Twenty years

by

(The usual winter travel schedule means fewer updates. Flickr is probably the best way to follow me around; see the photostream at right.)

A follow-on. “Even if you don’t move, the city will move around you.” — Mary Schmich on Chicago Public Radio, 7 January 2008

1987. My mom looks up from under a wide straw hat to scan the horizon for her two sons, romping with buckets amidst rows of strawberries planted atop sandy little ridges. I grabbed fat berries, sure, but mostly focused on plucking out the vigorous, blossoming runners that had taken root in the aisles — the better for propagation at home. (To this day, the occasional strawberry pops up as a weed in the back lawn.) Scrubby pine trees frame the farm on all sides, except for an old farmhouse with a gravel apron, now serving as gas station and general store.

The year I was born, the census counted 21,763 people in Cary, the sleepy town four miles down the road from this strawberry patch. The strawberries themselves were a sign of creeping urbanization. Years ago, this land was so prized for tobacco that J.B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company built a short-line railroad down this way from their Durham factories. However, the land was now too valuable for commodity crops, so the Sears family went with strawberries instead — aiming to profit off the burgeoning numbers of young families swelling the school ranks in town.

While I was in middle school, the adjacent forests began melting away to make way for development: hundreds of culs-de-sac lined with thousands of houses with brick fronts and gas grills behind, sand traps lining 7,011 yards of golf links, brown stormwater detention ponds tinted an inviting blue on maps displayed on model-home walls; long lines of brake lights arrayed at stoplights, obstructing a daily stampede of network operations controllers, plant geneticists, and copy-machine repairers to and fro their respective cubicles.

All through the Bush I economic downturn, Wake County chugged along with unemployment below 3% — a siren song calling across the land. The moving trucks kept pulling up to driveways, with the cinder-block walls of supermarkets, banks, and schools following close behind. Magazines proclaimed its charms in cover stories; later, eager refugees sought out answers to their thousands of questions on online forums.

Today, the country crossroads that I vaguely remember sounds more fiction than distant memory. The town of 20,000 now finds itself in the middle of a vast metropolis with nearly two million residents. A clock tower, fountains splaying at its base, announces the completion of the second of a planned quartet of shopping “villages” arrayed around the corner of High House Road and Davis Drive. Stone Creek Village takes the elements of a small strip mall and explodes them into an array of one- and two-story buildings surrounding a traffic circle, a broad boulevard, and other finely detailed if overly geometric public spaces. The entire ensemble squeezes into narrow downslope between the street above and a retention basin below — hence, perhaps, the ostentatious clock tower.

Across the way, the same architect placed blue gables atop Cornerstone — the first, and least fancifully embellished with urban ambitions, strip mall here — recalling nothing so much as the Magic Kingdom as they peek out from over the now-mature trees out front.

At the southeast corner and directly on the strawberry farm’s site, SearStone takes a more integrated approach (they even splash “New Urbanism” across their web site) to a senior development — with a few shops, a small hotel, and a continuing care facility among the walking-distance amenities promised to residents.

The newest, perhaps to begin construction soon, even provoked some dramatic political intrigue in what I had remembered as a town so sleepy and well-governed that the cops did away-on-vacation courtesy checks and pulled people over if their brake lights didn’t work. Charlotte-based Crosland, whose success with the Birkdale Village lifestyle center in Huntersville led CEO Todd Mansfield (recently appointed chairman of ULI’s board) led it to embrace mixed-use development, has plans for a similar development, although lighter on retail, at the northeast corner of the intersection. It went through months of acrimonious hearings as neighbors objected to its size. Ultimately, the threat of political backlash predicted at the final hearing came true: the ultimately approved development, even though it largely conformed with the existing comprehensive plan, became a contentious issue in the town council election and helped to contribute to swing the town’s political pendulum back towards slow growth.

