Category Archives: urban planning

Crowdfunded commerce can spark conversation about community change

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fundrise

Crowdfunding holds the potential to improve accountability and shine light on the currently ill-understood development process, better aligning the interests of developers and communities. No, for-profit equity issuance may not be as democratic as other means of ownership, and doesn’t guarantee community control. Yet in a conversation we had after my previous blog post, Ben Miller mentioned a few aspects about Fundrise’s plans offer a way for developers to work with, rather than against, neighborhood wishes:

1. Besides relatively cheap capital, crowdfunding allows the owners (the crowd) to learn about, openly discuss, and perhaps make the trade-offs necessary to keep an urban commercial district balanced.

Gentrification along a retail corridor usually results in a familiar tale of woe,, repeated in city after city:
– a few businesses pioneer the area
– they draw more customers in
– sales and values rise, more shops open
– land owners cash in, raise rents
– better-capitalized, less interesting shops move in
– the pioneer businesses get priced out.
The end result is a tragedy of the commons, where nobody is accountable for maintaining the “unique, authentic, cool vibe” that initially drew people to the area, which is subsequently lost as each owner maximizes her own value.

Non-profit or public ownership of anchor institutions (i.e., public markets, performing arts centers) can sometimes prevent the cycle from reaching its zenith, but much of the cool factor often stems from local, for-profit businesses ineligible for non-profit status. But as it currently stands, few owners are willing to take the financial penalty that comes with cross-subsidizing interesting retail — aside from a few examples of particularly generous landlords (whose heirs may not be so generous) or with moguls who own a significant chunk of land.

Those moguls can act like shopping mall landlords: one of the big breakthroughs for the mall was the realization that the right mix of retailers could offer something for everyone in the family, all under one roof. Unified ownership and management can afford to pick and choose tenants to perfect that mix: Jonathan O’Connell at the Post unearthed a Morningstar report about Tysons Galleria finding that some mall tenants pay almost three times as much per foot as others within the same mall.

Community ownership of retail space creates a similar opportunity: the crowd can choose to forego the higher cash rents that a chain retailer or formulaic restaurant might offer, and instead opt to derive non-monetary value from something less lucrative but more interesting. The crowd has an advantage over a mogul or mall owner: no one individual or company has all the answers, and unlike a corporate owner, the crowd isn’t obliged to answer to a financier who would probably say no.

The public policy tools available to tame the cycle of commercial gentrification are so blunt as to be useless, or even counter-productive: “formula retail” ordinances, inanely specific use regulations, liquor license moratoriums, retail rent control, or the good old-fashioned BANANA techniques of downzoning and historic-designation overreach. Even CDC control hasn’t always proved durable, since non-profit CDCs have limited access to capital markets.

2. At 906 H St., Fundrise is crowdsourcing tenant ideas; this was one of the plans from the start (and a separate platform called Popularise). The Maketto market at 1351 H St. had earlier won in a similar vote. Requests for for-profit retail amenities (rather than non-profit public facilities) also dominate other crowdsourced public involvement platforms, like Neighborland.

Pairing crowdfunding with crowdsourcing allows potential patrons to “put their money where their mouth is.” Since businesses answer only to customers with cash, directly involving only the investor pool doesn’t quite pose the same that’s-not-real-democracy quandary. Unlike with a cooperative business, the crowd has little say over the inside workings of the business — which bypasses the micro-managing tendency of co-ops, and allows individual entrepreneurs to bring their singular visions to fruition.

In instances where promised for-profit retail amenities are an important element of a community benefits package, crowdsourcing those amenities and backing them with crowdfunded capital could ensure the longevity of those businesses.

Crowdsourcing tenant ideas also reduces costs for the developers (and thus investors) for brokerage and for carrying costs. And if the crowd has an idea that doesn’t exist yet — Ben and I both wondered why there aren’t proper dive bars around* — it also has a built-in vehicle for raising capital.

