Category Archives: urban affairs

Signals across the urban archipelago

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City DOT commissioners panel

A recurring theme that I keep hearing about in 2013 is that cities — linked together through national and global networks — must assert a leadership role in conceiving and implementing the policy changes necessary to adapt to the 21st century. Not only have these changes become too great to ignore, but the federal government that led America through the last great era of socioeconomic upheaval (the consolidation of the United States into the world’s industrial superpower) is mired in deep paralysis. Although states are meant to be the “laboratories of democracy,” they suffer from the same hyper-partisan paralysis and an institutional bias against metropolitan regions.

As a recent Economist editorial put it: “the rest of the country is starting to tackle some of its deeper competitive problems. Businesses and politicians are not waiting for the federal government to ride to their rescue… Pressed for cash, states are adopting sweeping reforms as they vie to attract investments and migrants… creative policymaking is being applied to the very problems Congress runs away from, like infrastructure spending.”

Taking a cue from a sharply partisan 2004-election postmortem by Dan Savage and the editors of The Stranger, we live in an era of The Urban Archipelago:

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that’s as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents… We’re going to demand that the Democrats focus on building their party in the cities while at the same time advancing a smart urban-growth agenda that builds the cities themselves.

This approach was plainly evident in the closing panel at NACTO’s Designing Cities conference, where as Angie Schmitt reports, “transportation chiefs from Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and New York all talked about the progress their cities have made and shared their frustration at the lack of attention to cities and transportation in the state and national political arenas.”

“Why aren’t state governments and Congress keeping up with cities? Chicago DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein proposed that it’s because city residents — especially younger residents and entrepreneurs — expect their mayors and city governments to move at a much, much faster pace. City governments have to be much more creative and nimble to respond to these demands or else risk losing the residents and businesses that power their economies.” Yet, that agility doesn’t extend to the federal level: as Randy Neufeld said, “the disconnect seems to be Congress being out of touch with the good stuff happening on the ground.”

At the conference’s opening keynote, USDOT secretary Ray LaHood bemoaned that he would have preferred to do even more to support local government innovation, but that Congress had always “taken care of our infrastructure needs — right up to this moment in history.” Indeed, he singled out “this particular Congress” as having a peculiarly awful track record at passing transportation legislation.

The bond analysts at S&P concur that devolution of authority from the federal government will continue, reports Ashley Halsey in the Post: “The burden to finance infrastructure projects will fall more heavily on local government entities or users in the form of higher rates or tolls.”

A natural follow-up to the NACTO meeting came at TRB a few months later, where Bruce Katz addressed a substantially similar crowd at the Transportation Issues in Major Cities committee meeting. In summing up his forthcoming book, he strenuously argued that federal government are paralyzed by dysfunction, states refuse to adapt to the new metropolitan reality (and indeed, many state legislatures are backsliding), and need to be bypassed if cities are to successfully adapt to new global realities. The good news is that cities are in fact stepping up — even though they usually haven’t been empowered to do so.

(This comes with a huge caveat: ultimately, even a paralyzed state is a sovereign unit — quite unlike a city, whose municipal charter [particularly in a Dillon’s Rule state] may be tremendously limiting. And it is much more difficult to do a 50-state campaign, or even a 20-state campaign, than a single national campaign.)

How can citizens and local government officials respond? We can set up peer-to-peer innovation networks so that innovations can spread more quickly and easily between cities. States and national governments can no longer be counted on to scale up innovations, but we also no longer need them to do so.

We won’t be able to innovate our way out of every intractable problem — but with a fresh understanding of the problems, we may be able to find new resources to bring to bear. For example, Janette Sadik-Khan summed up her department’s super-effective work in three broad steps:
1. Leveraging existing assets: a holistic approach to street space manages to do more with less; “back to basics” means that feet come first; local & state governments already spend $2 in general funds on transportation for every $1 in road user fees and should expect greater accountability
2. Working nimbly: in times of austerity, we can’t afford not to work smarter, not harder (echoed by Rina Cutler from Philadelphia as “we cannot not fix” urban infrastructure, and by Gabe Klein, who contrasted the old capital-intensive approach with new ways that resemble “marketing, change management, public relations, and sales”)
3. Transforming the city: Mayor Bloomberg noted that the city has surpassed records for population & GRP, but has experienced the safest five-year period in its history and has successfully directed all new travel demand onto transit.

(About the title: a friend of mine grew up in Windward, the collection of damp suburbs east of Honolulu. There, TV and radio signals from Honolulu, just five miles away, are blocked by a mountain range, so instead residents watched TV from Maui, a hundred miles away across the flat ocean. Such is life in an archipelago: sometimes we have more in common with people far away than those just on the other side of the ridge. Our cities have more to learn from one another than from their hinterlands.)