It all sounds, and sometimes feels, completely random — countless other farms just outside countless other American towns look almost the same as they did 20 years ago. These farmers hit the lottery; but actually, they didn’t: the “instant city” was the work of many thousands of hands over several decades. How did this one intersection get to be the way it is? Why do cities arise in the places they do? Why do some regions prosper while others falter; why Cary, N.C. and not Napoleon, Ohio? And if smart people (of which the Triangle has no shortage) could design an instant city to house one million residents, to be built over the span of 20 years, would it look anything like what the Triangle looks like today?

Brides

by

Several complaints about downtown Coral Gables being chock-full of bridal shops brought this little story to mind:

Las Tunas Avenue (silly name, no?) in Temple City, Calif. is lined with Asian bridal shops with cheesy names like Love City. The Anglo neighbors began to get suspicious of drug fronts, not unexpectedly wondering where exactly the demand for bridal gowns was coming from.

What was happening, of course, was just a natural aggregation of businesses: the inevitable intersection of a young and growing immigrant population (many of whom spend quite lavishly on weddings) with time-pressed young brides who like to spend a lot of time comparison shopping. As word of the bridal shops began spreading, more began opening to cash in on the trend. And since bridal boutiques run high margins on low volume (and often do “house calls”), they appear to be “suspiciously” low on customers.

Red-eye escapes

by

(To be crossposted at carfreechicago; please add comments there)

Got a free weekend? Like trains? Amtrak offers car-free Chicagoans plenty of chances to make a quick one- or two-day weekend escape with “red-eye” (overnight) trains from Chicago to several cities that are a few hundred miles away. I like traveling overnight, since it offers maximum sightseeing time at your destination and cuts back on expensive hotel stays.

Thrifty, non-fidgety sorts can travel in coach for less than the price of airfare, and typically right into downtown. Those who prefer a little more pampering can spring for a sleeper, which offers complete privacy, a flat bed, and free meals. In either case, you’ll travel without road rage or air rage, and usually without worrying much about ground transportation on the other end. One drawback is that slow trains put most of the East Coast out of reach.

Some cities worth a weekend visit:

  • Memphis via the City of New Orleans
  • Pittsburgh or Cleveland (a long day) via Capitol Limited
  • Cincinnati (a long day); Charleston, W.Va.; Beckley, W.Va. (near the Winterplace ski resort); White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. via Cardinal
  • Cleveland (a long day) or Buffalo via Lake Shore Limited
  • It might be possible to arrange a long weekend, although with an early departure and late arrival, in Denver or Winter Park via the California Zephyr

The many short-haul lines out of Chicago can be used for day trips to locations too close for an overnight. Destinations include:

Megabus also offers many overnight trips for cities that are a little bit closer by, or for which Amtrak has inconvenient day schedules — and boasts its famously low prices. Granted, it doesn’t offer quite the space that Amtrak affords you, but its (mostly) clean, new buses certainly put a new face onto intercity buses. Their overnight destinations include Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati (a long day), Minneapolis, Kansas City (a short day), and St. Louis. Day trip options include Indianapolis, Madison, and Milwaukee.

J-diversification

by

Two video games that I spent much time with during high school suddenly make so much more sense — after wandering around Japanese cities for a few days. A-Train and SimTower, both of which were published in the USA by Maxis (creator of SimCity), have at their hearts urban and business models that respond to conditions quite unique to Japan — a society that, despite its considerable automotive might, practically defines “transit oriented development.” Both games were fascinating looks into the integrally interlinked role that transportation, both horizontal and vertical, plays in a densely populated society.

In A-Train, the game player is put in charge of a for-profit commuter and freight railway system serving local travel within a growing metropolitan region. As with Japanese rail systems, the lion’s share of potential profits stem not from railway operations but from the two “ancillary” businesses also in the simulation: property development and stock market speculation (based on the “keiretsu” cross-holdings model that was an integral part of the “Japan Inc.” business model).

