Pretty ambitious, too.

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

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

Disappointment

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She defines New Urbanism thusly:

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

My response:

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

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