Squeezed no more!

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Above the fold Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Hey, anyone else remember this photo? I used to squeeze through fast-moving traffic on Dearborn daily and recall more than a few close calls that resulted with cabs, buses, cars, even pedestrians.

Well now, thanks to a new cycle track, those bad old days are just a memory.

Far from home

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far from home Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Hi all! Didn’t want to make this a blog-post-free month — so I am briefly chiming in from Vancouver, where I’ve been attending the Velo-City 2012 conference. There’s always so much to blog about, but I need to start setting aside blocks of time to regularly update everyone.

Cycle tracks just as popular as trails

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cycletrack Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Last week, one of my classes presented a proposal for new bicycle facilities in Old Town Alexandria, including some protected facilities. The city expects that expanding Capital Bikeshare to the neighborhood, which they plan to do later this year, will result in an increase in novice cyclists on their streets and want to create facilities that they might be more comfortable with. (Currently, there are several streets marked with sharrows.) The plan that our class developed includes a few one-way cycle tracks (like this one in Vienna), along with buffered bike lanes, contraflow bike lanes, conventional bike lanes, and more sharrows.

Will new, more protected facilities appeal to a broad population of cyclists? A 2006 UBC survey of Vancouver bicyclists — ranging from those who cycle at least once a week to those who cycle less than once a year, almost one-third of adults — says yes. In fact, the cyclists rated cycle tracks almost as highly as they rated trails, long considered the gold standard in attracting a broad range of bicyclists.

On a scale of -1 to +1, the bicyclists ranked…
0.5 paved off-street paths (trails)
0.4 unpaved trails
0.4 cycle tracks on major streets with barriers
0.4 bicycle boulevard, minor street

These, and minor streets marked as bike routes, were strongly preferred over all other road types (mostly those with no facilities, rural or urban). In particular, “Regular cyclists were willing to cycle on many of the 16 route types, but those who cycle less often, including women and people with children, did not feel comfortable cycling on major city streets, even with bike lanes, but did like the [cycle track] option.”

I’ll see if I can find more detailed data in one of the academic articles; it would be interesting to look deeper into which facilities are most popular by transect zone & cycling experience level — i.e., which facilities exist in T4 areas, and which are most likely to appeal to different kinds of cyclists.

Inadvertently opting out of gentrification in Toronto

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I’ve found some validation for my earlier hypothesis that neighborhoods which opt out of the broader housing market will also opt out of speculative consequences including gentrification. From Alan Walks and Martine August, “The Factors Inhibiting Gentrification In Areas With Little Non-Market Housing: Policy Lessons From The Toronto Experience” [Urban Studies, 45(12), November 2008, downloadable from neighbourhoodchange.ca]:

“Perhaps the most important reason why the embeddedness of the Portuguese and Chinese communities factors large in inhibiting gentrification is their control over a significant proportion of the housing stock and dominance in the local real estate sector. In both cases, houses purchased within the community tended to stay in the community and were often converted for multifamily use using their own or bartered labour. In most cases, tenants were sought from within the community, as proficiency in English remained marginal at best (Teixeira, 1998, 2000; Chan, 2006)…

“As already noted, many immigrant communities, like the Portuguese in Brockton and the Chinese in South Riverdale, finance their housing purchases through family connections and their renovations via sweat equity (Murdie, 1986, 1991). This meant that the ethnic communities were able to raise capital during a period in which inner-city housing as a whole, and these neighbourhoods in particular, were devalued (and/or considered too risky to insure) by institutionalised finance capital. The influx of ethnic capital, and the conversion of many properties to multifamily use, had the positive effect of limiting devaluation and thus the rent gap in the face of de facto redlining, therefore reducing incentives for demolition and redevelopment (Smith, 1996). Much of the increase in rental in both neighbourhoods can be attributed to the conversion of properties to multifamily by ethnic owners and much of this housing was rented to tenants from within the community as many were uncomfortable having to deal with tenants in English (Teixeira, 2007; Chan, 2006). Likewise, ethnic contacts are often sought out first when properties are put up for sale (Murdie, 1991) and, considering that demand for housing from within both the ethnic communities remained strong well into the 1990s, this would have meant that a significant portion of the housing stock was effectively removed from the capitalist property market available to gentrifiers (although it would still have been available to ethnic speculators)…

“In both cases, the reliance on ethnic sources of housing finance capital and labour appears to have played a distinct role in maintaining a measure of ethnic control over a section of the housing stock, which acted as a complementary stabilising force for the community at a key time in its evolution. Thus, a third policy recommendation would be to support the usage of ethnic and/or non-market or non-profit sources of housing finance and/or non-market programmes that can match vacant properties to new residents, thus largely bypassing the traditional housing market and in turn reducing, if not preventing, speculative real estate activity and gentrifiers’ access to key properties. Such a policy need not be targeted at ethnic communities—embattled working-class communities could also benefit from such a system… Of course, the extent of the phenomenon (of ethnic housing finance) and its precise effects in obstructing gentrification in our two case studies remains somewhat of an unknown. This is an area that clearly warrants further empirical exploration by gentrification researchers.”

