Medieval skyline

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Providence’s small scale and ~75% intact downtown almost reminded me of Québec City at times. (A small cluster of ’20s and postwar highrises is just to the left of this frame, but notice that the church and the neoclassical Johnson & Wales building completely dominate the fore- and mid-ground.) Both are richly rewarding walks, with a largely-intact urban fabric borne of economic misfortune but today the basis for their health and strength.

For more photos from the Congress, see “this Flickr set”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/sets/72157594177561253 .
Next year’s Congress, by contrast, will be housed in a pathbreaking Modernist tower: the PSFS Building.

As asinine and predictable as Ouroussoff’s cheap shot against New Urbanism was in the Sunday NY Times, at least he had a realistic view of Jane Jacob’s scope. The Death and Life of Great American Cities isn’t the end-all book about urbanism; from the title on down, it simply doesn’t concern itself with the less-than-great cities (like Ouroussoff’s native L.A.). Neither does it mention gentrification. Sure, gentrification is a Bad Thing that destroys neighborhood diversity, but _Death and Life_ (1961) was written before Ruth Glass coined “gentrification” (1964), and long before “yuppie” entered the lexicon (1982). Paul Goldberger in Metropolis notes this internal conflict — that Jacobs prized the small in an age which has merely tilted further towards gigantism:

Has the city simply become too big, and too gentrified, to continue to operate as Jacobs wished it to? So far as a great deal of Manhattan is concerned, and particularly Greenwich Village, the answer is probably yes. Jacobs could not afford to live on her beloved block of Hudson Street today. The real limitation of Jacobs’s thinking is in her belief that since a relatively natural process gave us the city we love — the old neighborhood-rich, pedestrian-oriented, exquisitely balanced New York — then planning would not be of much use in the future. Today, however, the natural order of things yields something very different from the vibrant street-oriented and highly diverse world Jacobs taught us to admire. The natural process of growth now gives us sprawl, gigantism, economic segregation, and homogeneous, dreary design.

So simplistic dispatches like this, from the Beachwood Reporter, strike me as ham-handedly not seeing the forest for the trees:

[S]till more sterile castle condos, inhabited by invisible people hostile to corner taverns and other less-than-shiny storefronts, replacing the humble working-class home or venerable three-flat… I see a city whose neighborhoods once so unique in character are melding into one giant honeypot for a select few whose pull gives them imperial imperative to push others around like chess pieces… the policy makers[‘]… hidden hands instead drive processes such as gentrification that you are led to believe are “natural”… The mixed use of light industry, entertainment, small business, and residential dwellings that Jacobs so (rightly) pegged as a key to urban neighborhoods and which once in part defined not just Wicker Park but many city neighborhoods, has largely been vanquished in Chicago, as everything and everyone is put in their place. It is a mistake. The money people are the means, but not neither the beginning nor the end. We are disposing of that which ought to be most valued, and replacing it with that which is most disposable.

Well, no. Jacobs could praise the industrial-era city because she lived in it, and for better or worse the industrial might that created Greenwich Village, Wicker Park, the Plateau, et al has fled for warmer, cheaper climes. (Sectors like steel were particularly hard hit in the past 10-20 years.) I resolutely believe in economic integration as a goal — I’ve posited that economic diversity is the determining factor of a good neighborhood — but our post-industrial economy, constantly retrenching state apparatus, and (wholly unsustainable) globalized drive towards gigantism bring with them nearly unprecedented levels of economic inequality. Economic integration, already barely tenable when Jacobs wrote at the midpoint of the thirty glorious years, would take Herculean feats to accomplish today. Accusing “the policy makers” of “fearing” the “ordered disorder of street life and the dynamism it brings to urban living” when, in fact, the city perpetually teeters on the edge of bankruptcy strikes me as awfully foolish. As Vincent Scully, an equally unimpeachable observer of cities, wrote, “it is all very well for stylish architectural critics to write that the center city ought to be deliciously gritty and tough. Its inhabitants prefer it gentle and calm.”

