Woah! 2

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Preliminary 100% results from “the runoffs”:https://westnorth.com/2007/02/27/elections-woah/ indicate that *five* incumbents have been defeated:
2nd: Fioretti over Haithcock (wide margin)
3rd: Dowell over Tillman
16th: Thompson over Coleman (conceded)
24th: Dixon over Chandler
32nd: “Waguespack”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/463696414/ over Matlak

Added to the three decided in February and the one open seat (15th, won by Foulkes), and that’s nine new faces — 18% of the 50! We have some great new aldermen, too, with plenty of opportunities for a fresh urban agenda.

All relative

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James Lileks on an old photo of a Minneapolis hotel: *This is the city that was smaller than the one in which I live today, but seemed so much more bigger.*

Was it television? Automobiles? The city seemed bigger because people filled its public realm in a way we only see in the very largest cities today. Have people left out of free will, or coercion?

RTA Act

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Just for future reference:

(70 ILCS 3615/4.03) (from Ch. 111 2/3, par. 704.03)
Sec. 4.03. Taxes.
(a) In order to carry out any of the powers or purposes of the Authority, the Board may by ordinance adopted with the concurrence of 9 of the then Directors, impose throughout the metropolitan region any or all of the taxes provided in this Section. Except as otherwise provided in this Act, taxes imposed under this Section and civil penalties imposed incident thereto shall be collected and enforced by the State Department of Revenue. The Department shall have the power to administer and enforce the taxes and to determine all rights for refunds for erroneous payments of the taxes.
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Seaside sold?

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Following up on the resort front, it’s interesting that Canadian ski operations giant Intrawest up and “bought” the town of Seaside last year. (Not really: just the cottage rental operation, i.e., the “hotel” operation side.) Intrawest has a “Placemaking”:http://www.placemaking.com division whose job is to build adorable little apres-ski mountain villages at its resorts, and it’s recently sought to diversify its portfolio in recent years — including investments elsewhere on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

According to Leah Stratmann in the Defuniak Herald last March (cutely titled “Selling Seaside by the Seashore”):

bq. [T]owns are not generally for sale, yet rumors about the sale of the “town” of Seaside swirled around south Walton County like a windstorm last week… “Like Seaside, Intrawest believes in creating a complete community experience. Like Seaside, Intrawest believes in the value of preserving a community’s sense of place. But beyond philosophy, Intrawest has solid processes, resources and experience at the ready for a successful rental management program. We believe our business approach will provide Seaside even more success and stability.”

It’s interesting to think that maybe “ownership” of Seaside might translate into a stronger commitment to placemaking throughout its operations.

Measuring healthy places

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A follow-on to the “Healthy Places Act”:https://westnorth.com/2006/12/31/three-in-brief/ from San Francisco’s department of public health:

bq. The Healthy Development Measurement Tool is an evidence-based practice to consider public health objectives in land use planning. It provides land use planners, public agencies, and community stakeholders with a set of metrics to assess the extent to which urban development projects, plans and policies affect health.

And an interesting resource: some great “metro area profiles”:http://diversitydata.sph.harvard.edu/profiles_main.jsp compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health, including (school & residential) segregation and poverty indices by race/ethnic group.

“Stay on Track”

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4 April editorial in the New York Times:

But any mass-transit renaissance will come to a grinding halt unless a commensurate investment is made in upkeep and expansion. As Libby Sander reported recently in The Times, Chicago’s elevated train system, known as the El, appears to be near a breaking point. The second-largest public transit system in America after New York’s is suffering from rising commute times as the century-old system deteriorates… Once a system begins to break down, it can hurt the quality of life and economic growth of a city.

29 January editorial in Crain’s Chicago Business:

Chicago’s rapid transit system is rolling toward a disastrous tipping point. So far, riders have stuck with the elevated train system as service has gotten worse and worse… At some point, ridership will plummet as commuters abandon the trains for more reliable transportation and businesses depart downtown for more accessible locations. The effect on the city’s economy will be devastating.

Only Mayor Richard M. Daley can save the train system. So far, he’s mostly ignored the deterioration of service as trains swell with downtown office workers commuting from the gentrifying neighborhoods of the North and Northwest sides — a predictable side effect of the middle-class renaissance he worked to hard to foster.

(emphases added) This is the biggest point I’ve wanted to make about transit funding: without transit, downtown Chicago would cease to exist. Without downtown Chicago, Illinois might as well be Iowa or Indiana, some generic slice of rich Midwestern prairie. This isn’t just a city issue.

It might be interesting to calculate some rough figures on this topic: what would happen if 20% of downtown jobs disappeared? or if 20% of CTA riders started driving? The cascading impacts down the line — property values and tax revenue, income tax, sales tax, air pollution, stormwater and heat island impacts from parking — would be astonishing. It’s also not entirely unprecedented: look at, say, Philadelphia, where poor transit was one factor in the decline of a CBD that now accounts for just a third of the region’s office market.