Similarly, City Council actions to inhibit speculation and move housing off the marketplace helped: “in South Riverdale the city council specifically adopted policies to prevent ‘white-painting’ in the neighbourhood and protect affordable housing. While short-lived (from 1974 until 1977), a municipal ‘speculation tax’ was implemented across the city and the City’s non-profit housing corporation (City Home) was instructed to acquire selected apartment units and houses as a complement to its stock of projects and limited equity co-operatives (City of Toronto Planning Board, 1977, pp. 22, 50). Although the number of houses acquired in this way in South Riverdale was small (55 units), it was a disproportionately high share compared with the rest of the inner city and sent an important signal to the development industry that the city intended to protect low-income housing in the area.”

Other factors that may have contributed include tackiness, with the appropriate “historic preservation” response from The Powers That Be: “Perhaps even more important was the way that a significant proportion of the housing stock was renovated by the incoming southern European communities in west-central Toronto… The extent of dislike for such mediterraneanised facades is revealed by gentrifiers’ attempts to ban the use of ‘angel brick’ under the rubric of heritage preservation (Caulfield, 1994, pp. 204–207).”

They also discuss how delayed deindustrialization allowed the neighborhoods to maintain their working-class character longer — after all, industrial activity (a) creates housing demand by the working class and (b) has environmental externalities that the gentrifying classes dislike/avoid.

quick quotes

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“The federal budget for nonsecurity discretionary outlays — categories like highways and rail, education, job training, research and development, the judiciary, NASA, environmental protection, energy, the I.R.S. and more — was cut from more than 5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the 1970s to around half of that today. With the budget caps enacted in the August agreement, domestic discretionary spending would decline to less than 2 percent of G.D.P. by the end of the decade, according to the White House. Government would die by fiscal asphyxiation.” — Jeffrey Sachs

“For a BJ’s customer, you may think that is absolutely ridiculous. We never expected people to use mass transit to shop at a wholesale club.” — Patrick Smith, VP real estate of BJ’s Wholesale Club. [Not actually that unusual; Vancouver has a Costco with direct access to Skytrain.]

“It used to be that Republicans understood that transportation investment was necessary to spur economic growth and create jobs. Now, I guess they think if we give the rich enough tax breaks they will get off the golf course, get in a bulldozer, and start building roads.” — Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chair of the Senate Banking subcommittee with jurisdiction over public transportation

“Sometime during the past ten years or so food preparation officially surpassed filmmaking as the loftiest form of creative expression for the liberal arts demographic.  Furthermore, it’s essential that this food be prepared and served from some sort of vehicle (preferably a truck or a bicycle) instead of from an actual restaurant.  Part of the reason for this is of course that it’s cheaper that way, but it’s also because gentrification moves so quickly now that you need to be able to descend upon a new neighborhood within hours of reading a Tweet about it so you can provide all those young “pioneers” with the food products to which their refined palates have grown accustomed.   In any case, I have no doubt that if Darren Aronofsky were getting started today he’d never have made the movie “Pi;” instead, he’d be selling actual pies from a bakfiets.” — BSNYC weighing in on food trucks

A while ago, there was a pile-up on a Japanese highway of incredibly expensive sports cars. In the world’s second-largest car-making nation, this was a response typical of the social disapproval such showy vehicles receive: “It was a gathering of narcissists” — Mitsuyoshi Isejima of the Yamaguchi prefecture expressway traffic unit told Bloomberg.

Homes vs. Parking, ca. 1954

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Homes vs Parking Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The Smithsonian’s American History museum had this fascinating photo (from the Chicago Historical Society’s collection) of a Chicago two-flat whose owners were very unhappy about being pushed aside by redevelopment. It appears that their house was eventually taken to be a parking lot for Post Office trucks, but the date indicates that this was actually years after the Blue Line subway portal opened.

This was taken on the very same Mautene Court that WPB has spent so much effort trying to reactivate, and I’ve written about my ideas for resurrecting this block before. I hope this year’s Open Streets event on Milwaukee will feature events on Mautene, introducing the space to a broader audience.