Remember that Jacobs actually did get to enact a dream zoning ordinance, for the King-Spadina area just west of downtown Toronto. The code obliterated use and FAR restrictions, imposing some performance measures and building-envelope controls instead. The result? “[D]evelopers have surged into the King-Spadina area,” says John Sewell. As she said in an interview with Bill Steigerwald,

Manufacturing was moving out to where they had more room and where it wasn’t as expensive. There were a lot of small developers who saw that these nice old buildings were just ideal for converting into apartments. They were lofts, mostly, and you know how popular they’ve become. But they were blocked from doing anything about it because of use zoning that said it should be industrial. So you can change that use zoning and allow residential… It’s magical, it’s wondrous, how fast those areas have been blossoming and coming to life again.

Jacobs also praised Portland’s gentrification: “People in Portland love Portland… They really like to see it improved. The waterfront is getting improved, and not with a lot of gimmicks, but with good, intelligent reuses of the old buildings. They’re good at rehabilitation.”

Later, when asked about the zealous gentrification of San Francisco (such that a lawyer could not afford to live there), all she could muster was “it’s gotten so popular.”

(Further, the Beachwood Reporter falls into the classic Chicago trap, likely borne of living under the machine’s benevolent dictatorship, of attributing too much to politics. Otis White [scroll to end] notes that “the three great forces shaping cities — 1. economics, 2. demographics and 3. politics — unfold in roughly that order.” Note the primacy of economics; Jacobs certainly did.)

One last lovely obituary: the Economist communicates her curiosity and expansive mind, capable of understanding the vastly complex urban organism and of accommodating what would seem to be contradictory views to anyone else:

Though she hated top-down planning and approved of markets, as any city-lover should, pink-tinted Canada proved more congenial both to writing and to campaigning. The government listened to her, as the rulers of New York had only ever half done… Not just the workings of cities, but of things in general were a lasting fascination to her. In Scranton, a sooty mining town, she was miserable when the locomotives were fitted with iron skirts that hid how the wheels and pistons moved.

(Incidentally, despite her love of large cities, she was always suspicious of large regimes and long thought Québec should separate from Canada, so that Montréal could serve as center rather than “Toronto periphery.”) The article also offers a tidy summation of Death and Life and Economy of Cities:

Cities had come first, as the natural eco-system of human beings, and only once the web of work and trade had reached a certain size was there any need for the help of the static, primitive and muddy countryside… Cities should be densely peopled, since density meant safety; old buildings should rub up against new, and rich against poor; zoning should be disregarded, so that people lived where their jobs were; cars should not be banned, but walking encouraged, on pavements made wide enough for children to play. Streets should be short, so that people were obliged to experiment and explore and have the fun of turning new corners, just as she had done when hunting for jobs and apartments in her first months in New York.

Addendum 17 Jul: Karrie Jacobs writes of Jane in the August Metropolis: “Although she wrote with great prescience about the tendency of the most vibrant neighborhoods to be undermined by their own success, I don’t think she could have anticipated how a process she characterized as ‘unslumming’ would eventually play out as a raging real estate boom… The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard her as a champion of stasis — to believe she was advocating the world’s cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960… The real notion is to build in a way that honors and nurtures complexity. And that’s an idea impossible to outgrow.”

Her later works on economies and nature make the link to complexity (and later, to chaos theory and what’s now called “emergence”) much clearer.

[xpost: “Gristmill”:http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/6/21/20640/3549%5D

This Sunday, the “New York Times”:http://nyt.com ran a package of Business articles focused on “The Business of Green”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/index.html. (If previous packages are any indication, the links will remain active longer than the standard week.)

Hearteningly for this Second City resident, Keith Schneider’s banner headline — “To Revitalize a City, Try Spreading Some Mulch”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17chicago.html — spotlights Mayor Richard M. Daley’s efforts to improve the city’s quality of life through greening initiatives. While many local wags have ridiculed the Daley as a mere gardener, the article calls new street trees and spiffy parks an “economic development strategy” central to the city’s “general economic resurgence”:http://economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5601463:

bq. [M]ulch is an organic metaphor, tying together the various pieces of Chicago’s novel development strategy, praised by the Sierra Club and the Chamber of Commerce alike. By wrapping its arms and famous big shoulders around its Latin motto — Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) — Chicago has become a global model for how a metropolis can pursue environmental goals to achieve economic success.

