-shaped one could fit.

Continuing on North Shore news, Lisa Black wrote in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune on a proposed “distracted driving” ban in Winnetka — one that would go further than the woefully limited, completely unenforced mobile-phone ban passed by Chicago last year. Yet unlike countless articles about driving-while-talking, which somehow strikes some as UnFreedom-istic, this one hints at the bigger problems: an epidemic of selfishness and willfull denial that cars are deadly weapons.

Irwin Askow, 90, who was a village board president in the 1970s, pushed for a law barring drivers from using cell phones around 2000, when he was almost struck by a car.

“I was crossing the street in Winnetka and was almost run over — missed me by 2 inches — a lady driving an SUV and talking on the cell phone,” said Askow, who still supports the law, though he now lives in Evanston. “She didn’t even see me. She didn’t stop at all.”

[Resident Bernadette] Wolff said she believes distracted driving is a symptom of a broader societal problem.

“I think we have all become very self-absorbed and self-important,” Wolff said.

Perhaps everyone needs a reminder, she said: “This is a big vehicle. Pay attention.”

Still not pointed out: a driver conversing with a passenger will probably get positive feedback about watching the road (like, “hey, watch out for that tree!”), quite unlike one talking into a tiny plastic box.

In any case, drivers should expect to lose their “rights” when exercising the privilege of waving around a deadly weapon in the public way. I’d even favor streetcorner cameras to catch those who blatantly violate the hundreds of laws that supposedly protect us against deadly or selfish driving: speeding, refusing to stop or yield for pedestrians, loud engines, and hit-and-run crashes, for instance.

Restatement of “Greenfield’s theory of urban memory”:https://westnorth.com/2005/04/22/gentrification-today/ by “Michael Sokolove”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/305lives.1.html in today’s housing-themed package in the Times Magazine:

bq. I decided there should be a law: Before you knock down a house, you should have to post its picture on a nearby tree (one that will not get hacked down), because part of what’s so disturbing to me is the instant obliteration of history and memory.

Roger Lowenstein’s “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/305deduction.1.html?pagewanted=all nicely lays out the curious history and effects of the mortgage interest tax deduction, but perhaps isn’t explicit enough: this is a highly regressive tax break that hurts the middle class. It distorts the top end of the housing market by giving the upper class an incentive to build McMansions instead of more productive investments (for example, workforce housing), which raises prices for everyone through gentrification. Meanwhile, the working class ignores it; they just take the standard deduction, which is about equivalent to the interest on their $100,000 mortgages — and anyways, at their (well, mine too) tax brackets, a deduction isn’t worth nearly as much as a credit.

bq. The choice is clear: either we choose to be defined by worsening traffic and perilous streets or we can define ourselves through great public spaces and lively streets… The “New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign”:http://www.nycsr.org/ is building the movement to re-imagine our streets as lively public places.

A new campaign launched this month to “Reclaim the Streets” in a very broad sense throughout New York City, complete with some inviting renderings of sidewalks thronged with happy pedestrians. (It almost seems possible, too!) With some concerted action, it seems like many Community Boards — filled with “pedestrian voters”:http://www.carsharing.net/library/carandcityexecsummary.html (scroll down to #10) — could do a lot to reclaim side streets, in particular, from speeding through traffic — but New Yorkers’ simultaneous sense of complaint and begrudging compliance (“ah, fugeddaboutit”) might slow progress.