3. My earlier post riffed off a Post article highlighting how wealth managers didn’t look kindly upon Fundrise as an investment. From their standpoint, it’s not a product that they understand: it’s illiquid, it’s highly speculative, and poorly diversified. A good portfolio allocation strategy should include only a small slice for crowdfunding investments for these reasons — but the same rules apply for any high-net-worth “qualified investor” who, up until now, has always had the option of making a private-placement investment of a small (or even large) slice of their portfolio into illiquid real estate equity.

It’s also funny how the same wealth managers rarely comment on the value of homeownership, a similarly large, illiquid, and leveraged investment that most Americans have over-weighted their portfolios with. Yes, diversification is a good thing, but so is community ownership, and so is education. Crowdfunding real estate investors are likely to be within their home market — one of the few markets in which their superior on-the-ground market knowledge gives them an edge over outside investors. In gateway cities like Washington, D.C., regional property values are inflated by the presence of so much outside capital chasing returns and liquidity, and crowdfunding — along with even more democratic investment vehicles like investment co-ops, credit unions, community bonds, and the like — offers a venue for urban communities to leverage their own investment dollars and assert some (limited) level of economic control over their own fates.

A correction about equity classes: Ben Miller from Fundrise (whose latest public offering sold out) noted via Twitter that my recent post about Fundrise makes “A few small errors about the equity” — which I’ve corrected, and for which I apologize. Indeed, Fundrise equity is pari passu: all classes receive equal economic rights. In the event of a liquidation, debt holders will be paid first, but if there’s a haircut for equity holders it would be equal — you get back proportionately what you paid in.

Ben explained that shareholder dilution would be more likely to occur through a recapitalization or subsequent rights offering. If the corporation needs more capital, Class A shareholders would have the opportunity to make member loans, but Class C shareholders would not — that would get complicated and probably wouldn’t be worth the paperwork. Those member loans would then be senior to equity, but junior to the mortgage.

* Yeah, I know that besides high rent, the city’s lack of a working-class heritage in the pre-TV halcyon days of Third Places, probably has a lot to do with that void.

Help, the station ate my walk shed (1)

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Part 1. How 400 meters becomes 100 meters

Armitage

When I lived on West North Avenue (the namesake of this blog), I could walk out my front door, hear an “L” train approaching from behind the apartment, dash across the street and around the block, and catch said train at the station a block away. When I recently asked Chicago friends about how much time it took for them to travel through their “L” stations, the responses were quizzical: “Uh, seconds?” “Less than a minute on either end. Perhaps you should be measuring in seconds.”

Wheaton Metro escalator

The Washington Metro might have record-smashing escalators and awe-inspiring cathedral ceilings in place of the L’s humdrum wooden platforms, but the sheer size of its stations hurts its usability for short trips, writes Ian Rasmussen:

“You’ll almost never hear about how long it takes to get from the street to the platform when people are telling you how long a transit trip is going to take… [I]n the context of systems designed to attract longer trips (30, 40 minutes), it hardly matters. But in the case of shorter trips, such as those in the urban core where the system is intended to act as a circulator, the issue cripples the system… just think of how you feel waiting to get off an airplane when you are about to miss your connecting flight.”

When combined with shameful 20-minute headways, the two or three minutes* it takes to descend to, or emerge from, a Metrorail platform add up to a substantial fixed time penalty on short trips within the core. It isn’t just the flowing mezzanines and interminable escalators, either: even in dense residential neighborhoods, stations often empty into meaningless plazas rather than seamlessly meeting the neighborhood. Over time, buildings will grow towards the station (as at Columbia Heights), but this process takes decades and has often been stymied by poor planning decisions.

Potomac Ave

This is not to absolve Chicago: it arguably invented the expressway median transit line and thus spawned places like Rosemont — which Yonah Freemark called “the Land of Missed Opportunity” for its uniquely awful transit-adjacent development pattern. The town of Rosemont** obviously understands that its “L” access gives it a valuable advantage over more distant suburbs. However, its station area pedestrian experience is just monumentally bad, with an uncharacteristically lengthy “L” station emptying out into a bus parking lot in the middle of an interchange. The net result: absolutely nothing, besides said bus terminal, is within the five-minute walk shed (below). Rosemont has attempted to compensate by subsidizing all-day circulator shuttles to feed its new retail/entertainment hub, but no shuttle can match the spontaneity of a quick lunchtime walk.