Having moved here shortly after the 1996 Democratic National Committee convention that landscape entrepreneur Christy Webber says Daley’s greening strategy dates back to, I can’t really speak to how big of a sea change these policies have proven. And as much as the article over-sells Chicago’s strengths (e.g., tying population growth caused by Latino immigration to downtown flowerbeds, ignoring the transit improvements that were canceled to pay down park bonds), it’s always nice to have our humble Midwestern achievements noticed east of the Hudson River.

Speaking of the Hudson, “Robin Pogrebin reports on efforts”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17leeds.html by New York’s “Battery Park City Authority”:http://www.batteryparkcity.org/page/page1.html to complete its decades-long, 92-acre waterfront development to “exacting environmental standards”:http://www.batteryparkcity.org/page/page23.html. One new apartment tower will even use heat+power cogeneration — a remarkable step forward in efficient, distributed energy generation:

bq. The Verdesian runs on a natural-gas microturbine that creates electricity, which helps power the building. The heat given off in this process is used to create the hot water. Mr. Albanese said this amounted to overall efficiency of 80 to 85 percent for the building. A typical power plant — which burns fossil fuels like oil, gas or coal — is about 30 percent efficient.

The story’s accompanying video shows Pogrebin drinking from the “in-house sewage treatment plant”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/4652169/in/set-459914/ in the Solaire, a LEED-NC Gold rated apartment tower that opened in 2003.

Other articles in the package report on large corporations voluntarily “profiting from the green bandwagon”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17giant.html, sometimes with help from “enviro critics”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17partner.html ; “emissions trading”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17exchange.html in the US and Europe; a sort-of UL Labs for “foodservice equipment efficiency”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17food.html (one restauranteur reports a one-week payback time for new dishwashing faucet nozzles); potential “downsides to new technological fixes”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17tech.html ; “eco-advertising”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17market.html and counteracting “greenwashing”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17certify.html with certification; “organic pork”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17pigs.html ; “wind energy”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17wind.html ; reducing and recycling toxic “e-waste”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17ewaste.html ; and greening “government purchasing”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17procure.html.

[posted to pro-urb]

Awarding windfall profits to those who “luck into” inclusionary housing (since nowhere near as many people end up with it as could qualify) strikes me as tremendously unfair to several groups, including:

* People who bought inclusionary units in areas that didn’t appreciate wildly. (Yes, these areas exist. A ca. 1925 Chicago bungalow that sells for $160K in a “good” south side neighborhood would sell for $360K on the north side, largely due to “the segregation tax.”)

* People who bought non-inclusionary units in the same buildings (especially for high rises). They paid $50, $100K more for their units and got something maybe a bit nicer inside. When resale time comes ’round, a buyer will look at an inclusionary unit and conclude it’s only worth $20K less — the cost of upgrading the interior, since the location is identical.

* People who didn’t buy inclusionary units, but could have, perhaps because of dumb luck or a technicality, whether not winning the allocation lottery or not having qualifying income or a sufficient down payment at that moment in time.

Affordable housing policy should seek to get people into, well, affordable housing. Similarly, a house is first and foremost a place to live, and then only secondarily an investment.

If we want policies to build household wealth, we can do that through much more efficient means — like tax credits that match savings contributions, e.g., line 48 on the 1040. Government should NOT be in the business of encouraging speculation in one investment type over another, and should not lead people to believe that they can be guaranteed better-than-market returns on any investment, housing or not.

A site called SustainLane trumpets the Cosmo-style headline Ten U.S. Cities Best Prepared for an Oil Crisis. The ranking draws on an eclectic (incorrect?) set of criteria: “recent city commute practices, metro area public transportation, sprawl, traffic congestion, local food and wireless network access.”