The signs: “Homes vs Parking,” “Houses not Parking Lots,” and “We Will Not Give Up Our Home for a Parking Lot.”

Here on the south side

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Three shorts from the wrong side of the “city of magnificent intentions”:

1. Richard Layman correctly calls a proposed National Harbor casino an “enclave development,” but perhaps that’s the point.

Singapore recently legalized casino gambling, in a bid to keep business travelers amused — and so sought to minimize its impact on local residents by placing the casinos only within integrated resorts, far from local transit, and even requiring a passport check at the casino door (locals can enter for a $75 fee). That way, the city gets the tax revenue without having to deal with the external costs of residents’ gambling addictions.

The closest analogue to that situation in this area, or indeed in most any American city, would be… National Harbor. (The Maryland-waters casino boat at the pier in Chesapeake Beach, Virginia was a similarly inspired way of internalizing the benefits and externalizing the costs, but I doubt Virginia would be quite so happy with it.) I also don’t think that gambling will be all that sustainable a revenue stream, but I’d be hard pressed to find a more appropriately hidden-in-plain-sight site.

2. None other than Leon Krier, the eminence grise of classicism, weighed in on my (extended) neighborhood thusly [in Metropolis, curiously]:

“The post-war redevelopment of the Southwest D.C. neighborhood, beyond the human tragedy of wholesale clearing an entire urban community, replaced L’Enfant’s urban armature and network of streets and squares with a soulless nowhere. The gruesome operation was a crucible for imposing on Washington, D.C. the modernist vision so detested by Eisenhower, abhorred by the users and occasional visitors and avoided and ignored by those who have no obligatory business there… In my opinion [Gehry’s] expressionist design formulae would yet effect a welcome respite from the debilitating boredom of the area.”

He fondly mentions Francisco Ruiz’s counter-proposal, whose best feature by far is a statue astride the Maryland Avenue axis, entitled “The Republic Exhorts the Congress to Conscience.” I’ve thought about doing the same myself some days, but what’s the best costume?

3. I actually sorta relate to Mittens’ recent befuddling utterance that “trees are the right height” in Michigan. I grew up amidst trees, albeit too often trees marked for destruction, and after too many years at the edge of the prairie began to miss to trees. That’s one big reason why I moved back east.

October shorts

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It’s no longer shorts weather, but quick links endure!

1. Capital Bikeshare just turned one, and surprisingly has doubled its initial ridership projections and is currently running an operating surplus. [via GGW/WashCycle]

2. Economists like Ed Glaeser (and Ryan Avent, although I haven’t read his new treatise; reviewed by Rob Pitingolo in GGW and Lydia in CityPaper) often make the mistake of overly simplifying how housing markets work. Instead, numerous other important factors complicate matters, including:
– as Rob points out, housing is a bundle of goods whose utilities vary for different audiences
– housing construction can induce demand, particularly by adding amenities to a neighborhood
– housing construction can also remove amenities from a neighborhood, like a low-rise scale, thus changing other intangibles included in that bundle of goods
– construction costs don’t increase linearly; rather, costs jump at certain inflection points, like between low- and mid-rise
– housing and real estate in general are imperfect markets, since land is not a replicable commodity
– the substantial lag time for housing construction, even in less regulated markets, almost guarantees that supply will miss demand peaks

Pro-active planning remains the best and most time-honored way of pre-empting NIMBYs. Get the neighborhood to buy-in to neighborhood change early on, and then they won’t be surprised and upset when it happens.

3. Very interesting to see (via Dan Mihalopoulos/CNC) that Inspector General Joseph Ferguson has put a lot of sacred cows on the table for increasing revenue in Chicago — particularly several implicit subsidies to drivers. A downtown congestion charge, tolls on Lake Shore Drive, a commuter income tax, privatized parking enforcement, higher water/sewer fees, and higher garbage collection fees all would substantially impact suburbanites, single-family homeowners, and drivers.

4. How important are street enclosure ratios? As this gallery of reconstructed L.A. traffic sewers shows, they’re so important that almost nothing else matters if you get them right. (Photo-illustrations by David Yoon.) Back when I was reading comments on LEED-ND 1.0, a lot of complaints centered on the street enclosure requirement; I think that thinking about such urban design factors is just foreign to the architects & engineers who typically do LEED submittals. Yet it’s absolutely fundamental to defining urban rooms.