Rosemont "L" walk shed

Expressway median stations suffer from a triple whammy of poor geometry:
1. The geometries of the surrounding environment are often defined by the 70 MPH cars swirling around them (particularly since the busy streets that make sense for station entrances also make sense for land-gobbling interchanges), rather than the 3 MPH pedestrians within;
2. Much of the walk shed is wasted crossing the freeway itself, much less interchanges;
3. The adjacent land uses either want to shy away from the freeway’s noise and smoke, or surround themselves with moats of parking and limited access routes, or both.

The same geometric problem is hardly intrinsic to rail. Bus rapid transit, which essentially is the interface between a highway for heavy buses and pedestrians, faces exactly the same problem. Here’s the award-winning system in Guangzhou:

Guangzhou

The service had better be really fast, and really frequent, to be worth braving all that just to get to the bus stop. This sort of grade separation (also seen in Ottawa) is unusual; cost containment usually leaves pedestrians running in front of buses at grade, as in Cleveland:

Euclid at PlayHouse Square

Many of the inexpensive freight-rail alignments used for recent light-rail projects suffer from a similar (although less extreme) distance from the urban fabric. The north end of Baltimore’s light rail line runs in the former Baltimore & Susquehanna (B&S) Railroad ROW north to Timonium, alongside a stream valley, separated from adjacent development by buffers, grade changes, woods, and (to the east) the Jones Falls Expressway.

P1080461

The LRT corridor passes many major activity centers on the north side of Baltimore, including two campuses of Johns Hopkins University, parks encompassing the stream valleys and adjacent hills, the Woodberry area of redeveloped mills, prosperous neighborhoods like Hampden and Roland Park, and at the northern end the backs of retail and business complexes facing York Road in the northern suburbs. However, historically development of residential and retail uses focused on the hills above the stream valley and freight railroad; the only uses directly fronting onto the railroad today are station access uses and some renovated mills. Jeff Wood notes that Minneapolis is about to embark on a similar mistake with its Southwest LRT project.

In short, to genuinely intertwine transit with city life, it has to be as close & convenient as physically possible. Don’t cheap out on an inexpensive but inconvenient alignment, don’t over-engineer stations, and seek the smallest possible station footprints that will do the job. These principles should seem obvious, but too many new transit projects still don’t get this interface right. I’ll explore some more examples in two future posts.

* Times measured at Rosslyn and Court House.

** For those unfamiliar with Chicago, Rosemont has leveraged its unique location surrounded by the city’s transport links (airport, freeway, beltway, transit) to suck “profitable” airport-adjacent offices & hotels from a city that warehouses its low-wage workforce. Therefore, it’s the quintessential parasitic “affluent job center.” [OK, slightly strange link, but I couldn’t find any other summary of Myron Orfield’s Metropolitics suburban-town typology that was in HTML rather than PDF.]

Towards a unified theory of midtowns

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Midtown Atlanta

 

 

Downtowns, or central business districts, have been well-studied in the economic literature, but The Metropolitan Revolution is one of the few texts I’ve seen that not only mentions midtowns but posits that they hold the key to future regional economic growth. A midtown typically was a secondary business district that arose to serve the wealthy, uptown residential precincts, and eventually attracted some of the “nice” amenities that wealthy residents wanted to have close to home and away from the congestion of downtown. Yet, as eds & meds employment in particular have boomed, these tranquil bastions have become employment centers in their own right, and perhaps regional economic strategies should zero in on linkages between these areas and other regional economic nodes — and to the likely-interesting neighborhoods around them.

Pages 138-139:

What Detroit Teaches Us

Detroit is drawing a new geography of innovation, tearing down the traditional, artificial borders that have long divided downtowns and midtowns in the United States. Virtually every major city in this country has a strong central business district (mostly for the congregation of government, corporate headquarters, entertainment venues, and some cultural functions), a strong midtown area (where eds and meds and historic museums tend to concentrate), and a state-of-the-art transit corridor, mostly built within the past twenty years, connecting the two. Each of these discrete building blocks brings particular assets that, in turn, provide a platform for a key element of innovation district growth.