And a curious 29 March entry from the Economist (which has direct experience in congestion pricing):

But there is something odd about the way that many of Chicago’s leaders talk about [transportation] problems. They invariably try to link their suggestions to grand or abstract ideas, such as being a “global city” or winning a bid to host the Olympics. _The simpler need is to get goods and people moving_… The public debate over making drivers pay to use the roads has been as shallow in Chicago as in the rest of America. The argument tends to revolve around whether it makes more sense to use tolls and private enterprise to pay for better roads, or instead to keep charging taxpayers for a system that just limps along. By contrast, not much is said about the role that prices might play in altering the behaviour of both companies and commuters.

There you go: we need price incentives that cut car and truck traffic while raising revenues for rail.

Major paper mention

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I somehow never noticed that Inga Saffron, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architectural critic (and blogger), referenced my old Promenade Plantée photos in a column of hers about the Reading Viaduct Project back in February 2004:

bq. The Penn design teams were partly inspired by Paris’ success in transforming an elevated train trestle near the Place de la Bastille into an elegant, 2.4-mile-long landscaped path called the Promenade Plantee. (Excellent photographs can be found at http://homepage.mac. com/paytonc/promenade.) Such obsolete viaducts are fast being transformed into sky parks in cities around the world. New York City is working on plans to convert Manhattan’s High Line, which runs through Chelsea, into an elevated park.

Farm to table (in Wicker Park)

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Nicholas Day wrote recently in the Chicago Reader about the new certified-organic pizzeria opening soon four blocks south of me. One interesting bit:

bq. These days, any local organic product is precious. According to Slama, Illinois residents bought $500 million worth of organic food last year, 95 percent of it grown out of state. And still, he says, “there were tens of millions of dollars in demand that weren’t met.” In hopes of increasing production, Sustain helped write the Illinois Food, Farms and Jobs Act, which was introduced in the state legislature last month. It calls for the governor to appoint a task force that would develop policy recommendations for a local organic food system, and to earmark $5 million to support those recommendations.

With proper coordination, a project to increase local organic-food growing capacity to capture even a small share of the state’s organic-food market could yield millions of dollars in revenue for farmers and “farmland preservation projects”:http://www.thelandconnection.org/files/saving.html.

“Green” resorts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect, meet good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day tripping

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I’ve lately found some same-day cheap airfares to various U.S. cities, so I’ve experimented with doing day trips by air. (They’re not strict mileage runs since I actually leave the airport, unlike a true MRer.)

So, a few cities where getting from the airport to an interesting part of town doesn’t take a car, more than $2, or more than half an hour:

* Austin: A cheap ride direct to downtown and campus, although I didn’t think it very walkable once off the bus.
* Boston: We’ll see how this goes next week, but I’m going to try the Silver Line instead of the Blue + shuttle, and maybe see how the North End and/or South Boston Piers have changed since the Dig.
* Chicago: From Midway, try the South Loop; from O’Hare, try Wicker Park.
* Los Angeles: A fairly frequent LAX shuttle bus runs to the LAX Transit Center, but don’t bother with LA; instead, explore nearby Venice and Santa Monica with the Big Blue Bus. (The FlyAway to Union Station works well enough, but could take a while.)
* Minneapolis: The train runs to either downtown or the megamall (and Ikea!). To get to Uptown, transfer to a westbound 21 bus at Lake or go downtown (passing the new riverfront area) and take a #6 bus headed down Hennepin, which also swings by Loring Park and the Walker.
* Portland: MAX runs directly to the eminently walkable downtown.
* Queens: The Q33 is a short ride into Jackson Heights from LGA, and from there the goes to Flushing.
* Washington: Perhaps the easiest anywhere: fast and efficient Metrorail stops right at National.
* Two I haven’t tried, but which have rail to the airport: Cleveland and St. Louis.

A sidebar: one-day ski trips on transit. I only know of three ski slopes with 7-day public transit access from a major city, although I’d certainly love to know about others:
* Eldora Mountain near Boulder, Colo.: RTD bus N from the Boulder bus station
* Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver, B.C.: Coast Mountain bus 236 [pdf] from Lonsdale Quay
* Snowbird/Alta, along UTA’s Route 998 out of Salt Lake City. Only two buses a day, though.
* Special mentions go to the Winter Park Ski Train, Amtrak’s Vermonter, and the proposed Québec-Le Massif train although these aren’t transit buses. Many other resorts run private motorcoaches within town or to nearby airports or cities.

Additional special mentions go to Santa Barbara Car-Free, which promotes car-free trips to Santa Barbara, Calif., and CATCO’s Going to the Mountains from Calgary. CATCO’s slogan, courtesy Bill Ford: ‘If you live in a city, you don’t need to own a car.’