Landscape vs. New Urbanism

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A few notes I took at Charles Waldheim’s speech (the “LU vs. NU throwdown“) at CNU 19 in Madison:

1. Charles Waldheim didn’t show the same fangs towards NU in his talk that he has in his articles.

2. More about the “hegemony” of NU? Perhaps in theory, but anyone who talks like that merely shows how divorced ivory tower academics are from the practice of building tract houses, strip malls, and office campuses. It’s a huge world out there.

3. Waldheim takes credit for certain projects which aren’t quite what they seem. The High Line is a gold-plated park which works in that particular high-density context — but as Jane Jacobs points out with her discussion of small blocks vis-a-vis Park Avenue and Rockefeller Plaza, any new north-south route within the oversized Manhattan grid will create exceptional value. That goes double for the High Line, since NYC pursued a density-transfer approach that stacked even more buildable value along the High Line. It’s a proto-NU approach.

His slides only showed the Lower Don Lands project in Toronto as anything on the site (excepting the UDA-designed project just upstream) that included new urban fabric — and the urban design was by Ken Greenberg, who is a bona fide New Urbanist. Their proposal is a prime example of placing Buildings In Space without regard to the pedestrian connections or urban space between them; the landscape doesn’t allow the nodes of fabric to be contiguous, and the buildings’ jaunty angles don’t appear to have any rhyme or reason. Taking credit for the TTC’s carbon efficiency, and by extension the hydroelectric plants upstream, is manifestly cheating.

4. To complement point , he didn’t show the sorts of plans featured in the various LU books and journals — of fragmented separate-use, low density pods isolated by shards of landscape, resembling nothing so much as 1980s golf-course or marina subdivisions.

Transit to jobs

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A few notes from yesterday’s Brookings event unveiling “Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America.”

– Over the course of the recession, household incomes have fallen by $2000 and now gas costs have increased by $1000. That’s quite a squeeze!
– By 2050, America will add 130 million people — equivalent to the 2010 population of every state west of the Mississippi.
– Interesting distinction (which they explore in the report) within the Sunbelt between Western and Southern cities. I knew (having grown up in a southern suburb) that Southern cities lagged in transit coverage, but it’s really quite striking just how awful the buses are down there.
– 70% of metro Americans have transit access at home, so when people say “I don’t live near transit, it doesn’t benefit me” they’re probably lying. Put more nicely, that’s a teachable moment, and agencies could market their services better.
– The online mapping tool‘s “travel time” feature kind of reminds me of Mapnificent, but with less elegant geography and with some other data layers available.
– Sec. LaHood, answering a question about how to sell his fellow Republicans on the mere idea of investment, underscored that “debt is one priority among many.”
– These are the “biggest cities” for those of us who have specialized occupations, despise long commutes, and refuse to drive to work; i.e., metros ranked by the number of jobs reachable by the typical transit served household within a 45-minute trip (and their metro population rank in 2010):
New York: 946,058 (1)
Boston: 346,424 (10)
Chicago: 317,096 (3)
Washington: 277,092 (7)
San Francisco-Oakland: 240,819 (11)
Los Angeles: 225,838 (2)
Philadelphia-Camden: 202,724 (5)
Milwaukee: 135,829 (39)
Minneapolis-Saint Paul: 130,967 (16)
Houston: 126,364 (6)
Seattle: 117,441 (15)
Baltimore: 106,384 (20)
Pittsburgh: 102,333 (22)

Three bigger themes worth exploring:
– Households appear to be increasingly sold on the value of transit access, but it seems that corporate decision makers need to learn about the value of transit accessibility. Regional chambers of commerce would be a good platform for this education — one example that comes to mind is the Metropolis Pledge — and perhaps also commercial real estate brokerages could play a role. Once upon a time, I worked for a company that was in the process of relocating a large number of workers away from transit; their internal surveys showed that many workers were displeased with the move, but employees were only consulted after the decision had been made.
– Last mile circulation does not appear cost-effective with standard metrics like farebox recovery ratio or passenger loads, according to Keith Parker from VIA in San Antonio. Yet this segment of the transit market is the prime PPP opportunity, whether in shuttle buses or TOD or whatever, since the last mile is where the real value capture opportunities lie.
– From an urban design standpoint, there’s been some discussion at past CNUs about workplace New Urbanism, and to broaden the typical definition of “mixed use” from the usual (residential with some retail and maybe a bit of office, all of which is fairly high-rent). It’s a little disingenuous to say that all workplaces can be brought near transit — many of the low-skilled industries that Brookings identifies as lacking in transit access are probably hopelessly dispersed or just rural (agriculture, forestry, mining, repair, construction). Seems like there’s plenty of scope to bring many mid-skilled industries (manufacturing, TCU) into the TOD fold.