They point to Detroit, Houston, Cleveland, and Buffalo as prime examples, and mention Atlanta, Denver, Indianapolis, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Syracuse, and “even Las Vegas” in passing.

At first, I was a bit taken aback by the certainty of saying that “virtually every major city” fits this pattern, but I can’t think of many that don’t, particularly if one applies a geographically expansive definition to “midtown.” Strong examples include Westwood in LA, Longwood-Fenway or Cambridge in Boston, OSU in Columbus, or West End-Delmar in St. Louis. Sometimes downtown and midtown seamlessly blend with the CBD, as with Foggy Bottom & Georgetown in DC, McGill in Montreal, or Streeterville in Chicago.

It’s also intriguing to think that, with policies and investments directed towards creating a cohesive neighborhood, anchor institutions could be aggregated into a midtown which either never existed or deteriorated due to regional growth dynamics. UIC-Medical Center in Chicago is an obvious candidate; Howard-Washington Hospital Center in DC is another. In that instance, development of the McMillan site creates that missing physical link between the two.

Oh, and this call garners a subtle eye-roll from this generalist, who’s had a tough time monetizing that interdisciplinary knowledge:

[T]he people who deliver innovation districts would constitute a new network of metro builders who cut across disciplines, programs, practices, and professions. Modern society has deified specialists and technicians who diagnose and strive to fix discrete problems–say, traffic congestion or slum housing. Metro builders, by contrast, would be fluent in multiple city “languages”–architecture, demographics, engineering, economics, and sociology–and be cognizant of theory and practice. They would see the connections between challenges and work to devise and implement policies that advance multiple objectives simultaneously.

An alien notion: 800,000 D.C. residents

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How was it possible to fit over 800,000 people within the boundaries of the District of Columbia back in 1950?

My, what spacious quarters you Earthlings have

Copyright 1951 Twentieth Century Fox

The 1951 sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” inadvertently shows us how. Klaatu, an extra-terrestrial emissary and nuclear-free advocate, escapes captivity at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and wanders down Georgia Ave. to try and disappear into everyday D.C. To do so, Klaatu checks into a boarding house at 14th & Harvard in Columbia Heights. Each room houses one or two people, and as such there’s scant privacy to be had: everyone overhears everything. This is convenient for Klaatu (at left, in disguise), who knows little of Earthlings’ simple ways, but probably annoying for the Earthlings.

Crowded conditions like these were common in District homes at the time. The 1950 census found 14.1% of the District’s 224,142 occupied housing units to be overcrowded (with >1 person per room). By 2011, that figure had fallen two-thirds, to 4.7%; back in 1950, 5.3% of homes were extremely overcrowded (>1.5 occupants per room).

This crowding meant that on average, every apartment and house in D.C. had one more person living inside: households were 50.2% larger! In 1950, 3.2 people occupied each dwelling unit. In 2007-2011, the number of persons per household had fallen to 2.13, so the city’s population still fell to 617,996. That decline would have been much steeper had the city not built 74,760 new housing units: the city’s population would have plunged to 477,422, and the nation’s capital would be less populous than Fresno.

As the city gets reacquainted with the notion of population growth and begins to plan for a much larger population within the same boundaries, we’ll have to have a realistic conversation about household sizes and housing production. A change of just 0.09 persons per household means the difference between planning for 103,860 or 140,515 additional housing units,* for 35% or 47% more units. That amounts to 2,000-3,000 additional units per square mile of land, after subtracting the 10.5 square miles of parks and 7 square miles of water from DC’s 68 square miles.

Klaatu, unfamiliar with our contentious Earth politics and “impatient with stupidity,” might propose to build a platform of five-units-per-acre suburbia above the existing city, or require every second or third home to be subdivided, or return to 1950s household sizes and require every home to take in one boarder (and not necessarily fugitives). But since Klaatu is no longer with us, we will instead have to figure out more complicated ways of infilling a built-up city.