Honolulu was the first city that came to mind for me: they import a lot via ship, but in terms of many of life’s basic necessities (food, water, electricity) they’ve had the advantage of having had to think very hard about whether or not a local alternative is available before importing. Oh, and the perfect climate certainly helps: fresh food, solar electricity, and no HVAC year round.

Even though I live in the North, I have doubts about whether heating and air conditioning will be easily handled post-peak. Oil and natural gas prices are closely related, and cold cities pre-oil were filthy with coal or wood soot. The most technologically advanced solutions I’ve seen advanced — district cogenerated heating & cooling, with ground source heat pumps — still rely on natural gas.

On the other hand, electric heat is common in Canada, even though it’s the largest gas (and oil!) exporter to the USA. The province-owned hydroelectric systems apparently make it cost-effective, even in their bitter cold. Similarly, maybe the Pacific Northwest, with a mild climate and lots of salmon-killing hydroelectric capacity, might weather the storm well. That’s the deciding factor on why I strongly feel that Vancouver’s high rises, in particular, are quite sustainable: beyond the embodied energy of construction, the operation of elevators there will continue unimpeded long after oil.

On that subject, someone (I don’t remember who) tied the multistory industrial loft building’s rise and fall to energy costs. Lofts are from an era when on-site power & steam generation, usually through coal, was common, and refining oil into gasoline was almost unheard of. The multistory layout of lofts powered elevators or conveyor belts directly by angular momentum from the coal turbines, with little energy lost in converting that energy to electricity or moving it off-site. Those elevators often only moved product up; gravity usually brought product down. Industrial users switched en masse to horizontal production after gas made it cheaper to drive internal combustion engines across large factory/warehouse floors. (I wonder if someone could outfit a rooftop wind turbine with some kind of flywheel, thereby storing the angular momentum for use in an elevator. Hm.)

Any peak-oil situation will impact neither renewable electricity sources (fortunately) nor coal generation of electricity and steam (unfortunately). Energy uses which can easily switch to either of those two, and high-margin uses of petroleum (like plastics) will be able to adapt. Energy uses which are reliant upon liquid gasoline, particularly cars and trucks, will be hurt.

Jeff Gray and Hayley Mick writing in “the Globe & Mail”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060426.JACOBS26/TPStory/?query=jeff+gray :

bq. Former Toronto mayor David Crombie, an ally of Ms. Jacobs in [the Spadina Expressway] fight and others, said not even he was spared from her activism. Once, Ms. Jacobs brought a demonstrating crowd *in favour of* (emphasis added) an infill housing development right to Mr. Crombie’s front door at 11 p.m., rousing the mayor from his bed…

bq. Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and long an admirer of Ms. Jacobs’s work, praised her yesterday in an interview as a “natural-born social scientist, for sure.” […] Harvard University economics professor Edward Glaeser, co-author of a paper in 1992 that tested and supported Ms. Jacobs’s theories about how the industrial diversity in cities drives economic growth, called her the greatest urbanist of the past century. “There is no more creative innovative scholar that has been thinking about cities. . . . She is in a class by herself.”

bq. [Larry Beasley, city planner for Vancouver] and others from the planning department took Ms. Jacobs on a tour, pointing out what they felt were the most important elements of the city. But it was a small playground filled with children in the city’s core that caught her eye. She made them stop the car so she could leap out and have her photo taken in front of it. “She said, ‘This is the city of the future,’ ” he recalled. “And we were thrilled.”

Warren Gerard in the “Toronto Star”:http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1146001826801 gives more thoughts from Crombie:

bq. “The most important thing she did for me and us was remind us that ideas matter, and the ideas that were most important are the ones that mattered to us,” Crombie said. “She also believed you take action. You don’t have ideas and go away. There is a direct connection of thought and action.”

Incidentally, 4 May marks both what would have been Jacobs’ 90th birthday and the 10th anniversary of the Charter of the New Urbanism.

Excuses for the absence, but as always, check the photostream for some evidence of what I’m up to — in this case, enjoying the spring and visiting Texas for APA.

