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.

bq. “A lot of times these buildings are replaced with multi-unit buildings that are limited in space,” said Ward Miller, president of Logan Square Preservation. “Couples move in, find themselves running short on space and within a short period of time, leave. We’re looking for long-term stakeholders.” (quoted by Johnathon E. Briggs in Chicago Tribune

I know Ward and have long supported his efforts to preserve key buildings and areas within Logan Square, but this notion — that those who live in single-family buildings (vs. condo owners) or owners (vs. renters), stay in the neighborhood longer, are more invested in the community, and thus are more deserving — is a myth, plain and simple. Oddly, the wealthy north-side neighborhoods with higher rates of homeownership also have much higher rates of transience; in Bucktown, the millionaires in the single-family houses are not necessarily in for the long run and most definitely do not have the time to spare to get involved with the community. Heck, they don’t even add “eyes on the street,” as they just drive in and out, hiring others to deliver their pizzas and walk their dogs. I’d hazard that a high-rise housing low-income seniors would bring in many more involved community residents than an entire block of million-dollar McMansions.

The Greenbelt Alliance offers up a few turn-by turn “self-guided outings… through neighborhoods around the Bay Area, highlighting “good developments”:http://www.greenbelt.org/whatwedo/prog_cdt_projectsummary.html and pointing out opportunities for even more” — a good template for those wanting to do a “Tour de Sprawl”:http://www.northstar.sierraclub.org/tour-de-sprawl (Twin Cities link, or try “Athens, Georgia”:http://www.bikeathens.com/activities/tds/index.html)

I’d talked with local Sierra Club people about doing one, but the requisite two or three meetings never happened or the right people just didn’t come together; it might be fun to assemble one for next year’s Spaces & Places.

bq. The Alliance [for a Livable Los Angeles] uses several strategies to achieve its mission including candidate forums during election times, bringing the “Making Los Angeles More Livable” presentation to community groups, and organizing the Y.I.M.B.Y (Yes-In-My-Back-Yard) Brigade.

(I realize that I have a couple of incomplete posts from last year about reurbanizing L.A. Maybe soon.)

US EPA has collected a set of sample
Smart Growth scorecards from around the country. These scorecards “help communities assess their policies and proposed development projects” — they’re preliminary certification schemes, of a sort.

Next, I’d like to see a scoring of the scorecards.

The academic Modernists really don’t deserve to be taken seriously: as Susan Stone reports in Der Spiegel Online, a Morphosis proposal [“illustration”:http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,585866,00.jpg%5D seriously proposes abandoning three-fourths of New Orleans. The proposal states: “Given the prediction that the city, even three years out, will have lost 50 percent of its population, and the general assumption of uncertainty, the city realistically can neither re-build infrastructure nor resume services at pre-Katrina levels.” The Dutch curator of this exhibit calls the proposal “frank” and “most realistic,” and Morphosis has indeed built work — much of it for famously blindered public clients.

This hardly shows that Thom Mayne is off his rocker; indeed, it’s eminently sensible, ecologically and logically realistic to let southern Louisiana return to its naturally swampy state. Yet these people still don’t have a clue about the political and social realities of the world, which simply refuses to fit into ziggy little glass boxes. Residents of even the lowest-lying neighborhoods are angrily shouting down anyone who says that their homes and neighborhoods should be left to cattails and alligators. This hardly bodes well for the High Modernists’ ability to successfully navigate politics and actually build something.

And besides, this is somehow a new idea? This looks substantially similar to the Bring Back New Orleans Commission’s plan, primarily written by WRT (where CNU co-founder Dan Solomon and former board member Jonathan Barnett work), which at least proposed a method for identifying neighborhoods that could be either resettled or abandoned. Of course, that idea went down in flames as well.

From a Miami New Times interview with Alfreo Triff:

*Alfredo Triff*: There are those who defend a more traditionalist program. I’m thinking of New Urbanism. What’s your take on it?

*Zaha Hadid*: I try to avoid decrees, so don’t have one single idea about urban planning. Spaces don’t have to be necessarily traditional in the sense of squares. We can always reinvent the idea of civic space. Some of the New Urbanism [sic] ideas are interesting. My problem is when a program becomes dogmatic and develops into something too conservative. New Urbanism has this idea of mixed-use, small streets, and accessibility. It can work well in some places, but it may not work in others. There’s no tabula rasa that works all over. The problem is when this program is realized as a gated community [apparently in reference to Aqua Allison Island].

To her credit, she apparently has moved past the fallacious understanding of NU as neoclassical architecture, but I’d still be curious to know about the contexts that require inaccessible sprawl. Certain auto-oriented land uses (malls, warehouses) might, but expensive energy might render those uses obsolete.