We’ve obviously figured it out before; after all, D.C. has added an Alexandria’s worth of housing units to its existing housing stock since 1950, plus plenty of offices, museums, hospitals, parking garages, and the like. A lot of that change has happened around places like 1615 M St. NW, the address where a 1954 radio version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” placed Klaatu’s boarding house. Today, 1615 M is a nine-story Class A office building that brackets the historic Magruder and Sumner schools. The area above K but below Massachusetts was a high-density mixed residential area in the 1950s, what Park & Burgess would’ve known as “the zone in transition,” but today the height-constrained CBD has spread north to Massachusetts. Yet in fact many foreign visitors still board on that block, at the Jefferson Hotel and the University of California’s Washington Center.

Unlike in the movie, there is no way that Klaatu can make D.C.’s growth “Stand Still,” and so the built fabric of many other D.C. neighborhoods will have to change in the near future. Thankfully, neither is there a violent Gort parked on the Ellipse who will destroy the earth with laser-beam eyes if we don’t all just get along.

* Based on this 2006 Urban Institute/Fannie Mae Foundation report by Margery Austin Turner forecasting 100,000 new residents, a target that the Sustainable DC Plan recently raised to 250,000.
** Not to spoil anything, but the Earthlings outside the boarding house extend plenty of Cold-War-era-Earth-y hospitality.

Behold: a historic parking lot?

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Town Center Towers

I really try not to let these things annoy me, but the facts of this particular case just leave me dumbfounded. Last week, my local ANC meeting was filled with condo dwellers so angry over losing their views that they are attempting to use the historic-preservation process* as an end run around development. Yes, I’ve not only seen this movie before, I’ve starred in this movie before.

The most obvious flaw in their reasoning: it’s legally indefensible. The proposed PUD is a mirror image (two 11 story towers at the corners, low townhouses in the middle) of a PUD approved by both the city and the HPRB on an identical site one block away. (The photo is of the mirror site’s north parking lot.) Approving one plan, but rejecting an identical plan, would be the very definition of “arbitrary and capricious,” and therefore illegal, zoning.

Opposing the PUD is also a bad idea in practice. By-right zoning (R5D: 4.2 FAR, 90 ft. height, 75% lot occupancy) permits a wider, larger, but shorter building on the parcel than the one proposed, which would impair their views even more. Even though one neighbor dismissed this as “more empty threats,” there is legally nothing that can stop a by-right development. The developer should opt for taller, thinner buildings, because they still own (and rent out) one of the two impacted towers, and it’s in their interest not to impair their own property’s views — i.e., they have as much to lose as the condo owners.

Besides, the subject property is an appropriate location for a high-rise. It is a pair of 40-year-old parking lots, one 300′ (1/18 of a mile) from a Metro entrance, with two bus stops adjacent, surrounded by high-rises. The location earns 21 of 27 possible points under LEED-ND‘s Smart Location & Linkage section and 21 of the 29 points in the major Neighborhood Pattern & Design credits, -4. It’s impossible to do a full scoring without knowing more about the building design, but based on those credits, its location and program put LEED-ND Platinum (passing score 73%) well within reach.

Not only is the location appropriate for infill, the density is hardly excessive. Even with ~2,000 additional units proposed by Bernstein, Fairfield at Marina View, Sky House, and the NW/NE buildings at Waterfront Station, plus the 512 units between the four Town Center Towers, the gross density of the 31.4 acre Town Center superblock is still under 80 DUA [plus <1 FAR of commercial & civic buildings]. Heck, that’s walk-up density.

Infill developments that replaced urban renewal-era open spaces have improved property values, appearances, and amenities nationwide: in Boston’s West End, Portland’s Lloyd Center, Los Angeles’ Park La Brea, Battery Park City, even just to the north at Potomac Place Tower. Similar developments have even won awards from historic preservation groups. Attracting more shops, services, and residents to Southwest will dramatically improve the entire neighborhood’s property values, and provide homes for thousands in a growing city.

If this sets a precedent that even incidental open spaces surrounding old buildings are equally historic, then hundreds of now-historic buildings that form the fabric of our city could never have been built: not just Modernist examples like Tiber Island’s towers surrounding Law House, or the AIA headquarters that embrace the Octagon House, but even the Old Executive Office Building, DC’s courthouses, and the Mall’s museums (contrast this 1851 map to today’s built fabric). Or the striking, and now lauded, Arena Stage expansion shown above. Cities change, and the best cities have built fabrics that weave together collaged layers of history instead of freezing everything at one arbitrary moment in time.

