Latest and greatest Cottage

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USA Weekend reports on the Washington, D.C.-area Katrina Cottage built for this weekend’s “Make A Difference Day”:

bq. The [Katrina Cottage] project is a realization of a group of socially conscious designers, engineers and builders, called the Congress for the New Urbanism. Their goal, in the aftermath of horrific destruction by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, was to provide affordable, dignified housing for the needy not only on the Gulf Coast but in every pocket of the country. The award-winning designs can now be translated to fit any environment.

The cottage concept, as realized by Marianne Cusato, recently won the People’s Choice at the National Design Awards sponsored by Cooper-Hewitt.

By architect Steve Mouzon’s description, the “Katrina Cottage VIII”:http://www.katrinacottages.com/interface/home/i_news.html (column on left) is a big step towards design nirvana (far closer than, say, “the LivingHome”:https://westnorth.com/2006/10/11/ostentatious):
* it can and will expand in eight different directions
* it is visitable by those in wheelchairs and adaptable (can be made fully accessible)
* its energy performance is good, befitting the first Katrina Cottage that will see snow (however infrequently) but also having a high-albedo (non-heat-sink) roof
* “it has more clever space-saving devices than you’ve ever seen”
* its interiors are solid, not veneers, hence low VOCs and with ancillary benefits like absolute flexibility with regard to wall hangings thanks to wood paneling instead of drywall on interior walls
* it has all green materials, including bamboo and slate floors
* it is already in production, built at a new factory in Louisiana
* it is designed for affordability and is sized for humble living
* it also has no garage and is being donated to a low-income family living in transit-rich Silver Spring.

The art of compromise

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Ken Silverstein snagged the cover of the November _Harper’s_ with a strange article titled “Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine.” The article’s not the hatchet job that the title implies, but ends with a paean to these liberal lions:
* John Anderson
* Fred Harris
* William Proxmire
* George McGovern
* Frank Church

Why not throw Eugene V. Debs into the mix? Sure, back in the days of the liberal consensus and the Thirty Glorious Years, outright socialists on Capitol Hill could rail against the oil trusts. Lovely, but what the heck does that have to do with 2006? I’m sorry that Obama isn’t pure enough for you; he wasn’t pure enough for the 1st Congressional district in 2000. (Note to world: the man has actually lost an election.) Boo hoo. Well, Pat Buchanan is ideologically pure, mostly. Let’s rally around him.

Silverstein’s main charge seems to be that Obama has accepted money from corporate lawyers, financial interests, and ethanol interests. Well, Obama is a law professor at Chicago’s top law school, a city where lawyers and financiers have the big money (and where lawyers launder money from their anonymous clients).

Now, I’m “no fan of ethanol subsidies”:https://westnorth.com/2006/02/28/bush-a-peak-oil-convert but, quite simply, elections in downstate Illinois are ethanol lovefests. There’s a whole lotta corn here, as some Eastern elitists might notice if they glanced down from the plane once in a while. The farmers, for better or worse, have tied their fortunes to ADM’s, and what you call “politically courageous” might well be “politically suicidal.”

There’s also an implication that Obama is responsible for the Hastert Highway and for “pork” in the highway bill. No, Hastert is responsible for the Hastert Highway. A Democrat in the Senate could not stop the Republican Speaker of the House from doing whatever he needs to do to get his bill through the House and through a conference committee stacked with Republicans, especially if said Democrat has been urged by the leaders back home (saddled with a ragged, rotting transportation infrastructure) to give Hastert whatever he wants as long as the rest of the region can share in the riches.

Exaggerated?

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bq. the City of Berkeley… will lose one of the best opportunities anywhere for leading the world into a sane and healthy 21st Century… Why would I say something as extravagant as claiming the opportunity is one of the best in the world? Because the world is facing the largest crisis in 65 million years and if the right thing is built there, that particular development would constitute a major and early part in the solution to that crisis.