Admiring the mountain view

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

A cyclist pauses to, well, ignore the view. Montr�al, Vancouver, and Portland all share the same glory: a T1 forested mountain butting up against T6 downtown, with the skyscrapers and mountain offering fantastic views of one another. Montr�al has the added good sense to cap the buildings’ heights to keep the two in dialogue with one another.

Daniel Brook’s article on Measure 37 in the current Legal Affairs attributes the measure’s passage (and the cracking of the long-standing consensus in favor of planning) as a failure of imagination. Unlike Tom McCall, who spoke poetically on behalf of how the state’s beauty — both rural and urban — were in serious decline, opponents failed to demonstrate how the state’s planning regime was at risk, and how that planning regime has helped the state make monumental strides in everyday individuals’ collective and personal quality of life.

Yet rather than trying to draw the connection by showing voters what Oregon might look like without smart growth, the measure’s opponents let its backers define the terms of debate. The tagline of one anti-37 ad I saw wasn’t much of a rallying cry: “No on 37: Arbitrary, Unfair, Costly.” […]

OIA’S campaign didn’t succesed because of an appeal to self-interest alone, however. It was aided by complacency. OIA polling found that 54 percent of Oregonians who had had a run-in with the state’s planning system rated the experience poor or worse. Yet the same poll estimated that less than half of the state’s residents had ever had a run-in with planners at all, whether positive or negative. OIA’s campaign relied on the outrage and self-interest of those who felt they’d been burned by the system, but it also relied on those who had used a superior transit system, breathed cleaner air, or picnicked in a park without crediting the system that protected those benefits of living in Oregon.

The real genius of OIA’s campaign was in its having convinced voters who might otherwise have been disinclined to dismantle their state’s planning system that a vote for 37 was a vote to safeguard rights, not curtail them.

The rights being curtailed, of course, are the public’s right to livable, beautiful spaces. Yes, in fact, that is social engineering of sort, but sprawl is just as socially engineered as any other alternative growth mechanism. The foolish cry of “it’s my land, I can do what I want with it” is absolutely maddening in this context.

It was the fear of a paradise paved that mobilized Oregonians to undertake their experiment in smart growth in the first place. As Metro Council President Bragdon told me, in the 1970s “people saw a reason to act. Population was growing, the air was getting dirtier, downtown Portland was dying, there was disinvestment. And all of that sort of activated people in a way they ordinarily would not be activated around something as arcane and abstract as land use planning. At least for that brief period, people saw the relevance of it and the importance of it.” [emphasis added]

Someone at SkyscraperPage has compiled a fascinating set of maps comparing the built-up areas and transportation networks (road and rail) of most major American cities. Unfortunately, exactly what the scale is appears to be a mystery.

San Jose city officials, perhaps finally realizing that Silicon Valley will eventually need to mature into a real urban center, have proposed a tremendous upzoning of much of the city. Among other plans, downtown could double its office space and triple its residential base, while some office park areas would disappear under new urban centers. Although the plan would authorize a spectacular 70,000 new housing units, it still suffers from the usual economic-development bias towards employment: the 50 million square feet of additional commercial development authorized would, if filled with one job per 200 square feet (a typical figure for office these days) result in 250,000 new jobs.

Still, it’s encouraging to see that at least one local government (besides Oakland, that is) realizes that the Bay Area has tremendous pent-up demand for urban environments.

City leaders have launched perhaps the most ambitious overhaul ever of San Jose’s development policies. The effort encompasses more than 11,500 acres — more than a third of San Jose’s total — affecting every region of the community. If approved over the next 12 months, when the plans are expected to go to the council, the effort promises to push still largely suburban San Jose into an urban 21st century, at least in designated and concentrated areas.

In all, the city’s plans have the potential to increase San Jose’s housing stock by as much as 70,000 units, most of it high density, and to increase its industrial development capacity by nearly 50 million square feet — the rough equivalent of six downtown San Joses…

Faced with the loss of more than 200,000 jobs, the continuing decline of the region’s manufacturing, and the offshoring of much lower-level programming work, the city of San Jose undertook a massive evaluation of its economy two years ago. Among many other findings, it discovered a growing mismatch between its existing development and land-use plans and the region’s economic future.

No longer did area businesses want the low-slung, one- and two-story concrete research and development buildings so emblematic of Silicon Valley’s grittier past. Instead, the new class of company such as eBay and BEA Systems, which intended to keep their Silicon Valley headquarters, wanted mid-rise structures with lots of glass.

The tiny start-ups for which the region continues to be known, and on which it is banking its future, often were unequipped or unwilling to own their own buildings. Instead, they wanted to be one tenant of many similar to them in a large building. Further, they weren’t interested in working in a sea of windowless, industrial buildings with few nearby restaurants and little nearby housing. They wanted a real community with both.

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