Indeed, a 1997 study by Takahiko Saito comparing Japan’s “major private railways” found that 55% of operating profits (aka EBITDA, an earnings figure that excludes capital spending) stem from non-transportation operations. In most cases (and in the much larger case of Hong Kong’s MTR) property development, management, and operations were the largest contributor to profits — oh, and note that buses are usually run at a loss, presumably because they support profits elsewhere in the operation. (Even in U.S. regions with privately operated commuter buses, like Coach USA’s lines in New Jersey and Wisconsin, public subsidies play a key role.)

Ratings and Investment Information, a financial research firm, confirms that is still the case for the private railway sector: “transport’s contribution is… just under 50%” of EBITDA cash flow. The mainline railway business is just not that profitable, despite the railways being in a uniquely ideal profit-generating situation, with uniformly high densities across huge urban areas, and very aggressive management. Saito writes:

The fact that railway companies engaged in commuter transport in large cities could maintain sound management without government subsidy is remarkable to managers of railway companies in other countries. The traffic market in large Japanese cities is extremely favourable to railway management.

One strange “bug” that the game’s Wikipedia entry notes results from an anti-trust situation: the human player competes against the simulation to develop property, but only the player can place certain high-value developments (particularly recreational facilities like stadia, golf courses, and ski resorts). Since the player has a monopoly on these facilities, their market value is bid up tremendously, and their construction offers a ready source of cash and/or leverage opportunities. Indeed, winning the game seems well nigh impossible without exploiting this loophole; in particular, the capital cost of building new rail infrastructure simply cannot be recovered solely through railroad profits.

The game curiously omits the notion that freeways would compete with the rails for intra-urban traffic. The cost of driving in Japan — despite the lack of a Singapore-style conscious price-rationing system for road space, a combination of high tolls (a crosstown roundtrip can easily cost $40, as the expressways are also privately owned) and high prices for imported gas — discourages single occupant car trips.

(Of course, long distance rail companies in Japan still cheerily accept government subsidies for capital costs and to cover operating deficits in rural areas — a formula that could serve Amtrak well, except that almost all of America is “rural” by Japanese standards.)

SimTower gives the player a blank slate of land upon which to build a mixed-use skyscraper. Here, the transportation challenge is vertical, rather than horizontal: arranging a menu of wildly varying mixed uses (offices, condos, shops, hotel rooms, ballrooms, fast food, restaurants, cinemas, lobbies, a wedding chapel, a subway station, parking) around various circulation elements (local and express elevators, stairs, and escalators). Many of the simulated occupants were assumed to never leave the tower in the course of a day.

Mixed-use skyscrapers certainly aren’t unheard of in the USA, but the degree to which uses are mixed together and shoehorned in is far greater in land-short Japan: dozens of blocks in even small cities are lined with three-to-ten story buildings, perhaps on 3,000 square foot sites, stacked high with shops, fast-food joints, and bars. Underground retail concourses, second-floor shops, even food courts high inside skyscrapers and department stores don’t just exist, they thrive. One particular thing that surprised me about the game was the occupants’ seemingly insatiable demand for restaurants; true to form, Japanese shopping malls often have as many (or more!) eateries as shops — a nation of tiny kitchens and long working hours results in considerable demand for eating out. The main JR train station in Nagoya (one of the first large instances of a post-privatization JR company branching out into property) houses five floors with perhaps 50 eateries (from breakfast through cocktails) high above ground level, in addition to countless more food options at or below grade in several interconnected buildings.

The most ambitious mixed-use complexes surround or surmount railroad transfer stations, which offer the broadest market reach. Tokyo, with its longstanding decentralizing policy of terminating the private suburban railways at the circular Yamanote line (only subway and JR lines extend into the core), offers the most obvious illustration of this concept: each intersection between the Yamanote and a major suburban railway has spawned an urban node that surely rivals Midtown Manhattan in urban energy. And since the terminals are controlled by private railroads, they have a strong economic incentive to fill their station areas with a land-use mix promoting round-the-clock ridership — hence the preference for retail and entertainment over blank, faceless office towers.