I can’t knowledgeably comment upon what I have heard or read about the he-said, she-said back-and-forth regarding who signed what agreement or who threatened whom with nastygrams, but the offering contracts’ “not to impede… the further development” clause do not leave the homeowners with much negotiating room.

* For most communities, the only court-approved legal maneuver that allows a government to act as taste police. In DC, we also have the CFA, and back in the day Berman vs. Parker implicitly granted the Redevelopment Land Authority sweeping powers over aesthetics.

The Planning Fetish: Comprehensive Plans

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A guest post by Jennifer Hurley AICP, CNUa, PP, sent via channels affiliated with CNU NextGen. Although I didn’t write this, I agree wholeheartedly based on my experience working in several cities with varying degrees of commitment to comprehensive planning.

Planners have a fetish about comprehensive plans. Their belief in the power of comprehensive plans and their obsession with creating comprehensive plans illustrates what anthropologists call “magical thinking.”

Comprehensive planning as taught in most planning schools is a failed institution. I’ll pause for the collective gasp. Unless required by state law, most communities undertake a comprehensive planning process rarely, if ever. For years, planners have bemoaned this state of affairs—if people only understood what we do and how it benefits them. To address the lack of interest in comprehensive planning, planners have taken a marketing and education approach, trying to persuade people that we have a product they need.

But the market is telling us something. Maybe we should listen. If comprehensive plans were truly useful and a good return on investment, communities would presumably clamor for their creation. So why don’t communities “do” comprehensive planning?

Comprehensive Planning is too expensive. Being thorough in scope, data analysis, public participation, policy formulation, and urban design is incredibly expensive. It takes a great deal of technical expertise and time. Only a few communities can afford to do it at all, and even those only occasionally.

Comprehensive Planning is exhausting. In addition to the expense and exhaustion, comprehensive planning is no fun. Planning staff, public officials, and the public experience burnout. Once they complete the plan, they don’t want to touch it again for years.

Comprehensive Planning is not effective. Most comprehensive plans sit on a shelf rather than motivate people to action. The thoroughness of comprehensive plans means that few people have the time or attention to read the document, and no one uses it as a ready reference. Planning Departments often specify in Requests for Proposals that they want a plan that is “implementable”, gets used, and does not “just sit on a shelf.” They know what they do not want, but they do not know what to ask for in its place.

How can planners overcome these weaknesses in conventional comprehensive planning? The answer lies in understanding “plan” in its verb form rather than its noun form. The “plan” itself is simply a byproduct, not the most important outcome, of good planning. The most important task of comprehensive planning is to develop extensive understanding and not just to include everything and the kitchen sink.

Planners can provide value, improve the communities in which they work, and raise the profile the planning profession by focusing on three basic aspects of good planning.

Visioning: A community, group, organization, etc. needs a shared vision of the future they hope to reach. A vision is what people see when they can imagine that all of the constraints of today have fallen away. The community’s vision is not merely an amalgamation of many individuals’ visions, but something larger that individuals uncover and build together through group efforts. A concrete, articulated vision gives people a goal, a collective sense of direction, and a reason for moving forward through hard work. Achieving that specific vision is not important; in fact, the changing environment almost guarantees that any vision we articulate today will be out of date in the time it takes to achieve it. What is important about the vision is the motivation and collective goal it provides.

Relationship & Community Building: Community and the relationships that make up community comprise the living, breathing organism through which we carry out action. We need to leverage our targeted, short-term planning processes and interventions to build stronger relationships, healthier communities, and organizational capacity. The effects of a planning process reverberate through an area for years, possibly decades. Long after the specific details and data are obsolete, the quality of the experience, the institutions nurtured, and the relationships built through the process shape the future.

Strategic Action Planning: Strategic Planning involves analyzing various aspects of the environment, including physical, social, economic, political, etc., to evaluate how they affect realization of the vision. Action Planning creates a vital roadmap for immediate next steps. Putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, is the only way things get done. The institutionalization of repeated rounds of Strategic Action Planning transforms planning from its noun form (an occasional process resulting in a static product) into its verb form (an ongoing method for acting in the world).