Sharon Stangenes reports on developer David Hill in the Chicago Tribune:

Critical to success, in Hill’s view, is a stable political environment for the several years it takes to get a development done. Also needed: a clean, clear decision trail so projects are not bogged down during the local government approval process.

“The issue of density in today’s world needs to be rethought,” he said. “If the political authorities recognized they have major working family problems and they have well-intentioned developers — and there are many — they can provide added density to offset the cost of the land.”

Well, sure, but if last week’s election is any guide, we’re not about to rethink no steeeenkin’ density issues, nor are we about to consider a reasonably clear decision trail for planning and development. Hayley, the YoChicago reporter in Edgewater, thinks it mighty strange that “only 4 precincts (30, 38, 50 & 51) got to voice their opinion on Broadway’s commercial development.” Sure, 80% of the voters voted to keep heights down to four stories — absurd on a street as wide as Broadway — but naturally, those were only those living in the least dense of the blocks adjoining Broadway. The denser blocks to the north and east? Their opinions don’t matter.

Even stranger is the Pilsen downzoning referendum passed in retaliation to the inclusionary-zoned loft conversions (particularly David Hill’s, actually) seeping into the largely abandoned industrial district running along the Sangamon rail spur. (What’s even stranger is that the area was TIFed over resident objections, but that’s good now: the increased tax base will now have to be spent within the community, not elsewhere.) The downzoning peculiarly uses these developments as ammo for a completely unrelated measure: downzoning the adjacent blocks from RT4 flats to single-family RS3. To a certain extent, I understand that Pilsen residents are concerned that property values, which they’ve successfully managed for decades by trading property mostly by word of mouth, will rise to market levels as Realtors blab to outside buyers. Pilsen is one of the city’s best kept secrets, and they understandably want to keep it that way. Yet on principle, it’s silly to consider reusing vacant land to be an affront to the community.

In Houston, as John Buntin of Governing reports in a cover story on gentrification, a city councillor is directing TIF revenues from redevelopment of an industrial zone to secure long-term affordability easements in an adjacent neighborhood threatened by gentrification:

The [Midtown TIF] board has chosen to use almost all its revenues — $10 million in the past five years — to purchase and then ‘bank’ land in the Third Ward. ‘If you look at Midtown, that was all publicly induced — ain’t none of it affordable,’ says [Garnet] Coleman [city councillor for the ward]. ‘Why can’t we do the same thing for people who need an affordable place to live?’ … An essential part of [Coleman’s] plan is to attach restrictive deeds to the rental properties to ensure that they are never sold to private developers[.]

Overall, these advisory referenda are a nice way to do a poll on the cheap, but any elected official who takes these numbers too seriously deserves what s/he gets. What’s often a limited subset of the ward’s residents (as the referenda appear only in certain precincts) even get to vote, and even then only those who do vote (excluding the young, noncitizens, non-voters, etc.) get to have a say. Of course, we know that those with NIMBY tendencies — middle age, middle class homeowners — are the likeliest to vote, so these often do nothing to substantially broaden public participation beyond the current NIMBY neighborhood organizations.

The Houston article ends on an appropriately cynical note: “the gentrification debate, [former mayor Bob] Lanier says, ‘is substantially about political control.’ “

Stephanie Rosenbloom in the New York Times points to many cities worldwide that are cheap by the benchmark of hyperinflated New York City prices. Now, not only will Queens and the Bronx have to worry about gentrification spilling over from Manhattan — anywhere within reach of JFK can share in the fun! Although it might seem tempting to heal our hemorrhaging balance of trade by exporting vast quantities of Gentrification abroad, unfortunately our largest trade-debtor, China, has been exporting gentrification from Hong Kong to cities all around the Pacific Rim for decades now. (I hear that Auckland is the latest destination for the “astronauts” commuting via Cathay Pacific.)

