Malls: the long goodbye

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Second Floor, Owings Mills Mall

The slow contraction of the market for enclosed suburban shopping malls is part of a long-term trend, exacerbated by the credit crunch. I found a 2005 report from the International Council of Shopping Centers (hardly an anti-mall bunch!) that included a very noisy graph of shopping mall openings over the years. I chose to smooth the curve by (arbitrarily) calculating three-year moving averages instead, rounded to the nearest whole #:

 

1987-1989: 10
1990-1992: 15
1993-1995: 6
1996-1998: 6
1999-2001: 5
2002-2004: 4

 

The steep decline from the early ’90s occurred despite bubbly, credit-happy economies in the late ’90s and mid ’00s. Also, keep in mind that malls take several years to finance and build, so arguably developers quietly began aborting mall proposals around 1990, when the power center began its meteoric rise (and subsequent decline; Emerging Trends 2013 ranks them as the worst property type to invest in). The numbers since then (also from ICSC and from press reports) have been just dismal, both before and after the 2008 crisis:

 

2005: 2
2006: 1
2007: 0
2008: 0
2009: 0
2010: 0
2011: 0
2012: 1*

 

Even in a recent article trumpeting “Return of the Mall!,” Retail Traffic magazine admitted that “there is little, if any, room for new enclosed regional mall development… Even prior to the current downturn, the U.S. mall market was near the point of saturation. During the 1970s, the heyday of the mall, U.S. developers delivered a total of 375 million square feet of new space. By contrast, in the 2000s, new mall deliveries fell 62 percent, to 144 million square feet, according to research from CoStar.” The best that the article can muster is that trophy malls are still prospering, and that other shopping-center categories have been hit by bigger sales declines. Personally, I don’t know if that’s saying much; I’ve always thought that power centers were most vulnerable to online shopping — out-competed on price and selection (the only selling points of big box) — and we’ve seen that with the recent collapse of many big-box chains.

 
Given the number of malls that have closed — over 40% of enclosed malls built even in the DC region have shuttered — malls have been trending in reverse for almost 20 years now. They were sputtering in the mid/late 1990s, and over the 2000s I’d bet that many more have closed than opened. This isn’t some short-lived, newfangled fad, this is a seriously big shift in how Americans shop (and, in a consumer society, live).
 
Retail may have been the first property sector to see a huge momentum shift away from Edge Cities. Now that momentum in the residential and office markets** has shifted away from the suburbs, it’s hard to argue that drivable suburbia is still what Americans demand.

* City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake City replaced two enclosed malls that had failed. Net mall count was still reduced by one.
** Emerging Trends ranked “severely handicapped” suburban office the second-worst investment. Just as with malls, this trend is a long time coming: nationally, suburban office vacancy rates used to track downtown office vacancies, but decoupled in 1998 and have stubbornly remained about 5% higher through peaks and troughs ever since. Similarly, the best housing investments were ranked as infill/intown, senior, student, and affordable, with golf course communities and master-planned resorts ranking a shade above “abysmal” as the absolute worst property subsectors to be in.

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.

Wider fronts in the not-war on cars: the East Coast & the world

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More data points that I’d meant to post in last week’s update from the trenches:

1. Doug Short has graphs of population-adjusted VMT going back to 1971. Interestingly, most of the decades seem to see pretty steady growth, with growth rates (relative to 1971, so not even accounting for the larger base) declining in the 1990s, leveling off in the early 2000s, and beginning a sharp decline thereafter. The cumulative effect of that curve? Americans drive about half as many miles as would have been projected in the late 1980s, based on the fast-growing trend line at that time. Time to shred all those old highway plans, folks! (Via Brad Plumer‘s latest post on VMT trends)

2. A bunch of papers and videos from the OECD on driving trends in the USA, France, Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, and Australia. (Also via Plumer.)

3. “Gasoline demand stayed flat in states bordering the Gulf of Mexico or in the Rockies. But on the East Coast, it has slipped 10% below its peak level…. it has accounted for half the overall drop since the [peak]… The more striking trend: East Coasters are simply driving less. Vehicle miles traveled in Northeast and South Atlantic states in the year ended in March were 4.2% lower than in the same period ended in September 2007. In the rest of the U.S., they are down just 0.5%.” — Liam Denning, WSJ

Vehicle mix also factors in: “Real Americans” are 2.62X more likely to buy pickups than us effete eastern elitists, and 11.6% less likely to buy a hybrid car, but I doubt that vehicle mix has changed enough over the past few years to explain the differing outcomes.

4. I took this photo in 2005; it was in 2004 that the VMT trend began to sputter. In 2013, the gas station has closed, and a Tesla dealership opened across the street. So yeah, it’s tough to be in the gas biz these days.

$4/gallon, here we come!

5. Of course, Todd Litman from VTPI is always more comprehensive about this topic than anyone else. Here’s his 30-page take, which he updates frequently.