This sort of self-obsessed hyperbole [from “EcoCity Builders”:http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/about.html%5D, asserting that two acres in California are somehow vastly more crucial towards solving all the world’s problems than the 99.9999999946% of the earth’s land area around it, is one reason why I can’t see myself working in the Bay Area anytime soon. One can easily say that the Berkeley community deserves and demands an environmentally superior solution, that the world faces multiple environmental crises and that new development can help to start to address these crises, etc. However, asserting that you (and/or your pet project) are singularly tasked with changing the future of the world says more about your ego than anything else.

PPS’s public space agenda for NYC

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Sometimes, PPS gets a bit tiresome with its Cosmo-style “Ten Ways to…” ledes, but hey, they seem to draw attention.
Nine Ways to Transform New York into a City of Great Places is different: it’s a genuinely gutsy set of recommendations, starting with:

bq. The highest and best use of New York’s street space is to support pedestrian activity and access.

The article very justly attacks:
* starchitects’ Corbusian indifference to the city beneath their floating glass palaces (compared with the Empire State Building, “so human-scaled at the sidewalk level that people standing in front… stop to ask where it is”);
* the city bureaucracy — schools, small business, culture, health — for sitting in silos, blind to the value that great public spaces could bring to their departments (see the Richard Jackson piece below);
* the reactive, antagonistic, opaque Community Board process, which is effective at neither gathering broad input nor regulating change, and for which blame lies on both the CBs and the developer-city-designer combine for being too afraid of forward planning;
* BIDs for not thinking beyond just picking up trash:

bq. BIDs have proven effective at the basics of maintenance, security, and beautification, but they have yet to explore a broader public role. Small Business Services, the agency that manages their funds, should lead BIDs to form more community partnerships, program their public spaces, and implement streetscape improvements. BIDs themselves would relish the new role. Some are already raring to work with surrounding communities on bold visions for what their public spaces could become–they just need the go-ahead.

180 degrees

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James A. Bacon writes about how a Virginia Beach intersection metamorphed from planners’ laughingstock to a vibrant urban oasis.

|Before (from _Suburban Nation_) | After (from CMSS, via Bacon’s Rebellion)|
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Andres Duany, the New Urbanism evangelist, carries a carousel of slides to illustrate his speeches with real-world examples of atrocious urban design. For years, one of his favorites — for all I know, he uses it still — was an aerial shot of the intersection of Independence and Virginia Beach Boulevards in the Pembroke area of Virginia Beach.

This suburban abomination consisted of 20 or more lanes of traffic colliding at a single point. Flanking the thoroughfares were acres upon acres of mostly empty parking lot. And shoved off to the edges of the image — separated by vast distances that no sane person would negotiate on foot — were isolated stores and office buildings. Clearly, Duany would dead-pan with his inimitable sarcasm, Virginia Beach had designed the community for the care and feeding of automobiles. People evidently did not figure into the equation.

It may be time for Duany to find a new slide.

Pembroke, the least likely of locations, is undergoing a thorough-going transformation. Several blocks are blossoming with high-rise towers, parking decks, condominiums, stores, offices and restaurants. The streets are bustling with business executives, lunch goers, errand runners, even joggers….

In what had been an asphalt wasteland a few years ago, developers have brought online 300,000 square feet of office space, a comparable amount of retail, 342 apartment units and a 176-room hotel. Under construction today are another 42,000 square feet of retail, a 1,200-seat performing arts center and a 37-story hotel/residential tower — which will be the tallest building in Virginia. All told: about $400 million in investment….

In [architect Burrell] Saunders’ [principal of CMSS Architects] view, Virginia Beach’s main contributions were twofold: scrapping the zoning codes and other regulations that locked development into expensive and inefficient “sprawl” mode, and creating a Tax Increment Financing District for the development of structured parking and infrastructure improvements. Once the city let developers exercise their problem-solving ingenuity, growth took off.