The world needs planners and planning. We owe it to the communities in which we work to provide effective planning. We cannot allow our blind faith to deprive the world of good planning.

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.)

Parks are free, right?

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Stripey
See those high-rises? They paid for Millennium Park.

And this month’s award for Not Getting the Point goes to:

“The idea that McMillan could be Washington’s Millennium Park or High Line, that kind of creativity has never come to the project,” [John] Salatti [of Bloomingdale] says.

Not only does he want a free park instead of taxpaying development on a decrepit old industrial site that the District needs to develop to meet its own revenue projections. Not only that, but he wants a park on par with two fabulously expensive parks: $475 million and $250 million apiece just for construction, plus ~$9 million a year apiece in maintenance, and all even though his neighborhood is a half-hour stroll from the National Mall, which is not only about as big as Grant Park and Central Park combined, but might have a few world-class attractions of its own. (And yes, in fact, building The Park Of Their Dreams on the unstable structure and soils at the Sand Filtration Plant would in fact cost somewhere in the nine figures.)

No, the real stupidity lies in his ignorance of park financing. Both of those parks were largely paid for by lining said parks with skyscrapers: Millennium Park with revenue from the Central Loop TIF, bolstered by 80-story towers that boast park views, and parking garages underneath it that serve the adjacent downtown; the High Line only became possible by selling its underlying development rights and upzoning some adjacent areas by 50% to permit residential towers in an industrial zone.

It seems especially rich when these NIMBYs lash out in ad hominem attacks that impugn the ethics of anyone (including me) who disagrees with them: obviously, they must be paid off by the greedy developer, since money is apparently the only possible motivation. These folks know something about selfishness: They want city taxpayers to lavish hundreds of millions of dollars to beautify their backyard, in addition to foregoing a considerable opportunity cost from new development.

Peak Car presentation

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Taking to the street

I gave a brief Pecha Kucha presentation last night at CNU-DC‘s bimonthly 20×20 series. My topic was “Peak Car: nothing to fear here,” in a weak attempt to fit into the month’s Halloween theme. Peak Car doesn’t mean Apocalypse Now — cars will continue to be an important way for millions of people to get around — but it means that a whole series of assumptions around having to always increase pavement supply need to end, and a new set of assumptions around sharing urban spaces among many modes (and methods of interaction) needs to begin.

PK presentations don’t lend themselves to extensive quotes or footnotes, so here are three bonus items:
1. Mark Halper’s article at SmartPlanet provided background on the cost of alternative automotive fuels. Takeaway: $4+ “gas” is here to stay, regardless of whether it’s actually gasoline or something else. Joel Garreau made this point in Edge City (p. 126) back in 1991, and despite all the technological advances since then, it still holds true.
2. Christine MacDonald wrote in CityPaper about Joe Mamo, who holds a near-monopoly on DC’s gasoline supply — but not because the gas business is lucrative (it’s in a long term decline, as even oil industry CEOs admit), but because they’re an opportunistic real estate play: “The market is changing. A lot of properties are being used for best and highest use, as the properties become more expensive. So the chances are less and less gas stations in the future.”
3. The takeaway: car access to a location will slowly mean less and less in the future. Non-car access to a location will increase in importance. There are great tools out there, like Mapnificent, which can help us visualize these relative differences.

Stay tuned for a February follow-up about how America can love its streets once again.

Ethnoburbs: why not?

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James Frank Dy Zarsadiaz in The Atlantic Cities writes about his ethnographic research into Asian immigrants in Diamond Bar, Calif. (where my cousin lives and works):

While scholars and researchers rightfully problematize political economies, migration patterns, and social dynamics between different racial and class groups in the contemporary ethnoburb, oftentimes post-1965 Asian immigrants moved to these neighborhoods for tangible and banal reasons. Interviewees provided various mundane and frank motives as to why the east Valley sold them twenty or thirty years ago: inexpensive new housing, reputable school districts, easy access to work, distance from urban crime and racial “others,” and by the late 1980s and 1990s, conveniences to ethnic commodities.