6. Contrast these data points to the comparatively rosy (for carmakers, and therefore awful for the planet) scenario recently posited in the Economist:

One reason for concern is that half the world’s population now lives in towns and cities, which have only so much space for cars… Young urban residents may also be meeting up less often in person, thanks to social-networking sites that let them keep in touch digitally. So they have less need for a car… In particular, the generation who came of age after 2000, the so-called “millennials”, express a preference for having access to rather than owning cars…

[S]tudies also show a marked rise in the proportion of elderly people with driving licences. Baby-boomers pretty much all learned to drive, and now that they are beginning to retire they expect to continue motoring. The development of assisted driving, followed one day by fully automated cars, will allow them to stay mobile for much longer.

What may be happening in rich countries is a one-off shift in the timing of people’s driving careers, so that they start later but then continue well into old age. This may be no bad thing for carmakers… So it is not clear that declining car ownership among young urbanites will have more than a marginal effect on overall car sales….

All in all, “peak car”—the point at which worldwide demand for cars will stop rising—still seems quite a long way off. In the rich world some of the economic factors that have deterred young people from taking up driving will fade away: as cars become increasingly self-piloting and accident rates fall, insurance costs should decrease, and in time there will be little or no need to take expensive lessons.

Perhaps true, but retirees generally don’t travel very far, and VMT/capita drops off considerably at retirement. Crowded cities in developing Africa, Asia, and Latin America have less potential for car growth, and have arguably embraced many transportation innovations faster than the rich world has.

Metro DC’s not that rich (for the most part)

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Western Avenue
Western at Wisconsin in Friendship Heights: not Madison Ave. by a long stretch

Nate Cohn in the New Republic addresses a factoid that really bugs me: metropolitan Washington is not the wealthiest region in the country, because sums, means, and medians are all quite different things. Rather, the surprisingly high median household incomes posted by many suburban jurisdictions here reflect a large upper middle class of dual-income white-collar families, rather than the very spiky (higher average, lower median) incomes that one finds in New York City or Chicago (or, perhaps even more strikingly, metro Chicago).

Compare, for instance, the Gini coefficients for income (derived from 5-year ACS):
Central jurisdictions
New York County (Manhattan): 0.60
District of Columbia: 0.53
Suburban jurisdictions
Fairfield County, Conn.: 0.53
Hudson County, N.J.: 0.48
Prince George’s County, Md.: 0.38
Loudoun County, Va.: 0.36

For the suburban jurisdictions, that’s the difference between Brazil or Zimbabwe-level inequality in NYC suburbs vs. Japan-level inequality in the Washington suburbs. Despite the District having worse income inequality than any state,* the region as a whole ranks 82nd among top-100 metro areas in income inequality.

This broad equality also contributes to the region’s general good performance on other economic metrics. Despite the extortionate cost of housing locally, proportionately high incomes for the middle class mean that the cost of living is about as reasonable as in Des Moines. A preponderance of well-paid jobs makes the area the most productive in the USA, as the returns on labor are pretty broadly distributed here.

This particular factoid is a favorite of those who trot out the tired “Boomtown DC, growing fat on your tax dollars” GOP talking point. That would have been a correct storyline back when Virginia defense contractors were getting rich off of Presidents Reagan & Bush(es), but it doesn’t quite hold today for various reasons. Besides, those complaining might take a closer look at how wealth elsewhere ultimately stems from federally directed subsidies from “the rest of us”: boomtown Houston flourishes only through vast implicit subsidies to untaxed, unregulated carbon pollution, and booming NYC (with more cranes building more flats for the superrich than anywhere else in the USA) is fed by a federally bankrolled financial industry.

Incidentally, anyone who is looking for the super-rich around here shouldn’t look along the Red Line. Wisconsin Ave. may have “Gucci Gulch,” but besides its relative lack of ostentation (a clue that the real money in America is elsewhere), it’s not nearly as exclusive as the sensitive watershed to its south. Stephen Higley locates the real gold coast along the Potomac gorge: the storied Embassy Row — so named because many of its Gilded Age mansions now house chanceries — of Massachusetts Ave. and its Maryland extension, River Road, plus their Virginia counterpart of Georgetown Pike.

* Typical disclaimer: D.C., as a wholly urbanized place, is not comparable to any state. Urban areas usually have higher inequality, since the very wealthy generally earn their living only within metropolitan economies.

The Metro Way to more of Arlington & Alexandria

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A few weeks ago in class, some classmates and I made this firmly tongue-in-cheek PowerPoint in support of the Metro Way bus rapid transit system that will launch soon in Arlington-Alexandria’s Route 1 corridor.