A coalition of private business interests — led by Saunders, Gerald Divaris, Frederick Napolitano and Richard Olivieri — willed the urban center into existence in the face of initial skepticism and apathy on the part of city government. The city eventually came on board with funds of its own: contributing to parking, streetscapes, and other infrastructure improvements with the increased tax revenue flowing from the new development itself.

For those who think that re-working failed suburbs is a process that will take generations, Saunders’ assessment of Pembroke is profoundly optimistic. Yes, developers and city officials should approach their task with a 50-year planning horizon. “A city,” he says, “should be built to serve generations.” But Town Center has demonstrated that it’s possible to transform large pieces of the physical environment in just a few years…

Saunders “insists [that] Virginia doesn’t need to spend mega-billions of dollars on new road and transit projects to ameliorate traffic congestion,” since the urban form along those roads (“the road edge,” in engineer-ese) can take care of much of that. In a pioneering example of New Urbanism, “1000 Friends of Oregon”:http://www.friends.org/resources/lutraq.html launched a regional modeling process entitled “LUTRAQ: Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection,” but the message has yet to fully sink in: not only are all three so deeply intertwined that they’re effectively different sides of the same issue, but today we can now safely extrapolate from air pollution to water and climate, the emerging hot topics in environmental management.

bq. Transportation is not an issue that should be left only to the traffic engineers. Their solution is to add more lanes of roadway. A better approach is to change where people live, work and play. “We have enough roads,” Saunders says. “We have enough asphalt. It’s a question of how you organize the use of the asphalt.”

Given that Duany always uses that slide to show just how far overboard the highway engineers and zoning engineers (aka planners) have gone, it’s quite a revelation indeed.

Neighbors Project

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I picked up an anonymous flyer about theNeighbors Project recently, apparently an attempt to engage Chicago’s citizens in placemaking political action. Their mission sounds promising:

bq. Our mission is to activate and organize members of the urban generation in cities across the nation. We will strengthen and invigorate city neighborhoods one neighbor at a time throughout our lives. Our grassroots movement will make diverse cities with a healthy grassroots culture rooted in public streets and institutions the preferred place to live for Americans of every kind.

Yet it’s all quite nebulous right now, perhaps by design since it’s young. They’ve contacted my garden group and we’ll find out what they’re about soon.

Promising examples abound, like “City Repair”:http://www.cityrepair.org/wiki.php/projects in the Northwest, the “Toronto Public Space Committee”:http://www.publicspace.ca/elections/about as well as the various quasi-party public action committees (and affiliated candidate slates) that other cities have (particularly in Canada, with good examples like “COPE”:http://www.cope.bc.ca/issues-city.htm in Vancouver and “Projet Montréal”:https://westnorth.com/2005/11/28/urban-green-politics-arrives-in-montreal).

Sprawl’s pathology

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Jeff Speck interviews the CDC’s Richard Jackson in Metropolis Magazine about the ongoing effort to portray sprawl as a public health issue.

It has been asserted that I’m too negative when I describe this situation [the sprawling built environment], and it’s true that we doctors tend to focus on pathology. But we know the treatment for these problems. We know how to build communities with central commons surrounded by civic buildings, with sidewalks, parks, and transport, with kids and old folks being able to get back and forth to their daily destinations. I think we are at the right moment to reinvent American communities back to what they were at their absolute best.

In fact, the focus on pathology — on those big, ultimate causes of death rather than the smaller causes leading up to it — has played a large role in blinding medicine to the problem for decades now.

Still no grand green plan

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A mole at the recent Clinton Global Initiative conversation reported that Chicago was being held up as an example of a “green city,” a theme echoed in the Massive Change exhibition now up at the MCA. It’s quite fashionable to talk of Chicago as a deep-green city, but the real accomplishments to date have proved rather scattershot. As with the nascent approach to obesity, there is no approach, just photo opportunities.

