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 #2.

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 #7 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.’

Blago’s budget on transit

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The relevant passage:

bq. *Continued support for northeastern Illinois mass transportation*. Through the Department of Transportation, the state will continue to provide significant funding for mass transportation in the northeastern Illinois region. The governor’s fiscal year 2008 budget recommendation includes $419.9 million in total appropriations that include funding at the statutory maximum for the Strategic Capital Improvement Plans (SCIP I and SCIP II), 25 percent state match on all Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) Sales Tax revenue collected in the six-county, Chicago-area region, reimbursement of reduced fare subsidies for students, the elderly and the disabled, and paratransit services provided in the region.

So, no new operating (beyond paratransit, which was new last year) and some new bonds.

Elections: woah!

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updated after midnight:
Burt Natarus and Darcel Beavers are headed to defeat! Oh, and Arenda “we be ho’s” Troutman, but we knew that.

A lot of runoffs (higher vote total first, *incumbent):
2nd: Fioretti vs. Haithcock*
3rd: Tillman* vs. Dowell
15th: Foulkes vs. Simmons-Stoval (open seat)
16th: Thompson vs. Coleman*
18th: Lane* vs. Stewart
21st: Brookins* vs. Jones
24th: Chandler* vs. Dixon
_32nd_: Matlak* vs. Waguespack
_35th_: Colon* vs. Colom
43rd: Daley* vs. Smith
49th: Moore* vs. Gordon
50th: Stone* vs. Dolar

_ward_ = a sure thing, with 100% of precincts reporting

Adding tolls

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I wrote earlier about how the Kennedy and Dan Ryan are perfect opportunities to introduce congestion pricing — with separate express lane infrastructure, parallel transit, and I-Pass already in place.

Yet right now we’re moving the other way. A Crosstown truck route would only funnel away through-traveling trucks that should be on I-294 (Tri-State Tollway) anyways, and if it were a tollway (as Madigan suggests, to raise the tens of billions necessary) it wouldn’t do anything to keep the freeloaders off 90-94. Meanwhile, Chicago wants to use $117 million in PFC charges [ticket taxes] to widen I-190 to O’Hare — charging everyone, including connecting passengers and those of us who take the [achingly slow, 15-mph, in need of $54 million to replace faulty, disintegrating ties] train, to speed drivers off the Northwest Tollway. Huh?

If freeloading trucks are a problem, then stop the freeloading: toll 90-94. If I-190 needs $100,000,000 to unsnarl traffic, then make the drivers along that route pay: simply move the toll barriers half a mile and add I-190 to the tollway network. Airport-goers are a remarkably price-insensitive bunch, anyhow.

update 26 Feb: one week after revealing the I-190 plans, Jon Hilkevitch writes that fixing up the Blue Line (now up to 22% in slow zones) will cost… $100 million, which, of course, CTA doesn’t have in the absence of an Illinois FIRST successor. It took 70 minutes to get from O’Hare to Monroe this morning, a full 55% longer than the “scheduled 45 minutes” that Mr. Friendly Announcer used to promise to passengers boarding at O’Hare and which signs inside the terminal walkways still proclaim.

Also, Dennis Byrne writes of the Crosstown in a Trib op: “As if Daley doesn’t have enough concrete to pour to keep him and his contracting buddies content for the rest of his lifetime reign. Maybe the city should buy up a bunch of vacant lots that he can pave over just to keep him and his pals happy. It certainly would be a better use of the money.”

UPDATE: comments closed due to spam

Urban lesson plan

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Otis White is wrapping up his run of Governing’s “Urban Notebook”:http://governing.com/notebook.htm, among the first (and still among the best) urban blogs — it seems to have predated blogging software, in fact. He leaves with seven lessons:

Lesson 1: Innovate, save money, throw the bums out and use good sense.
Lesson 2: Protect the order of public spaces.
Lesson 3: Get dense: It’s how you make residents and housing affordable.
Lesson 4: Save the property tax.
Lesson 5: Tie transportation to land use.
Lesson 6: Don’t act helpless: why local leadership is important.
Lesson 7: Have fun: Cities are funny, funny places.

For further explanation, see his concise “Best of Urban Notebook”:http://governing.com/notebest.htm roundup.

His final print column includes this:

bq. Suburbs are looking more like cities did 30 years ago: commercial, crowded, ethnically diverse, hectic, poverty-pocked and unsafe in places. Suburbs are no longer the refuges we once considered them. Meanwhile, cities are getting safer, turning into gentrified magnets for empty-nesters and young singles… [H]ere’s the vision that might help metro areas […]: the complete community. Cities that have neighborhoods with suburban [bourgeois?] sensibilities, suburbs with areas of hipness, density and transit, and places in both for all income levels.

This focus on regionalism is a refreshing change from the tired city vs. suburban tirades that certain libertarian writers keep falling into. In cities all over the country, I see exciting New Urbanism being built in both city and suburb.

Chris Swope, their best (and dishiest) writer on city governance, takes over for Otis next month.

Paradise

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Derailment

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Graffitists in Santa Monica wistfully pine after the Red Cars of yore — an interesting sight, given that the Red Cars stopped in 1961. It’s a sad tale, and one which exerts a strangely tragic pull over Angelenos to this day. (It’s worth mentioning here that, like nearly all transit [and most passenger transportation systems], the Red Car was only ever marginally profitable — land speculation along the ROWs paid for Henry Huntington’s empire.)

Meanwhile, the Chicago machine is suddenly wistfully looking back on the days when it could bulldoze entire neighborhoods. Too bad the freight railroads are actually using that land for something useful, like, um, moving freight; that CREATE remains woefully unfunded; and that there are already two (well, 1.75, but soon to be two) toll beltways around the city’s south and west flanks. Hmm.

Thank you

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On the back of a ticket stub: “[Denver Art Museum] programs are funded in large part by the citizens who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District.” It’s nice to make these sometimes obscure special taxing districts a little more visible — and the cute little logo doesn’t hurt, either.

Bridges for sale

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The LA Times ran an article on Tuesday about governor-led (and Bush-backed) plans in California to grant more toll road franchises. A “letter in response”:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-le-thursday15.2feb15,1,6430864.story?ctrack=1&cset=true:

bq. Privately financed toll roads provide state and local politicians with upfront money to make themselves look good, but captive commuters will be paying tolls for generations to largely foreign landlords. The public-private partnerships utilize tax-exempt financing and government loan guarantees — and merely outsource difficult decisions that strike fear in our politicians — such as raising gas taxes. — _Jack Eidt, Los Angeles_

Chris Swope’s article in last month’s “Governing”:http://governing.com/articles/1roads.htm mentions that investors expect the Indiana Toll Road to throw off a 12% cap rate (i.e., return). _Emerging Trends_ reports that commercial real estate investors are looking for 5.5-7.5% cap rates in the USA. Why not let these enterprises throw off proceeds for government, instead of shareholders elsewhere? If better, more aggressive management is what’s needed, that can be done completely separately from refinancing the whole asset.

Speaking of road revenue, Gary Washburn in “the Trib”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0702060132feb06,1,3381332.story reports that City Council’s transportation committee advanced the PBD resolution — they’re now being called “transportation enhancement districts (TEDs)” and are planned for 53rd Street in Hyde Park, along a stretch of Broadway in Edgewater and in the Logan Square neighborhood. Meanwhile, police commander Robert Evans said that “I think we are doing a great job” about moving violations — even though the average officer writes _fewer than three_ stop-sign running tickets a year.