Busy month, notably owing to a full winter travel schedule. (Chicago’s a nice place to leave in the winter.) Now, I’m almost sure that my hard disk has crashed — thus wiping out most of the photos from the past few weeks, too, at least since the last backup. Oh well.
Among the photos to be posted earlier which will likely never make it: one of the “multimodal signs”:http://www.commuterpage.com/carshare.htm marking Zipcar spaces in Portland. Nice to know it’s not just a PDX thing, though.
The only one out of around 3,000 that I scanned through (hey, a week on vacation) that vaguely caught my attention. For kicks, I also checked out the stock charts of two of the more common targets; indeed, both had fallen at least 60% in the past week. Yowza.
John and Dottie mince no words:
bq. If we had to sum up the taste, overall, of inexpensive American Chardonnay today, we’d say the single most notable smell and flavor is pineapple, with syrupy sweetness, some acetate or nail-polish remover, far too much alcohol and a bizarre overlay of unintegrated acidity, as though a big sack of industrial-strength acid mixture had been dumped into the tank at the last minute to compensate for the lack of natural acidity.
Seeing as I’m leaving for there in a few hours, thought it would be useful to post something I wrote in July in response to a request for a sightseeing itinerary along the Cascadian coast.
All three cities have new “instant neighborhoods,” light-industrial areas near downtown that are rapidly becoming mixed commercial-residential. It’s quite interesting to compare the varying approaches between and within the cities. Here’s an interesting “Seattle Times article”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2003/0202/cover.html
on the three.* Portland downtown, generally (what districts or buildings?)
* Orenco StationA light rail tour of Portland is quite doable. A quick overview of what’s “around the east-west MAX stations”:http://world.nycsubway.org/us/portland/max-blue.html and a “quick restaurant guide”:http://www.extramsg.com/uploaded_misc/portland_tipsheet.html are both online.
Most of the new neighborhoods surrounding downtown can be covered using “the Portland Streetcar”:http://www.portlandstreetcar.org/map.php. Several gentrifying neighborhoods (like Hawthorne on the east side) aren’t on either line, but are easily reached using the “Frequent Bus”:http://www.trimet.org/bus/frequentservice.htm network. (I prefer MSP’s name: [Say Hi to] “Hi Frequency Service”:http://www.metrotransit.org/serviceInfo/hi-frequency.asp)
* Vancouver, downtown, residential towers
Vancouver’s downtown peninsula is very small and incredibly walkable. Most of the new towers are on or toward the waterfront, particularly along the downtown peninsula’s south edge (facing False Creek). There’s a bike rental place on Marinaside Crescent; I’d suggest renting a bicycle and taking it for a trip around the entire peninsula. Just inland is Yaletown, with some of the newest towers and (in fact) new mid-rises. Another, less successful clump of new high-rises is around Coal Harbour, on the northwest corner of downtown right by Stanley Park. Many of the suburban municipalities have also encouraged similar development around their transit nodes, so it’s worth taking SkyTrain, SeaBus, and the B-Line rapid buses out to sites like Metrotown, Lonsdale Quay, and Richmond Centre to see how other jurisdictions have done things differently. (Richmond Centre is also more like Hong Kong than Hong Kong, which is amusing.)
South of False Creek are a set of neighborhoods also worth investigating. Granville Slopes, on the south bank of False Creek, was state of the art in the 1980s — feels like a leafy suburban PUD — and shows what would’ve happened to the rest of downtown Vancouver had the city not discovered New Urbanism. Kitsilano is a yuppie area to the southwest; around Arbutus & 11th is a new low- and mid-rise, mixed-use neighborhood built on a former brewery site in the ’90s. Granville Island is a kitschy but still interesting take on a festival marketplace — less tourist-focused than the usual US version.
The city has a helpful set of publications outlining areas they view as “urban design achievements”:http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/currentplanning/urbandesign .
In Seattle, the hot new urban neighborhoods are Belltown (between Pike Place and Seattle Center) and South Lake Union (up Westlake from downtown). There’s interesting stuff, but as the Seattle Times article makes clear, the story’s much bigger in Portland and Vancouver.