Why? It’s a classic case of hacks vs. wonks, as Bruce Reed calls it. The way machine politics works — “I’ll create a little exception for you to get your vote, and your people’s votes” — inhibits Chicago politicians from thinking, much less acting, in a manner which considers broad impacts and bigger plans. Its deep skepticism of technocrats leaves no room for cold policy analysis, whether of the celebrity-driven “green ribbon commission” sort used to develop the climate action plan for Seattle or even for a Comp Plan (sure, it’s mandated by state law, but we’ll let that slide) or a regional plan that has about as much authority as Houston’s.

Hence, the biggest polluters — like the ancient coal power plants or the rivers of cars flowing oh-so-freely down freeways and through downtown, unimpeded by flitting concerns like pedestrian lives — get off scot-free, while expensive solar panels sprout in conspicuous locations and the transit system rots. This results in odd scenarios, like Daley championing a
Climate Protection Agreement at the recent US Conference of Mayors convention that he hosted, effectively signing on USCM to Kyoto (as he already has for Chicago) — even though there’s not even been discussion of how to even begin planning for the agreement’s 2010 deadline. (Pertinent text of the Agreement below the fold.)

A few years ago, some photo opportunities might have been sufficient to proclaim one’s green-ness, but thankfully most other places have moved their sustainability initiatives beyond symbolism. Even other old-line cities are doing so. NYC (which similarly has no comp plan and, unlike Chicago, allowed a zoning rewrite to die on the vine a few years ago) recently recruited away former Massachusetts smart-growth czar Doug Foy to lead a new Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability. In Providence, a rare city with more corruption per capita and even more hardened white-ethnic politics, the mayor has convened Providence Tomorrow, a weeklong charrette to guide a comp plan rewrite.

Indeed, ICLEI, an international organization that helps countless local governments with sustainability plans, defines planning as absolutely crucial to every step of achieving sustainability:

We help local governments generate political awareness of key issues; establish plans of action towards defined, concrete, measurable targets; work towards meeting these targets through the implementation of projects; and evaluate local and cumulative progress toward sustainable development.

So far, the Environmental Action Agenda is a start, but outlines mostly basic purchasing decisions: switching solvents, adding hybrid vehicles, starting capital projects. In the “mobility” section, the only “good” goal (5% of short trips by bike) comes from the Bike Plan, not the EAG. It doesn’t add up to the big goals that the mayor has set by adopting Kyoto, nor does it attempt to work backwards from that goal to create quantifiable near-term targets. Viewed as a response to the Agreement, it’s skipping straight past the Big Picture items that start the list and jumping right to the small-bore items — not what we expect in the city of Big Plans That Stir Men’s Blood.

Continue reading →

Green housing in NYT, sorta

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Dwell editor Allison Arieff recently wrote on her “TimesSelect blog”:http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com about sustainable homes, noting Sonoma Mountain Village (seeking LEED-Platinum for all 1800 DUs) at a former Agilent corporate campus in Rohnert Park, Calif.; prefab sustainable homes from three companies; and calling “even better” two green multifamily developments in Southern California.

She defines New Urbanism thusly:

bq. “founded in reaction to sprawl, is based on principles of planning and architecture that work together to create human-scale, walkable communities.”

My response:

The next big leap in new sustainable homes will come later this year, when the USGBC and its partners, the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Natural Resources Defense Council, plan on launching a new LEED rating system for Neighborhood Developments (LEED-ND). Currently, LEED doesn’t look far beyond a building’s exterior walls, even though a building’s neighborhood context vastly influences its occupants’ abilities to lead sustainable lifestyles.

The irony of LEED-certified suburban houses is that Americans consume a third more energy driving to and from their houses than they consume while inside their houses, according to the Energy Information Administration. Thus, a car-free, urban family living in a drafty old bungalow might still tread lighter on the earth than a family driving hybrid SUVs to an off-grid exurban home. Even better, as Allison says, would be a family living car-light in a townhouse or apartment, which offers inherent advantages over single-family houses in terms of insulation, walkability, and affordability. That’s exactly the kind of development choices that LEED is agnostic to but that LEED-ND will reward.