To be sure, countless social and economic differences mean that these lessons can’t be transferred directly to America. However, the Japanese experience does demonstrate that private real estate interests — guided, of course, by public policy (e.g., the world’s highest farm subsidies) — can have tremendous success in profitably creating transit-oriented development, and illustrates the stupendous amount of urban value that transit infrastructure can generate.

Dark sky

by

From a Bloomberg article by Bob Ivry:

The skyline of Miami is visible from Key Biscayne, the barrier island where John Rosser lives. Some nights the real estate broker scans the new buildings and sees more dark windows than lighted.

That skyline — dozens of huge towers, some with lighted crowns, stairwells, and parking garages; others with silent cranes; most of them otherwise eerily dark shadows looming overhead — makes downtown Miami feel like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. Just saying.

Mismatched incentives for cycling

by

[I’m leaving town in a few hours and NOT bringing a computer with me. Therefore, expect zero posts for at least two weeks!]

Alan Durning points out,
in another installment in his “Bicycle Neglect” series about cycling, an interesting cost-benefit analysis that examined just one of cycling’s many positive aspects and pitted it against one of the more obvious negative aspects — the purportedly unjustifiably high cost of bicycle facilities.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, the public cost to install and maintain a network of five bike and pedestrian trail was about $100 per year for each person who became more physically active as a consequence, according to an article in the journal Preventive Medicine. The cyclists and walkers who used the trail paid another $100 each per year, on average, for running shoes or bikes, bringing the total cost of the trail to about $200 per user. Meanwhile, the health benefits of using the trails – largely, savings on medical bills – were above $550 a year per trail user, according to a related journal article.

The trouble is that even if we know that the benefits of said facilities outweigh their costs, those benefits are far too widely dispersed across the economy to make sense to your average transportation policymaker — and to your average commuter with a choice. Indeed, the social benefits of cycling appear to exceed even the substantial personal benefits:

At rush hour, in town, a mile you bike rather than drive saves you a quarter dollar, plus the cost of parking, and adds about a quarter hour to your life. The same rush-hour mile biked provides even bigger benefits to your community: some 50 cents, just for quantifiable gains.

As with transit, this introduces a significant market failure: since the primary benefits are external and the primary costs (for most people, the fear of being hit by a car and the additional time involved) are internal, it doesn’t “seem” to make sense for any individual to take up cycling — unless society (those who benefit most from having people cycle) creates incentives to do so. In other words, governments has a responsibility to subsidize “good” behaviors (those that create significant social/external benefits, like cycling and transit use) to better balance individuals’ cost-benefit calculations — all while taxing “bad” behaviors (those with high individual benefits and high social costs), like driving.

Similarly, any discussion of the (de)merits of specific modes is incomplete if it solely examines that individual cost-benefit calculation.

Now that we’ve established that communities should spend lavishly on bicycle facilities, what should they do? The FHWA’s BikeSafe has a new “Bicycle Countermeasure Selection Tool” that will tell you with a few clicks!

Retail courts lost and found

by

I stumbled across this delightfully human-scaled space in the middle of the variously anonymous and flashy bank towers of uptown Charlotte:

Brevard Court and Latta Arcade together provide homes for dozens of tiny businesses — Latta is divided into miniature, 500 sq. ft. bays — along a through-block passage off Tryon Street, Charlotte’s main drag. A preservation easement over the site protects it in perpetuity, even if the current tenanting plan seems a little uninspired. (Most everything was shut at 5 PM, and a few forgettable fast food chains visually dominate the space.)

Closer to home, in supposedly preservation-obsessed Oak Park, a place similar in size and scale to Latta — Westgate, a picturesque (“storybook style”) parking-court ensemble of two-story Tudor facades just half a block behind the main drag of Lake Street — is about to get summarily wiped away after 75 years. A series of insensitive developments gradually walled Westgate off from the rest of downtown: the 1950s filling in of an open-air arcade to Lake Street (the building in yellow, Tudor on the back and Deco in the front), and the botched 1990s tilt-up retail complex that “revitalized” Harlem at the expense of the town around it.