I think I’m getting better about “uploading trip photos in a timely manner”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/sets/72157594419601104, although more will certainly trickle in over the next year. Some things I noticed in Denver:
* Street-runing LRT along Welton Street is resulting in gentrification of a historically Black main street, with surprisingly good retail occupancy. Not many intact Black main streets are left out there, so it’d be a shame to see this disappear.
* South Broadway has what looks like a Motor Row, also threatened by development.
* What is up with the giant arched atria in every 1980s building? Wells Fargo has by far the most ostentatious of the bunch, even more so than the performing arts center, but sheesh. Was it city policy at the time?
* Stapleton, slightly to my surprise, is in the metro’s unfavored sector (northeast; “MARC”:http://www.metroresearch.org/projects/national_report_region.asp?region=9 has favored/unfavored sector maps). In fact, to get there from downtown you take “Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard”:http://www.sallygreene.org/mlk.htm. Apparently, it’s not a big challenge for retail leasing — there’s little competing new retail along the corridor, and a large population base — but they’ve done an admirable job with addressing the “schools issue”:http://www.sellstapleton.com/schools.php through choices like charter schools.
* Add Boulder to the short list of places where driving has declined considerably. Mode split of downtown commuters, 1999 to 2005: drive alone 59% to 36% (-39%), transit 14% to 34% (+143%). Walk/bike accounted for 14% in 2005, carpooling for 9%.
Katharine Grayson reported a while ago in the Chicago Journal about a survey on “social capital”:http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/primer.htm in Bucktown and Schaumburg. Actually, my household participated in the research; I got a letter and my brother did the phone interview.
Curt VanderWaal, a professor of social work at Andrews, said one quote, offered by a 40-year resident in a telephone interview, seemed to sum up that finding: “The whole neighborhood identity is changing. That’s a challenge. It’s not like a neighborhood that has to deal with a lot of crime. The larger issue here is economic and cultural identity.” […]
She did note, however, that residents in Bucktown are also more open to having affordable housing built in their neighborhood than their Schaumburg counterparts, though only about a quarter strongly agreed that it was necessary.
What is somewhat surprising about the study, however, noted VanderWaal, is that residents of Schaumburg are just as happy—if not more pleased—with their neighborhood than Bucktowners. There are, of course, some key demographic differences, he said, including that the suburban residents are more likely to own their home and have lived in the neighborhood longer. They also have more children. However, he said, they also are more likely to believe that their neighborhood is tight knit.
What’s also important to note, however, is that Bucktown residents are more likely to spend a social evening with their neighbors—and have friends that live just a few blocks away.
It’s an undergraduate project, to be sure, but the two neighborhoods differ in so many ways that it’s difficult to impute any differences found to one factor or another (notably neighborhood form, which they mentioned — several Andrews professors have admirable New Urbanist inclinations). One confounding factor is governance, notably with regard to schools. It would be far more prudent to have chosen two neighborhoods within the same municipality: say, comparing “old” Wheaton or Naperville with new subdivisions a mile or two away, or maybe more interestingly, someplace like historic Kenwood with modernist Prairie Shores.
bq. John Edwards for President, Inc., 410 Market Street, Suite 400, Chapel Hill, NC 27516
That puts the office in the only office building at “Southern Village”:http://www.southernvillage.com/#cli. When I was in high school, the Edwardses were Inside-the-Beltline society, but either no space was available within downtown Chapel Hill (fairly likely) or the Edwardses live out towards Fearrington.
* MTC, the Bay Area’s MPO, has a “Pedestrian & Bicyclist Safety Toolbox”:http://www.bayareatrafficsignals.org/toolbox/Index.html of education, enforcement, and engineering tools at various price points: from brochures to bike boulevards.
* The Pew Climate Center has published “reports on buildings”:http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-in-depth/all_reports/buildings/index.cfm that I should read, notably “this one”:http://www.pewclimate.org/policy_center/policy_reports_and_analysis/buildings/index.cfm
* Another worthy cause: Obama and Solis cosponsored an APHA written bill to spend more federal money so that planners can examine “healthy places”:http://www.apha.org/nphw/2006/pg_newsletter_4-4-06.htm, including sponsored research on the built environment’s role in health and local Health Impact Assessments. It turns out that CNU board member Dhiru Thadani heads the Washington practice of “ASG”:http://www.apha.org/nphw/2006/pg_newsletter_4-4-06.htm, which rents office space from APHA.