As banal as the reasons for moving to suburbia are, though, Asian Americans have reshaped suburbia in some interesting ways. The San Gabriel Valley’s population shift has been accompanied by an influx of a few things that conventional sprawl didn’t accommodate well — like extended families and myriad small businesses — and the towns there have started to extensively retrofit their built environment to accommodate them. By organically adding mixed uses and a wider range of housing types, they’re perhaps well out in front of suburbs elsewhere in America that are seeking to improve their resilience.

Last year, I presented as part of a “Cultural Urbanism” panel at the Next Generation of the New Urbanism which explored additional implications for urbanism that might arise as American metropolitan areas become more multi-ethnic — and assimilate different metropolitan values from the world’s cities.

My bonus slide’s call to action: Great urbanism exists outside of Europe. Before pointing to European cities in your presentations, keep in mind that the next generation of Americans looks quite different. Urban America is already majority minority, and soon America’s children will be as well.

Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even North America are filled with great examples of wonderful urbanism, in contexts no more “foreign” than Europe — so find them, and use them. Want to talk about bike infrastructure? Show off Bogota and Montreal. Transit oriented development? Curitiba and Hong Kong. Mass re-housing under capitalism? Santiago and Singapore. Organic, medieval street networks? You’ll find none more enchanting than Casablanca or Kyoto.

Southwest Washington: introduction

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This school year, I’m working on a series of projects relating to my neighborhood of Southwest Waterfront. Since this semester’s work is with a team of other students less familiar with the neighborhood, I’ll be posting resources about the neighborhood on a periodic basis, which you can easily find using the swdc tag.

Walk through Southwest Waterfront

A few months ago, I gave a short presentation to CNU-DC based on a summertime walk around the neighborhood. Note that this covers only the Waterfront residential neighborhood, not the Southwest Rectangle (Federal Center & L’Enfant Plaza) office precinct north of I-395. You can download the PowerPoint or take a look at the photos on Flickr.

There are also a lot of great, easy-to-use online resources. I particularly like:

An extensive collection of original documents related to urban renewal in Washington can be found at the Washingtoniana Collection, on the third floor of the MLK Library at Gallery Place.

Shorts: Austin + Madison, McLean, the South

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1. No, it’s not another post about trendy baby names of the Aughts… Bike Snob NYC visits two cities that have also recently hosted the Congress for the New Urbanism, and once again I feel validated:

Austin:

If you enjoy shirtless motorcycling, being drunk in revealing clothing, or just plain shouting “Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!” like a Fred who’s just hit 46mph, then Austin is your kind of town. If, on the other hand, you prefer more refined pleasures such as quiet cocktails, polite conversation, and maintaining your dignity, you might be more at home elsewhere.

Madison:

As it turns out, Madison is more than just “bike friendly,” and it’s actually so affectionate towards cyclists that it sometimes gropes you in a way that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable… I daresay that Minneapolis and Madison may be even more rideable than “The Artisanal ‘P’.” In particular, riding in Madison was like riding a cotton candy bicycle while being tickled with buttercups…

2. Speaking of fabled places, I would never have guessed that this line by Bobbi Bowman would have been filed from the Beltway’s Republican redoubt:

That battle was basically a clash of visions of downtown McLean. The vision of JBG and its partner, a townhouse developer, was townhouses, a garage on Elm Street with the first floor of restaurants and retail space, a tot lot, and improved storm-water management. The Planning Committee, McLean’s citizen-planners, envisioned apartments, higher density and no garage. [emphasis mine]

3. One of the strange-at-first-glance statistics in a recent Pew report on intermarriage is that the South, which led the opposition to mixed marriages, has a higher incidence of intermarriage than the Midwest or Northeast, although lower than the West. That ranking appears to be an artifact of two factors:
– exposure appears to lower rates of out-marriage in the Midwest; more homogenous states just don’t give their residents much opportunity to out-marry
– Florida and Texas are part of the Census Bureau’s definition of the South, and both share with the West a Hispanic heritage — which, by long-standing Census definition, is already a mix.