Here it is today, still mostly intact.

Of course, the same quest that led to the Harlem buildings getting wiped away in favor of hopelessly bland chain retailers in forgettable strip-mall brick boxes has come back with a vengeance. Vince Michaels has an overview of the process that led — even after an official commission heard from several professionals who urged its salvation — to the village’s announcement of an RFP to bulldoze half of what remains at Westgate and replace it with what’s optimistically termed “transit oriented mixed-use infill.” The village’s RFP only said “encouraged” teams to “investigate” saving “some of the facades.” This week, the only RFP responses selected to proceed all declined this “encouragement” in favor of teardown.

6. Historic Preservation: The Oak Park Historic Preservation Commission has indicated a preference for saving some of the facades of the Westgate buildings on the RFQ parcels and integrating them into the design of a redevelopment project. Teams are encouraged to investigate this possibility as part of their preliminary plan submittal — especially if it helps with the LEED Certification Process…

And here’s an overview of the RFP parcels (in red).

Now, I’m no reflexive NIMBY — I got excommunicated by my neighborhood association for speaking in favor of a giant condo literally in my backyard, and I’m also obviously a fan of human-scale hotels and big box retailers (what the proposals, well, propose) — but really. When you have something this exquisitely human scaled, sitting in an enviable location next to a major transit hub in an upscale area, and surrounded by underutilized land, you can make it work — by demolishing the throwaway retail boxes and parking lots at the heavily trafficked edges of the block, not the historic ensemble in the center.

Socialist baseball

by

Hooray! A local group, For Fans Sake, is attempting to socialize the Cubs. Well, not really, but they’re offering shares in a company that would replicate the community ownership model behind the Green Bay Packers, instead of selling the franchise to some random egomaniac billionaire. From their FAQ:

How much money can I make on this?

None.

Un-American!

EDIT: Okay, when I wrote that, I was thinking “social ownership of the means of production,” not “welfare state,” as in “corporate welfare subsidiaries to benefit billionaires” — like the wastrel governor maneuvering to buy the stadium, thereby removing a potential liability from the team’s balance sheet as its ownership shifts from one billionaire’s pocket to another.

Every step of the tomato’s way

by

Andrew Martin in the New York Times notices a new study that adds a few wrinkles to the locavores’ “local is better” equation with food. As with any simple equation that attempts to summarize an endlessly complex system, it has nuances.

Gail Feenstra, a food system analyst at the [University of California at] Davis campus, says her group hopes the research will help consumers decide if buying local is better than buying organic food that has traveled hundreds of miles. “Maybe you can buy organic within a certain geographic range, and outside of that the trade-offs won’t work anymore,” Ms. Feenstra said.

At some point, the ethical maze can make you dizzy. But there was one line of inquiry from the California researchers that hit particularly close to home: the carbon impact of shoppers themselves.

Some people walk or take the subway to buy their groceries and then compost what they don’t use. But, let’s face it, most of us drive and toss the leftovers into the garbage disposal or the garbage can. In doing so, we may be contributing nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gases associated with our food, research has shown.

Here’s why: Instead of going to the grocery store once a week and stocking up, many consumers are driving for groceries several times a week, if not every day, to all sorts of different stores.

(BTW, UC Davis makes olive oil from street trees on campus. How cool is that?)

Pick up and go [updated]

by

[I’ll be traveling for the latter half of December, perhaps without benefit of computer or phone! The horrors!]

A few assorted things from the past few weeks of being away:

* “If I lived 17.5 miles from work, I wouldn’t bike to work, either — I’d move. Remember, location and locomotion are two halves of an equation where neither is constant.” [posted at updated metrorider link]

Todd Litman calculates that every nonmotorized (active) trip displaces about seven vehicle miles traveled — not because active trips are seven miles long, but because they’re associated with smarter patterns of development.