After a puzzling delay, IDOT’s drive less. live more. campaign finally launched last week. It’s a basic, but handsome site, which offers some basic info about transportation choices: facts, transit schedules, etc.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Americans actually are “driving less”:http://www.cnn.com/2006/AUTOS/11/30/gas_prices.reut/index.html.
The Midtown Greenway is a sunken rail-to-trail-with-future-rail traversing the diverse (and dense, by Twin Cities standards) neighborhoods of South Minneapolis, from yuppie haven Uptown, through Midtown and past the Midtown Exchange, crossing the Hiawatha light-rail-with-trail, and eventually landing in Longfellow. The trail very nearly links two major park systems: the Chain o’ Lakes to the west and the Missisippi River on the east. Current proposals would put either LRT or a streetcar along the south half of the former freight ROW, as part of a LRT service to the near southwest suburbs.
There’s no view whatsoever — neither the babbling mountain brooks of Denver’s flood control ditches nor enchanting murals on the concrete retaining walls — and the plants have died. Still, the rhythm of all those bridges crossing overhead looks pretty neat at bicycle speeds.
As with all grade-separated trails, it’s not cheap: a good number of the bridges have been replaced, a new grade-separated crossing is underway at Hiawatha Avenue, and a CCTV/”blue light” security system had to be installed. Yet the trail is definitely encouraging new investment, like the lofts on the left.
Earlier, “I blogged”:https://westnorth.com/2006/11/23/safe-streets/trackback/ a photo of a PSA ad promoting safe driving around pedestrians. Today, Hilkevitch’s “front-page column”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0612180161dec18,1,413615.column?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true in the Trib offers details on the overall “Safe Streets for Chicago”:http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalContentItemAction.do?BV_SessionID=@@@@1658248418.1166469198@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccdaddjjfemidgcefecelldffhdfhg.0&contentOID=536939798&contenTypeName=COC_EDITORIAL&topChannelName=Dept&blockName=Transportation%2FMaking+Chicago+Pedestrian+Friendly%2FI+Want+To&context=dept&channelId=0&programId=0&entityName=Transportation&deptMainCategoryOID=-536895918 strategy, including:
* a Mayor’s Pedestrian Advisory Council, to launch in January
* design strategies, like bulb-outs, median refuges, raised crosswalks (“sleeping policemen”), and zebra crossings
* motorist stings, with EMC/TMA and police cooperating to catch speeders
* road diets (four to three lanes)
* installation of more pedestrian countdown signals
* greater education
The last point is perhaps most important: the driving culture can, in fact, be changed, given enough education and enforcement.
Our SSA commission will be meeting with the police department at some point to discuss sites for camera installation; I’ll ask whether the red-light cameras are smart enough to catch other infractions, like intruding on crosswalks and not yielding before turning, and whether sting operations can be set up at our intersections.
It’s a truism that American houses are growing to be elephantine; many articles on McMansions point out that the average new house in America has grown in size by 46.63% since 1973. Yet the story isn’t that simple: in fact, house sizes in recent years have grown at below trend — little more than 1% a year, a big slowdown from the mid-1980s. Also, the size of multifamily apartments is reported separately and in a different fashion (in size brackets rather than exact numbers), which makes it impossible to figure out how average new dwelling sizes are changing as multifamily grows as a share of American housing starts.
|year|size|% growth*|
|1973|1660|–|
|1976|1700|0.80%|
|1979|1760|1.18%|
|1982|1710|-0.95%|
|1985|1752|0.82%|
|1988|1995|4.62%|
|1991|2075|1.34%|
|1994|2100|0.40%|
|1997|2150|0.79%|
|2000|2266|1.80%|
|2003|2330|0.94%|
|2005|2434|1.49%|
|1973-2005|+774|2.12%|
Note: Size is in square feet, average for new construction. Source: U.S. Census, “data set C25”:http://www.census.gov/const/www/charindex.html. Sample was readjusted in 2005, with the effect of tilting sample towards Sunbelt, so results are not directly comparable to earlier years.
% growth: annualized rate, over past three years.
west north 