Jokes and !!!!!!!s aside, one useful idea contained therein makes BRT a particularly compelling idea for this half-dedicated-ROW corridor: its extendibility. Metro Way not only has its dedicated ROWs within Crystal City & Potomac Yards, but also relatively free-flowing limited-access roads at its north end. Thus, limited-stop route extensions can connect Crystal City to numerous transit interchanges:
– North to the Pentagon bus interchange
– North along 110 to Rosslyn, which might make up for lost Blue Line service between Pentagon and Rosslyn
– North along Washington Blvd. to Clarendon, if demand warrants an Arlington crosstown express
– Southwest along Shirley Busway to Shirlington, perhaps through-routing with future Shirley Busway BRT service through Shirlington to Beauregard

In addition, extending the routes several blocks south from Braddock Road would bring BRT service to either Old Town/Market Square or King Street Metro — the latter a connecting point not just to DASH but also the Richmond Highway express bus.

Retail = restaurants in 2013

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axis
Findlay Market in Cincinnati, always a great place to buy food

It’s not just you: nationwide, what’s opening on Main Street is pretty much only restaurants. To quantify this hunch, retail consultancy Terranomics compiled expansion plans from numerous chains and found:

40% of new retail unit openings will be restaurants… there really are not an enormous number of options out there for landlords looking to backfill smaller shop spaces… There is only one segment of the market where we are seeing aggressive growth plans from inline users and that is the restaurant sector… As e-commerce increasingly competes with the bricks-and-mortar retail landscape, shopping centers will find themselves insulated against those technology driven shifts by beefing up dining and entertaining options that do not compete with the internet.

Yes, we’d all love to be able to walk to the corner and buy some bolts from a corner hardware store, or socks from an apparel shop, but let’s face it: not enough of us do that often enough to sustain very many such businesses, particularly in areas that don’t have enough foot traffic to guarantee significant cross-shopping. Such uses will increasingly congregate within metropolitan subcenters — probably focused on today’s fortress malls or midtown destinations — so there will be winners and losers among retail nodes. At least everyone will have someplace to eat, though.

(BTW, connectivity to those subcenters will be necessary from ever-wider catchment areas. This will require rapid transit, not just walk accelerators like streetcars or bikeshare, in order to connect neighborhoods to retail focal points.)

What will those centers look like? A new ULI report by Leanne Lachman and Deborah Brett (complete with a cover image of a yarn-happy hipster using Square to buy a single-speed cruiser bike) suggests the following tenant mix to keep a lifestyle center — a format designed around Boomer women — relevant to Millennials. I’ll stifle my giggles.

  • a broader choice of eateries;
  • apparel brands favored by Gen Y (such as J. Crew, Old Navy, Forever 21,
    H&M, Zara);
  • a gym;
  • hair/blow-dry salons;
  • Trader Joe’s and green grocers;
  • a bike shop;
  • a pet store and/or a dog run; or
  • uniquely local offerings.

Third places are surprisingly important, with restaurants nearly rivaling homes as gathering locations:

Favorite places to get together with friends (pick three)
At home—my place or theirs 66%
At a restaurant 59%
At a bar 30%
At a shopping center 28%
At a coffee shop 22%
At a park/the beach 20%

(There’s also this amusing mental image: “Hispanics’ propensity to go out for weekend brunch is especially notable. Brunch is also more popular in the South, where 20 percent go weekly, and among downtown residents, with one-third saying they go for brunch each weekend.”)

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, #1-4. 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.

Map: mortgage interest deduction underwrites suburbs

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Mortgage interest deduction amounts by ZIP

See those donut holes? Inner-city areas with low rates of homeownership, low incomes (and thus fewer residents who itemize deductions), and relatively lower property values are receiving far less of America’s fattest housing subsidy — the mortgage-interest personal income tax deduction (see previous discussion) — than their better-off suburbs. The sprawl subsidies continue apace.

The bigger picture is that this is a subsidy that overwhelmingly benefits wealthy people who have expensive houses, and big mortgages to match — and thus benefits “coastal elites” more.

Map from the Pew Center on the States’ report “The Geographic Distribution of the Mortgage Interest Deduction” (PDF).

War or not, it’s working

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“…because the mayor hasn’t declared a war on cars. I doubt that anyone disagrees that we need to reduce traffic. I would call it an effort to get people to use alternative transportation.” – Mayor Vincent Gray, 20 February 2013

Okay, so I think we’ve established that there is no war on cars. But call it what you will, “efforts to get people to use alternative transportation” do seem to be working quite well, as steep declines in people using cars to get to work (lighter lines) are declining vs. people using “sweet modes” increases (from MWCOG research):

How Washington, D.C. residents get to work

One net result is that the doom-and-gloom traffic apocalypse predictions are now no longer valid. Even if VMT resumes its 40-year upward track — an exceedingly unlikely occurrence given recent trends — the past several years of flat or declining VMT has permanently dented the total, and therefore the amount of road space needed in the future (from OSPIRG):

VMT increase projections

Driving is not coming back. It’s time to get used to it.

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?

by

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.