“Not every walking or cycling trip causes seven miles of reduced driving. The lower vehicle mileage in cities with relatively high nonmotorized mode split reflects various land use and transport system factors, such as density, mix, street design, parking supply, and pricing which affect the relative attractiveness of motorized and nonmotorized travel. But programs that increase nonmotorized travel tend to create such communities, which is to say that smart growth supports nonmotorized travel and nonmotorized travel supports smart growth.”

* The Pacific Northwest spends more on oil and gas — 100% of which is imported — than on public K-12 education in 2006 or hospital care, and more than 3.5 times total spending on prescription drugs. [Sightline Institute] All that goes “up in smoke,” as they say. Interestingly, Idaho is separated on that counter — an interesting point of comparison, since as many people live within 10 miles of my house than in all of Idaho.

* An interesting “List of Privilege Lists” — ways of “unpacking the invisible knapsack” that accompany those of us with unspoken social privileges, whether racial, sexual, class, religious, gendered, or ability.

* Jay Mouawad in the Times notices that the oil producers fear the geo-green agenda:

“What we are worried about is for industrialized countries to use climate policy as a pretext to discriminate against oil,” [said Mohammad al-Sabban, a senior Saudi government adviser on climate change].

Over in the UK, $100/bbl oil has led gasoline across the magic 1.00 line: one pound per litre. That translates to about $9.50 a gallon, so really, quit whining about gas prices in America already.

* While in Toronto, I picked up a brochure distributed by Alphabet City — not the Chicago Humanities Festival, not an academic symposium, but rather something in between — outlining a program of events around local food in the Toronto area. (Ongoing online discussion hosted by the Walrus.) It opened up first to a manifesto (er, open letter) that posits food distribution as another problem of internalized profits and socialized costs, principally because “healthier, tastier” food is not necessarily more profitable. Indeed, it’s often less so. As such, it calls for market intervention and political action:

Ontario’s working landscapes, farms, rural communities, and cities are linked in a web of complex exchanges. But our food policies to date have usually ignored that web, dividing rather than connecting. If we are going to build a healthy and sustainable village, we have to make the connections… [W]e believe that food is connected to every major problem being raised in the current provincial election campaign—rising medical costs, poverty and hunger, declining farm incomes, the paving-over of farmland, wildlife protection, urban sprawl, youth unemployment, and communities at risk.

These problems will only be solved when we connect the dots.

Local farmers markets, community and school gardens, food co-ops, urban gardens, food access centres—all of these emerging possibilities support healthier, tastier food for all villagers. As this happens, everyone benefits and communities become stronger and more inclusive.

Streets everywhere, but no strolls in sight

by

Chris Leinberger’s new Footloose and Fancy Free “Field Survey of Walkable Urban Places” study isn’t exactly of the highest scientific caliber: I won’t begin listing his omissions, since that’d be tiring; and I personally prize a “streetcar urbanism” of continuously enjoyable expanses of urban fabric rather than periodic episodes of frenzied activity focused around rapid-transit nodes. However, it does try to put some background behind one curious observation about LA: “there are 10 million people who have, between them, maybe five places to go for a Sunday walk.” Therefore, those five places (now up to 15, by Leinberger’s rather more lenient definition) are absolutely thronged with crowds (1.13 million Southern Californians apiece, by his calculation).

His most interesting conclusion:

If the bottom 10 metropolitan areas developed as many walkable urban places on a per capita basis as the top 10 have done to date, there would be approximately 40 additional walkable urban places developed in these metro areas, probably representing tens of billions of dollars of real estate development.

Some worry that such developments appeal only to a small slice of the population — and that the market for retail of this variety is especially thin — and therefore that cannibalization will inevitably occur when new developments attempt to create walkable places. However, the demand is apparently quite a bit deeper than skeptics suspect; if demand warrants at least one walkable place per 500,000 residents (and the D.C. area apparently supports twice that level), then, say, the Twin Cities could support six or seven such places — far above the three in existence today.