bq. The world is dappled with electric and storied cities — and real estate is staggeringly affordable in many of them. “There is so much value in a lot of foreign countries,” said Nigel Leck, an international property expert on the BBC program “Uncharted Territory.” “The capital growth will be very, very good.”Entrepreneurial types should seize the moment in Eastern Europe, where cities like Budapest, Prague and Krakow, Poland, are in need of basic services and programs to propel them into the future. Those who want the privileges of home — a democratic government, a transparent market, the protection of property rights — but want more bang for their buck, should consider Toronto, Montreal and Quebec. Sun-seekers looking to live and invest in a more tropical climate may want to migrate to one of the many flourishing cities in Latin America. Young executives who want to position themselves for the next decade can get deals in Shanghai, while romantics can embrace a piece of Paris for less than they may have thought.

(Oh, and I can already see the Montrealers moaning. Maybe another icestorm or a round of “FLQ kidnappings”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLQ will scare off the ugly Americans.)

Finished reading the script for Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses [ archive of reviews] last night — it’s reprinted in the latest issue of Duke UP’s Theater” along with a preface by Alex Timbers. The play takes an ironic, contrarian angle to Moses’ life, casting Moses as a crowd-pleasing “Get Things Done” hero. Jane Jacobs is cloaked as an archnemesis, her “bunch of mothers” in Community Board Three a cackle of scheming lovers betrayed by famed Modernist beaus. Some choice bits, excerpted to show how complex ideas of planning can be reworked as pithy stage one-liners:

* Jane Jacobs on Le Corbusier: “The city should be an organ of love, not one of order and height; my womb of Lilith shall bear profligate, winding, unnumbered streets, impossible to navigate. Oh yes, I shall attain revenge on my ex-boyfriend.”
* Jacobs again, complying with FDR, Nelson Rockefeller, and Joseph Goebbels (!): “I will curb the death of great American cities. Long live the sidewalk!”
* Moses: “I have a grander vision, for a new city. A co-operative society where man can live one atop the other in high density, residentially zoned neighborhoods. With parks all around them. People will be happy.”
* Minor character in a rare moment of un-ironic candor: “The more highways that are constructed to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles pour onto them and congest them more. That forces the building of more highways — which generates more traffic and more congestion, creating an inexorably widening spiral[!]… If [Mr Moses] continues building so prolifically and the city is increasingly getting stopped up with cars, it sounds like Manhattan will at some point become one giant parking lot.”
* Stage directions: Crossfade back to Moses at the pulpit, on the entrance to the Triborough Bridge. He is flanked by two female models, with halter tops that say Urban and Planning, respectively. Reminiscent of a photograph from Norquist’s presentation, which I’ll post shortly.

(The article is available online for a fee; otherwise, the Arts reference desk at Harold Washington library has the journal, which has a few photos and lovely typesetting.)

The Census Bureau has released “PHC-T-40”:http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/daytime/daytimepop.html, an estimate of daytime population by place. [Via “Urban Cartography”:http://www.urbancartography.com/2005/10/biggest_commute.html%5D

Places with daytime population over 500,000:

|Residents|Daytimepopulation ^1^ |%Chg ^2^ |% Localworkers ^3^ |Name|
|8,008,278|8,571,338|7.0|91.5 |New York city, NY|
|3,694,820|3,822,697|3.5|63.1 |Los Angeles city, CA|
|2,896,016|3,038,344|4.9|70.6 |Chicago city, IL|
|1,953,631|2,356,944|20.6|81.0 |Houston city, TX|
|1,517,550|1,607,780|5.9|75.4 |Philadelphia city, PA|
|1,321,045|1,417,165|7.3|69.3 |Phoenix city, AZ|
|1,188,580|1,416,135|19.1|65.3 |Dallas city, TX|
|1,223,400|1,365,327|11.6|77.7 |San Diego city, CA|
|1,144,646|1,212,635|5.9|87.3 |San Antonio city, TX|
|572,059|982,853|71.8|73.0 |Washington city, DC|
|951,270|950,611|-0.1|48.5 |Detroit city, MI|
|776,733|945,480|21.7|76.9 |San Francisco city, CA|
|781,870|903,832|15.6|81.9 |Indianapolis city (balance), IN|
|894,943|844,874|-5.6|49.6 |San Jose city, CA|
|589,141|831,233|41.1|66.4 |Boston city, MA|
|735,617|797,840|8.5|91.2 |Jacksonville city, FL|
|711,470|793,990|11.6|69.2 |Columbus city, OH|
|656,562|783,890|19.4|87.1 |Austin city, TX|
|650,100|752,843|15.8|84.1 |Memphis city, TN|
|651,154|743,779|14.2|61.9 |Baltimore city, MD|
|563,374|723,417|28.4|73.8 |Seattle city, WA|
|554,636|710,122|28.0|63.4 |Denver city, CO|
|416,474|676,431|62.4|59.3 |Atlanta city, GA|
|540,828|655,483|21.2|82.2 |Charlotte city, NC|
|545,524|651,726|19.5|83.8 |Nashville-Davidson (balance), TN|
|529,121|650,864|23.0|73.9 |Portland city, OR|
|596,974|632,838|6.0|60.5 |Milwaukee city, WI|
|534,694|609,520|14.0|61.1 |Fort Worth city, TX|
|506,132|600,777|18.7|80.7 |Oklahoma City city, OK|
|478,403|593,243|24.0|55.9 |Cleveland city, OH|
|563,662|570,680|1.2|87.5 |El Paso city, TX|
|484,674|544,478|12.3|78.2 |New Orleans city, LA|
|441,545|543,511|23.1|63.6 |Kansas City city, MO|
|486,699|530,153|8.9|79.8 |Tucson city, AZ|
|407,018|507,951|24.8|60.1 |Sacramento city, CA|

Few big surprises here, although Detroit is pretty jarring in its loss of residents each morning. As a rule, cities that import workers, and/or have local jobs for most of their residents, are generally better off economically — with the notable exception of Washington, DC, since it gains little tax revenue off the jobs it hosts.

Since that list turned out to be 35 cities, here are the top 35 cities (with daytime population over 30,000, the size of a good-sized Edge City) ranked by the percentage increase in their daytime population:

|Residents|Daytimepopulation ^1^ |%Chg ^2^ |% Localworkers ^3^ |Name (nearby central city)|
|16|30,774|192237.5|40.0 | _Lake Buena Vista city, FL_ (Orlando)|
|91|37,527|41138.5|47.2 |Vernon city, CA (LA)|
|777|52,760|6690.2|31.3 |Industry city, CA (LA)|
|12,568|57,253|355.5|21.1 |Commerce city, CA (LA)|
|8,702|39,212|350.6|14.4 |Oak Brook village, IL (Chicago)|
|11,035|46,392|320.4|27.1 |Greenwood Village city, CO (Denver)|
|18,540|72,651|291.9|22.6 |Tysons Corner CDP, VA (DC)|
|16,033|62,172|287.8|32.1 |El Segundo city, CA (LA)|
|17,438|61,265|251.3|17.8 |Santa Fe Springs city, CA (LA)|
|20,438|63,802|212.2|26.9 | _Doral CDP, FL_ (Miami)|
|12,513|38,666|209.0|23.6 | _Blue Ash city, OH_ (Cincinnati)|
|14,533|42,359|191.5|15.6 |Melville CDP, NY (NYC)|
|19,837|57,757|191.2|23.4 | Auburn Hills city, MI (Detroit)|
|12,825|36,850|187.3|25.1 | _Clayton city, MO_ (St. Louis)|
|16,500|46,947|184.5|23.5 | _Creve Coeur city, MO_ (St. Louis)|
|15,931|43,826|175.1|26.9 |Secaucus town, NJ (NYC)|
|14,166|37,534|165.0|12.9 |Addison town, TX (Dallas-Ft. Worth)|
|20,976|49,829|137.6|56.1 | *Naples city, FL* |
|17,181|40,589|136.2|17.4 |Tukwila city, WA (Seattle)|
|27,508|64,955|136.1|19.1 |Farmers Branch city, TX (Dallas-Ft. Worth)|
|18,511|42,772|131.1|27.4 |King of Prussia CDP, PA (Philadelphia)|
|15,550|35,869|130.7|21.3 | _Bridgeton city, MO_ (St. Louis)|
|22,979|51,083|122.3|27.7 | Romulus city, M (Detroit)|
|25,756|55,194|114.3|21.0 | _Maryland Heights city, MO_ (St. Louis)|
|20,100|42,695|112.4|17.1 |Hauppauge CDP, NY (NYC)|
|17,634|36,387|106.3|38.0 | _Ashwaubenon village, WI_ (Green Bay)|
|25,737|52,645|104.5|22.9 |Paramus borough, NJ (NYC)|
|45,256|91,937|103.1|40.7 |Redmond city, WA (Seattle)|
|33,784|68,476|102.7|26.3 |Beverly Hills city, CA (LA)|
|22,759|45,489|99.9|63.2 | *Myrtle Beach city, SC* |
|34,854|69,132|98.3|30.8 |Alpharetta city, GA (Atlanta)|
|25,578|50,641|98.0|56.6 | *Gainesville city, GA* |
|56,002|110,513|97.3|56.1 | *Greenville city, SC* |
|15,889|31,070|95.5|40.2 | _Greensburg city, PA_ (Pittsburgh)|
|15,600|30,493|95.5|65.8 | *Brunswick city, GA* |

*Bold* cities are the few on this list that qualify as (small) central cities. _Italicized_ cities are Edge Cities whose “host” cities don’t appear on the first list. Note the presence of multiple Detroit and St. Louis suburbs here — the super-winners in their bloody metropolitan games, with plenty of jobs to profit from and few residents to take care of — and the number of LA suburbs also listed, relative to other metros of its size. Upon first glance, many of these importing cities are Edge Cities, tourist meccas, or industrial hubs (the original Edge Cities).

*Notes*:
1. Estimated
2. Population change due to daily commuting
3. Residents of place who also work there

Waikiki’s physical form is a row of ’60s slabs perpendicular to the beach; as JCB-toting Japanese tourists have displaced fat, ugly Americans, “boardwalk” has evolved (partly, which is the fun part) from t-shirt shops to marquee-name couture boutiques. Prada sits three doors down from a peep show joint. The truly wild thing is that Ala Moana, the near-downtown megamall less than a mile west, has all the same shops, plus oddball Hawaiian locals like the “Crack Seed Center” (a bulk candy and roasted-nut shop). Since the economy’s tied more to Tokyo than DC, there’s a lot of ’80s glitter but surprisingly little new since then, save a few monuments to the very latest real estate bubble.

High property values, high value agriculture, consolidated local government, and lack of buildable land (between coast and mountain, as they say in Vancouver) means relatively compact sprawl and bad congestion, even in the absence of any noticeable job center. Only downtown and the adjoining Chinatown have any real historic-district merit; it’s overwhelmingly a postwar city, and the “real” neighborhoods have that sunstruck, run-down look of, say, San Diego. (Not as dirty as LA, much less rain than Miami.) Ethnic restaurants are aplenty, but bohemia seems in little evidence: the only band posters I saw were in Hale’iwa, the little surfer town at the gateway to the North Shore’s heroic waves.

Bus transit is excellent, many intersections have scramble signals, and downtown has a ped mall, a bike/bus mall, little surface parking, and an old-line department store, besides the usual government offices in an old royal palace.

The overall feel crosses Las Vegas with Miami Beach and Myrtle Beach, but filled with pushy Asians. (whites are less than 25% of the population, and maybe half of the 100,000 tourists.) Just as strangely un-American as Canada in many ways, like the lack of major crime, residential high-rises in odd places, indifference to the Protestant work ethic and news from the mainland, and an oddly communitarian local political culture — apparently dating from the early days, of Japanese settlers, New England missionaries, and money-grubbing Yankee capitalists mingling with famously laid-back native Hawaiians.

Photos Flickr-ed to my “West Coast”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/sets/462801/ set.